Past Be Damned

  Past Be Damned

  Last Hope, Book 2

  Rebecca Royce

  After Glows Publishing

  Past Be Damned

  © Copyright 2017 Rebecca Royce

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  Published by After Glows

  PO Box 224

  Middleburg, FL 32050

  AfterGlowsPublishing.com

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  Cover by Lyn Forester

  Formatting by AG Formatting

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  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

  Note From The Publisher

  Past Be Damned

  It is the end of days…

  * * *

  Ripped from her life and her loves, Teagan spent five hellish years in a demon infested mine. The darkness she experienced, living on within her long after her rescue. Lost without her loves, she worries as the darkness grows—she will not become the evil they have faced. Sacrificing her identity will protect those she is supposed to serve…and after everything else she’s paid, Teagan sees no other choice.

  * * *

  They will never give up…

  * * *

  Thaddeus, Aidan, Noah, Eric, and Brody live for one reason—revenge. They will destroy Sister Superior for her part in the death of their love. Battle and hate fill the void where their Sister should be, but when they get word that Teagan might be alive—nothing will stand between them and the woman they love.

  1

  A year earlier…

  Outside, in the world that somehow spun despite the fact that it was ending, rain came down in droves. The endless mass of people went on with their lives, unmoved that each day more and more demons arrived to kill their families, invade their spaces, and bring us closer to the end.

  The rain still fell. The sun still appeared from behind the clouds. Why didn’t anyone else just want to stop and scream?

  Inside our kitchen, I remained calm and disciplined after years of training, with the ability to hide the war raging inside of me. Why should anyone need to know? But the time had come to put an end to this, and today was the day.

  I stared at the kind face of Sister Daniella. The woman was the premiere expert on all things Sisterhood. Well, the true Sisterhood. Not the distorted, disgusting order that Sister Superior—also known as Sister Katrina—foisted on the world. Daniella knew our true calling, and she had powers the likes of which I had never imagined.

  For five years, I’d been imprisoned because of Sister Katrina and her ilk in a mine filled with demons. My crime? I loved my five guards as I’d been born to do, as it had been ordained by divinity. But instead of being allowed to embrace our love and help save the world, Katrina banished me to hell, killed my guards, and destroyed my soul.

  Since then, I’d helped to destroy the mine, my own personal hell. I’d found others, real Sisters who understood me. They were everything I’d once hoped to be, but I could take no more. The hollow shell I’d become was no help to anyone. I was not assisting the cause.

  I placed my hand over Daniella’s and squeezed. “This is what I want.”

  She sighed. “I hate this.”

  “I know you do.” Only my desperation could drive me to ask her for something so horrible. “But I can’t go on this way any longer.” A world without Thaddeus, Aidan, Noah, Eric, and Brody, I didn’t want to survive. I wouldn’t kill myself. I still had a mission. I could still help—just not as I was. “So make this lost me disappear, too. If you wipe my memories, every part of me lost without every part of them, then maybe I can find a way to bring goodness to the world.”

  Daniella rubbed her eyes. She’d helped me hone some amazing powers and showed me parts of our universe I’d never imagined. I wanted to forget it all.

  “Are you really sure?”

  I nodded. “It’s awful of me. I know. Endless sadness? I’m afraid I can’t do it anymore. I’m sinking under it, and… I’m terrified I’ll take others with me or hurt them. I need to help make the world better, not destroy it.”

  She squeezed my hand back. “There will be an out. I’m going to leave a spot in the back of your mind where, if you want to, you can touch it and have your memories back. You’ll do it yourself.”

  Why would the new me ever want to return to the barren wasteland I’d become? The whole point was to give the world the best possible version of myself so I could help.

  Daniella closed her eyes. Her power pushed against me and mine rose in answer to her call. I fought back against demons, and this felt to my body akin to the invasion a mid-level demon might try to make in my mind. I had to order my powers not to resist and that was hard since I was so rarely in control of them. She was going to render both my powers and my memory changed. I would be human, not divinity-touched. No more demons to find. No more battles to fight. I had faced my darkness, but on the other side there had not been light.

  Just more of the same. Forever.

  I would be only human, but humans could help in so many ways. I would be useful and no longer in danger of becoming as empty and wicked as Katrina. My sisters didn’t believe it possible, but they couldn’t imagine the parched condition of my soul. Choking back my natural resistance to an overwhelming force of another’s power usurping my own, I surrendered to the request I’d made.

