by Laken Cane
He was caught.
The most important thing for the rest of his life would be her bite. Nothing else would matter to him as much.
The same way nothing would matter quite as much to the berserker.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
For a moment, she thought he might not answer, but finally, he gave her a name. Maybe it was his, maybe it wasn’t.
“Will.”
He spoke, as he usually did, in a clipped monotone. But she could hear the eagerness. The need.
She dropped her fangs.
I don’t want to bite that. I don’t want to…
As Denim and Lex watched, she grabbed the assassin’s head, tilted it to get at the strip of flesh below his mask, and struck.
It was…horrifying.
Not the taste of the blood—that was creamy, rich, and flavored with life.
No. Getting the blood was what nearly made her pull her mouth from him and run gagging from the room.
Because before the blood spurted into her mouth, she had to get through the scar tissue covering his flesh.
She’d bitten into a particularly thick patch, and it was like rubber against her lips. The scar seemed to scream when she punctured it.
Don’t think about it. Think about the blood. The blood.
And finally, she succeeded in ignoring the packaging in which her dinner was wrapped. Finally, she could enjoy the meal.
A whisper of sound left Will the Assassin’s mouth. Just a whisper, but in that sound was the release of every bad thing he’d ever experienced. Having his addiction fed at last would have been like nothing he’d ever known.
Heaven.
She withdrew before she drained him, her monster sighing at the bliss of feeding. She dropped her hands from his neck with a lazy contentment, but jerked out of her daze when she unintentionally brushed her fingers across his erection.
She stood and wiped her mouth, uncomfortable. “Talk, Assassin.”
He rolled his head languidly against the wall, and it took him two attempts before he was able to lift his fingers to touch the wounds left by her fangs. “There are two people you need to destroy to end the attempts at creating lab monsters. One is the Shop head, Orson Blackthorne. The other is his son—he holds something inside him, something…”
She thought of the flashes of silver swimming around the tank babies. “Magic?” she asked.
He nodded. “Magic. It’s all about magic with Orson and his branch of the Shop.”
She shivered, then wiped her hands on her pants. “Where are they?”
“You’ll have to go back to Reverence. He never leaves the county. Some of his people bring him what he needs.”
“Where is the lab?”
“In the hills.” He leaned forward, maybe to take pressure off his bound hands. “In hell. There’s a road called Tick Ridge. Follow it. You’ll come upon a small village of nondescript houses after you crest the third hill. The entire village is his. He has a lab under his house at the corner of Oak Street. I don’t know how to get into it—that’ll be something you and your people will have to figure out. I’ve only ever been carried there unconscious, drugged, or blindfolded.” His voice was completely emotionless, as though he were giving the instructions on making a sandwich.
She nodded. “He has the baby and Megan Smith?”
“He has the girl. Maybe the baby, but he’s probably thrown it away by now. The sheriff said it was normal. Before you go after him, take out his son. Without the boy, the Shop can’t create more living monsters. At least for a while. If you leave the boy alive, someone else will continue to use him. Orson has apprentices. They do anything he wants.”
“What do you mean?”
“They get the girls for him. Once he impregnates them, he sends them away to be kept by his team. They take him the monsters when they’re born.”
“How does he get them pregnant?”
His gaze was unblinking. “He takes what he needs from captive people—usually Others—and uses needles and magic to get it to go where he needs it to go.”
She didn’t comprehend what he was telling her about the procedure. Not really. She got the feeling he didn’t, either. “How do you know so much about him?”
His voice was soft, dark, and smooth, and had it not been for the information he was giving her, she could have been lulled to sleep.
But his next words woke her up. Her heart began to pound with dread.
“You know his son,” he told her. “You’ve met him. You’ve felt sympathy for him. But he is not one to sympathize with. He will gnaw your bones as you scream, if he gets the chance.”
“Who the fuck is he?” she whispered.
“He’s the evil you know as Epik,” Will said. “Part of him is inside every monster those girls birth. And I know so much because I am also Orson Blackthorne’s son. I don’t contain the magic that lives inside my brother. My father attempted to make me special in other ways.” He smiled—she was sure of it.
“My brother hates me. He thinks what my father put me through is something to be jealous of. Orson gave me too much attention and Epik needed it all.”
She wanted to put her hand to her stake wounds, but resisted. “Why do you work for him?”
“I don’t. Now release me. I’ve told you everything. I’ll lie low and enjoy my relief while you prepare yourself for the trouble that lies ahead.”
Chapter Forty-Six
She knocked on Ellie’s bedroom door. “Ellie?”
Levi opened the door, surprising her. “We were talking,” he said, like he needed to reassure her.
And maybe he did.
She smiled. “I’m glad, baby.” She poked her head in. “We need food. As soon as we’ve eaten and gotten ready, we have monsters to hunt.”
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you while we’re eating to save time. I have to shower and wait for…” She swallowed, then continued. “For the berserker and Owen. Ellis, can you—”
“I’ll make sure all the crew is here in half an hour,” he said, “If I have to hunt down Strad and Owen myself.” His voice was tight with disapproval. “All this fighting.”
