Pack Possessed, page 17
part #4 of Thrown to the Wolves Series
"Also a possibility." When none of us smile, her lips buzz with her heavy exhalation as she finally relents. "Logically I know you're right, she's just a bad influence and it's easy to get swept up in the excitement of anything that might potentially give us a leg up. Especially after the way he threatened Cinjin."
Picking her up, I pass her down to Damian so Hunter and I can scale down first. Climbing up is a hell of a lot different than going down, and if she’s not going to let me carry her, I want to be ready to catch her when she inevitably slips.
“Trust me, I get it. But we can’t let that son of a bitch goad us into making mistakes.” Debating if it’s going too far or not, I decide to take the risk and point out, “And your inner demon has a bit of a reputation for being impulsive and quick to temper. Ash knows that and will want to exploit it.”
Damian helps her as she begins her descent, prepared to snatch her wrist as long as she’s in range. “Aurelia may have been in this alone, but you’re not, remember?”
She groans. “You’re right, you’re right. Old habits die hard sometimes. Sorry for getting caught up in the manic high and not mentioning it sooner. I really did just want to burn off some energy, but when we were about halfway here, she brought it up and nearly won me over.”
Hunter lands on the first ledge, eyeing her foot placement as nervously as I am. Sabrina is many things, but the extent of her athletic abilities are running and swimming. If the last few months are anything to go by, anything outside of those two activities are likely to result in disaster.
“Let’s chalk it up to relationship growing pains. With all of the stress we’re under, we’ve done remarkably well since our trip to Khalida, if I do say so myself. We were overdue for a glitch or two, and as much as I wish we were perfect, we’re likely to still mess up now and again. What really matters is how we handle things when they come up and actively try to do better, right?”
When she’s a few feet above me, I coax her into dropping. The breath rushes out of her lungs as I catch her, but the mini-thrill seems to be enough to pacify the demon we were insulting not five minutes ago, if her smile is anything to go by. “That’s exactly right.” With a brief kiss, she slides to her feet.
Falling into a rhythm, we make decent time getting away from that rocky death trap. The last leg is slower going because of the steep incline making things awkward on the return trip. If someone were to slip, they’d wind up rolling downhill instead of simply falling, and the trees are sparse enough that we couldn’t count on them to stop our momentum. The ground has dried out since the last storm, but there’s also healthier vegetation beginning to sprout that conceals the old paths, hiding possible roots.
After a long stretch of silence, Damian steals her hand, kissing the back. “Any theories on why he’s more concerned with the demons in the mountain than the shifters? Because something isn’t adding up between Ash or Aurelia’s stories, but I’m drawing a blank.”
Humming in contemplation, she loses herself in thought for a while alongside the rest of us. Eventually, she defaults to spit balling statements aloud, hoping that’ll make it easier to make sense of them. “While I really do think he’s hung up on her, I think that’s secondary to his real goal of freeing the demons.”
“What if his goal isn’t to wipe out humans?” As they give me their full attention, I clear my throat. “Aurelia said he slaughtered a handful of humans to instigate them into attacking the demons, right? But nothing about the man makes him seem straightforward in his intentions; everything is layers upon layers of deceit and manipulation. So maybe we should be trying to figure out why he killed those humans specifically? Then it was just a benefit that it spearheaded his war on humans. It set the course that demons were flocking to the mountain for safety, so maybe that’s what he really needs; demons. And shifters don’t do the trick, even if he can siphon demonic energy from them. So, what could he need a batch of demons for?”
We all turn to Sabrina, because at this stage, her brain buddy is our best shot. Furrowing her brow, she gets lost in a silent discussion we’re not privy to, and Hunter, Damian, and I wisely keep our mouths shut so we don’t make her lose her train of thought. Carrying on in silence, I mull it over as well, but I keep coming back to the heart of things.
