by SM Reine
What he didn’t understand was why Lilith had stuck her neck out for the woman. The smart move would have been to bring her back to Gideon Black and let the weres sort things.
He doubted Gideon was the sort of were who suffered a witch to live unless he had a damn good reason.
It was their lycan pack mentality that deeply distrusted the fierce independence of witches. The fact they were owned, body and soul, by the seraphim didn’t seem to factor in the conflict. Probably because the seraphim rarely meddled in were or human affairs.
He tried to feel Lilith’s presence, but he’d lost her when she entered a cave. He’d backtracked to where the trail forked, picked up his pace until he came to where he guessed the cave might come out if she’d used it as some kind of short cut. The howling of the hunting weres had faded on this slope, so if she’d been trying to get away from the pack, she would have come this direction. There’d been no sign of her.
Now, as he worked his way back to where the trail had diverged, the howling grew louder. Soon they’d be close enough to pick up his scent.
Light flashed up ahead, a small beam of light that flickered in and out, bright and focused, but low to the ground.
Remy broke into a run.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lilith woke to tiny feet dancing on her face.
“Wake up!” The voice was tinny, small and distant; the pummeling from itty-bitty fists was not. Lilith moaned.
“Stop.”
“Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
Lilith lifted her head, and a wave of nausea made her roll on her side, open her mouth, but nothing came out. She gagged and coughed and lay there letting her stomach settle.
Crispin must have leaped to the ground when she’d moved. He advanced on her, and it was strange, but they were on eye level. His feet on the ground and her cheek smashed against the mat of fallen pine needles that covered the forest floor.
“Stupid witch,” he said.
Lilith swatted at him, but he danced out of her reach.
“Must get up. Up, up, up,” he shouted. “Now. Didn’t save stupid witch for nothing. Move!”
With effort, Lilith did as the Kyrst asked. It was still dark, but colder now. She looked down and fiddled with the zipper on her leather jacket. “What happened?”
“Master is angry,” Crispin said.
“So what else is new?”
The last thing she remembered was standing in front of the portal inside Gaebryl’s chamber. “What happened?”
“No time,” Crispin said. “This is bad, very bad. You must run. Now.”
The little man tilted his head back, and Lilith noticed that he wasn’t wearing his hat. Crispin never went anywhere without his hat.
He pointed at the sky. The moon was nearly full and the reflected sunlight turned the vault of the sky dark blue and the sweep of the Milky Way was clearly visible. Shadows flitted back and forth. Lilith squinted. They were sometimes long and diaphanous because she could see the stars twinkling through them. Others rolled into round and oblong shapes that became dense and darker than the sky.
“Do you know what those things are?” she asked.
“Fehin,” Crispin said. “Master brought them back with him.”
Lilith scrambled to her feet, propped her hands on her hips and studied the sky. There had to be dozens of the things in flight. They circled like vultures over a kill. She and Tasha had barely survived a confrontation with two of the things.
“What did you say they were?” she asked.
Crispin flicked out of sight and reappeared on her shoulder. “Fehin.”
“And Gaebryl brought them from…where?”
Crispin tugged on her ear because he knew she hated that and pointed at the sky. “They are very bad. Only a stupid witch stands around and asks questions.”
She wanted to strangle him, but he’d already blinked away, leaving her alone.
A single howl echoed through the dark forest followed by a chorus of were voices.
Something big crashed through the trees.
Lilith ran.
Lilith ran hard down the trail, dodging gnarled roots and overhanging limbs, shunning the small branch trails, pounding steadily down the hills, scrambling higher up the other side. There were other trails she could take, longer, narrower, less frequented trails that would take her all the way to the lake and back. If she did that, she would surely lose her pursuer, but she kept an eye on the sky, darting glances when she passed a break in the trees. Every time she saw the same dark shapes, wisps of evil circling and circling. They were too close to her cabin for comfort. Too close to Tasha.
Evil that threatened because of Gaebryl.
Fury gave her speed, but not enough. The pounding of footsteps behind her grew louder until she could hear him. The sound of a heavy body crashing through underbrush. The heavy footfalls that were not…paws.
She swung around the backside of a huge tree and paused, panting.
Her pursuer must not have shifted like the others. Then she heard his voice.
“Lilith!” he called. “It’s me.”
Remy.
She pressed her face into the rough bark and wished she knew the spell that would allow her to vanish inside the tree. Had he come to help her? Or drag her back to Gideon?
He came into view, slowing his pace and looking right and left. She stepped out from behind the tree. He smiled and dragged a hand across his brow.
“You’re a long way from home,” Lilith said, making sure to keep her expression neutral.
“You can be a hard woman to find.”
“I don’t need your help and the woods aren’t safe tonight.”
He shrugged. “Gideon sent them. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Listen, I’m only here to help you.”
As he spoke, Lilith watched an evil shred of midnight float through the trees and perch on a branch over Remy’s head. It coiled one end of its length around the tree limb; the orange heart glowed in the darkness.
