Blood Bond

“Shut up,” Ren glared at him not liking the way the color had just drained from Storm’s face as the bleeding started. Storm had always made jokes about not being able to tell anyone their future... saying it would kill him, but Ren didn’t think it was funny seeing it was the truth. “I get the gist of things and the rest I’ll figure out on my own.”

Storm staggered back to the chair holding his head, “I’m trying to even the odds by bringing LA as much backup as I can.”

Ren got up and walked around the desk, gripping Storm’s shoulder and in an instant they were back on the island. “If you ever try to tell me the future again, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

By the time Storm was steady enough to realize where he was, Ren was gone. Feeling the splitting headache that would probably last for days he smiled knowing it had been worth it. Ren was in place, and now that Angelica was within the city limits, she should draw in another hidden power that could turn the tables completely in their favor… they needed the gods on their side.

*****

Ren had spent the last week mapping the city by walking the streets. He knew from the download of the PIT files where some of the non-humans were but as he walked or drove his motorcycle, he could feel power riding him that didn’t belong to the things on that list.

He turned on the huge screen that covered one wall of the study, pulling the grid map up on it and leaned back in the chair behind the desk. To anyone else, the map might have resembled a Christmas decoration since it was littered with pinpricks of different colored lights.

It was the colors he was studying now. He could see exactly where the shifters were… had even visited Moon Dance and Night Light. The corner of his lip twitched at the memory. He’d made the mistake of ordering Heat and had done fine until he’d called it a night and come home. By the time he’d made it half way home, he was way out of the range of the shifters and completely drunk.

The shifter’s territory was backlit mostly by green lights with a couple pinpricks of red and blue… blue was the PIT team stationed in that area and everything that happened there he was leaving to them… the same with the wolf pack.

Michael, Damon, and Kane were all loose cannons as far as he was concerned, which had earned them yellow and their soulless progeny that were slinking around in the shadows city wide were tastefully a blood red. At least that cowardly group was nice enough to bed down during the day in groups and tended to stay in groups at night which made it easier to track their feeding ground.

Now, the fallen were a different story. They had been hard to track at first, but recently they were so unstable that he’d given up though he knew when they were close… he could feel them. He thought back to the history lesson he had gotten from Storm.

The short version was the fallen had almost destroyed their own world by breaking through to our dimension and stealing some of our women because they thought they were beautiful. Stealing humans had only been their first mistake. Once they were back on the other side of the wormhole, the fallen had taken turns breeding with the stolen women.

The problem was… the children that came from those unions were not what they expected and the birth always killed the human females.

Only a small percent of the children were born full-blooded fallen and only one out of hundreds were female. The rest were known as demons… hybrids that didn’t turn out to be full blooded anything. Most hybrids were what humans called monsters. As those monsters turned on their own creators, the fallen started eradicating their world of all the hybrids… whether they were monsters or not.

Once they were finished with their genocide, they found there was now dozens of males to each female in their world. So the idiots had come back through the wormhole, this time keeping their creations on our side as they mated with as many women as they could… as quickly as possible.

As the children were born and the mothers died, the fallen would pluck any full blooded fallen and take them back to their world, leaving the hybrids behind. Not needing the male children that were born, they took them and trained them to fight their half breed siblings.

Just before those boys hit puberty, the leaders of the fallen sent them back here and closed the wormhole between the two dimensions… stranding all children here except for the female fallen for whom they had sacrificed so many lives.

The story hadn’t ended there. Those young warriors had been trained to do the same thing their fathers had done… rip openings into the bordering dimension… just not the one leading to their home world. This new one existed so close to us that it was only a breath away. One could only presume this was where the theory of Hell originated. So close that humans with heightened senses could feel it and sometimes see it.

As the warriors sought out the hybrids, they found that many of their rivals were just as powerful as the full blood fallen. Bloodshed happened on both sides and it was also documented that some of the fallen were dragged into the alternate dimension with the hybrids.

The murdering masterminds that had sent their children here had known it was a death sentence. They had counted on the fact that their progeny would kill each other and clean up the mess they’d left behind.

Only a handful of those boys still roamed the earth and most were younger than the first batch, arriving after the war had died down and the surviving hybrids had scattered. In Ren’s opinion, this was where things got muddled. Not all hybrids were what you would call demonic… and if undetected they could blend in with the humans and animals… again breeding hybrids for over a millennium.

The big secret Storm was protecting was the fact that most paranormal creatures, shifters and weres, or humans with even the slightest abnormal ability were more than likely the descendant of one of these hybrids… including the succubus powers he’d been using to track them then turn against them. It still made Ren uneasy to think of himself as part hybrid.

