Hell's Rejects (Hell on Earth Book 2)

by AJ Mullican

  I can stop the possessed in their tracks now. I’m almost certain of it. I can use the new power that Queen Una gave me to save lives and still kick ass when it’s needed.

  I’m a valuable member of Team Earth now, not just a sidekick.

  Standing tall—or as tall as I get—I unlock the door and fling it open. Rick and Finn stand there, mirrored expressions of concern on their faces. I take Finn’s cheeks in my hands with a grin and plant a kiss on his lips.

  “Hey, baby. Get everybody in the living room. I’ve got an idea.”

  Without waiting for a response, I hurry down the hall back to the great room, half expecting Beth to still be there, but instead it’s just Lena, Kalen, Oren, Cherry, Holden, and Callie. Kalen and Oren sit on the couch with Cal, having an animated discussion over whether she cheated when she kicked their asses in-game, and Lena confers with Cherry and Holden in hushed whispers. They all turn to me when I enter, and I grin.

  “You guys, guess what? I think I can help the next time a demon attack hits!”

  Lena and Cherry exchange a look, and Cherry clears her throat. “Molli, Lena told us how much it drained you to heal Bradley. Maybe you should back off the fae magics for a bit, get some rest.”

  I shake my head and put a hand on my hip. “Nope. I’m good. Better than good, actually. I know how I can undo an active aging spell. I can regress the kidnapped babies in the field.”

  To say Lena’s expression is dubious would be an understatement. “Five minutes ago you were Little Miss Timid with this shit. Now you’re going to go on the offensive with almost no practice? You’ll get murdered!”

  I’d be pissed, but I’m in too good of a mood right now. I whip out my phone and start cruising the local news sites, hoping to find a demonic attack in progress.

  One by one, the others file in, some more awake than others. Matt’s sandy hair sticks up in a massive case of bedhead, and Lena’s incubi even look groggy. Samsher yawns and stretches, his t-shirt lifting up at the waist to display a peek of his toned abs and that luscious “V” at his hips. I blink and shake my head to clear it of the sinful mental images that pop in uninvited.

  Damn sex demons. Even when they’re not actively turning on the charm, they get to me.

  “Okay, everyone. I need to test my theory. Samsher, how well have you studied the magics used on Callie and Bradley?”

  Samsher shrugs. “I will admit that I have only glimpsed the surface of the spells. Prior to your reveal last night, I had not realized that any demonic energy remained in the tattoos left on young Calliope.”

  “Could you recreate one of the spells? Not the aging one, but any of the others. The pentagram, maybe, or one of the other infernal designs.”

  His brows furrow in confusion. “Why would I cast these magics?”

  I stomp my foot. “So I can undo them! I just need a volunteer. Someone to agree to have a spell cast on them for a few minutes at most.”

  Matt steps forward. “I’ll do it. It should be one of us wolves, I think. We’re the second closest to humans left in this group. We can’t very well expect Lena to do it because she’s pregnant, and I don’t think anybody’s willing to put Callie through that again.”

  Callie heaves a sigh of relief.

  “There! We have a guinea pig.” I grab Matt’s arm and damn near drag him over to Samsher. “Okay, Sword of Asmodeus, get to work. Cast something on him.”

  With a quick glance to Lena for approval, Samsher starts to work. His magic glows a sparkly red as his hands wave over Matt’s bare forearm. Matt hisses in a breath, as though the process pains him, and within seconds, an infernal mark appears, brighter and bolder than Callie’s and Bradley’s but similar in shape and appearance. I don’t know yet exactly what kind of spell Samsher cast, but I don’t think it matters much.

  Here goes nothing. Time to prove I’m useful.

  As soon as Sam steps back from Matt, I draw on my inner light and push it out of me, focusing through my outstretched hand. From the way everyone shields their eyes, the blast of light isn’t just visible to me. The room fills with blinding white light, which surges over the new mark on Matt’s arm. The light pulsates for a few seconds, then blazes for a heartbeat before settling to a dull glow.

  Whatever spell it was that Samsher cast, my burst seems to have erased it.

