by Kelly Hall
“And take away his fun? Are you crazy? He’d send me out to find you just so he could kick you out again. Now shut that fucking pie hole and—”
There was a sudden thud, and Port went quiet before a new voice met Grady’s ears. “Grady?”
“Bull?” He had never been so excited to hear the motherfucker’s voice.
“Yeah, it’s me and Drake.”
“Hey, man.” Drake’s voice was just as welcome. “I’m going to throw down this rope. Can you climb up?”
“I can, but I’m chained.”
“It’s cool, man,” said Bull. “I’ve got Port’s keys.”
Grady’s blood pumped with excitement, and he forgot all about the bites and itching. When the rope came down, he climbed up and sat by the edge of the hole while they unlocked his chains.
When they had him unchained, he stood. That was when Port made his move. He jumped up and pulled his knife. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Grady hadn’t expected that. “Fuck, man. I thought you killed him.”
Port charged for Grady, but Bull stabbed Port in the gut, ripping his knife up the man’s middle. Port fell forward, landing facedown in the dirt next to the hole.
Grady couldn’t believe his friend had acted so quickly. “Damn, dude.”
Drake’s heart pounded. He couldn’t believe what had just happened. “Shit. What the fuck did you do? We better get the fuck out of here.” He raked his hands through his hair and gripped it tightly as he paced back and forth.
Bull was stunned, and all he could feel was the warm, wet blood that soaked his hand. He reached down and wiped it on the back of Port’s shirt. “That wasn’t part of the plan, but he just moved so goddamned fast.” Bull’s heart pumped wildly as he sheathed his knife.
Grady could tell that Bull was freaking out, and the last thing any of them needed was someone losing their shit while they had to get away. He stepped up to Bull, held him by the back of the head, and met him eye to eye. “Come on, man. You did good. Fuck that guy. He was going to kill us. You did the right thing.”
After the pep talk, Grady dragged Port to the hole, and after stripping him of his weapons, he pushed him in. The other hunters would find him soon enough, but hopefully, Grady and his friends would have a good head start first.
They tromped through the woods, making damned sure they were going far away from the 2K camp. They walked in silence until sometime later, Grady broke up the monotony. “Where’s Kyle?” he asked, thinking the young man had been too afraid to join them.
Drake made a sound of disappointment. “He pussied out and said he’d rather stay with the 2Ks. He’s got a hard-on for Brock Barnes and his leadership. Says he knows it’s the right path for him.”
“Asshole. Barnes can have him. The question is, what are we going to do? You guys have made your choice. We’re all free agents now.”
“What do you want to do?” asked Drake. Grady had always been the leader, and he was more than willing to follow. With the strength, speed, and their other hunter abilities, they could do some fighting on their own.
“We should all go back home and get whatever we need. Then I say we meet up and go on our own hunt. You heard what Barnes said about an initiation for the rogues. Why should we put ourselves through that when we can do our own thing? Form our own group?”
Bull nodded. “That sounds good to me. I know you guys will have my back.”
“Always, brother.” Grady patted his shoulder. The man had killed for him. He wouldn’t take that lightly. “I owe you one.”
Drake stopped for a rest. “It’s been an hour. Do you think they’ve noticed we’ve gone yet?”
“Probably not,” said Bull. “I don’t think Port had been there too long, so unless someone goes looking for him, they won’t find him until the shift change in the morning.”
“We should keep going.” Grady didn’t want them to slow down. “We need every bit of a head start we can get, especially if we’re going home.”
“I think I’m just going to get my brother to meet us somewhere,” said Bull. “It’s too risky going home with our parents, and I don’t want them to be interrogated about our whereabouts. We’ll be caught, and the 2Ks will kill us all.”
Before Grady took a step to continue on, he heard the sound of something shuffling through the woods. He reached out and held the others still.
No one made a sound. Grady glanced back at his friends, and the looks on their faces told him that they’d heard it too.
