“So the girl born a monster thinks more human than the men and women who were born as humans?” he asks. “Didn’t you truly start all this because you wanted to protect your people and forge a better future, while surrounding and protecting the woman you all loved?”
I sit quietly, not saying a word.
“Violet finds your overprotective nature a bit overbearing and inconvenient at times. Idun, however, used it against you,” he says.
“Why are you educating me on my own life, incubus? Tread carefully. When we land, I may take some of this personal, and you’re no match for me.”
“Posturing, Mr. Morrigan? I can assure you I mean no offense, and I’m quite aware of our gap in the pecking order. I fully respect your position as an alpha,” the bullshitter spews.
“You’ll immediately lower yourself to kissing ass?” I ask, not believing my ears.
He grins. “Of course, Mr. Morrigan. An incubus has very little pride when it comes to avoiding violence.”
Yep. Just as condescending as Vance, but also as cheeky and arrogant as Damien.
Serves the Morpheous right for being stuck with this prat.
We both sit up straighter when we reach the coordinates, because there’s nothing there but a patch of woods.
“Land this thing and come find me,” I tell him as I shove open the door and free fall, strategically dropping in a small clearing that’s just enough to avoid the thicker branches.
A few smaller ones break against me as I fall through them, and the ground sinks when I land. My knees bounce just barely, and I straighten, looking around for some sign as to where—
Edward, the sketchy ghost, pops up, standing across from me, and he gives me a wave.
“Where the hell is he?”
He points toward his feet to a patch of undisturbed and inconspicuous earth.
“How do I get down there?”
He shrugs. “Pandora disappeared from the graveyard. It took some work to find him. I can just pop down there, but I can’t break him free from the silver statue he currently is.”
“What?” I ask incredulously.
“Maybe one of the trees is a secret lever?” he guesses, genuinely useless.
“Or maybe this is bullshit and you’re some fucked up ghost yanking our dicks,” I suggest.
“You really do have a certain fascination with your lower appendage, don’t you?” he quips, while appearing to search for a secret lever in earnest.
“If this is just some devious ghost prank, I will kill you. Dead.”
I add that last part just to let him know it’ll be permanent, since ghosts haven’t been staying dead, as of late.
“The longer you stand here watching me try to do something productive, while you do nothing, the longer Violet gets her ass kicked by Idun. She’ll take it until you have the Van Helsing safely returned.”
The blood feels to drain from my body, and he grins.
“The Van Helsing is here. I assure you. I have no prior experience with diabolical witches, secret underground lairs, or spells that make Van Helsing silver go crazy. I’m afraid you’ll have to be a hero at some point.”
Staring down at the ground, I lift my foot, and I stomp as hard as I can. The dirt gives, and pain shoots up my leg, as something metallic groans an echo under me.
“There really is an underground lair,” I say with some honest surprise.
“There are also some shifters you should probably kill before they sneak up on you,” the ghost tells me.
I whirl around just in time to surprise the bitch, who is mid-swing with a silver sword. I catch it just before it hits my throat, and a slow grin curves my lips, while a growl bubbles in my chest.
Her eyes widen in horror, along with the eyes of the males behind her.
“Finally. I’ve been needing a good fight. Twenty shifters? Sounds fun,” I state with a growing grin.
Predictably, they all recover from the surprise and immediately attack. It’s almost too easy to counter their moves, and I feel cheated the good fight I was expecting.
Without even summoning my wolf, I effortlessly dodge strikes and remove heads, my claws stretched and sharp as daggers. In the midst of severing a body through the middle, I hear an explosion, and the ground rattles under me, momentarily distracting me.
The billowing smoke in the distance is the same direction Talbot went to land the helicopter.
Pain slices through my chest, and I choke on air when I see the silver sword poking through the wrong side of my chest. They always aim for the heart.
They usually miss, since my heart’s not where it should be.
Guess Idun hasn’t sold all our secrets.
