by Sam Cheever
As Emo and I started off toward the tunnels, a cold spray continually pummeled us. We were drenched and dripping by the time we reached the mouth of the tunnel.
We stopped just inside the wide, slimy tunnel opening and used our power to dry off. Then we created balls of light in our hands and headed into the dank darkness toward the house.
The tunnels narrowed some as we ventured more deeply into the earth but stayed fairly consistently head height and wide enough for two people to walk comfortably side by side.
I knew from childhood stories that the tunnels had been magically enhanced and supported so that they would last indefinitely in their current form.
The ground beneath our feet was spongy with moisture at first but gradually dried to rock as we got closer to the fortress.
Something skittered past my feet and I jumped, plowing into Emo. He grunted as my elbow hit him in the soft underbelly and he wrapped his arms around me chuckling.
“I think there are rats in here, Astra,” he whispered into my ear. I shivered but I wasn’t sure if it was from the idea of rats or from the teasing heat of his breath against my ear.
He chuckled again. “You want me to carry you?”
I scowled at him but the effect was pretty much lost in the dark. “Bite me!”
He shrugged, “If you insist.”
I smacked him on the chest and started off again.
Bats swung by our heads with chirping sounds but those didn’t bother me. I simply ducked and let them fly on by while keeping a close eye out for those damnable rats.
Finally my light ball illuminated the thick, wooden door that led into the dungeon.
I turned a rusted handle and shoved but the door was swollen and wedged pretty tightly into the door frame.
I looked at Emo. “We can’t blast it because that would make too much noise.”
He nodded. “Let’s apply heat. Maybe it will shrink enough to open.”
I grinned at him. “And I thought you were just another pretty face.”
He grinned and we turned back to the door. It took about ten minutes of power-induced heat to get the door open. Together we shoved it open enough to squeeze through one at a time.
The basement was cool and damp and empty. We moved quietly up the stone stairs to the main floor and I cast my sensing power around the rooms there but found no life force of any kind.
I climbed the stairs that led to the upper levels of the house. Like the other floors, the upper floors were uninhabited. Even my father was gone.
We returned to the Viper the way we’d come in and headed toward the Angel City Coven headquarters.
As we neared the wildlife preserve I felt myself losing nerve. The last two times I’d gone there had turned out badly to say the least. I was so not happy about returning to the coven.
Sensing my unease, Emo took my hand and squeezed it. “Raoul said the coven would be holding a rite in the clearing tonight. Headquarters should be empty.”
“I know.” I frowned as I spoke. Something was eating at me that I couldn’t explain. I felt like I had a doom boogey riding around on my shoulder and nothing I did seemed to shake it off.
I thought again about Enoch and his accusations and felt my stomach tighten in dread. “Where the Hades is my father?”
I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until Emo responded. “He’s doing his job.”
My head jerked around and he looked quickly away, almost guiltily. Our arrival at the coven building kept me from questioning him further but I made a mental note to grill him later that night when we got back to the office.
I dropped the Viper about a half mile from the building and Emo and I hoofed it. I wish I could say coven headquarters was empty but it wasn’t. What I can say, however, is that it was filled with the wrong witches.
As we approached the darkened building we started noticing dancing lights behind the windows and realized that someone was inside and they were using palm-sized canister lights to search the place.
It seemed someone else shared our desire to visit while the witches were busy elsewhere.
Chapter Eighteen
Altar-ed Reality
With sleepy eyes our heroine, awakens to her fate,
Awash in lust she calls for aid and prays he’s not too late.
I turned to Emo. “What do you want to bet this is the Devil’s Glenn crew?”
He nudged me with his elbow and grinned. “Wanna have some fun?”
I nodded. “Oh yeah.”
Keeping a low profile, we scurried toward the building. Crouching under the closest window we peered carefully inside, being careful to stay out of sight. Inside the room a small but powerful beam played itself over the files and pages that were piled high on a very messy desk.
“I got this one,” I said. Then I pulled my power forward, concentrated it into a slender thread and sent it on silent feet through the slightly open window into the room. The power thread reached the desk and burrowed under the mound of paperwork, causing it to jerk and bounce and then shoot straight up into the air, where it separated in a whoosh and flew around the room. The person on the other end of the beam of light shrieked, leaped straight into the air and flew out of the room.
Emo and I snickered and moved to the next window.
We were just in time to see the intruder in that room heading for the door to see what the commotion was all about. Emo raised a hand and the door inside the room slammed shut in the intruder’s face.
The larger form, apparently a man, jumped back from the door and stood staring at it as if waiting for it to move again.
Emo wiggled his fingers and the door flew open again but when the intruder headed for it Emo shut it again before he could get through. The man jumped back just in time to keep from getting a hand slammed in the door.
This time the man grabbed the doorknob and tried to open it, then started yelling when it wouldn’t open. When he turned to look at the window as a possible escape route Emo wiggled his fingers again and opened the door.
