by A L Hart
As we encroached on the staircase, I tried to imagine if it were Ophelia whom they’d captured. The smiles she greeted everyone with, her birdlike gentleness she habitually indulged and the kindness to rival a Saint, I tried to imagine her screams as they tortured her.
My foot hovered over the first step.
Turn around, Peter.
“It’s alright, Peter,” she insisted, her hand now like an inferno against mine. Or maybe that was mine. “Just think of who we’re doing this for. Think of Kyda and Anisah.”
“And Walsh?” I fished in bitter amusement.
“And Walsh,” she agreed on a hushed laugh.
We descended.
I looked at the watch on my wrist. We were six minutes and forty seconds in. The database was on sublevel D. We passed a sign reading S-B.
Two more floors.
Thirteen minutes and twenty seconds before the electricity powered back up and the agents swarmed the compound.
I was one step farther down when my phone went off.
My heart leapt into my throat, burning, searing. I fumbled to yank it out of my pocket. Looked at the screen. I was about to mute it if not for the number scrawled there.
It was the coffeeshop.
Swallowing a groan, I hit answer.
Ophelia looked at me in bewilderment.
I didn’t have time to explain. If it was Jera—who we’d left asleep without divulging our plans—I could tell her our location in case this all went south. It was too late for her to stop our expedition, but it wasn’t too late for her to save us if we needed it.
It only occurred to me that Jera didn’t know my number when I heard Danny speak into the phone.
“Hey, Boss.”
Another groan, this one audible. “Danny,” I hissed. “I told you to only call if there was an emergency. What are you doing on the shop’s phone?”
“This is an emergency,” he said. “It’s about the money. The money you’ve been paying me—”
“Don’t have time for this, Danny. I’ll pay you what I owe you when I get home.”
“But—”
“Anything else you need, ask Jera.”
“The mean lady?! She’s not even here!”
Ophelia and I continued to creep down the stairs. “Then how did you get inside—wait, what do you mean she’s not there?”
“What he means means—” My heart sank. “is I’m no fool, Peter.”
Swallowing hard, just one flight of stairs left before we reached S-D, Ophelia and I turned at the same time.
The demon beside me didn’t seem at all surprised to see the face of her sister.
Ch. 24
Jera was an image of death at top of the stairwell, the red backup light behind her doing nothing more than curdle her ghostly features into something powerfully sinister, a goddess of death rather than sex. And the way the gray of her eyes caught the red reminded me of the way she’d smelted Dave’s gun as if with a mere thought.
My heart thudded faster.
Somehow, despite our precautions, she’d managed to follow us. Had she known our plans from the start?
Suddenly I wasn’t sure what to be more afraid of, the trained killers somewhere loitered throughout the compound or the one right in front of us.
Ophelia stepped in our path, her eyes narrowed up at Jera. “This was my idea.”
“Certainly,” Jera said slowly, descending the steps with murderous grace. “For a fool such as the one you are so fond of could have never thought it up.”
Ophelia backed us towards S-D’s door. The database was just on the other side. “You may not care for the lives Peter saved, but I do. He does. Our decisions are our own. You shouldn’t have come.”
Jera paused, looked at me. The walls were down in her eyes again, those ruins of fathomless time and space peering into me. She flicked a finger in my direction. “You’re endangering my male and thus myself. I’ve every right to interfere. Besides, Lia, look at the way in which he quakes. Is it not clear he does not want to be here?”
I pursed my lips, stepped forward—
Ophelia pressed me back.
“I want to be here,” I bit out. “And we’re killing time. Dave said—”
“You’re both fools,” Jera snapped. “Dave is but a killer of our kind. HB will always choose one another no matter the circumstance. This is but a death trap and I am here to save you from it, as always. Now Peter, come.”
I remained, shoving the phone in my pocket. “You can either help us or leave, Jera.”
She could have implemented that ringing pain in my skull. Could have had me crawling to her. But even she knew that would do little more than alert the hunters to our location.
“Come, Peter, and perhaps I’ll rethink my vow of your eternal suffering,” she purred. And then she curved her lips upward in a smile, her tongue gliding over their supple flesh, telling me that could be mine. If only I went to her.
Confliction slammed down over my thoughts.
“Peter—hold your breath,” Ophelia demanded.
But it was too late. I was in that floral meadow of plush things, violet scents curling into my nostrils, stirring my insides. Delicate, velvet skies, stardust sprinkled over Jera’s existence. A blue-black scent—I needed it. To taste it, her. A kiss, her body pressed against mine, the warmth melting into me, her spine curving to the shape of me. Grinding. Giving. Taking.
Hungry.
“Come, darling,” she whispered again.
Her scent sank into me. Spread throughout me. A slow burning. Fiery inhibition. Blood rushed down, pounding a need through me that, all at once, had me marching towards a woman I knew I couldn’t live without. A woman whose silken mane I had to feel falling over my hands, over me, as she wreaked havoc onto my body again and again. Endlessly.
Take.
She could have all of me. Inside. Outside.
Consume.