“It’s what we do,” Rune said. “You should be used to that by now.”
“We don’t fight each other,” he told her, coming to the door to stand beside Levi. “I’ll never get used to that.”
Levi slid away from Ellis.
“Are you okay?” she asked the twin.
He seemed a little less dark. A little less frustrated. “Better.”
“Good.” She turned to go, her mind already on the night ahead, when Levi grabbed her arm. She flinched. “Don’t grab me, Levi.”
He cleared his throat. “I want to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being on my side no matter how fucked up I am. No matter what I do, good or bad, you’re on my side.”
“Yes. Remember that.” She reached up and cupped his face. “You’re never alone.”
“And you’re always loved,” Ellis added.
Levi didn’t respond to Ellie. He might have been talking to him, but he wasn’t forgiving him. Not yet.
Rune let go of Levi. “I’m glad the two of you are working shit out. You need each other.”
“I wanted to tell him what happened,” Levi said. “We’re not…” He swallowed his words. “I also need to explain to you, if you have a minute.”
She would never have refused him. “Yeah.”
“Gustav saw me in the cafeteria. I don’t know what he was thinking. Why he thought…”
He took a deep breath, then continued. “He sat down with me, told me he couldn’t get me out of his mind, and he grabbed me.” He stared at the wall over her head. “Even after what he’d done with Ellis. He slid his hand under the fucking table and grabbed my dick.”
Ellis closed his eyes.
“I went dark,” Levi continued. “I barely remember anything except…” He shrugged.
“I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill.” He clenched his fists and pressed his lips together when they trembled.
No one said anything for a long, tense moment.
Once upon a time Rune might have said, “Yeah, it’s a shit world.” And she would have walked out of the room.
Not anymore.
She gripped his upper arm, rose up on tiptoe, and kissed his cheek. “We’ll help you through this, Levi. Through all of it.”
Then she went to get ready for Reverence. For the lab. It was all she could do.
None of them had really had a moment to let all the bad shit sink in. Or maybe they were becoming hardened to it.
Before she went to Reverence, she would find Epik. She’d decide for herself if she had to kill him. She wasn’t stupid enough to take the assassin’s word for anything. But Epik…he was a strange fuck, and that was the truth.
At the very least she would lock him up in the Annex until she returned from Kentucky.
Neither Owen nor Strad had returned by the time she finished her shower and was sitting down to eat.
Ellis had tried to call them, but got no answer. He’d actually been on his way out the door to go find them when Rune pulled him back.
“They’ll find us,” she said. Then she leaned closer to him. “Stay away from the panic room.”
“You’re not going to release him?”
“Not yet, Ellie.” Killing the assassin would give Gunnar some peace of mind. When she got back, she might decide to give the ghoul a nice dead assassin for a gift.
Or she might not.
So she, Raze, Jack, the twins, and Lex drove to Wormwood to look for Epik. And knowing what she knew—or what she thought she knew—Epik became a little creepier.
Once at Wormwood, she grabbed the bag of Baby Ruth candy bars Ellis had handed her, then got out of her car to stand with the others. “Does anyone else miss just hunting and staking vampires?” she asked them.
“We’ll always find vampires to stake,” Raze said. “But there will be times when we’re sidetracked.”
Rune laughed. Sidetracked. Yeah.
Then, with the crew at her back, she walked into Wormwood.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Gunnar ignored the crew and held his hand out for the bag she carried.
“I have a question for you,” she told him, holding on to the candy. “But first…I heard you’ve been giving candy to Sean Colley’s…boy. Epik.”
He flinched. “I give no one my candy, Your Preposterousness. I can hide from the boy, but must leave my candy behind. Sometimes he takes it.”
“Gunnar,” she murmured. “Why didn’t you tell me you were afraid of Epik?”
“He has yet to catch me. Caution is necessary when dealing with that one.”
“How’d the assassin catch you?” Jack asked.
Gunnar put his nose in the air. “That one is wily.” He would say no more, and she was pretty sure he was never going to explain that particular encounter.
Rune remembered times when she’d seen the ghoul running from something. Or someone. She remembered his fear. Had Epik, even then, been tormenting the Wormwood Others?
She sighed. “I need to get to the pike master, Gunnar.”
He pointed in the direction of Poison Pond. “The hill behind the pond holds caverns. The entrance to one is similar to a big mouth holding two fangs.” He paused and eyed her. “Like yours. That is the Pikes’ backdoor.”
She gave him the candy, surprised it had been that easy. “Enjoy, Gunnar. And don’t eat that all at once. At this rate, you’re going to need chocolate every day.”
“Thank you, Highness. I will see you tomorrow, then.” He bowed, and turned to trot away with his candy.
She shook her head as the crew laughed, then led them to Poison Pond. “Be watchful,” she told them. “Epik is a mean little snake.”
But she could tell that not one of them was able to see Epik as scary. He looked too much like a victim. Pushing her into the well had been, they figured, the order of his master.
She no longer really believed that.
