THE GAME
United States — 1985
It started, as so many things in Battle Cry's history did, with a dare.
Her name was Anya Soletska. She was Ukrainian by blood, American by birth, and trouble by design: six-foot-one in bare feet, with dark hair that fell past her shoulders, cheekbones that could cut glass, and a smile that had been starting fires since she was old enough to light one. She was a working model on the Los Angeles scene, tall enough to look most rock stars dead in the eye and stunning enough to make them forget what they were saying when she did. She'd been a fixture on the LA rock circuit since the late seventies, running with a crowd of women who were part groupie, part socialite, part something else entirely, women who didn't just follow bands but collected them, catalogued them, and occasionally conquered them. Her inner circle included Amara, a dark-skinned model whose beauty was matched only by her regal bearing and the athletic grace of a former track star; Zara, a Persian actress with sly, clever eyes and a silence that made her dangerous in any game; Lena, a blonde with a laugh that could fill a stadium; and a rotating cast of others: a fiery redhead named Katya, a Native American woman named Nila who moved like smoke, and a brunette named Lyra whose quiet intensity belied a wicked sense of humor.
Anya first entered Battle Cry's orbit at an after-party in the fall of 1983. The show had been intense, the kind that left the band buzzing with residual adrenaline, and the party was a low-key affair meant to bleed it off. Jace was nursing a beer in a corner, feeling the familiar, comforting buzz of a successful performance, when she approached him.
She was all curves and confidence, a tight dress clinging to her like a second skin and a spark of defiance in her eyes that set her apart from the usual backstage crowd.
"You were incredible tonight," she said, her voice a low, husky purr. "All that energy. All that power."
"It's just a show," Jace said, offering a polite, practiced smile.
"Bullshit," she shot back, grinning. "I know power when I see it. And I have a feeling you have a lot of it. In every way."
She leaned in closer. "I dare you. Two hours. Straight. No breaks. If you can last, I'll be your biggest fan. If you can't... well, you'll just be another rock star who couldn't back it up."
The sheer, unapologetic audacity of it was something Jace had never encountered. It wasn't about love or connection. It was a challenge, pure and simple, and for a man who was still learning to master the empathic fire that burned through him, who was still proving to himself that his body was his own and that he could command the flame without being consumed by it, the dare was irresistible.
"Two hours," he said. "You're on."
He won. Decisively. And in the process, lit a fuse that would burn for the better part of two years.
What happened next was Connor's fault. Or Anya's. Or possibly the universe's, which seemed to take delight in turning Battle Cry's personal lives into spectacles of escalating absurdity.
Anya, intoxicated by her night with Jace, sought out Connor at the next tour stop. The Visionary, who could hear surface thoughts and sense intentions, saw her coming before she arrived. He also saw, because he was the Visionary and discretion was not among his gifts, exactly what she'd done with Jace.
"You're a naughty girl," he told her, his emerald eyes gleaming with amusement.
She was stunned. "How did you..."
"I'm the Visionary, remember?" He tapped his temple. "I hear everything."
Connor, being Connor, didn't just accept her challenge. He raised the stakes. Three hours. And he delivered, not with Jace's raw force but with the psychic artistry of a man who could project visions of bliss directly into a lover's mind while his body did the rest.
Word traveled through the Brotherhood the way all secrets did: quickly, loudly, and with embellishment. Ricky caught wind of it and was delighted. The chaos goblin lived for competitions, and a challenge that combined performance with pleasure was made for him. He matched Connor's three hours and broke the game entirely, using his teleportation to keep things unpredictable and his natural, irrepressible humor to turn the whole encounter into something that was as much fun as it was physical.
Erik was next, though he required a different approach. Anya couldn't dare the gentle giant, who would have blushed himself into a coma. Instead, she asked him. Sincerely. Respectfully. She told him she didn't want a contest. She wanted to know what it felt like to be with a man who could break her but chose to cherish her instead. Erik, disarmed by her honesty, gave her three and a half hours of the most tender, focused, quietly devastating lovemaking any of them had delivered. When the others found out, the smug grins died. Nobody said a word.
Nathan was the final holdout. The eldest, the most logical, the one who saw the whole thing for what it was, a pissing contest wrapped in a dare, and wanted no part of it. But Anya didn't dare him either. She proposed an experiment. A collaboration. She appealed to his intellect, his artistry, his inability to resist a puzzle. He lasted four hours, and when the others found out, the competition officially escalated from friendly game to declared war.
