Deacon Read online

  Deacon

  Warrior World, book 1

  Rebecca Royce

  After Glows Publishing

  Deacon

  © Copyright 2017 Rebecca Royce

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  Published by After Glows Publishing

  PO Box 224

  Middleburg, FL 32050

  AfterGlowsPublishing.com

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  Cover by Crimson Phoenix Creations

  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.

  AfterGlowsPublishing.com

  Contents

  Dear Reader

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  Note from the publisher

  Dear Reader

  Once upon a time in 2008, I started writing a Young Adult series called The Warrior. It took a long time to write. Publishers closed and it got moved around a lot. In the end, it finished with five books looking at a brief period of time in the life of Rachel Clancy, who started at sixteen years old and ended when she was eighteen years old. Rachel battled monsters, madmen, and politics. In the end, she met and married Chad Lyons, leaving behind broken hearts in her wake.

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  One of those lovelorn guys was named Deacon Evans. Rachel rescued him from a Vampire cage—you’re going to hear a lot about that later, I’ll let Deacon tell you. He just wouldn’t leave me alone. So the story continues in this spinoff called Warrior World. A three part spin-off. This book is Deacon’s.

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  What can I say? I need to give the grumpy, loud-mouthed, dreamy Deacon a happily ever after. Please do note, The Warrior series was Young Adult that became New Adult with closed door love scenes. Warrior World is a New Adult sub-series that will have adult love scenes.

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  If you are interested (and I say again it is not necessary to read the Warrior books to read Deacon or the next two Warrior World books) then the reading order is:

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  Initiation http://bit.ly/2liaRIg

  Driven http://bit.ly/2lRbhBY

  Subversive http://bit.ly/2kqCz6b

  Redemption http://bit.ly/2kytCTu

  Justice http://bit.ly/2kqKKiR

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  Hugs,

  Rebecca Royce

  Prologue

  My name is Deacon Evans. If you’re reading this, then I didn’t change my mind and throw this shit away. I don’t know why I’m being dumb. The redhead back in Genesis, she used to keep a journal, and I guess she rubbed off. Whatever. I’ve left the safety of Warrior-ville. I never fit in there anyway. They hate me and with good reason. I tried to undo the ways my actions nearly destroyed Genesis, but maybe there isn’t any way to say sorry for certain things we do. Maybe we have to live with them. In the end, they saved themselves with little help from me. So now it’s me and Micah Lyons. We’re going to see what else is out there. If there is anything else. Maybe we’re all that’s left, and wouldn’t that just suck big, giant balls.

  One

  Snow covered my boots. It touched the sides of my ankles, and my skin froze where it snuck under my pants. The snow had been falling pretty steady flow for an hour, which meant we were going to have to stop sooner than normal. I’d never lived in any world except this one. A lot of the people I knew, who had once existed in a time where snow wasn’t usually deadly, told me they used to look forward to something they called snow days. It got them out of having to go to school that day.

  I’d have liked the chance to go to school—to learn something other than killing Vampires and Werewolves. It would have been a damned privilege. In a post-apocalyptic world, there were priorities and luxuries—math and literature didn’t factor much into my early life. Now I was twenty, and I supposed I was who I was.

  The wind howled all around us. The former prince of Genesis and my current partner in crime, Micah Lyons, led us into his choice of abandoned home. It was one of the brown ones. All of the houses in wherever the hell we were looked the same to me. Maybe they were supposed to. Maybe the people who lived in them desired sameness. The same model, repeated ten times on one block. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand pre-apoc people, and I never would.

  This house—the third brown one in the row—had a roof without too many holes. So there was that. I hated winter, and snow was a special kind of pain. Not that I planned to complain aloud. The whole adventure had been my idea. I wouldn’t give the perpetually happy Micah the pleasure of hearing me grumble. The man would never shut up with his platitudes in his efforts to cheer me up.

  “This will do, right?” Micah entered the house first. Technically, he and I were both Warriors. That meant we had the ability, thanks to the now very dead Isaac Icahn messing with our genes, to sense Vampires and Werewolves. I wasn’t feeling any, but Micah was better at sensing them than me. I didn’t work at it. If I felt them, I felt them. If I didn’t, I didn’t. He actually took steps to enhance his abilities. I wasn’t sure why he bothered. The monsters would kill us all eventually. People like us didn’t grow old.

  Micah looked around, repeating, “This’ll do, right?”

