by C. M. Owens
Her keys are predictably in the ignition, because we’re apparently too trusting with all of our valuables. Hell, we barely even lock the door.
I won’t be that stupid again. I’ve gotten lax since my running days are behind me. Looks like I’m about to be running again.
Deciding I’m not ballsy enough to pull out right in front of Thad’s house, I go the opposite direction, heading toward Edgebrook.
After driving for a solid twenty minutes, I find myself beside the lake on one side, and covered by woods on the other. This stretch of highway is nothing but the lake and the woods until the lake veers and it turns into just woods on either side.
It’s creepy as hell, considering I’m officially in hiding until… Until… Hell, I don’t know how long.
What did Thad mean when he said something about me being human? What the fucking else could I be? And why was someone saying something about hashtag and Buffy while leaving?
Unbidden, Wendy’s book of freaky pictures crosses my mind, and I shudder. No way am I going there. I’m not crazy enough to believe the two coincide.
Just as I reach the end of the lake on my right, I’m swallowed up by the woods. Hella creepy indeed.
The shadows dance as the bright, full moon blares down, catching small slithers where the trees aren’t fully blocking its light. The eerie sounds of the wind howling through the woods is also less than comforting, and I’m forced to endure the sounds because Jenny’s stereo has been screwed up for months.
My heart thuds in my ears when I hear a sound that has my stomach twisting in nervous knots. Like every damn horror movie ever freaking created, the car starts sputtering until it completely stalls out in the middle of the road.
The dark, creepy, scary, no-house-in-sight road. And my cell phone is not in my purse. Of course it isn’t. Why would it be? That would be way too easy. Stupid thing probably wouldn’t have a signal out here in the middle of nowhere anyway.
Deciding not to meet up with Jason or Freddy, I stay my ass in the car and wide awake. In the movies, the girl always gets out of the car, and a hand clamps down on her ankle. Or, like an idiot, she runs into the thick of the forest. She’s usually screaming or crying or begging the killer not to kill her.
Nope. My ass is staying planted in the fucking car until someone comes by. And I’m keeping the doors locked while they work on the car outside. I’ll even be holding…
Shit. What’s in here to hit someone with?
Searching Jenny’s car, I find lipstick, perfume, and… gum. That’s so not helpful.
Just as I give up my search, something flickers and catches my eyes. I look up just in time to see something happening. Black fuzzy dots are appearing in rapid motion until there’s suddenly a body beside me. A fucking man in a motherfucking mask.
I’m dreaming and Freddy is here.
“Car problems?” the hallucination or dream killer asks candidly, looking all too relaxed in the passenger seat.
My entire body feels bone-stiff, and my fingers actually curl involuntarily, forming a white-knuckle grip on the perfume bottle and lipstick tube. A scream tries to breach my throat, but it painfully clings to my lungs, refusing to escape and share the air with this… I don’t know what this is.
My eyes are wide and unblinking as I stare into the freakiest eyes I’ve ever seen.
One second I swore they were yellow, and the next they seemed blue. The black mask is covering his entire face, but I almost feel his sick, sadistic grin.
In my dreams, I always fight as hard as I can, but it feels like I can never punch, kick, or run with all my strength.
I hope this time is different.
“Show me your true colors.” He whispers the words so low that I can barely hear them, and I edge back against the locked door, making it look like my elbow clumsily hits the unlock button.
Then, I do something stupid. I spray the son of a bitch in the face with perfume, only to hear him laughing as I dive out of the car, slamming into the unforgiving pavement on my back.
“I know you can do better than that,” he tsks. “Where are your marks?”
My freaking what?
I hear his door opening, and I do something stupid again. After heaving myself back up to my feet, I run… into the woods… whimpering, squealing, and making a whole hell of a lot of racket.
It’s too dark to see in here, and I’m just barely making out the shape of a tree before I crash into it. Limbs slap me in the face, and I cry out when my ankle twists. Stupid freaking sandals. Stupid freaking dress that I never took off.
