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  Balfor’s Salvation

  Sanctuary in Shadows, Book 2

  By

  Susan Trombley

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Trombley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author.

  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Chapter 1

  Duke Ranove approached the campsite cautiously, noting the severed heads lined up along the trail. The scent of blood, spilled bowels, and death tainted the air. When he entered the sheltered area, hemmed in and shaded by basalt columns, he saw what he’d hoped not to see.

  Prince Balfor crouched beside the sullen embers of an old fire, a severed adurian arm clutched in one clawed hand. Ragged flesh on the dismembered limb showed bite marks. The silver of adurian blood coated him from his horns down to his talons, mixing with his own black blood, also spilled in copious amounts. A coagulating pool lay beneath his feet as swirls of black and silver sluggishly dripped from the loincloth that was his only covering. In the clearing overshadowed by towering basalt, pieces of adurian corpses littered the muddy ground. Standing at the edge of the campsite, Ranove could barely detect the prince’s personal scent beneath the stench of rotting meat and old blood.

  Though Balfor had his back to Ranove, his wings were partially extended in threat. The prince had no doubt sensed Ranove’s arrival from the moment he entered the basalt traps.

  Ranove ventured a few steps in Balfor’s direction before a baleful growl from the prince froze him in place. He tensed as Balfor suddenly turned and charged him, a snarl twisting his blood-coated face to reveal chunks of flesh caught in his bared teeth. Ranove sidestepped the larger umbrose, sweeping his wings back to lift himself out of Balfor’s path. Balfor rushed past him, spinning a step beyond him to face Ranove, roaring in challenge.

  Ranove lowered his head and wings. He’d have preferred not to fight and risk his own death, or worse, the possibility that he might win and Balfor would die. The power granted to Balfor by the Mother would inevitably pass on to Ranove as the next strongest umbrose. That was the last thing he wanted. He need only look at what it had driven Balfor to do just to escape Her influence. The primal was in full control of the prince now.

  Balfor growled at Ranove’s submission, circling him. The prince feigned a lunge forward. Ranove didn’t flinch—which would have lowered him to the level of prey in the primal’s estimation—but he kept his head down.

  Suddenly, Balfor lowered his head and rammed Ranove, bashing their horns together. Ranove staggered back a step—tasting blood from the force of the blow—but quickly recovered, resetting his footing to hold against Balfor’s onslaught. The bony, hollow thudding of their horns crashing together echoed in the canyon of stone columns. Digging into Balfor’s shoulders with both sets of claws to restrain him, Ranove strained to hold onto the heavier umbrose to minimize the damage caused by his head bashing. Venom dripped from his claw tips as they pierced the prince. His own skin burned from venom as Balfor’s claws sliced across his chest.

  They pummeled each other with their wings. It was a primitive fight, but one meant for establishing dominance, not for killing. It had been a long time since Ranove had fought this way. The old way. The primal way.

  Balfor was bigger and stronger. Despite that advantage, blood flowed freely from wounds on both umbrose when Ranove dropped to one knee in defeat. Balfor staggered back, lifting a hand to his forehead. He touched the broken flesh beneath one horn and then stared at his palm covered in black blood mixed with silver.

  When he looked at Ranove again, the duke finally saw recognition in his eyes. “How long have I been gone?”

  *****

  Balfor didn’t like the circumspect expression on Ranove’s face when the duke answered his question. “Two weeks ago you set the slaves loose in the basalt traps armed with weapons. You’ve been hunting them since then.”

  Balfor frowned. Memories trickled back from the past two weeks. Ugly memories blurred by the mental veil he kept between himself and his primal. “How many slaves this time?”

  Ranove glanced to his right. “Fourteen.”

  Balfor followed the direction of his gaze and saw the corpses. Lip curling in disgust at the

  sight, Balfor shook his head. “Did I catch them all?”

  Ranove nodded.

  That was one relief. If the slaves had escaped, they could’ve reported his condition back to Uriale and Anata, jeopardizing Sanctuary’s safety. It would have been Balfor’s fault, and his burden of shame to bear. He was no longer fit to rule, but the Mother had chosen him and would not release him until his death. “How many slaves are left?”

  Ranove’s expression told Balfor he wasn’t going to like the answer. “This was the last of them.”

  “Father’s Curse!” He clenched his fists and spat on the ground, wanting to rid his mouth of the foul taste of raw meat and blood, but also of failure. “I killed them all, then?” He glared at Ranove. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  Ranove wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Even the Mother could not stop you.”

  The revelation shook Balfor. He’d already lost control of his primal four times in the two years since he’d been freed from the adurians. Each time, he’d disconnected from the Mother and enjoyed the blissful silence behind the veil where even She would not go, but the price for that silence was too high. His primal was growing stronger and more difficult to restrain. There might come a time when he became lost to the primal forever.

  Now that most of the umbrose males were off fighting the war against the adurians, they needed the slaves to work the fields to offset the loss of their labor. He could not risk allowing the females to leave the safety of the city boundary when their population was still so small. “You didn’t inform me we were running out of slaves.”

