The Price of Desire (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 1) Read online

  THE

  PRICE

  OF

  DESIRE

  P.J. Fox

  Book One of The House of Light and Shadow

  This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places or things, in this solar system or another, is purely coincidental.

  THE PRICE OF DESIRE

  Copyright © 2014 by Evil Toad Press

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Orange Box Design

  Published by Evil Toad Press

  ISBN 978-0-9904762-1-4

  First Edition: June 2014

  Acknowledgements

  Writing this book has been an enormous undertaking, that was several years in the making. During that time, four babies were born to our family; our own son, as well as two nieces and one nephew. We, as a group, suffered both setbacks—the foundation of our house collapsed—and blessings. But, through it all, we supported each other. And everyone supported me, while I spent countless hours writing and revising the manuscript that would eventually become The Price of Desire. As always, I owe my family everything; because not only does their support make it possible to write, their love is what inspires me.

  P.J. Fox

  For J.C.

  Table of Contents

  Chapters:

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  About the Author

  ONE

  Aria brought her staff up, blocking the man’s attack. He was filthy, foul-mouthed and cheerful about the prospect of killing her; although his good humor had begun ebbing into annoyance at her persistent refusal to die. Or better yet, she knew, surrender. Her shoulders and arms were on fire and his face swam before her eyes, but she gritted her teeth and steadied herself as steel struck wood.

  Wrenching free, she staggered back a few steps.

  Her staff had begun life as a tent pole, pressed into service when she’d first scented trouble. She was glad now that she’d been cautious, even as she wished that she’d been more cautious. The man swung again and she dodged just in time, barely keeping her balance. She felt the rusted, pitted blade score her flesh and a jagged cut bloomed on her thigh. It wasn’t the first of such cuts; she’d been flung, hit, and banged around so much over the last week that she’d lost count of the hurts.

  Reason dictated that she give up—surrender while she still could and hope for the best. She was heavily outnumbered, the small clearing ringed with jeering, leering men. Her attacker was, she presumed, their leader; certainly the other men followed his orders, if haphazardly. She was postponing the inevitable, and she knew it.

  If she were taken alive, she’d pay heavily for having put up a fight and humiliating her attacker with a few well-timed blows of her own. But she couldn’t give up, not while she drew breath. She wasn’t acting from any misplaced sense of virtue but, rather, from a sense of obligation; she owed a duty to the six young girls she’d brought to this godforsaken hellhole and who currently cowered in the now-useless ship behind her. Girls not much younger than Aria, but who nonetheless depended on her as their leader in the absence of any other choice. She’d failed them once already, by getting them marooned here. She’d be damned if she failed them twice by surrendering them all to certain doom.

  She blocked, parried, blocked, parried, thin chest heaving as she gulped down the fetid jungle air.

  This was her fault; this was all her fault.

  They’d crash-landed almost a week ago. Their pilot was dead and she didn’t even know what planet they were on. The ship’s navigational charts had burned in the crash and she couldn’t have read them, anyway. Since then, while trying to keep the girls alive and together, she’d discovered more kinds of flesh-eating animals than she’d imagined in her wildest nightmares. The jungle was alive with predators; even the plants were carnivorous, snapping up rodents and other small things with frightening ease. Just that morning, Aria had stood and watched as a pretty, hibiscus-type flower ate a hamster alive. The tight cone of flesh-like petals had…pulsed, somehow. And belched.

  She’d decided then, foolishly, that things couldn’t possibly get worse.

  The men had arrived shortly thereafter, stumbling into their little camp seemingly by accident. They could have been rescuers, there was no reason to think otherwise, but Aria trusted her gut sense that something was wrong. She’d herded the girls inside the wreck of the ship, her pallid face and thin, bloodless lips convincing them as words couldn’t. And they’d stayed hidden, and for that she was grateful.

  Sweat clung to her like a second skin, now. Risking a quick glance behind the man, she scanned the impenetrable wall of green for signs of movement. They’d built a small fire the previous night, and had been warming their hands and pretending that everything was fine when the tiger appeared—or, at least, something that looked like a tiger in the way that that furry brown thing had looked like a hamster. Surprised at her own courage, Aria had chased it off with a burning brand. She wished more than anything that it would come back now. A four hundred pound predator would make short work of this cretin.

  He smiled, revealing rotten teeth. “Come on girly,” he cajoled. “Give it up.”

  Fuck you, she thought, and the horse you rode in on.

