A Symphony of Savage Hearts (Fae Guardians Season of the Vampire Book 3) Read online

  A Symphony of Savage Hearts

  A FAE GUARDIANS NOVEL

  LANA PECHERCZYK

  Copyright © 2022 Lana Pecherczyk

  All rights reserved.

  A Labyrinth of Fangs and Thorns

  ASIN: B09KGN9XKP

  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.

  Text copyright © Lana Pecherczyk 2022

  Cover design © Lana Pecherczyk 2022

  Structural Editor: Ann Harth

  www.lanapecherczyk.com

  Contents

  Map of Elphyne

  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

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Other Books To Check Out

  The Longing of Lone Wolves

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Envy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Need to talk to other Readers?

  Also by Lana Pecherczyk

  About the Author

  Map of Elphyne

  ZOOM MAP TO ENLARGE

  Prologue

  Rory’s boots clicked across chipped tiles in the Sky Tower greenhouse. It stank like moss rot and the air was thick, despite being hundreds of feet above sea level. Rusted iron frames barely held the windows and dome ceiling together. Howling wind battered the two stories of glass. Any minute, she expected the panes to crash down, but they held. Always had.

  Plant specimens of all kinds filled spaces between pipes, cluttered tables, and spiral staircases. Between ferns, vines and palm leaves, taxidermied fae creatures watched with dead eyes. Bull horns and ivory tusks dangled from cages. Clockwork gadgets whirred. Copper boilers puffed steam to humidify the air. Pip pip, went the valve release ever so softly between ticking and chiming.

  Rory patted a stuffed antlered rabbit as she cast her gaze about, searching for her father. She expected to see him by the table strewn with maps and cartography equipment, his impeccable suit pressed to a crisp and his shrewd gaze calculating. But he wasn’t there.

  Biting her lip, she held onto her tension a little longer and wiped her hand through condensation on a window to look outside. This lone tower existed at the epicenter of the grimy, crowded and diesel-stinking metropolis known as Crystal City to the outsiders. To her, it was simply home. It was all she’d known her entire life.

  Down in the city, plumes of black smoke billowed and mixed with low-lying clouds frigid with cold weather. This tower had been here long before she played in the shadow of greenhouse palms as a child, and long before her father had wrested control from the previous inhabitant and married her mother—the daughter of the last leader, or so she’d been told. History books weren’t kept. The unforgiving razor wire mesh soaring from the tower to the citadel walls was all her father’s doing. It allowed daring—or stupid—winged creatures to drop in, but also ensured they never escaped.

  She remembered the day it went up, but not why—what triggered the sudden defense tactic? For a moment, she imagined someone plucking glossy black feathers one by one. The room’s ticking clocks and pipping steam became a teenager’s scream. But that was all she could grasp from her rambling memory before clouds took it away. And then her father’s commanding steps echoed in the room.

  “There you are,” he grumbled, as though he’d been searching for her.

  She pursed her lips. “You asked me to meet you here. Where else would I be?”

  His scowl caused the wrinkles to deepen across his pale skin. She didn’t remember the distinguished gray hair at his temples being there. But maybe more time had passed than she realized. She often lost herself in her work—training Reapers for field missions, even though she wasn’t allowed on them herself.

  Often she was too busy to speak to her father for weeks. Months.

  When had her father’s right-hand man, Bones, left for the Seelie city? When had he been captured? Was that a week ago… more? She shook her head to disperse the brain fog that clung to her memory more with each passing day. Didn’t matter.

  Nero was her father. The leader of the free people. And the future savior of their kind. Before he’d come along, the human population was dwindling and bowing beneath the pressure of fae rules imposed on them. Under his leadership, humans had clawed their way back from the brink of extinction. But resources were dwindling again. There was only so much recycling and repurposing they could do.

  Humans would not go quietly. They were on this planet first. They had rights as much as any other. It was time to up their offensive. From the dark intent in her father’s close-set eyes, he thought the same thing.

  “It’s time,” he said. “There is no room for failure. Send out a small group, including your most ruthless, heartless son-of-a-bitch.”

  “That would be me.” Rory lifted her chin, then added for propriety, “Sir.”

  He clicked his tongue in disapproval. “One never reveals the ace up their sleeve until the last moment. No—send another Reaper.”

  She clenched her jaw, bristling at being caged again. She made one mistake when she was a teenager, and her father had never let her forget it. But her time would come, and when it did, pity the poor fool standing in her way.

  “Fine,” she said. He wanted their most heartless son-of-a-bitch? “I know just the person.”