Grady pointed two fingers to his eyes, and they turned around, their backs to each other’s as they scanned the area.
Grady wondered if they had scared a deer or perhaps a coyote, but then the sound happened again. This time, it was much closer and more distinct. Bull, who was to Grady’s right, tapped his shoulder, and they all turned to face the sound.
There was movement in the trees still far away, and then something gray and large moved closer. “It’s big,” whispered Drake, taking his hand off his knife and opting for his sword.
Grady turned his nose to the air and smelled the faint trace of damp fur and musk. The hairs on his arms stood up, and his entire body was suddenly alive with instincts.
“Shifter,” said Drake. He felt it in his bones.
Grady nodded. “Let’s kill this motherfucker. Send a message to his friends not to fuck with us.”
They had their weapons drawn when the wolf finally came close enough to see details, and with the way its eyes fixed on them, it already knew they were there too.
It bared its teeth and growled, low and guttural, the sound sending the hunters’ instincts into overdrive. They spread out, ready to attack, but the wolf approached them like it was ready to take them all on.
“Brave fucking bastard,” said Bull. He had already killed once, and he was going to prove that it had not shaken him.
He moved closer and prepared to strike, but something strange happened.
Something black, like a dark cloak, lifted up from the wolf’s back, and then quicker than they could focus, it turned to a dark shadow; a swarm of swirling black smoke that took on the form of a man.
The tendrils suddenly stretched out. Bull turned to run, and it grabbed hold of him, wrapping itself around him until suddenly his hands and feet burned with such intensity that he could feel the skin start to split open. At the same time, he felt like someone had cut around the top of his head and stabbed him in the side.
All at once, blood poured out of each burning wound, killing him instantly.
Bull dropped to the ground, and the shadow rose up again, turning to face Grady.
Suddenly, a chorus of hushed voices filled Grady’s ears. “Your darkness calls to me,” it said.
“Fuck that,” said Grady. He turned to run, and Drake was already ahead of him. They ran as fast as their feet could take them, which was pretty damned fast with all of their hunter’s power flowing through their veins. “Thank the fucking Cuntress for fast feet,” said Grady as he caught up to run beside Drake.
“No shit. What was that thing?” Their conversation wasn’t slowing them down.
“It’s that fucking stigmata. The one I battled before with the Cuntress. I thought she said she killed it, but I should have known she was a liar.”
“It killed Bull, man. It ripped him apart.” He wasn’t going to let it do the same to him.
Grady nodded. “Karma caught up with that poor bastard fast, didn’t it? I didn’t like what it said.” He was getting winded trying to talk while running, but they needed to keep moving, and they also needed a plan.
“What do you mean, what it said? I didn’t hear it speak.” Drake slowed down a little.
Grady kept his pace and looked over his shoulder as Drake fell behind. “You didn’t hear that shit?”
Drake looked at Grady like he was crazy. “No, it didn’t say anything.” Maybe he had been so focused on the fact that his friend was being ripped apart in front of him that he didn’t have tim
e to notice.
Grady was sure that Drake was full of shit. He came to a stop. “Fucking hell. Don’t fuck with me, man.”
Drake stopped beside him. “I’m not. I didn’t hear a thing.”
“Your darkness calls to me. That’s what it said.” He looked around, knowing that while he’d surely put a good mile between them and the stigmata, or whatever the fuck it was, he knew they had to keep running. First, he had to take a piss.
“I didn’t hear anything, man. Seriously.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Grady. “I’m going to mark a fucking tree, and then we’re getting the fuck out of here. I’ll call one of my friends and have him help us out. The sooner we get out of these fucking woods, the better.”
He walked over behind a large oak and unzipped his pants. Drake did the same, yards away.
He closed his eyes and rested a moment, taking deep breaths to calm himself and prepare for another couple of miles. Thank fuck for all of his training at the academy. Those early morning runs were really paying off.