My elbow swings back, catching my attacker in the face, and even with a sword stabbed through me, I manage to thin the remaining flock very quickly.
Just as I spin, removing the final head, Talbot comes racing through the trees ahead of me, blood smeared all over his face. His clothes are singed, and his face is a mix of ash and green blood.
“You were just going to land the helicopter and come find me,” I tell him, as I grab the oversized, double-headed axe from the ground.
“Yes, well, we’ll be walking home. I wasn’t prepared for a shifter with a bazooka. The world is entirely too fucked up these days,” he says on panted breaths, as he bends over and grabs his knees, heaving in fresh air.
“Idun wouldn’t have armed them with hand-to-hand combat weapons if she’d expected us to find this place,” I say as I swing the axe, barely making a dent in the metal. “They didn’t come out until I struck metaphorical gold. They hesitated when they realized it was me, but shifters fight to the death, once engaged in conflict.”
“Well, that’s food for thought,” the ghost chimes in.
Talbot eyes the bodies with some confusion, as he gestures around me.
“I took down two and you took down twenty, all while discovering what appears to be an underground dungeon. And you did all this in the five minutes it took me to escape a bazooka, lose the helicopter, and nearly die three times. My days aren’t usually this eventful. By the way, we really do need a new way home, and hitchhiking didn’t look to be much of a feasible option. I didn’t notice many roads in this section.”
I swing the axe down again, wincing in some pain, even as I strike the same spot just hard enough to break a split in the metal.
“Fuck’s sake, there’s a sword sticking through your heart. A silver sword. How are you not dead?” he asks as he comes closer. “Isn’t this a kill method even for an alpha?”
It’s not even Van Helsing silver, so it barely stings, unless I move too freely.
I swing the axe again, this time breaking the fucking weapon, while making barely a dent in the metal.
“Violet’s going to be beaten to death in a game of tag. Instead of wagging your chin, perhaps you could fucking help out,” I bite out, my anger steadily rising, as my wolf tries to surface.
“Go get the sword out of your chest, since that’s probably not very safe. I’ll work on this,” he says as he picks up another axe and gives me a nod, his eyes dipping to the blade poking through my chest.
“If you’ve never seen battle, how are all the legends about you true?” I ask the possible imposter.
“I’ve seen plenty of battles and stabbed a lot of hearts. Most of them die. They don’t immediately start stabbing into metal,” he says, as I turn my back to him.
“Pull it out. It’s silver. It’ll likely work better against this metal,” I tell him, glancing back to see him staring at me in some mild horror.
“Could you at least pretend this is causing a significant amount of pain instead of being nonchalant about it? I have big balls too, but I still cry when I’m stabbed. Wolves are more especially allergic to silver.”
Damien Morpheous has to be his idol. It’s like speaking to a true protégé.
After a breath of my frustration is released, his lips thin and he reaches over and pulls the sword
out. I wince, feeling the burn of the silver sliding through me.
“It’s moderate compared to the burn of Van Helsing silver,” I assure him. “And wolves have a stronger allergy than most, likely because we were the most aggressive the night of the sacrifice. Incensed, really. We’d sacrificed loved ones for immortality. Then it was all slipping away. At the time all the rules first went into play, we were the biggest threat, due to our rage and constant anger.”
Turning, I take the silver sword from him and start hacking into the metal with it, finding some better results. I talk to distract myself from the severity of my wound, because I’m half woozy by the time I finally make a big enough tear in the metal to be of some use.
“I’m bleeding heavily and not far from blacking out, unless—”
He pulls some vials from his pocket and hands them to me. “I had more, but they didn’t survive my less-than-graceful landing, when I had to abruptly abandon the helicopter.”
He kneels and grabs the edges of the ripped metal, pulling hard enough to start bending it, as he grunts and groans, straining with enough effort to redden his face.
I drink both vials, hesitating only after finishing. Fuck’s sake, I simply drank them without even sniffing them first.
