The Fallen (A Sons of Wrath Prequel) (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

Xander tipped back the shot of bourbon and set the glass on the
Chix on Cox
napkin atop the bar.

Shadiest strip club in Detroit. On the outside, it looked like any legitimate joint. Bright lights. Packed lot. The occasional patrol car parked at the curb of Cox Street.

On the inside, everything went down. Drug deals. Prostitution. You name it.

Perfect place to find a raping, misogynistic bastard.

‘Get Down Make Love’
by Nine Inch Nails railed through the speakers, as naked girls fucked dance poles, while every guy up in the place stroked himself under the tables. Whole place smelled like pussy and the sweat of sinners who worshipped it.

Rising from the barstool, Xander sniffed, tossed some cash on the tabletop and made his way toward the back. The flickering strobe light on stage allowed him to slip behind the black curtain, unnoticed.

Standing just inside, arms crossed over ‘Security’ embroidered in red across his chest, Jake gave a nod and threw his thumb over his shoulder. “She’s the last room on the right tonight.”

Xander patted his arm as he passed.

Females spinning their clients’ fantasies like a silken web filled the dark hallway. Moans. Fake orgasms. Unlikely promises.

Sin in a box.

Shithole could’ve caved into the depths of hell and claimed a good hundred souls along with it.

He opened the door to a small booth with a single chair facing a tall glass enclosure. Secluded and private. Claustrophobic for a virgin high school boy. In the cash machine below, Xander fed bills into the automated slot. Lights flipped on to an equally small, boxy room on the other side.

His eyes were greeted by the kind of ass that’d seen its days in the gym—toned, rounded—the kind that made a man wonder if it’d jiggle at all with his dick slamming into it.

She sat with her back facing him, slim hips curving into a narrow waist. Long brown hair cascaded over slender shoulders. Peaches ‘n’ cream skin glistened under the harsh lights, flawless, just like an angel’s.

“Hello, stranger,” she said over her shoulder.

“How’s the good life treating you, Sloane?”

She turned to reveal her bare pink pussy and perfect tits. “Just a sec, I’ll get my robe.” Her head tipped to the side, red lips kicking up into a smile. “I know how much you hate looking at me.”

“What’s to hate?”

“You know,”—she leaned forward and bit her lip—“you’re the only customer I’d let sample the goods, if you wanted.”

“Thanks.” He offered a wink to soften the dogged rejection—females took that shit to heart sometimes. “I’ll pass tonight.”

Those lips soured into a pout. “You always do. When are you going to stop denying me? It’s giving me a complex.”

He cocked a brow. “I see that.”

A fake sigh threw her back against the chair and her eyes landed on his dick. “You probably fuck like a champ.”

Xander chuckled at that. “And you’d wear me out.”

A demure smile lit her face as she reached beyond the boundaries of the glass and slipped her arms into a silk robe. “One of these days, you’ll surprise me with a visit just for me.” From a small ledge sticking out from the glass, she nabbed a pack of smokes, lit a cigarette, and crossed her legs in front of him.

Silence hung on the air as she blew the smoke upward.

“How’s Hasziel?”

Xander groaned, weary at the thought. “Busting my balls, as always.”

“He worries about you.” Sloane scratched the back of her head. “Personally, I can’t fucking wait for this tour to end. I’m out of this hellhole, and then it’s on to bigger and better things.” She took another drag. “Mortals are ungrateful bastards. Don’t know what you get out of the job.” Her tongue swept over those plump, red lips. “If you were smart, you’d come with me.”

“What? Leave all this?” Xander rested his elbows on his thighs. “What do you got for me?”

The amusement in her eyes disappeared, her face tightened to business, and she shook her head. “Weird fucker. Comes in every Friday night. No one’s gotten a good look at the guy. Seemed to have a thing for Lolita. She said he was the best-looking John she’s had. Didn’t know his name, though. Said he liked to watch her cut herself and smear the blood on parts of her body. Lita’s hardcore,”—Sloane waved her hands in the air as she spoke—“into that torture play shit, so she was cool with it. Last week though? She met up with the guy for drinks. Friday night. Hasn’t been to work since. No one’s heard from her. One of the girls stopped by her place the other night. No answer.”