That was when Jace, who had been blissfully oblivious to the entire escalation, having thought his night with Anya was a one-time thing, finally pieced it together. He couldn't hear the details, but he could feel the smug, competitive energy radiating from his brothers through the bond. He skimmed the surface of their thoughts, caught fragments, and realized he was in last place.
He found Anya that night.
"Five hours," he said, his voice a low, confident growl. "And you're not going to dare me. I'm daring you."
He didn't just reclaim the crown. He ended the competition entirely. Five and a half hours, channeling echoes of all four brothers' essences through his own Guardian abilities: Connor's psychic artistry, Ricky's wild unpredictability, Erik's protective strength, Nathan's technical precision, all woven together by his own raw power into something none of them could match. When the others found out, their jaws hit the floor.
"Guardian," Jace said, tapping his amulet. The single word a declaration of total victory.
But Anya was not a woman who stopped at victory. She was a woman who kept pushing, kept inventing, kept escalating, and the Debauchery Experiments were born.
The games started as creative sexual scenarios, elaborate and theatrical and occasionally ridiculous, involving Anya and her growing circle of adventurous friends. Connor and Ricky were willing participants, gluttons for punishment who treated each new scenario like an amusement park ride. Erik and Nathan opted out early, content to return to the music and their own quieter lives. But the experiments kept evolving, growing more elaborate, more targeted.
And increasingly, they targeted Jace.
It made a perverse kind of sense. Jace's empathy was the most potent and the most volatile of the Brotherhood's gifts. During intimate contact, if he wasn't careful, he could project waves of desire that affected everyone in his vicinity. The experiments, Anya reasoned, were helping him train his control. And for a while, they were. Jace participated willingly, using the increasingly intense scenarios to practice holding his empathic boundaries under pressure.
But the line between training and targeting blurred. The scenarios escalated. What had been playful became possessive. Anya's circle of friends, which had grown to nearly thirty women, developed a fixation on the Guardian that went beyond games.
The final experiment crossed every line.
They captured him. Bound him. Gagged him. Thirty women in a room they called the "pleasure den," with Jace as their centerpiece. What followed was an hours-long assault on his senses: methodical, relentless, designed to break his control completely. And it did. His empathy shattered open, flooding the room with waves of raw sensation that only fueled their hunger.
When Anya leaned down and whispered, "We're keeping you," the fear lancing through Jace was real, not performance or part of a game. Genuine terror. He was a hostage, and he knew it.
But his brothers felt it too. Connor and Nathan felt the spike of fear through the trifold bond, cold and sharp and wrong. Erik and Ricky felt it through Jace's empathic projection. All four moved.
The door to the pleasure den burst open. Connor, Ricky, Erik, and Nathan stood in a wall of righteous fury, armed with fire extinguishers and faces that promised consequences.
"Get away from him," Connor growled.
The rescue was chaotic, comical, and effective. They sprayed the room with white chemical clouds that sent the women scattering, coughing and sputtering. They grabbed Jace, untied him, wrapped him in a velvet curtain, and carried him out like a fallen hero.
On the tour bus afterward, Jace sat in a blanket with a cup of coffee in his trembling hands while Connor made the call.
"Jace is off-limits, Anya. You and your harem scared the hell out of him. He's not playing anymore. None of this."
Erik, cleaning his bass, nodded.
"He's right. That was too much. We're a band, not a buffet."
Nathan, ever analytical: "The risk-reward ratio is no longer viable."
Ricky, ever Ricky, shrugged.
"I don't know, man. I thought it was kind of hot."
Connor shot him a death glare.
"Shut up, Ricky."
An hour later, Anya appeared at the bus door. Alone. The predatory queen was gone, replaced by a woman who looked genuinely shattered by what she'd done.
She knelt in front of Jace.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered, her voice thick with emotion. "I got lost in the game. In the power. I forgot you were a person. I forgot you were our friend."
Jace looked at her for a long time. He saw the sincerity in her face, the genuine remorse. And behind it, the woman who had started all of this: not the predator who had ended it, but the bold, audacious woman who'd walked up to him at an after-party and dared him to prove himself.
He took her hand.
"It's okay," he said quietly. "I'm okay."
It wasn't entirely true. The memory was raw, the fear still a cold knot he hadn't shaken. But forgiveness came easier to Jace than most people realized: it was one of the quieter gifts of the Guardian, the ability to feel someone's remorse as clearly as their cruelty, and to choose the former.