Stupid. Freaking. Impossible. Night.
Limping slows me down, but I keep running, feeling the heat of a dark gaze on my back.
“Show me, Roslyn,” the guy’s voice says right next to my ear.
I scream, but he’s not beside me when I spin around.
“Show me your true colors,” he says from behind me.
Spinning around, I throw the tube of lipstick that I’ve apparently been holding, but all it slices through is vacant air.
“Let’s see the real you,” he says from behind me again, forcing me to spin once more.
Nothing. There’s nothing around me.
Either he’s damn good at projecting his voice, or he really is a phantom and I didn’t imagine that shit in the car.
This cannot be happening.
“Break loose. You’re not getting out of here unless you fight,” his voice says, now sounding like it’s coming in from several different angles, forcing me to spin and spin until I’m almost dizzy.
Suddenly, those same dots appear that I saw in the car, and a scream actually bubbles out of me as the freak appears right in front of my eyes. One of his hands goes to my throat, lifting me off the ground until I’m eye-level with him.
“You know you want to fight me,” he whispers.
I grip his wrist, trying to ease the choking hold on my throat, but it’s useless. My hands flail as I suck in small spurts of labored air, desperately trying to get more. I connect with his mask and drag it off, wishing I never had.
The second the mask is gone, a gasp dies on my tongue, unable to fully form for lack of oxygen. His inky black hair falls over his forehead, and underneath his hair somewhere, a scar starts, sliding down over the middle of his eye, stopping before touching the actual eye, and starting again just under it. It runs all the way down to his chin.
That’s all I can see before he shoves me against the tree, and my vision starts dimming, blurring as I lose the fight to breathe.
“I have a friend who will be very pissed if you kill her.” A girl’s voice finds my ears just as the hand on my throat disappears.
I fall to the ground, coughing and strangling on painful bursts of air that are rushing into my lungs. I hold my chest, wondering how it could possibly hurt worse than my throat.
“Ah, Princess, I should have known you’d follow me.”
Ella. It’s Ella. My eyes adjust enough to tell it’s her.
“It wasn’t you I was following, although we have been looking for you. Do you always go around torturing humans? Because that’s not why we freed the slave rings.”
I look up in time to see his lips curl in a taunting grin. It’s then I notice the tattoos slithering down his arms in sleeves. He has another scar on his neck, both of them marring what would otherwise be a handsome asshole.
He deserves more scars.
I try to push up on my hands and knees before he tries to hurt Ella. She won’t stand a chance.
“Princess, I can assure you, I’m the least of your worries. Believe me when I say I’m doing you a favor by taking care of this. I just need her to show me her true colors. I don’t feel right killing someone who isn’t fighting.”
Ella glares at him, while I digest his words. He wants to kill me? I really am in a horror movie. I half expect a wolf to howl and bats to fly overhead at any moment.
I definitely expect someone to come crashing through with a chainsaw.
“See, I was under the impression you were one of the good guys,” Ella says calmly, as though this guy isn’t psychotic.
He smirks, but that’s his only reaction. “No such thing in our world, baby. Besides, there are some people I’m itching to see. I owe them a few lashings, if you know what I mean.”
“Actually, I don’t know. How about you tell me and leave her alone?”
My head drums, and I start looking for a way to escape. I can’t just run and leave Ella behind.
“You don’t want to do this, Princess,” the guy says, though I don’t know why.
“You’re right. But you aren’t giving me much of an option.”
He grins as though he’s excited about something, and Ella takes a deep breath before her motherfucking eyes turn silver—glowing, freaky, unnatural silver.
“Game on, darling,” the guy whispers seconds before some bright surge of something comes rushing out of Ella’s hands and flying directly toward him.
All I can do is glue myself to the tree and watch in disbelief as fear and anger collide. I really don’t want to pass out, so I hope fear wins.
