by Ivy Sinclair
Riley nuzzled the side of my neck. “That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
In the aftermath of our interlude, I found that I was suddenly shy especially when Riley hadn’t joined me. Without his body covering mine, I felt the chill of the air. I shuffled away from him looking for my clothes in the long shadows. I wasn’t even sure what to say.
As I slipped my shirt back on, I heard Riley sigh. “Paige, I want to tell you why I stopped things from going too far.”
I shrugged but refused to look in his direction. “Unless you have protection in that fancy kit of yours, it makes perfect sense.” The logical side of me said that it did, but that didn’t keep the sullen tone out of my voice.
“I carry everything I could possibly need in my kit,” Riley said.
That certainly didn’t make me feel any better. I couldn’t get my jeans back on fast enough. “We should probably get going. It’s almost dark. You said that demons prefer moving around at nighttime over daylight. We slept too long.”
I felt him behind me just before he took my elbow and spun me around. “Paige, I need you to listen to me.”
“I’ve been listening to you!” The words came out more violently than I expected. I forced myself to take a deep breath. “We don’t need to talk about anything else. It’s not a big deal.”
Riley’s finger came up and touched my collarbone. “There is nothing more that I want to do right now other than make love to you. But I can’t.”
It had something to do with Benjamin and the mark that lit up right after he said that he loved me. I finally looked up at Riley. “Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Right now, it’s the same thing. This mark means a lot of things for you. It also means that at the moment, you are off-limits to me.” Riley traced my collarbone, and I felt a stirring of longing in the pit of my stomach.
“That makes no sense. I don’t have feelings for him like that. There is nothing romantic about our relationship, even if that’s what he wants.” ‘He’ was the archangel Benjamin, who had pretended to be my best friend and confidante for the last three years. “’I’m not sure you understand that whatever that is, it isn’t something I asked for or wanted. He clearly put that there without my knowledge.”
“It doesn’t matter how it got there,” Riley said slowly. “But the fact that it is there at all means that I have to tread lightly where you are concerned if I value my hide. I’m already on Benjamin’s shit list. I don’t need to give him another reason to kill me.”
“So you can do…that?” I struggled with how to label what had just transpired between us without it sounding crass. “But you can’t do the other thing?”
“Let’s just say that I pushed the boundaries of what I think I was allowed to do,” Riley said. “Beside that, I try to never disappoint a beautiful woman.”
The man was infuriating. I grabbed one of his flashlights off the top of his kit and flicked the switch to turn it on. “I think it’s time to go.”
Then I stomped further into the caves. Riley could catch up.
CHAPTER THREE- RILEY
Most people would feel claustrophobic being embraced by the earth, but for me it was oddly soothing. The cool walls of the cave on either side of me had textures in the stone that danced up and down in a rippled attraction to the ceiling above my head. It was hard to predict when it would flatten out in front of me and I’d have to duck my head, but I didn’t mind. Each step deeper into the caves carried Paige away from those who wanted her, and that was good enough for me.
She walked confidently in front of me, and after following her for the last half an hour, I wasn’t even sure that she even needed the flashlight in her hand.
“So spelunking?” Even though I tried to keep my voice soft, it still reverberated off the rocks walls in a jarring way. “You seem to know these caves pretty well.”
“When you live on a dry island where everything pretty much closes at six pm, there isn’t much else to do with your downtime.” She didn’t turn her head when she replied. The flashlight’s beam danced off of the black stone ahead of us. “A lot of people take the ferry over to the mainland for shows and shopping and things like that, but that didn’t interest me. I was content here.”
“Benjamin showed you the caves then.” I hated even bringing up his name, but I was more than curious about the last three years that Paige had spent with the archangel. She had known him only as her manager and friend, but he wasn’t human. Benjamin said he was in love with Paige, but I didn’t know if angels were capable of such an emotion.
“Benjamin showed me everything about the island,” Paige answered. This time she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Guess it makes sense. It sounds like he’s been here a long time. He also never encouraged any excursions off the island when other people would ask me.”
“As far as he knew, this was the only place you were safe.” I knew that was the reason the archangel would give her. I wasn’t about to bring up the fact that he had also claimed Paige as his intended. It wasn’t the right time or place. I’d have to figure out a way around that one soon enough. As long as she had Benjamin’s symbol branded on her skin, he’d be able to track her wherever she went. The archangel said that he was in love with Paige. But if there was anything I knew for sure about dealing with the holy flock, it was that they lied through their teeth as it suited their purposes.
Paige sighed and her hands flapped in the air. “So what’s going to happen when I leave here? That’s what you want to do, right? Leave the island?”
“Benjamin kept the demons away from here for a decade with threats and fear. I think it’s safe to assume at this point that cover is blown. Demon traps and the threat of death aren’t going to keep them away any longer. For the last ten years, he managed the impossible so you have to give him credit for that.”
“Over all that time, there have been others who came here who wanted to escape demons, right?”