She was a little offended when she saw the cave entrance Gunnar had compared with her mouth. It was gaping and black, like the mouth of a toothless hag of fairytale books. She pushed her tongue into the spots where she was missing two of her teeth—the teeth she’d lost when Shop enemies had shot her down.
They were growing back, but with excruciating slowness. She could knit a broken bone in seconds but her teeth were taking their fucking time.
She shot out her claws and stepped into the cavern, the crew behind her.
“Feels like we’re walking into a monster’s mouth,” Jack mumbled.
Lex shuddered and stepped closer to Raze, perhaps inadvertently. He immediately puffed out his chest.
“Well then,” Rune said, “let’s get to its belly.” She heard the welcome sound of her crew sliding silver blades from sheaths. The caves were cold and dark and smelled of things she was unfamiliar with and could not describe.
“Fuck,” Rune whispered.
“What is it?” Raze voice, too loud for the depths of the cave, made her flinch.
“I hear screams,” she told him. She’d almost said, “I hear pain.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Jack said. “Are you sure?”
“She’s sure,” Lex said.
And then the dim and distant sound came to all of them, floating to their reluctant ears. “Not good,” Jack murmured.
Not that they’d expected it would be.
They walked deeper into the caverns, room after room becoming colder, darker, and closer to the screams.
Ten minutes later they switched on flashlights and began to descend.
She dragged in a ragged breath. Stagnant, damp air lay like greasy hands upon her flesh, coating her lungs and clogging her nostrils.
The screams grew louder with each step she took. Preceding each cry was the sharp slap of something—a whip, maybe—against flesh.
At last the narrowness of the passage opened up into a huge cave, the shiny wet walls of which were fitted with cuffs, chains, and other things she had no name for.
That room was for punishment. For torture.
She stopped walking, wanting to breathe but unwilling to pull in the stench of open wounds and oozing, septic flesh.
Four people were in the room—two of them were in ankle chains, sitting in hunched-over misery upon the wet floor. One of them had been cuffed by his wrists against the far wall, his bare, ravaged back exposed to the crew’s horrified stares.
A man wielded the whip with practiced but tired efficiency, and even as they watched he sent the whip cracking once more against the restrained man’s bruised and bloody flesh.
The person with the whip was Sean Colley.
The one being beaten was Epik.
Rune was on Colley in seconds. She wrenched the whip from his grip and threw it against the wall.
“Wha…?” he asked, his eyes dazed, as though he were waking from a long, deep sleep.
“This is what,” she said, and punched him in the face.
He hit the wall with a solid thunk. She didn’t wait for him to slide to the floor before she flew to Epik. “It’s okay, kid. I got you.”
He said nothing, and didn’t look at her.
“Raze,” she said. “Help me get him out of these cuffs. Jack, watch Colley. The rest of you, free the other two from those fucking chains.”
Raze strode to her side, then reached for the chains at Epik’s hands. He stopped, then frowned. “Rune,” he said, quietly. “He’s not locked in. He could have gotten free any time he wanted.”
She looked up, then backed away from Epik’s ravaged body. Raze was right. Epik had his hands wrapped around the chains. He held on to them—they didn’t hold on to him.
“He’s not a prisoner?” she asked. Then, “What the fuck is going on here?”
Sean Colley’s laugh was bitter. “Unless you’re going to kill him
as I watch, I won’t say a word. Except…” He hesitated, then continued quickly. “I’m not the torturer. I’m not.”
Epik let go of the chains and lowered his arms. He had to have been in severe pain. Had to have been. But he didn’t show it on his face.
“He asks you to hurt him?” Rune shuddered as the memories of her own torment began to slide through her mind. And pity for the boy, despite the assassin’s warning.
“He doesn’t ask,” one of the other prisoners said. This one was a woman who was so swollen and bruised she would have had no physical resemblance to the person she was before the torture. “He demands it. It’s his warped way of getting what his father withheld from him. When he’s bored, he plays with us.”
Her voice was polite. Weak, but polite.
She was dying—Rune could smell it on her.
So she was beyond fear.
Epik said nothing and kept his face averted. He had his damaged back to the wall and even as Rune watched, he swayed gently, rubbing his wounds against the rough, filthy wall.
“Epik,” she said. “Look at me.”
He glanced at her, his face bland and calm. Blank. But there was something sinister gleaming in his eyes. He darted his gaze away quickly, as though knowing she’d see it there.
“They will lie,” he told her, “to protect the master.”
“You will lie,” she said, “to protect yourself.”
Lex walked to the boy and wrapped her fingers around his wrist.
He moaned, and as his body began to jerk, he pressed his groin against her.
Lex cried out but before she could say a word or pull herself away from Epik, Raze grabbed him by the back of his neck and flung him away from her.
The boy scuttled like a crab toward the exit, but Levi and Denim were there to halt him.
Lex held shaking hands to her mouth, her breath coming out in little gasps.
“Lex,” Rune said. “What’d you see?”
“I didn’t see anything,” Lex said, finally.
She lowered her hands and reached out beseechingly, and Raze was quick to take her fingers in his. “I didn’t see anything.”
Rune could feel Epik’s stare eating into her back. She turned to look at him, unable to understand Lex’s fear.