  Chapter

  One

  Sweat and oil stuck to Silver’s skin as she lay on a trolley beneath a half-built airship. Diesel fumes choked the air, but her respirator kept the worst from her lungs. She tinkered on the undercarriage mechanics of a new cannon. This was the first prototype she’d been able to fit to the blimp-style aviation craft. With what they knew about the fae, and what technology she could remember from her time, it was shaping up as a solid military vehicle.

  God, it felt good to get her hands dirty again. To put them to use doing what she did best—engineering weapons. She enjoyed working with metal, from the welding side to the mechanics. And she was done lying about it. She was done feeling guilty about it.

  Six years ago, give or take, she’d thawed out after being frozen for two thousand years following a nuclear winter. At first, she’d been horrified to learn what had happened to her world—fae existed now, and they were the apex predators, not humans. It was humans who’d dropped the bombs around the world. While she’d never had a
direct hand in the catastrophic event, she had still worked in the weapons industry. Her guilt had kept her away from Crystal City for over a year. If someone discovered her vocation, they might force her to do something despicable. But then she stumbled across humans spelled by fae to perform music until their fingers bled, and her blood had boiled. The more she learned about human oppression, the more she remembered why she’d joined the military in the first place.

  So she’d helped the humans escape Cornucopia… and then followed them here.

  To her people.

  A tug of guilt caused the wrench to slip in her hands. The faces of two women she’d thawed out with came to mind. Peaches and Violet. Both were from the old world, like her. And both had the same culpability when it came to working in fields directly linked to the nuclear holocaust. Silver had encouraged them to pretend to be fae—to hide their true identities in case they were used to create more destruction. At the time, her motivation had been true. She wasn’t on board with anyone ever building another nuclear weapon… but she’d never been against non-nuclear war.

  Sometimes it was necessary.

  The people of Crystal City were starving, and the fae cared nothing for it. Bitterness laced her tongue. No… cared nothing was poor word choice. The fae cared enough to laugh. They ridiculed. They said the fae deserved the lush lands because they followed the rules of the Well.

  And apparently humans weren’t worthy of the planet because they used metal and plastic.

  Pfft.

  What a crock of shit. As if they could boil the human condition down to that.

  In the undercarriage’s gloom, she glanced at the silver-plated vambrace on her forearm. Score lines marked her fae kills, starting with the vampires that had tried to capture her and drain her dry when she’d first awoken in this time. To be fair, most of those kills were Violet’s, but Silver had taken down one. If it were up to the fae, she’d not be wearing the metal at all. But this was where it got tricky. If there was no metal on her body, she’d be vulnerable to what lived inside her.

  Footsteps shuffled near where her feet stuck out from the undercarriage. She glanced down the length of her body to the light at the end. Two sets of worn leather boots stopped nearby.

  “Get to work,” a gruff male voice said. Sounded like Angus, the aviation dock foreman.

  “Here? With her?” A smaller, shaky male voice. The smaller set of boots angled toward her.

  “Got a problem with that?” said Angus.

  “Well… I just… ah, I heard some things. That’s all.”

  “Just keep to yourself. And don’t look her in the eyes.”

  Silver snorted. She wasn’t that bad.

  “What happens if I look her in the eyes?”

  “She bit the nose off the last person who did.”

  The resulting gulp was audible. “Okay, got it. Don’t look her in the eyes.”

  “And whatever you do, don’t ask her for a kiss…”

  Fucking Angus. Silver anchored herself on pipework and propelled her trolley from the bowels of the airship. Once out and wincing in the glaring overcast light, she stood and undid the strap on her respirator, so it flopped to one side of her face. She glared at the two surprised faces. Angus was a big, surly man with hair over his face and body. The other was a kid—male teenager. Brown puppy-dog eyes and fluff on his upper lip. Both wore grease monkey coveralls, just like her.

  “Silver,” Angus sputtered. “Didn’t realize you were under there.”

  Bullshit. She’d heard everything. He just never expected her to come out and call him on his crap. She smiled, tossed her wrench to her left hand, and then punched him in the nose with her right. It was a fast, powerful jab. Straight and to the point. The resounding crunch of cartilage was satisfying. Let’s hope he learned his lesson.

  Angus’s eyes watered as he clutched his nose. “Fucking bitch.”

  “That’s for spreading lies about me,” she snapped and then pointed her wrench at the kid. “To be clear, it was an ear, not a nose. And it had nothing to do with looking me in the eyes and everything to do with him trying to take more than a kiss.”