In his own defense, Ren was pretty sure the demons he’d killed in the past were not of the redeeming quality… either that or he would call it self-defense because they had sure been trying to kill him.

To make matters worse, Storm just had to drop the bomb on him that some original hybrids are not evil, even though they give off the same aura as a high class demon would. And if that wasn’t enough of a headache, then add the fact that a vampire is not a hybrid at all… but something entirely different that had invaded earth.

Ren rubbed his left temple still staring at the grid map. All area’s he found where he’d felt a power boost were black-lighted and considering Misery never stayed in one place… that was most of the city. But taking into account that she had a fetish for soulless vampires, he could only allow her to claim the areas that were near the vampire nest.

That left a lot of unlisted power and somewhere among it was the reason for Storm’s bloody prophecy. Speaking of Storm, he hadn’t seen him since he’d tossed his fortune telling butt back on the island and so far no one had shown up claiming to be part of PIT.

Ren smirked knowing exactly how to get Storm’s attention. He had become so in tune with the high-tech computer system that he no longer had to do anything but be in the same room with it. He watched the computer screen flash as it linked up to the main PIT system then fed the grid map behind the thick firewalls that only he and Storm could access.

It usually only took a few minutes before Storm would respond or pop into existence, so when the minutes ticked by with no response, Ren became worried. Then the screen flashed.

Storm appeared on the screen so Ren could see him and lowered a crimson spotted cloth from his nose before he leaned back in his chair and smiled at Ren via the webcam.

Ren frowned at that and could also see that Storm was at home on the island. “I’m surprised you didn’t come yourself… but then it kind of looks like you’ve been breaking the rules again,” Ren chastised with an arched eyebrow.

“The time flux in your area is keeping me from jumping and giving me one hell of a headache.” Storm explained holding the bloody tissues in his fist.

“Then stop trying,” Ren glared.

Storm nodded, “We’re going to have to stay in touch this way until things settle down on your end. For now, you have incoming PIT teams and it’s time you start learning how to work with them for everyone’s sake. Since you have a photographic memory and have read their files, I’m sure you will know more about them than even they know about themselves.”

“So you’re finally putting me in the middle of a lot of people with powers? Is that a smart thing to do? What if I can’t control it?” Ren asked not relishing the idea of working with someone else besides Storm.

Storm grinned and lifted his shoulders in a shrug, “Practice makes perfect Ren and you’re about to get a crash course in human interaction. Zachary and Angelica are moving in with you so they can access the databank and all the equipment I’ve stored in the castle. They’ll also handle most of the PIT teams that are coming. As for you, your job is to try to find out what the hell is causing the time flux and barring me from the area.”

He paused for a moment before leaning toward the screen. “Answer your door.”

The video link abruptly disconnected, leaving Ren staring at it with raised eyebrows. A loud knock at the door made him look in that direction then back at the blank screen.

“I hate it when he does that.” Ren grumbled and stood up from his chair grabbing his sunglasses to hide his eyes.

Walking through the open double doors that led into the foyer, Ren answered the door and stared at his visitors… soon to be roommates.

Zachary was smiling when he saw the young man standing on the other side of the entrance. “It’s nice to finally meet the real ‘ace in the hole’ that Storm has been talking about for as long as I’ve known him.”

Ren gritted his teeth but accepted Zachary’s outstretched hand and nodded at Angelica before standing aside and letting them in. He knew every face on PIT’s roster and what their gifts were. He’d made a point to memorize the profiles of all PIT members not long after Storm took him in.

Storm had added notes into the blocked version of the profiles and Ren had mentally downloaded those too. Storm was right… he probably knew more about them than they knew about themselves.

Zachary was a little bit of a wild child with what Storm had described as a double personality… one minute Zachary was joking and the next he was as deadly as a ticked off cobra. He’d seen the news broadcasts of the fire that took out the home of a mob boss a while back and the whole situation had PIT, more specifically Zachary, written all over it. The next morning Zachary had filed the report into the PIT system and confirmed Ren’s suspicions.

Angelica’s power was a little more complicated, being able to kill demons using the magic she was born with. Storm had once called her the key but never said what the hell she unlocked.

Her file was thicker than anyone else’s… it was as if Storm had been documenting her every move since birth. Ren couldn’t figure out why… and he didn’t really care at the moment. Without a word, he closed the door and headed into the room that served as his office. Somehow he’d known they would follow him.

“So,” Zachary said after less than a minute of awkward silence, “Do you live here alone?”

“No,” Ren said. “I have new roommates.”

Angelica smirked at the dumbfounded expression that appeared on Zachary’s face. “I think he’s trying to break the ice.”

“He’s doing a bad job,” Ren said already feeling crowded.

“I know,” Angelica soothed recognizing a quiet loner type when she met one.