Hell and Back: The Protector Guild Book 4

by Holborn, Gray

  With a teasing salute, he winked at me and took a large step back.

  Declan and I let out a mirrored breath of surprise as he disappeared from sight.

  It was strange. I was a protector. I grew up knowing that vampires and werewolves were real. I was training to hunt all of the monsters that went bump in the night. I knew that the hell realm existed, that it’s where the beasts come from.

  But to see the magic take shape before my eyes felt like a peculiar dream. Everything suddenly felt real, more tangible somehow.

  Claude cleared his throat and I saw the muscles in his jaw pumping as he stared at the spot where his brother disappeared. Something told me that he didn’t expect to ever see his twin again. And while he’d spent part of the afternoon attempting to kill him, I knew that their relationship wasn’t as clear as we’d thought. It was a mixture of love and hate and everything else in between.

  With nothing more than a quick glance at each other, Eli and Declan followed Darius, leaving me alone with Atlas and Claude—the two most intimidating men I’d ever encountered.

  My skin felt tight as the air around us all grew heavy with tension. Desperate for Eli’s or hell, even Darius’s dark humor to lighten the mood, I took a quick step in the direction of the portal, ready to chase after them and swallow my fate whole.

  A harsh grip tightened around my wrist, stopping me mid stride. I turned around and found Claude hovering over me, his lean fingers digging into my forearm but not enough to bruise.

  “My brother is fixated on you. That much is clear. But you’ll do well to remember exactly what he is.” His tone was hard, monotonous, and he wasn’t looking me in the eyes.

  I swallowed, unsure how to respond, but unable to look away from the sharp angles of his face all the same.

  “Those people broke something in his mind—a mind that was already a complicated place to spend time in before them. He’s a predator and he’s dangerous. Forgetting that will not serve you or whatever strange destiny you have before you.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I squinted up at him, watching as his breath hitched slightly at the question. “Why do you care?”

  Claude quirked one side of his lips in the shadow of a smirk that made him look more like Darius than any of his mirrored features did. He glanced down at me, his mismatched eyes boring into my own. “I don’t care. But I don’t understand you—what you are. And I’ve spent enough time tied to hell to know that the energy containing it is stretched too thin. And the tether tying everything together grows more tenuous by the day. Our world is on the precipice of a big change, and I have a sneaking suspicion that you will be at the center of it. I don’t know what your role is, or why Khali and my brother are so intrigued by you, but I do know that you should watch your back. It’s not too late for you to turn away, to leave all of this and this ridiculous mission behind.”

  I glanced over at Atlas; his eyes were lined in gold, all of his focus drawn to the spot where Claude’s skin touched mine.

  I tore my gaze from him and shook my head. “I’m going.”

  Claude loosened his grip until his fingers fell away one-by-one. “As you wish. Just don’t be surprised if what you find there isn’t what you expected. And be aware of the fact that you may very well be walking into your own doom.” He let out a sigh and, for a moment, seemed softer than he had before. I wouldn’t say that it was compassion radiating from his expression exactly, but something close to it. “It is your fate. Navigate it how you will. I’ve done my due diligence in warning you.”

  I ripped my focus from him as Atlas walked towards us. The gold in his eyes was lighter now and he threaded his fingers through mine, pulling me away from Claude. My skin felt electric in the places that it grazed his. And I hated the way that proximity to him seemed to make my heart rage against my ribcage, like it was desperate to get out, or worse, get closer to him.

  With a last look at Claude I nodded. “Thanks for, er,” I looked around momentarily, like the small patch of land might give me something concrete to say. It didn’t. “Not killing any of us, I guess. Even though you tried. Hopefully if we meet again, you’ll continue with that approach.” I paused a beat, clearing my throat. “To be clear, I meant that I hope you continue with the not killing us approach, not the trying to one.”

  Claude didn’t move, but something told me from the way his eyes were glistening, that he was swallowing back a grin.

