Jason: A Dystopian Paranormal Urban Fantasy Romance (Warrior World Book 3) Read online

  Jason

  Warrior World #3

  Rebecca Royce

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

  Jason (Warrior World #3)

  Copyright @ 2018 by Rebecca Royce

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-947672-54-3

  Print ISBN:

  Cover art by Jodielocks Cover Designs

  Content Editing: Heather Long

  Proofread Editing: Bookends Editing

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Rebecca Royce

  www.rebeccaroyce.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  A Note from the Author

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Author

  Also by Rebecca Royce

  For Ripley—without whom this would never have been written.

  A Note from the Author

  Dearest Reader,

  Thank you so much for picking up Jason (Warrior World #3). This is the final book in the Warrior World series, the spin-off of my young adult series The Warrior that I wrote so long ago. Jason has been an interesting hero for me to get to know over the years. He started off Rachel’s hero. You see, when I first wrote The Warrior I had this idea that I was simply writing a complicated love story between Rachel and Jason. Then things got tricky. As I don’t pre-plan out my books I suddenly met this character named Chad. And he was so clearly Rachel’s hero. The road to true love was not easy for them (death… cloning.) But they got there.

  This left poor Jason in quite a bind and an angry Jason who thought Rachel was his mate started to behave in really difficult ways. The problem? He was also succumbing to the same virus that took out his whole pack once before and made them all act very differently than themselves. His father, the Alpha, didn’t help things. Jason went from hero to very misunderstood bad guy who eventually sacrificed himself to save Rachel. In the book Redemption, I thought the redemption would be Rachel’s from the terrible mistake she made in Subversive but it wasn’t—it was Jason’s.

  Now here we are. In Micah’s book he accidentally re-cloned Jason which is what the Werewolves wanted anyway since they need an Alpha and that hasn’t been going all that well. He is back. But he isn’t eighteen anymore. They aged him. Twenty-three years old we find a different Jason returned. Things are a mess. But he could be the one to save them all.

  I do love a good redemption story. I hope you enjoy Jason. This series is not my most popular to buy and if you are one of the few reading it I thank you. This is a ‘love’ project for me. It can be hard to sustain these types of books when they haven’t found a large audience. The few of you who read them (and my critique partner who was the driving force in getting these out right now) truly make my day.

  With love,

  Rebecca Royce

  Prologue

  Bet you didn’t think you’d be reading anything I wrote? Yeah, I’m sort of surprised to be doing it, too. I’ve read those five journals of Clancy’s, and I don’t come off real well in them. I’m the bad guy who got in the way and caused all kinds of problems for everyone.

  Yet, here I am all these years later and now they want me to contribute something to the library? Seems like bullshit to me. But whatever. How would you like every mistake you made as a teenager to be on display for people to read? I mean, things were really screwed up back then. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe I should let you all think of me as Jason the bad guy and leave it as that. People who know me, know me. What do I care what other people think?

  I guess at this point you say, Jason, why are you bothering then?

  I’m writing this letter because Rachel thinks that someday—if there is a someday—that everyone will want to know how I fell into things. I guess a Werewolf who died and got recloned is kind of an interesting occurrence that doesn’t happen every day, not even when things like that happened more regularly then than they do now.

  So I’ll write it down for you. I’ll tell you how I was raised to pretend I was human, had my high school girlfriend and her family put on ice to save them, lost years, came back, screwed up, died, came back, and… yeah. It’s too much. The original Vampires are out there prowling the night and even now as I sit down to write this I can’t help but think there are more important things for me to be doing than journaling…

  Got to go. Something is moving out there in the night, something that wants us all dead. Some nights it seems I’m all that stands between us, and total destruction.

  One

  The rain pounded on my head, but I’d long ceased to notice that I was wet. Truth was, if I shifted like most of my pack had, I wouldn’t care about the rain at all. The problem was at least one of us had to remain human most of the time to keep a look out for trouble better fixed with words than claws and as I was Alpha that someone was me. I shook my head, throwing drops off my blond hair and walked down toward the Hudson River.

  I sniffed the air, looking for danger but didn’t come up with any. It was safe for me to wander. It wasn’t like there was all that much for me to do on this rainy afternoon while my pack ran for miles spending time as their Wolves.

  My pack. It was still odd for me to think of them that way. Pack to me had always been family. My father, my sisters, even my human mother. They had been pack. But they were all gone now and for whatever joke of a reason I had been brought back. These Wolves I hardly knew, who had only remote links to my father’s pack, needed me to lead them.

  And since I’d been born to be an alpha, leading them was what I was doing.