“Has he been in since?”

“Once. I tracked him but didn’t catch any foul play.” Her eyes widened, perhaps realizing the idiocy of what she’d just confessed. Could’ve also been the murderous stare Xander directed back at her, though, that had her shrinking in the chair. “Look, I know that’s your job. Wasn’t trying to get in your way. It was harmless. Just looking.”

“Just looking could get you killed.”

“Anyway …” Her head lifted to the side, brows still upturned as she blew another plume of smoke. “Sounds like he could be your guy.”

“Human cops know about this?”

“If they do, they haven’t done shit about it.” Her lips puckered at the same time she shot him a wink. “That’s why I called you, handsome. Fiercest motherfuckin’ angel on the force.” Stone gray eyes narrowed on his. “I know you’ll find him. And kill the bastard.”

“Harsh words from such a pretty mouth.”

“Shit job’s getting to me. She’s the third girl that’s gone missing in the last month. Guy definitely has a thing for dancers.” Sloane blew the smoke into rings. “I’m ready for some Elysian fields and a flock of badass archangels feeding me grapes while I bathe in the warmth of paradise.”

Xander smirked. “You find that place, let me know.” Hands against his thighs, he prepared to take the information and go. “Thanks for the tip, Sloane.”

“You know it’s my pleasure. Any excuse to have you come see me. Don’t forget my offer.” Had Xander not known she was an angel, the devious grin she shot back at him carried the same wicked enchantment as that of the succubi. “Find her.”

“Mortals are ungrateful bastards, right?”

“This one’s personal, isn’t it?” She blew him a kiss through the glass. “Don’t be a stranger.”

Xander rose from his chair and the lights dimmed to complete darkness. White curls of smoke drifted upward against the black backdrop like some kind of film noir.

If Xander had any thoughts that his job was the worst an angel assigned to the human realm could possibly hope for, he’d just gotten a dose of true misery. Sloane’s job consisted of keeping her ears open and her legs spread wide.

And if opportunity happened to stumble in before her co-Sentinel got the chance to catch a psycho bastard, she could very well land herself on a chopping block with her skin stretched over the whack-job’s face like a mask.

Not that Xander’s job was any better. He’d seen enough messed up shit in the last few years to crimp the toughest angel’s lip. Slimy bastards made up much of the underground scene—sex being the harmless shit of it all.

Snuff Squads like Xander’s, otherwise referred to as Sentinels, went about as deep into the pits of hell as earthly possible, to the bowels of human carnage, where the Fallen made themselves at home.

Nothing more stony and unapologetic than a bitter angel forced to leave the heavens—even demons avoided the Fallen.

Humans, on the other hand, couldn’t avoid them if they tried.

Every day, kids and females got snatched up from the streets like smelt in a shallow pond, drugged and used at the amusement of their sadistic captors. Nobody gave a damn about some hood-rat gone missing—one less mouth for the city to feed.

And human police couldn’t penetrate the rings the same way the angels could, thanks to being naturally equipped with a conscience—at least, those looking to remain a good cop, anyway. A bad cop could infiltrate the Fallen, but most times, they ended up leaving the force for the cartel and ratting out their coppy friends.

To truly break down the ring, you had to go deep, show loyalty. Become the most trustworthy motherfucker the leader had ever known, and then, at a moment’s notice, be willing to turn around and stab your newfound friend in the back with the sharpest blade you own.

Sentinels endured special training to deal with human sin, to become acclimatized to it so they could keep their minds focused on the job. Still, some angels found themselves indulging in the same sadistic play as their quarry.

One of two things happened in that case—they got swiped off the Squad or they’d fall, lose their wings, and end up hunted by the very angels they’d fought beside.

Xander couldn’t deny the thrill of watching his blade slice through the flesh—a pleasure he kept to himself for fear he’d be sent back to the heavens for domestic duty, cutting out paper hearts for the cherubim or some shit. Killing, like the first drag of a cigarette, offered a buzz like no other, and Xander lived by a simple motto: fuck up whatever has the power to fuck you up first.