  I shrugged before turning back towards the brick wall, gripping Atlas’s hand tightly in mine. I hated that I was afraid of walking into the portal alone. Part of me was filled with fear that this wasn’t actually a portal into hell—that we’d land somewhere worse somehow, or separated from each other altogether.

  As if sensing my anxiety Atlas pulled my body closer to his and stepped through the invisible barrier into the unknown abyss. I wasn’t sure why, but having him next to me felt safe somehow, like we could—and would—accomplish what we were after.

  I heard Claude chuckling behind us, his voice trailing off as I followed Atlas. “You are intriguing, Max Bentley. For that reason alone, I hope that you aren’t stepping towards your death.”

  At first, there was nothing, I heard nothing and saw nothing. The portal was simply absence. There was no sound, not even my own heartbeat or breath. Just empty. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever heard.

  I found myself clinging with a childish desperation to Atlas, drawing closer so that our hands weren’t the only place of contact. Instead, I circled my arms around his waist, grounding myself by pressing against him. For a long, whirlwind of a moment, I almost deluded myself into feeling safe in his arms.

  11

  Declan

  My heart beat so quickly that I was certain it was on the edge of exploding. The heavy drum of it rang in my head like a countdown to my final moments. What a ridiculous way to die—bounding into a portal opened by a damn vampire and his creepy magical blood. What the hell were we thinking?

  A heady flash of light blinked so brightly that I could see it even through my closed eyelids. A swirl of movement that I felt rather than saw had me feeling so dizzy that it took everything I had not to throw up. A sharp, piercing whistle penetrated my ear drums, so loud I wasn’t sure I would even call it a sound at all—it seemed like a trivial word for the thing cascading through my skull like an ice pick.

  Just when I thought I would pass out, that my brain would burst from the pressure, everything quieted. With a heavy thud, my knees hit a hard, jagged surface, my hands following seconds after.

  Rocks dug into the flesh of my palms and I could feel my blood being absorbed into them, like a sacrifice to the land or, more accurately, an unwilling offering.

  After watching the vamp open up the portal, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me that hell was a blood-hungry place.

  If that’s where we even were. I still wasn’t totally sure, if I was being honest.

  But if we were in hell, what made us think that the realm would allow protectors inside in the first place? None of our kind had ever gained entry before, as far I could tell. It was part of the reason the lab was so desperate to find answers, to get to the bottom of where and how the monsters breached the barriers in the first place. At least Atlas stood a chance—the one benefit of being a werewolf was probably that he wouldn’t be outright ejected from hell.

  Then again, I didn’t know that I would actually consider that a benefit.

  And Max—well, I wasn’t sure what the hell she was but I knew for damn certain that she wasn’t just a protector. I wondered if the rest of The Guild had any idea. Did Cyrus and Seamus know? Had they willingly encouraged us to watch after some sort of demon? Put all of us in danger? Gotten us attached to a creature we might be forced to eventually kill?

  I exhaled sharply, remembering the way she lit the room on fire with nothing but her mind. She’d saved Eli, sure, but it was clear she had no idea what she was doing with her powers, if she even realized she had po
wers in the first place.

  I hadn’t decided yet if the whole naive innocence thing was for real or if she was playing a part in some grand master plan to take us all down.

  I’d been so close to—

  I shook my head, tossing my hair around my shoulders. I did not want to explore that line of thought any longer. I’d rather brave whatever beasts hell was going to throw at me than try and validate any winding paths my mind wanted to carve out for me where Max was concerned.

  New plan.

  Find Wade. Save Wade. Get us all the hell out of...hell. And then figure out the rest when we weren’t fighting off creatures that were aching to watch us die.

  Surviving long enough to do all of that was the first thing I needed to focus on. The creepy demon at the bar, Marge, seemed to be able to sniff out species. I just had to hope that we didn’t run into any of her kind while we were here. If we did, we’d be screwed. Especially me and Eli. Since we were, all of a sudden, the only two protectors in the group left.