“If you turn out to be on Idun’s side, I’ll kill you, Talbot Lane,” I inform him.
He moves to the other side, grabbing the metal and pulling it as well, quickly bending it.
My wound starts closing very slowly, but enough to stop the extreme blood loss, the potion slowly working its magic.
As he finishes making a hole wide enough to drop through, he glances up at me.
“I’m here for January Violet Carmine, and I have a very respectable reputation, especially for an incubus. I can imagine it’s hard to trust me. I don’t expect it from you. But I fully intend to prove myself to Ms. Carmine, because I genuinely want to be a part of what she’s doing.”
He drops down the hole, and I struggle to join him. The hacked metal scrapes my shoulder deep enough and rough enough to cause a slight wince.
I land with a pained grunt, feeling my sword wound really start to ache now that the adrenaline from the brief fight is winding down.
I spot Talbot’s eyes wide, and I follow his gaze through an open wall that leads to…
I’m not sure how to describe it.
Black chains hold a silver man to the wall.
“What the bloody hell is this?” I ask on a quiet breath, as I hurry to pull at the chains.
My hand scrapes the silver and sizzles, forcing me to hiss out a breath.
“It’s his own damn silver,” I say in confusion.
“Pandora is a powerful blood witch. I’m not sure why you left her be all these years,” he says as he analyzes the silver, careful not to touch it.
“Because Pandora never intended to destroy the world. She picked people who wanted to make it better, back when we thought we knew how to do that. Then we made the mistake of only thinking of our own people.”
“A mistake you continue to make,” he’s fast to interject.
“Our punishment for our ambition was a greater responsibility than any of us ever intended. The world’s still a mess and certainly imperfect, but it’s better than it was—in many ways,” I tell him through gritted teeth, as I strain to no avail to break the chains.
“That’s entirely subjective to argument, based on who you are and what you have grievances about,” he murmurs, his attention more focused elsewhere.
“I can break Van Helsing chains easier than this,” I state, studying the black metal more closely.
“It’s rumored that when the dragon blew fire against the ground, it fused the minerals together and created a dark metal. It was also rumored that an army fitted with this metal as armor slayed ten thousand men with only one hundred trained soldiers, and all without a single loss of life.”
His eyes meet mine, and I let out another frustrated breath.
“If you’re telling me this is some sort of ancient dragon-fire metal, I’m going to mess up your face.”
He stares at me, almost hesitant to continue. He clears his throat and carries on.
“Pandora is rumored to be obsessed with the dead dragon. It’s very likely she’d seek out anything remotely rumored to be related to the creature,” he continues, definitely stating this is dragon-fire metal.
“So this metal’s been lying around for thousands of years and is so powerful that ten-thousand men were slain by a mere one-hundred. Tell me, Master of Random Rumors, why hasn’t it surfaced until now?”
“Because Pandora doesn’t share. If she found all of the metal, she’d hoard it and save it for something important. Such as holding a Van Helsing to the wall, while casting him in his own silver. He was supposed to rot down here, and he can probably hear everything we’re saying, because Idun would have wanted him conscious, so as to leave him to suffer to the fullest for his crimes against her.”
He makes a fist and raps on Vance’s head, but there’s no sound or movement. A hollow tink sound is all that answers that suspicion.
“We need to break the chains and get him out of here. It’ll be a long trek on foot, and—”
My foot bumps something on the ground, and the mirrors light up, as a loud whistle blows in the air.
“I can’t keep knocking them out, because they’re getting closer and closer to salting me. They really want to rescue her,” Anna says to the camera, as though she’s talking to the TV, while gesturing to Arion and Damien—or rather, gesturing to their unconscious bodies. “So hurry it up, boys.”
My eyes land on Violet, who’s slow to get up. Her body is covered in bruises, as she turns and flashes her bloodied smile toward Idun.
