Firestorm (Smoke & Ashes Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

  Yeah, vampires weren’t exactly known to stick together. They were loners.

  “The same way she got the were-cheetah pack to work for her,” Abraham said from the back. “She’s giving them something. Or at least promising them something.”

  “And you have no clue what it could be?” I asked because he was supposed to know this shit better than us. He had visions about it.

  But he shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  Me neither, but the feeling in my gut insisted it had something to do with him. With angels. And I couldn’t wait to find out what it was.

  “It doesn’t matter, anyway. They’ll all be gone for good by sunrise. The fuckers bit me four times,” Feather Girl said with a sigh, looking down at her body. She was right—her clothes were ripped almost all the way off, and there was blood all over her. It was…nice not to be the only one who looked like that, actually.

  “Hey, where did you learn to fight like that?” I thought to ask. Vampires were a handful. Without magic, you had no advantage against their enhanced senses and movements. But she had no trouble killing at least three that I saw.

  “Downstairs. I fought in the Fourth Circle for a year. Long story,” she said with a flinch.

  Wow. The Fourth Circle of Hell was mostly inhabited by monsters and beasts and every other creature whose sins hadn’t only transformed the souls after death, but their physical appearance, too. Needless to say, it was not a nice place to be in, let alone fight in. It was definitely a story I wanted to hear—just not in front of Abraham. Or Chelsea. She still hadn’t recovered from watching us fight with the vampires.

  “You okay there, Chelsea?”

  She looked at me through the rearview mirror like she was surprised I was even there. “No, I’m not okay. What kind of a stupid question is that?” she snapped. I grinned. Yeah, she was going to be okay. “You’re not okay when there’s vampires coming out of the woods. And you’ve been bitten by a fucking shifter, and you turn into a were-cheetah. And you need angel-guy here to keep you in check.” She turned to Abraham. “No offense, Abrah.”

  “None taken,” he said, stifling a smile.

  “Do you see why you need to stay behind when we go after the bitch, then?” Because she was not going to be there, no matter what we had to do.

  “Oh, I’m definitely not coming. No, thank you. Chain me to the fucking fridge or something, I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere,” she said, and it made my night. Convincing Chelsea when she didn’t want to be convinced was like trying to break through a ten-foot-wide concrete wall with a tiny hammer and no more than human strength.

  “Actually, we won’t be chaining you to the fridge. You’re going to stay with Jo,” I said, then bit my lip. Chelsea knew very well who Joleen was. She hated her with a passion I never understood, claiming Joleen had had more responsibility toward me than just to put food on the table when she agreed to care for me.

  But maybe her feelings had changed recently. We hadn’t talked about it in a while…

  “I am not staying with that bitch.” Nope. Still the same.

  “It’s not a choice. She’s the only one I trust with this.” And the only one who would be able to do something with her magic if Chelsea started shifting and I wasn’t there. In fact, I’d be more than happy to ask Joleen to make a spell or a potion with her herbs and plants to knock Chelsea out for a whole day if it meant keeping her from hurting herself.

  “I’ve never even met her. I don’t like her. You know this,” Chelsea complained, but she already knew she had no choice.

  “Okay then. I’ll take you to your parents so you can shift and rip them apart with your claws.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Fine,” she mumbled, then proceeded to curse me under her breath in all kinds of fun ways.

  “You’ll be okay,” Abraham told her, just when I was about to. The fucker. He didn’t get to steal my lines with my best friend.

  “You’ll be okay, Chelsea,” I said through gritted teeth, throwing a pointed look at Abraham through the rearview mirror, which he completely missed.

  “Yeah, Chelsea. You’ll be okay,” Feather Girl said, grinning at me like she could see right into my mind.

  “Let’s just get this over with. I’m tired. I wanna go home,” Chelsea said.

  That was no problem at all for me. I was looking forward to meeting with the were-cheetahs and finding out which one exactly had bitten her. That person and I were going to have a lot of fun together.

  Or at least I was.