Fire burned in his muscles as he left
Chix on Cox
that night. Purpose. Sloane had given him the fix he’d been craving: prey.

The hunt had begun.

CHAPTER 2

Crouched in the rooftop shadows of the building adjacent to
Chix on Cox
, Xander anchored his gaze on the female standing alone in the dark alley.

For ten months he’d watched her.

To class every Tuesday and Thursday night. The library on Mondays. Walking to the bus stop at Woodward and Martin Luther King. Her shitty job, dancing, on weekends.

Most human targets, he could read in a matter of minutes, and as he came to know every mundane detail of their lives, he understood exactly why their abductors had chosen them.

Sick really, the way Xander’s adrenaline spiked his veins, just like a serial killer’s, at the same observations—those golden nuggets of opportunity to pluck an unsuspecting female from her normal life, and drop her straight into the chasm of hell. Like the girl, standing alone in an alley along the shittiest strip in Detroit.

Easy prey.

The kind that’d jump at the opportunity to make fast cash.

Only problem?

She
was nothing he had figured out, because everything Xander had learned about her, studied for months, was nothing more than a façade.

For a newbie Sentinel, she
seemed
like kill-bait—quiet girl, for the most part, with her long black hair that curled at the ends and pale green eyes, going about her everyday business in torn jeans and concert tees. Preoccupied by her own shit, with little interest in the world around her.

At a glance, a fool would mistake her for being weak, shy, and possibly ashamed of her weekend gig.

Girls stripped all the time to pay tuition, some for an ego-boost—those girls who showed up on amateur night and got the attention they’d been lacking somewhere else. Many hated the shit, kept it low-key around the decent people of the world.

Karinna didn’t strip to pay tuition, and she sure as hell didn’t do it to boost her self-esteem.

Sleazy clubs and drunken men didn’t boost her ego, either—they gave her information.

Weeks of unintentional observation had Xander looking deeper, seeing through the small peephole into the dark portals of her soul, where anger and vengeance lay dormant.

Waiting.

The class she took had nothing to do with helping her become something more, or to reach her goals for a better life. It taught her how to effectively incapacitate a man twice her height and weight. To make a one-handed kill against an attacker, without breaking a sweat.

The library books she religiously studied provided insight into the psychology of women in captivity, the mindset of a sadist and a masochist, and the draw of pain as a means of release.

Pleasures of the Fallen.

Her precarious walk to the bus stop served no other purpose than to draw them. Like a walking T-bone in a forest of starving wolves, she beckoned the Fallen to take her.

And the dancing?

To find out exactly
what
had pushed her sister, Lolita, over the edge with enough force to hang herself nearly a year ago.

The hair, the clothes, the makeup—a smooth veneer designed to hide the fragmented face of revenge seething deep inside her bones.

Karinna.

Ordinarily, Xander never made a point to acquaint himself with their names. Doing so would make them more than objects, and because his motive had nothing to do with saving lives, objects could be dropped like bags of discarded bones.

Humans died all the time. What was one mortal life when demons could be eliminated, wiped out from the snuff scene, where hundreds of girls were slaughtered every year?

Somehow her name had stuck with him. Haunted him for reasons he couldn’t understand. It called to him on nights when an anonymous piece of ass just wasn’t enough.

She kept her dark hair tucked into a hat, her lips downturned, a slim body hidden beneath the long black trench she wore, concealing the clingy boy shorts that, Xander knew, hugged a set of toned thighs.

He licked his lips at the sight of her raising a fingerless gloved hand to her mouth, the cigarette dangling between bare fingers—a habit she’d only adopted in the last couple of months. Rose-tinged cheeks caved as she sucked in a drag and blew a cloud of white smoke.

Karinna
.

For most strippers, dropping panties for cash didn’t take much thought. They did the shit every night and never thought twice about the men who jacked off in the crowd or fucked them in the back alley. Nothing personal, just a job. An exchange of needs—money for sex.

She was different.  Her conquests served a purpose. An unflinching motive that somehow overrode everything else—including the girl she’d once been.

