Someone on the other side of the door pounded on it twice.
“We have to go,” Clarisse urged.
We made our way out of the dark, cramped portion of the building, through an entry area with plush couches, full of natural light spilling in through stained glass windows from the top of the great door to the ceiling. We passed the tiled entry, void of any living beings, and made our way down a wider, more decorated hall. Clarisse stepped aside when she brought me to another door, and two Hunters took three steps to stand at each side of me.
“Come in,” a familiar voice called, despite the Hunters’ lack of knocking on the door.
The two Hunters escorted me into an office and shut the door while Clarisse waited outside. If this guy was here, Marcus’s father couldn’t be far.
“Please,” John said, waving to the empty chair before his desk as though I were a business associate of his and not his captive. “Have a seat.”
I didn’t need my huldra abilities to smell the strong cologne he wore, no doubt a habit from working with huldra who could smell the scent of his emotions.
John. The male who had vowed to protect the Washington huldra coterie as the leader of the Washington Hunter complex, who’d looked me in the eyes and spilled poisonous lies from his mouth as though he were a mama bird feeding her young. And we had eaten those lies up as though our lives depended on it.
I seethed with something stronger than anger. Hate. Malice. The desire to see him, above anyone else, the slow victim of my huldra’s worst torture.
I refused to sit in his presence, but it only took one nod from him and the two Hunters shoved my shoulders down, forcing me to take a seat. I balled my fists at the pain in my side and thigh, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing me cry or seeing me shudder.
I stared daggers at the man.
“Thank you,” he said as though I’d had any choice in the matter.
Plaques and ribbons, all with some sort of dagger insignia, littered the office walls. This couldn’t be his office; it had to belong to the silver-haired man in most of the photos who looked very much like the Hunter who’d shot Marcus and Shawna in Maine. I eyed the most prominently displayed name on the plaques and awards, set on burning it into my memory. Joseph Alexander had most certainly made my slow-torture list.
John noticed my wandering eyes and said, “Yes, old Joe’s been kind enough to let me use his office for the time being.” He stretched and leaned back in his swivel office chair. “I thought we could use someplace private to talk.”
I almost rolled my eyes, but I didn’t even want to give him that. I kept my expression blank.
“You are a prisoner in our home, so to say,” John started. His hair had a little more salt than when I asked him for help in finding Shawna at the Washington complex and he’d denied my request with some bullshit about her being in succubus territory. Then he’d told me his job was to protect us from ourselves.
Goddess, I wanted to strangle him where he sat.
“If you play nice, once we’re done taming this little uprising you’ve caused, you will be promoted to a guest in our home.” He spoke in that casual friendly way he used to talk to us when we came in for our monthly check-ins and when he taught his version of Wild Women history—his story. “You have become quite the commodity, and I’d hate to see one of my men end your life. It’d be a waste. And if I dislike anything, it’s waste.”
John stood and scooted his chair in under the desk. “Have I made myself clear?”
I stared forward.
I noticed him making a motion from my peripheral view. The Hunter to my right grabbed my chin in his calloused hand and forced my head to nod. When he pulled his hand away he wiped it on his black cargo pants.
“Good, good,” John said, as though he hadn’t just forced my fake compliance. “You can go now. You look like you could use some fresh air.”
The two Hunters pulled me from the chair and walked me down the hall and out a side door into an enclosed area. They released me but didn’t remove my burdensome shawl. They turned and shut the door behind them, leaving me alone in what looked to be a courtyard of sorts, if courtyards included twenty-foot tall chain-link fencing with barbed wire at the top, a few planters of weeds, a human-sized cage, and one lone red maple tree.
I hated the way I felt without access to my huldra, vulnerable, weak, and utterly incapable. I’d been around bloodstone before—rescued my sister from a room at the end of a bloodstone filled hall; helped the succubi escape from a prison cell covered in bloodstone. But I’d never had the stuff draped over my body.
I made my way over to the maple tree, with its thick, old trunk and exposed roots peeking up through the dirt. I ran a hand along its smooth bark and pressed my cheek to the trunk. Which had come first, I wondered, the tree or the monastery. And had this building started as a monastery? Did it include underground passageways as Aleksander had mentioned traditional monasteries had? I needed to find someone here willing to talk, someone who wouldn’t just parrot how they were not authorized to tell me things.
I racked my brain for Hunter facts Marcus had told me. They couldn’t be alone with females, which probably had something to do with why they sent Clarisse in to cover me with my shawl before they entered the room to escort me out. Clarisse also wasn’t allowed to be alone with a male, due to her being engaged, which from the ring I saw on her finger, was still a thing.
I paused and remembered more recent discussions I’d shared with Marcus. This was the complex where the Hunters were holding the women they were trafficking out of the country. But where were they keeping them? I held to the tree but took in my surroundings. The grounds appeared well-maintained, outside the current courtyard I stood in, and quiet. No sign of groups of drugged-up young women waiting to be transported.
Goddess, I hoped I didn’t find Heather here. I would never forgive myself for asking her to be bait. Though—the thought gave me a shred of hope—whichever Hunter tried to detain her would assume she was human and would be unprepared for an energy-controlling succubus.
