Storm Secrets, page 21
part #4 of Scarlet Jones Series
The fourth proved to be much more difficult. He didn’t seem to be afraid of my sword, and that gave him an advantage. Holding his fingers like they were claws, he scratched my face from the forehead all the way down to my chin. The pain was instant and paralyzing, sending waves of shock down the length of me. I fell, completely losing balance, and the demon jumped with both feet on my stomach. Focusing on my arm, I got him in the thigh before he could claw at me again, but as soon as he turned to charcoal, one of his friends took his place, blowing charcoal dust on my face. It burned like hell, which was how I knew that the demon had made more than superficial wounds on my face. More importantly, the powdery substance got stuck in my eyes, and all I could see was black. Panic put my body into a seizure. I moved every inch of me with all my strength until the demon was no longer pinning me down. A hand wrapped around mine and pulled me up to my feet. Trying to get the powder out of my face with one hand was difficult, but I could see Wilder now, trying to help me stand, and before he could turn, his eyes grew really wide, and something burned me right between my ribcage.
I looked down to see the tip of a very sharp blade. The blade was coming from Wilder’s stomach. It took me half as second to realize what had happened. Forgetting the dust in my eyes, I put a hand on top of Wilder’s head and pushed him down to his knees. The demon who’d put the sword right through him opened his mouth as if trying to suck my magic out of me. Before he could realize that he no longer could do that, I ran my sword over his face.
Fire burned behind the charcoal statue, and I kicked it to make room behind Wilder’s back. The sword was an ECU sword, just like I’d suspected. The demon must have taken it out of the hands of a soldier. I grabbed the handle and pulled it out of Wilder as fast as I could, but I knew it would hurt. It would hurt like hell, but he’d be okay. He’d be just fine.
I rushed in front of him and kneeled, taking his cold face in my hands. His eyes were closed, his brows narrowed, pain rippling through his body, but he wouldn’t go down.
“Wilder,” I breathed, slapping him on the face. “Wilder!”
When he opened his eyes, I realized just how terrified I’d been that he’d fall to his face and die. Which was ridiculous. If you didn't catch the heart, stabbing them anywhere else wouldn't kill them.
“Get up,” I whispered, afraid he’d tell me he couldn’t. “Please, get up.”
His hand found my face, and he touched my cheek gently, analyzing me as if he couldn’t figure out where he even was. His eyes changed color from yellow to brown, and he gritted his teeth as if he was in an unimaginable amount of pain. A low growl left his throat, bringing chills down my spine. That’s when I realized, he wanted to turn. He wanted to turn into a wolf.
I saw the demon’s shadow on the flames spitting on both sides of us. I didn’t want to leave Wilder alone but to make sure he would be okay, I had to fight the demons. So I stood with my sword raised and charged the one coming for us with all my heart. There was no way I’d let them kill Wilder. No way in hell.
But all I got was another charcoal statue. The three soldiers holding up the flamethrowers had stopped moving. That’s how I knew that something was off. Wilder was trying to get to his feet, Wick and Stacey by his side. The soldiers had stopped shooting as well and were looking deeper into the basement. There was another corridor on the other side, just like the one we’d come through, and all the demons who’d been fighting us were running to it, disappearing into the darkness.
“Is he okay?” I shouted at Stacey, torn between staying behind with Wilder and going after the demons.
But Wilder looked up at me then. He was still struggling to get up, and I was sure he’d tell me to stand down.
He surprised me. “Go,” he said, waving me toward the corridor. “Go, Dirt!”
Relieved to hear those words, I ran forward with my sword, and the soldiers who were still standing followed me.
I’d dropped my flashlight, but two vampires running right behind me had theirs still. The flamethrowers had given a rest to their machines because the fire would fry us in that narrow space. And the corridor extended for a little while before opening into another hole in the wall, something like a cave, only with a lot of mud. The hole seemed to have been dug with fingers and that’s where the metallic smell was coming from.
Only, it wasn’t metallic from so close up. It was…spices. All kinds of spices mixed together, and the smell made me want to throw up. Something white decorated the walls, white and gooey, with bubbles popping on top of it every few seconds. And the mud wasn’t really mud. The floor was grainy and wet, slippery, as we found out when one of the vampires slipped and almost fell on his ass. It was so strange, something I’d never seen before.
But more importantly, the demons weren’t there.
“Where the hell are they?” the vampire who had almost fallen asked, looking around the small room.
There was something across from us in the wall, kind of like a crack but bigger, and the edges of it dripped with the white stuff that smelled of spices. I took a step forward, and my sword began to burn my palm. A look down said nothing was out of the ordinary. The sword blinded me with its blue light and continued to heat my palm until I was face-to-face with the crack in the wall. I reached out a hand to touch it, to see what it felt like, but I couldn’t. My hand was right there but couldn’t get through because there was something in front of it, something I couldn’t see or feel. Like an invisible barrier separating me from it.
“They’re gone,” a guy from the team said.