Fate could be a heartless bitch sometimes. One cruel wave of her vicious claws meant a life forever changed.

Ten months prior, the girl’d been caught up in the shit medical grads did with their sleepless nights—fighting her way toward a better life. A chance to get out of the city and leave her past behind.

A fresh blank page to write her future … if not for that night.

All Karinna’s plans went to hell the night Lolita unmasked the faceless monsters of the Fallen …

Xander crouched in the shadows of the abandoned warehouse basement. At one time, the place served as a food bank, until the owners started stashing away kids from the streets. Ironically, the place was named
Sowers
. Operations closed down, but the doors remained opened to ‘questionable’ activity, as described on police reports.

Two males fussed over what was left of an Asian girl they’d raped just an hour before, tossing bones and mutilated flesh aside like butchers. A red shirt and black shirt distinguished one male from the other, otherwise the white volto masks they wore, spattered in crimson, made them nothing more than faceless slaughterers—emotionless, untouchable.

Xander had seen her at the club, hanging off Red Shirt, who now hovered over her ravaged body like a rabid wolf deciding on the choice meat of a doe. She had that unfounded glimmer of hope in her eyes, the wicked candy that brought her kind to the playground in flocks—like all the girls who stripped in seedy clubs and fucked on the side to pay rent—looking for options, a way out.

Desperation—the great motivator.

And the girl—the perfect bait.

Even with as many snuff films as Xander had seen throughout the years, the rapes and mutilations were never easy to watch in person. Hard for even a seasoned bastard to get used to the sound of hope slipping away with every slice of the blade. At least when the only fighting chance the girls may have had watched from the shadows.

Faceless bastards had filmed the whole thing.

It seemed the usual snuff didn’t cut it on the streets anymore. Half the time, it looked staged. The psychopaths who bought the shit wanted more and were willing to pay top dollar for it. Hot demand for anyone willing to snatch the girls up and butcher them in front of a camera.

The films only represented one small faction of the enormous cartel that Xander had been assigned to take down. Guns, trafficking and drugs fell under the enormous umbrella, run by the Portaine brothers. Fallen angels disguised as slimy club owners. It’d taken years for Xander to get inside and climb the ranks.

Killing the two would be a piss in the ocean, but Xander had to start somewhere, and his blade had become mighty thirsty for blood in recent weeks. A coldness had taken up residence in his gut, one that could only be heated by one of three things: a female, liquor, or his personal favorite—a slaughter.

He’d already plotted how he’d kill them. Slow. Meticulous. Merciless. Exactly as they’d murdered the female.

Eyes closed, he smiled as warm tingles innervated his spine, imagining the high-pitched howls of pain, cold steel dancing over warm flesh like colliding forces of nature, and the salty spray of blood in his face.

Man, he loved that shit. Human bodies made the coolest sounds when being torn apart.

“Help me. Oh, God, somebody please help me.”

The faint voice broke Xander’s musings. He glanced over his shoulder.

Deeper within the basement of the warehouse, another girl waited in a cage. Her panic at the sound of the first screams had died down to no more than prayers and promises to do right.

Prayers wouldn’t help her. And promises never made a difference.

Xander turned back to the macabre and licked his lips, plucking his thumb across the blade of his dagger, ready. Waiting.

Maybe she’d stay in one piece, if he got the chance to kill them first. Course, dying in a cold abandoned warehouse, isolated from the rest of the world, might be worse than being chopped into small pieces of meat and bone.

Sentinels didn’t save humans. They hunted the Fallen.

A creak echoed from behind.

Xander spun on the ball of his foot, eyes trained on the dark hallway behind him. He glanced back to see the males had halted movement, like they’d heard it, too.

Fuck.

Shuffling sounds stimulated Xander’s keen senses.

She’d escaped her cage.

Red Shirt crept passed Xander, pausing for a moment to sniff the air. He kept on down the hallway, straight toward the sounds, disappearing into the eerie blackness.

“C’mon,” Xander muttered. “Change already.” Heat flared inside his blood like a livewire, ready for the kill. Any minute, the bastards would take their Fallen form—the only way Xander could be sure the souls would be cast into the pits of hell. Human torture and butchering often brought their evil form to the surface. The reddish tint in the whites of their eyes that gave them a crazed look, and the dark, almost black hue to their lips easily identified their kind.