She reached a hand down for such a lowly creature as myself.
I reached high for a goddess.
A force knocked into me. Yanking me the opposite direction.
“Lia!” Jera growled.
But it was too late. Her sister—her hand locked around mine—had already turned and kicked S-D’s door down, the horrendous sound of bending metal ripping me from my trance.
Ophelia dragged us inside of the translucent, spacious sublevel, where the walls were made of glass, the white linoleum floors going on for eons. A filmy blue light flickered about the room like a dying spirit, revealing the scarcities around us. The level hosted nothing other than the towering, looming beast of buttons and computer screens and hard drives.
The database.
“Don’t!” Jera roared again.
I looked over my shoulder.
Jera lingered at the threshold of the entrance, her eyes wide with terror and rage, hands balled into fist. White fangs out. Black curls dripping hazardously around those disastrously beautiful features.
“Lia, please, please come back,” she pleaded.
My brain, too foggy and trapped in the scent of lilacs and saccharine desire, lazily wondered why she shouted with such urgency, why her lip curled back over her serrates in such a vicious snare, why she refused to step into the sublevel with us.
When I turned forward to where Ophelia ran at full speed, my hand still locked in her grasp, I understood why.
Hunters surrounded us in droves.
They poured in from every corner of the sublevel, weapons raised, but they weren’t firing. Only falling into one thick, walled formation in front of us.
And at the front of them stood Dave.
Ophelia saw this. She saw this, yet her pace didn’t slow the slightest. Her hand was outreached, her attention pinned solely on the database.
If we couldn’t remove ourselves manually . . .
She was going to fry the entire system.
She never made contact.
Abruptly, body gone rigid as a corpse’s, she fell to her knees�
�just as I followed.
I felt something . . . crawling—something was crawling over me, burrowing into my skin. The ball of dark energy inside of me jerked. Expanded. Contracted. Vines whipped from it at random, lashing out at nothing.
Ophelia was crumbled up, gripping her chest. Volts of black, lethal bolts streamed from her in jagged, thin lines, forking from her as she began a slow spasm. Her skin flushed, turning paler than that of paper as her lips trembled. Black bolts zapped from them, static sounds zzzzing from them alongside a trail of spittle.
What was wrong with us?
Or, not us, but our dark energy . . .
Comprehension dwindled, eyes roaming dazedly to the database, I wondered . . . if I could just get her closer to it—
“Load her up, boys. And you, Dave—” A man clothed in what looked to be expensive, dark militant gear turned gleaming metal toward a solemn Dave. He pulled the trigger. “Good work.”
I jerked at the gunshot and watched the body fall. A spy from the start.
My eyes hardened at the sight, but the resentment was short-lived, the downward spiral inside of me going spastic, flaring and collapsing, exploding and hiding, disorienting my concentration so that when they aimed the guns at us again, I was slow to comprehend.
Slow to move.
That persistent energy inside of me, however, wasn’t.
At the horrid, resonating pop of the firearms, the iridescent feathers flared nearly the height of the computer rig, the bullets pleating against the wings like little pinches. They fluttered back once, a gust of wind knocking half of them down, then again.
But just like Ophelia’s dark energy, I lost control of my own, the wings suddenly behaving as erratically as the succubus’ lightning. They flapped open, closed. Snapped to the floor repeatedly. Spread open again as another spray of bullets were let loose, trembled, then went haywire, flapping back and forth as though unsure what else to do.
Through the whizz of surrounding, deadly bullets, one of them spoke into an earpiece. “Appears we have an unclassified on the scene. Male. 6’1. Susceptible to light energy frequencies.”
Ophelia was just as disoriented. Whatever was doing in the dark energy inside of me was disabling her more, black bolts syphoning around her in a deadly whirl.
A whirl I was impervious to. In the past, touching her lightning had never harmed me beyond repair. Would it be different now?
There was no time to ponder it.
When another round of bullets went off, I lunged for her body, closing my arms around her, crying out when her volts whipped into me relentlessly. Singing through my skin, the taste of charged electricity cranking my awareness into a sensory overload.
I didn’t let go.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to push myself to a stand, take us away from here, but my legs, they weren’t working right. My muscles, bones, every tendon and ligament in between buzzing and protesting at every action I sent down to them.
“Hold fire,” came the rough bark.
I gritted my chattering teeth, growling as my chest burned, my heart palpitating and beating wildly at the pumps of lightning striking at it endlessly. Around me, my wings flapped uselessly, bulletproof though they were.
Close, I begged them.
“Peter,” Ophelia gasped. “Go.”
A muscle ticked in my jaw. I tried to force thoughts through the brain fog, the onslaught of voltage frying my comprehension.
“Go!” she ground, hints of anger spilling into our personal enclosure. “Do not go down for my own failure.”
My lips pressed.
I would go down because of our failure. The plan was either she got out alive or we both did. My survival and her death was never one of the options.
“Go, Peter. Or they will kill you.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But if I don’t walk out of here with you, Jera will kill me. So it’s a lose-lose situation all around.”
