Faded, p.1
Faded, page 1
part #1 of Faded Series
FADED
M. L. Ray
Faded: A Paranormal Romance
Faded Paranormal Romance Series Book 1
Copyright 2019 M. L. Ray
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Book Sample
Thank You
Prologue
Constantinople, 373
The girl struggled against the thick leather straps that bound her to the sacrificial table, but Kabir merely smiled and stroked the hair back from her face.
“Dear one…there is no use fighting. This is your destiny. You know it. I know it…your lover knows it. That’s why he has tried so hard to protect you from this, but he cannot change destiny. You will die here today. Painfully. Slowly. Your blood will be mine.”
He touched his fingertips to her temples, and the girl’s body stilled. He was sedating her, but she would still feel the agony of his knife. Kabir unbuttoned her gown and exposed her soft belly, then stroked his fingers down its curve.
“So much life blood to be harvested.”
She closed her eyes, as he drew the knife from his cloak.
Please let this be over quickly. She drew in a deep breath, as Kabir raised the lethal looking blade.
“Your lover is right,” he said, almost tenderly, “You really are the most beautiful creature on this earth.”
He plunged the knife deep into her. She cried out as the steel sliced through her flesh. The pain was unimaginable.
God, no…no…
He stabbed her again; the bloodlust in his eyes obvious. Her blood poured from the wounds, down her sides and into the channels of the stone table. She tasted blood in her mouth. Kabir was merciless, meeting her gaze as he stabbed her over and over. The girl, defiant to the end, did not look away. She knew she was dying; she knew that she couldn’t survive this. She felt every inch of his knife slicing her to shreds and could smell the rust and salt of her blood. She saw dark spots of her consciousness at the corners of her eyes, as it slipped away. Pain. God, she never knew such pain…her back arched every time Kabir slammed the knife into her.
Please let this be over…please let me die…
As she lost consciousness and drifted into the darkness, she could feel him unrelentingly stab her again and again.
Stop, she thought, stop. I’m already dead.
She dragged a final breath into her lungs. As she released it, she felt her life slip away and she gave in to the darkness.
Kabir lowered the knife. She was dead. Her blood still flowed down her lovely body, collecting in the sphere he’d placed at the end of the table. The girl was pale and still, but even more beautiful in death.
Kabir was breathless but triumphant, muttering an incantation in a long-since dead language, as he raised the sphere of the girl’s blood into the air. He held it up to the light, smiling at its deep, rich color.
“Now see what I have done to your love, my brother, my enemy.”
He handed the sphere to Camille, whose violet eyes deepened to almost the same color of the girl’s blood.
Kabir nodded. “Take this to him. Tell him he lost…again. Take her blood to Asa Thorn…”
Camille smiled, a vicious grimace of razor-sharp fangs, and disappeared into the night.
Chapter One
Seattle, Washington
Present day…
Asa Thorn saw her the moment she stepped into the auditorium. He also noticed other men’s gazes hone in on the petite brunette with long hair and a sweet face hidden behind huge, black-rimmed spectacles. The woman seemed suddenly aware of the audience’s scrutiny and flushed scarlet, fidgeting as she waited for a moment to interrupt the speaker.
In that moment, Asa knew it was her. That hot rush of blood into the soft cheeks made his mouth fill with venom, his fangs pulse with a feral ache, and his heart—which once beat as a mortal—give a familiar throb. He watched as the woman handed a file to the speaker and then slide quickly from the room.
Asa moved silently and at lightning speed to the door and followed her out of the room. She moved quickly down the hallway, her sneakered feet almost running. She didn’t look like the usual power-suited administrator he usually saw at these things. Instead, with her t-shirt barely meeting the top of her jeans, she looked like a bookshop nerd. Asa grinned to himself as he took in her dark hair piled on top of her head and remembered her big glasses pushed up her nose. He imaged that lovely nose buried in a book.
“Excuse me?”
She turned at the sound of his voice, and he saw her eyes; huge and dark chocolate. Beautiful. He guessed she had mixed parentage. There was something Asian about her features—delicate and perfectly symmetrical.
She blinked at him. He knew she was reacting to his face. Asa wasn’t an arrogant man, but he knew the power of his handsome, regal face. It was a face Michelangelo would have wept over; fine angles, intense green eyes, dark short curls cropped close to his head. His body, broad, tall, was as hard as a rock. He enjoyed her eyes sweeping over him. There was that blush again. God, she was breathtaking.
“Yes?”
He walked up to her, so close he could feel her body trembling, and smiled down at her.
“I was wondering if I could buy you a drink?”
Her fingers were knotting at the hem of her t-shirt, revealing a delicious strip of belly that he longed to touch an icy finger to. Almost imperceptibly, he moved closer and could feel her body heat and smell her clean scent of soap and jasmine. She was looking up at him; her doe eyes wary and nervous. He couldn’t help himself. He brushed the back of his hand against her cheek, tender and quick. He knew it would leave her skin burning.