If only the fuckers would change already.

Black Shirt cleared the table where they’d cut the first girl into an unrecognizable pile of body parts.

Screams reverberated down the hall.

Caught.

Scuffling.

“No! No! Let me go!” Her futile sobs bounced off the cold stonewalls, louder as they approached.

Xander glanced up to see her slung over Red Shirt’s shoulder. Short, burgundy hair lay plastered in blood against her face. Clothes had been torn away. Long gashes marred her skin where she’d been cut for days, it seemed, as each wound appeared to be in various stages of healing. Dirt coated her face, arms, legs, and blood had dried on her backside where the pants she’d worn had been ripped in half, allowing access to her most vulnerable parts.

Tortured. Raped. Trapped.

As Red Shirt stalked past, her eyes locked on Xander’s. Panic flitted across her face, and she reached out to him. “Help me! Please!”

Lolita. The tip from Sloane.

And she’d seen him.

Fuck.

“Don’t let them do this to me!” She writhed against the table as the males strapped her into place.

Black shirt pressed the button on the camera, ready to film the next one as Red Shirt shoved a cigar inside the hole of his mask and tore at her clothes, zipping scissors along the already-frayed fabric and tossing them aside until she lay completely naked.

Destroying the clothes seemed to be part of the ritual, as they’d done the same to the Asian girl. An assertion of power—ripping away a protective layer.

From the wall of tools, Red Shirt grabbed a Cat O’ Nines flogger and raised it into the air, poised and waiting. Welts on her stomach and across her sex indicated she’d been whipped recently. Harshly.

“No! No! No!” She struggled against her binds. “Please, no!”

The strike came down hard, and she cried out as a streak of red carried the distinct bite of the whip. Black shirt groaned, unzipped his pants, and stroked his exposed dick.

Another strike. A second outcry.

Red yanked the cigar from his mask and pressed the orange embers into her thigh.

The girl bucked and screamed as her skin crackled against the burn. Nothing Xander hadn’t seen before, but damn, that sound turned his stomach for some reason.

“Yeah, bitch. Scream for me.” Red’s tongue poked through the hole of his mask like a snake and slid up her cheek. “Such a good pet.”

With a heave against Red Shirt, Black Shirt climbed atop of her body, straddling the girl, hands clutching both sides of her face before he covered her mouth with his. Sloshy sounds of his tongue gutting her mouth through his mask hole drowned out her muffled protest. Pants hanging to his knees, his hips circled against her naked core. Chains beat against concrete as she tugged at her binds. He pulled away, took the silver piercing of her bottom lip before releasing it, and kept the mask trained on her as she shook her head, begging him to stop. He shoved himself inside of her, rutting against her like a plundering stag. Red shirt moved where her head lay and yanked down his pants, thrusting his hips forward, a silent command to take him into her mouth.

She turned her head in Xander’s direction, looking right at him. The unflinching stare, eyes wide, lips tight, held determination, a will to survive in spite of the aftermath that would surely come to haunt her if she made it out alive.

“Please,” she whispered, tears running down the side of her face.

Xander bowed his head.

Never save the girl.

The words muddled his head.

He directed his gaze back to the assault.

Black shirt grunted, slammed into her with such violence, she cried out in a prayer, begging him to stop.

Red shirt grabbed her hair and crammed himself inside her mouth. The sounds of her gagging seemed to thrill him. “That’s it, whore,” he said behind the mask. “Tell me again how much you like sucking dick? How much you’d love to be in film.”

Xander screwed his eyes shut.
Don’t do it.

“Ah, yeah, bitch. I’ve got something to warm your belly.” Red’s laughter grated on Xander’s spine. “How ya like that, Pet?”

He rose from the shadows.

Xander blinked away the memory and sat back on his heels.

The tattoo on his forearm peeked from beneath his leather sleeve, and he ran his fingers across the ink. Frosty mists burst from his mouth as his warm breath hit the frigid springtime air.