“They had to be.” He exhaled. “The first responders hadn’t reported anything unusual. Most weren’t armed.”
Unarmed meant different things to different fae, but most shunned guns and modern weaponry.
“This should be fun.” Flat as the area was, the Richardsons could literally see us coming from a mile away. Based on the evidence at hand, they had one nasty welcome wagon ready to roll over us.
When I stepped from the road onto the driveway, the thick soles of my sneakers sank in the sand and turned my foot. Stupid ankle. Thrown off balance, I flung out my arms and braced for the fall, landing on all fours. That was when I felt it, a slight trembling under my left palm.
“Do you feel that?” I reared up, scanning the area, hearing nothing, seeing nothing.
In my periphery, Shaw shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t hear it now.” Stinging in my palm made me wince. Blood smeared my hand where I must have landed on a rock. Before the cut closed, instinct guided me to place the wound to the earth. Sound exploded in my head. “Something’s coming. Something big.”
A shudder wracked Shaw, the start of his change. “I don’t see anything.”
Filling my lungs only made me cough. “I don’t smell anything, either.”
“I got nothing.” He knelt beside me, bracing his palm flat on the ground. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t know.” I dusted my hands. “My magic has been on the fritz lately. I’m not sure if it’s—”
The rumbling became audible. Tremors made the ground quake beneath our knees. Dirt erupted, and a dusky appendage burst upward, spraying sand. The conical tip swung left to right, hesitating as runes flared in my palm. The stout column swayed, lowering, following that burst of frantic light.
“What the hell is that?” I squeaked.
“It’s an annuli.” Shaw’s hand clamped down on my arm. “Don’t make any sudden moves.”
Muscle quivered in my thighs, twitching with the urge to run. “Is that Latin for ‘giant worm’?”
“Close enough.” His stance tensed. “It shouldn’t be able to track us this well aboveground.”
Its segmented skin faded from a swarthy rose color to near translucence around the area protruding from the ground. “It doesn’t have eyes.” I flattened my palm to help my balance, and the thing’s head rotated to one side. Crap. A vague memory of a gross earthworm dissection in my sophomore year surfaced. “It’s the light.”
“Receptors in its skin cells,” Shaw agreed. “It can detect light and changes in light intensity.”
“So it can’t see us,” I reasoned, “but it can track our movement using our shadows if we run.”
Except—lucky me—I had a beacon in my palm, making me easy to spot.
“Something like that.” He studied its swaying bulk. “It can’t hear, but it can sense vibrations.”
Thinking of how quickly it had pinpointed us, I swallowed hard. “Magic or otherwise?”
“I’m guessing,” he said, lowering his voice despite himself, “but I’ll go with both.”
I groaned. “What you’re saying is we’re screwed.”
“Pretty much.”
The annuli continued swaying like a cobra ready to strike, with what, I wasn’t sure. No eyes, no ears—was it too much to hope the giant worm didn’t have a mouth filled with sharp teeth either?
Ripples worked through its neck, like a cough with nowhere to go.
And then the tip of its head split in two.
“You’ve got to be joking.” I tried to look away, but stared transfixed as its gaping mouth parted. The annuli’s hacking cough worsened, deepened. Like idiots, Shaw and I knelt there watching it all. After a few more tries, it hocked up a glob of white mesh hanging from a thick cord down its, well, it didn’t have a chin. The odd bundle dripped familiar opaque goo. “It looks like a melting spider web made out of gooey string.”
“New plan.” Shaw didn’t wait for it to slurp the mesh back into its mouth. “Run.”
He jumped to his feet and jerked me so hard after him my knees left the ground. Stumbling, I gained my balance in time for the annuli to vomit—its tongue?—at us. Spittle from the tongue flecked the backs of my arms with liquid agony as it smacked into the ground on my heels.
“Does this new plan have a next step?” I panted. “We can’t outrun it forever.”
“I’m working on it,” he growled.
