Dreams of a Dark Warrior

streets. Sometimes various species band together in leagues.”
    Declan’s lips parted. He’d also held out hope that they hadn’t been real. That he’d gone crazy. Now someone, a man with authority, was staring him in the face, confirming what his eyes had seen. Declan’s mind reluctantly accepted it. “You killed them?”
    “Yes, a complete extermination. Again, too late for your parents and brother and …”
    And you,
the man hadn’t needed to say.
    The things those monsters had done to him, to his skin.
The blood in my mouth, blood that wasn’t my own …
    Declan looked away in shame, his face flushing. “They … they fed.”
    “Those were the Neoptera, some of the most nightmarish of them all.”
    “Why
us
?” Declan’s voice was raw with bitterness. He realized he’d never grasped what bitterness was until this exact moment.
Hatred that burns cold
.
    “As near as we can tell, you were picked at random. They attack simply because they can. Some of them feed on humans like cattle. Some play with us, torment us,” he said. “That’s why we hunt them down and kill them without mercy.”
    Declan faced him once more, his attention fully engaged.
To be able to hunt them …
    “They call themselves Loreans,” Webb continued. “We just like to call them dead sons-of-bitches.” He dug into his jacket pocket, then held up Declan’s charm. “We found this. Is it yours?”
    “Aye, it’s mine.” Hanging from a cord of leather was a thin medallion imprinted with two birds. His da had gotten it for him at a fair.
    My father’s dead.
    Declan’s hand shot out to snatch the medallion, the stitches up and down his body straining. Clutching it in his fist, he grated, “I want in.”
    “I thought you might say that. But it’s not so simple. You’re not even eighteen. Maybe if you were older, with some military training under your belt—”
    “Now.”
Declan bit out the word. “Now, goddamn it!”
    “And what about the drugs? I read your tox screen.”
    Declan flushed again. “I’ll get clean.”
    “Even if we made exceptions for you, not everyone gets inducted into the Order. You’d have to be combat-trained, and it’s grueling. Rangers and marines have told us that their training was a cakewalk compared to ours.”
    “I don’t give a shite.”
    Webb’s eyes bored into his own. “You’d be dealt pain on a daily basis to harden you, so that you could fightthese fiends. And at every second, you would have to demonstrate a single-minded purpose, the obsession to eradicate immortals.”
    “This is mine by right, Webb. More than anyone’s. Ye ken it is.”
    “You think about this. Long and hard. Because to fight these monsters, son, you’ll have to become one. …”
    Declan shot upright, waking drenched in sweat. Drops of it trailed down his chest, past his dog tags, over his raised scars.
    With a shudder, he stared down at the wounds that had been carved into his body from neck to waist. More covered his back and down both his arms to his fingers.
    He dropped his head in his hands. The Neoptera had taken his flesh and made him drink the blood of the ones he’d killed. Why? And how much of that blood had tainted his own that night?
    Maybe that was how Declan had gotten his strength and speed, his heightened senses. Maybe the drugs kept his change at bay all this time. What else could explain it?
    God, to become a thing like that …
    Nothing that a Glock to the mouth can’t cure, Dekko.
    He forced himself to lie back, to control the mad drumming of his heart. It was too soon for another injection.
    Twenty years later, and I’m still shooting up.
    But the dream had been so realistic, gripping him harder than it had in memory. He stared at the ceiling,recalling those ensuing years, focusing his mind on all the work he’d done to get where he was now. …
    After his detox—a bleak period of unrelenting nausea and bone-jarring tremors—and four months of physical rehab for his injuries, the Order had taken him to their compound.
    The training had been as punishing as Webb had promised. Pain came daily, but it did harden Declan. The commanders who hurt him the most were the ones he respected above all others.
    When he’d heard other recruits complaining about “brainwashing techniques,” Declan had been astounded that anyone might disagree with—or resist—what the commanders were instilling in them.
    How could Declan be brainwashed into hating the detrus more than he already