Darkness Possessed (Order of the Blade) by Stephanie Rowe Read Free Book Online

him, his sword hanging loosely in his right hand.
    Disgust was a sour burn in the back of his mouth. "This is how you treat your team?"
    "This is how I try to save their lives."
    The chained warrior moved suddenly, lunging toward Rohan with speed Zach had never seen before. The prisoner attacked Rohan, trying to take him down with his bare feet. Rohan raised his sword, for a few brief moments, a vicious battle ensued between a warrior's feet and Rohan's sword. The warrior's hands and arms were not accessible, because he had no fucking hands to hold his weapon with, so it was his feet that he attacked with, unleashing incredible precision and force.
    Zach stood ready to defend himself if the fight came his way, but he didn't interfere. He didn't care who won. All that mattered to him was that these two crazy bastards stayed in this darkened bubble, and didn't go back out to where Thano lay defenseless and unconscious. But hell, he could barely comprehend the speed, strength, and sheer violence of the battle between Rohan and his prisoner. Impressive as hell, but at the same time...Zach's fingers tightened involuntarily around his sai. Could he protect Thano from them on his own, armed only with a sai? He gritted his jaw, refusing to truthfully answer his own question.
    The skirmish took less than a minute, and then the warrior was unconscious again, courtesy of a devastating blow to the head by Rohan with the flat of his sword, an impact which sent sparks of blue electricity crackling violently through the other warrior's body. His scream of anguish ripped through the night before he collapsed again, his body swinging rhythmically from the chains as he descended into oblivion once more.
    "Explain." Zach kept his sai up as Rohan lowered his weapon. What kind of leader treated his team like that? "What the hell's going on?"
    "This is Trevor Swan," Rohan said. "He went rogue twenty-three days ago."
    Zach glanced again at the poor bastard strung up without his fucking hands. "You did this to him because he met his sheva? " The curse of the Calydon was to go rogue upon meeting and bonding with his sheva , the soul mate he was destined for. After completing the bonding stages, he was destined to go rogue and destroy all that mattered to both of them. The only way to stop him was for her to kill him. Once he was dead, she would be so overwhelmed with anguish over the fact she had killed her mate, that she would take her own life. It was a bitter, hellish way to go, especially for Calydons, who were driven by strong passion and desire…which was why Zach had taken precautions long ago to make sure he never ended up with a sheva.
    With the recent possible exceptions of a few Order members, there was no happy ending once a Calydon had met his mate. The only way to stop the curse was for either the sheva or the Calydon to be killed. The Order killed the Calydons to protect the innocent, except when the Order was involved, in which case it was the sheva who was cut down…until recently the Order had started letting their shevas live. Now, things were all fucked up, and Thano was paying the price.
    Zach ground his jaw as guilt attacked him. If only he had adhered to the ancient tradition that he and Dante had started of killing shevas to save the lives of the Order members, Thano would be sitting around, cracking jokes, and being an irreverent ass, instead of being strapped down on his horse like a crazed monster.
    Zach could still remember that moment when Ryland had finally found the woman he'd been hunting, that moment when electricity had flooded the air. He'd known there was something going on with her. He should have taken her out right then, but no, he'd become complacent, accepting the modern way of thinking, forgetting the true danger of the sheva. And now Thano was going to die because of it.
    "No," Rohan said, "there was no sheva for Trevor. He was on a mission for me, and he went rogue. I haven't been able to bring him