  He wasn’t really asking me. In the two weeks we’d been together, I’d discovered a few things about Micah. He didn’t speak much, which was a good thing, but when he did, it wasn’t to ask permission. If Micah spoke, he’d decided on a course of action and that was what we would be doing. I’d never have chosen to take this trip, adventure, or whatever we were calling it alone with Micah if I’d had a choice. My friend Darren was supposed to come with us. Like me, he’d figured out too late that Icahn was evil. Maybe our joint stupidity was why we called each other friends. I didn’t know. I didn’t have friends, not really.

  Last minute, the son-of-a-bitch had fallen in love. The great trio had become a dynamic duo. That was a Micah-ism. Not my idea.

  “One place is basically the same as the other.”

  “You’re in a great mood.” Micah set his pack down and started doing what he did in every abandoned house we camped within—exploring.

  I really didn’t care how many bedrooms the place had or if any of the old decorations remained in someone’s room. Micah must have elected to come because he wanted to remember the past. I was here because there had to be a future.

  We had to have a future, because otherwise, what was the point?

  Micah and I had very different backgrounds. He’d actually been born a long time before, then placed in stasis by a madman to survive the Vampire uprising—a disaster caused by the same d
amn madman’s meddling with viruses. His mind had been tweaked so he didn’t remember any of it. Except eventually, he and everyone else who went through the same mind-screw had remembered.

  As for me, I’d been born in a Vampire prison where the vamps bred us to be their food supply. The same dude who screwed with Micah’s head did the same to mine at one point, but all of that was after Rachel Clancy rescued me from the Vamp menu.

  I knew enough pop culture from Micah’s time, thanks to the brain screw, that I could talk a bit with the others but not enough to know why all these houses were frickin’ brown.

  Slumping on the floor of the living room, I pulled better socks out of my pack. If my pants pushed up again tomorrow in the snow, these socks would better suit the situation. I couldn’t decide which I hated less: being wet or being cold.

  Micah descended the stairs, taking them two at a time, which meant he felt better about the soundness of this structure than I did. I wouldn’t have been so easy on those stairs. The whole structure might come down around us if we weren’t careful.

  It had happened before. Clancy fell through a roof and two floors before Darren and I managed to save her earlier in the year.

  Micah plopped down next to me. “So you’re in a mood.”

  “I’m not in a mood.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Yeah, bro, you are.” He elbowed me then pulled out his cards.

  Maybe I should have thanked him for bringing the fucking cards. I wouldn’t. But maybe I should have. I wasn’t that good of a player and didn’t know all the games he did, but they certainly helped to pass the nights. I tugged out a small lantern from my pack and lit it. The device offered only low light, not something easily seen from outside of a house, and we always took care to keep it away from windows. If need be, we’d blow it out. Fortunately for us, we’d feel the monsters and know to go into complete blackness. It didn’t, however, give off any heat. We’d be freezing until we climbed into our sleeping bags.

  “We should have left in the springtime.”

  Micah nodded. “We would have if my parents hadn’t needed me to stay to help with the rebuild of the river flow. And then there was the flu that took out half the agricultural community. This coldness is on me and bad frickin’ luck.” He shrugged. “But then again, since we mean to stay away from Genesis for the next couple of years, or until you get over Rachel Clancy Lyons, we were going to hit winter at some point. We’re getting the pain over early. And I’d like to point out that we’d made great time until it started snowing. I’ve never been this far west. Have you?”

  I’d been north—way up north saving Clancy—but never this far west. “No. I spent most of my life underground, remember?”

  “So did I. Well, this part of my life.” Micah dealt the first round of cards. I had a pair of twos. We didn’t have anything to bet except small bits of chocolate. One thing I’d give to Micah, he knew how to budget his food. I wasn’t going to have to worry about him running out before me. We’d both agreed before it was dire, we’d hunt. We were good at it.

  He was annoying, but he was smart. I appreciated that quality, if nothing else.

  “I don’t have to get over Rachel.” Not exactly sure why I felt the need to defend myself. Yet, there it was.

  He rolled his eyes. “Sure you do. She married my brother. She’s probably pregnant, and you believed you’d be the last man standing. Don’t deny it. If you’d just held on long enough, Jason and Chad would’ve taken care of themselves. Chad already died once, and came back. That had to suck for the game plan. And Jason did eventually take himself out of the game by being too much Werewolf. But… Chad, he came back.”

  I bet my two pieces of chocolate. “Thanks for the recap. It’s not like I was there or anything.”

  I’d also been fully aware of the second I officially lost my chance. Even after the oldest Lyon prince came back from the dead with help from the madman’s now defunct cloning machine, I’d had a chance. I was Rachel’s best friend, even more so than Micah. She would have come around to see we had more in common and more of a future than she’d ever have with a Lyons guy. After, I ended up on the wrong side of the fight, and Keith got killed.

