Dawn of a Dark Knight
Read Dawn of a Dark Knight Online
Authors: Zoe Forward
| Dawn of a Dark Knight |
| Zoe Forward |
| The Wild Rose Press (2012) |
In the shadows of our world, a secret band of warriors fights to protect us. They are the last line of defense against an evil no human can stop.
An ancient nemesis has resurfaced. Duty demands that Ashor Vlahos, Scimitar Magi commander, recruit a magical healer to fortify the remaining eight magi. The gods' choice is the woman who helped him escape torture a decade ago. Ashor couldn't have imagined a better punishment for his vow-breaker homicidal incidents than for the gods to bind him irrevocably to the only woman in the universe he cannot have. The soul-searing desire she ignites in him is strictly forbidden.
Kira Hardy, M.D. is a brilliant, hardworking internal med resident with big secrets. But when Ashor asks for aid after a brutal daemon attack, she is sucked into his dangerous, secret world. Enslavement to the magi, no matter how hot they are, may be an unattractive life plan, but being targeted for death by their enemies is less tolerable.
She must trust the sexy, tormented Ashor to keep her safe while he must deny his ultimate desire and keep Kira at arm's length lest he bring destruction down on them both. As a centuries-old evil catches up to them, they face a crucial decision--follow the gods' rules or follow their hearts.
Zoe Forward writes action-adventure paranormal romance about a new kind of hero.
Visit her website: zoeforward.com
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Dawn of a
Dark Knight
by
Zoe Forward
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Dawn of a Dark Knight
COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Zoe Forward
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by
Debbie Taylor
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Black Rose Edition, 2013
Print ISBN 978-1-61217-721-2
Digital ISBN 978-1-61217-722-9
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To my mother who has always believed in me
even when I didn't believe in myself.
Foreword
Pharaoh Hotepsekhemwy was but newly seated upon his throne when his empire plunged into darkness. Terror and death covered the land in the wake of daemons summoned by zealots of dark magik. Hotepsekhemwy pleaded with the gods to intervene.
Moved by his prostration, Horus the elder himself, the exalted God of Light, selected ten of the fiercest human warriors to protect the Human Realm from evil ones. With sacred ceremony, these warriors became the Scimitar Magi. However, the gods withheld knowledge: whereas their souls were granted eternal existence, their bodies were to suffer death, the ultimate human frailty. Reentry unto physical body was nigh never immediate, but at the determination of the deities.
That be not the only condition unrevealed. When blessed with physical reincarnation, the courageous magus was burdened by a stark deficiency of previous life memory. And, thus, having no instruction to guide him with regard to his granted preternatural empowerment, he was left to struggle for significant time. So say we praise the gods for their generosity of eternal life? Or curse them for their deceptive and capricious natures?
Translated in 1710 A.D. from the
Thutmose Treatise
by the fifth-generation Prime Scimitar Magus Asten Hanacek
Chapter One
Ashor jolted awake with an eyes-wide
holy hell
as his car plowed into a telephone pole. His unsecured body did a header through the windshield onto the gravel shoulder. A side roll down the rough embankment ended with a splash land in a few inches of ditch water.
With a frustrated snort, he yanked several long, dripping, black strands from his face. The scant stars in the dark sky playfully winked at him between the clouds.
“You guys getting a kick out of watching this?” he yelled at the sky.
Some warrior for the gods he was. Reeking of ditch refuse, whacked out from lack of REM sleep, and bouncing between lunacy and sanity on a regular basis were not ideal qualities for the Prime Magus, the leader of the daemon-killing protectors of humankind. Maybe the gods would revoke his superhuman status.
Right
. If they intended to release him from this hell, then he wouldn’t be lying in a ditch.
The warm wetness tickling his eyebrow and the all-too-familiar coppery smell meant he’d sprung a leak. Based on the bottle-rocket exploding in his brain, there was probably a river delta of leaks. They’d heal, and probably within hours.
Priority number one: Get out of this ditch before a Florida gator thought he’d make a good chew toy.
For a second his mind went foggy. He shook his head.
Don’t pass out.
Blackout oblivion equaled disaster. That’s when crazy happened, and humans died. And that violated one of the gods’ rules:
No killing humans unless in self-defense.
Waking to a bloody nightmare with dead people surrounding him was one scenario he planned to avoid tonight. He’d consumed enough caffeine pills to kill an elephant less than an hour ago.
You knew they wouldn’t work.
He’d pushed himself too far beyond the max. Seventy-four hours into a no-sleep bender—a point when no drug or caffeine OD had any hope of keeping him in the land of awake.
He would do anything not to kill. To have some measure of control over what happened when he conked out. In his defense, all his past victims had been the enemy, the ones that summoned daemons—the Hashishins.
He fought to sit upright. The world spun like a carnival ride with a guaranteed puke-fest ending. His visual field dimmed, but the threat of going blackout homicidal had his body surging a double shot of adrenaline.
