Scarlet Dusk

ALSO AVAILABLE BY MEGAN J. PARKER:

SCARLET NIGHT

SCARLET DAWN

**ORIGINAL SIN

GONE WITH THE SIN

*
THE LOVER

*A prequel to the Scarlet Night series

**A prequel to Crimson Shadow (by Nathan Squiers)

ALSO AVAILABLE BY NATHAN SQUIERS:

CRIMSON SHADOW: NOIR

CRIMSON SHADOW: SINS OF THE FATHER

CRIMSON SHADOW: FORBIDDEN DANCE

CRIMSON SHADOW: THE DIRTY DOZEN (SHORT STORY COLLECTION)

**SCARLET RISING

A HOWL AT THE MOON

*
S(a)TAN

*
FORBIDDEN PAINTS ON A WICKED CANVAS

**
THE FIGHTER

*A prequel to the Crimson Shadow series

**A prequel to Scarlet Night (by Megan J. Parker)

Copyright © 2014 by Megan J. Parker & Nathan Squiers

Edited by Nathan Squiers

Cover art by ShinyShadows (DeviantArt)

Design by Eden Crane Designs

"To all the lovers and fighters out there; here's to always having what it takes to face down your demons"

We’d like to send out our thanks to YOU! All our readers who have been following both of us through all of our works! This series wouldn't be here without your love and support. We are so excited to share this final piece in the Scarlet Night series. We’d also like to thank our local friends & family who back us up and support our work & cheer us on.

Anyway, thank YOU for all the support we have received and we hope that Serena and Zane’s final book in this series.

(Don’t worry; Serena and Zane are FAR from gone!)

Much love & rock on!

~Megan J. Parker & Nathan Squiers

(The Literary Dark Duo)

HE COULDN’T RECALL BEING BORN.

Couldn’t recall much of anything anymore.

Still, he doubted it hurt as bad as this…

Unable to move or see—unable to even
function
beyond the simple sense that he
was
, in some way or another,
existing
once again—he simply floated in the void of his own growing self-awareness and let the jagged, ugly deposits of whatever reality existed beyond his blindness grow more and more obvious:

Voices. One was unmistakable; a voice that, for some time, he’d grown to know as a part of himself…

The vampire called Zane.

Though he couldn’t be certain if he even
had
lips anymore, he was certain the name would have brought a sneer to them.

The other voice, though…

The unmistakable pitch and sensuality of a woman though tarnished with an undeserving pride and intellect.

Ah yes…
he mused to himself,
The blue-haired whore!

The name escaped him, though the face shimmered just beyond the veil of his memory. One of Zane’s co
mrades; one of the psychic types, if he wasn’t mistaken. She was close to Zane, he remembered, though he’d never bedded her. No, she was more of a sister to him…

One of the reasons he’d always wanted to personally break her; to take her in the worst ways possible and leave Zane to soak up the guilt of the aftermath…

But, with Zane’s voice ringing
outside
of his head, it was clear that his
unique
relationship with the vampire playboy had been terminated…

Though, if he could figure out a way to
operate
whatever vessel he’d been placed within, perhaps the circumstances could be turned in his favor.

“You
know
she’s going to taunt me about being right when she wakes up, right?” the blue-haired whore said.

“Can’t really blame her,” Zane’s voice was solid and confident;
happy
! A deep rage boiled deep at that realization as he listened on: “She was right about
everything
!”

“Can you do me a favor and
not
feed her that gloating right for at least a day?”

“Only if you do me a favor.”

A groan from the whore, “What?”

“I am
dying
to get a Slushie and a cheap, nasty gas station hot dog in my belly, and I’m sure Serena would love to have a Snickers and one of those magazines she’s always reading.” The echo of freedom in Zane’s voice was only fueling the rage, then, “Do you think you could drive me to the city and front me the cash to grab the goods?”

“Why can’t you drive and buy your own garbage?”

“Because then it wouldn’t be a favor.”

A chuckle? He was actually
laughing
?

This wouldn’t do!

“I guess that makes sense… sort of. Alright, fine.”

A pregnant pause offered the hope of miscarried happiness.

“Why are we keeping that
thing
in here?” Zane asked, the familiar jagged edge of fear clinging to his voice.

Another pause.

“Because that’s a corpse…” the inflection at the end was more taunting than fearful, “And we’re in the medical center. Would you rather we kept it in the cafeteria?”

A corpse? Is that what he’d been dumped into?

Unacceptable!

“I guess I just don’t like the idea that it could suddenly wake up.”

Yes!
There
it was!

The fear!

The concern!

After all that had happened, he
still
had Zane by the manhood…

And it was right time to twist and pull!

“Doubt it. It’s not that it’s not going to wake up
eventually
, but
that’s
been out without
any
sign of life—no pulse, no brain activity, and barely any measureable auric activity—for
days
, where Serena’s breathing and dreaming no differently than if she was just napping. Between the two of them, I’m willing to bet that Serena’s going to be the first to open her eyes.”

Not if I have anything to say about it, bitch!

His sense of smell resurrected then, offering two
very
pleasant-and-familiar scents:

Zane’s fear; his succulent, delicious terror!