“Ya think?” said a woman, but I couldn’t focus long enough to remember their names. I kept running my hand over the invisible barrier and wondering how it was possible that I couldn’t feel it. Like my eyes were deceiving me and the wall wasn’t really there. No spell did that. Barriers could be felt. Normally, they would throw back anyone who tried to touch them, but not this.
“We’ve got to get the Captain,” I said in a breath. If Wilder could stand, he was going to want to see this.
Only after the soldiers went back to get him did I realize that I’d referred to him as Captain, and I’d meant it wholeheartedly.
Twenty
“It was a mistake,” said Wilder, shaking his head furiously. “A stupid mistake we knew better than to make.”
“You’re hurt,” Stacey said reluctantly. “You need to see Rob.”
Rob, the healer Green witch, was going to freak out when he saw Wilder in this state. Yet Wilder pretended she hadn’t spoken at all. We were back in the office, going over everything that had happened while a different ECU team went to the pavilion to check on the crack on the wall we couldn’t seem to touch. As much as I’d wanted to stay behind and watch, they hadn’t even let me say it twice, but at least they’d let me check for Storms. We’d found none. Not one Storm witch anywhere near the pavilion, which relieved me now that I knew the others had never left the monastery. No Storms in the basement meant no Storms had been tortured by that particular horde of demons.
I was thrown into an SUV and driven out of there before I could come up with a good enough excuse, because apparently, the risk of demons wasn’t enough for them. Fine. Whatever. They could all die for all I cared.
But Wilder sure did.
“People could have died. We weren’t prepared for that number. Why the hell weren’t we informed that there would be more than twenty of them down there?”
He was shouting at Vera, who’d already been at the office when we arrived.
“The map showed less than there were at the last location,” the witch repeated, looking at her computer screen. “I don’t understand it, either.”
“Mistakes like this cost lives,” Wilder said with an exhausted sigh. His uniform was torn, and there was blood all over his front and back. His wound had closed on our way back to the facility, but he was still pale. Too pale. “If we don’t even know what the hell we’re up against, how can we hope to survive even one more horde?”
“I’m sorry, Captain. I checked on the satellite and the scanners, and they’re working fine,” said Vera, shaking her head, completely lost.
“Miss Vera, check again. And again. Then get somebody else to check them for you. We were lucky today, but we won’t get lucky every time. Do you understand that? If we go against demons underprepared, we might as well stab ourselves in the eye with our pens right now!”
Vera shuddered. “Yes, Captain.”
Wilder opened his mouth to say something else, then flinched. His lips pursed, he lowered his head, immediately regretting the way he’d spoken to Vera. He was being an ass, but it wasn’t entirely his fault. We all could have died tonight. There were many more demons down there than we thought there would be. We weren’t prepared for that many. We didn’t have nearly enough men, and if the demons had stuck around until the end, they’d have finished most of us. Most, if not all.
But Vera wasn’t to blame, either.
“Go home and get some rest. Tomorrow, I’m going to have a talk with the leaders and regroup. We have a lot to discuss,” Wilder said.
“Will you go see Rob?” asked Stacey again.
She was covered in blood, too. Her nose bled, her left arm bled in three places, and the wounds had been so deep, they hadn’t healed yet. Wick was the same. Only Vera wasn’t covered in blood.
“I will,” Wilder said. “Go, get some rest.” Then, he looked up at me. “A word with you, Dirt.”
I nodded. “Sure thing, Asshole.”
No one commented. The others just said goodnight and walked out of the office with their heads down. I grabbed Wick’s chair and put it in front of Wilder, who was sitting in the middle of the room.
“You okay?” he asked.
As he analyzed my face, his eyes darkened. I hadn’t dared to check myself in the mirror yet from fear of what I might see, but if the look on his face was anything to go by, mine was a mess.
“Just a few scratches,” I said. “You?”
The wound on his stomach had closed completely, leaving only a purple bruise behind. That didn’t mean that his insides were okay, though.
“I’ll live,” he said. “I want you to go see Rob. He’s downstairs.”
Just like he’d done to Stacey before, I pretended I didn’t hear him.
“There was no way Vera could have known about them.”
He clinked his teeth together hard. “Yeah. I figured that out.” After he yelled at her, he meant.
“It has to be it.”
The crack on the wall. It was a portal. The portal, the one that sent you to the demon’s realm, wherever that was. I was almost a hundred percent sure of it. Otherwise, where would they have gone? They couldn’t have disappeared like they did.
“They were brand new,” Wilder said with a sigh. “Like they’d just come to our side.”
“Untrained. Very hungry.” It’s why the demons had resembled the first demon I ever saw on my first night in Manhattan. “It’s a portal.”
“A fucking portal in Chinatown.” He laughed dryly. “No way in hell am I letting anybody after them now. No way.”
“Wilder, we have to. There’s no other way to stop them.”
“No.” His voice was so authoritative, it made goose bumps raise on my skin. “I won’t have blood on my hands. I won’t take anybody with me next time. Anybody but you.”
I grinned. “Well, why didn’t you say that from the beginning?” I liked that plan, but I had a better one. “Or you could just let me go alone.”