“I’ve seen Vance hit Damien harder than that,” Violet tells Idun. “Surely you’ve got more power behind your punches, since you’re supposedly the queen of badass.”
Idun smirks, digs her feet into the ground, and prepares to launch herself at Violet.
“Fuck. Me,” Talbot states with obvious horror, his lips parting for a deep exhale to follow, as he stares at the screen.
The chains snap very abruptly, falling from the wall as though those were the magic words.
The silver man drops to the ground without warning, landing on his face. I refuse to look at the screen, as I quickly glance around the floor, spotting the remote I bumped. Where the hell did that come from?
I turn off Idun TV, unable to watch what comes next, while I’m stuck this far away.
“Idun’s smarter, faster, and stronger. She’s also more willing to cross every vicious line there is, and do whatever it takes to reign supreme,” Talbot tells me, turning to face me with no expression. “She’s not as predictable as I predicted, and I’m getting a little annoyed by that.”
“I’m not sure how those chains snapped, but we don’t have any more time for chatting. Grab his head. I’ll get his feet.”
“And then what? Burn ourselves while touching Van Helsing silver until we can’t hold him anymore?” he fires back. “We won’t even make it topside before our hands are too burned to continue holding on.”
It’s a good point.
It’s also incredibly inconvenient, because there’s absolutely nothing lying around to help, aside from the chain. Which…just slides over the Van Helsing silver, making it impossible to tie around him.
“Maybe we can fashion a stretcher from our clothes.”
“And then wander around the woods, while naked and carrying a silver man on our clothes? It should only take five hours or more to get back. I’m sure that will work out well.”
“How about giving a better solution instead of pointing out how stupid all my ideas are?” I snap.
“Certainly. After we hurriedly find a place with reception, we’ll phone in the troops. Then we’ll let Violet know he’s safe, so that she can stop getting her ass kicked for Idun’s amusement.”
I really hate this smug motherfucker.
> The sound of a chopper has us both going on the defense. It hovers over us somewhere, because the whirring of the blades is definitely loud.
A wire ladder drops through the hole we made, bouncing when it finishes unrolling a few feet off the ground. My claws extend, until I spot Zuela Van Helsing sliding down the ladder.
He lands and turns to find us. His eyebrow quirks when he sees Vance.
“That’s not good,” he says, stating the obvious.
“I take it you’ve been using Violet’s apple products?” I guess, since there’s not a single scent of a Van Helsing on him.
“Judging by the distinctly odorless air, despite the various creatures attending the Monster Olympics, I’m going to say that girl’s products are flying off the shelves,” he absently volleys. “Pandora did this.”
“We’ve deduced that much,” Talbot says with a tight smile.
“She has a spell that forces the Van Helsing’s silver to attack and cover its manipulator,” he goes on. “It can only be undone with blood magic. We’ll have to take him with us. It’s not safe to stand around here. Not to mention his future wife is currently taking another beating from that crazy fucking bitch.”
“Clever old fella, aren’t you?” Talbot asks in a dry, smartass tone.
Zuela’s eyes turn to slits, and his silver sword extends. “Careful, incubus. Things have gotten entirely too casual, and formalities aren’t a stuffy, archaic thing of the past. Show some respect,” Zuela grinds out.
Talbot immediately lowers his eyes, bowing his head. “My apologies, Sir Van Helsing.”
Zuela’s attention returns to me, while Talbot remains at a bow. I hate Zuela. He makes it look easy to check a beta like Talbot.
“I guess I’ll be carrying him on my own,” Zuela bites out. “Useless fucking wolf and incubus,” he adds on a mutter.
My suspicion over Zuela’s identity is put to rest when he touches the silver and nothing sizzles. Only a Van Helsing is impervious to it.
You can only wield a Van Helsing weapon if it’s been gifted to you. If their silver is not gifted to you, it usually burns.
I snatch the curious chain from the ground, deciding to take it with us.
Gypsy Truths (All The Pretty Monsters Book 6) Page 30