Ash wanted all of the demons at the mountain before his plan went off the rails and he’s gone through all of this effort to free them again. He doesn’t really care about the demons or humans at all, which leaves the main evil villain motives; love, revenge, money, and power. Bringing Aurelia back wasn’t his main goal, and he’s clearly got money out the ass, so we’re left with power.
Damian puts it together a split second before I did. “Aurelia beat him to the punch stealing power from the other demons and gained their abilities. A Nightmare’s abilities are the long con, not physical power. Stone may have shot him down, but there has to be another demon born in that place by now that could replicate what he did. Then he’d be nearly unstoppable, king of the demons and humans alike. It wouldn’t matter if the wolves couldn’t be manipulated outside of Sabrina; he could bring them to heel by threatening to chuck them in a pit of lava or whatever Elementals do.”
With a yelp, Sabrina’s foot gets caught on a root and she goes down, dragging Damian with her. The two of them tumble down the sharp incline of the hill, Hunter and I chasing after them with a curse. Skidding on the dirt, I manage to snag her ankle before I fall on my ass; hard. Though we continue to slide, I tug her back in time to save her head from bashing into a tree trunk, using my foot against it to finally bring us to a stop.
Heart hammering a mile a minute, I thump the back of my head against the dirt in relief, keeping an iron lock on her ankle so she can’t even attempt to get to her feet and put me through that again. “That’s it.” Chest heaving, I try to hear anything other than my thundering heartbeat in my ears. “You’ve lost walking privileges and I’m carrying you the rest of the way down before you get yourself killed.”
Damian groans. “I don’t care if being stuck in the cabin drives you crazy and you blow half of it up; every time you go outside something bad happens.”
“Guys.” Hunter’s harsh whisper has my eyelids flying open, immediately finding his worried gaze a few feet away. “Don’t move.”
Sabrina’s muscles tense up beneath my hand. “Let me guess; scorpion? Poisonous snake?”
An ominous rumble vibrates through the earth and into my bones. “Sabrina. Very carefully, crawl towards Hunter. Try to keep your weight as distributed as possible, okay? Like if you were on ice.”
With a nervous swallow, Hunter shakes his head. “It’s not any better here. Better shot heading past Damian, I think.”
Slowly, she pushes herself off of her stomach. “I’m not abandoning you guys.” Immediately, the sound of shifting dirt sounds beneath us, the rumbling intensifying behind us as a few pebbles tumble down the cliff.
“You’re not abandoning us, you’re going to find somebody with a rope. That way if we fall you can pull us out, and if we’re still here when you get back, you can play hero, okay? Get moving.”
She manages to slink a few more inches before there’s a massive crack behind us, stones rushing down the mountain in a landslide and the ground gives out, the four of us plummeting into the darkness below.
***
Coughing up a mouthful of dirt, I spit off to the side, my hand slipping on a wet patch of stone. “Shit.”
Hunter’s voice rings out somewhere in the darkness, but it’s so pitch black I can’t see a single thing. “Everybody okay?”
Nearby, Sabrina’s groans. “Pretty sure my bruises have bruises, but nothing’s broken. You guys?”
The shifting sound of dirt has us all tensing in anticipation, but it’s followed by a sputtering Damian. “Motherfucker.”
As we get to our feet, the trickling of water and the occasional pebble shifting offers a little help navigating the space. Carefully, I feel my way towards Sabrina, peeling off my shirt and putting the wadded-up mess in her hands. “Here, set this on fire.”
Thankfully, she manages to actually light it up instead of immediately reducing it to ash, so at least she’s learning some restraint despite how much stronger she’s gotten in the past week. Lifting the makeshift torch, shadows dance around the space, but it offers enough light to see.
The tunnel we’re trapped in I only manage to clear by about six inches, so at least I’m not stuck crouching indefinitely. At our feet is a small stream of water following the downward slope behind us before curving off out of sight. Ahead, Damian is finishing pulling himself out of a mound of dirt and debris, barely a foot away from the pile of rocks that block off the other half of the tunnel.