Fear is helped along just as I see a second body—the body of a slender girl—suddenly appearing in a dark cloud of smoke, and her hands are glowing red as she takes her place next to the scarred psychopath.
“Hold your fire. The princess is all mine,” the guy taunts, and I curl in on myself as tears slide free. My head is aching, my chest is caving in, and all my nightmares surface as panic edges in.
Chapter 14
ELLA
With barely any effort, he knocks away my power as though it’s some cheap parlor trick. He’s not supposed to be able to do that. It wasn’t a strong shot—since I’d rather scare him more than hurt him—but he just batted it down like it was a twig.
Glaring into eyes so dark that they’re almost black, I suck in a slow breath, trying not to let him smell the fear I actually feel. I assume his girlfriend is Kya, even though her face is covered by a mask.
His eyes shift, drawing my attention back as they turn a shade of green I’ve never seen, and then they shift again to red. Holy shit. He’s…
“You’re like me,” I whisper.
He smirks as though he’s amused, and he moves away from Kya, making me follow him with my eyes. Warily, my gaze darts back to Kya, then to him. I keep this up as he moves farther and farther away.
“Eyes on me, Princess. She’s not going to touch you or the other girl.”
My eyes immediately dart to Roslyn to see her wide-eyed and pale as a ghost. No way in hell is she anything more than human. She’s honestly terrified out of her mind.
If I wasn’t worried about needing her to be alert in case she has to duck or something, I’d put her under a sleeping spell to spare her the horrors she’s not far from seeing.
“Eyes on me,” he repeats a little firmer.
As commanded, I jerk my gaze back over to him to truly study him. He has a scar running from his forehead to his chin. Something had to have been powerful and painful to leave a mark on our flesh. My mother is one of the few I’ve seen scarred.
Deciding to quit playing his game and giving him power over me, I lash out again, feeling the power hum and burn through my veins, and releasing a stronger surge of energy.
Again, he bats it down, splitting the white light in half and letting it crash into the forest behind him, slicing down trees and wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting woods.
“Easy, Princess. We both know you don’t have enough control to keep doing things like that. You’re only embracing the light side of you, and the darkness lurks for its chance at control. I hear it’s a family trait—to deny your darker side.”
How does he know anything about me?
Cracking my neck to the side, I draw in another breath. Apparently he’s enjoying toying with me, and I’m not as gentle as he thinks I am.
“No,” I tell him, feeling the power shift like a tide inside of a storm. His eyebrow cocks up, seeming confused. “You’re wrong. I happen to love the hell out of my dark side.”
I feel the power swirling, growing, and begging to be set free as the wind stirs violently around me. My hair is whipping near my face, and I notice the strands ever so slowly turning from blonde to black.
It’s been a while since I let go, and there’s no one here to stop me.
“Slade…” Kya’s voice is a soft warning, but the guy who is apparently named Slade seems to enjoy the shift.
His smile grows wickedly, and his eyes darken once again.
“That’s more like it,” he whispers seconds before I unleash hell.
Power buzzes through me, and this time when the light leaves my hands, it’s almost blindingly bright. He grunts when he tries to slice through it, but it knocks him backward.
Adrenaline burns through my veins and everything tingles in its wake as I strike again, needing to feel that rush of death as it explodes from me.
Blue power slices through, colliding with it, tackling my power as we both push with all our strength. The powers collide again, but this time neither of us let go, both of us pushing harder and harder against the other.
Red light slashes through, almost hitting me in the side, but I throw up another hand, sending out a painful wave of power that sends Kya to the ground, screaming out in pain.
“Fuck! Stay out of it, Kya!” he yells.
He pushes harder, letting me know he was holding back, and I’m forced to release my hold on her to match him.
His eyes shift, moving to silver, and that’s when I feel the darkness truly taking over, beckoning to be in control as the beasts within me demand blood. And I cede the power to the side of me that has never gotten to fully be released.