The door from the hallway to the courtyard opened again and a tall, lean woman who looked to be in her fifties slowly made her way out, a Hunter on each side of her holding what looked like wrist shackles imbedded with bloodstone. She eyed me as they walked her to the cage, escorted her inside, closed the cage door, and unlocked her shackles as she held her arms through an opening. Once they removed her shackles she pulled her arms into herself and rubbed her wrists vigorously.
We stared at one another as the Hunters exited the courtyard. The moment the door to the building shut, I hurried over to the cage as quickly as my side would let me and stopped before I got within reaching distance. She looked familiar, not like I knew her, but as though she looked like someone I knew.
“You’re a harpy, aren’t you?” I blurted, assuming they’d placed her in a cage so she couldn’t fly away.
The woman sized me up with a sharp gaze. It was her, I was sure of it. Goddess, her mannerisms were just like her daughters’.
When she didn’t answer I kept going. “I know your daughters, Eonza, Lapis, and Salis. You must be Rose.”
The woman lifted her left eyebrow but gave no other indication as to her thoughts or feelings.
“Eonza is pregnant and due to birth the egg any day now,” I whispered, nearing the cage.
The woman’s hard expression dropped as she cradled her face into her hands. Her shoulders fell forward and her chest heaved with silent cries. I wanted so badly to wrap my arm around her, to comfort her. All I had, though, were my words. “She’s healthy and safe. All three of your daughters are.”
The harpy, Rose, looked up at me. Her blue eyes now bloodshot from crying. “They haven’t been taken?” she asked in a small voice.
I shook my head. “No, they’re hiding in a motel, last I heard. They’d put us in empty homes unconnected to any Wild Woman names.”
She gave a faint smile. “My girls
are very intelligent.”
Damn straight they were. Except for the whole journalist Brice snafu, which didn’t need to be brought up at the moment.
“They told me they’d taken my girls also, to different complexes, separated them,” she said, her voice growing in strength.
I shook my head. “They lied. What’s new?”
“So then, I assume you have not come to rescue me. What are you?” she asked, looking me over for a sign as to which Wild group I heralded from.
I shook my head. “My name is Faline. I’m a huldra,” I said, finding an ounce of joy by just conversing with another Wild, by being able to proudly state my name and kind. Then there was the fact that if their mother was alive, my mother really might be too.
Rose tilted her head in a quick, sharp movement like a bird in thought.
“What?” I asked. “Did they tell you lies about me too?”
“From the Washington huldra coterie?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s where I’m from. The only huldra in the United States,” I confirmed. “Why?”
She gazed into my eyes a moment and neared the cage. “Because,” she whispered under her breath, “I’ve met your mother. Naomi, she’s here.”
Fifteen
“My mother?” I breathed the words, clinging to the harpy’s cage. “She’s alive?”
My head started to spin and I realized I had been holding my breath. I inhaled deeply, my wide eyes locked on Rose.
“She is,” she answered with a nod. “Though I doubt they will allow both of you air time at once.”
“Air time?” I asked.
“Yes.” She cleared her throat. “It’s why they bring us out here, to breathe fresh air. They believe the oxygen keeps us healthy, more able to reproduce.”
My head spun again, but for a different reason. I knew they’d taken Shawna and other Wild Women with hopes of creating a Wild/Hunter hybrid. But Rose’s explanation made it more real. “Have they been trying to procreate with you and my mother?” I asked, a new anger rising within me.
“They have,” she said, her eyes cast down. “Though with us they have not been successful. She tells me they’ve tried different methods through the years, and she believes they’ve been effective, though she refused to say how she knows that.”
I had so many questions about their breeding program, if I could call it that, but none rang louder in my mind than the fact that my mother was alive. “How does my mother look?” I asked, knowing full well I had little to compare Rose’s analysis with, seeing as the Hunters took my mother when I was only seven. “Does she have a schedule? When she comes out here?”
Rose’s chest moved like she’d silently chuckled. “They don’t afford us schedules. I suspect they think it gives us an upper hand, makes them more predictable. And she looks good. She misses you.”
I felt like a little girl in my aunt’s lap, hoping to pry a story out of her about my mother, something to keep me warm at night. “She does?” I heard myself say in that little girl voice.
Rose’s smile warmed—the smile of a mother who knows a hurting little one when she sees her. She leaned in, closer to the metal cage. “When I first arrived I only plotted to escape. But after my faulty plans failed me,” she tapped the cage, “your mother lifted my spirits by talking with me about that which we are most proud of, our daughters.”
A tear welled in my eyes. “How?” I asked. “How could she have been here so long and still be able to raise your spirits? A newcomer?”
Rose took a slow breath. “It’s that tree.” She motioned with her head to the single old tree in the courtyard. “During her years with the Hunters, she had been moved from complex to complex. But she’s been here the longest, long enough, according to her, to get acquainted with what she deems as her plant family. She spends her outdoor time with the tree, says its wisdom lifts her spirits.” Rose shrugged.