With a weary sigh, Sabrina whispers, “I really do only blow stuff up, don’t I?”
Damian swipes at his dirt-stricken face, but it hardly makes a difference. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Just focus your energy on blowing up Ash next time instead.”
Crouching down, Hunter eyes the slow trickle of water managing to slip through beneath the blockade. “Good news and bad news. We have a source of water, but if the water builds up behind it, it can destroy the unintentional dam we created, forcing all of the boulders down on us along with a deluge of water if we don’t find a way out of here first.”
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” Sabrina argues, bringing the flaming shirt ball near the walls of the tunnel to prove her point. “The ground is smooth stone underneath, but it’s only about a foot wide before the moss and dirt take over, so the water doesn’t even reach the walls on the best of days.” Checking the ceiling, it’s the same firmly packed earth as the walls. “It’s not like an underground river made the tunnels, more like they were already here and over the years as the mountain became more unstable, one of the landslides probably caused a fissure under the lake or river somewhere. If we were down here for a month or something, yeah, be worried, but I’m pretty sure our biggest concern is the others losing their minds. They’ll dig us out long before we die down here.”
I’m not sure if he tilts his head in agreement simply because he really wants her to be right, but he does, taking the makeshift torch from her. “Let's see where this tunnel leads then, I guess.”
Sabrina lets him take the lead, falling into step beside me. “Ahh yes, the part of the movie where they walk into the creepy basement, my favorite.”
Clapping a hand over her mouth, I shoot her a pointed look. “Remember what we said about joking around out loud with this apocalypse stuff? Happy thoughts only, please.”
She cringes, wiping dirt off of her mouth when I remove my hand. “Sorry. Maybe if I think about wanting a way out really hard it’ll all magically work out?”
“Please don’t, I want to live.”
She takes a playful swat at my arm, but it helps change the mood from worried we’re all going to be buried alive and have to resort to cannibalism, and more towards accepting this is yet another bump in the road.
Hunter isn’t buying into the attempt as easily though, and I feel for the guy. He got the short straw of being in charge, and Sabrina is a hell of a lot harder to keep alive than any wolf I’ve ever met. Cinjin may have given Slade a run for his money over the years, but our mate blew his record out of the water after only a couple of months.
“Let's just see where this leads,” he decides. “It’s riskier for us to start shifting things from the bottom to dig out ourselves, so we’re better off waiting for the others to find us. We’ll play the waiting game and look around in the meantime.”
Following the path the water cuts downhill, we keep a swift pace before my shirt is rendered to ash and we’re plunged into darkness again. All the while, I make a mental map in case we need to find our way back later and run out of things to burn or the water ceases to flow completely, but so far, it’s looking like there aren’t any other tunnels branching off of this one, and the concern is moot. It may not be a straight shot, but can’t exactly get lost when there’s only one path.
“Sorry I got us into this mess,” she repeats, keeping her gaze firmly forward. “If we’d stayed home, none of this would have happened.”
Damian scoffs. “You’re right, then we might have been caught in a house fire instead. Seriously, beautiful, don’t beat yourself up over things that are out of your control. You’re getting stronger; that’s a good thing. And you were attempting to burn off some energy because you’re trying to make sure you don’t spontaneously combust. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’d far prefer this sort of excitement over you exploding.”
Dragging Hunter into his attempt to make her feel better, he adds, “Landslides, sure; we all know that’s something that tends to happen on the Slaughters’ land. Lightning storms setting the trees on fire? Sadly, also a normal concern around here. But in the entire course of your life have you ever worried about sinkholes?”
At the shake of his head, Damian gives Sabrina a reassuring smile. “Between the storms and this, you’ve been practicing with your abilities without even consciously doing so. Our lovely mate felt like we needed to check out the caves, now here we are. There’s probably a good reason for it, because you’ve got some damn good instincts.” With one hand, he palms the side of her face and tugs her in to kiss the crown of her head. “How could we be upset about that, angel?”
“We’re here because we want to be, not because we have to, remember?”