  I gaze up at Samsher with questioning eyes, and he nods. “You have saved him.”

  Yes! I did it! I pump my fist and do a little celebratory dance.

  Matt takes a step back. “Wait, saved me? What would that spell have done if that light trick hadn’t worked?”

  Sam shrugs. “You would have become a portal for the nearest demon in search of a vessel.”

  To my surprise, Lena looks impressed. She raises a brow and takes Matt’s arm, studying it. “Cool. Good work, kid.”

  “Kid”? Damnit.

  Ah, what the hell. Let her call me “kid.” I’ll take my wins where I can get them.

  Chapter 16

  Once my demonstration ends, the sleepier members of the group disperse, some grumbling under their breath, and head back to their respective rooms. Cherry offers to sauté some veggies for me, since I still can’t stand the smell of meat cooking, but I’m too excited to eat. What I really want to do is get back out in the thick of things, so I can kick some ass with my new skills.

  While everyone else eats, I scour the internet in search of any sign of demonic activity. No dice, though; the demons, it seems, are taking a break. I’m a little disappointed.

  “Anyone else suspicious with how quiet it is today?” All eyes turn to Lena as she puts a voice to my thoughts. “Like, there have been daily attacks since back at my house. All against us, nothing widespread, but still … I keep waiting for the door to explode again.”

  “I thought maybe it was just me.” I lift my phone. “There hasn’t been anything public in days, except for the one possessed person at the motel. Aside from that, it seems like they’ve gone into hiding.”

  Holden sighs and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Do we really want them to attack?”

  “Better than us just sitting here waiting for them to get the drop on us.”

  I nod. “Lena’s got a point. From what I understand, everybody was more proactive prior to the attacks here and at Lena’s. Now? Now nobody’s gone out in search of demonic activity in days, and while Geiger’s death accounts for some of that hesitation, we can’t just sit and mourn forever. At some point we’re going to have to get off our asses and get back to it.”

  “I heartily agree. We should fight.” Kalen produces yet another sword, this time from a hiding place under the couch, and I facepalm.

  “Babe, I know you dig your weapons, but we can’t be running around Nowhere carrying swords. What we need to do is set up some recon, get a map or something, mark everywhere they’ve popped up, start looking for patterns to their movements—”

  Samsher snorts. “What do you know of reconnaissance and mapping?”

  “I watch TV!” That earns me an eyeroll or two from the crowd. “Okay, fine. What should we be doing, then?”

  “Well…” Holden swallows his bite of bacon, which thankfully seems to have stopped amping up my gag reflex. “Actually, Molli has some good ideas.”

  Yes! Praise from the Alpha. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  I turn to Cherry, who’s chewing on her breakfast slowly, as though it’s helping her think. When she finishes her bite, she clears her throat and sets her fork down. “If we’re going to go on the hunt, then we need to get a plan together for when we find them. Going straight into Hell never seems to work, but nickel-and-diming them doesn’t seem to help much, either. We’ve got to find where they’re hiding out, how many there are, how many are possessed versus demons in human form, how many are recently aged, et cetera. We need to be thorough, because so far we haven’t been able to get our shit together enough to make a difference.”

  Hm. “Where in Nowhere could they be hiding, if they
’re not coming straight from Hell? It’s a relatively small town, so there can’t be that many places.”

  Lena rubs her belly and pushes her plate back. “They’ve got hundreds of potential victims, some already adults when they were possessed, others aged in various ways—some have grown up in Hell, while others had spells put on them like Callie and Bradley—and countless demons in on this. There’s no way to know what kinds of numbers we’re up against. That being said, since I took the college out of the equation when I saved Bradley from Rukhsana, I can’t really think of anywhere other than the warehouse district that they could be holed up. Most of those buildings are massive, and quite a few are empty.”

  “What will we do when we find them, though? I mean, we can’t exorcise hundreds of people at once; we’d have to pick ‘em off one by one, which would take forever.” Matt shakes his head. “Unless Molli’s new digs give her some kind of ultra-mega counterspell ability, we’d barely put a dent in them before they overran us.”