  The dark memory of an earlobe unnaturally necrotizing beneath her lips surfaced, but she shook it off and tossed the wrench down. It clanked and rolled until it hit their feet. A filthy feeling curled her lip. She tightened the laces on her vambrace to the point of pain, controlling the feeling of slipping, of tilting into the darkness. If she could get to her under-bust corset through the coveralls without being obvious, she would tighten it too. But revealing any sign of weakness around here was as good as a death sentence. There were too many mouths to feed as it was. Losing one to a brawl was no skin off the Regulator’s noses.

  “Silver,” clipped a female voice behind her.

  Speaking of Regulators, the city’s police, she tensed as a steady hand rested on her shoulder. She shook it off with a snarl and turned, half expecting to face one for her assault on Angus, but came face-to-face with the president’s daughter and captain of the Reapers. Rory was tall, athletic, with gray eyes and caramel skin. She could pass as Silver’s sister if it wasn’t for the fact they were born two millennia apart.

  Rory folded her arms and glanced at Angus’s bleeding face. Copper clamps on her chin-length afro dreadlocks tinkled as she gave a concerning shake of the head. She tapped a restless finger on her arm, copper-plated knuckle rings glinting in the overcast light.

  Silver couldn’t help compare her own outfit and Rory’s. Where Silver wore greased and crumpled overalls, Rory’s tailored uniform was pressed. The shaved side of her head only accentuated her copper and gold jewelry. Rare metal accents were a sign of affluence in this city. Copper for the high-ranking officials, silver for the Reapers, gold for the president.

  Silver flicked her unadorned, bleached braid and let the long length settle down her spine.

  “He asked for it,” she said. Not that she needed to explain herself. Her silver status far outranked someone like Angus and even the Regulators, whose only metal adornments were iron. The sad part was that she was still a grunt. Her rank gave her zero standing in Sky Tower. It was only pertaining to missions out in Elphyne that she had the power to make any decisions.

  Rory’s nostrils flared. Then she sighed. “Whatever. I’m not here for that. It’s time.”

  “What?”

  “Gather your team. I want you gone by dusk.”

  Team? A scoff burst from Silver’s lips. She picked up the wrench, flipped it in her hand and walked away, shaking her head. I can’t believe this. Silver hadn’t had a team in over a year. “Too reckless” were the words Rory had used to describe Silver’s behavior on her last mission, and now that she’d had some distance, she had to be thankful for the change in pace. Working with her hands, reconnecting with what she loved, had been good for the soul.

  With purpose in her stride, Silver’s legs made short work of the journey through the bustling riverside dock. Since the first airship prototype had passed a year ago, more ships were being built. A sky battle fleet to replace the derelict battleship wrecks they salvaged for parts. They would never have enough metal resources to make advanced vehicles like the old Apaches she used to work on. After the nuclear fallout, the quarantined humans spent centuries simply trying to survive in their underground bunkers while the weather and fae were mutating outside. Much knowledge was lost. Airships were a mix of old technology and new. Better than nothing.

  Rory’s boots pounded the pavement beside Silver as she made her way to the staff change rooms. The city’s opaque crystal walls were on one side, the dock, its buildings, and the river on the other. They moved out of the aeronautics zone and into the nautical where fisherman hauled catches and raiders prepared for missions.

  She’d gotten used to the smell of ill-drained sewage mixed with salty brine. She’d even gotten used to the trash in the streets. But she would never get used to the beggars and the malnourished sick who’d escaped the city gates for fresh ai
r and scavenging.

  They passed a stoop with a broken awning. A toothless, middle-aged woman in a moth hole riddled blanket reached out. A small blond girl with dreadlocks and probably lice clung to her legs. Rory kept walking, but Silver stopped.

  The little girl’s eyes widened when she saw Silver. “Aunty!”

  Silver’s heart tugged. She’d given the child an apple once, and apparently, now she was family. All she had in her pockets were tools today. No precious fruit. No dried meat. She gave the girl a fist bump instead.

  “Hey Princess Polly,” Silver smiled, then greeted her mother solemnly. “Carla.”

  The woman’s confused eyes tried to focus on Silver, but they were too glazed to hold any sort of recognition. She stumbled into Silver. Gangrene fingers peeking from fingerless gloves plucked at Silver’s greasy overalls. For what, Silver wasn’t sure. The woman was too confused.

  Rory twisted, saw Silver had stopped, and pursed her lips. “We need to get going.”

  “Why aren’t you inside?” Silver asked Carla gently, gathering her disheveled blanket and tightening it to stop it from falling. Coming outside the city gates was perilous, especially with a child. Winged fae could attack without the protection of the barbed wire net overhead. She glanced down at Polly. “Where’s Jimmy?”