THAD
“Ella still not answering?” Kimber asks me as I curse my phone.
“No.”
Punching the gas harder, driving back to Pine Shore from Edgebrook. That was the biggest dead end ever. Apparently Kya doesn’t want Karma finding her, and she has laid out one hell of a breadcrumb diversion path.
Bitch.
“Chaz is on his way over there, since neither one of them are answering their phones,” Kimber says from the back seat. Dice and Karma are in the very back. Gage and Kimber are in the middle set of seats, and Zee and I are up front.
For some reason, Chaz didn’t want to help us find Kya. Said he had other shit to do, which isn’t like him.
“Roslyn’s stuff is still at her house, including her phone. She didn’t bring anything last night since we were going to a party. And by the way, I forgot to mention that she still remembered Alex.”
Gage leans up, putting his head between me and Zee from the back of the SUV.
“Impossible. I wiped her memory up to the moment she got to the party. She would barely remember walking in.”
“Yeah, well, it caught me off guard too. But she remembered Jenny leaving with Alex. I kept waiting for her to say something else to allude to how much she remembered. She never did, but she seemed incredibly off. Any reason your dusting shit wouldn’t work?”
I glance over to see him studying the vacant air while he thinks about it.
“No. Hell, my shit works on fey, too. I don’t know about it working on anoin—”
“Don’t go there,” I growl.
“Why do your eyes look browner today than they did yesterday?” I hear Karma asking randomly, interrupting our conversation.
“Point of fact,” the incubus says, “our human eye color actually changes over the years at different rates based on the individual. For instance, Kane’s human eyes were solid green when he met Alyssa. Now they have a bluish hue to them. Eventually they’ll be human blue. It happens.”
Fucking random. Fucking inquisitive, new immortal demon/hybrid. I have more important things to worry about than freaking eye color.
“No way,” Karma groans, not trusting her jackass boyfriend who always spews bullshit.
“It’s
true,” Zee says, getting in on the conversation.
“Really?” Karma asks, sounding excited. “Why?”
“Who fucking cares?” Gage and I ask in unison.
“Just trying to stop you two from fighting. Again,” Karma mumbles under her breath.
Gage rolls his eyes just as I do. That’s what we do—fight. It’s just how we communicate.
“Hey,” Zee says, squinting into the distance. “What kind of car does Jenny have?”
I squint, but I can’t see anything ahead of me other than an endless row of forestry.
“Fuck if I know,” I mumble. “Why?”
Before he can answer, something explodes off to our right, and I screech to a halt as red, blue and white collide, blasting up into the air and thundering in power like it’s the fourth of July or some shit.
I leap out of the car when I see ungodly white light burning inside the middle of the forest, too bright to be cloaked by the trees.
“Fuck! Ella!” Zee shouts, running with me as we all crash through the woods, racing toward the point of origin.
Ella’s the only one to ever have power that white and that powerful. And I have a bad feeling Ella isn’t the one in control anymore.
“Careful!” Gage yells close behind us. “She could kill us all if she’s lost it!”
Kimber appears in front of me, then disappears into another portal just as Gage dematerializes. My feet pound the ground as I run faster, pushing my body to its limits as I hurdle over fallen trees and turn everything into a blur around me.
I stumble to a halt when I see a girl with black hair that should be blonde. Son of a fucking bitch.
“Probably shouldn’t have left her alone,” Dice whispers.
Roslyn is on the ground, seeming to be hyperventilating. Her eyes are dilating wildly as she stares at the brutal onslaught of blue and white power colliding.
Kya is on the ground, her mask broken and revealing her face. She’s clutching her side as though Ella has already gotten to her. Karma gasps when she sees her, and dematerializes to go to her side.
I see just the outline of a man, unable to see his face past the blue light surrounding him as he fights Ella like it’s his fucking job. Ella’s eyes are wild, dark, and fucking creepy as hell.