And, painfully near to him, Serena.
His
Serena!

His buttercup baby!

Yes, Zaney-boy! Do run along with the whore! Immerse yourself in your delusions and leave me to my devices. Nothing will be alright; not while I remain!

Zane’s anxious sigh sang such glorious potential, and the motivation to drag himself from this mock-death grew so powerful he was certain he’d awaken in his new body cackling.

Finally, Zane sealed his fate:

“You promise?”

I swear it, Zaney-boy! I fucking
swear
it!

It had taken a bit longer for Zane and his blue-haired colleague—who was finally identified as Zoey through the rest of their incessant banter—to finally leave the room; to finally leave him alone to his devices. The time, however, didn’t feel quite as wasted in hindsight, as it was a period that allowed for even more senses and awareness to return to the seemingly dead creature laid out not far from them.

Once they were gone, though…

About fucking time!
he growled, though entirely internally, his new body still not able to respond to his commands. Despite this, he was otherwise fully aware. His internal senses told him that he was on his back, that whatever he was lying upon was cold…

And then there were the senses he
hadn’t
expected.

The skin of whatever he was in was somehow able to
feel
the presence of light and heat; somehow able to tell him the presence of ultraviolet and neon waves without being able to actually
see
them!

Simply fascinating!
he mused to himself as he tested this alien ability. Underground; every nerve of his being screamed that he was underground. Part of him was pleased with this—feeling a sense of security and secrecy in it—but yet another part was furious with the total lack of meat…

Save for morsel that he’d been able to smell since almost the very start!

Then there was
his
part. The part of his mind that was neither hardwired to this new body nor sympathetic to its comforts and preferences. The part that he’d carried with him from the start, long before he was in this body or planted inside Zane as the creature known as
Maledictus
or even when he’d been occupying the makeshift reliquary he’d buried his essence into. The only part of himself that he had left.

That
part didn’t care about his new shell’s comfort or contentment, and he certainly wasn’t going to offer up the morsel to its simple appetites.

Not when his own appetites—appetites that burned just below his new body’s rumbling stomach—were so much more demanding; so much more
satisfying
.

No,
he chortled to himself as he willed his mind to hurry the process of claiming the body’s motor functions,
I have MUCH more delicious plans for
that
one! But if you behave,
he internally addressed his new body,
then I’ll feed you the cartoon-headed cunt with Zaney-boy’s still-beating heart plopped on top like a plump cherry.

The body lurched.

A labored, hissing growl oozed through a parched throat.

His legs tensed and kicked as his arms flexed and flopped with the sudden waves of backed-up neurological commands.

Something at the base of his spine twitched and rolled.

A serpentine tongue lashed out, tasting the air and filling his mind with even more details about his surroundings—none of them pleasant. As he’d heard the blue-haired one say, they
were
in a medical center, and the air—the very air—was
teeming
with the rancid artificialness of it all; sanitizers and cleaners and cold, bloodless metal upon even more cold, bloodless metal. His mind thrashed and hissed at the total lack of death and rot and agony…

But, despite this, his dry, chapped lips peeled into a grin as the thought screeched in his head.

“Oh, I think I’ll like you very much,” he offered to his new body; relishing in its need—its sheer
demand
—for the forced procreation and agonizing extinction of
everything
around him.

Those fools had actually planted
him
inside a creature that outright
thrived
on rape and murder!

Perfect! Then let’s begin!

Finally cooperating, his eyes opened and he was met with the harsh and unnatural glow of synthetic lighting that his skin had already warned him about. Curiosity grew as he shimmied to the edge of metal slab he’d been lying upon, and he dragged his hands into his view, marveling at the scaly, clawed digits that occupied his sight.

Reptilian?
he marveled, running one elongated finger across the back of his opposite hand and smirking at the cold, bumpy texture of his new flesh. “How fucking delightful!” he chortled and stood, glancing down at the stilt-like pair of clawed, brownish-green legs that now supported him, “In their haste to be rid of me, they put me in a blood-thirsty, cold-hearted
weapon
?”

Spotting a mirror above a sink set into a nearby wall, he allowed himself a long moment to take in his new face. While there were some notably simian qualities about the head and jaw—looking more like the brutish sculpt of one of the human’s slightly more primitive, tree-dwelling ancestors—there was definitely an unmistakable, lizard-like aesthetic. A pair of stretched pupils nestled amidst a pair of hazy, piss-yellow bogs that surrounded each of them, that should have belonged in the skull of a giant snake narrowed at their own reflection as he leaned in to inspect his visage. Two teardrop nostrils flared then, and his mouth—seeing that what he’d previously passed off as chapped was, in fact, a total lack of actual lips and just an angry gash cutting through the scaly surface—parted enough to let a long, forked tongue jut forward and vibrate angrily against the glass in an attempt to sample the air around their doppelganger. He smirked at the simplicity of the response, and the gesture reminded him of an alligator exposing its assets. The brownish-green hue appeared to be a constant throughout, save for the paler area of his chest and abdomen and…

He snarled.

“My dick!” his hands flew to the body’s scaly-yet-flat crotch and began frantically searching for something—
anything
—resembling a pair of genitals. “Where the
fuck
is my…”