Forbidden Lineage

Chapter 9

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Valentina:

She’d been watching Kai closely since he arrived.  His hair was longer.  The look suited him, the light stubble giving him a dark edge along with his new found confidence.  He looked amazing, just like she’d imagined he would.  He still smelled like the Kai she remembered; like wood and spice.  Only now, the scent had matured, just like he had.  There were lots of things that were different about him besides the way he looked, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it until she saw him interact with Sofia. 

They were mates.  Inside, she rejoiced.  He deserved some happiness after what he’d been through.  She’d always loved him like a son, still did.  Had she been able to, she would have surely taken him and ran.  She had been the first to hold him when Dante and Nik brought him with them.  He was so little that the destruction they spoke of seemed hard to believe.  The Witches had warded him, but she could still feel the power radiating off his tiny body.  They said he needed essence as well as sustenance.  She’d never heard of that before, not with someone so small, but she quickly learnt how to deal with him. 

He was faster, stronger and more attuned to his surroundings than any of them were, even though he was just a baby.  Dante had kicked him once because he’d accidentally crawled in his path.  Nik had rushed to pick him up, to find the floor sunk in where he’d landed without a scratch.  She promptly named ‘Kai’, meaning strong, or unbreakable.  Surprisingly, the name stuck.  He was a well behaved child, and he carried that with him as he grew.  She’d never needed to use submission on him.  He had aged at a very slow rate for the first hundred or so years of his life, but his intelligence was something else.  His mind seemed to soak up information like a sponge. 

According to the rules they had formulated regarding him, no one was to know how he came to be.  They didn’t want anyone getting any ideas about the Guardians getting soft.  Between her and Nik, they’d happily kept him occupied whenever they weren’t busy with duties.  At one hundred, he only looked to be about ten.  They’d never seen that happen before either.  They couldn’t quite figure out how long his body would take to reach maturity, so they set about training him to use his excess energy positively, by teaching him fighting and defense techniques.  It was decided eventually that he would spend a month with each of them so that the task would be equally distributed amongst them, but she’d found a way to spend more time with him anyway.  It was when she was with him, that her maternal instincts had kicked in.  She’d never before felt so protective of another until then. 

Dante and Yesinia were like a bad rash.  They were always grumbling about something or another, and they did the worst of torture to Kai every chance they got.  The others weren’t so hard on him, mainly because he was a quick learner when it came to training, and he was always eager to please. 

Until they decided to use him for control… 

She couldn’t talk them out of it no matter how hard she tried, even though at the time it did seem like the only option they had. 

A handful of Crimsons had taken it upon themselves to disregard the Law of Humanity when they fed off humans.  They began taking pleasure in torturing them first, just like the Elders had done centuries ago.  Their numbers had quickly risen when the news spread about contaminated essence.  It was like a bad drug addiction when essence they fed off came from fear.  The negative effect had begun to turn them insane, and then the killing began.  Before the Witches intervened, they handled the situation by themselves using Kai.  Starving him seemed to do the trick, but she could see that the transformation was painful.  Only Guardians had the power of submission.  Dante would wait for just the right time to issue the order, and once Kai turned that order would be followed to a T.  And the field they used to execute punishments was cleverly concealed from prying eyes, the land barren to this day.  Not even the parched, dry earth had anything left to offer.  After the clean up, he would be despondent for weeks.  He’d once told her that he remembered everything he’d done, but had no control no matter how hard he tried stop himself.  Nobody had recall under submission before, nor did they have any control over their minds.  She never mentioned it to anyone, hoping to shield him from more trouble.