Handling the Hybrid Read online

  Dark is a Kindred warrior on a mission. He must steal the Shannom-rah, an ancient crystal capable of storing trillions of personalities, before the enemy of his people gets it. In order to do this, he has to infiltrate the home of the Trollox collector who owns the priceless artifact. Posing as a Replicant, he is in the perfect position to complete his mission. But he didn’t count on finding a female in danger. Despite his determination not to get involved, his heart is torn by her plight. As his feelings of protectiveness for Anna grow, he longs to tell her the truth about himself. But he knows doing so will destroy her faith in him—she has been hurt so badly by living males, she can only trust him because she thinks he is a Replicant.

  When the truth comes out will Anna still care for him, or will she feel betrayed knowing that she has been…Deceived?

  One

  The first time Dark’s mother held him, she cried.

  It had been a long and difficult delivery and she was nearly used up, her emotional and physical resources bled dry by the agonizing pain of the birth. When the midwife handed her the newborn, she took one look at his strange, bronze eyes and cried out in horror.

  “A Pain Taker—the child is a Pain Taker!”

  Then she turned her face to the wall and wept and would not be comforted.

  Dark had heard the story often enough from his father that he knew it by heart. And his sire always added, “She was never the same after that. She started fading away the minute you came into the world.”

  Or some similar accusatory words whose meaning was clear, even when he was child. You’re a freak—you don’t belong. You aren’t wanted.

  Although to be fair, his mother had never made him feel unwanted in the short time he had known her. She might have had a moment of weakness at his birth, but she had loved him and his little brother fiercely, right up until her death, when Dark was thirteen cycles and his brother Creek was only seven.

  That was the first time he ever used his gift—or curse, call it what you will. It was the first time Dark had allowed himself to take pain for another of his own volition.

  It was the sound of his little brother’s tears that prompted him to do it. They shared a room and he could hear Creek crying in the darkness, missing their mother so much it seemed as though his tender heart might break. He was so young—too young to be motherless and alone. For their father was never home—running his restaurant, LorElle, which had earned fifteen Marks of Honor from Frip, the most prestigious Culinary Guide in their quadrant. His job was a convenient excuse—a constant escape.

  After their mother’s death, their father threw himself even harder into his work as head chef and restaurant owner. So that soon, instead of only seeing their father for a few brief hours at night, Dark and his brother were lucky to see him for an hour or two during the week. And that was only when he was so tired he was drooping with weariness or he had to get a change of clothing.

  Dark had suspected their father might be trying to work himself to death so he could join their mother—or at least, work himself into oblivion so that he could forget her loss. He and Creek had no such luxury, however. They had only each other and Creek was nearly paralyzed with grief.

  It was on one of the nights when his little brother’s sobs were especially intense, that Dark finally slid out of his own sleeping platform and went to him. Creek was curled in a ball of misery at the foot of the bed, his shoulders heaving, his entire body tight with the pain of loss.

  “Creek?” Dark had touched his little brother and sensed the intense pain radiating off him like heat from an oven. He had his own grief to bear—his mother’s death had hit him like the blow of a hammer, smashing some vital thing inside him that was crooked now and might never be made right. But he couldn’t stand to see his brother suffer—his misery called to Dark, his suffering shining like a dark star in the night.

  “Creek,” he said again. “Come on, now—come here.”

  He had pulled his little brother up to the head of the bed and wrapped an arm around his trembling shoulders, letting Creek press his hot face to his chest while he sobbed.

  “It’s all right,” he told his brother. “Everything will be all right.” Which was a lie and they both knew it but he had to say something.

  “No, it’s n-n-not,” Creek had stammered through his tears. “Nuh-nothing will ever b-be all right ag-g-gain. Muhmuh’s gone—she’s gone, Dark! And she’s n-n-never coming back!”

  “I know.” Dark had sat there, holding his brother and feeling helpless. Creek could be a brat sometimes but he loved the little guy. Also, now that their mother was dead and their father always gone, he felt responsible for him as well.

  What can I do? How can I help? he asked himself. A voice whispered in his head—take his pain.

  He had never done this willingly or on purpose before. As a Dark Healer –half Dark Healer, anyway, his other half was Blood Kindred—he knew that some of his people had the innate ability to heal the emotional and physical pain of others. But only those that harnessed and practiced the power of healing could really use it effectively. The holy ones who lived and prayed at the Temple of the Goddess of Healing studied for years in order to be able to ease mental and physical suffering. And even after years of study and practice, they could not heal completely but only ease the ache.

  What it took the holy ones years to master, came easily and naturally to Dark—too naturally. He had spent his childhood being subjected to the negative emotions of the other kids in his crèche. Anytime another child touched his bare skin, he instantly absorbed whatever hurt—either emotional or physical—they had, leading him to easy tears and early avoidance of touch.

  His mother had begged to take him out of the crèche and keep him home but his father had refused.

  “Let him stay—he needs to toughen up,” he’d told her. “He needs to learn early how to put up walls around himself. How to keep the others out. Otherwise he won’t last a minute in the real world. Pain Takers have to get hard fast or they die, Melsandra—you know that.”

  Dark had learned and by the time he’d been old enough for primary classes, he had a tough shell around him to keep others out. The other children knew not to touch him—a lesson he reinforced by breaking one boy’s fingers when the bully wouldn’t let him alone. He’d been suspended for several weeks for that but it was the one time Dark remembered his father expressing pride in him.

  “Did what you had to do—good for you, son,” he’d barked, clapping Dark on the back so hard he almost fell over. “Don’t let them get behind your walls and you’ll be fine. We might make something of you yet.”

  It was the first time his father had showed him any physical or verbal approval and shortly after that, Dark was allowed to accompany his sire to the kitchen of LorElle and start helping with the prep work. It was there that he fell in love with cooking, for it was the only way to be close to his father—who closed himself off from everyone but their mother, when she was alive and closed himself off entirely after her death.

  So Dark had learned his lessons from his father early and well—keep your walls high and your knives sharp. But sitting there in the darkness, cradling his younger brother who was weeping his heart out, Dark couldn’t keep his walls up anymore.

  Circling Creek’s thin, birdlike wrist loosely in a finger and thumb, he had deliberately let down his walls for the first time since he had built them up in primary ed.

  Pain had blazed into him, pouring like fire through a funnel into his guts. His own grief for his mother was like a dull, grinding ache—a constant sorrow that never went completely away, even when he was asleep. But Creek had intense emotions and their mother had been his whole world. He hadn’t been born a Pain Taker like Dark, so their father had allowed her to baby him and cuddle him as she had not be able to do with her oldest son. Creek felt her loss like a knife wound to the heart—a stabbing agony that went on and on and never dulled or lessened. A pain so great it was breaking him.

  It al