AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER1
And the primordial goddess Nyx rose up with her undying warriors beside her and banished Erebus, her brother, her lover, to the depths of chaos for all eternity.
~ Partially recovered carving from an unknown city beneath Knossos, destroyed 7000BC.
Octavius
Octavius kepthis head down and his hood up as he passed a gang of men lurking in a streetlight’s illumination.
St. Louis, Missouri. The murder capital of the US, and the perfect hunting ground for nyks. In the past, Mikalis had sent teams to clear the city’s north side, but the nyks always came back.
Octavius was here, so maybe there was something to that rumor. Although, he wasn’t a nyk, but he was hunting one. Possibly the most dangerous nyk of all.
Traffic hummed in the distance. Sirens wailed and faded. He kept on walking, the same as he’d been doing for the past few nights. Walking, surveying,tracking. You didn’t have to look very deep to see how the north side’s residents struggled. Drug paraphernalia littered the alleys, gunshots were a nightly occurrence. The Brotherhood kept the nyks out, but as for the rest of the city’s troubles, they weren’t for the Brotherhood to solve.
Causation or correlation,Raiden would ask. Did nyks cause the crime rate to skyrocket, or did they come to St. Louis to hide among the human-made chaos?
Shit, he needed to stop thinking about Raiden and his stupid smile, or the blinkered scientific way he had of analyzing the world around him, and how sometimes a glimpse of Raiden’s easygoing and casually handsome looks was enough to stop Octavius’s heart.
He cursed under his breath. It had been months since he’d fled the Brotherhood. Raiden probably despised him just like the rest of them did.Traitor. At this very moment, Mikalis was personally hunting Octavius down like a dog. If he caught him, he’d put him down like one too.
Octavius couldn’t stay in St. Louis much longer. The Brotherhood would catch up to him.
One more night, perhaps two. The nyk was here. Hefeltit. It made sense. Where better to hide out? And this nyk was smart, ruthless, and savage, although likely mad too, like most of them. Outside of Octavius, the nyk he hunted was at the top of Mikalis’s hitlist:
Saint.
The one and only Brotherhood member who had flipped back to being nyk. Killing indiscriminately, envenoming his human victims, turning them into blood slaves, causing chaos in his wake.
A cat yowled at the end of the alley. A bottle rattled into the gutter. The clatter drew Octavius’s eye.
An intoxicated male stumbled from behind a dumpster. “What the fuck you lookin’ at, man?”
Octavius held up a hand. “Nothing, man.”You didn’t see me.He pushed the demand into the man’s mind, mentally injecting it, and the drunk human veered away, mumbling about losing his keys. He wouldn’t remember seeing Octavius. Nobody did. Octavius moved like a ghost through this world, leaving no memory of his passing, just the way he liked it. There was nothing out here for him anyway.
He’d lived for the Brotherhood, lived for Mikalis, and they’d turned on him at a snap of Mikalis’s fingers.
Fuck ’em.
He’d prove them wrong. All of them. Make them eat their accusations. Even Raiden.EspeciallyRaiden. Octavius had tried to talk to him, to explain he wasn’t a traitor, but the light had faded from Raiden’s eyes and hundreds of years of friendship had evaporated in seconds. He had proof, Raiden had said. And then he’d told Octavius to run.
Octavius would show them how wrong they all were.
He’d find Saint, track him down, recapture him, and he’d damn well get the truth about what had happened when the Brotherhood headquarters fell. Saint had to know something. Why else would the real saboteur release him moments before Atlas imploded?
It was a slim lead, but it was the only hope Octavius had.
Six months he’d been on the run. Six months ghosting through the US, scanning news reports for suspicious spikes in murder rates, trying to find Saint, but everywhere he looked, stupid humans killed each other, skewing the murder rates. No wonder the nyk population was increasing. Humanity was a mess, and nobody gave a shit. But finding Saint wasn’t easy. All his records—when Atlas had been operational—had been sealed so damn tight, even Octavius hadn’t been able to hack into them. And he’d tried. None of the Brotherhood ever talked about Saint, but they were all curious. He had to be monstrous if Mikalis kept him hidden away. But any clues to his whereabouts were few and far between.
Saint was the key to all this. Octavius was sure of it.
He just had to find him and stay alive long enough to question him.
At the very least, if Octavius caught Saint, it might buy him some breathing space with Mikalis. Because he was going to need a miracle to survive the Brotherhood leader’s wrath.
Another siren howled a few streets away. Octavius glanced down a narrow side alley between two rows of boarded-up buildings, expecting to find another cat or vagrant rummaging through trash. Instead, he caught the blur of somethingother, and stopped. He took a step back and peered deeper into the dark.
A light drizzle fogged the glow from the nearby streetlights. Strips of plastic stuck in a fence fluttered, but nothing else moved.
