Storm Secrets, page 6
part #4 of Scarlet Jones Series
“Have you even met him?” Archie asked, squinting his eyes.
“Met who?” If they meant Adams or Brigham, the answer was a reluctant yes.
But before any of them could reply, the door behind me opened with a jolt, making me jump.
“Me.”
The man literally took up the whole room. When he stepped inside, he made me back away from the door quickly. He was taller than me, twice as wide, and very much a werewolf. His tight black shirt showed every muscle on his torso and arms, and let me tell you, he had muscle in places I had no idea you could have muscle.
And he was drop-dead gorgeous, too.
His dark hair was cut close to his head, barely a shadow on his skull. His stubble was the same. His eyes were so dark, they looked black instead of brown, and he even had a couple freckles on his nose—the only thing on his face that looked out of place. The thin scar that started on his upper lip to the right, close to the corner of his mouth, went down to the bottom, and ended somewhere below his pronounced chin. Easy to track it since the scar tissue didn’t allow hair to grow on it, and it was a couple shades paler than the unbelievably bright rose color of his lips.
Fast movement behind me, and I was glad it made me tear my eyes off the wolf’s face. He was scaring me more than I liked to admit, but looking back at the office only intensified my fear. The other four who had been staring at me and looking incompetent until a second ago, were now in their seats, eyes locked on their computer screens, shoulders straight. I doubted they were even breathing.
“I see you met the team,” said the wolf, walking a circle around me. The way he pierced the air, it almost made me stumble and fall without even moving. Even more reason for me to back away. “I’m Captain Mad Wilder. You can call me Captain or boss.”
My brows rose. “Your name is Mad?” Maybe that’s what his parents were when they named him…
“My name, to you, is Captain or boss, and I do not have a lot of patience for anything, so do try to pay attention when I speak.” He touched his temple with his finger. My mouth opened, but he didn’t let me speak. For a second, he sniffed the air like a hound. “I see you’ve made your place.” And raising his arm, he pointed his finger at the desk I’d just stood up from. “Stick to it until I tell you otherwise.”
Oh, no. “I’m leaving for today.”
“No, you’re not,” the man said without missing a beat. “Everybody here leaves when I say so, and I didn’t say you could.”
I laughed a little. “Look, I spoke to Adams and Brigham already, okay? I think you misunderstood the situation.” As far as I was concerned, when the ECU leaders—and my father—spoke about the team, they meant it was my team, not a team with a freaking Captain whose name was Mad.
Finally lowering his arm, Wilder clapped his hands and rubbed them, letting go of a deep breath. Then, he walked closer to me. The door was barely a foot away, and if I backed down now, he’d know how much he freaked me out. That wasn’t the impression I wanted to give to those people, so I stood my ground and held his dark eyes.
“I don’t appreciate anyone talking back to me, Jones. The only person who seems to have misunderstood the situation here is you.” He searched my face like he already knew what was under my skin and was just trying to find it. Find all my secrets. “You’re on my team. I’m the Captain of my team. When the Captain tells you to sit the fuck down, you sit the fuck down. It’s as simple as that.”
“You’re in luck because I don’t appreciate assholes, Wilder. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’m in the wrong room. I’ve got my own team waiting for me somewhere in this building.” Sticking around with that man all up in my face was a bad idea, so I turned around and opened the door.
I pulled it open with all my strength, but it met resistance. It met Wilder’s hand. He slammed it shut, taking me with it and my nose was an inch away from the door when I caught myself. Anger burned a hole in my mind. This guy was really something. I’d gone through all of this, had been forced to accept to work for the ECU, had left all my people alone in exchange for the document in my hand that promised us freedom, and he wanted to tell me I’d done all of it just to be under someone’s thumb?
“Let go of the door, Wilder,” I said under my breath. Even if he wasn’t so close to me, he could hear it. He was a werewolf.
“It’s Captain,” he whispered back. “Go to your desk, now.”
My magic sprung to my hands, begging me to make a mess of that place, responding to my anger like it always did.
“No.”
We could butt heads all day long if he wanted to. I had time now. I had time to be childish.
“Okay.”
Wilder stepped away from me and the door. My magic settled in my gut again, taken aback, same as I. Wasn’t he going to fight me over this? I narrowed my brows. He was supposed to fight me over this.
“Go ahead, Jones. Leave. Nobody is going to stop you,” he said, half a smile playing on his lips. “Just don’t forget to leave that on Miss Vera’s desk on your way out.” He nodded at the document in my hand.
Instinctively, I pulled my arms back. No way in hell was he getting that statement from me. “Adams gave this to me.”
“And I, in Adams’s name, will take it back. Just leave it on the table.” He bowed his head a little. “Goodbye.”
Without another look my way, he turned around and went to the desk on my right, the one farthest away from the rest, with the screen turned so that everyone could see what Wilder was seeing.
“All right, folks. Back to work,” he said with a clap of his hands and sat down on his desk, leaving me breathless.
I wanted to explode into a million pieces. The asshole had pretty much told me that if I didn’t play by his rules, the statement I’d done all of this for would be gone. Invalid. Worth nothing.