  I was going to kill him if it turned out that Eli was a secret banshee or something.

  Carefully, I opened my eyes. I had to wait a moment for things to adjust, the way your eyes have to readjust to your surroundings after you’ve been staring into the sun for too long. It took a moment for the contrast to balance out a bit, but I didn’t catch any movement other than the blurry light dots around me, so I assumed we were safe. For now anyway.

  While it was dark when we entered the vamp’s bar, the land surrounding me seemed to be glowing slightly from a distant atmospheric light source, though I couldn’t exactly see anything in the sky like a sun. And since no protector had ever made it to hell and demons remained notoriously tight-lipped about the place, we knew next to nothing about what we’d find here.

  I pushed off the ground, which appeared to be made out of a burnt orangish-brown rock, and wiped the gravel and blood off on my pants. There was already an angry hole in my knees from the landing and I was far from naive enough to think my favorite pair of pants would be the only casualty of this journey.

  It looked like we landed in a ruddy desert of rocky hills. The whole place seemed dried up and dead, like it’d been baking in the sun for too long.

  I couldn’t catch much in the horizon ahead of me, and while I wouldn’t say it looked like we were still in the human realm, this place also didn’t scream fire and brimstone either. More like somewhere in between the two. Which, seeing as I wasn’t immediately swallowed up by lava or a river of dead souls, I guess this was as good as I could reasonably hope for.

  Maybe this was purgatory? Such a place didn’t actually exist in our history, but maybe there was something to the human theory. This place certainly looked like what I imagined nature’s waiting room would look like.

  I craned my neck around, hoping to spot Atlas so that we could start forming a plan, when my lips parted on a gasp.

  I was so not a gasping sort of girl. But when I turned around, I expected to at the very least get sight of Eli trying to recalibrate his equilibrium on impact or, hell, even the obnoxious vamp we’d been carting around standing over us with that smug look of his plastered across his face.

  I did not, however, expect to find myself alone.

  Utterly and completely alone.

  I spun slowly in a circle, like maybe I’d see somebody if I took a steady breath and just, I don’t know, looked.

  But after a few minutes of spinning like a goddamn ballerina, I realized the truth: that while I’d clearly made it through the portal, it was entirely possible that they hadn’t.

  My breath was coming out in quick bursts and, even though I could feel my lungs expanding and contracting, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of me. I crouched low and dropped my head into my hands as I tried to remember with a desperate focus exactly what the fuck had happened.

  I wasn’t the only one to go through the portal. We’d all watched the vamp stumble through first, aloof and infuriating, even then.

  And then what?

  Did Max go through next? Atlas?

  I shook my head, like I was having a conversation with myself—probably because I was.

  Eli and I went next. I was almost positive that we took the leap together, him maybe even half a step ahead of me as we walked through the creepy invisible wall.

  So where the hell was he?

  I stood up again, too fast this time and I nearly fell back down as the blood rushed through my body. I tried to force slow, steady breaths in. I’d had enough of them to know that if I didn’t calm down a bit, I was a hair’s breadth away from a panic attack. And a panic attack while unguarded in the heart of enemy territory was just all sorts of bad.

  Okay, so it was just entirely possible that I’d gone and gotten myself stranded in hell. Solo. With no way out.

  I would deal. Or at least I’d try. Because one thing was certain, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

  I willed my heartbeat to regulate and I took in my surroundings. This place was unnaturally quiet. I didn’t know if it’s because all of the human media subconsciously made me buy into the whole screams-of-agony-and-never-ending-torture thing, but it almost felt like hell was the absence of sound. There weren’t any creatures around yelling in pain, or buildings collapsing under a wave of fire. It was just...empty.

  And I wasn’t expecting it to look like a slightly distorted and exaggerated version of the sort of rocky terrain you could find in the Dakotas.