  Ranove bowed his head, but not before Balfor saw a flash of anger cross his face. “Your Highness, I did pass on that information.”

  The duke’s tone bordered on disrespectful. Up until this point, Ranove had always been his staunchest ally; the advisor he trusted the most. It angered him that Ranove would slip up and reveal his disdain. It disturbed him that he might have lost the other male’s respect for his multiple failures to attend to the duties that only the Mother’s Chosen Prince could perform.

  A vague recollection surfaced. A warning from Ranove about the slaves. It had irritated him at the time, preoccupied as he’d been by his concubines and heady shadowberry wine. Overindulgence in both had done nothing to silence the voices, but they’d made it easy to ignore his second in command.

  Those voices whispered at him now, a susurration that made it difficult to hear the breeze weaving through the basalt canyons. The Mother was disappointed in him. The weight of Her displeasure hung over him like a physical burden. His people were already in dire straits because of his negligence. Any further attempts to escape his responsibilities would bring far harsher punishments from the Mother of Shadows than this current manifestation of Her displeasure. There would be no more escape from Her will. “Give me your report.”

  Ranove looked around them again as if he wasn’t comfortable surrounded by the grisly evidence of Balfor’s loss of control. Balfor wondered when his duke had grown so soft. Probably the human female making him weak. He allowed Lilith’s presence in Sanctuary because Ranove wanted her. Acceding to his wish gave Balfor leverage, but that didn’t mean he liked having a
human among them. For too long, the star-people had been the servants of his enemies. They could not be trusted.

  “Your legion commanders have reported successes in their campaigns. Aduria is neutralized and the Summer Palace has been completely destroyed.”

  Ranove’s optimism didn’t spread to Balfor. “Uriale and Anata are not fighting. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Uriale is little more than Anata’s puppet now, and her madness has infected him. She weakens him instead of augmenting the Father’s power within him. I saw this for a fact when I was their captive.” Ranove’s tone didn’t change as he spoke of his captivity, nor did his expression, but fine tension vibrated the duke’s muscles, and his wings twitched with his words. Like Balfor, Ranove had suffered in adurian hands. In fact, the adurian princess had taken an obsessive personal interest in breaking Ranove, which had made his unexplained transfer to the human facility he’d escaped from a reprieve. Balfor had not been so lucky and had remained in the hands of Uriale and Anata, subject to their torture. The bright ones had no mercy for the umbrose. The feeling was entirely mutual, and someday Balfor would repay them for every wound they’d inflicted upon himself and his people.

  Balfor crossed his arms over his bloodstained chest. “I have also witnessed Uriale’s waning power. He must be trying to reject their bond.” He grimaced at the thought of being bonded to a twisted sadist like Anata. He almost pitied his mortal enemy, because Uriale couldn’t break what was forged by the Father of Light, any more than Balfor could deny the will of the Mother of Shadows. No matter what Uriale tried, he’d be tied to Anata forever. “But that’s not enough of an explanation for their failure to defend their own people. Anata is arrogant enough to try and fight me despite my connection to the Mother’s Heart, even with Uriale’s greater experience cautioning against it. Yet they’ve issued no challenge and aren’t fighting alongside their own legions.” He turned and paced the width of the campsite. “They’re up to something. Searching for some way to overcome the advantage the Mother’s Heart gives me.”

  “Our scouts are out there. I’ve already told them to look for signs of Uriale and Anata.”

  “Good. I need to know what they’re planning.”

  “I will report to you immediately if I hear something.” Ranove spread and folded his wings as he spoke again, his words coming slower in a hesitant tone uncommon to the normally decisive umbrose. “About the crops ….”

  Balfor suppressed his sigh. “You have a solution.”

  “I have a suggestion.”

  He already suspected what Ranove prepared to say. “I’m not going to like it.”

  Ranove bowed his head. “The humans want to open up trade with Sanctuary. Their domes were damaged during the rebellion and most of their resources have gone towards rep—”

  Balfor lifted a hand to silence Ranove. “I don’t care about the humans’ problems.”

  “They have the laborers to work our fields in trade for our resources to rebuild their city.”

  “And you’ve already worked out a deal with them, I suppose.”

  “Not without your permission.” Ranove’s voice sounded smoother, reassuring. “Their primary materials provider, Dornan Industries, has made several inquiries in that direction. They wish to send a representative to personally meet with you.”

  “Dornan? I’ve heard that name before.” He’d more than heard it. It had been a refrain in his mind for two years now. Even though memories were sketchy at best lately, that one stuck out.

  “That is the second name—the family name— of the soldier wounded during your extraction from the adurian tower. She is my concubine’s closest friend.”

  Balfor had been told her name by the human rebels after his rescue from the royal tower in Aduria. It had been mentioned in an aside, a tally of casualties in the hopes of impressing a debt upon him. He’d felt no obligation to them—indeed, he still looked upon most of them with disdain—but he’d caught the name and remembered it. Just as he remembered her.