It took her a second to react, but then she stepped back. “What…the…hell?”
Asa smiled. “I’m sorry. I just had to.”
She suddenly looked angry. “Excuse me.”
She turned and stalked off. Asa waited a second before following her, walking at her side and grinning at her. She was starting to get irritated; he could tell, but he was enjoying the game. After a few steps, she stopped and turned to him.
“Look, what do you want? Who are you?”
He stuck his hand out. “Asa Thorn.”
That shook her. “Asa Thorn? Doctor Asa Thorn?”
He grinned and tilted his head. “The very one.”
He knew what she was thinking. Asa Thorn, the world’s most famous, most brilliant hematologist. Winner of no less than three Nobel Prizes and all before the age of thirty. Well, Asa chuckled to himself, the age of thirty as far as any human knew. In reality, he was just shy of fifteen hundred years old.
The beautiful girl seemed lost for words for a moment, but then she shook herself. “Well, Dr. Thorn, regardless of who you are, I don’t like to be touched by strangers. Some would say that was assault, but I’m willing to let it go this once if you leave me alone.”
Asa shrugged good-naturedly. “I can’t do that. You asked me what I wanted? Easy…you. I want you.”
“You don’t even know me.”
Asa smiled. “Oh, Gaia….I do know you. I’ve known you for a long time.”
She was scared now. “How did you know my name?”
Asa closed his eyes for a brief second and willed his skin to come alive, his pheromones to filter into the air to surround her. Satisfied, he heard her gasp and opened his eyes. He could see his scent and her arousal mixed in the air around her. They’d become a heady drug enclosing them both. She was his. Gaia Sullivan was his.
After all this time….you’re mine again, Gaia, you’re mine….
***
Gaia Sullivan sat down in her chair with a bump. What on earth had just happened? Her colleague, Amanda, peered over her microscope at her.
“What’s up, hun?”
Asa Thorn’s cock, preferably in me, she thought, shocking herself.
Gaia immediately shoved the thought away. She smoothed out her expression and smiled at Amanda. “Nothing. Just some douchebag trying it on with me.”
She was further shocked by the guilt of called Asa Thorn a douchebag…but why?
Amanda rolled her eyes. “I keep telling you, that face of yours is like catnip to the male species.”
Gaia puffed out her cheeks and crossed her eyes. Amanda giggled. “Hot.”
Gaia grinned back at her friend. At twenty-five, she was in an enviable position of being a research assistant in one of the most prestigious universities in the world and, although she knew she was classically beautiful, she hated the fact that her face was the first thing people noticed about her. After working long and hard to get her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she refused to be dismissed as nothing more than a pretty face. Now, in the middle of her doctorate, she dismissed the fact that her beauty could open doors for her if she wanted. She was determined to work for it all.
Gaia Sullivan had grown up with her adoptive family in St. Anne’s in Seattle, inspired by her father’s love of all things scientific. He used to take her stargazing, travelling to a field outside the city to look through their telescopes or to museums where they would study geological, or archeological relics and samples. Gaia read her father’s books on every subject she could find, most of them way too advanced for her young age but she read them over and over.
Her father had died suddenly when Gaia was a teenager. She found out the one thing he hadn’t been honest about; he was a hemophiliac. The shock of his death made Gaia retreat into a silent world for months and, despite the care and love of her mother and her sister, she’d never gotten over his death.
The day she’d started talking again, she’d gone to her adoptive mother and told her she was switching her focus from becoming a volcanologist to studying to become a hematologist. That decision became even more imperative to Gaia when her mother was diagnosed with lymphoma. Of course, Gaia’s training would take longer than her mother’s cancer gave her to make a difference. To the end, her mother was proud of her adoptive daughter.
“You’re going to change the world, Gaia. Remember that.”
Gaia thought of her mother’s words now as she considered Asa Thorn. Now, he had changed the world, introducing new—and often controversial—theories and practices which extended the life expectancy of many patients of blood-centered diseases.
Not lymphoma though, Gaia thought, with a pang.
She typed his name into a search engine and checked his Wikipedia entry. Thirty years old. She smiled sadly. No, not even Asa Thorn could have saved her mother. He had been twenty-one; probably at an earlier point in his education than she was now when her mother passed.
Gaia heard her phone buzz, and she saw it was her sister Lana calling. She grinned as she said hello. “I think you must have a sixth sense, Lana. I was just thinking about Mom.”
Her sister, Lana, her parent’s biological daughter, was seven years older than Gaia, but she was her very best friend in the world. While Gaia was a woman of science, Lana was the artistic one in the family.