  Lexar was right behind us on his bike. It would only take us another ten minutes to get to Lafayette Hills, and I needed a moment to talk to him before we met with the were-cheetahs and probably Michael Alifair. I needed the cheetah who bit Chelsea, and Lexar was going to have to come to an agreement with the master alpha because, technically speaking, shifters were his jurisdiction. He would normally carry out the punishment for the biting, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  But I also couldn’t be trusted to negotiate, especially with a man like Alifair, so it would have to be Lexar. I was in deep shit with him—letting him join me in the hunt in the first place and then relying on him for so much—so why not ask this little thing from him, too?

  I figured it wouldn’t hurt.

  And then I forgot all about the were-cheetahs and the bites and the master alpha.

  “What the hell is that?” Feather Girl whispered in awe.

  Ahead, in the distance, the sky wasn’t as dark as everywhere else. Blue lights rose high in curvy patterns, almost like a mutated aurora. The phoenix inside me raised her head to look, and the panic was instant in both of us. The light glowed bright blue, exactly like it had in the basement of that house when we first met the bitch, and she channeled the evil spirit out into the world.

  It looked exactly like that. I hit the brakes without really thinking about it. We were on a highway somewhere, I couldn’t even remember the name, and the light was coming from the north. It was as beautiful as it was terrifying, and it was so big. The evil spirit in the basement hadn’t been that big, had it?

  When someone knocked on the window to my side, I almost set the entire car on fire. I turned to see Lexar, his eyes focused ahead on the light in the sky, waiting for me to open the window.

  “It’s the evil spirit,” I said halfheartedly, knowing exactly what that meant.

  “She’s there,” Lexar said.

  “Oh, my God. She’s there?” Chelsea cried.

  “Finally,” said Feather Girl. “We’ve waited long enough.”

  “But it’s too much,” Abraham said. “I’ve read about dybbuks. They don’t grow as big as that light. What are the odds that that’s something else?”

  “No, it’s the dybbuk. Nothing else glows like that.” Lexar looked down at me. “Are you ready for another fight?”

  Hah! Are you ready, he said. “Of course, I am.”

  “Because you know it’s not going to be like it was with the vampires. If—”

  “Stay close,” I cut him off and closed the window.

  I hadn’t planned on finding the nocturnal bitch tonight, but if she was there, even better. I hit the gas, and the car shot forward, nearly slamming into another that had been coming from my side. I hadn’t even noticed. They honked at me, and I normally would have at least flipped them the bird, but I was too busy thinking to care.

  “Abraham, how far exactly does your power reach?” Because Chelsea was going to have to stay in the car. Far away from the fight, as far away as she could without the risk of shifting.

  “About half a mile,” he said, but he didn’t sound all too sure. “I will be focused on the fight, too, so I’m not sure how that will affect Chelsea.” He was either a really good actor, or he was genuinely concerned.

  “You’re just going to have to make sure to keep your focus on her. Trust me, you won’t need to fight. We’ll be enough to handle the bitch. And the evil spirit.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Chelsea sai
d. “Just kill her quick.”

  That was the plan. I drove like a maniac for the next ten minutes, and Lexar always stuck behind me. Cars honked as I passed them by, but I paid them no attention. My mind was buzzing, Chelsea at the center of it. How could I protect her if she was half a mile away from me? Because the bitch wouldn’t be alone this time. The were-cheetah pack would probably be with her; otherwise, the master alpha wouldn’t have texted us this same address.

  The phoenix in me cried, insisting that there was a perfectly easy solution to this entire situation. All I had to do was take off the bracelet and let her out, and it would all be over within minutes.

  She kept forgetting what it would mean if the world found out about her in the first place. It couldn’t happen, not unless I had absolutely no other choice. So, for now, she was going to stay inside, no matter how loudly she protested. I swear, her cries could kill an entire town if she were close enough. She sounded just like death.

  Soon, I wouldn’t have to worry about her pressure, though. Soon, I’d be fighting, and when I fought, everything else came to a pause.

