by Laken Cane
Or worse, captured.
She got a sudden, intense longing for the berserker.
Shit.
As she walked deeper into the cold, murky water, she thought she saw a glimmer of a face in the black depths. She had no doubt there were many faces down there.
She didn’t want hers to be covered by the menacing wetness, but she had to keep going. The water lapped at her thighs, then her stomach, and finally, her chest.
She stopped walking for a long minute to adjust to the crushing weight of the strange water. The pressure was like a giant hand squeezing her chest, constricting her lungs.
“Shit,” she muttered. She couldn’t draw a deep breath, couldn’t force her lungs to expand, couldn’t possibly take one more step into the smothering wet hell surrounding her.
“Rune?” Owen called. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Shit,” she said again, and took another step.
Then there was nothing—no rocky bottom on which her feet could gain purchase, no sweet air, no sounds other than the roaring in her ears from either her panic or the water attacking her eardrums.
And just that quickly, she was inside the pikes’ world.
Invisible hands pulled her greedily down, down into the shadowy depths of the lake, and suddenly the roaring silence was replaced by whispery voices. She could see nothing—blind and panicked, she struggled against her watery prison. She opened her mouth to scream, then choked as the vile liquid ran eagerly into her throat.
She pushed with her legs, trying to find the surface, but her head hit a hard, unforgiving ceiling and she was trapped.
Drowning.
And she was sure she heard mocking laughter.
It was that sound that freed her from her terror.
Inborn rage and pride and plain common sense came to her rescue, and she forced herself quiet.
Calm.
And in that calm she found Z’s face. Just for an instant, but it was there, smiling at her, believing in her. With her.
He was always with her.
“God, Z,” she whispered.
But then he was gone, and she was alone in a pond she couldn’t escape. Not yet. She had things to do there.
She swam, hands cutting through the dark water, and she let the water become a refuge.
The deeper she went, the clearer she could see. Vague shapes became fish and snakes and shifters. One of them, a smallish pike with vivid green markings, brushed her arm playfully before darting away.
Inside Poison Pond was a whole new world, one she’d only marginally been aware existed.
She caught sight of an iridescent light moving ahead of her and followed it, going deeper and deeper, until she was blocked from going farther by a rock wall.
But the swimmer ahead of her had disappeared into that wall. She swam the rock slowly, sliding along until her fingers found a crevice through which she was sure the being had exited.
Slight as she was, the crack in the wall was too skinny for her to fit through. But she had to get through—there was light coming from the other side, and she had no doubt that’s where she needed to be.
Dammit.
She pushed herself along, hoping…
And yes. There it was. The fissure widened, and she slipped through it easily.
The water on that side of the crevice had a different feel to it. It caressed her skin with a languid, silky touch and tasted something like green tea.
She pressed her lips together quickly.
The farther she swam, the lighter the water became. And finally, she saw a hint of daylight.
She broke the surface, her relief tinged with disappointment that she hadn’t found the pike alpha. The Annex would send crews, though, and they would—
“What the fuck?”
She was no longer in Poison Pond. She had no idea where she was, but hoped it was some part of Wormwood. She waded to the grassy bank and climbed out of the water, shivering as gooseflesh erupted on her wet skin.
Behind her was the small pool of water from which she’d escaped, and surrounding her were hills, grassy and large.
She started climbing the hill directly in front of her. The top of the hill would at least give her a high vantage point and maybe help her figure out where she was.
She jogged up the hill, taking a couple of minutes to reach the top. And when she looked down, there was Owen, a tiny man guarding the lake into which she’d gone earlier.
She raised a hand and started to yell at him, but a whisper of sound at her back caused her to whirl around, her fangs dropping as she turned.
Epik stood behind her, half crouching. “Come with me.”
She hesitated. “Where?”
But he wasn’t saying. He turned and loped away, his naked, dirty body torn and battered.
Unable not to, she followed him, releasing her claws as she ran. It would be autumn soon, and she couldn’t help glancing at all the green that would, in a few short weeks, change colors and die.
She was never ready for winter, but winter would come anyway, with its freezing, relentless beauty and its dark despair.
Epik’s ribs were even more prominent than they’d been the last time she’d seen him. His shoulder blades parenthesized his long, knobby spine, which was almost visible through the paper-thinness of his lightly veined, greenish skin.
After about ten minutes he stopped and pointed to a line of caves above them and to the right. “Up there.”
She frowned. “What’s up there, Epik?”
“Go on,” he said. “Go.” He twisted his fingers together, his eyes too wide. “Please go on, now.”
The boy was in bad shape, and she wasn’t going to argue with him. Obviously he wanted her to see something. “Are you coming?”
“I’ll stay behind you.”
Something up there was scaring the fuck out of him. She nodded. “I won’t let anything happen to you, kid. Let’s go.”
She walked up the hill and toward the caves, slowly, so her speed wouldn’t tax the already exhausted boy. Once, he took her elbow, yanking it gently like a kid pulling at his mother’s skirt for attention.