  Nothing seemed to be moving as far as I could tell either. I inhaled deeply, expecting to smell sulfur or some other unpleasant scent, but it just smelled like the outdoors. Maybe with a touch of smoke, but nothing that I wasn’t used to.

  I didn’t know whether to be freaked out or mollified by the fact that this place didn’t seem to align with my expectations.

  Satisfied that I wasn’t in any immediate danger at least, I started to walk. Part of me was torn between searching and staying, on the off chance that Eli or Atlas or even Max would eventually show up to join me on this spot. But the isolation was getting to me and I half convinced myself that something happened to them all while I was crossing over.

  Maybe they got here first and something captured them?

  And when it came to choosing between doing something to protect my friends and standing around waiting for the other shoe to drop, I was definitely a proud supporter of opting for the former.

  Maybe the portal wasn’t entirely linear. Maybe they got tossed to another location close by. My landing didn’t exactly scream friendly and planned. And the fang twins did mention that the portal was unstable and had a tendency to move around. Maybe spitting us all out in different spots was part of it?

  Satisfied with the hope that that was a very real possibility, I made quick work of covering the plain. I cringed every time my feet landed too harshly and disrupted some rocks, creating a loud, cascading echo around me. It wasn’t exactly stealth mode to sound like a small stampede, and on the off chance that some demon was lurking nearby, it was best to keep quiet.

  I walked for what felt like half an hour, maybe even longer. The dryness in the air, mixed with a faint scent of smoke, had my body begging for some water. I dug through my bag and my stomach sank when I saw that my water bottle was almost empty. Why hadn’t I filled it properly before leaving? I tapped the last few dregs onto my tongue and kept walking. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.

  Did hell have water? Or food that we could consume?

  I shook my head as I tied my hair up into a ponytail. We didn’t exactly think this whole thing through very well. Seamus would have our heads—not only for going on an unsanctioned mission—to hell of all places—but for being thoroughly unprepared for the endeavor as well. The constant surprises since leaving Headquarters had shaken us—more than we’d prepared for.

  We were better than this. Hell, we were one of the best field teams The Guild had to offer. And I worked my ass off to make sure that I was worthy of my t
eam—that I could protect my friends and operate at full capacity. But apparently, when you went and threw emotional attachments into it, we forgot all of our training, all of our foresight.

  Still, even if we starved to death, it’d be worth it if it meant we could save Wade.

  I stilled for a moment as distrust crept over my skin like a wave of tiny insects. What if Max had been lying? What if she hadn’t really been seeing Wade in dreams? Even if she had, what if her whole goal was to lure us here? And, without question, we’d followed. Now we were separated and way out of our depths.

  I focused on my breathing, trying to dispel the anxiety taking hold around my chest. And when I did, I saw an image of her, head lying gracefully on her hotel pillow while she spilled her heart out to me. I saw the look of raging compassion in her eyes when I told her about my parents, when I talked about Sarah. My stomach tightened when I thought about how badly I’d wanted to kiss her in that moment, how badly I wanted to say fuck The Guild and bondmates and all the trash they fed us about procreating. That was never going to be for me, not in the way my people wanted anyway.

  When I thought about it, when I really focused, I knew with alarming certainty that she wasn’t pulling something over on us. That she truly believed Wade was here and that he was in danger. That I was just falling into old habits and refusing to trust anyone outside of the members of my team.

  And while it had taken years and years to build up the vulnerability to trust my team, Max made my head spin in new and thrilling ways. It was like my skin buzzed when she was in the room; my entire body called to her, reaching. I just didn’t know what it was reaching for.

  Maybe that was the problem. I always treated her with suspicion, not because she deserved it, but because I was so fucking conflicted and confused about how drawn to her I was. Maybe the right way to proceed was to treat her like a member of our team. We were kidding ourselves if we didn’t think she was eventually going to be a bonafide member of Six. She fit with us like she was always meant to be ours. And while she confused the hell out of me, the thought of having her around in a more permanent capacity didn’t fill my mouth with bile.