Hunter finally gets with the program, starting to relax a bit, if only for her sake. “You keep things interesting, I’ll give you that. Chaotic, but interesting. And that’s a good thing in my book, so nothing to apologize for; especially when none of this is your fault.”
When her foot slips on the wet stone, I steal her hand, threading our filthy fingers together to make sure she doesn’t wipe out and give herself the concussion she miraculously survived in the landslide. “But if we could avoid volcanoes and playing on train tracks for the foreseeable future just to be safe, I’d appreciate it.”
As we follow the winding tunnel, all that can be heard is the slapping of our shoes against the wet stone and the sound of our breathing, far too amplified and close.
All it would take is the ground above our heads to collapse and we’d be buried alive. Trapped. Unable to move, suffocating on dirt until- The tight pressure in my chest eases up a fraction. Is the only oxygen in here from before the landslide, or is there another opening somewhere? We might be running on a limited supply of air. It won’t matter if we can shift, if Sabrina can blow shit up, or start a fire. Fuck, the fire. That’ll burn it up faster-
When the pressure finally relents in full and I can draw in a deep breath, I turn to find Sabrina already looking at me, giving my hand a squeeze. Without a single comment, she faces forward again as if nothing ever happened, not tipping the others off on the panic attack that she shot down before it could gain traction.
Tightening my grasp on her hand, I try to convey everything that I can’t put into words. The moment I met her, I knew she was going to bring me to my knees, yet never once has the position made me weak. If anything, it’s made me stronger, because the only force I’ll surrender to is her.
“Holy fuck.” I nearly crash into Hunter’s back as he comes to an abrupt halt around the curve of the next bend.
“What?”
The word has barely rolled off of my tongue before I’m rendered speechless, staring past his shoulder and debating if what I’m seeing is actually real. Crossing into the massive cavern, we sidestep where the trickling water empties into a large pool in the center, the stone arcing around it in a semicircle. It’s the walls and high ceiling that really strike me dumb, though; thousands of gems glittering in the firelight in a myriad of colors.
The dwindling flame in Hunter’s hand is snuffed out, and without hesitation, he strips off his own shirt and passes it to Sabrina to ignite. “This is,” he trails off, no words really able to encapsulate what we’re seeing, and none of us do it the disservice of trying.
There are some things in this world that you describe, and others that you feel in your soul.
“You did say you wanted a change of scenery.”
An incredulous breath escapes Sabrina as she looks around in awe. “Careful what you wish for, all good things come at a price; those old storybook warnings are starting to hit a little too close to home these days.”
“Agreed, you should go back to reading the kind of smut where a chick gets railed by demons. Manifest us all some orgasms instead of earth-shattering events, okay?”
Slipping away from me, she follows Hunter as he makes a pass around the cavern. “Sounds good to me.”
As I carefully skim my fingertips across various gemstones embedded in the wall, Hunter calls, “Dead end,” his voice echoing around the chamber.
Damian crouches near the pool. “It must let out somewhere even further underground.”
“Do you think it’s safe to drink? I know there’s some risk with that chemical possibly contaminating things out here, but so far at least we’ve been okay.”
Damian pokes a finger in the water as if assuring himself it’s not acidic. “Pretty sure dehydration is a bigger problem, so I say we go for it if we’re stuck down here indefinitely.”
Hunter crouches down beside Damian. “Agreed. See if it’s poisoned?” Without warning, he shoves his friend into the pool.
Coming up sputtering, Damian flips him off, but winds up cupping his hand to take a drink. “Tastes okay to me. I’m biased since I grew up with this water, so if it is contaminated, I’m a poor test subject. But so far I haven’t gone rabid, so that’s got to count for something.”
Taking a breather, we all wind up sitting on the edge of the pool and drinking our fill as we attempt to figure out our next move since this turned out to be a dead end. “Might not pinpoint exactly, but the tracker will have moved around somewhat I imagine, so at least they’ll know we’re not dead.