“What is it?” she asked him.
He pointed to the cave directly to their left. Its large entrance gaped with sinister blackness.
For a long moment, they both stood staring at it. “There’s something terrible in there,” she said.
He nodded.
“Your alpha?”
Again, he nodded, then reached out to give her an encouraging shove. “We have to go in.”
“I get that. I’m nearly certain we shouldn’t, though.”
“If you don’t,” he said, “I’ll die.”
Fucking alpha. “He sent you after me?”
He didn’t reply, just stared at her. Waiting.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He followed her to the cave, his fingers light upon her back. His breathing picked up, and when she glanced at him, he looked almost…eager.
The voices were there, preaching caution. But as usual, caution wasn’t enough.
“Good,” Epik whispered, and then he shoved her. Hard.
Caught off guard, she stumbled into a hidden chasm and began to plummet down a seemingly bottomless shaft.
Chapter Ten
She crashed to the ground, finally. The impact scrambled her thoughts and shattered her body, which began to knit immediately.
Still, the shock left her breathless and blind and unable, at first, to move. Pain was blessedly dulled by overwhelming numbness, but unfortunately the numbness began to ebb with alarming quickness.
She ran her fingers over her face, realizing only then that she wasn’t blind. She simply hadn’t opened her eyes.
They bulged from their sockets and pulsated like angry hearts, but at last, she opened them.
Her small world spun, and with a suddenness that left her stunned, pain roared over her.
She turned weakly to the side and heaved up the
little she had in her stomach, groaning as an excruciating headache added its screams to the other pains begging for attention.
She remembered banging off the sides of the crevice, but the actual impact with the bottom was already forgotten. Maybe she’d passed out by the time she hit—she just couldn’t remember.
She had no idea of the distance she’d fallen, but when she finally managed to peer up at the opening, it appeared at least forty or fifty feet away.
“What the fuck?” she murmured. Her voice slid into the shadowed crevices, dancing eerily and echoing from the rock walls. It seemed, for an instant, as though other whispers were mocking her.
Areas of her skin were dark blue and purple, seeping and splattered with her own blood. The fall wouldn’t have hurt her so badly had she been able to control it, but she’d thumped and smashed and banged against the walls her entire way to the bottom.
It was cold at the bottom of the well, or whatever she’d fallen into, and it didn’t help that her hair and underclothes were still wet. Shivering, she sat up and glanced at her body.
Fucking Epik. It didn’t matter that he’d likely been ordered to push her into the well, not right then. She was too pissed for it to matter.
She’d been warned about the pike alpha, and she hadn’t been careful enough. She groaned when she tried to stand, and decided to give it a couple more minutes.
Broken bones and smashed organs took a little while to heal.
She put a hand to her chest and took a deep breath. It was not a good time for her claustrophobia to kick in.
But then the smell hit her, clogging her nostrils and attacking her brain. Her impending, panicky claustrophobia inexplicably lessened beneath the odor of rotting death.
The floor of the well was littered with debris. Piles of it. It was then she realized that most of the piles were bones, some still with meat clinging stubbornly.
Finally able to stand, she got to her feet and walked gingerly to one of the skulls, staring at the long strings of bloodstained blonde hair clinging to it.
Then she studied the hole at the top of the well, not really seeing the bright block of sky above. Someone had been using the ominous hole in the ground to dispose of people for a long time.
It was unlikely anyone other than a vampire could have escaped the hole, and even a vampire would have to be pretty damn old to climb, jump, or walk the very tall walls.
It was even more unlikely that anyone could have survived such a fall. A shifter would have been destroyed on impact.
She counted six skulls, and when she used a stick to dig deeper into the rubble, she was unsurprised to find more.
Wormwood had graveyards inside the graveyard. And the one in which she stood…that one was bad.
Real bad.
Obviously Epik and his alpha had no idea what she was. She looked up at the hole again, and curled her lip.
Fucking pushed into a fucking well…
Shit. It was almost insulting.
She’d have no trouble getting out.
She gave a last glance around, and her attention was caught by something shiny in the rubble. She leaned over to snag it, and her breath caught when she held it up to see what she’d found.
A small, silver crucifix.
There were several reasons a silver crucifix might have been found amidst all the bones, and none of them were good.
Others didn’t wear silver crucifixes.
A thin chain was attached to the cross, part of it showing the rusty red stain of old blood. Part of the cross was also bloodstained.
The scent of despair, held in the air by rotting flesh and maggot-filled entrails, became too much for her.
Grimacing at not only the smell but the lingering pain in her head, she and her monster prepared to get the hell out of the horror that lived at the bottom of that well. She dropped the chain over her head.
She ran, then leaped at the walls she’d banged off of when she’d made her hasty descent. She was fast and strong—her monster was unbelievable. She had absolutely no doubt that she’d be able to climb the walls. She scaled them, pushing herself from one wall to the other as she scrambled to the top.