In the next room I shot a stream of power into a chair and it exploded into fire. The three searchers ran shrieking from the room and seconds later the front door shot open and half a dozen forms in long, dark robes ran from the building as if all the spirits of Hell were hot on their heels.
I couldn’t see any faces until they climbed into their air vehicle, which had been tucked into the shadows not too far from the building and then I recognized a couple of the witches from Raoul’s and my visit to Devil’s Glenn.
When they were safely gone Emo and I stood up and headed for the door.
“I don’t suppose there’s much point searching the building after that. If he’d been in there I figure they would have found him.”
Emo nodded. “We’re here though so we might as well look.”
Sighing in frustration, I preceded him into the abandoned headquarters building.
I threw out my sensing power as soon as I came through the door. My immediate sense was that the building was empty. As we moved toward the garden room where Dialle and I had been just a few days previous I started getting a sense of something that made my pulse pick up. It was a magic signature. One that I hadn’t expected to find in that place. I’d hoped to find its owner but I didn’t expect him to be using magic.
I turned to Emo. “He’s been here.”
Emo frowned. “How do you know that?”
“Don’t you feel the magic residue? That’s his signature.”
Emo shook his dark head. “I haven’t experienced his signature.”
I moved further into the room but the residue started receding the closer to the greenhouse area I moved so I turned and headed back toward the other end of the room. There, in the shadows where we’d first encountered Commander Astis, I saw a door in the wall.
So that was how she’d snuck up on us that day.
I approached the door and reached for the handle. As I touched it I was assaulted by a vision so strong it
brought me to my knees.
It was King Dialle, held by magic chains to the wall in my father’s dungeon room, screaming as a stream of power drilled a hole in his beautiful golden chest.
Every scream, every jerk, every melting inch of flesh flooded through me as if it were me chained to that wall rather than him. I screamed and tried to pull my hand off the door handle but it wouldn’t come loose.
The power drill finally stopped and the king’s silky black head drooped forward. His muscular body was covered in a sheen of sweat and blood and his chest heaved with his frantic breathing.
I watched my father approach the gravely wounded royal.
Placing a hand over the bleeding hole in Dialle the First’s chest, my father emitted a warm, white power that I knew would burn like acid on a dark worlder. Even as I had the thought King Dialle threw back his dark head and screamed in apparent agony, his strong throat jerking with the frantic pulse of his heart.
I joined him in his agony.
Amazingly the hole started to heal. After a moment it was entirely gone and King Dialle seemed to have passed out. My father stepped back from the unconscious royal and disappeared from sight.
Almost immediately the power drill started up again, this time invading King Dialle’s flat, hard stomach.
Slumped against the door, my stomach ripping invisibly beneath a mystical onslaught, I wasn’t sure how much longer the king or I would last.
Suddenly strong arms wrapped around me and a jolt of heated power saturated my hand on the knob. I came loose in a shower of sparks and my knees buckled. I sagged to the floor, dragging Emo with me.
I lay there panting and shivering with Emo hanging over me, his golden face dark with concern. “Astra, what the hell just happened? Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Just give me a minute.”
Emo hovered anxiously over me until I sat up and then he pulled me to my feet. He kept an arm around my waist until we were both sure the weakness had passed.
“What happened, Astra?”
I looked at the door handle and frowned. “This has happened to me before, when I was hunting Prince Nille. I didn’t like it then either.”
He jerked me around to face him. “What happened?”
“I had a vision but more than a vision, it was like I was in his skin…”
“Whose skin?”
“King Dialle’s. He was hanging from the wall in my father’s dungeon and somebody was drilling a hole in my—I mean his—chest with a stream of power. My father healed the hole and that hurt almost as much as the drilling had. Then my father was out of sight again and…” I stopped and looked at Emo, feeling ice crystals forming on my spine. “Holy shit, Emo! My father was torturing the king.”
Emo frowned at me, doubt clearly visible in his black eyes. “Are you sure, Astra? That doesn’t sound right.”
I shook my head and dropped my butt into the nearest chair. “No. It isn’t right. It can’t be.”
Emo looked back at the door. “What should we do about that?”
I followed his gaze and shook my head. “I’m not touching that thing again. You do it.”
Emo walked over and grasped the handle. It opened right up to reveal an empty room. I went through the door with him, taking care not to touch anything and was perplexed to find no magic residue that I recognized in the room. It was a simple conference room with a large table in the center and several chairs arranged around it.
We left the house and walked toward the Viper.
Emo leaned against the vehicle and stretched his neck wearily. “According to your vision he’s at your father’s house.”
I frowned. We’d been through the house from top to bottom and the king hadn’t been there.
“He’s not there.”
“Something’s not right.”
I looked at him. “You think?”
That was when I noticed the fog moving along the ground around our feet.
Emo’s gaze followed mine. “What the hell is that?”
I didn’t know but I sure as hell didn’t want to find out either. “Get in the Viper, Emo.”
He continued to stare at the fog. “It’s kind of purple, that’s weird.”
I smacked his arm. “Get the hell in the Viper, Emo. Now!”