  The room goes quiet, and I chew on my lip ring as I try to think of a solution. To say that we’re outnumbered is, like, the understatement of the century, and though I’m more confident in my abilities now, I doubt I could perform a mass healing of the kind of magnitude we’d need. On the other hand, if we don’t do anything, all those hordes of demons and possessed bodies could just show up on the front doorstep, and we’d be screwed. No matter how I look at it, we need to take control of things and find some way to get the upper hand. Any advantage we can wrangle up is better than what we have going for us right now.

  I pull up satellite images of the warehouse district from an Earth image website and scroll through the pictures in search of potential safehouses for the demon swarm. The images are months old; guess this site isn’t updated often.

  Something catches my eye, and I scroll back up a few pics. That’s when I notice a familiar van parked outside one of the warehouses.

  “Hey, Lena.”

  She stops midsentence with a glare in my direction. “What?”

  “Why were you in the warehouse district last winter?

  She shrugs. “My parents’ business, where we all lived, got blown up. I had nowhere to go, no cash, so yeah, I holed up in a warehouse for a little while. What of it?”

  On a hunch, I go back into the site archives and scroll through earlier dates for that building. “Cherry, where was it that your ex’s brother took you when he kidnapped you way back when you first became a shifter?”

  Cherry and Lena exchange a look. “Let me see your phone.”

  I pull up the date I’m looking for and hold the screen up for everyone to see. “This one?”

  Cherry squints at the screen. The image depicts several motorcycles parked outside the same warehouse Lena squatted in. “Yeah. I think that’s it.”

  “Lena, do you recall if there were ley lines under that building?”

  Her eyes widen, and she rubs her belly. “Shit, yeah. I think there are. I never tapped into them, but I could see that being why I was drawn to that building out of all the ones available at the time.”

  “So since you say the ley lines are the reason so much weird shit happens in Nowhere, is it reasonable to say that they could be why Cherry turned—transformed, whatever? I mean, she was in real danger of dying in that warehouse, right? Could that have triggered the change from human to shifter?”

  In the stunned silence that follows, I tap my phone and go to the city clerk’s office website. My fingers fly across the screen as I dive into their records in search of listings of vacant buildings in that city block, particularly ones that have been vacant for the past ten months or so. I hit the mother lode when my search comes up with an address that matches the building in question. “Jackpot!”

  Kalen leans over to peek at my screen. “Did you win the lottery, Molli?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I found where the demons are hiding out.”

  “Well, you at least have a solid theory.” Lena grimaces as she hauls herself out of her chair. “Only one way to verify it.”

  Holden shoots to his feet. “Whoa! Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Have you been paying attention? I’m going to go check out that warehouse.”

  He crosses his skull-covered arms over his massive chest. “No, you’re not. I’m going with Samsher, Aistan, Matt, Kalen, and Oren. The rest of the guys are staying here to protect everyone while we’re gone.”

  Oh, my God, I can’t stand the testosterone. As if I don’t know what he meant by “everyone.” Fucking sexist pig. “Hey! I don’t need protecting, if you recall. Why can’t I go?”

  “I’m not risking any more people than I have to. We’ll split up in two teams of three and sweep the area, find out what info we can, and come back. This is not us going to start a fight; this is us gathering intel.” He scrubs his hands over his stubbled face. “I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but Cherry and Lena are both pregnant, and you’re too valuable to risk on something like this.”

  I sit back and pout, but I guess I see his point. Still, he didn’t have to pull the Alpha male card and select himself a team of Y-chromosome carriers. There’s more to life than muscle.

  Twenty minutes later, the “teams” are all set to go. Holden and Matt just wear ballcaps, sneakers, and loose clothing, probably to facilitate a quick strip for shifting to wolf form in an emergency, but Samsher, Aistan, Kalen, and Oren are all decked out in their own personal armor. Holden groans and pinches the bridge of his nose when he sees this, but it’s his own damn fault for bringing otherworldly warriors with him on this mission.

