Primal Heat 05 - Darkness Reborn

but no one on this God-forsaken earth could explain why he had them or what they meant. Kane's memories of his life began five hundred years ago, the day Dante Sinclair, the now-deceased leader of the elite team of Calydon warriors called the Order of the Blade, had hauled him out of the gutter. How old had Kane been that day? Thirty? A hundred? Two hundred? How had he ended up there, covered in body art of the most brutal kind?
    He had no idea, but the story carved on his body and the enormity of the blackness hunting him made it clear that there was shit he needed to know about his prior life, and he was running out of time to do it. In his five hundred years as an Order member, he'd spent every day fulfilling the Order's mission to protect innocents from rogue Calydons, grimly willing to sacrifice one innocent to preserve the greater good, but no matter how hard Kane fought in defense of the Order's moral code, it still hadn't filled that void inside him, an emptiness that had been taking on a decidedly violent taint lately.
    The void he could live with. The uncontrollable need to inflict violence on others without justification? Not so much. That shit had to stop, and now.
    The air in the southern Oregon woods was thick with moisture, rich with the scent of earth saturated by the rain that was too cold for this time of year. Thick fog was rolling in fast, sucked in by the dance of the heat and cold. The air Kane was breathing was alive with vibrant energy, and yet all he could feel was the endless free-fall of his spirit into the bottomless chasm of darkness.
    "These guys were serious shit." Caked with sweat and blood from the battle, Ryland Samuels crouched beside one of the two rogue Calydons they'd been hunting for the last eighteen hours, deadly bastards who had put up a hell of a fight before Ryland and Kane had taken them down. Usually two-on-two battles were weighted so heavily in favor of the Order of the Blade that they lasted less than a second—but once they'd finally found the bastards at sunset, the two rogues had kept Ryland and Kane at max capacity for over two hours before the good guys had won.
    The fact that the battle was so tough was bizarre as hell because the rogues had been so underdeveloped physically that they couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. They'd been only a month or two past the dream that had brought them into their powers as immortal Calydon warriors. No rookie should ever have been able to put up that kind of battle against elite warriors who had been saving the world for over five hundred years.
    And yet they had.
    Which meant the Order needed to find out what they were, where they were from, and why they were both rogue. Rogue Calydons were bad shit, and the odds of two Calydons going rogue as a team almost nil, so the Order needed to make sure that these two were an anomaly, and not a trend.
    Ryland hooked his machete under one of their wrists and raised the dead warrior's hand. "What's with the manicure?"
    Ten-inch claws protruded from the tips of the Calydon's fingers, still covered in Kane's blood from when it had tried to cleave his heart out. "Maybe they came up from Hollywood," Kane said. "You know how those fancy Californians are all bailing up to Oregon nowadays. How the hell would I know what his deal is?"
    Ryland narrowed his eyes at Kane's aggression. "You seen it before?"
    "No. Calydons have weapons, not claws." Kane shifted restlessly as Ryland nodded his agreement. He was unable to settle now that the battle was over. He was on edge, his instincts still ready for more action. He knew they needed to figure out what was up with the rogues who had invaded their territory, but he couldn't focus. All his senses were on overload, telling him that something was deadly wrong. He scanned the woods, hunting for a clue, but came up with nothing.
    Ryland dropped the kid's wrist. "What's your deal, Santiago?"
    Kane whirled around to face his teammate, his adrenaline leaping at the tense undercurrent in Ryland's voice. "What?"
    Ryland flashed him a grin that didn't reach his pitch-black eyes. "I'm the one who's supposed to be on the edge of going rogue, not you. You planning to snap so you're the next one who has to be cut down to save the world, instead of me?"
    "I'm not going rogue." Usually, a Calydon went rogue only after bonding with his sheva, the woman destined to be his soul mate for all eternity. The bond between them, once completed, was destined to