I didn’t wait for him to do what I’d told him. Flinging myself into the Viper I pulled the door shut behind me manually and, as soon as I felt Emo’s butt hit the seat next to mine I screamed, “Seal and climb.”
The fog surged over and around the Viper until it obscured everything outside the view ports. The Viper’s nose tipped up in an attempt to rise off the ground but then the power sputtered and died and the Viper dropped heavily onto its sleek belly on the ground. The impact jarred my teeth and pounded a grunt out of Emo.
It was then that I noticed the fog was inside the vehicle. “Get the hell out, Emo!”
I heard his voice in my head, it sounded all slurry. Get the hell in, Emo, get the hell out, Emo…make up your damn mind, Astra.
He turned to me, his eyes already looking dazed and incoherent.
“I said…” The thought I’d been trying to express just drifted away and I felt my limbs growing heavy as the fog surrounded and saturated the interior of the Viper.
The last thing I remember before I fell away from consciousness was Emo’s head hitting the view port as he passed out.
Then everything went black.
Voices droned in the distance, tickling insistently at my ears like bees. I wove the sound into my dreams and slept on. I dreamed I was slime wrestling a purple slug monster and fell into the slime, taking the slug monster with me. I pushed as hard as I could against the squishy purple chest above me but my hands just kept sinking into it and getting tangled. No that wasn’t right, you can’t get tangled in purple slug monster flesh. And why was it so silky? Before I could get my mind around that question, the slug opened its pincers and a long, warty tongue slid through to slither down my cheek.
It should have been disgusting but somehow it made me all tingly. And the monster smelled good too. Really good, like…
My eyes flew open and I was staring into Emo’s midnight eyes, my fingers tangled in his silky hair. Having already left a warm, tingly trail down my face, his tongue was stroking my neck, toward my ear. He closed his soft lips over my earlobe and nibbled before drawing it into his warm mouth and sucking it.
“Holy shit!” I tried to push him away and sit up but he just grabbed my hands and held them above my head, pushing his rigid lower regions into me and grinding softly against my most sensitive area.
For the briefest moment in time I forgot the reason I needed to get out from under him and closed my eyes, moaning under the multiple, yummy assaults on my body. A throbbing pleasure radiated out from the place where his hard length pressed against my body, drawing my thought processes into sensual oblivion along with my pleasure center. My stomach jumped in excitement. My lips were tingling where they’d met his and my nipples stood at rigid attention like good little galactic soldiers.
Then I remembered why this was bad, bad, bad and my eyes flew open again.
“Emo!”
He murmured an incomprehensible response and released my earlobe to kiss his way down my throat. Before I could stop myself I moaned and arched toward him. He growled low in his throat and took my breast into his hot mouth, sucking it gently through my soft sweater.
Sweater? My eyes flew open again and I looked down. Oh thank the Big Guy I was still fully dressed.
But not for long at this rate.
I struggled to get my hands free and finally managed to pull one hand from his grasp. I reached down and grabbed his ponytail and yanked it upward, hard.
His head came up and I looked into a pair of dazed and feverish eyes. I’d seen that look before.
Shit!
“Emo! Snap out of it, you’re under a spell.”
He grinned lazily at me and jerked his head out of my hand. A clump of his be
autiful hair came away from his head with a ripping sound. I winced but he didn’t seem to notice.
He tugged my sweater up and initiated a warm, wet journey up my belly toward territory that was under the jurisdiction of the Astra Q Phelps sexual permissions committee of one—that would be me!
“Emo stop!” I tried to push him away again but with only one hand it was impossible. Deciding I didn’t have a choice I stopped struggling and concentrated on building my power to use against him.
The sound of chanting grew in intensity, reminding me that we weren’t alone. A quick glance around told me we were on the altar in the clearing where I’d watched Raoul vanquish the fire demons. Although I could only see indistinct shapes just outside the circle of light created by a huge, smoking fire in the center of the clearing, I had a clear perception that we were surrounded.
I visualized the tiny flame at the core of my power and concentrated on growing it. It doubled and then doubled again until it was a respectable campfire but not big enough to do anything with.
That was when Emo’s warm, insistent mouth made it into the more mountainous regions of the territory.
I gasped as his lips closed over a taut nipple through the silk cami that served as my only undergarment. Of its own volition my body responded, causing me to moan and throw back my head, arching my chest to give him better access.
The piddling power flame I’d managed to draw died a sudden death as another kind of heat consumed my body. I was wrapping my legs around his hips, welcoming his probing fingers under my skirt when a niggling memory broke through the sexual haze.
I saw again the back of a sleek, dark head and long, lean body lying over me, pleasuring me as I moaned and begged for more. I remembered the chanting voices surrounding us and I remembered…angel’s tears.
Then I recalled with a stomach lurching clarity what had happened in that prophetic dream when the current activities had been consummated.
Yikes!
Like ice water that thought cleared the haze from my mind and, without thinking about it I reached for my power and threw it outward. Emo’s body rose off mine a couple of inches. He was far too gone to react, except to clutch me harder, pulling me halfway off with him.