Hate by K.A Knight
Dad...Gabriel.
He’s alive.
He’s alive…it keeps repeating in my head. All this time, I thought he was dead, killed for his crimes, and here he is. Alive and well, and not only that, but thriving and making more of his experiments, one that includes my mate. He stands tall, proud, and cold. He looks the same, but it all feels so wrong. How did I never notice the utter callousness behind his eyes, the cool way he would watch us, even back then? Because I was a child, wanting my dad’s love. I can see the real him now, but did he ever love me...love us?
God, Mum. He let her die, he let it happen and didn’t even try to stop it! He could have! He could have stopped it, why didn’t he?
“Because she was a means to an end, boy, nothing more,” he retorts, watching me with those golden eyes I used to wish I had.
He never loved us.
“No, you were amusing. I will give you that, and once I felt something akin to kindness towards you and your human mother, but then I realised that sentiment was holding me back. If I wanted to complete my mission, to make the strongest soldiers, I could not afford such luxuries and weaknesses.”
I flinch and he steps forward, his eyes on me, driving each word home, flaying me open until I stand before him broken, damaged, and unloved. I start to spiral, my madness rushing through me...
“You were not the perfect soldier, too driven by emotions. And those others could not even think for themselves. I realised where I went wrong. I needed to start with babies with souls and minds of their own. Take the strongest of our kind and mate them, breed them until we had soldiers. Raise them as ours to follow us.” He looks at Dawn then and I slump when not under his gaze. “But you...you were a hope. A daydream. I did not think it would actually work, but here you stand. And how magnificent you are!” He grins, pride on his face. “You are what I was searching for all those years. They were all failed experiments, but you? You are true power, I filled you with it. Enough to kill any man, human or otherwise. Pulled directly from the oldest of us, the gods, and injected into you as an embryo. You bonded with it—” He shakes his head, staring down at my mate like she’s his world...he used to watch us like that.
It was all a lie.
“Gods?” she repeats, confused and angry, her fists clenched at her sides.
“Old relics of a world past, creatures best forgotten. They turned their backs on this world and retreated. The very first of us. I found a few of the first seven, the original gods. I took their power, harvested it!”
“And put it in me,” she whispers, watching him in horror. “What am I?”
“I don’t know!” He laughs. “Nothing we have ever seen before! You have the exact untrained and unknown magic that made them...but now it’s more. So much more, and you are magnificent!” he cries, and steps towards her. “Think of everything we could do! We do not need the council, any council, they can’t rule us.”
“You mean me,” she spits. “You are nothing, just an angel. You call your son fallen, an experiment, an abomination, but you are the same. You’re fucked up, so fucked up.” She shakes her head. “Even if I didn’t hate you for what you did to me, I would loathe you for what you did to my mate!” she screams at him, and power launches through the room, tossing everyone back as it spins faster and faster with her at the center of the storm.
“Mate? Interesting,” Gabriel mutters. “What else can you do?” he questions, looking around at the evident power.
“You want to know?” she queries, her tone deadly, quiet, and I know she’s going to explode. “I’ll show you!” she roars. “You will never hurt him or anyone again!”
I know she means me. She’s angry on my behalf, and love for her fills me at that, pushing back some of the darkness. The woman who loves me despite everything, who wants to protect me from my own father, from my own mind.
With her last word, pure, unfiltered power flows from her, like she’s a conduit, to do her bidding, but it’s too much. Too powerful. “Dawn!” I yell as she screams in agony. I can feel it searing her, killing her. “Vasculo, stop it!”
Everyone else fades away—my anger, my betrayal, Gabriel, Amos. Nothing matters but my mate.
Dawn.
“Little Monster, that’s enough, they will pay!” Nos tries to gain her attention, laying his hand on her arm, and I watch it start to burn. He winces in pain but holds on. “I am here, Little Monster, I can feel you, so lost, so alone...you never are.” He looks at me then and I know.
She needs me.
Stepping forward, I struggle against the power, but when I get close enough, I lay my hand on her too. My knees almost buckle from the pain, not just my own at the fire racing across my hand that’s touching her, but at the pain inside her. Coming from her…she is lost. Alone in the middle of all that power. It’s controlling her, not the other way around, wanting to do her bidding, but it’s too much for her alone. She’s curled into a ball inside, cut off from everyone, unable to even feel our minds.
Locked away.
This is what she feared even if she never voiced it. She feared that the power was too strong. That she couldn’t control what she was and one day would hurt someone, but she should have realised that she’s never alone, we are here. We are hers, made for this. For her. We can handle it together, control it together.
“She needs us!” I scream to the others, as the chairs and decor in the room are picked up by the storm. The windows blow open, and glass shatters everywhere, yet still I hold on.
Dume takes hold of her shoulder and the power lessens. Jair clutches her other shoulder and I can almost touch her inside now, so close. Aska wraps his tail around her leg and I feel her look up at us from the bottom of that storm, searching for us, so close… It has to work... Why isn’t it?
No, I can’t lose her.
Not another person I love, this has to work!
But then the wolf presses his head against her leg and her hand reaches for him, so close…we are so close. Her fingers brush us, feeling us, and the storm stops for a moment, but it’s not enough.
We are not enough.
She screams, and it fills the room as the storm rages on. She’s in the middle, the tempest called by her rage and hate. Fuelled by it. She needs love to break it, us, her mates…
Then he’s there—Lucifer. He presses his forehead to hers, his red eyes locked on her unseeing gaze. “I am here, come back. Let it go, feel us, we are here. Find us, touch us, release it into us...let it wash through us and out again, let us help. Let us anchor you.”
She reaches for us again, fighting so hard to get to us, and then she’s there. Her hand grips ours, her mind mixing with ours, our bindings surrounding her, anchoring her to this world and our arms.
The power stutters and then redirects, flowing through us. At first it hurts, there is too much. Fuck, how did she survive this? How did she have all this inside her and not go mad?
But then it lessens to a trickle instead of a tsunami and I can breathe again. Opening my eyes, I look to my mate, my vasculo.
She slumps in our grasp as all that power finally leaves her, flowing within us, filtered through us until she can handle it, then it drifts back to her. Her eyes close for a moment before they flicker open, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. I was so scared. So scared I had lost her forever. I would have died with her here, in this storm, because there is no life without my love.
My love.
Our love.
“You saved me,” she whispers, looking around at us. “I couldn’t feel you anymore, I was so scared...and then you were there, a light in the dark...I could feel each and every one of you. How deeply you cared, how sure you were I could do this…” She shivers in our grasps. “Feel your love.”
“Even monsters need love, Little Monster, you know that. You always have ours.”
She nods and we hold her. Here, in the middle of her destruction, we hold her. Eventually she nods and pulls back, looking towards Gabriel and Amos. “You were right, I don’t know what I’m capable of. I’m powerful, uncontrolled, and untrained. A threat, a monster. But with my men, with my monsters at my side, I can conquer it.”
She steps forward.
“We fight death. I survived the worst of humanity and your world. I can survive anything with them at my side. That’s what you didn’t count on. You thought I would need you, but I don’t. I need them, the ones you feared and tossed away. My monsters. And I’m the biggest one yet.”
Pride fills me, such pride and love. Never before have I wanted to follow anyone, but this woman...Nos was right. I would follow her anywhere.
“As one, we are more than you could have ever imagined, and now those you created will be the ones who kill you. Poetic.” She grins and lifts her hand.
She’s going to save us all.
