The Siren's Call (Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance) (FORCED TO SERVE) (9 page)

Lady Genastia thought of the beauty of the Siren male and how she had been drawn to him at first glance. She had paid far more than males like him were typically worth, but she’d been unable to stop herself. There was just something about the Siren that drew her. She’d rather see him dead at this point than belong to another female who might succeed where she had failed.

Pushing a packet of money across the table, she smiled. “I’ll take my chances. Give him the drug.”

The doctor picked up the bulging packet and glanced at the contents. “Very generous. And an offer no sane businessman could possibly refuse. I will administer it in his sleep and see if I can adjust his dreams to achieve the results you wish to obtain. If he were to see his mate as his enemy, perhaps his loyalty can be redirected.”

Lady Genastia bowed her head to the doctor across the desk.

***

He paced the boundaries of the confinement area, restless as always. But today he was restless and confused. He put a hand over his stomach, pressing against the ache that was growing stronger there. They had slipped drugs into his food again yesterday, and given him more while he slept. His dreams were tortured and of a strange female in uniform. She had aimed a weapon and shot him, causing him to wake. It made him wonder if that was the reason for the unexplained extreme pain vibrating in his gut.

“Good day, Handsome One,” Lady Genastia said.

She folded her arms as she studied the male staring back at her with not a hint of recognition. All the other drugs had worked. He no longer remembered who he was. He no longer fought the collar. He now accepted that he was a slave. So why was he still resisting his service to her?

“How are you feeling today?” she asked kindly, walking in front of the bars. “You’ve been ill a very long time. I have missed you and wish you could come home. I hate seeing you in a healing cage.”

Though not sure how, he could tell the female was trying to deceive him. He had no recollection of anything before two weeks ago, but he had no sense at all of this female. She was a stranger and one who had ulterior motives. He had learned not to be disrespectful to anyone, as a loose tongue led to painful punishment, but he had never managed being deferential. Nor had he found a kind entity—other than one slave who had come to him in a dream and tried to help him escape.

Instead he had learned to be stoic because all his captors seemed to accept that as being normal. But inside, he was everything but calm. Inside there boiled a rage that he could barely control. When he woke up this morning, it was like a fire burning within. His only thought was of escaping.

“Is my home truly with you?” he asked softly, hoping she would say something that would help him figure out what was going on.

“Of course,” she said on a light laugh. “Do you honestly not remember me—or us? Though we are new to each other, you have served me faithfully. We have been very happy together. You don’t know how much I regret the distance this illness has put between us. I have given the doctor large sums of money trying to fix you. I heard you slept well last night.”

He paced and then sat down on the bed, which was the only real surface in the area allotted to him. “Actually, I did not. I had bad dreams. I dreamed a female shot me with a weapon at close range. It was not you.”

He noticed she smiled at his last statement, obviously pleased about it somehow. He wanted to tell her that he wished now that his attacker had been more successful because he might not still be trapped in a cage making idle conversation with a lying female he detested on sight.

“I think we’ll be able to go home soon,” she said softly. “My bed is lonely without you. Is there anything you wish?”

A thousand things rolled through his mind, but he let none of them escape his mouth.

“I only wish for my life to be normal again. This space is very confining,” he replied, forcing himself to smile at her.

The female practically beamed through the bars.

“Soon, my prize. Soon,” she said, twirling on heels and walking away.

He clutched his stomach and looked for a place to hide the food he had no intentions of eating that night. If they came to give him drugs again, they were going to get a surprise, pain or no pain.

He was tired of being controlled.

Chapter 7

Guards escorted Ania and Gwen into a building just inside the city walls. Gwen was immediately put into a cage with several others wearing collars like hers. She could see everything happening in several rooms from her location, including the one where Ania had been taken. A large male in a pressed uniform greeted her from behind a desk.

Gwen watched as he smiled and motioned Ania to a chair. She couldn’t hear the conversation clearly, but she picked up the gist of it being an explanation from Ania. The male ordered one of the guards to fetch her a drink. Gwen had a tiny moment of envy because she was thirsty herself, but then a wave of dread and a vision of Ania in shackles wiped it away.

“No—don’t drink it,” she whispered, clutching the bars of her prison and wishing she dared free herself.

Then it was too late. She watched Ania lift the glass, drink, and swallow. Waiting for her vision to come true, Gwen breathed hard and bit her lip. She was positively shocked when Ania rose and walked calmly to the cage to talk to her.

“Sorry you’re in a cage. You’ll be released shortly. It’s standard procedure to secure slaves when they are not working or serving in some manner. We’ll be on our way as soon as I convince the chief that we have nothing but honorable intentions,” she said.

Gwen nodded and watched Ania turn and start back to the male, who saw her coming and rose. He smiled and said something to Ania that made her gasp.

Then she saw Ania fall unceremoniously to the floor a short distance from the desk.

The giant male walked to her and toed Ania’s fallen body with the edge of his boot, then motioned to two guards to take her away.

Then he walked to the cage where Gwen couldn’t help glaring at him from behind the bars. She stepped away preparing for a fight, but trying not to look like she was.

“Hello there, my beautiful prize,” he said to her.

“Hello,” Gwen said back, thinking playing nice and acting afraid instead of disgusted was probably better than indulging her sarcastic streak at the moment.

“You owe me your life,” he said, smiling at her as his gaze swept her body. “Your previous captor was one of the walking dead. She carries a demon’s power, but the entity does not seem to be within her at the moment. Fortunately, we have drugs for controlling just about every possible entity that has ever graced the land of Terris Rein. And I happen to be in the market for a demon.”