“We have to escape; we have to get her out.” My arms ached with emptiness, now that the rusalka’s promise of my mother’s life had been confirmed. Knowing she was here, so close to me, in the same building…my heart ached too.
The rusalki were able to communicate with other Wild Women once they located where to project themselves. They only needed to learn where I was to make a connection with me and speak into my mind, to visit me. If I could tell them where we were being held, they could all move forward with plans to attack this complex and free the last of the Wild Women imprisoned by Hunters.
If they were all still alive.
Just as quickly as my hope soared, it crashed and burned…a lot like our attack on the Maine complex. I kept that depressing bit of news to myself. Goddess, I hoped they’d all made it out of that complex okay.
“I’ve tried to escape this place before. It ended badly,” Rose said grimly. “But I was on my own in that attempt. This time there are three of us. Better odds, I’d say.” Her lips lifted into a hopeful grin. Her brown eyes also seemed to grin. “I suspect you’re being kept a secret, even from other Hunters. The Brotherhood knows there’s human women here, and the top tiers of leaders know about your mom and me, but you’ve been kept a secret. I will spread word of your arrival.”
“Huldra eight-two-zero-one-three,” a man boomed from right outside the door to the brick monastery.
I tried to ignore him.
“Oh, honey,” Rose said, shaking her head. “They’ll get what they want in the end anyhow. If you don’t go to him, he’ll make your walk back to your room very painful. Believe me, I know from experience.”
I let out a huff and wished I could hug her goodbye. “I’ll get us out of here,” I assured her.
Her tired smile revealed her unspoken response. She highly doubted it.
I lay on the lumpy bed and gazed out the window. A half-eaten tray of toast and chicken noodle soup sat on the nightstand. I’d tried to gulp down the food, I’d tried to sleep, but knowing my mother slept under the same roof as me kept my body buzzing. It was a strange thing, but I missed my huldra. She had to have had a connection with my mother, even if I didn’t remember it. I wanted to feel her reaction to the news, feel her jittery excitement and eagerness to break down the door and track our mother down.
Did my huldra have a separate and deeper connection to my mother’s huldra? I’d never asked my sisters if mothers and daughters experienced such a thing; I’d never thought to.
I wondered this as I watched clouds move through the dark sky, barely lit by the bit of moon they hid from view.
For years I’d believed my mother to be dead, until my hunt for Shawna revealed the truth behind the missing Wild Women and my own mother’s abduction. After that, I worried I’d never get the chance to see her again, worried she’d died in captivity. And when I was told she was still alive, another worry lived in my heart, the worry that she’d go the way of all huldra in their fifties, that she would die young. Each passing day was one less I’d get to spend with her.
A muffled knock created a soft sound on my door. I sat up in a hurry and sucked in a quick breath at the stinging in my side. I wished one of my aunts were here to care for the wound.
A dark-skinned man peeked his head in. “Faline?” he whispered, barely audibly.
My muscles tightened with fear and the need to defend myself when he crept into the room without my invitation. He wore the black uniform of a Hunter. His dagger glinted in its holster along his hip from the small amount of light coming through the window.
I had no weapon. I had no huldra abilities. And I was wounded and weak. I could not protect myself. But hell if I’d let him take me without a fight.
He quietly closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it. It looked as though he were waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Thanks to my lack of huldra abilities, I’d had some recent experience in that necessity.
He spoke again with quiet formality. “Faline Frey of the Washington huldra coterie, are you awake?”
Hunters don’t know our names
, and even if they found our names out through a little digging, they’d never call us by them. To them we were numbers, not worthy of names.
I paused my thoughts of using anything and everything in this room to bash over his head and into his stomach, including the cross hanging on the wall made of wooden daggers. Why they thought that’d be a safe item to place in a detainment room, I had no idea.
I tried to smell his emotions, but with my non-existent abilities, nothing registered.
“Marcus sent me,” he whispered, his voice nearly as low as a growl.
“Yes?” I answered, squinting to get a better look at him.
It could be a trap, but what else did I have to lose?
“Is he okay?” I asked, to gauge whether this Hunter was friend or foe by his response.
He took a step and his boot hit the leg of my bed. “He was shot, but the xana was able to use water manipulation to get the bullet out and the succubi healed him. Same with the incubi leader and your sister. They are all well and healed.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
I highly doubted anyone other than a person who knew Marcus would have that sort of information, those details. But to be sure, I pressed further. “Why did Marcus send you?”
He suppressed a laugh and it came out as a type of scoff. “He’d said you wouldn’t trust me ’til you tested me and asked a personal question only Marcus and you could know.”
I nodded and realized he probably couldn’t see me. Just like I barely saw his chest rise and fall to know he’d stifled a laugh.
“Since I can’t possibly remember all the answers to anything you’d ask, he told me to tell you about a time that only he, you, and a rusalka would know. A recent instance in which powerful erotic energy was used to physically transport you?” His statement sounded more like a question and I didn’t blame him. A rusalka using a huldra’s orgasm as energy to teleport her to a forest? That sounded like something out of a sci-fi novel, not my actual life.
Wild Women Collection Page 62