  In this screwed up world that never should have been.

  I knelt at the top of the cliff and looked down. I could remember this place so well from before. I’d been young here. When this world had been hopping. When I used to stare across the river to New York City across the banks. It had seemed so alive, so constantly busy, and so full of possibility.

  Werewolves don’t live in Manhattan, Jason. You’re lucky we can live so close to it.

  My dead father’s scolding voice echoed from the past reminding me that no matter how nostalgic I may be, things hadn’t been so perfect back then either. Of course, it was better than it was now. I rubbed at my face. I was tired. We were going to have to seriously start to build permanent structures. After the world ended, my father had preferred a nomadic life, but this was exhausting everyone. I had fifty lost Werewolves and even though I was twenty-three, half the age of the next youngest member of my pack, they
looked to me for answers.

  Fifty beta Wolves lost to this mess…

  We needed houses. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to build them.

  I’d been the spoiled son of a doctor. No one had asked me to do any manual labor ever. The best I’d done was put up tents and take them down when we moved.

  I sighed. If the universe wanted to stop fucking with me anytime soon that would be great. I’d already died once and now I had to be cloned to come back to this? I couldn’t be reborn, say hundreds of years from now, when this was all worked out?

  The scent of a Vampire hit me hard, biting at my senses and making my nose hurt. I stood, turning around. No way in hell should I be smelling one of those metallic aromas right now. It was still the middle of the fucking day.

  I needed to see what was happening. Could my nose be deceiving me? It had done so before. I’d thought I had a mate in Rachel Clancy thanks to my senses and that had turned out to be a giant mess. She was human. I was Werewolf and even though the combination worked for my parents just fine it turned out that it wasn’t so wonderful when one half of that deal didn’t want to be in the relationship anymore. Humans didn’t mate, they loved by choice and Rachel hadn’t felt that way for me after a while. That left one half mated and the other… not. I’d gotten the worse end of that arrangement. I had no idea what had happened to her and I’d not sought her out since I’d been back. I didn’t need any more pain. I had enough as it was.

  And none of that solved why in the hell I scented a Vampire in the middle of the day. I tugged on my worn coat—who knew why I was even bothering wearing it—and pulled it closer around me.

  Vampires lived below ground during the day. There they were sluggish but could move around. Not above ground, not even on rainy afternoons. This much sunlight would kill them. I didn’t move. Maybe I was crazy. Nothing new really, I’d always been borderline off even when the world had been normal and I’d been a teenager.

  I hadn’t had control of my Wolf all that well, and I hardly had it under my thumb now. It was possible I didn’t smell anything at all.

  In any case, fear didn’t factor in this moment at all. Death came for all of us, and clearly, I didn’t have to stay dead if someone else wanted me back.

  So much for heroic endings…

  I stepped forward. Better to proceed like I knew what I was doing. The easiest way to follow a scent was on four legs, not two. I called the Wolf onto myself. The first time doing this in childhood had felt like death, but now it was like scratching an itch in the back of my mind. An ever present irritation that could only be fixed by giving into the change.

  My bones broke, reshaped, fur appeared where none had been, and my eyesight altered. The whole thing took seconds and then the beast within me drove to the surface. I shook my head back and forth, lowering my nose to the ground for a second before I reared back. The magic of this, the part we could never explain away with science, was that my clothes would be back on my body when I shifted back. They disappeared during the transition and came back. It had always been the part no one could quite explain.

  This was my world. In this form there was no doubt. I was Alpha Wolf. I ruled the days and the nights. There was a Vampire out there. I could smell him. Whatever happened to let that thing come out when it didn’t belong in my daytime needed to be corrected. I would end it.

  I took off running. This was going to be fun.

  The Vampire was moving. That was even better. If he wanted to run, I would chase. Everything was prey. This was my world. It didn’t belong in it. I picked up speed. The quicker it moved, the faster I went until I was outright running. This was a swift undead.

  I loved it. There was nothing like sweet victory after pursuit.

  I rounded a tree line and abruptly stopped. My Vampire wasn’t alone. No, he had a human female up against a tree. She shook with fear and the scent of it tasted acrid on my tongue. Her anxiety burned inside of me. I didn’t like it. Females were to be protected.

  I stalked forward. The Vampire was bigger than it should have been, a whole foot taller than any I’d ever seen before and when it turned to stare at me, there was no human left in its face. The human part of my brain used the word monster.

  Yes, it was. But so was I.

  I leaped on him, knocking the filthy undead thing to the ground. They smelled like metal, and I hated them. Eating them wasn’t any fun either but I would not allow it to exist in my sunlight. Or moonlight for that matter.