  Her favorite teacher, murdered by Isaac Icahn, while I stood right behind the now-dead Keith on a view screen. It was all over then. The shittiest part was I’d really, really liked Keith. I’d never get over his death either or the role I played in it by believing Icahn, even after Rachel told me he was evil.

  I just hadn’t liked how my part in the world was featured if her version of reality was true. I preferred the fiction I’d been fed. I liked my role better. I’d responded by basically being a douchebag. No other defense or excuse required.

  Micah raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t kill him.”

  My thoughts were my own, and I wasn’t that easy to read, so he could screw himself. “Bet or show.”

  He smirked, throwing in two pieces of chocolate. “She was in love with me first.”

  Now he just egged me, and we both knew it. Micah wanted to get a rise out of me tonight, but it was too cold for me to tell him to screw off. I didn’t feel like finding another house. Why did he always have to dig at this old wound?

  “She was. She loved me for years and years. Even before, in the world before the Vampires, she flirted with me while she dated Jason. I was her love first.”

  “Yeah, hers and every girl in Genesis over the age of sixteen. Isn’t that kind of your thing?” He wasn’t the only one who could do recent history conversations. “Make them fall in love with you then not return their feelings?”

  Micah narrowed his eyes. “Maybe we should stop this.”

  “Yeah, probably.” Look, he could take a hint.

  The thing with Rachel, I’d been so damn certain we were meant to be, like so ridiculously sure. She’d shown up in the darkness. I’d been slated to die. I was such a pain in the ass to the Vampires they didn’t even want to feed on me anymore. They’d put me in a cage then they would have dropped me into a pit filled with their sick and weak. I’d have been overwhelmed simply by the sheer numbers. I’d known it was coming, having seen the ritual hundreds of times since birth. She’d appeared with Jason’s father, Andon. I hadn’t known him personally, but I’d recognized him as a Wolf. I’d always had an awareness of them, even before Icahn enhanced it in me.

  She hadn’t run off with him. She’d stayed and fought for me when I’d been a complete stranger. I’d believed she was meant for me. That the way we met had to have meant something. Fate or some shit like that. As it turned out, I was a complete idiot.

  A flash of light appeared in the barren night. Micah and I saw the illumination at the same time and jumped to our feet. I blew out our lantern, and we rushed to the window. Some distance away, someone had lit a fire.

  The sick prickles of Werewolf awareness moved through me. I gritted my teeth. I loathed the sensation. Glancing sideways, I met Micah’s equally tense expression.

  “Should I be worried we saw the light before we felt it?”

  Micah nodded. “I don’t love it. There is that risk. Now that Icahn is dead and not infusing us with whatever, we’ll lose the extra sense. We could just be normal humans.”

  “Normal, lethal humans who know how to fight monsters. Someday they’ll kill us. But not today.”

  Micah laughed. I wasn’t being funny, but whatever.

  “We have two choices,” he said, staring out the window. “We stay in here, cold but covered, and wait out the night. Hope they’re gone in the morning. Hope more of them don’t show up. Hope we get away unnoticed. Hope they don’t smell us. Hope…”

  I held up my hand. “You know I don’t hope.”

  “Then we should get our gear back on, make sure our machetes are ready, and go kill us some Werewolves tonight.”

  Hunting was one way to keep us warm. The only good Werewolf was a dead Werewolf. Underground, with the Vampires always needing to use or kill us for food, the Werewolves had enfor
ced the Vamp’s law. They’d all been under the direction of Isaac Icahn, at least in our little area of the world.

  Werewolves were nasty. They killed at will then pretended to be human, which made them worse in my book. At least the Vamps looked like monsters they were, no pretense.

  I couldn’t make the ones who had hurt me pay. But I could take my frustration out on all Werewolves I met from now on. One good thing about being away from Rachel was that I didn’t have to try to make nice anymore. Although now they’d tried to kill her, I doubted she remained one of their biggest fans either.

  Not that I’d ever get the chance to ask her. After I’d brought her back to Chad, I hadn’t lingered. With Keith dead, and everyone knowing my part in it, I’d made myself scarce. I’d never see her again, much less get a chance to ask Clancy if she liked Werewolves still. When I left Genesis, I knew in my heart I’d never return.

  Why should I stay in a place where everyone hated me? My family was still there—the ones we’d rescued—and they seemed happy. My days in Genesis happyville were done.

  There had to be more to this world than what I’d left there. More people. More stuff. More adventures. More chances to start again. More fucking everything.

  For tonight, however, there were monsters to eliminate. That could be my gift to the world. Fewer Werewolves and Vamps to contend with. I planned to enjoy every second of it.