I’d already sent it to the monastery! He couldn’t take it away now. Nobody could. The whole world was going to see it, they were going to know that we were free, no longer hunted by the ECU, accepted by our government. Nobody could take that away from us anymore!
But they could. Just as easily as they’d given it to me. They could make all of this go away in the blink of an eye.
And I couldn’t let that happen.
Taking in a deep breath, I pushed against my anger. This was more important than me. It was more important than Captain Asshole, more important than the ECU. The others needed this, and I wasn’t going to send it all to hell because of of my personal issues with authority.
Ages later, I made myself move.
“Okay, Wilder. You got your way. I’ll stay.” The words tasted like dirt in my mouth so I easily spit them out. When I sat down in front of the computer again, the room spun fast for a second. This was my new reality now. I was working for the ECU, and I was under a werewolf’s orders. Maybe I’d thought too soon when it seemed like Adams and Brigham had given me everything I’d wanted.
With a huge grin on his face, Wilder spun his chair around and faced me.
“It’s Captain,” he said. “Or boss.”
“You have to earn that title, Wilder. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve earned nothing yet.” I could make this hard for him, too.
“Two can play this game,” he said, excited rather than pissed. Or maybe he was just very good at hiding it. “Enough talk. Let’s show the Dirt what we have on those suckers so far. Who knows? Maybe she’ll even be worth something and not just a waste of our time.”
There was a pen on my desk. It took a lot of willpower not to throw it at his face. Biting my tongue, I begged my nerves to calm. It didn’t matter what he called me or what I called him. We were both on the same side here. We were going to hunt down and kill demons together. No need to keep this up.
But, dammit, if it wasn’t one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
Turning his chair around, Wick faced me. “Go to Computer and search for Sucker. In the folder, you’ll find an executive file. Run it. The password is suckerssuck094 with two capital S-s.” And he said this with a straight face.
My tongue was already bloody, but it was still impossible not to smile. Focused on the screen, I did what he asked.
The program took less than a minute to open. The screen went dark and only two white words were in the middle, together with the cursor. Data and Quit. I clicked on Data.
The main window was blank, but in the two columns on either side were folders named with dates, which ran back all the way to March of this year.
“We’ve recorded every sighting of demons since the first time we came across them. You can find the location, date, time and footage on the left, and on the right, we have everything we know about them so far,” said Stacey, never moving her eyes from the screen. “Their anatomy, their powers, their MO, their way of living.”
A shiver washed down my back, and I moved the cursor to the right. I didn’t need to see any footage just yet. I’d seen more than enough demons with my own eyes. But I really needed to see what the ECU knew about them.
I opened the first file, also named as a date. It was updated three days ago. The document filled my screen. I read through the lines as fast as possible and swallowed the information like it was my lifeline. The first thing that crossed my mind was to make a copy of it and send it to the monastery. The demons were the primary enemy of every Storm witch in the world. We needed that information more than the ECU.
The demon body was made exactly the same as ours. Same organs, same bone structure, slightly different skin that enabled them to heal at an incredible rate. They’d rated the healing speed from one to one hundred. The chart showed humans at thirty, witches at fifty-five, werewolves at sixty-seven, fairies at seventy-one, vampires at eighty-nine, and demons at ninety-nine, which basically meant that those assholes could heal from any wound. Any wound at all.
Except from the magic of my dragon, which I suspected was the one that separated them from the one hundred rate.
As far as the ECU knew, the demons didn’t need food to survive. They didn’t sleep, either. They established lives around feeding resources—around Storm witches, which was why they suspected the demons stuck to Manhattan, where the biggest recorded population of Storms was.
Their powers were mostly unknown. They had the nose, sight and hearing of a werewolf. They learned faster than any other paranormal being on Earth. Based on observations, they liked to hunt alone, except when there was a bigger feeding resource, which tied groups of ten to fourteen together for extended periods of time. I’d seen this firsthand when fighting the demons at the abandoned hospital to save the other Storms they’d kidnapped from the same building I was in right now. Another chill washed down the length of me. That night…it felt like a different life. A different lifetime.
They lived in dark places and they didn't need much space. Until two weeks ago, their only target was Storms. Since two weeks ago, they’d killed four other paranormals that the ECU knows about, a wolf and three witches. They attacked three places in Manhattan, and there was footage for one of them, too. They’d done so in broad daylight, which meant they no longer cared if they were being seen by anyone.
And their food source. The magic that ran in my veins together with my blood.
The ECU didn’t understand much about us, it seemed. They had no idea why we had powers without needing to reach the age of eighteen, without needing it ignited by our parents with a ritual like every other kind of witch. I’d wondered about that, too, but it wasn’t worth losing sleep over. As I scrolled through the pictures, I was thrown back to the basement of the building, back when I was being chained to the bed and experimented on. Fallon had said something about the tablet of one of the workers, where she’d seen the picture of a human shape with lightning in its body. I was staring now at that same picture.
