He lowered the bottle, peering into the dark. In a murky corner of the kitchen, someone lay on the floor.
Was his brother passed out? "Jaysus, Colm. Ye're too young. Ye want to end up like me?" Declan would beat his arse for this. "Colm?" he demanded, striding over. "What the bloody-"
His brother's sightless eyes were opened wide, fixed on the ceiling. His throat was slashed down to the spine.
"C-Colm?" he rasped. Dead? Someone had murdered his little brother? He stared dumbly, tears wel ing. Until muffled screams sounded from the living room.
Somebody's hurting me parents too! Fury ignited within him, burning away the tears. In a daze, Declan slipped into his parents' bedroom, grabbed the bat propped by his da's side of the bed.
When he entered the living room, he faltered, barely able to comprehend what he saw. Red-eyed beings with fangs and claws fil ed the area. And those were the creatures with humanlike bodies. Others were winged monsters with bulging eyes and limbs jutting out all over.
The winged ones had gagged and tied up his parents on the floor so they could ... slowly feed. Their deformed mouths peeled away one strip of flesh at a time-while his mam and da still lived, screaming in agony against their gags.
Me mind's going to break, can't do this, can't believe this is happening. But just when Declan thought he'd pass out from the crazy pounding of his heart, one monster's head rose up from his da, and blood dribbled from its mouth.
Da's blood.
A mindless wrath overwhelmed Declan, and he attacked them. all he could hear was his thundering heart, his bel ows, the bat connecting with bone over and over. He didn't know where this frantic strength was coming from, but he crumpled the metal bat against their skulls.
Yet as powerful as he was, they were more so. They kept coming and coming until they overpowered him, pinning his thrashing body to the floor. Even as he flailed, he spied a glimpse of some eerie kind of intel igence in the hideous eyes of a winged monster, and Declan had an instant of clarity.
Colm was the lucky one. ...
As ever, Declan's mind wasn't ready to relive what those creatures had done to him-the unimaginable torment until he'd blacked out; twenty years later, his dream easily flickered past, picking up at the time when consciousness had trickled in once more. From outside his parents' house, he'd heard voices, and finally the blackness wavered.
He felt the biting tension on his bound wrists and ankles ease, nearly screaming as circulation coursed to his hands and feet once more. How long ago had he been tied up?
Days. ...
He was aware of a man's voice tell ing him that he would live, that help was here. "Those things have been slaughtered, son. They'l never hurt anyone again."
"Da?" Declan rasped before the blackness took him once more.
In a kind of twilight, he felt his bones being set, his skin pierced again and again as his numerous wounds were stitched.
When he woke, he was in a hospital, covered in bandages and casts. A tal , dark-haired man sat beside his bed.
"I'm Commander Webb," he said, his Yank accent marked. "You're in a private hospital. You're safe now."
Declan recognized the voice of the man who'd saved his life. He was middle-aged, his hair closely cropped. He wore what looked like a military uniform, but Declan had never seen one like it. "Wh-what happened?"
"I'm sure you're in a state of shock right now. The docs are amazed you survived-"
"And me family?" He hated the way his voice broke.
"I'm sorry, Declan, but they're all dead."
He'd known, but he'd still held out hope. "You're the one who got me out of there?"
"My team and I did. I belong to an organization cal ed the Order, and it's our job to protect people from those miscreats. Unfortunately, our scouts didn't locate this pack until too late."
"Miscreats? Pack? " Declan pinched his forehead, wincing as the skin on the back of his hand pulled tight under a bandage.
Webb nodded. "Miscreations. They're immortal beings. Just about anything you thought was a myth is out there walking the streets. Sometimes various species band together in leagues."
Declan's lips parted. He'd also held out hope that they hadn't been real. That he'd gone crazy. Now someone, a man with authority, was staring him in the face, confirming what his eyes had seen. Declan's mind reluctantly accepted it. "You kil ed them?"
"Yes, a complete extermination. Again, too late for your parents and brother and ..."
And you, the man hadn't needed to say.
The things those monsters had done to him, to his skin. The blood in my mouth, blood that wasn't my own ...
Declan looked away in shame, his face flushing. "They ... they fed."
"Those were the Neoptera, some of the most nightmarish of them all."
"Why us?" Declan's voice was raw with bitterness. He realized he'd never grasped what bitterness was until this exact moment. Hatred that burns cold.
"As near as we can tell , you were picked at random. They attack simply because they can. Some of them feed on humans like cattle. Some play with us, torment us," he said. "That's why we hunt them down and kil them without mercy."
Declan faced him once more, his attention ful y engaged. To be able to hunt them ...
"They cal themselves Loreans," Webb continued. "We just like to cal them dead sons-of-bitches." He dug into his jacket pocket, then held up Declan's charm. "We found this. Is it yours?"
"Aye, it's mine." Hanging from a cord of leather was a thin medal ion imprinted with two birds. His da had gotten it for him at a fair.
My father's dead.
Declan's hand shot out to snatch the medal ion, the stitches up and down his body straining. Clutching it in his fist, he grated, "I want in."
"I thought you might say that. But it's not so simple. You're not even eighteen. Maybe if you were older, with some military training under your belt-"
"Now." Declan bit out the word. "Now, goddamn it!"
"And what about the drugs? I read your tox screen."
Declan flushed again. "I'll get clean."
"Even if we made exceptions for you, not everyone gets inducted into the Order. You'd have to be combat-trained, and it's grueling. Rangers and marines have told us that their training was a cakewalk compared to ours."
"I don't give a shite."
Webb's eyes bored into his own. "You'd be dealt pain on a daily basis to harden you, so that you could fight these fiends. And at every second, you would have to demonstrate a single-minded purpose, the obsession to eradicate immortals."