Disclaimer: All characters, setting, world, and other BJT related items are property of Anne Bishop. I only wish I wrote that well…

Author's Note from Erkith: So I know it's been a ridiculously long time… Good news is I'm back and writing again. But anyways, here it is at last.

As always,

ENJOY!

Erkith

Previously:

Rainier smirked. His green eyes narrowed with a dark mischief – the kind that found collateral damage amusing. "Well," he leaned forward as he said in confidential tones, "I guess I lied."

Predators' Dance

Chapter Seven: Tainted Justice

It was hatred that stifled the air in Rainier's apartment. Well, hatred and fear. All males that stayed true to the Old Ways were enflamed by the idea of violating that sacred trust – of using their strength to wound instead of protect. Mercurial by nature, Warlord Princes were worse than most when provoked, and Jaenelle's males were worse still…

Witch had been broken by a tainted male, a piece of scum named Greer. Those who claimed the right to protect her had been helpless to stop him. They felt the guilt and the frustration and the pain. If she'd been anyone else, and if Daemon had not been what he was, Jaenelle would have walked the Twisted Kingdom or been lost to them forever.

It was still their greatest fear. To be that powerless to save the ones they loved.

Daemon looked at the other men: Saetan, Lucivar and Chaosti, and knew that they would not suffer an abuser to live. Rainier was as good as dead. You did not question the fox in your hen-house; you shot it and reinforced the hole it squeezed through with steel.

Which was exactly what this fox wanted. Daemon thought past the raging of his blood. He tried to reason the thought through. But he had little time. The room was already starting to freeze over.

If what Rainier said was true, then he deserved worse than death. Daemon had to clamp down on his reaction to those thoughts. The Sadist would enjoy that. Meeting out that punishment would sooth the fear and the pain.

If the man was lying, he had to have a death wish… Rainier certainly seemed to be flirting with one, but this… it didn't feel like a lie. Yet how could Rainier have passed under Jaenelle's eyes – Witch's eyes – for years without her sensing his taint?

Jaenelle? Daemon sent the thought on the Black. You need to come deal with Prince Rainier.

There was a pause where there ought not to have been. Rainier? He could almost see her biting her lip. What's wrong?

I'm not sure. He claims… he claims to… Daemon let the thought drop as he felt the Sadist stretching out inside him.

I'm coming.

Graysfang watched as his mistress cradled yet another dying, broken child to her chest. The girl's head was matted with blood and grime, but he didn't think either of them noticed. Surreal's lips were pressed against her hair; her arms hugging her close as the as she faded into the Darkness. The child would not die thinking she was alone.

When the child's eyes finally closed, Graysfang crept closer to his mistress – cautious and unsure of his welcome. The assassin lay down the corpse in her arms gently, almost as if she thought the child could feel it.

The smell of death and blood hung in the alley like the must of an underground tunnel. Damp and weighty, it was the fog that clung to graveyards and chilled the bones. Graysfang, predator or not, felt his fur bristle. He could feel its claws rake over his soul, leaving ugly, blackened scratches.

He barred his teeth against a whine. It hurt. But he was becoming used to it, and that was worse. Surreal didn't so much as twitch as the psychic maelstrom of violence washed through her. A growl emerged from low in his throat. Had she even noticed?

"I can't keep doing this…"

No, the wolf agreed silently, she couldn't. Not alone – and not like this.

"I can't keep watching them die."

He nuzzled her hand, but drew back sharply when she took a swing at him. He barred his teeth, growling at her. This damaged thing was not his human. She was not the witch he served.

She blinked at him, confused, like she hadn't even known he was there. The feral look fading as she woke from the madness that gripped there. It was growing worse with every night, with every child. A little more of her died with each one, and he had to wonder just how much of her was left. The wolf could feel her slipping away more and more… worried if it had become a matter of when rather than if she would tumble into the shadowed confusion of the Twisted Kingdom.

She sank down against the wall, holding herself together by pulling her knees into her chest. It made her look like the children she was trying to save. The position conserved heat and was soothing. And still she shook.

Graysfang sat down next to her, careful not to make any sudden motions. Slowly, he leaned against her, sharing his warmth, but wary of this strange, wounded creature.

Surreal bit her lip to keep the sobs at bay. They would have torn the last of her control from her, the last of who she was. She couldn't look at Graysfang – hated that he was ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. She knew she was scaring her wolf; knew that he had cause to worry about her. Hell, she was worried about her. She was losing it. Letting her head fall back against the alley brick, tears slipped down her cheeks. She was really fucking losing it.