“Am I boring you?” Remy asked.
“I’m not talking about the weres.” Lowering her voice to barely above a whisper, she said, “Walk very slowly and get behind me.”
Remy shook his head.
“I’m not kidding.”
“Lilith, you can trust me. Please. I don’t care what you’ve got going on with Tasha and Owen. Whatever it is, we can work it out.”
Two more demons…fehin…broke away from the circling flock above and dove toward Remy and Lilith.
Quickly, Lilith sidestepped around the lyr and sketched the same protection spell she’d used earlier. “You wouldn’t happen to be wearing stilettos, would you?”
He chuckled softly. “I left them at home tonight.”
“I was afraid of that.” She finished the pattern, adding a few flourishes for good measure, but paused before closing the last loop. “As soon as I finish this spell, we’re going to have to run like hell.”
He’d come up close behind her, close enough that she could feel that his big body had gone rigid. Even if he didn’t understand what was going on, he knew something was wrong. “I’m ready.”
Lilith closed the last loop and spoke the final sequence of the spell. It was a more advanced variety than what she’d used earlier, but had no idea if it would hold off the demons.
The pattern fired.
Lilith and Remy ran.
Spent power tingled at her fingertips, trailing red and gold sparks behind her as she ran. Markings a were could follow more accurately than any scent trail, but it was too late to worry about that. Remy put on a show of speed and surged ahead of her. As he passed, she caught a glimpse of his aura. It shone iridescent bright in the night forest, shimmering blue and green and yellow, but a filament of midnight fog streamed from it like a demonic flag.
Still running, she formed one hand into a fist then opened it and breathed fire, crushed it into a ball and threw it at the fehin. It hit dead center, crisping the creature.
&nb
sp; Remy stumbled, catching himself with one hand against a tall pine as he ground to a halt.
“What the fuck, Lilith.” He panted.
She only had eyes for the smoking region above his head where the fireball had demolished the fehin. “Do you feel all right?” she asked.
“I’d feel better if I knew you weren’t trying to kill me.” He shrugged. “Other than that, no big deal.”
Men.
Bulletproof and immortal. Except as a lyr he was pretty much both of those things, but he hadn’t faced anything like the fehin before.
“It’d be really great if you could get it through your head that I’m not the enemy,” he said.
“You followed us up to the cabin, didn’t you.”
He nodded.
“So if you wanted to take Tasha back to Gideon, you could have. I get that.”
He spread his hands wide. “What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. Right now I need you to look.” She pointed skyward. “See those things?”
He looked up through the trees to the patch of visible sky where the dark forms swarmed. Their number had increased.
“Yeah. What are they?” he asked.
“They’re demons called fehin. There was one attached to you. I got it off.”
“Okay. Thanks, I think.” He studied the sky. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before.” Turning back to her, he said, “Is that what you were talking about when you said we needed to run?”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t the first time I’d seen those fuckers.” She told him about her encounter with the fehin earlier, leaving out how she’d learned that Gaebryl was responsible for introducing the fehin to the earth realm.
Gaebryl had a lot to answer for, but that list was already long.
“They don’t seem to have followed us,” Remy said.
“Where they’re circling is too close to my cabin. I’m worried about Tasha.”
Remy frowned. “She’s not in the cabin.”
Lilith started. “What do you mean?”
“After I saw her leave the cabin, I went inside. You weren’t there, so I—”
“What about Erin?”
“Who’s Erin?”
“Redhead. Friend of Tasha’s. She was on the couch, sleeping.”
He shook his head. “There was no one in the cabin.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Is that a bonfire?”
As Remy pointed to what looked like a small fire in a clearing under the tall pines, Lilith came up beside him and squatted. Both were exhausted from running, but they’d managed to find where the fehin had gathered.
He waited while Lilith studied the scene. The clearing was small, maybe twenty feet across from side to side. Tall grass covered the ground and ran all the way up to the edge of the bright glow in the center of the area. He expected her to say why yes, that is a fire, but somehow knew that was wrong. The grass was too close to the glow; it would have burned. Not to mention how the fire morphed and shifted in ways that were almost…reptilian.
“No,” Lilith whispered, “it’s fehin. A lot of fehin clumped together.”
Dozens more of the dark shapes hung from trees like demonic moss and even more circled overhead. A human-sized form lay on the ground to the right of the fire, wrapped in a quilt and tied with rope. Blond hair spilled on the ground.
Another person-sized form capered around the piled fehin, dancing and cackling.
Erin?
Remy rubbed his eyes to make sure he was getting it right. There was a kind of haze over the clearing that bent available light in odd directions and distorted everything.
“It’s a nest,” Lilith said.
“We’ve got to get them out of there.”
“Just Tasha.”
“We can’t leave Erin,” he insisted.
“Yeah, we have to.”
He measured the expression on Lilith’s face: dead serious. The kind of look he’d learned meant if you ask a question I’m going to have to kill you, but it also wasn’t the first time, so he asked.