  I imagined the worst possible scenario before getting there.

  What I was looking at now was a lot worse.

  The low hill we were standing on was just to the side of a narrow road with so many holes in the asphalt, you’d think rocks rained upon it constantly. Chelsea was there, in the car, holding two of my knives in her shaking hands, and the rest of us were looking ahead, right where the blue lights were coming from.

  Yes, lights—plural. Both Abraham and Lexar had been right. An evil spirit wasn’t that big. It couldn’t make that much light.

  But several evil spirits together definitely could.

  For the longest second, none of us could find a single word to say. The hill wasn’t steep, and it was another quarter mile of dry, empty land to the spot the evil spirits hovered over. There were other low hills on each side, and to our left was a large yellowish rock formation that almost looked like it was put there on purpose. It towered over everything else, reaching even higher than the evil spirits, at least two hundred feet. And it smelled of water here, too, but there wasn’t any building of any kind in sight.

  There were two vans, though, very close to the evil spirits, and there were people around them. I couldn’t see their faces—they were too far away, but I could feel all their eyes on us.

  And right under the evil spirits was the nocturnal bitch.

  I couldn’t make out her face, but who else would be sitting down in front of what looked like a gigantic hole in the ground, arms by her sides, looking up at the sky? No, at the evil spirits. Just how many of them were there? I tried to count but only succeeded in making myself dizzy. The way they were moving…I had never seen anything like it.

  They were blue, and they glowed, but that’s where the similarities ended. Some of them were long and tall, other were big and wide. They all had faces of monsters, beautiful monsters that took your breath away, like they had come straight out of a dream. They were swirling and dancing around one another, becoming one before separating again, their motions in perfect harmony. The circle they made was easily fifty feet wide, and from where I was standing, it looked like they’d completely taken over the sky.

  “I count six,” Lexar said eventually, and his voice was dry. Even in Hell, you didn’t see stuff like this every day.

  “What’s the plan?” Feather Girl asked, and to her credit, she sounded perfectly normal. Maybe because she knew she’d just wake up in Hell again if she died here tonight.

  “We go in, we kill the bitch.” There was no better plan in the world.

  “What about the were-cheetahs?” Abraham asked. And he was right. But the were-cheetahs had already taken second place now. I was no longer interested in them as much.

  “Annabelle and I will take care of the were-cheetahs. It should be quick,” Lexar said.

  “Abraham, how big of a light can you make with those hands?” I pointed at the evil spirits in the distance. “As big as that?”

  “No, but more powerful,” he said with a flinch.

  “Powerful enough to break the bitch’s connection with the evil spirits?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never come across anything like it.” That made two of us.

  “It will be a distraction,” Lexar said. “And then Sassy can go for the witch.”

  “Should be relatively easy if the evil spirits keep dancing up there.” And if the were-cheetahs weren’t protecting the bitch, there was nothing stopping me from killing her even from a distance.

  “What the hell are they doing? What is she doing?” Feather Girl asked, and I had no clue what to tell her.

  “If those evil spirits gather enough power to exist on their own, killing the witch won’t make a difference,” Lexar said. In other words: we’re screwed.

  “Let’s just make sure that doesn’t happen then,” I said and looked back at the car, where Chelsea was still sitting in the back seat. “And where the hell is Alifair? You said he’d be here.”

  “Possibly watching from a distance,” Lexar said, looking around the hills. It was too dark to make anything out on them, the only light coming from the half moon and the evil spirits. “I suspect they’ll join the fight once we do.”

  “In that case,” I said, unzipping my hoodie. That thing was priceless, and I didn’t want to risk ruining it here. I threw it on the ground behind me, hoping I’d find it there when this was over. “I’m ready to kill.”

  I started running down the hill.