She was an assassin. The deaths shouldn't have forced a tear, never mind this overwhelming flood of them. The ache in her heart was by no means new. She should have been used to it. It shouldn't't feel like the end. It shouldn't feel like that last straw.

"I'm just not good enough," she choked on the admission. "I can't save them. I'm not trained for this." I'm broken.

Graysfang whined sympathetically.

"I'm an assassin, Graysfang, not a tracker. I track down names, descriptions, and timetables. I don't investigate murders. I just can't do this, not fast enough."

The wolf lifted his head to look at her. His tail wagged once. Help? He asked.

Careful, Surreal laid a gentle hand on his head. "You've tried. He's too clever to leave much of a scent trail."

But Graysfang shook his head, tail wagging slightly. Not me. Sadi?

"He can't leave Jaenelle for that long – not even for this."

He thought about it. What other hunters did they know? Yasi?

"No he'd try to take me back, and this needs to end. That stupid Prick won't listen."

The tentative wag of his tail thumped to a halt. There was another… the wolf hesitated. Mean Prince.

Surreal had to raise an eyebrow over that one. Mean Prince? Way to be specific, Graysfang. "That being?" she asked, but the wolf was absorbed in his own thoughts.

Should have bitten him… Graysfang muttered darkly.

Bitten? Surreal frowned, trying to force her tired brain to pick up the reference. Who would her wolf want to bite? Someone who'd hurt her. A name came to mind. He couldn't seriously mean…? "I'm not going to ask Falonar! He'd probably puke. And that's only if he didn't hand me over to Lucivar first."

Graysfang barred his teeth and growled. Yes, I should have bitten him too.

"Not Falonar then…thank the Darkness. Then who?"

Mean Opal Prince.

Her eyes widened. "Rainier?"

Found you. The wolf pointed out.

Surreal hesitated… "I guess he did, didn't he." She had to consider it. The man was definitely a talented assassin; she'd known that from his handling of her. But she'd looked him up too. He was known just as well for retrievals as for kills. The man was a qualified tracker.

Good hunter.

"Thank you, Fangs, I remember."

It made sense, unfortunately.

Surreal gave her wolf a sour look. "I don't suppose you have any better ideas?"

There was silence as the warlord did his best not to smile as he dutifully searched for other – less embarrassing – options. Good hunter. He concluded.

Surreal snorted. "I thought not." She searched her mind for a way out, more than a little reluctant to go through with it.

This was going to be seriously uncomfortable. Not because she thought he'd refuse her; he was a good Warlord Prince after all, but because she had a higher rank, was a notorious assassin herself and to top it off his former assignment. Bad and awkward under any circumstances…

But he'd seen her break. He'd seen her broken.

Graysfang could smell the sudden downward spiral. It was like tasting tears. His amusement at her obvious reluctance fell away as he watched her resolve melt. He'd watched her struggle against it before.

Between her encounters with Rainier and the serial slayings, Surreal was emotionally fragile – quick to anger, vulnerable to tears, and recklessly driven. Failure that would normally have spurred her and deaths that would have focussed her anger were instead destroying her.

He nudged his head against her leg, bringing her back. She stood distractedly, but patted his head, soothing them both.

She forced herself to look at the small corpse and then walked out of the alley.

Jaenelle didn't like the scene she walked in on. All of the men were pressed up against the walls, as if the room were too small to contain them. Saetan, Lucivar and Chaosti were standing on the side opposite to where the dance teacher sat, while her husband stood in the far corner where he could see the other four. The inexplicable, uneasy tension that had put her on edge was abruptly explained.

It was their disturbance she'd been picking up on. They were her first circle. This close, she could feel the oily turmoil roiling sickly in their guts, could feel how threatened they felt and what instinct was telling them to do about it.

Witch agreed.

Reaching for reason, Jaenelle focussed on the one she'd been called to see. Her former dance teacher was a mere shadow of what she remembered – skin stretched tightly over bone. Her concern centred on him. He'd lost so much muscle that even breathing appeared to be an exhausting motion. How had this happened? A sound of distress left her throat. Poor Rainier.

She stepped towards him and unwittingly unleashed the men's fury. Those standing broke away from the walls. "No!" A mixture of spear threads and speech slammed into her. She flinched under the command. Why? Even Daemon had reacted strongly. He was halfway across the room.