  He could have shot her but he hadn’t, preferring to toy with her instead like a cat with a mouse. Aria didn’t know much about guns except that using them involved pointing and pulling a trigger, but she’d had no trouble recognizing the pistol hanging at his hip.

  He flicked his wrist almost casually, raising anot
her bright red line on her thigh. Her once-stylish pants were cut to tatters, and her thin cotton shirt hadn’t fared much better. After a week in the jungle it was more gray than pink, and hung loosely on her emaciated frame. She’d been thin, before, but now she was starving. They all were—these men included.

  They were slavers, and their livelihood depended on capturing and selling slaves. Children fetched the highest prices, followed by young women like Aria. Who was so small that she looked like a child. Her assailant hadn’t shot her, because he wanted her alive—for sport and for sale. Being their leader, he was probably the canniest of the group and that meant he could think ahead—unless, of course, Aria somehow made him angry enough.

  “I can do this all day,” he assured her.

  He sliced at her again and she hissed without feeling the pain.

  She felt nothing, now, except rage.

  Someone laughed, and money passed between dirt-grimed hands. Their audience was enjoying the show.

  From their idle comments, she’d learned that these were no ordinary slavers but a special breed of scum that specialized in supplying the outer rim’s brothels. Slavery was legal in some jurisdictions, illegal in others; most of the outer rim planets had no law to speak of, so the question was moot. And even though there were many adults, even some attractive ones, willing to sell their bodies out of greed, desperation or simple boredom, a certain kind of client wanted only that which couldn’t be bought.

  Meeting the man’s cold, dead eyes, Aria realized again what a fool she’d been—a fool to lead the girls into this mess, and a fool to think that she, she, mousy, ill-educated Aria Hahn from a nowhere burg like Cabot Lake Township was up to the challenge of protecting them. She’d had no idea, before she’d left home, that men like this even existed; she’d learned the truth about interstellar travel after it was too late to turn back. Except she wouldn’t have turned back, even if she could have—and that admission was what galled her most of all. Running away and having an adventure had been her idea. But for her, these girls would probably all be safe in their beds at home.

  Instead, they might be locked up in some dungeon before nightfall. Wealth and influence allowed men—and sometimes women, too—to act out the deepest desires of their hearts. Girls to torture, girls to maim, girls to keep locked in tiny windowless cells. These clients paid well for disposable girls, and were catered to accordingly. And the brothels bought the girls, in turn, from roving bands of slavers like these: the lowest of the low, thugs who lurked in the shadows and waited for easy pickings like a group of penniless, friendless girls who’d crash-landed in the middle of nowhere.

  Aria sucked in her breath. Maybe she was a coward, for courting death so brazenly. Maybe she’d rather die than live with the knowledge of what her stupidity had wrought.

  The blade twirled in the slaver’s hand, glinting in the sunlight, another wound opening on her leg. Seconds later its twin appeared on her hip. Both were deep, deeper than the others, and she felt the nauseating sensation of her flesh gaping and rubbing against itself. He’d opened up six wounds, now—no, seven. No, eight. She counted them with a certain detachment, more curious than anything else. She was aware, in an academic sense, that she’d lost a great deal of blood, but she couldn’t quite make herself care.

  Dropping to her knee, Aria marshaled her strength and swept the staff up between the man’s legs. It connected solidly, producing a satisfying thud and an even more satisfying howl. She panted, half-smiling, suddenly aware that she lacked the strength to rise.

  “I’ll fuck you up the cunt with my dagger!” he screamed, half incoherently. “Then we’ll see how much you grin!”

  He swung down and she raised the staff again, somehow. She’d done so barely in time, and instead of slicing her head off the blade skittered down the length of the tent pole and buried itself in her upper arm where it jarred against bone. Droplets of blood misted the air. She didn’t cry out; she didn’t faint. She just waited. This was it, and now she’d die. The only reason she’d survived this long had been because he’d wanted her to and now she’d finally succeeded in making him angry enough to kill her. She’d die, and that would be it.

  She’d die a failure, she’d never find out what happened to the girls…and part of her was glad.

  She was so tired. She felt like she’d been at this forever.

  She looked up, squinting into a bright afternoon sun that had transformed her executioner into a featureless silhouette outlined in gold, and tried to prepare herself. She wondered if dying hurt.

  But instead of decapitating her, or shooting her, he tottered back a few steps and collapsed in the grass. The sword dropped from his nerveless fingers. His mouth stayed open in a permanent expression of surprise. She watched, fascinated. He’d been alive, but now he was dead. She was not dead. How was such a thing possible? A fly landed on his eyeball.

