Free Dragonswan.doc by Unknown

FEAR THE DARKNESS
    New Orleans, 2007
    Nick Gautier was home.
    And he was pissed. As the taxi wended its way from the airport in the mid-morning hour toward his Bourbon Street home, and he saw the scars that were still left by Hurritcane Katrina, his blood literally boiled.
    How could this have happened? Closing his eyes, he tried to blot out the boarded-up windows and fallen signs. The white FEMA trailers. But those images were replaced by the news feeds he’d seen of victims stranded on rooftops, of fires burning, of rioting in the streets...
    Nick couldn’t breathe. New Orleans was his home. His touchstone. This city had birthed him. She was his lifeblood. And in one heartbeat, she’d been torn asunder. Crippled. Never in his life had he seen anything like this.
    Growing up here, he’d lived through numerous hurricanes over the years. They hadn’t had the money to evacuate for the worst storms so he and his mom would get into her broken-down red Yugo and drive up to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where they would camp out in a grocery store parking lot, eating deviled ham sandwiches made with stale bread and mustard packets, until it was safe to return. Somehow his mother had always made those days fun and adventurous, even when they were hunkered down in the car during tornado warnings.
    Then they’d come home to a sight similar to what he saw now, but within a few weeks’ time, everything would be back to normal.
    It was now going on two years after the hurricane and still there were closed businesses—businesses that had been there for years and, in some cases, centuries. There were entire areas of the city that looked as if the hurricane had just blown through.
    Most of his friends were either dead or relocated. People he’d known for decades.
    In one heartbeat everything had changed.
    Nick gave a bitter laugh at the thought. He’d changed more than anything else. No longer human, he wasn’t even sure what he was anymore.
    The only thing that kept him going was his furious need for vengeance on the ones he blamed for this catastrophe.
    He moved his hand to scratch his neck, then froze as he felt the bite mark there. By taking a blood exchange, Stryker had made Nick his agent. If Nick obeyed the Daimon lord, then Stryker would give him the means to destroy the man who’d ruined Nick’s life... and his town.
    Acheron Parthenopaus. At one time, they had been best friends. Brothers to the end. Then Nick had made the mistake of sleeping with a woman he hadn’t known was Ash’s daughter. Ash had torn him apart over it.
    That he could handle. What had made them enemies was the night Nick’s mother had died and Ash had allowed it. Unlike the other immortal beings who made New Orleans home, Nick knew the secrets that Ash carried. He wasn’t just the Dark-Hunter leader, an immortal warrior who served the goddess, Artemis, and protected mankind from the vampiric Daimons who ate their souls.
    Ash was a god. He had the power to do anything he wanted. He could have saved Nick’s mom or at least brought her back from the dead the way he’d saved Kyrian Hunter and his wife Amanda. But Ash hadn’t done that. He’d turned his back on Nick and left Cherise Gautier dead.
    Nor had Ash saved this city from the storm. Up until the night Nick had slept with Simi, Ash had loved this city more than anything. Ash wouldn’t have allowed New Orleans to suffer.
    But that was before they’d become enemies. Now Ash hated him so much that he’d taken everything from Nick.
    Everything.
    “Nice house.”
    Nick paused as the driver’s voice interrupted his thoughts. He looked at the Bourbon Street mansion that had been his home since he’d started working for Kyrian.
    “Yeah,” he said under his breath. “It is.”
    Or at least it had been when he’d shared this place with his mother. Nick got out and paid the fee, then pulled his suitcase from the seat. Slamming the

door shut, he looked up at his house and gripped the handle so