The ECU had no idea where our magic came from. It was everywhere in our bodies, from our heads down to our toes. I didn’t know what devices they’d used to create this image, but our magic looked exactly like lightning. Our magic’s speed was rated a nine, with Blood magic right behind us at seven. Bones were a six, and Greens a five. I suspected that had to do with the fact that we didn’t conjure spells. We just let our magic out. It seemed the use of magic required more energy for us than for any other witch. Again, that was because we used it in its raw form. We hadn’t had spells until just two weeks ago. Now that we did, and now that we’d have an actual grimoire, these statistics might change drastically.
“What do you think, Dirt?” asked Wilder, calling my eyes from the screen.
For whatever reason, when he called me Dirt, it didn’t bother me as much as when everyone else did. Probably because I knew he was saying it to spite me. Whether he meant it or not was irrelevant.
“I think you’re missing the biggest question of all: where are they coming from, and how do we stop them from crossing over to our world?”
“They most certainly are not from around here,” said Miss Vera, raising her thin brows as she looked down at her hands. “Not from the fairy realm, either. Their world is likely dark, which would explain their skin. They’ve never been seen consuming animal or other types of food, so apparently they don’t require flesh and blood to sustain them. All they seem to need is magic, which can only mean that wherever they come from is a realm made of it. Or it’s running out of it, and that is why the demons have come here to look for it.”
Well, that… made sense.
“They’re growing in number,” I continued. “Two years ago, the most I’d see together were four at a time. Now, they come in dozens.”
“They’re evolving. Adapting to our world. The more power they take from Storms, the stronger they get,” said Archie. My stomach rolled at the mentioning of our name. It was stupid, but I felt so proud for a fleeting second to hear someone else other than us call us Storms.
“And the greedier,” said Wilder.
“We think their goal is to kidnap witches and keep them prisoner so they can feed off them regularly,” said Stacey. “Which then brings us to the even bigger question: what are they trying to get to?”
“Take over the world?” said Wick. I flinched.
“Possible. We’ve gone over these theories a hundred times in the past two months, but all we can do is guess.”
“I still think the most important thing to figure out is where they’re coming from,” I said. “If they’re not from here, that means there’s a portal or portals they use to come here. We shut down portals to the fairy realm once. We can do it again.”
“We haven’t been able to find one so far,” said Archie.
“But you know where the demons are, don’t you?” I asked halfheartedly.
“Some of them, yes,” said Wilder.
“So can’t we assume that they stick close to however they get here?” Just in case they needed to run away or something.
“It’s impossible to track them like that,” he said with a flinch.
“I’ll tell you my suspicion: they use no traditional portal. We’ve been tracking twelve of them for weeks now, and they simply drop off of the face of the earth during the day,” said Vera. “They could be using the equivalent of a black ravenstone.”
Black ravenstone. The stone from the fairy realm that enabled you to travel between worlds.
“They’re not using anything,” said Wilder, shaking his head. “We’ve searched them a thousand times.”
“They know how to hide,” Vera insisted. “Nothing else makes more sense.”
“Or, they’re not using a tool. They’re simply…transporting themselves. With a spell, maybe?”
“They don’t chant. Their magic doesn’t work that way,” said Wick.
“How does it work?”
“Like a vampire’s. They can move and hear and see faster than most, but their magic isn’t active. It can’t be used to alter reality like ours,” Stacey said. So she was definitely a witch.
“Enough about us.” Wilder leaned back in his seat. “What do you know about them?”
“I know that two years ago, the only things they knew how to do was smile and suck my magic. They were weak, slow, clueless in a fight.”
I remembered that time perfectly. It had been so easy to escape from them; now, it seemed ridiculous.
“Today, they can speak. They can track someone’s magic.” Like the one who’d found me in that same building, and his friend, who’d been after Luca’s magic. “They can taste it and follow its scent.”
“You mean like a particular witch’s magic?” asked Archie.
“Yes, exactly. They know how to fight. They weren’t as fast before, or as capable of seeing and hearing as well as they do now. They’re evolving, all right. They’re stealing. Copying from us.”
“Like babies,” said Vera. “They’re growing, but they appear to be the same age.”
“Always,” I said with a nod. “They also look very similar to one another, which makes me think they’re copying their looks from us, too.”
“Yes, but how would they do that?” said Wilder.
“Through our magic.” I looked at my hands. Our magic was their food. That’s what we knew. But what if it wasn’t just that? What if it was some sort of an enhancing energy to them?
“Through observation,” said Vera.
“The more time passes, the better they get.” Unfortunately for us.
“Which means we have to hunt them down as fast as possible,” Wick said.
“How do you hunt them?” I asked.
For a second, they just looked at one another. “We don’t. Not yet,” said Stacey.
“What?” I thought Adams and Brigham said they had a team of hunters I was working with.
“We can’t kill them. We’ve lost more than a hundred men equipped with all kinds of spells and weapons. None have ever made it back,” Wilder said.
“A hundred? I've never heard about this before." The ECU just loved to show the world how much they were doing to protect the people. If this was the truth, they'd have made it public.
“Nobody has. Panic is the last thing we need right now,” said Wilder, shaking his head. It made sense. Telling the people that the mighty ECU couldn't protect them, would create chaos. It’s why they’d brought me in. “We’ve gathered all the information out there on them, and we’ve tracked them down, but that’s all we were able to do until we found a way to kill them.”
