Gilded Cages

  Credits & Copyright

  Alpha Reader/Editor:

  Danielle Romo

  Beta Reader/Editor

  Benjamin Phillips

  Cover by:

  Melony Paradise

  Gilded Cages

  Vamp Tales Book Six

  Copyright © 2018 Melony Paradise

  www.melonyparadise.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.

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  Table of Contents

  Credits & Copyright

  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

  The Discordant Earth Series

  Other Books by Melony Paradise

  Connect with the Author

  Chapter 1

  Cold metal bars dug into my back as I glared out from my cramped cage at a woman who should dye her hair black on one side and white on the other. Toss a Dalmatian fur stole around her pointy shoulders and the picture would be complete. The harsh lighting in the enormous lab didn’t help the vainest woman I had ever met. Rowena King.

  “How did you do it?” Rowena stepped up to my cage, her sharp nose nearly touching the etched bars. Calculating, unnaturally blue eyes peered at me as her collagen-plumped lips smirked. “Did it feel as magnificent as it looked?”

  “Mercy, don’t tell her anything!” Kat Price, my vampire sire, snarled from the cage next to me. Her violet eyes flashed with rage, her raven hair frizzing from too many nights sleeping in these awful cages.

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to, bitch.” I sneered, wishing I could zap her with my powers, but she hadn’t fed us in over a week. I couldn’t summon up a breeze, much less a deadly air-spear, and I certainly couldn’t levitate her enough to crush her against a wall.

  “I’m referring to the spectacular display of supernatural power that killed more than half of my mercenary army.” Rowena leaned back, crossing her bird-boned arms, and pursing her lips in a way that looked like a beak to me. Everything about this evil woman screamed vulture. “Fortunately, my drones were high enough to survive your blast.”

  “DroneTV.” I scoffed. “Too scared to be there in person, huh?” My fingers shook from hunger as I shoved them through my ratty, black hair. I hadn’t felt this gross since my darkest depression days after my parents died.

  “If you would just cooperate,” she said, ignoring my comment and slowly pacing in front of our cages, “give me a display of what you can do, I would have something to show my investors.” She rubbed her angled chin as she paced. “Well, then I would be happy to provide you and your vampire friends with the sustenance you so clearly need.” She stopped in front of Edgar’s cage, whipped her head around to smirk at me, and winked. “Darling, you look terrible.”

  All the world is a stage for this snooty bitch. I would drain her dry if she weren’t so full of plastic and chemicals. Gah, the stench of her makeup alone makes me want to vomit.

  Kat made a quiet snorting laugh. I glanced over to see her huddled miserably in the center of her cage, arms hugging her legs and head resting on her knees. The etchings on the bars were a repeating pattern of religious symbols, mostly Christian. When Kat or Edgar touched the bars with bare skin, they were treated to searing pain. For me, the pain was dull and mostly tolerable. We hadn’t yet figured out why it affected me differently.

  I turned my hot gaze back to our captor. “I’m not your pet to perform on command, you greedy whore. Why don’t you get one of your other playthings to dance for you?”

  A sweeping look around showed thirty cages stacked three high in ten rows, similar to what veterinarians housed dogs and cats in, with Kin of various species inside. Across the lab, on the other side of the tables used to poke and prod our unconscious bodies, stood ten barred cells. Each cell held a shapeshifter on a barely padded bed with machines and tubes connected to them.

  The bars contained silver. Rowena happily explained that to us when a werewolf woke up and tried to rip the bars apart only to have his hands burned to the bone. Healing silver wounds took longer than regular human healing. The anesthesia hadn’t stopped the injured man from whimpering, even when they tripled his dose of sedative. When we woke up three days ago, the werewolf was gone.

  “Oh, my dear,” Rowena sang, “none of them dance as well as you, and I want to see how nimble you can be.”

  Anger welled up inside me. I shot up to my knees, wrapping my hands around the bars, ignoring the dull ache, and glared at the demon in a designer dress suit. “Open this cage right now and I’ll show you exactly what I can do to your sorry ass. I’ll drain you dry and level this hellhole and you’ll never—”

  Rowena lifted her bony hand and pressed a remote switch. Instantly, the bars of all the cages electrified, jolting me backward. My head slammed against the unyielding metal and my vision dimmed.

  The electrical current stopped, but the others still crouched in their cages, trying not to touch the bars and get zapped. I stayed still, too tired and achy to move, not even looking as the glass wall separating us from the rest of the lab lowered from the high ceiling.

  An exhausted sigh escaped me as sedating gas poured from the base of the wall behind our cages. The weakest of us went down first. I turned my throbbing head to look at Kat. She watched me with a mixture of sympathy and pride. I tried to sort through the emotions that brought up in me, but the gas won out and I went down for the count.

  Chapter 2

  Pain pulsed distantly through my cheek, each throb like the buzz of an alarm clock waking me for a reality I loathed to face. A muffled roar cleared the fog from my brain and I opened my dry eyes to a horrific sight.