  She swayed slightly, nauseous but too tired to vomit, and felt herself fall forward into the grass. The morning dew had burned off long ago and it crackled, hot and dry, underneath her cheek. It tickled, but she lacked the energy to roll over or even move her head.

  Vaguely, from somewhere very far away, she heard shouting.

  Who was shouting, and why? Was it more slavers?

  Her eye felt gummed shut, but she forced it open and saw that their little clearing, their home away from home for the past week—with a fire pit, some scavenged seating and even a little laundry line—was filling with men. Men in uniforms, but uniforms she didn’t recognize.

  They moved almost soundlessly. These men weren’t rabble, like the slavers; they were highly trained, and communicated with each other using hand signals. Which was nice, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything, except sleep. Still, some long-buried instinct forced her to keep watching as long as she could. She couldn’t die until she knew what was happening.

  These men had different weapons, she noted vacantly, better ones, and they used them without compunction. One of the slavers—the one who’d lost the bet—collapsed. His head exploded like an overripe melon, and for some reason Aria found that funny. She tried to laugh, but laughing hurt too much. Other slavers ran, only to be cut down as they reached the trees. Whoever these new men were, they didn’t hold with fooling around—or with prisoners, it seemed.

  She coughed, and blinked, and tried to reason through the cotton balls stuffed between her ears.

  Someone was experiencing this, watching the scene unfold beneath her as she floated high above. But not Aria. She blinked again, realizing that there was something in her eye. It dribbled down her cheek and over her lip. She licked at them, tasting the coppery tang of blood.

  A figure knelt down, his shadow falling over her and blocking out the light. It was the slaver—no, he was dead. She tried to organize her thoughts, and couldn’t: every time she gathered them together they swirled apart again into thousands of tiny unconnected fragments. And then…no, she told herself, this was someone else. But who? All she could see was his boot, black and polished and clean despite the mud. How strange.

  He checked her pulse. His fingers were cool and dry, his touch confident.

  She didn’t care; this cumbersome thing didn’t feel like her body, anymore.

  His fingers withdrew, and he started barking orders. They made no sense to her at all. Then he said something that did.

  “Find the others. Take them in. This one’s mine.”

  TWO

  She tried to tell him that she certainly was not, but nothing came out except a low moan.

  She had only the vaguest recollection of the next few hours, drifting in and out of consciousness to the sounds of voices, the minute vibration of engines, and the feeling of calm, competent hands. None of these things felt real to her, and none of them made sense; she’d claw herself almost to wakefulness, only to be sucked back down into a dark place of frightening, fever-spotted dreams and half-remembered moments from the past few weeks.

  She’d boo
ked passage on the now-defunct ship, spending the last of their money. But she’d trusted the captain; he’d seemed like exactly the sort of rakish, devil-may-care space cowboy that in children’s films always had a heart of gold. Her reasons for trusting him didn’t seem much like reasons, now, and hadn’t since she’d begun to suspect that he was selling them downriver.

  Which she had, when he began to grow cagey about when they’d reach their destination. She’d paid for passage to Adaon, one of the safer of the rim planets and reputedly a good place for refugees. By the day of the crash, they were already three weeks behind schedule and the gallant maverick had begun to look more like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. How could she have been so stupid, to place all their trust in a—a myth?

  Even feverish and half asleep, she was disgusted with herself. He’d shown her what she expected to see, and on purpose, like luring a small child into an alley with the promise of a puppy.

  The crash had been an accident. There was no struggle for control, no noble effort to turn the ship around. Aria didn’t know how to fly and neither did the other girls, two of whom were too young to drive a car let alone a spaceship. No, their ignoble end had come at the hands of a rogue meteor that struck the left forward thruster. A few terrifying minutes later, they’d burned through the atmosphere and plowed into the soft earth of the jungle floor. Their clearing was thus man-made, nothing more than scorch marks. But jungles reclaimed their own, and by the time the slavers arrived vegetation had sprouted in the furrows. Within another few weeks, they’d have been overrun.

  But their more immediate concern had been tending to each other’s wounds and finding something to eat. The captain was plainly dead—his head was missing—and good riddance to him. The ship, too, was clearly scrap, its hull breached in three different places. That she and the girls had survived at all—miracle, as a term, didn’t begin to cover the scope of their luck. If Aria had believed in God, she would have said that this was His hand.

  Or the Devil’s, she thought bleakly, if these were more slavers. She felt herself being lifted, and put down. She was shivering again and before that she’d been boiling hot, having finally succumbed to the fever she’d been fighting—ever since the first cut, the one from the crash, got infected.