Her feet gained purchase on the slippery, slimy walls, but only for a brief second—then she was pushing off and digging her toes into the wall a little higher up.
Slime and goo competed with vegetation for space on the well walls, and by the time she burst free of the hole in the ground she stank almost as much as the rot at the bottom of the grisly prison.
She shuddered and ran her palms over her body, trying unsuccessfully to rid herself of the sticky grime as she strode away from the treacherous hole.
The sun was hot, the air so fresh she couldn’t stop drawing it deeply into her lungs. It helped clear the lingering memory of the stench from her brain.
She picked up her speed, running back to the hill on which she’d stood when Epik had approached her. When she stood on the hill looking once more at Poison Pond, Owen wasn’t the only one standing there.
The berserker stood beside him.
He and Owen peered into the lake, and as she watched, Strad began yanking off his weapons, then peeled off his shirt.
She grinned. He was going in after her.
“Hey,” she screamed and waved.
The two men glanced up at her and Strad’s hands froze on the waistband of his jeans. “Rune,” he roared. He didn’t sound happy to see her.
She lifted an eyebrow. “I’m coming,” she yelled, and without waiting, charged down the hill.
She ran through the trees at the bottom of the hill, her bare feet skimming the ground. Most times her monster wasn’t entirely engaged unless she was in danger, fighting, or otherwise extremely emotionally involved, and running toward Poison Pond seemed to take forever.
She needed to get to the berserker.
She wanted to wrap her arms around his hardness and taste the skin of his chest before he covered it back up. She wanted to inhale his scent, to put her lips to his smooth neck and sink her teeth into his flesh.
She wanted his blood. The need for him was so sudden and overwhelming she slowed her run.
Nothing good could come of wanting another person so much. Nothing.
He was addicted to her. Addicted to her blood.
What if, for him, that’s all it was?
What if he made her weak?
She forced herself to jog, slowly and methodically, across the forest floor.
When she finally reached the two men, Strad was once again fully dressed, frowning impatiently.
“What—” he began.
“Fuck you,” she said, and began to pull on her clothes.
Owen pursed his lips and stared into the distance.
Strad raised an eyebrow, then folded his arms across his massive chest. “What the hell happened up there?”
She jerked on her vest so forcefully she nearly ripped off her fingernails, aware the men thought she’d lost her mind but what was new about that?
If the berserker turned on her…
But how could she love someone she was afraid would hurt her? More importantly, how could she almost actually believe that someone might not hurt her? If she let him, he’d hurt her. That was the way it was.
And it’d be her own damn fault.
She bent over to pull on her boots.
One second she was furious and frustrated and fucking scared—and the next, she felt a touch on her back.
“Rune,” Owen said. That was all. Just that touch and her name.
She went from anger to horror in a millisecond.
She fell to the ground and curled into a ball, her breath wheezing from her constricted throat as slayers grabbed her—
“Rune! Rune, no, no…”
There were no slayers. She was not splintered, and there were no slayers. Her clothes were on. She was not being violated. She was not on the ground.
She was not.
She was instead face to face with Ow
en, her long, silver claws buried in his belly. His face had lost its color, his thin hair lying flatly against his cheeks. His breathing was harsh, his eyes too wide.
The berserker had his fingers wrapped around her wrists, maybe trying to pull her claws from Owen, maybe trying to hold them there.
She was sure of only two things—one, she’d lost her mind.
And two, she’d killed Owen.
Chapter Eleven
“Fuck me,” she whispered. “Oh, God. Oh, no. I’m…oh, fuck me.”
“Shhh,” Owen said. “I’m okay.”
But how could he be okay with her claws in his body? She shook her head and looked down, down to where her hand rested against his belly.
The berserker was moving his thumb over her wrist, caressing, gentle. He squeezed lightly and started to pull her claws from Owen’s abdomen.
She’d managed, in her fog, to shoot two claws into him—her thumb and first finger.
“I think you cracked a rib,” Owen said, his voice strained. “But you missed anything vital. I’m going to be okay, honey.” He looked at Strad and gave him a terse nod. “Back her away.”
She let Strad move her backward. “Owen. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She closed her eyes and ran her hand over her face. “Fuck. Oh God.”
“I’ve had worse.” Owen grinned, but leaned forward, his hand to his ribs.
She hated that they were being so careful, like she was a dangerous but mentally unstable girl they needed to handle. Which she was.
“Shit,” she said. She shook Strad’s hand from her arm. “I’m good, guys. I lost it for a minute. I thought Owen was…”
“Rune,” Strad said. “You’re okay.”
She was finding it difficult to breathe. “Let’s get Owen out of here so we can get a cell signal. He needs to be in a hospital.”
“Call the Annex,” Owen said. “They have a nice setup for injured ops. They’ll take care of me.”
“Yeah.” She and Strad put Owen between them, and supporting him, they began the walk out of Wormwood.
Owen had gotten lucky. The next guy she zoned out on and tried to kill might not be. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.