WickedBeast Read Free

taste of what he craved much
less this new, indefinable mix of whatever it was they supplied.
    Placing the woman carefully on the floor, his hand went to
her leg without hesitation. She was in shorts, the damage painfully evident.
Passing over it, he felt crushed bones, mangled arteries and dying muscle. Even
with the little one on his back he didn’t have the strength to fix it all, so
he swiftly did what he could with the arteries and veins she needed to ensure a
healthy leg. The rest modern medicine could set, but the tiny blood vessels
would have been beyond them.
    He grabbed a kitchen towel off the back of a chair and
draped it over her leg to hide the ugly reality from the little miracle on his
back. No child should see that. He shifted so Minuet would be facing away from
the pale form of her mother when she opened her eyes.
    “Okay. You can open your eyes and get off, honey.”
    Her little body slid off and she dashed around him, grabbing
the purple bear as she went to her mother’s side.
    “Mommy, wakes up!” Grasping a limp hand, she franticly shook
it. Power was building in the room as Minuet struggled to wake her mother.
    Cord gathered deceptively frail pink shoulders under his
arm. “Mommy is sleeping and that’s good. Her leg would hurt her very much if
she were awake,” he tried to explain and calm the tearful child. Her vibrations
at this level of distress could echo too far. She was so young. There was no
way to explain the cost of that much white power flowing across the
countryside. His own actions were compounding those dangers, but he couldn’t do
otherwise.
    From the first rose petal scent to penetrate his
booze-induced fog he’d be helpless to overcome the instincts that brought them
to this moment. Rose petals and pink pajamas. Who knew these were the tools
that compelled him to forsake sacred vows and his last hope of redemption from
a God who didn’t know him.
    The directive he’d rejected was a perfect theory, long and
involved yet elegantly simple. His commitment to the mission had dragged him
through endless decades of remaining sentient for one last service required by
his beloved creator. To save the humans, all he had to do was kill the woman
and her child.

Chapter Two
     
    This isn’t right , pounded through his brain. Nothing
was as it should be. The plan had been perfect, freaking brilliant, but no one
had said anything about a tiny white power miracle, pink pajamas or rose
petals. And how was his animal nature actually offended at the thought of
killing them? Animals don’t get offended.
    Minuet wasn’t exactly a white witch. She was something else.
The little girl clutching her mother’s hand was so much more than anyone had
been before. He’d like to use that as an excuse for his inability to follow the
plan. She was a new development, a twist of fate and genetics who might save
them all. It could happen. Apparently anything could happen in this new
reality.
    His eyes went to the alabaster face of her unconscious
mother and he knew the truth. Minuet might indeed save them, but every drop of
innocent blood shed from this moment forward would be on his head. He wasn’t strong
enough to kill this woman.
    Merciless animal instincts came with a price it seemed.
Logic was not an unstoppable response, logic was always a choice. What his
creators seemed to have miscalculated on was the amount of instinct remaining
in his system.
    Cord’s hand tightened on Minuet’s shoulder. “Where is the
phone, honey?”
    Minuet never took her eyes off her mother’s pale face.
“Phone man sick. Him come tomorrow.”
    So they were moving in, not out. That explained his not
being aware of them. “Does Mommy have a cell phone?”
    Minuet nodded. “In a floor.”
    “Where? I need it to call help for Mommy. Try to remember
exactly where the cell phone is.”
    A fresh tear raced down her cheek. “I dop it inna floor.
Mommy put me bed and go find phone. No more Mommy.” Her silvery voice