The Debauchery Experiments were officially retired. Connor and Ricky were allowed to continue their association with Anya's friends under strict new rules. Erik and Nathan went back to their lives. And Jace remained Anya's friend: minus the benefits, minus the games, minus everything except the genuine affection that had been there from the start.
But Anya, being Anya, couldn't leave well enough alone. She needed to replace what she'd destroyed with something better. Something that preserved the thrill, the chase, the adrenaline, without the damage.
It took her three months. And when she brought it to the Brotherhood, it was with the nervous energy of a woman presenting a peace offering to men she'd wronged.
"I have an idea," she said. "And before you say no... just hear me out."
The air in the four-story building was thick with anticipation.
It was an odd place for a game: part shopping mall, part hotel. A strange combination, but Isabella, the building's owner, swore it was a successful business model. Isabella was a few years older than Anya and the others, closer to Nathan's age, with long, medium-blonde curly hair and the polished bearing of a businesswoman who'd built something real. She didn't dress like the rest of the Ladies of the Chase; where they favored tight dresses and leather, Isabella wore fitted blazers and heels that said I own this building while still cutting a provocative silhouette. The hotel portion was being remodeled, two weeks from opening, which meant two entire floors of empty rooms, unfinished corridors, and hiding spots that hadn't been explored yet. She had not stopped smiling since Anya made the call.
The terms had been negotiated with the seriousness of a peace treaty. No sexual contact. No ropes or gags or any tools that suggested captivity. Just a game. Pure, old-fashioned evasion. Last man standing won. A well-earned dinner afterward as further incentive to participate.
Isabella had handed over the keys to her kingdom, closing the mall for the night and opening the access stairs to the two upper floors. Anya's friends, the same women who'd once been the "harem," now rechristened the Ladies of the Chase, were the seekers. Their job was simple: find the five members of Battle Cry, hidden somewhere in a four-story maze of retail stores, empty hotel rooms, maintenance corridors, and industrial laundry facilities.
Rock Star Hide-and-Seek was born.
"The rules are simple," Anya announced to the assembled group. "You hide. We seek. Last one found wins. No powers. No teleporting. No shapeshifting. No empathic cheating. Just your wits, your legs, and your ability to stay quiet."
She looked pointedly at Ricky. "That means no giggling."
"I don't giggle," Ricky protested.
Everyone looked at him.
"Okay, I giggle a little."
"Go!" Anya yelled.
The five of them scattered into the dark.
Ricky was confident. He was the chaos goblin, the master of stealth and unpredictability. He had a plan: hide in the maze of clothing racks in the discount store on the first floor. He crouched behind a row of polyester suits, his breathing controlled, a smirk on his face. He was a ghost. He was a shadow.
But Ricky had one fatal flaw: he couldn't stay quiet when he was having fun. He heard a group of women searching nearby, their footsteps echoing on the linoleum. Instead of freezing, he decided to make a tactical dash to the next aisle.
"Gotcha!" he whispered to himself, giggling as he sprinted.
That giggle was his undoing.
It echoed through the silent store. Three women turned the corner just as he tried to dive behind a display of winter coats.
"Strat Cat!" Lena laughed, pointing at him. "You're too loud!"
He tried to scramble away, but he was laughing too hard to run effectively. They surrounded him, not with ropes or gags but with triumphant high-fives and hugs.
"Alright, alright, I'm out!" Ricky gasped, holding up his hands. "I surrender!"
"Personally," Lena replied, "I think you were waiting to surrender. You made yourself a sitting duck."
Ricky snickered.
"Quack."
"Okay, to court with you!" Lena called out.
"Court?" Ricky asked. "I'm on trial?"
"The Food Court, you adorable idiot!" Lena laughed.
He was escorted to the designated holding pen, where he sat down on a bench, grinning.
"It was the giggle," he admitted to no one in particular. "I knew I shouldn't have giggled."
Erik, the gentle giant, had a more structural approach. He knew he couldn't hide in plain sight: at six-foot-six and two hundred and forty pounds of pure muscle, he was a beacon. So he went for the high ground.
He found a maintenance access panel in a storage room on the third floor and pried it open. He hoisted himself up into the crawl space above the drop ceiling. It was tight, dusty, and filled with ductwork, but he figured he was invisible.
He crawled, moving slowly, trying to distribute his weight. I'm a ninja, he told himself. I am silence...
He was about twenty feet in when he heard an ominous creak. Then a foreboding crunch.
"Uh oh... I am too friggin' heavy..."