  25

  Adrenaline laced the blood in my veins, making me feel nearly invincible. Beside me, the others ran just as fast. My mind was clear—there was no room to think about Chelsea or the were-cheetahs or anything else that would distract me from killing the nocturnal bitch and making sure those evil spirits disappeared for good. Nothing was going to go wrong because I’d already decided that I wasn’t leaving here until that happened. Only a decision away.

  The air grew thicker the closer we got to the evil spirits. It was fully charged with magic, more magic than I had ever felt in my life. A lot more than what was inside me. My phoenix cried, her voice filling my mind as I watched the nocturnal bitch, still sitting on the ground, eyes closed, arms wide open. If she knew we were here, she just didn’t give a shit. But I’d underestimated her enough. This time, I was giving it my everything.

  Lightning lit up the sky like fireworks, and to my left, Lexar’s entire body was sizzling with electricity. On my other side, Abraham’s hands were glowing, not nearly enough to make anyone even squint, but it meant he was ready. Next to him, Feather Girl kept her eyes on the bitch, a furious expression on her face.

  Lightning struck, the sound of it hitting the ground almost deafening me. Dust took up half the view in front of us, and when it settled, I could see the were-cheetah pack clearly now. We were barely twenty feet away, and they could see us, too. They were getting ready.

  One of them, a guy who looked huge even from the distance, started to undress. The alpha of the pack. Behind him were the rest, at least twenty people that I could see, and they were all mimicking the alpha. The shifting began just as another lightning bolt hit the ground, terribly close to the pack, and for a split second, I could see every detail of the distorted bodies, changing from human to animal with an incredible speed. Skin tore, bones broke, even blood spilled as the shifting continued, and the cries of the men and women who were there to stop us turned to growls and hisses.

  “Stop!” I said to the others as I tried to halt in place, but I’d been running too fast, so I went another few feet ahead. The were-cheetahs were right in front of us now, but they weren’t the only ones. There were four werewolves among them, and I could only recognize them by the fur. Theirs was much longer than the cheetahs’, but their eyes were just as hungry as they looked at us. The alpha was the biggest, at least four feet to the shoulders, with a head that was too wide to be normal, but he carried it without tro
uble. His yellow eyes shone blue because of the evil spirits’ glow over his head.

  “Abraham, it’s show time,” I said under my breath, knowing that the shifters could hear me. I looked at the bitch again, but she hadn’t moved a single inch from her place. The evil spirits were still dancing around one another, floating in the sky like they owned it.

  “Protect your eyes,” Abraham said, and I only had a second to see the alpha cheetah charge at us, before I spun around with both my arms in front of my face and ducked.

  Even so, the light still reached me. I could see it behind my closed lids, feel it in the air, light as a feather, chasing away the magic of the evil spirits like a hurricane.

  It was over in a heartbeat, like the flash on a camera. I kept my eyes closed as I stood up, afraid of going blind, but there was no more strong light behind my lids—only the blue one.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw what the light had done.

  The evil spirits were half the size of what they had been just a second ago. They were still moving, still glowing, but they weren’t as big. And they were angry. Their huge jaws were open, each one of them lined with teeth as big as my head, and they roared.

  The were-cheetahs sounded the same but not only because they were angry. They were in pain, too. About half of them didn’t look like normal oversized cheetahs anymore. The first one I saw was standing on two legs, and as his fur shed from his body, I could see that his legs were shifting to human. Another, this one a woman, had hair coming out of her cheetah head—long blonde human hair. Even one of the werewolves had been affected by Abraham’s healing magic, and instead of paws, he howled at his human fingers on one of his front legs.

  But the alpha and a lot of others were perfectly intact. They were already coming for us, and Lexar and Feather Girl shot out ahead to meet them halfway. Lightning struck and feathers flew in an instant. The growls and howls and screams filled my head when I turned to Abraham, whose eyes were on the evil spirits. They were growing bigger, and we were almost right underneath them now. At least twenty feet over the ground, they kept locked in their dance, never even looking down at us—but the bitch was. Her eyes were open, and she was looking right at me. It wasn’t a nice look, as I’m sure mine wasn’t, either.