I had a sense that I knew where her train of thought was going, and I couldn’t help but be surprised. “It’s pretty common knowledge that if you have a demon problem and need to disappear, a stay on Calamata Island usually does the trick.”
“I took that away,” Paige said. She looked up at me. “A safe haven free of demons, and now it’s not. It’s not safe for anyone. That’s my fault.”
It had been a long time since I was around someone who cared about anyone else outside of their own self-interests. I had forgotten that there were people who genuinely gave a shit about other people, even people they had never met. I reached out and touched her shoulder. “It’s not your fault. I’m sure Benjamin will find a way to return it to the way it was before. He likes having his own little kingdom a bit too much to have it any other way. Angels are very territorial.”
Paige twisted away from me and pushed forward into the darkness. I had no choice but to follow.
“I just wish I understood why he chose me.”
I didn’t think she meant the words for me, but with the echoing nature of the walls around us, I heard it anyway. My mouth opened and then closed. I had an inkling that it had something to do with her abilities. Paige didn’t know about those yet though, and I didn’t know how to tell her all of that either. It would only serve to scare her even more than she was already.
Paige was important. That was certain. How or why or what happened next were the mysteries. There was only one person that I knew who could help decipher a mystery like that that I trusted, and she was two thousand miles away. Getting Paige to her wasn’t going to be as easy as jumping on a plane. Once we hit the mainland, there were eyes and ears everywhere, both angel and demon. I wasn’t sure what my next move was going to be, but for now I just had to focus on the task at hand. That was getting both of us off the island in one piece.
Then Paige seemed to dissolve before my eyes. I blinked, but then felt her hand on my bicep. “You missed your exit.”
I squinted into the darkness and found that
I could just make out Paige’s slender form in front of me. I tried to put aside the fact that I had the opportunity to connect with her in the most intimate way possible, but turned it down. I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like to press her against the wall and let my hands do a little spelunking of their own.
Forcing my thoughts back to the present, I cleared my throat. “It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of the dark. Why did you turn the flashlight off?”
“I heard something,” Paige’s whisper seemed like a shout in the small space.
Immediately I was on alert. My hand reached for the Plythen steel knife that I had attached to my belt. My armory of guns and ammunition got lost when our canoe overturned in the lake, but I still had a few tricks up my sleeve. This part of the island wasn’t like the ground around Benjamin’s cabin sanctuary where no one had ever died or been buried. That meant that the knife wasn’t my best weapon by far.
“What did you hear?” I kept my voice low as well.
“It’s hard to describe.” Even though I couldn’t see her face, in my mind I knew that her nose was scrunched up as she tried to dredge up the right words. Light freckles ran across the bridge of her nose and the apples of her cheeks. I found them absurdly adorable. “It sounded like something smooth brushing across the surface of the stone. Like a hiss.”
I grabbed Paige against me and put my hand over her mouth to stop any further words. I trusted that if she heard something, she did. And there were more than a few demons on the list that emitted that particular kind of noise.
Closing my eyes, I let my mind reach out. It was nothing more than light fingertips out into the air and then into the dirt and stone all around us to find what I was looking for. The dead occupied almost every square inch of soil that I had ever found. Here, on Calamata Island though, the dead were even older than I ever would have expected. It was no doubt tied to the fact that the island had its own mysterious past.
A heavy sigh filled my mind, and I latched onto it.
“What do you want?”
I normally didn’t care for using telepathy with those souls that I found. It seeped more energy than I cared to use and cut off my regular senses in a way that was more than disconcerting. It was almost as if I entered a kind of dreamland where it was just me and the dead one, and there was a shared connection of emotions and memories. It was a cold place.
“I need to know if there are others in these tunnels.” I didn’t use my nice voice. Not today.
“Others? You are the first to interrupt my slumber in many years.”
A pale image now accompanied the voice in my mind. Long white hair flowed down the man’s shoulders. He was a slim form dressed in clothes that were from another era. In life, he would have passed for any other man, but dead he couldn’t entirely hide his true face from me. Two glowing red eyes stared back at me. Even in corporeal form, demons were demons.
“Why do I feel like you’re lying to me?”
“I have no reason to lie.”
“How about I bring your sorry ass over here to tell me that to my face.”
The demon’s face soured. “I’m the least of your concerns, Necromancer.”
I released the demon from my mind. He told me what I needed to know, and I wouldn’t have trusted the rest even if I had managed to wrangle it out of him.
Safely back in my own mind, I leaned down until I felt the tickle of Paige’s hair on my cheek. “How much further is it?” I said in a hushed voice next to her ear.
“Not far.” This time I barely heard her. Like me, she was figuring out the trick of how to pitch the level of her voice to suit the environment. “Ten minutes. Fifteen at the most. But that’s with a flashlight.”
I cursed. “That’s too far.”
“What is it, Riley?”
It was time to lean on some of the other abilities that I had at my disposal, and I didn’t like that one bit. I always had Alice’s warnings about drawing on too much energy at the forefront of my mind. But I couldn’t risk letting Paige walk into something far more dangerous because I was a chickenshit to try.