  An appealing feminine scent beneath the reek of blood, a soft moan of agony he scarcely heard because of the sharp retort of human weapons. A slight weight rested against his shoulder. Slender fingers gripped his forearm as pain coursed through the body beside him. He moved his arm, and the fingers fell away. Immediately regretting their absence, he quested for them with his own hand, hardly moving because of the crippling pain from his many wounds. Then they were in his grasp. A victory! He held them tight, engulfing them in his much larger fist as pain wracked them both. She needed him, and that gave him purpose, and the will to fight.

  “I remember the female.” Balfor’s voice was a mere whisper as the memory faded, but the feeling of her fragile hand in his, and the memory of her scent that clung to him—even after she’d been taken from him—remained clear in his thoughts. Plagued with problems upon his return to Sanctuary, he’d never hoped to see the human again and had made no effort to even find out more about her than what the humans called her. Private Dornan. He’d learned that the first word had been a military rank and not her name. Since humans had multiple names for some reason, he didn’t even know her familiar name, because Dornan was her family’s name, passed down from her sire.

  Until the humans had listed her as one of their wounded, he’d wondered if he’d only dreamed her. Surely the star-people had never produced one so compelling that she reached him even though his agonized stupor.

  Ranove’s brows lifted nearly to the horns rising out of his forehead. Regarding Balfor with shifting wings, he opened his mouth to speak, but after a moment, closed it on silence.

  Balfor ignored Ranove’s discomfiture. She smelled of moonfloss blossoms in bloom with just a hint of some unknown musk that was hers alone. With all the blossoms in the last two years’ harvests, I haven’t been able to recapture that elusive scent. “I will consider a trade agreement with this Dornan Industries, but only if they send my choice of representative. Prepare a message that I will meet with this female named Dornan in one week’s time.” He wanted to know her familiar name. “What is the name she is called by?”

  “Stacia.”

  Balfor repeated the syllables. “Stacia.” For once, the many voices in his head remained silent, not even correcting his pronunciation of the human word as they’d so often done when they’d taught him the language humans called DC Common. He reveled in the moment of silence. He was almost able to smile at Ranove because of his relief. “Bring this Stacia to me in one week’s time, and I will consider her proposal.” He turned his back on Ranove, facing the grisly campsite without really seeing it.

  Ranove’s wings rustled as he bowed to Balfor’s back. “I will send the word, Your Highness.”

  Chapter 2

  The bass throb of music from the dance club beneath Stacia’s apartment vibrated against her bare feet. There had been a time when she would have been down there in the midst of it all, drinking illegal alcohol and dancing to music being played against the dictates of the Censors. Now, there was no thrill of danger in the acts. The music, the liquor, and even the club itself, were fully legal under the new laws set down by the Common Counsel. Most of the members of that counsel were former Commemoro leaders, but at least they’d been elected by the people, though loyalists to the Diakonos had not been given a vote.

  The lack of risk was not what kept Stacia from going to the club. She’d grown out of her rebellious phase, just as Dome City had grown out of the Diakonos—violently, and not without scars—although her rite of passage had come at a much higher cost than Dome City’s. She no longer even recognized the person in the mirror. Perhaps that was why there were none in the gray and white apartment, kept obsessively neat by a small army of household bots.

  Restless, but unable to figure out what she wanted to do, she paced the cool metalline tiles of her apartment. The place was small—much smaller than the mansion she’d grown up in—but she liked it because it was in Zodiac Dome, the Hub of Dome City. Even with her
wealth, securing a place in the Hub had been difficult, especially with the influx of new residents from the Commemoro rebels rejoining their loved ones after the rebellion ended.

  She had always wanted to live in the Hub, but it was the one material thing her father had refused to give her. Now she had a place where the press of humanity that surrounded her made her feel safe and anonymous. The mask she wore to cover her lower face in public fit well with the Hub style. Everyone wore breather masks. The dome had been cracked during the war, allowing the deadly fungi from the surrounding jungle in. Fortunately, filters in the climate control facilities kept the outbreak from spreading to the other domes. Though the fungal outbreaks had been under control for over six months now, the masks had become something of a fashion trend, setting Hubbers apart from their fellow humans in the other domes.

  No one knew Stacia here, and no one cared. She was in a huge crowd and still completely alone, and that was how she wanted it to be.

  The chime of her comm-link interrupted her restless pacing. Normally, she would just ignore it, but she recognized the unique tone. Lilith—the one person in the world Stacia still cared about—was calling her. She approached the multi-console which contained her comm-link.

  “Stacia here,” she said aloud, and the voice-activated comm-link opened the call.

  Lilith’s voice came over the link. “Stacia! It’s so good to hear you.” The cam-link indicator flashed as Lilith requested a video feed.

  With a sigh, Stacia swept her hand over the link, activating it as well. A hologram of Lilith appeared above the console. After the console ran a brief scan over Stacia, another holo would appear on Lilith’s end of the link. Lilith was the only one Stacia allowed to see her without her mask. If she wasn’t so eager to see a friendly face, she might have ignored the link, even for Lilith.