He turned and spoke to the guards in a language Gwen didn’t understand. They looked at her and nodded.

“Do not fear for your safety. I have claimed you,” he said gently. “Later I will expect a proper show of gratitude in return. If you please me, I might not sell you. You’re just my kind of female.”

“I don’t think so,” Gwen said automatically, thinking he was too, too much like Fener Sel for her allow him any liberties for the sake the escaping. Either he would die or she would. “If you touch me, I will have to kill you. This is my only warning.”

The male laughed at her words and picked up a controller from a nearby table. He pointed it at Gwen, running through several settings before locating the frequency that sent her collar shooting vibrations through her.

Gwen called out and fell to the floor clutching at her neck like she was enduring great pain. “Stop. Please stop,” she begged, glad she had practiced until even Chiang had stopped laughing and believed her.

“You beg very sweetly, so I will,” he said, tossing the remote back onto to the table. “I’m going to enjoy you very much.”

Gwen climbed slowly to her feet again. “Not as much as I’m going to enjoy killing you. I missed out on getting to kill the last male that tried to take advantage of me. If Ania wakes up before you let me out of here, I may miss out again. She is not as merciful as I am.”

“If you’re referring to your previous master, I’m afraid she’s not going to wake up for days,” he said happily, “and when it does happen, it will be to find herself in the best shackles made in the universe. We’ll just be holding onto her until her entity shows up to save her, then we’ll capture him and dispose of the body. There’s a Norblade who’s been looking for a demon for a very long time. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be the exact one.”

“His name wouldn’t be Conor Synar would it?” Gwen asked, snorting at the guard’s stupidity in thinking he could manage to capture Malachi.

He frowned at her. “You have quite a bit of knowledge for a slave. So what if it is?”

“Your potential buyer made other arrangements. So you can kiss that big sale goodbye,” Gwen advised.

“Big talk for someone wearing a collar. Your master is not my first demon host, little girl, and you aren’t my first slave. See you later.”

He turned to walk away and Gwen looked at the rest of the slaves huddled together in the corner. If she blew up the office with one of Chiang’s explosives, she might take out the innocents as well as the bastards. If she got past the locked door, they still would take her down because she was outnumbered.

Dropping back to the floor, Gwen decided she might as well rest and conserve her energy for the next opportunity. They weren’t going to hurt Ania because they wanted her for demon bait. And they probably wouldn’t touch her otherwise because she was considered an unclean female.

The guard walked back to the cell and pointed the remote at her again. “One more thing, Beautiful. Give me your shoes or you’ll get another dose. We don’t allow slaves to wear shoes on Terris Rein.”

Grunting, Gwen pulled off one shoe and threw it out the bars and then the other while the controlling bastard laughed at her. He had no idea how badly losing her shoes pissed her off. She looked at her bare feet and cursed her intuition.

“And everyone wonders why I never want to know these things ahead of time,” she said fiercely. “Raging fires of Helios, knowing didn’t do a damn bit of good. I still lost my freaking shoes. It just makes me more angry to have seen it coming and not have been able to stop it.”

“Do not be disrespectful to the guards. It only makes it worse for all of us,” a sullen male whispered urgently to her.

“Oh bite me,” Gwen said, leaning back against the wall. “You better be thinking of what you’re going to do when I get us all out of here later. I’m not a damn slave.”

The male laughed softly. So did several others.

“When you wear the collar, you’re a slave,” the sullen male told her.

Gwen rolled her eyes up and closed them, trying not to think about both Zade and Sarinnea saying that to her in her visions.

“Listen up, Creators of All,” she announced into the air, uncaring if her cell mates thought she was crazy. “I’m not up on religious protocol, but your intuition gift is not very helpful. If you’re going to warn me about something like this shitty situation, stop hinting and just show me plainly.”

“You have the most irreverent tongue I’ve ever heard on a female,” the sullen male said. “The chief guard deserves you.”

Gwen’s only answer to her fellow captive was a laugh that was fueled by more evil thoughts than she’d had in a long time. If the chief guard touched her, he would die. Right now, she would be happy to kill him just for taking her shoes.

***

He let the physician who had been drugging him for days check his current condition, even answering the questions about his well-being as honestly as possible without letting on how his mind was firmly set to end his torment that day. After the physician left, he toyed with the food they had brought, walking around as he pretended to eat it, all the while discreetly discarding it throughout the meager furnishings of his cell. The mess he was creating meant little because he didn’t plan on sleeping in the bed again after tonight anyway.

Either he’d escape when they came in to drug him in his sleep or he’d die trying. Anything was better than continuing to tolerate the situation.

The drink they brought him wasn’t as easily disposed of, but he held most of it in his mouth as he pretended to knock over what left, spitting out the part he hadn’t swallowed as he stooped to retrieve the glass from the floor.

He just hoped the amount he’d had to ingest didn’t affect him too greatly.

When the guard who watched over him offered more to drink, he refused it with a frown, throwing himself on the bed with a sigh. He closed his eyes and tried to force his mind blank, thinking to lower his anxiety level. Instead, every time he closed his eyes he saw a tall, beautiful slave female with smooth skin, telling him over and over she was coming to get him.

Thoughts of her usually comforted him, even when he wasn’t even sure there was anything worth fighting his way out of the cage for. More than once he wondered how much of his dreams were just an illusion caused by what they were doing to him. He certainly hoped the dream he had of her shooting him last night was drug induced. Seeing her in a uniform brandishing a weapon hadn’t exactly reassured him of her motives either.

Soon—no matter how much he wanted to stop it from happening, he felt his eyelids drooping as he slipped into dreaded sleep.