  My memories faded, each one going to black then being replaced by a narrative Daniella wove. It didn’t hurt me, and soon, even the room began to blur. The faces of my loves passed before my mind’s eye. My long gone soul mates. Thaddeus, Aidan, Noah, Eric and Brody. My guards. My heart. I would see them again someday… in the next world. They would forgive me for not keeping them safe, for failing them. They would forgive me for needing to forget. A tear slipped from my eyes. I’d had such love. More than most. I would be grateful for them even if I couldn’t stand to think of their loss for another day. Not if I was going to stay here and do what I’d promised: help.

  Thaddeus… sometimes I imagined his dead body prone on the ground, his blue eyes unseeing. A spear thrust through his heart. The scavenger birds picked at his bones. He’d have thrown himself in front of a demon for me. My One. The chief guard. Oh, how I had loved him. His arms had been my safe haven. He faded before my eyes.

  Aidan… so brave. I’d actually seen him go down. He’d charged the men who dragged me from the Sisterhood in the middle of the night. They’d struck him in the head. Blood had been everywhere. He didn’t possess even an ounce of cowardice, but he’d held me whenever I wasn’t brave like it
was the most natural thing in the world for him to do. My Two. He was quickly gone.

  Noah… he wore his heart on his sleeve. The peacemaker of the group. He’d never let us go to bed angry. He’d been the first to kiss me. He’d simply taken off my hood and done it in the middle of a field of possessed people he’d just finished killing. He’d have fought back when they came for him. He would have lost. Maybe they took off his head. My Three, gone from the world. I cringed at the image, and he disappeared. I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking of.

  Eric… he had a brain to rival any of our great thinkers. He planned strategy and made sure everyone was safe. He taught me games and how to laugh. He held me when I slept, always keeping me warm. I’d loved his gentle smiles. Four. Hanging from a tree… What had I been dwelling on?

  Brody… number Five but not last in my heart. Brody was the glue who’d held us together. He saw us all, down to our deepest souls. He’d been the one to warn against going to Katrina. He’d wanted to run. I wished we had listened, but I’d thought I could still help and I’d needed the Sisterhood to do it. They’d beaten him to death. My love. Gone. I blinked.

  It really was a lovely day.

  Across the Deadlands…

  Thaddeus

  * * *

  I adjusted my eyepatch and stared at the little man I was about to remove from the world. Enough was enough. I’d been clear with Tray the last time I tied him to a chair that we would not tolerate any more interference from him. If he did business with the Sisterhood—as he had chosen to do once again—we considered him an enemy. I had been more than fair.

  The scum in front of me had done even worse than deal with the Sisterhood. He’d been passing information about us—Aidan, Noah, Eric, Brody, and myself—to Katrina. She wanted the phantoms, as she called them—I didn’t give out nicknames—caught and hung. The Sister Superior needn’t have bothered. We were dead inside and had been since Teagan, our Sister, our love, the woman in our care, had been taken from us and burned to death in the middle of the night.

  We’d failed her. Now, we existed only for revenge against the woman responsible. Katrina would know pain and death before long. She would know fear. She would understand anguish. I’d see to it.

  Tray held up his hands. They were bloody, evidence that the man had been digging his own fingernails into his own palms. “Don’t kill me.”

  The room stunk. We’d had him in captivity for twenty-four hours. Unbelievable amounts of human filth surrounded the small chair we’d strapped him to. “Too late.”

  Tray strained against the ropes. He could try it all day. When Aidan tied a knot, no one got out of it. I shook my head. “Not sorry. You had every chance to turn this around. All you had to do was do nothing. The money worth your life?”

  “I have information you want.”

  I highly doubted that. Unsurprisingly, Noah stepped forward. He didn’t like death no matter how much a person deserved to have their life ended. “Tell us what it is, then we’ll decide if you walk out of here.”

  “Let me go first, and then I’ll tell you.”

  “Not going to happen,” Eric called out from where he leaned against the wall, watching. “You first.”

  “There’s a new Sisterhood. In the Deadlands. Anne, the niece of Katrina, created it. They don’t get along. A different place. There’s talk that not only do they want their Sisters to embrace their true loves, but encourage it.”

  Brody visibly jerked from across the room. I understood the sentiment. All we were hearing was that other people would live better than we did, that they would get to love their Sisters and not have her taken from them. “That’s nice.”

  “Anne has two Sisters with her. I’m told their names are Daniella.” Tray coughed, and I waited. I knew the tale of Daniella and her guards. Of course, I’d heard they died. But there were so many lies in this world I couldn’t be surprised of one more. If she had somehow managed to escape with hers, it was just one more example of how badly we’d handled ourselves and what we should have done instead. “And Teagan.”