Time to call for an assist.
He pawed at his black cargo pants’ pockets, coming up empty.
Damn.
Cell was in the car.
Getting up the steep embankment required finger digging. Within yards of the car, he collapsed, overwhelmed by the whirling in his brain.
Move. Your. Ass.
His body rejected the command.
Stay awake.
He feared killing an innocent. Who knew how far he’d go when the blackout insanity hit. Time to admit to the others he needed help.
The blackout episodes were a nasty side effect of too many life-threatening battles with hellish daemons, the Orc-like caricatures of long-dead humans obsessed with dark magik that some Hashishin had summoned back into the human world. Daemons emitted a corrosive evil that slowly eroded a magus soul’s energy. When he exhausted that inner
élan vital,
the
kem-seki
—the growing id-based darkness lurking in his mind, the state that took over during blackouts—would own him. He’d Turn into a monster little better than those daemons the gods mandated he execute. That time looked to be coming soon.
Suicide?
Tried it. And failed.
That failure had nothing to do with lack of follow-through. He figured since he wasn’t quite immortal he could eventually find something that would work. But it turned out the gods put a little fuck-you into his contract, making suicide impossible. Apparently, only a daemon or fellow magus could take him out. None of his fellow magi would step up and offer him a suicide assist, at least not right now. Not until he Turned completely.
The solution? Self-imposed insomnia. The downside was shit like this. Falling asleep at the wheel was unacceptable. He loved the supercar whose front end was now wrapped around a phone pole.
Happy New Year.
Time to buck up. This was the price he paid for his life, even if it hadn’t been his choice, at least this time around. At some point millennia ago, he had vowed his eternal soul to do the daemon-kill thing. That meant every time he was nixed in the Human Realm, some god jammed his soul back into a new body to start all over again.
With a roll, he pushed up only to see sparkles light up his visual field. “Bloody hell.”
****
Ashor’s lids popped open. Above him a plastic pink flamingo went triple-count. Then back to single, and multiplied again.
Throbbing pain gripped his skull. Pain he could handle. It was nothing new.
He yanked the lawn ornament out of the ground and chucked it. With a cheek swipe, he removed the pine needles adhered to his face. The unfamiliar, poorly manicured suburban backyard belonged to a dilapidated, early-eighties doublewide—a tribute to crappy eighties engineering. A POS sedan sat cock-eyed in the drive. Its front left tire rested on an unkempt flowerbed as if the driver had been a piss-poor parker. Or rushed.
His left forearm burned. Rotating it into view showed three knife lacerations deeply bisected one of his more intricate blue hieroglyphic tats. The bleeding had long since stopped.
Great,
he thought sarcastically
.
Blackout amnesia again.
A detailed area scan found one body a few feet away. The human lay sprawled face down at an angle that suggested a cruel death. The guy’s arms had several half-healed linear lacerations in a pattern distinctive for spell blood-letting, a common practice amongst dark-magik casters. He crawled to the guy and moved greasy hair off the back of his neck. The concentric circular symbol tattooed at the V of his neck confirmed him to be an Order of Assassins Hashishin. Not a higher-up. Not enough rings in the tat. Probably a
Dais
or new initiate. The body was a bloody mess of knife cuts. Not a loss to the world and definitely a relief that he hadn’t killed an innocent. But he’d fucked up again. Another black hole in his memory. Another gruesome murder.
He collapsed a few feet from the dead guy and gazed sightlessly at the now starless sky. All he wanted was out. For over a century, he’d lived by a doctrine of discipline, leadership, and cogent action. These past few months of losing control at random had been pure hell.
Fuck daydreams. They were for retirement-plan wusses who sat in high-rise offices all day, drove family sedans, and denied anything out of the norm existed. These were the ones he was supposed to protect. He had responsibilities.
His ridiculously brief indoctrination from man to magus over a century and a half ago gave him little prep for the intensity of this life. The Egyptian gods informed him his soul belonged to them. He’d vowed eternal servitude long ago. They gifted him with supernatural powers and specified a few rules. Human to super-warrior in five minutes. No instruction on how to use the new supernatural abilities came with the deal. With no memory of previous lives, he’d been a virtually immortal screw-up for decades. Now that he’d figured out how things worked, he was a master at avoiding the one thing he desired most. Death.
Retina-scalding light lit the backyard. Time to get going since someone had just hit the flood lights.
The light source moved close.
An echoing, otherworldly voice ordered, “Get off the ground, Ashor Vlahos. This pity party is over.”
“Bloody hell. Now I’m hallucinating,” Ashor mumbled, throwing an arm across his eyes. There was no change in the eye-numbing radiance.
A glowing hand clamped his wrist, prying the arm off his face. Its fingers melted into his skin with the scalding intensity of boiling oil. He jackknifed up, roaring. Futilely, he yanked against the soldering vise grip like a fish on a hook.