He shook off his cock and put it away, but as he zipped up his pants, he heard another rustle through the trees. He looked over to see Drake zipping up and stepping out of the higher grass he’d gone to piss in. But when Drake turned around he froze, his face draining to the pale color of fear.
Grady saw his expression, but he wasn’t falling for it. “Don’t fuck with me,” he said as he slowly turned around and saw the dark shadow man looming large above him. The thing looked familiar in a way.
Your darkness calls to me.
Grady took a step back, and then another. He hoped to put enough distance between them where he could turn and run away, but he stumbled over a root and fell backward, landing against a pine tree.
The shadow’s arms reached out, and its fingers turned to those black tendrils that consumed Bull. Grady was not going to show any fear. Fuck everyone and everything that had led him to this point. The dark tendril began to choke him, and while he opened his mouth to gasp for air, the black swirling fog crept down his throat, marking his neck with a black bulging vein that showed the darkness consuming his brain.
The hate in your heart for those I seek will lead me to them.
Grady realized he was being consumed to be used for a purpose, and with the last ounce of himself, he thought of all he knew about Brock and his men, about Rebekah and the others in their Irish Castle retreat.
He would take it there. He would let himself be used to destroy them all. His ultimate revenge. And as the hate for them grew even stronger, he gave himself over to the power completely and became it. His consciousness lay just below the surface of the darkness controlling him. The puppeteer.
Drake found himself torn between running away and helping his friend, but when Grady turned to look at him, the bulging vein in his neck as black as night, he had a feeling the friend he knew was gone.
Chapter 7
Canter had waited until the house was completely quiet and everyone had settled for bed. It took a while, with Mace working overtime in the dungeon to get Delilah’s affinity fire sword finished. Then he sneaked down into the tunnels and made his way to the south tower.
The tunnel was dank and dark. The sound of dripping water and the scurrying of mice kept him on his toes and one hand on the hilt of his sword. The other gripped his academy-issued flashlight, and he kept a quick pace to make better time. He didn’t want anyone, especially Katie, to wake up and find him missing, and he certainly didn’t want a search party the way they’d looked for Rebekah.
He had never gotten an answer to his question and had a feeling he wasn’t going to. She had made it a little obvious that she didn’t want to return to the subject by the way she looked at him when he’d asked her where she’d been, and he had a feeling he knew why.
Wherever she’d been, she had learned some awful truth about Ignis, and since she’d mentioned Kayne’s name, she wondered if he was the one the information came from. Regardless of what had happened, Canter had a job to do and was prepared to do it, even if it meant pissing off his friends. He was sure that would happen sooner or later, especially if he had to keep slipping off in the middle of the night alone.
Katie would be the first to notice, and he prayed that she slept soundly and would know better than to go prying into what he was up to. Knowing he was on a mission was enough for her to understand, and he hoped that she didn’t mention his late-night absences to Jarreth and Delilah.
If Jarreth found out, he’d only try to intercept and come along for the ride, which as far as he knew would get him killed. He had been surprised at Brock Barnes and how he was prepared to handle Grady, but rules were rules. The fact that Katie could speak up and save him was sheer luck on Grady’s part, and Canter couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen to him.
He came to a corner, which he was sure had been below the east tower. He continued on, crossing the large room which was empty other than a few old crates. The echoes of his footsteps grew louder, the acoustics changing drastically from one hall to the next. He was sure that no one was there to hear his steps, but it didn’t take away the creepy factor or the hope that he wouldn’t run into someone.
He ran to the end of that hallway until he came to another corner and what appeared to be a dead end. “Where’s the fucking entrance?” he mumbled, frantically rubbing his hand across the wall and shining his light on it. There had to be something, a latch, a lever, something to open up the wall.
He finally found a groove cut into the stone and realized he had to stick his hand in it to get the job done. “Please don’t be any spiders living in here,” he said as he stuck his hand in the crevice. Thankfully, nothing had built a home in there, and the wall sprang open, the south tower’s entrance opening easily from there.