He looked down just in time to see the ceiling tile beneath his knee give way. It wasn't designed to hold a two-hundred-and-forty-pound Nordic bass player.
"Oh, shiiii..."
CRASH!
Erik plummeted through the ceiling, landing in a display of gourmet popcorn tins in the middle of the hallway. The noise was tremendous: a combination of drywall shattering, metal rattling, and Erik's startled yell. He lay in a pile of debris, surrounded by aluminum popcorn tins, looking up at the hole he'd just made.
A group of women, including Isabella, came running around the corner. They stopped, staring at the destruction, and then at the dusty, sheepish giant sitting in the middle of it.
Isabella looked at him, then up at the ceiling, placing her hands on her hips.
"Erik Hahn... you broke my ceiling!"
"Uh," Erik said, waving a hand weakly. "Structural failure. I'd have it looked at."
Isabella put a hand over her mouth, trying to suppress a laugh.
"Erik, honey, you are definitely caught."
He climbed out of the popcorn tins, brushing dust off his shoulders.
"I'm going to have to pay for that, aren't I?"
"Oh, absolutely," Isabella grinned. "Come on, big guy. Let's get you to the food court."
Nathan watched Erik's extraction from a distance with a critical eye. He decided verticality was not the answer. He needed to be smarter, quieter. He chose the ventilation shafts, but unlike Erik, he planned to use them for travel, not hiding.
He navigated the tunnels with the precision of a special ops agent. He was making good time, moving from the second floor up to the third, planning to exit into a storage closet behind the shoe store.
He found the grate he was looking for. He peered through the slats. Clear. He pushed the grate open and lowered himself down, landing silently on the concrete floor. He was a shadow. He was a ghost. He had won.
He turned to exit the closet, opening the door outward slowly... right into Amara. She stood there in the dim corridor like she'd been carved from onyx: tall, dark-skinned, breathtakingly beautiful, with the posture of a queen and the coiled stillness of the track athlete she'd once been. She smiled at him in amusement.
"Going somewhere, Conjurer?"
Nathan froze. "How...?"
"You think too much," she said, tapping her temple. "I knew you'd try to outsmart the physical space. I just waited for the logical exit point."
Nathan sighed, his shoulders slumping.
"Well played," he said, offering his arm. "Shall we?"
Amara linked her arm through his, laughing.
"We shall. Let's go see how much Erik owes Isabella for breaking the ceiling."
Connor was the only one left besides Jace. The pressure of that was not lost on him. He needed an impenetrable spot. He found it on the fourth floor: the back room of the soon-to-be-opened gift shop. It was small, dark, cluttered with stacked boxes and crates. It smelled of old wood and mothballs. Perfect.
He squeezed behind a massive crate, wedging himself into a corner. Pitch black. He couldn't see his hand in front of his face.
This is it, he thought. They'll never find me here.
But then the silence got to him. The back room was creepy, too creepy, especially for a man whose Visionary senses were already primed to detect every stray sound and flickering shadow. A few times he found himself holding his breath for a little too long. The floorboards creaked on their own. The shadows seemed to move. Every time the building settled, Connor's heart jumped.
"It's just the building," he told himself. "Settle down. You got this!"
Then he heard it. A soft scritch-scratch near his feet. His imagination, usually his ally, turned against him. He pictured giant spiders, vengeful ghosts, or worse: Zara. The Persian actress was silent, beautiful, and far too good at this kind of game. Connor knew it in his bones because he recognized in her the same sly, crafty instincts he had in himself, that gift for reading a room and playing it, the Persian thread running through both their lives. Zara had all of that and none of his Irish good nature to soften it. His Visionary senses tingled, and he tried to locate her with his mind, but Zara gave nothing away. No surface thoughts. No stray emotion. Just stillness, folded in on itself like a closed fist.
A mannequin arm fell off a shelf nearby, clattering to the floor with a loud bang.
Connor yelped, composure gone.
"Screw this!" he hissed.
He scrambled out from behind the crate, tripping over a lamp in his haste to escape. He burst into the hallway, gasping for air, looking for light, for people, for anything that wasn't a mannequin arm in the dark.
He ran right into Zara.
She caught him by the shoulders, steadying him.
"Whoa, Visionary. Running from something?"
Connor, trying to regain his rock star cool, straightened his jacket.
"No. Just... strategic repositioning."
Zara raised an eyebrow. "In a hotel?"
"Darlin'..." Connor grinned. "There are fans, and there are die-hard fans. We always utilize strategic repositioning when needed."