  “Edgar!” I croaked, struggling to my knees. Beside me, Kat held her hands over her ears, squeezing her eyelids tight as her lank hair hung like a curtain around her downturned face. Her anguish leaked unfettered through our connection, accompanied by Edgar’s faint misery.

  “Hold this open here,” Rowena directed, pointing to Edgar’s bare torso.

  A short, balding man, wearing goggles and a blood-spattered white lab coat, used clamps to peel back thick skin flaps from Edgar’s belly. He didn’t even flinch when more blood squirted him.

  “Utterly fascinating.” Rowena stared inside Edgar with wide eyes and a child-like smile, as if she’d just opened the best birthday gift ever. “Do you see how hard his flesh is trying to reknit itself together?” She pointed to the top of the incision. “Do you feel anything? Is it pulling against your hold?”

  “Yes,” the man said with a hasty nod. “It is weak, but there is pulling. Imagine if he were properly fed. I wonder if the pull would be strong enough to break my hold.”

  “Hmm, yes, add that to our list of tests to perform on one of the others. This one I have other plans for.”

  “Of course, Ms. King. Shall I close him up an
d disconnect him? He is nearly drained.”

  That comment snapped me out of my shock and I finally noticed all the other horrors they had inflicted on my grandsire. Tubes and needles stuck in more places than I could count, and machines beeping and whirring all around the table Edgar was strapped to with heavy leather bands and metal cuffs etched with the same symbols as the bars of our cages.

  “Have you obtained the samples I requested, doctor?” Rowena tugged off surgical gloves, tossing them into a nearby red trash bin.

  “We have enough blood samples for the requested tests, and the necessary amount of bone marrow for examination. I’m afraid if we take too much marrow, he will not heal enough for what you have planned for him.” The doctor blinked at Rowena, a touch of fear in his eyes.

  “Very well.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully, snapping her head up as her eyes brightened. “Remove his non-essential organs. I want to see if they grow back.”

  The doctor flinched slightly, but nodded, his jaw clenched tight enough I could hear his teeth grinding.

  Rowena disappeared through a door on the far side of the lab near the larger cells. The doctor turned back to Edgar, scalpel in hand. With the precision of any practiced surgeon, he methodically removed parts of Edgar that he deemed unnecessary. How he knew which organs were essential and which weren’t, I didn’t even want to guess. The notion made me so nauseated, I would have vomited if I had eaten anything this week.

  Edgar screamed around his gag, his body straining against the restraints. Kat struggled to contain her own screams, whining in agony until she couldn’t hold them in anymore. Her wails assaulted my eardrums and my brain through our bond simultaneously.

  I slammed my hands over my ears and the walls in my mind into place, quieting but not blocking them out. I could hear my own thoughts, but all I could think about was Edgar being taken apart bit by bit. Oh fuck, please make it stop!

  On bony knees, I inched around to stuff my head in a back corner of my cage so I couldn’t see the gory show anymore. The dueling screams went on for nearly an hour before the doctor finally sedated Edgar and had some of Rowena’s goons move him into one of the larger cells to heal.

  They’d kept him strapped to the same table, but his body had been closed back up. He now had a tube leading only to his mouth from a bag of blood hanging nearby, slowly dripping with what I assumed to be just enough to aid his healing.

  “Kat?” I scooched around to peer into Kat’s cage. Curled up in a ball, she had her back to me. “Kat, can you hear me?”

  “What?” she asked with a scratchy voice.

  “Will he survive this? Will we survive this?” I leaned closer to the bars to hear Kat’s quiet voice better.

  “I don’t know,” she snapped.

  I blanched, jerking away from her harsh tone. The strain of our situation seemed to be taking a harsh toll on Kat. My hopes dwindled as she sighed with resignation, shrinking even more into herself.

  Chapter 3

  The lab had no windows. We kept count of our days by how often we slept. With our captor using gas to knock us out on her whim, we could only guess at the accuracy of our count. Give or take a few days, Rowena had captured us a month ago.

  We had sorely underestimated our nemesis, thinking we would have time to recuperate after our last battle. I guess money can buy you an army at the drop of a hat. Less than a week after that battle, hunters swarmed Mandy’s ranch, somehow busting through the witch’s wards.

  Kat, Edgar, and I, along with a handful of guards, had done all we could to keep the hunters busy while our most trusted guards helped the rest of our people escape. When I first woke up in my tiny cage, I cried, relieved that Nick, Elena, Mandy, and Benjamin weren’t in any of the surrounding cages, and despair that Kat and Edgar were with me. I tried not to think about the possibility that my loved ones might have been killed, or worse, captured and already succumbed to Rowena’s terrible experimentations.

  I stared, unseeing, through the bars above me with blurred vision tinted deep red. We hadn’t seen anyone in the lab for two days and hadn’t fed in over a week. The were-creatures growled or whined with hunger while the vampires lie limp and emaciated, breathing harshly.