The driveway stretched for maybe half a mile ahead of us. The rental car sat about that far in the opposite direction. The abandoned car was closer, unlocked, which made it a damn tempting refuge. But I wasn’t sure how much the annuli would swallow to get to us, and all I needed was to be caught Googling How to Hot-wire A Car in Sixty Seconds or Less when it showed up, flung its drool-covered net over the car and gulped down the whole thing. Any way you cut it, death by digestion sounded disgusting.
Hard-packed dirt split beneath our feet. Sand bubbled through the cracks when the annuli passed under us. Its tunnel bowed the road, making our feet sink into the shifting debris trail. Heavier than I was, Shaw sank to the ankle in the freshly tilled soil. I clamped my fingers around his belt, steadying him until he caught his balance. While I kept hold of him, I led him toward the fence and the pasture.
“We need more room,” I yelled by way of explanation.
“It won’t help.” Planting a palm on the nearest fence post, he vaulted over it. “Thierry?”
Barbed wire raked the inseam of my jeans when I leapt. Unlike Shaw, my landing didn’t stick. My ankle was still tender and it turned, sending me sprawling into the grass on all fours. The same raw power as before seeped into my palm, flipping a switch in my pain-addled brain and launching my darker self into the foreground of my mind with a snarl. Pressure built in my head. Familiar hunger set my stomach cramping.
I had experienced this out-of-body sensation before, a tangible awareness splitting plain old Thierry from the Black Dog’s heir. As it had with the chimera, some internal set of scales began shifting, searching for balance, weighing my life and Shaw’s against the annuli’s. Seconds later, the uneasiness vanished, and only a cold resolve remained.
My hunger wasn’t like Shaw’s. It wasn’t set by a clock. It didn’t follow a pattern. It didn’t crave a thing I could supply to slake its yearning. My need wasn’t a whisper in my subconscious, haunting me all the time like his. It burned hotter, struck faster, goaded me nearer to the edge until I tumbled.
The fall was white-hot bliss burning through my palm.
Shaw grabbed me by the elbows, lifting me onto my feet and dragging me after him.
“We can’t keep going like this,” I wheezed, breathless from the magic swirling inside me.
“What’s the alternative?” he snapped. “Stop and let it eat us? No thanks.”
“No. Not you.” I swung my leg out and tripped him. “Me.”
Momentum carried him crashing to the ground. Turning my back on him, I faced the worm and spread my arms. The wait was a short one. Vibrations underground jarred my teeth. A plume of dust spat at the sky as the annuli rose into the air and towered above me. “Come and get it,” I screamed, waving my glowing palm.
The worm belched its net over me. That is so nasty. Sticky and slimy like those hand-shaped toys you got for a quarter out of vending machines at the grocery store. Where its saliva touched me, I burned. I had a nice crosshatch pattern going before he started slowly reeling me toward his mouth.
“Are you insane?” Shaw sank his fingers into the tongue and latched on. “Get out of there.”
“Let me go.” Or both of us would die. “I got this.”
Understanding widened his eyes. “This thing is huge. You can’t take it down by yourself.”
“We don’t have a choice.” I sank my elbow into his gut. “Trust me.”
With a furious snarl that raised hairs down my nape, he released the net. His jaw set and his fists clenched, but he let me go. I turned
my back on him before I lost my nerve and found myself facing the worm’s gullet.
As it dragged me past its liplike folds, it began coughing again. This time it spat stomach acid that splashed me, burning so much worse than the mesh ever had. Skin blistered and welts rose. The smell made my eyes water. As its mouth closed around me, the annuli jerked its tongue, and I fell onto its bottom jaw. Feeding every ounce of power I had into my palm, I flattened that glowing hand flush with its skin.
Hissing and writhing, the annuli slung its head, slamming me against the walls of its throat. The length of my body caught sideways in its craw, and it choked. Ripples in its skin pulsated beneath my hand. Sunlight flashed in my eyes as its maw gaped open. With a wet hack, the annuli horked me onto the ground. Two bodies came hurling out after me in a mound of mucus, both partially digested.