“I’m hurt, Dirt. Not stupid.”
“You think the leaders will go for it?”
“Probably not. I won’t leave them any choice, though. Those people almost died because of me.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
I flinched. “Maybe you’re not hurt, then. You’re just stupid.”
Clenching his hands in fists, he leaned closer to me, like he wanted to punch me. We could go down this road. I leaned in, too. He could be the biggest asshole on the planet right now, but I would not let him blame himself for this. I knew perfectly well what that kind of thing can do to a person.
“We had no way of knowing that there was a portal there. No way of knowing that newbie demons were coming through.”
“Which shows just how unprepared we are for them,” he said with a low growl.
From this close up, his eyes looked dark enough to swallow me whole, which reminded me:
“Why didn’t you turn?” I’d seen it in his eyes. When he’d stopped that demon from killing me and another had stabbed him with a sword, he’d wanted to turn into a wolf.
The question caught him by surprise. “You…you wanted me to turn?” He apparently found that amusing.
“Why not? You’d heal faster, you’d be able to hurt them much more easily.”
Half a smile took over his pale face. His eyes softened, the golden glow returning to them fast. Just then I realized how close we were to one another, and I slowly leaned back in my seat.
“If I turned, the demons wouldn’t be your only enemy down there,” he said in wonder, throwing me off.
I opened my mouth to ask him what the hell that meant, but he didn’t let me.
“Let’s just leave it at that and get the hell out of here.”
He was right. It was late, and we were tired. There was time to talk. For now, I needed rest. I needed to gather all my strength for tomorrow.
“You can’t drive home like this. Let me get someone to take you.”
I made for the door but he stopped me.
“You can drive, can’t you?”
Suddenly, I remembered what he’d texted me. “I’m not going back to your place, Wilder.”
“Oh?” he breathed. “You’re just going to let me bleed by myself?”
I turned around, laughing. “You’re not bleeding.”
“Internally,” he said. “I might be bleeding internally.”
“That’s why they have healers, and Rob is just downstairs,” I reminded him.
The light dimmed from his eyes. “Okay, Dirt. Suit yourself.”
Then he made to stand. He barely could. Holding onto the chair, he waved me off when I tried to help him.
“Wilder, you need a healer. You can’t go home like this.”
“Sure I can.”
“No, you can’t.”
He was already breathing heavily. It was obvious that it hurt. The inside of his stomach must have been a mess because werewolves didn’t get like this after sword wounds. I hated to admit it, but it scared the living hell out of me.
“Get out of my way, Dirt.”
He let go of the chair and stood on his own. He tried to hide it, but the pain was all over his face.
“You’re not going anywhere like this!”
He made for the door. “You can try to stop me. I’d love to see it, in fact.”
He fell against the wall, then pulled the door open. God, he was stubborn! More stubborn than even me. I couldn’t just let him go home like that. What if he didn’t heal at all? How the hell did werewolf healing even work?
“Fine!” I shouted, exasperated. “Fine. I’ll come with you. But you’re seeing Rob first.”
He slowly turned around to face me with a wide grin. “Deal.”
***
It was the third time I was sleeping in Wilder’s house. Hopefully, it would be the last. After I drove us in his car to his place, he had no trouble walking himself in the house, which made me realize he’d faked it. The whole scene at the office where he couldn’t walk and barely stood on his own was all an act. He’d played me, and he’d succeeded.
Since it was too late to go back to my own place now, I sucked it up and hit the couch in his living room. Thoughts of the others in the monastery chased my sleep away every time I wanted to close my eyes. They were so close now. So close to freedom. By this time tomorrow, I would have stolen that stupid thing for Arius, and he was going to release them. He was going to give them back to me, and I was going to quit the ECU gig to go back. No way was I leaving them there all alone again.
I missed them more than I ever thought I’d miss someone. I missed Ezra and Fallon and Sienna. I missed Ax. Just the thought of him made me feel like an elephant was sitting on my chest because I was sleeping in another man’s house, and I was…dangerously close to making a mistake I’d never forgive myself for. The only thing that made me feel a bit better was that I was never going to see Wilder again after tomorrow. He would be gone from my life and the fight for our freedom would continue if the ECU decided to withdraw the declaration they’d given us. Which was very likely to happen, once I quit.
Sometime before dawn, sleep took me, and when I woke up to Wilder’s face, the first reaction of my body was to smile.
Smile.
As if I was happy to see him.
Scary as a thousand demons in front of me.
Sitting up with a jolt, the room swam for a few seconds. The headache was terrible, but I didn’t know if I had it all night, or if it had started the moment I opened my eyes.
“Morning,” Wilder said, shoving a white mug full of steaming coffee in my hand.
Thankful, I nodded and took a sip. I needed to get going soon.
“Slept well?” he asked.
“Mhmm. You?”
The coffee was delicious. I was pretty sure I’d read a blog about werewolves being the worst at making coffee. Or tea. Or any kind of drink. So bloggers lied. Shocker.
“Good enough.” He sat on the table in front of the couch, which was made of glass. I had no idea how it was holding all his weight still.