  When the hissing sound of the knock-out gas started, I didn’t bother to move or resist. For once, I welcomed the emptiness of sleep. Hunger and pain faded with unconsciousness. Maybe I won’t wake up this time. Wouldn’t that be a blessing…

  ***

  A pained sigh lifted my sunken chest briefly. I refused to open my eyes, wishing to return to the numbness of oblivion. A tentative prodding of my sire bond revealed a similar feeling in Kat but exploring the fainter bond with Edgar tugged me out of my wallowing.

  I shot up to my knees and searched for him. Kat and I had been positioned in a dark room behind a curved window that looked out onto a huge, white cylindrical room with a ceiling higher than I could see from my limited view. Edgar stood on shaky legs near our window, alone and facing a door that began to slide up into the wall above it.

  Silhouetted in the inky darkness of the space behind that door stood Michael Anderle, the front half of his body glistening in the fluorescent light of the white room.

  Vampirism had bulked Michael up to inhuman proportions. His arms hung away from his sides like an ape. Camouflage pants hugged his legs like a second skin, tucked into black military boots, but nothing covered his upper body other than sweat. He looked like an overinflated pro-wrestler oiled up for the big smack down.

  With glowing red eyes, Michael lumbered into the room as Rowena sidled up beside my cage, arms crossed with an appraising look through the window.

  “What do you think of my fighting pit?” she asked to no one in particular. “The walls are made of the strongest metal alloy on the market, and the glass is better than what they use for the president’s vehicles.” She glanced my way and winked. “Nothing can get out.”

  Rowena turned back to gaze through the window with a smug smile and her nose in the air.

  “So, you’re pitting a starved and weakened vampire against a what… mindless, obviously well-fed, revenant?” I don’t know why this surprised me. Rowena had zero compassion.

  “Is that what you call his kind?” She tilted her head to the side and arched an eyebrow. “That does explain the differences we have noticed between him and the rest of our vampires. Mindless violence, feels no pain, and nearly instant healing… Is that why he hasn’t displayed any special abilities?”

  “We don’t know anything,” Kat snapped. “Feel free to slice him open and yank out his guts. He’s an abomination!”

  My eyebrows jumped up at her vehemence.

  “No matter.” Rowena waved off Kat’s words. “He’s a fascinating subject. If only he had the wherewithal to communicate with us. Anyway.” She pushed a button beside the window and spoke at the wall above it. “Now.”

  Michael lunged forward, crossing half of the long distance between him and Edgar. His rumbling growl echoed through our little viewing room, sounding as if it surrounded us. Edgar bent at the knees, bracing himself, and thrust his arm out.

  As if he’d hit a wall, Michael skidded to a stop, his eyes glazing over. Edgar leaned forward, thrusting his other arm out. I wanted to ask Kat what he was doing to make Michael stop, but I didn’t want to reveal anything to Rowena.

  A throaty groan grew in volume until it became a mighty roar. Michael stumbled, catching himself, as Edgar dropped his arms and slouched, breathing heavily. A gasp caught in my throat. I couldn’t bear to watch but my eyes refused to look away.

  Michael gained a few more feet before Edgar raised his arms again. After two faltering steps, Michael clutched his head, his lips peeling back from clenched teeth. His body appeared to glow with a red outline like a neon sign but not so bright. Those red lines twitched oddly, like an old television on the fritz, creating the urge to blink away blurry vision.

  A grunt from Edgar drew my attention. He swayed and seemed to wither with
his exertions. When he had done this in battle, stealing spirits, he made it look almost effortless, but now, I had to assume Michael’s will outweighed Edgar’s.

  The red outline of Michael’s spirit jumped toward Edgar and I almost cheered, but with a great big breath in, Michael bellowed so loud it rang in my ears. His spirit sucked back into his body and the glow instantly faded away.

  Edgar stumbled backward, dropping to one knee with his head hanging. His body visibly shook with exhaustion.

  “Stop this,” I begged Rowena. “Please, stop this before he kills him!”

  The vile bitch didn’t even twitch in response, just smiled as she watched the battle.

  Chapter 4

  “It’s no use, Mercy.” Kat sighed through tears, her eyes never leaving her sire, the only man she had ever loved since she became a vampire. “Just give him what you can.”

  I blinked at her, shocked at how fatalistic she sounded. Her pain weighed heavily on my mind, but I did as she asked. Gathering up all the strength I had left in me, pulling from the love I felt for Mandy, and tapping into the mate connection I had with Nick, I sent it all to Edgar.

  I could almost see Nick turning abruptly to stare at me as if I hovered somewhere above him, and suddenly, the bond opened a bit more. His unique scent filled my senses, and a tendril of loving warmth slid through me. I jerked my head around to see if Edgar showed any signs of receiving what I sent him.

  With a body shake and a stiffening of his shoulders, Edgar pushed himself up into a sturdy stance, sending a fleeting touch of gratitude. Before I could smile with relief, Michael slammed into him, riding Edgar to the ground. The impact sounded like thunder over the room’s speaker.

  Shoving an arm between them, Edgar pushed Michael away as he tried to clamp his teeth around Edgar’s neck. They struggled against each other. Edgar used all his might to hold Michael off while Michael snarled in his face.