I recoiled, scuttling backward until I locked down my panic. The bodies of the fallen marshals gave me strength to stand. While the annuli flailed and spat, I ran straight for it, leapt onto its throat and pressed my runes back into its slimy skin. Its scream rang in my ears as ravenous magic jolted its heart, no hearts. Five massive organs all lined up in a neat row down its center. Power blazed through each, shocking them out of sync like the annuli had gulped a live wire.
Its soul was scattered, pockets of it lingering behind each pulsing beat, and my magic writhed in those nooks and crannies, chomping down on that sweet, dark energy until my body hummed with it, until my senses were bloated with a crazed hyperawareness.
Fueled by the meal, I sent scissoring blasts of power sliding under its skin. It cried out once more, a horrid sound that faded as its soul extinguished and my internal scale balanced. Too late to call back what I had unleashed, I clung to the body of the annuli until its skin peeled and fell over me, drying to a ringed husk that crinkled as I batted it away. The creature’s flesh quivered for a minute, its tiny brain realizing too late that it was dead, before the column thumped onto the ground.
Tangled in yards of peeling skin, I leapt aside. Not far enough. The stout neck rolled, crushing my right foot before I could crawl out of its path. I was lying there, screaming, when Shaw bent over me and shoved a ball of fabric into my mouth to muffle my shouts. I bit down, gnashing my teeth and clawing the annuli.
Throwing his shoulder against the worm, Shaw slammed into its corpse until I could scoot from under it. Backed a safe distance from its still-twitching body, I fell onto the ground in a sobbing heap. Tears veiled my eyes, but I saw Shaw, pale skin clashing against the green grass and blue sky.
“Focus.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t hear. It hurt too much.
His hands cradled my face, and he removed the gag. “Lock down the pain so you can heal.”
The next shake of my head was feebler.
“You’re shaking.” He forced my gaze to his. “You took too much. Your body can’t process so much energy.”
That explained the sensation of being stuffed with sizzling light that wanted to blast out of my pores.
“Hurts,” I managed.
“I know.” His thumbs swept across my cheekbones. “Come on, Thierry, focus for me.”
My eyes watered. Shaw’s touch centered me, anchored me while I pushed the strange new magic swirling in my system toward my injuries. Power fused the broken bones. Muscles snapped back into place. The burst of agony as my body mended sent shock waves rippling up my leg and shivering through my torso. It jarred my heart and zoomed up my neck to my head. Faint sparks danced on the ends of my hair.
“I need to...” I pushed upright, slurring drunkenly as I rotated my ankle. “Hey, I thought that was broken.”
The smile touching Shaw’s lips didn’t reach his eyes. “I have to take you down a few notches.”
I laughed, giddy from the high of surviving, the rush of feeding, the sweet ache of being so close to him. Throwing my arms around his neck, I tugged him over me as I flopped down to the plush bed of grass.
He surrendered with a pained groan, as though the flurry of jade sparkles in my hair had ignited the beast in him, reaching deep inside, past his defenses, drawing his monster out to play with mine.
Skin already pale faded. Razor claws elongated, thickening, curving to spear into the ground beside my head where he braced himself over me. Even his canines elongated at the corners of his mouth in a savage way that sent anticipation trembling through my lower stomach. My hand rested on his shoulder. It was so easy sliding it down his chest, over the buckle of his belt.
“Don’t,” he begged me. “Not like this.”
“I don’t think I can stop,” I confessed on a ditzy laugh. “I need you.” His touch was my anchor, his skin and his scent the only things able to stop me from shattering into a million sun-drenched pieces.
“I know.” He pressed a lingering kiss to my forehead. “But not in that way.”
Before I could argue, he captured my wrist, joined his right hand with my left one and threaded our fingers together. I jerked against his iron grip as the grim set of his mouth penetrated the cottony haze stuffing my head.
“This is going to hurt,” he said.
I caught lightning in my palm. That’s how it felt as he bled the excess magic from me into himself. My gut burned and my heart stuttered as I weakened. His need was nothing gentle, nothing caring. It was endless and miserable, mindless and reckless. At that moment I was all that existed in his bleak world, all he craved, the best thing he had ever tasted and the one meal he wanted to savor forever.