  The world tilted. For a second, I couldn’t breathe. My mouth struggled to keep up with my brain, with the million things I had to know instantly. “Where did you hear that name?”

  “They pulled her out of a mine. She’d been a prisoner for years. The woman who cooks for them told my aunt that Teagan saw and experienced unspeakable horror. That’s a name you guys know, right? Think that could be your Teagan?”

  My Teagan. Our Teagan. I turned to Aidan. My mental faculties shut down. Hearing her name was like receiving a mortal wound straight through my heart into my soul. Tray telling us she wasn’t dead but instead had suffered, alone, without our protection this whole time—unless he lied—ripped a gaping hole in my soul.

  Aidan took over the interrogation and loomed over Tray. “Keep talking. And I’d better believe every word you say.”

  Teagan… if she was alive, I would not rest until I found her. I knew my brothers in arms wouldn’t either. My love. Was it possible? Did she still breathe? Could she ever forgive us? Was any of this possible?

  A year later…

  Teagan

  * * *

  Storms assaulted the grounds outside, thundering so loudly that it shook the building every time it pounded. I shivered and gripped my blanket around me. There was still so much work to be done with the Sisterhood and nothing would be accomplished until the weather became more agreeable. I’d not grown up in this part of the world, but Sister Daniella’s husband, Curtis, had told me storms were normal weather for the time of the year. Although, even he agreed this was a bit much.

  I made a list. Another one. Making them was about all I could do since the fierce weather kept me trapped inside. How was I to earn my keep if I couldn’t get out of the house long enough to see what needed to be done, fixed, or managed on our property?

  Candles flickered in the room. I’d turned off the lantern to save the oil. Supplies had to be managed, or we’d go over budget and Sister Anne would need to ask the nobles for more gold. Her goal, and therefore my goal, was to minimize how much we had to take at any given time. If possible, we had to become self-sufficient. Easier said than done. The burgundy colored curtains at my window swayed slightly with the draft that slipped through the less than perfectly sealed windows.

  I sipped my tea. Sister Daniella and her family were in isolation and had been for days. Two of her children had colds, and her men were as equally attentive to their daughters as they were to their wife.

  Sister Anne had only just returned to the Sisterhood—and to her infant son, who had been left in the care of four live-in babysitters we employed from the nearby town—from battling a demon a small distance away. She was tired, but would recover.

  Two more Sisters arrived to join us during Anne’s absence. Until a decision could be reached about their admittances, Sister Daniella had cloistered the new arrivals away. How those two ladies had managed to get here without guards or help was beyond me. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. The Sisters were amazing women.

  I was lucky to spend time with them. Even if doing so meant my nights were filled with dreams of demon attacks. I’d never seen one in real life and never would, since only the Sisters of the Sun could see them, most of the time. Their guards could sometimes see them, too. Inside the Sisterhood, I was safe.

  A knock sounded on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The door cracked open. Brooke, one of our housekeepers who occasionally took babysitting duties, glanced inside. “Teagan?”

  Setting aside my tea, I rose to greet her. Yes, these were my rooms, but civility dictated I stand, not recline as though she were there to wait upon me. “Yes, how can I help you?”

  Technically, she worked for me. I was in charge of all the household staff. In reality, I’d be lost without any of them. Over the past few months, I’d learned to do things—like laundering clothes—that I’d never done before. I was useful, but with
so many tasks, I could not do it all alone. I was strong. I could lift things that most women couldn’t and helped with the farming a great deal. But the household? I was learning on my feet.

  “I thought you might like to know that five men arrived.”

  It was nighttime. Most of the time the gates weren’t open after sundown. The Sisters decided who entered. “Do they need something of me?”

  “No,” she tilted her head. “I’m not trying to gossip. I thought you should know that there is an argument below. Sister Anne and her husbands, as well as Sister Daniella and hers, are in a heated discussion with the new guests.”

  Had Brooke come to hide with me? The argument might be fierce, but it wasn’t loud enough to reach my rooms. If the five men were staying, perhaps they’d be best served on the other end of the Sisterhood house or in the building Mason just finished construction on. Yes, it was good for me to know.

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  The gray haired, sweet tempered woman nodded and closed the door behind her. I pressed my ear to the door and listened for her to walk away. She did, slowly. When she was clear and silence returned to the hallway, I let myself out. My door was never locked, and most of the time not closed. Only the chill from the storms had me closing it to keep the heat in.

  I hated confined spaces, even if I needed the warmth. The cool, dampness of the hall eased the pressure tightening around my chest. Nightmares haunted most of my dreams, but even those I had become accustomed to—they were familiar.