  Cherry says a tearful farewell to Holden and Matt, Lena kisses her demons goodbye, and I give Kalen and Oren crushing hugs before the guys file into Holden’s van to head to the warehouse district. The whole scene feels reminiscent of countless war movies where the husbands go off to battle while the womenfolk stay home, and I hate the feeling of dread that accompanies their departure.

  In those movies, there’s always someone who doesn’t come back.

  Once the van disappears down the gravel road through the woods, the left-behinds gather in the living room to watch some TV. Cherry puts on the latest season of Orion’s Calling while Rick and Billy make several bowls of popcorn, Lena doles out beers to everyone except Cherry, Callie, and herself, who get diet sodas, and I snuggle up in Finn’s lap on an armchair as the show starts.

  For several hours we watch Captain Hardigan and his crew save the galaxy from one threat or another, though from the quiet, solemn mood in the room, not many people are sufficiently distracted by the entertainment. I usually love this show, but I find my mind drifting to the warehouse district, wondering if our own away team is still alive. I try to distract myself by playing with my phone, searching the public records again, this time looking for building plans or blueprints for our target.

  Captain Hardigan fires his plasma gun at an alien invader just as the sound of gravel crunching outside signals our team’s return. Cherry and I spring to our feet while Lena struggles to get off the couch. She’s been having more and more trouble getting around lately, and I note the flickering of her life-light again.

  Before I can ask her if she’s okay, the door to the garage opens, and to our collective relief the six men emerge none the worse for wear. I rush to Kalen and Oren, hugging their necks and planting kisses on their cheeks. Cherry leaps into Holden’s arms, wrapping her legs around his waist, and she pulls Matt in for a kiss.

  “What did you guys find out?” Ever the pragmatist, Lena greets her demons with much less enthusiasm than Cherry and me.

  “Young Molli’s instincts were correct,” Samsher says. “There is indeed a nexus of ley lines beneath that warehouse, and the building is rife with demons and the possessed.”

  I scowl at the “young” comment but feel vindicated in their admission that I was right.

  “Question is, what do we do next? We know where they are. What now?”

  Lena puts a hand
to her lower back and stretches. “Well, it’s the fifteen of us versus how many, exactly?”

  The returning scouts fall suspiciously silent.

  “Holden…” Cherry’s voice holds a hint of warning to it. “How many?”

  Oren clears his throat and scratches the back of his neck. “Remember the rave party you took us to in Charlotte, Molli? It was in a warehouse twice the size of this one.”

  I nod. “Sure. They had to call the fire department because there were so many people crowded in there. We almost got arrested because the cops accused you guys of refusing to take off what they thought were fake ear tips.”

  Kalen rakes a hand through his red hair. “Molli, the demons and the possessed occupy nearly every square inch of that warehouse. They easily outnumber the partygoers at the rave. By scores, if our count is correct.”

  “I hope the authorities do not get called to this warehouse,” Aistan says. “Not even the whole of the Nowhere Police Department could hope to stop them.”

  So how the fuck are fifteen of us—one of them a kid—supposed to?

  Chapter 17

  “Maybe we can sneak up on ‘em and have Molli blast ‘em, like she did with Matt’s mark that Samsher put on.”

  I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Billy, for the last time, I don’t know if I can fire off that much at once. It could kill me before I even wipe a handful of the tattoos, and we don’t know yet if me healing the tattoos will exorcise the demons. Lena might have to do that first, and we all know how that went when she did it on Bradley.”

  Lena chews on a fingernail. “I wonder if it would be less strain on me if you healed the marks first. If the marks are what binds the demons to the bodies, it might make things easier on me to have them gone first.”

  The conversation has been going in circles for hours, and I’m just about done with it. My stomach rumbles to remind me that I haven’t had much more than a few handfuls of popcorn, the buzz from my beers during Orion’s Calling left me twenty minutes after this argument started, and cranky doesn’t even begin to cover my mood. I nudge Finn’s ribs with my elbow and hold my hand out for some of his spirit-magic berries. If I have to sit through another minute of this without something to eat I’ll flip my lid, and I could use some solid spirit magic to jumpstart my hopes, which lost their juice at about Hour Two of this nonsense.