His stream of consciousness seared my brain for days, or maybe it was seconds, before my mind shorted out and the world spluttered from full color to a static flicker. Soon even that twinkle faded to an icy-cold black.
Chapter Fourteen
Waking in a small room in a wet puddle left me more confused than the half-baked dreams I left behind. Faint light spilled from my hand, illuminating a water pump and a pressure tank near my leg. Humming from a motor droned in my ears, a not-so-nice counterpoint to the ringing already there.
Muck squished under my hand when I pushed upright. “What’s that smell?”
“Manure,” a rough voice answered from the darkness opposite me.
I angled toward the sound, blinking while my eyes adjusted. “Where are we?”
“The pump house,” Shaw answered.
Mentally I tallied our position. “Halfway between the start of the driveway and the rental car.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Metal jingled. Keys dangled from the ring looped around his middle finger. Shaw stared through a crack in the door, gaze sweeping from side to side.
Rotating my ankle, I winced. “That’s not a subtle way of asking me to wait in the car, is it?”
His hand closed and the rattling ceased. “I didn’t say anything.”
“That makes it easier to forgive and forget what you implied.” I settled some weight on my foot. “Forgiving is tough. Forgetting is easier.” I hissed as I stood. “That might be brain damage talking.”
He cracked a smile. “I can’t tell any difference.”
I made a face at him. “What are the odds the Richardsons have another annuli on patrol?”
“Zero,” he answered a beat later. “They’re too territorial to even share land with a mate.”
“Good.” I shuddered. “If I never see another one, it will be too soon.” Shaw turned from his post to study me limping around the tiny room’s edge. “How do you think the Richardsons controlled it?”
“Annuli minds are small and easily influenced. A simple spell would do the trick.”
The more I walked, the looser my ankle became and the less it twinged. “How long was I out?”
“Twenty minutes.” His expression softened. “How do you feel?”
“Like the worm after the early bird got through with it.” I frowned. “No, that’s not right.”
His warm chuckle calmed my nerves. He pulled my phone from his jeans. “Mable emailed.”
“Good news?” I to
ok the cell, thumbed the email icon and grinned. “Very good news.”
“Anything you want to share with the rest of the class?”
“Cute.” I snorted. “She sent a scan of a map of the Richardsons’ property.”
“And?”
Two blue dots sat inches apart. “There are two locations marked for storm shelter installation.”
“I thought there were no records?” He folded his arms. “How reliable is her information?”
“Apparently the Richardsons went all out. They added plumbing in two of them.” I forwarded a copy of the email to him. “They needed permission from the local water company to run the pipes. It looks like the water company has an easement on the property, so they kept a record for future use.”
His fingers spread over his phone’s screen, enlarging the image. “Which looks more promising to you?”
“The one on the right is close enough to the main house to have been a storm shelter. Every inch of the foundation was pored over by the investigating team before they started vanishing. Anything unusual would have been found and reported.” After taking the second dot and our relative position into account, I tapped the screen. “The other is positioned several acres from the house and offers more privacy.”
“With the annuli guarding the property line,” he mused, “they could afford to retreat deeper into their acreage.”
“Okay.” I slid my phone into my back pocket. “Let’s go.”
“I’m only going to ask this once.” Blocking the door, Shaw faced me. “Are you sure you’re—?”
“Don’t make me hurt you.” I walked up and jabbed the center of his chest. “It’ll look bad on my performance evaluation.” Grazing him on my way through the door, I scowled. “Don’t count me out yet.”
His breath blasted my nape. “You’re like a dog with a—”
My elbow shot back and sank in his gut. I’m lucky I didn’t break something on those abs of his. While he coughed manfully over my shoulder, I studied the flat, grassy terrain between us and our objective.
Resisting the urge to rub my elbow, I stepped outside the relative safety of the pump house. “Are we just going to walk up to them?”
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