Dreams of a Dark Warrior

irises were the color of plums, but with emotion, veins of black forked out. “At last I’d escaped. Then less than a week later, I was captured by these wanks. Your takeaway from this story: I need to get laid.” She cast a keen glance at the kid.
    “He’s like six hundred years younger than you are.” Regin pointed a finger at the ceiling and declared, “I refuse to be the moral compass of our cell! Most weekends I have an intoxispell bong attached to my mouth like a respirator. I love scatological humor, and I list ‘pranks involving nuclear waste’ and ‘making demons eat things’ as my hobbies.” Hubcaps, fire extinguishers, pizza boxes. Though she was friends with many of the demon species, she made the rest of them suffer.
    “Valkyrie, if there was ever a cradle to be robbed … Gods, just
look
at him.”
    Admittedly sigh-worthy. But Regin merely shrugged. “What are you going to do with him if he wakes? Make porn for the security cameras while I plug my ears and drone
la-la-la
? Besides, he’s not fully immortal yet. You claw him and he’s dead.”
    Natalya glared at her claws.
    “Face it, Nat, this is one tiger who will never be jumping through your flaming hoop—”
    Regin caught the sound of Chase’s nearing footsteps. She recognized his long-legged stride, the echo of his heavy combat boots. “Here comes the Blademan. …”

NINE

    I s anything wrong, Magister?” Dixon asked, fawning expression in place as they moved down the corridor, assessing new prisoners.
    “No.” His tone was brusque, his answer a lie.
    Declan was having a shite day, and it wasn’t even noon.
    Tests on the vampire’s ring had revealed nothing—which made Lothaire’s interrogation this afternoon even more critical.
    Declan still hadn’t crushed his unnerving fascination with the Valkyrie; her cell was coming up fast.
    And he’d found out that yet another magister’s prisoners were on the way to his facility, though Declan hadn’t even surveyed the ones brought in while he’d been away hunting.
    Dixon had offered to bring him up to date on the recent arrivals. He’d accepted because she’d brought him the additional doses and because he’d assumed—rightly—that she wouldn’t dare broach the subject of
them
anytime soon.
    Now as they passed cells newly filled with more creatures from “myth,” she relayed details of their capture and backgrounds.
    One cell contained Cerunnos, sentient creatures possessing the head of a ram and the body of a serpent. Another held a number of revenants—zombies con-trolled by some unseen Sorceri master.
    Even a winged Vrekener—a horned demonic version of an angel—had been captured.
    Declan grudgingly admitted that this wasn’t a bad haul, though not nearly the caliber of his last one.
Nor in the same league as my next will be
. He’d been laying a trap for the most powerful immortal ever to live. A vampiric demon …
    When they passed the cell of Uilleam MacRieve, the Lykae said, “You’re the magister?” His Scottish brogue was thick, his eyes blue with rage.
    Declan merely stared at him. In less than half an hour, Dixon was scheduled to examine the were-wolf. She and her team would be doing the regular workup, but they’d also be testing a sonic weapon devised to immobilize a creature with his acute sense of hearing.
    Turning strengths into weaknesses.
    MacRieve bared his fangs. “When I get free from this place—”
    Without a word, Declan continued on, ignoring him. If he had a quid for every time one of them said, “When I get free …”
    I’d be even wealthier than I currently am.
    All these immortals smugly thought they’d escape soon, assuming that humans could never contain them. Yet in the centuries of the Order’s history, none had escaped.
    And no one would be breaking that perfect record under Declan’s watch. He’d installed so many security fail-safes that commanders and other magisters mocked him. They called this Installation Overkill.
    What they considered costly excess, he deemed standard precautions.
    The metal walls of the cells were solid steel, three feet thick. The forward glass wall was made of the same material used for space shuttle windshields. If reentry into the earth’s atmosphere couldn’t crack that glass, then an immortal with a torque sure as hell couldn’t.
    But if one
did
breach the glass, then hydraulic bulkheads—barriers of six-foot-thick steel—would drop into place, sealing each of the three