Darkness Reborn (Order of the Blade #5) Read Free Page B

past her vehicle, their equilibrium destroyed, the night filled with the scent of their burning flesh. Thud after thud of creatures that used to be men hitting the asphalt, screaming in agony.
    Nausea and regret at the harm she had caused flooded Sarah as she fought to regain control of the SUV as it careened across the road toward the woods. "Come on!"
    The vehicle finally obeyed, and she realigned it, jamming her foot on the accelerator the moment she had control, hurtling up the dark road again. Guilt burned at her as she drove away from the bodies, leaving them to rot and die from her attack. Although the backlash wasn't nearly as severe as if she'd used her own power to hurt them, the cost was still significant. A bad-ass warrior she would never be, as convenient as it would have been to have that be her professional calling.
    How many more were going to be in the next wave? And how soon? She knew they were coming, because she hadn't seen her brother go down. As long as he was still alive, he would be able to track her and bring them straight to her—
    "Sarah." The low male voice rasped in her ear, and she yelped, hit the brakes, and whirled around.
    Her brother was sitting in her backseat.
    Her stomach dropped, and raw terror knifed through her when she saw the blood red glow of his eyes, filled with the promise of death, torture, and a night of her begging for mercy she would never receive. His tousled blond hair was the same as it had been before his change, but his black tee shirt was torn and his skin was stretched taut across the bones of his face, like the demon within was about to break right through his skin. "Jacob, don't do this—"
    He lunged over the backseat at her, his claws bared as he went for her throat.
    She lunged for the door, but there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. No mercy was coming for her tonight. Only hell.

Chapter Two
    Even with his chest heaving from exertion, his weapons burning in his hands, steam rising from his bare torso from the humidity, and the earth ruthlessly torn up from the battle, Calydon warrior Kane Santiago wanted more.
    He needed more.
    He needed to keep going until sheer, raw exhaustion dragged him ruthlessly into the sleep that wouldn't come, until he was so drained that he couldn’t think any more.
    Kane had been driving himself relentlessly for eleven days straight, but it hadn't been enough to chase away the gaping void trying to consume him. It had been coming at him for months, this great pit of darkness, stalking him at every moment, but now it felt like his entire soul had been sucked from his body and thrust into a bottomless void of blackness.
    He didn't know what was coming for him or how to stop it. He didn't have answers. All he had was a scarred body that looked like an artist had used his flesh for a canvas and a knife for a paintbrush, and a thousand unanswered questions about a past he didn’t remember.
    Kane's skin looked like ancient designs had been carved into it, but no one on this God-forsaken earth could explain why he had them or what they meant. Kane's memories of his life began five hundred years ago, the day Dante Sinclair, the now-deceased leader of the elite team of Calydon warriors called the Order of the Blade, had hauled him out of the gutter. How old had Kane been that day? Thirty? A hundred? Two hundred? How had he ended up there, covered in body art of the most brutal kind?
    He had no idea, but the story carved on his body and the enormity of the blackness hunting him made it clear that there was shit he needed to know about his prior life, and he was running out of time to do it. In his five hundred years as an Order member, he'd spent every day fulfilling the Order's mission to protect innocents from rogue Calydons, grimly willing to sacrifice one innocent to preserve the greater good, but no matter how hard Kane fought in defense of the Order's moral code, it still hadn't filled that void inside him, an emptiness that had been