  I tore the thing to shreds.

  The female cried out and rushed from the tree where she’d been about to die. Good, she was smart. She should go.

  I had death to deliver.

  It wrapped its arms around my neck and tried to squeeze the life out of me. It was surprisingly strong. While I tore at its leg, it growled, digging its fingers into my skin. I could feel the venom pulsing at me. This would kill a human but I couldn’t be made Vampire. No matter how much the bites stung. I eventually tore it to shreds.

  The Vampire tasted wrong. More unnatural than normal and I didn’t know how that was possible. I spit and gagged until most of the taste was out of my mouth. Dizziness assailed me, but I shook it off.

  Maybe I’d just sit here for a second.

  Vampires didn’t usually give me so much trouble. I took down dozens at a time. There really had been something wrong with this one.

  The female’s smell moved over me again, and I lifted my head to look. She stood right in front of me. What was the matter with her? She should have run. If I’d failed she would have been changed into a Vampire.

  She knelt down in front of me. Now, that was stupid. People should know better than to show weakness in front of crazed animals.

  “I bet you feel a little… wrong.”

  The female had a nice voice. All in all, she was lovely all around. Her smell was better than her appearance but that was only because I preferred scent above all things. My human side thought she was beautiful. Dark haired, dark eyed. She was slender and athletic looking. Maybe she wasn’t slender. It was hard to tell. I was tall in both situations.

  Did I feel a little wrong? I did. Battle didn’t usually do this to me. I was lightheaded. Granted, I didn’t get to eat as much as I would like. Werewolves needed a lot of food. But yes, this was weird.

  “Obviously.” She cleared her throat. She was soaking wet. The female needed to be gotten some place warm and dry. “They’re not normal Vampires. We don’t know what to do with them. I was stupid coming out here but lately it seems nothing I do is working. I thought maybe I could take samples from where one touched something and study it in the lab.”

  I staggered to my feet, my back legs swaying a bit. The female needed to be removed from this area before she caught her death of cold.

  “What are you doing? You’re not going to be okay if you push it too soon. I know you guys have a resistance or whatever, but you’re bound to feel like hell.” I pushed at her with my nose until she stepped back. I’d do this the whole way to somewhere with a roof if I had to. Hopefully, she’d catch on before that.

  “Oomph. Okay. You want me to move. Oh there you go again. Okay. Look I just want you to rest until the poison leaves your system. Surely your Alpha will come looking for you soon. That’s what you call your leader, right? Alpha. Do you guys have one? And I have to say it’s been very nice not fighting Werewolves anymore. It’s enough with just the Vampires.”

  The female liked to talk, and I understood the gist of it. She was worried about it. That was fine. I didn’t need help. Sure, I was feeling a little bit drugged, but as long as I didn’t succumb to the Werewolf madness that infected my father and thereby all of us years earlier I’d be fine. Eventually, she picked up her pace, and I trotted along beside her.

  There was a small cabin in the distance, and it smelled empty. She could wait out the storm there. Eventually, we must have gotten on the same page because I herded her inside and she actually went. I stopped on the step after
she was in. Okay, that was good. The female was where she needed to go.

  She turned to look at me. “Oh no. I’m not going to stay in here like some damsel while you keep getting wet, Wolfie. If I am getting out of the rain then you are getting out of the rain. You’re the one with the Vampire bites. Inside. Now.”

  No one ordered me around. Toward the end of his life, my father hardly had and he had been my alpha. Yet there I was tromping inside to where she directed. She shut the door behind us. Not that it mattered. Locks were pointless and that door would probably fall off the hinges as soon as actually work.

  I was thinking very human-ly but I’d made no move to shift. Something was very… odd.

  With the female inside, dizziness wafted through me as though getting her some place dry meant I could actually succumb to whatever this was. She squatted down. “You’re going to be okay. I mean I think you will. If you were human, I’d think you were going to die. But I guess we’re lucky you’re not.” She wiped a piece of her dark hair away from her face. “I’m a doctor. You’d think I could do better than just guessing, but this is all foreign territory to me. I used to work for the enemy and even I don’t know who or what these things are.”

  I sat down. Okay. If I was going to pass out, it was better to do it from this position than topping over entirely. I knew what it was to work for the enemy. Forget working for them, I was the enemy. And I didn’t know how to deal with that. Yes, I’d always wanted to just be human.

  I sighed. Yes, this was thinking like one of them for sure.

  “I’m Margot. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone you helped me. I know how it is to feel… hunted.”