The two women were nothing alike, neither in looks nor career goals. While Gaia was petite, caramel-skinned from her Asian heritage, Lana was tall, with a cascade of thick red hair and a face that belonged to the golden age of cinema. She was named after Lana Turner but had the style and sensuality of Veronica Lake. The only physical thing she shared with her adoptive sister was that they were both curvy. Gaia was the tomboy. Lana was the siren; that’s just the way it was.
But their bond was unbreakable. Gaia remembered very little about her adoption at the age of two, except that Lana was always there, protecting and comforting. Her champion.
Lana chuckled now. “You know, I was too, this morning. I was making banana bread, and I heard her nagging me about the amount of cinnamon I was using.”
Gaia laughed. “You do use ‘dirty bomb’ levels.”
“But you love it.”
“I do. Listen…it’s Friday, and all I want to do this evening is eat junk food and watch crappy television. Sound good?”
“It does…but you’re not seeing Ted tonight?”
Gaia sighed. “Nope. We broke up.”
There was a silence on the other end of the telephone. “Again?”
“For good this time. He’s not gaslighting his way back in again.”
“Oh, Gaia, I’m so glad.” Lana sounded a little tearful. “It’s the right decision.”
Lana had never liked Ted Geller, Gaia’s on-again-off-again boyfriend. Gaia had met him at college during her undergraduate degree and, at first, Ted seemed to share her love of science, support her dream of becoming a doctor and of helping people.
It only became clear later that Ted was in it just for the money, the glory, to satisfy his burgeoning God-complex. When Gaia started to show that she was way ahead of him in skill and talent, their relationship became something else.
It happened so gradually that Gaia, distracted by her studies and by her laser-like focus, hadn’t noticed the constant put-downs nor the effect they had on her self-esteem.
When she’d had a panic attack on the day of her finals—and Ted seemed to find it funny—she finally saw him for what he was. Toxic. She’d let the relationship drift on for a year or so but didn’t put any effort into it. She knew Ted was cheating on her frequently, but the fact was, she didn’t care anymore.
Gaia knew she had taken their virtual break-up as a reality, but when Ted had shown up at her door, begging for another chance, he’d seemed so genuine. The damage to Gaia’s self-worth had been so permanent that she’d let him back into her life.
It had only been last week when it finally came to a crashing, shocking, and violent end. Gaia shivered now, thinking of it. Ted’s fingers pressing into her throat. She knew she should have reported it to the police, but she didn’t want to alarm Lana. Ted had apologized almost immediately and had left her alone since then.
She made a date with her sister for the evening and said goodbye. Checking the clock, she saw that the conference was about to close out for the day. It was her job to clean up all the equipment and papers left behind by the delegates.
Gaia was glad that Asa Thorn wasn’t in the conference hall when she returned to it. She could do without the harassment. Then she felt guilty. He’d been arrogant, yes, but he’d hardly assaulted her. The way he’d touched her face had been almost tender and, when she’d seen the look in his eyes, there was something more than simply lust. There was a sadness, a deep sense of loss. It belied his arrogant manner; his presumption.
“Slut!”
The shout broke Gaia’s reverie. Laughing, she turned to see her friend Aisha walking down the auditorium steps to greet her.
“Well, hello to you too, you slattern.”
Aisha grinned. The young British grad student had been Gaia’s closest girlfriend since they both began medical school together a year ago. Gaia loved her friend’s sense of humor and outlook on life. Aisha Khan had no filter when it came to telling other people how she felt about them, and Gaia appreciated her honesty.
“Did you see who was here? Only frigging Asa Thorn.” Aisha looked impressed, and Gaia rolled her eyes. “Man, I would do that man sideways and into next Tuesday.”
“I hate to burst that bubble, but I met him, and he’s just as big of a douchebag as you would expect.”
“Yeah, but,” Aisha made a crude movement with her hands and then laughed. “I wouldn’t mind a piece of him.”
“You are so, so thirsty.” Gaia hugged her friend. “And to change the subject, I thought you were in London for a few more days.”
“Got bored.” Aisha found a half-empty pack of potato chips and scarfed a handful into her mouth. “Went to your apartment, but the creeper neighbor told me you were here.”
Gaia snorted but shook her hand at her friend. “Danny is not a creeper.”
Aisha gave an exaggerated shiver but shrugged. “Whatever. Come on. I’m starving, and I came to feed you. Let’s go.”
“Let me finish up, and I’m all yours.”
Aisha went outside to wait for Gaia as she finished her job. In her office, Gaia shoved the discarded papers and leaflets into the recycle bin and logged off all the computer equipment. Amanda had left already, so the office rang with silence.
It was always like this after a conference. Beforehand, there was panic and disarray, but the conferences always ran smoothly. Afterward, Gaia was often left alone to tidy up. She didn’t mind it at all; it was like a serene peace she could exist in alone for a few hours.