“Why?’
“She’s dead.”
Erin danced and waved her arms and opened her mouth as if singing, although the only sounds he could make out were strange croons and grunts.
“She’s alive!”
Lilith caught him by the arm. “No, she’s not.”
Remy jerked free of her hold and started to stand. If he slipped sideways…
Lilith rose beside him, her voice soft and harsh in his ear. “Her aura is completely gone. She’s about as dead as dead gets. She’ll be ripe by dawn. The things that attacked us in town tonight smelled like rot and pieces were falling off of them. I couldn’t figure that part out until now.”
“Figure what?” he asked, although he didn’t want to know the answer.
“They possess a body and live off the life energy until it’s gone, until the person is dead. Then they hang around until it’s decomposed too far to be useful. I guess after that, they go hunting for another host.”
Remy’s gaze followed Erin’s mad dance around the clearing, searching for any sign that she might simply be off her rocker or so drugged she’d lost her mind.
“She might still be in there and the presence of the fehin are masking her aura…or whatever.” There were many life forms in the ocean that lived various states of symbiosis. Parasites who were beneficial to the host.
“I’m telling you she’s gone. There’s nothing we can do for her.”
“We can’t leave her here.”
“If we waste time on Erin, we risk losing Tasha, as well. We’ve got to do what we can and fast.”
In some part of his brain, Remy knew Lilith was right. Erin’s body moved as if plucked randomly by invisible wires, but worst of all, there was no light in her eyes. They stared in one direction; fixed and oddly pale, no matter which way the fehin tossed the body.
“Come on, Remy, do you think you can go sideways?”
“Yeah.”
“Go in and get Tasha.”
“What about you?”
“Just take care of Tasha. When you get out, follow me. I’ll leave a trail even a blind were could follow.”
“I don’t like this,” he growled.
“You wanted me to trust you. Now it’s your turn.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lilith ran up the trail to the cave, pushing faster and harder, pushing until her legs burned. She wasn’t afraid of being followed by fehin, and for once she wasn’t afraid of being chased by weres. She was counting on them to pick up her trail.
All she could think about was Gaebryl, her master.
Gaebryl, the seraphim who’d comforted her the night her mother died.
Gaebryl, the jealous lover she’d walked away from three hundred years ago, which had led to the period she thought of as the French Disaster. Gaebryl had disciplined her by randomly killing anyone she’d cared about.
The body count had risen before she’d finally given in. She still blamed herself for those deaths. If not for her arrogance, if not for her stiff-necked defiance, they might have lived. Short lives in comparison to the sweep of her existence, but worthy lives all the same; lives that could have been rich and full cut short, and all because of her.
It was why she kept Remy and everyone else at arm’s length.
Never again would she allow her weakness to paint a target on an innocent’s back for a seraphim’s whim.
Gaebryl, the sucking bastard who’d introduced a new demon to this realm for his own amusement.
He would not get away with it this time. His latest scheme would become his undoing.
When she reached the cave, she blew through the wards, ducking just in time to avoid the shiny garrote and making certain each one in the sequence had been deactivated, leaving the cave unprotected.
She found the seraphim reclining in his singular chair, idly strumming his lyre as if he’d been waiting for her and decided to strike a pose. She want
ed to spit, but refrained.
He wore white from head to toe, but that was the only thing about him that was the least bit angelic. He had the sensual lips of an enthusiastic sinner set under a prominent nose and deep-set dark brown eyes. Throw a patch over one eye and a gold hoop through an ear and he’d pass for a pirate. His dark hair fell to his shoulders in messy ringlets that might have been effeminate on another man.
Except he wasn’t a man.
Lilith had to remind herself of this every time she encountered him. Her master. The very thought made righteous indignation fire in her soul. It warmed her, and she held the anger close, but that was all the good it did her. Under normal circumstances, she was about as likely to break free of Gaebryl’s control, as Crispin was to fulfill his passion for David Beckham.
Fortunately, there was nothing normal about this night.
The idea had come to her while she’d watched the fehin nest and remembered the second feather Gaebryl had left for her—the one in the place where the man in the red plaid shirt had been sitting. Practically in the same location as the fehin attack.
Not a coincidence.
Humans were obviously easily susceptible to the fehin. Gaebryl had wanted to find out how she fared against the demons.
So he had been planning this.
Tensions between the were packs were at an all time high. It would take little provocation to spark a full-blown war. Into this volatile mix, Gaebryl had introduced a new weapon: the fehin. It had taken a while for her to make the connection, because who would think of a demon as a weapon?
Only a seraphim.
But he had forgotten one thing: weapons could be used by anyone—anyone with sufficient power and knowledge, that is.
She crossed into his chamber.
“You’re late,” Gaebryl said.
“I was detained, but I think you know that already.”
As if in response, he waved a big hand at a lump that lay on the floor a few feet away. “What do you make of that? It’s filthy and probably ruining my rug, but I wanted you to take a look at it first. It’s why I summoned you.”