She didn’t like that humor. She turned in my arms and placed her head into my chest so softly against the chaos around us, the wings fluttered sporadically once more, before enclosing around us gently.
I still wasn’t in control of them, but they, at the very least, wouldn’t allow that to get in the way of my sole priority here. She was the one who was supposed to make it out alive. There was nothing else to it.
But just because the dark energy responded to the overall priority, didn’t mean my limbs did. They refused to adhere to my orders. Tingling from my stomach down.
Even if I wanted to do as Ophelia said, I couldn’t make myself move.
Which was why, in the next moment, I felt her head lift from my chest, fingers of lightning trailing down my shirt, where her actual fingers pressed down flat—she shoved with what strength she could muster.
Which turned out to be a lot.
I went flying backwards, wings snapping closed around me as the hunters shot their guns. I knew what I crashed into the moment I made contact, Jera’s gruff yelp penetrating the wing’s cocoon as we both slammed into the stairwell’s wall.
The bullets didn’t stop.
The wings remained cocooned until Jera shoved me off of her, where I toppled down the stairs, but just before I went reeling back into the sublevel, I felt her hands close around one of the wing’s outer bones.
She pried the reluctant span open, reached into the cocoon of darkness and found my hand.
The moment my fingers closed around hers, the other wing snapped open, creating a wall replacing the door Ophelia had all but wrenched off. The spray of bullets continued to pelt against the bulletproof, leathery expanse to no avail.
When Jera lugged me to my feet, I found my legs in agreement with my mind again, doing as I told them to. Which, just then, I ordered them to turn around and storm back into the deathtrap of flying bullets and collect the woman in the midst of it all—
Jera pulled me the opposite direction.
“Ophelia’s still in there!” I objected.
By the grave shadows clouding her eyes, she was one hundred percent aware of the fact. Yet she still urged me forward.
“We have to save her—”
An ear splitting scream erupted behind me.
My blood chilled to ice, my heart pounding in my throat.
Ophelia’s scream.
Don’t turn around.
Bullets rained steadily.
Another scream raked my ear drums. Pain. Torment. The wretched, wet noise haunted the walls around me, soaking into my ears. No, no.
Jera was dragging me up the stairs, ignoring what I realized were my own vocalized demand for her to let go of me. “Jera, let me go! Now!”
She didn’t and my strength came back to mock me as her bone-crushing grip pulled me farther and farther from the bloody screams climbing the stairs with us, echoing long after we broke onto the field, dashed across the field.
When we got to the wall, I was vaguely aware of the shadows pursuing us and the sound of bullets smacking pathetically against my wings. All I could hear was my own roar for us to go back.
And the sound of my own failure.
Ch. 25
She torched them all.
Not a single agent remained by the time she finished, only the burning inferno spreading around the compound rapidly, smoke curling towards the star-filled sky.
Still she didn’t go back for Ophelia.
Ophelia who was most likely dead, I thought bitterly as I descended on the opposite side of the wall.
“She isn’t dead,” Jera said after we walked in silence across the miles of gravelly pastures.
Dread coating my insides, hammering around my stomach and pinching up my comprehension, I turned a solemn stare on her. “You heard her screams.”
“Injections. They neutralize our dark energy, which is essentially like snipping nerve endings without anesthesia.”
Gaze wild, body still amped by the volts her sister had shot into me, I stared questioningly, not trusting myself to spea
k.
“HB has many gadgets designed to hinder us. The collar around my sister’s neck was but one, the neutralizing agents were another, and then their newer contraption, some sort of dark energy discombobulator. Scatters the energy particles all over the place, disabling our ability to use them properly.”
I remembered one of the men mentioning light energy frequencies, but couldn’t wrap my head around it. Not when a more harrowing realization settled into me.
If they weren’t killing Ophelia, then they were doing something much worse.
The dissecting the twins had spoken of. Opening her up. Studying her insides. Ophelia had described their practices as merciless, lacking of a conscious. Was the neutralizing injection just the beginning?
I wasn’t aware I’d turned and started back towards the compound until Jera was dragging me back the direction of the car.
“Did you not hear me, human? As we are, we cannot get past that energy field. We must first rejuvenate our strength and return when we have an actual plan unlike the pathetic one you two imbeciles conspired behind my back.”
“How can you be so calm in this?” I bit out, stalking after her angrily, knowing she was right, but unwilling to let logic lead me down a coward’s path. I would have to march back through those walls. Me. No one else. Because I should have been the one on that floor screaming. Not her.
“Because one of us has to be.” It was as she’d said before. She may not have have taken on the role those around her wanted her to, but that which we needed her to, and while I knew I should have admired the resolve when it came down to something as tender as her own blood sister, it was for that very reason that I refused to submit to reason.
“We should stay near the compound and think of a new plan. The farther away we are, the longer it’ll take us to return and do what needs to be done when—”
She whirled on me, her eyes that of frost and raging storms. “Peter, you went behind my back. You nearly got yourself killed because you were thinking with that enragingly human organ beating in your chest. Your time for making decisions is over.”