"Uh-huh," Zara laughed, hooking her arm through his. "You're caught, Braydee. Let's go."
Jace was the last one left. The Guardian. He was in his element.
He had used the time wisely, moving silently through the mall, staying in the shadows, using the service corridors. Hide and Seek came naturally. He had played it endlessly with his older brother Tobin when they were kids on the reservation. He'd also put those childhood skills to use at various hotels, nightclubs, and even a few venues while on tour. His secret was simple: the patience of Job.
He headed up to the laundry facility on the fourth floor. Industrial, quiet, and full of hiding spots. He crept in, scanning the room, and found a stack of large industrial shelving units. He climbed to the top tier, settling down behind a pile of folded canvas tarps. Invisible. He could wait here until morning if he had to.
He waited. And waited. And waited some more.
The mall was silent. He checked his watch. An hour had passed. Two hours.
Maybe I won, he thought. Maybe they gave up.
He decided to move to a better vantage point, somewhere he could see the door without being seen. He climbed down from the shelves, moving silently across the catwalk. He spotted a position near the laundry chute: perfect sightline, solid cover.
He stepped onto a section of catwalk that looked solid. It wasn't. It was a secondary trapdoor, designed to drop heavy linens down to the sorting carts below.
With a loud CLANG, the hinges gave way.
Jace didn't even have time to yell. He dropped, sliding down the metal chute and landing with a soft whump in a massive canvas cart filled with freshly laundered sheets and blankets.
Warm. Soft. Genuinely comfortable.
He lay there, stunned but unhurt. He had made a lot of noise, and seekers would arrive soon, but he figured he had just enough time to move and hide again.
He peeked over the rim of the cart. Coast clear. He was about to climb out when a face popped up directly in front of his.
"Boo!"
Jace let out a startled yelp, flailing backward into the pile of linens.
"Damn it!" he muttered from inside the cart. He worked his tangled body free and looked up.
Anya was leaning over the edge, grinning from ear to ear.
"We've gone from bondage to giving me a heart attack," Jace groaned. "I think I was safer when you tied me up."
Anya laughed, reaching in to help him out.
"You were the last one, Jace. You almost had it," she told him.
Jace scrambled over the edge and sat on the floor, catching his breath.
"I almost had it? I fell down a chute!"
"You lasted longer than anyone else before you did, though," she said, pulling him to his feet. "You're the winner, technically. Even if you did fall for the oldest trap in the book."
She kissed him on the cheek, soft, platonic, and genuinely warm.
"Come on, Guardian. Let's go find the others."
They gathered in the food court. Jace walked in to a round of applause.
"There he is!" Ricky cheered. "The man who fell from the sky!"
"Shut up," Jace grumbled, though he was smiling. "At least I didn't fall through the ceiling."
"Hey," Erik protested, brushing drywall off his shirt. "Structural failure. Not user error."
They sat around the tables, recounting their adventures. The women had been monitoring via the building's security cameras and filled in the blanks, laughing at Ricky's giggle, Erik's crash, Nathan's strategic blunder, and Connor's haunted flight from the gift shop.
"This was fun," Connor admitted, leaning back in his chair. "It's nice to just... play. Without the... you know."
"Sexual peril?" Anya offered.
"Exactly," Connor nodded.
Anya looked at the band, her eyes bright with a new idea.
"You know... you're going on tour soon. Aren't you?"
The guys exchanged a look.
"Yeah," Jace said slowly. "Why?"
"Well," Anya mused. "Hotels. Arenas. Backstage areas. All perfect for Hide and Seek. We could make it a tour thing. A challenge. No sex. No funny business. Just the game."
Jace looked at her, really looked at her. He saw the promise in her eyes. No more targeting him. No more fear. Just fun.
He smiled.
"You're on."
The debauchery was over. The game was on. And for the first time in a long time, Jace was actually looking forward to being found.
Over the years that followed, Rock Star Hide-and-Seek became one of Battle Cry's most cherished traditions. The Ladies of the Chase refined their tactics. The Brotherhood refined their evasion. The games moved from malls to hotels to arenas to backstage complexes, each one more elaborate than the last. And eventually, the invitation extended beyond Battle Cry to other bands, friends who'd earned the Brotherhood's trust, who knew enough about Aelin to understand why five superpowered men would voluntarily strip themselves of their abilities and rely on nothing but their wits to survive.
The band called it "a tactical exercise." Their friends called it completely insane fun.
Both descriptions were accurate.