“Give me a sec.” Like before, I opened my mind, but this time I had a different purpose. This wasn’t to connect with the dead things buried in the walls around us, but instead an active probe, not unlike the way a bat used its senses to navigate its flight. The only problem was I didn’t know my destination. That was where things got tricky. But I wondered if I could balance things out in a way.
“I’m going to go ahead. What I need you to do is indicate to me which way to go.”
“I can’t see,” Paige replied.
I took her hand in mine. She caught her gasp before it slid fully out of her lips, but I winced nonetheless. I knew what she was seeing. It was as if the world around us was there in its shadow form. There was no light, but there was a glow all around us that indicated the openings of the tunnels around us.
“Where do we go?”
“Left,” she whispered. There was a hint of something in her voice that I immediately recognized. Fear.
That was the last thing I wanted her to feel around me or about me. But at the same time, I couldn’t hide who I was from her either. She said she wanted to know me, but I couldn’t help but think that, once she did, she’d regret the day she ever met me.
I slid past her but didn’t let her hand go. Then I proceeded into the tunnel to our left. I pulled the knife from its case and let it fall in front of me. If we were lucky, whatever tracked us in the caves would never even find us. With Paige’s help, in more ways than one, I had the advantage.
I was sure in hell going to use it.
CHAPTER FOUR- PAIGE
Every time I thought I was settled with the idea that my worldview was irrevocably changed for the rest of my life, I encountered something else that blew my mind all over again. I had no idea how Riley was doing what he was doing, but I could see my way into the tunnels in front of us even though we were walking in complete darkness.
For the next few minutes, we walked in silence. I squeezed Riley’s hand and moved our joined fingers in whatever direction we needed to go. I understood that there was a good chance we weren’t alone in the tunnels. Riley thought we had shaken the demons’ trail when we went into the lake, but it appeared that wasn’t the case. For some reason, I thought that they probably preferred the dark, damp interior of the Calamata tunnels to the outside.
Troubled once again, I couldn’t help but focus on the hulking form of the man in front of me. Riley Stone. Life saver. Demon fighter. Necromancer. Now I needed to add a new phrase to my list. Telepath? At least, that was the only word I could think of to describe what he was doing. Somehow, he was projecting the image of the glowing tunnels walls to me. But he wasn’t reading my thoughts. I started. At least, I didn’t think he was reading my thoughts.
Riley stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,’ I replied, feeling foolish for diverting his attention away from the task at hand. There was also a part of me that didn’t want him spending too much time focused on me. Whatever strange power he possessed seemed to be amped up at the moment, and I had no idea what else he could do with it. My mind was full of questions, but I wasn’t sure that I was ready to know the answers.
I was also kicking myself. I let him kiss me and do a whole hell of a lot more than that. I wasn’t going to deny that I was incredibly attracted to him. Between his emerald eyes, broad shoulders, and muscular physique he checked off every physically salivating mark on the attraction checklist. These kinds of situations continued to remind me though that I didn’t really know him at all. He had been right to stop things before they went too far between us. I met him two days ago and had effectively thrown in my lot with him, but I hadn’t known what else to do. It wasn’t like I was even aware until that point that such things as angels and demons even existed.
I sensed that Riley wanted to question me further, but time was growing short. I didn’t need to be a mind reader
or sensitive to know that. My instincts were tingling as if on high alert.
The hair on the back of my neck rose as I heard the same slithering noise that I heard earlier. My mind corrected itself. It was the same kind of noise I expected to hear when running silk over rough skin.
“Down!” My knees immediately buckled at Riley’s warning. The moment our hands disconnected, my world went dark once again. A high-pitched squeal filled the space, and my palms flew to my ears to deaden the blow to my eardrums. Riley pushed me to the side even as he moved around me. I heard his grunt as he made contact with something coming up fast from behind us.
The squeal vibrated against the walls again, but this time it held a ring of pain in it. I heard the sickening crack of bones being broken. Then it was silent except for Riley’s rough panting.
I found myself dragged back up to my feet again before I could blink.
“We need to go,” Riley said.
I nodded numbly. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew that he could see me. “Is it dead?”
“Yes.” Then Riley scooped my hand up in his again and pulled me forward. “But I am sure it isn’t alone. Rackor demons are pack hunters.”
With the eerie vision renewed with Riley’s touch, I couldn’t help but twist back and look behind me. I felt my stomach overturn as I whirled my eyes around to the front looking at Riley’s back, but the vision remained in my mind.
The body leaned up against the wall wasn’t human, but it wasn’t fully formed as a snake either. A long tongue hung limply out of its mouth, and I didn’t miss what looked like barbs on the tip of it. The head rolled off to the side and hung at an angle that wasn’t possible for something with a straight spine. Riley broke its neck. Considering I didn’t see any weapon in his possession other than a hunting knife, I could only assume he had managed to do the deed with his bare hands. I wasn’t sure why this bothered me. I had seen other demons before, and I had watched Riley kill them. But something about the brute force required in these small, dark quarters gave me the creeps.