"What's going on here?"

"We're deciding who gets first crack at tearing him to shreds," Lucivar muttered through his teeth.

"What?!"

"Turns out Prince Rainier here has been lying to us about his past… his very dark past," Chaosti bit out.

Jaenelle just looked at them confused. She pushed a tendril of hair back behind her ear and smeared her cheek with blood. Luc hissed at the sight of it.

"What?!" she asked, exasperated… "oh. I was just gardening." And giving the land her blood…

Daemon's eyes latched onto that smear. As memories surfaced, the ensuing argument faded to background.

Gentry. Daemon cursed the name as he watched the shell of what had once been a promising young witch shiver uncontrollably in a thin nightgown. The brown splotches on the white fabric were, he suspected, a dried matting of her virgin's blood. If the stains were any indication, the bastard had ripped her up physically as well as psychically. The Sadist fantasized about what he would do to the man who wielded his dick like a blade… when he finally tracked him down. He knew this monster. He liked to mark his conquests with a smudge of blood on the cheek, as if he'd gently smoothed back their hair with their blood still fresh on his hands. Only recently had Daemon discovered that the Gentler, as he was known to the aristos, was a man whose moniker played off his name. Like the Sadist to Sadi, so was the Gentler to Gentry.

"What name did he give you?" Daemon asked his father flatly, interrupting, cursing himself for taking the safety of this court for granted. In all the courts he'd served since he'd heard it, he'd looked for this name among the listings.

Saetan's golden eyes narrowed, "Lefay. Rainier Lefay. Why?"

The temperature in the room dropped several degrees.

"Lefay, is it?" the Black-Jeweled Warlord Prince repeated softly. "In the Old Tongue the Fay are known by another name, and I think so are you. Tell me, destroyer, what is your name?"

"Gentry."

A chair across the room exploded. Everyone except predator and prey jumped.

As the splintered wood fell at their feet, it was the Sadist who glided towards Rainier. "So it is you then. Finally we meet, Gentler."

"So you do know me… how sweet." Rainier's voice slipped again into a twisted, chiding darkness.

"I've been looking for you."

"Tsk, tsk! We've danced before, Sadist."

"I should have recognized you then. But someone told me you were a good Warlord Prince." The crooning voice took on a tone somewhere between bitterness and amusement, as if it mattered very little now.

Lucivar, who had vouched for Rainier, hissed through his teeth in reaction, but Gentry seemed to find something amusing in it.

"Oh, by some people's standards I am very good Warlord Prince." His growing smile taunted the creature before him. "And Sadi," he leaned forward to whisper, "so are you."

"No!" The Sadist denied. The force of his anger lifted Gentry off his knees, pinning him to the wall several feet behind him.

Gentry coughed twice, spitting out blood. Seeing it, he laughed. "See?" he said. "You like pain and blood. You have the hatred in your veins; you burn with the need to destroy, Sadist, just like me."

"No." This time it was Saetan who spoke the word, and it was calm with certainty. He laid his hand gently on his son's shoulder. "Daemon is not like you, Gentler. Not even the Sadist in him is like you. The Sadist hunts the predators; you prey on the victims. Daemon is nothing like you."

"No, Daemon is nothing like you, Gentler." Witch's voice quieted the room. "But neither is Rainier."

Rainier cursed under his breath. He'd been afraid of this: that Witch would see through the game, through the projection of the madness hiding inside him. "You talk of them like they are separate people, Witch. They're not. Not even like you and Jaenelle – two sides but one personality housed within. The Sadist is Daemon. Rainier is me and I am him."

"You lie."

"Pretty sure I mentioned that already."

"Rainier would never hurt a woman on purpose. I know it." Witch challenged. "I know it."

"Nope." He answered with another hair-raising dose of that cheerfully wicked laughter.

Midnight eyes narrowed. "You are not Rainier."

"Said that too, if you'll recall." Rainier's mouth said with a smartass' smile.

"And who would you be then?" A voice asked from the doorway. They all turned to see Surreal leaning negligently against it, stared at her. "Well now, I'm hurt. Seems someone forgot to invite me to today's little party."

"Want to tell me what this is all about?" Surreal asked more seriously now that she had their attention, because she needed to know. They were all being seriously weird.

"Seems I finally found the Gentler, Surreal," said Daemon. No one else could have put that much menace behind such a lazy voice.