He walked into the dungeon, which was apparently used for keeping prisoners sometime in the castle’s history, and he shone his light into every cell as he passed, wondering if it were the enemy that had been kept there or merely human prisoners.
He came to the stairs and hurried up, finding the door at the top much easier to push open. It led to another long hallway. He could see the rubble ahead and looked up to the large opening in the ceiling, where the full moon and the night sky looked close enough to touch.
“Katie would love it here,” he whispered to himself. He heard the scurry of a mouse, and suddenly, a hiss and the screech of a stray cat had him jumping with fright. The ginger tabby went after his prey, jumping off a broken piece of castle wall and running across the room. “Fucking cat!”
As he regained his composure, he looked ahead and saw another door, but then there was another set of stairs, so he took those to the second level where Rebekah said Ignis kept his journals.
He walked into the room, which didn’t appear to have any damage compared to most of the tower, and the first thing he noticed was the smell of old books. He shined his light and found piles of them, all stacked up neatly against the wall, without shelves or anything to keep them organized. He had no idea where to start, but he decided to see if the books were in any particular order.
He looked for the dates that Rebekah had promised were on the spines, and once he found them, they were indeed in chronological order. He followed the dates until he came to the end of that wall and still hadn’t gone far enough back to find what Rebekah had been talking about.
“March through May, nineteen hundred and eighty-two,” he whispered. He wondered what Ignis had been like then, and Rebekah too. All he knew about the eighties was what he’d seen on TV, and he imagined Rebekah in shoulder pads with big hair and a tight neon dress. Ignis had probably dressed like Don Johnson from Miami vice, with pastel tees and casual blazers.
“Nineteen hundred and sixty-nine.” He noticed a whole stack that wasn’t organized, containing journals from the sixties through the eighties. He had no desire to read any of that, though. Then Canter shined his light on a table, where a few books lay stacked that seemed a
s though Ignis had deliberately left them there recently.
He read the dates, which appeared to be the latest journals. They had been written during the days that Rebekah arrived at the Nevada Academy and ended with him losing Rebekah’s daggers.
Canter couldn’t resist. He flipped through the pages looking to see if there was anything about Rebekah’s meeting with Kayne.
The night in question, Ignis had removed the pages. Canter aimed his light at the table and saw a candle and a bowl that was filled with ashes. “He’s burned the pages.” Was he protecting himself or Rebekah?
He continued to flip a few more pages and caught Jarreth’s name.
Of all of the progeny we’ve encountered through the decades, the strangest situation has arisen. Not only did I learn that the cocky blond, Jarreth, is in fact a close descendant of Ethan the Great Hunter, but his best friend, a boy who was a ward of the Church, just like Rebekah no less, is also a descendant of Atticus Arrius’ own bloodline. Upon Atticus’s return to the cathedral to be laid in the soldier’s tomb, I had the unfortunate job of confirming the death of Rebekah’s betrothed for her and her father. The unique signature of his blood is something that’s haunted me through the years, and I haven’t distinguished the scent from another until tonight at the marking ceremony when Rebekah pierced his flesh. To believe that this is a mere coincidence would be going against my core beliefs, and as it stands, I think these two young hunters have been placed in Rebekah’s path for a reason.
“Atticus?” Canter remembered the name from the great hall and how for some reason, the small name plate had always called to him. He closed his eyes and imagined himself tracing the name with his fingers, as he’d done many times, and when he opened them, the cat was standing across the room, staring at him as if it knew he shouldn’t be there.
Then it wandered over and rubbed up against his boots as if it were starved for attention.
Canter reached down and patted its head. “Nice kitty,” he said, hoping the thing wouldn’t try and follow him back to the other side of the castle. He looked at his watch and realized that he had already spent too much time searching, and he decided to put the book back how Ignis had left it and head back to his bed and the comfort of the woman who was there waiting for him, hopefully still sleeping soundly.