Surreal froze. She turned to Rainier. "Is it true?"

"Yes." The admission flat and simple punched through the room.

Rage answered, rising in the men and in Jaenelle. But in Surreal there was nothing. No matching wave of emotion flooded through her.

STOP

Rainier looked up to see the Surreal was walking towards him. Power held her in place. There was no anger in her expression only pity. He must have finally stepped into the Twisted Kingdom; how could there be pity for the likes of him? There was blood, so much innocent blood on his hands.

"Let me go."

"He just admitted to being the Gentler, Surreal. That's a death warrant if I ever heard one. He's dangerous, too dangerous."

She was fighting them, fighting them to get to him. Why?

"This is my fault," she said. "This is because of me."

"Surreal!"

"Didn't you ever figure it out, Daemon?" her usually brash voice, quiet and young. "How many years, in how many courts did we hunt for him? Did you never realize how they hid him from us?"

"What are you saying?"

"He's a sleeper, Daemon – the perfect assassin hiding in plain sight – one who didn't even know what he did." She took advantage of their shock and walked over to Rainier, kneeling before him.

He wouldn't look at her. "I killed them… I broke them and I killed them."

She lifted his chin, so those tortured eyes would have to meet hers. "Yes," he flinched at the confirmation, "but you don't remember, do you?"

"Dreams," he said, "only dreams." He shuddered as she cupped his cheek in her hand.

"It was me, wasn't it?" she murmured, "me that made you remember."

He just looked at her.

"I'm sorry."

"We should put him down," Lucivar said.

Surreal turned on him. "He's as much a victim as anyone!" The anger that had been missing from her before rose now.

"If the Gentler is who I think he is, then he's too vicious and too dangerous to be left alive. He's killed hundreds of women, Surreal. Look at him," he gestured at Rainier's emaciated body, "it'd be a kindness to snap his neck."

"And you're good at that aren't you!" she accused with the knowledge of his mercy killings alive in her eyes.

"He's a witch breaker, a witch killer! He can't live with that, and we can't let him live with it either. He's a fucking disaster just waiting to be happen."

"Oh sure, 'cause you're so innocent and so totally sane! You've never done anything you regret or crazy under the influence of say… safframate!"

"Safframate!" Rainier's unexpected laugh cut the building argument. "Mothernight, I wish, but they'd never have done it. I used to wish they'd use safframate."

There was a shocked silence.

"Why in Hell's name…?"

"It made it easier to be their pawn. I'm allergic to the drug. In small doses it turns me into their version of a 'good' Warlord-Prince: vicious, psychotic and obedient." He said bitterly. "Unfortunately, I also black out and don't remember a thing, which meant I didn't suffer enough for those bitches. They started using something else so I could keep my nightmares."

Saetan broke the silence that caused. "How did you know?"

Rainier gave him a scathing look. "They told me what I'd done the next day. They knew what kind of man I was – knew how to twist the knife deeper once they discovered. But they started giving me something milder once I grew numb to their post-coital reenactments."

"And after that the black outs stopped?" Surreal asked.

Rainier closed his tired eyes. "Mostly."

Only mostly? The others wondered.

"How many times a month would you have a memory lapse?" Saetan asked urgently.

"A couple times, now and then… nothing specific."

Daemon hissed in sick appreciation, meeting his father's eyes. "That's how they did it then."

"I think so."

"Bitches!" Luc swore, hurling something – a vase maybe, Rainier wasn't sure – into opposite wall. But yeah, there was an understatement.

Rainier watched as they gathered to discuss it. He felt numb. It wasn't his fault those women were dead. It felt like his fault. Even now he could feel that awoken predator in him… the Gentler lying just below the surface.

"We'll lock him up and care for him until we can be sure he won't go crazy on us," Saetan murmured.

"A little late on that," Lucivar muttered.

They HAD to kill him before he hurt someone else. Surreal had been the first, but now that He was awake she wouldn't be the last.

Surreal came back to his side and he flinched away from her soothing touch. His green eyes confused by the pity in hers. He was a monster. "I hurt you."

Her head tilted in that way of hers, considering. "You saved me."

"After I hurt you."

"Details," she said flippantly.

He stared at her.

Her lips curved. She turned back to the others who were still discussing his fate and told them: "You don't have to worry about that. He's coming with me."

A/N: Soon I promise. SOON as in normal person soon not me soon :)

Erkith