by Salem Cross
Rylan turned and ran his blazing red eyes over me. The wounds the vampires had inflicted on him were already healing. The grizzly sight of his blood mixed with the black vampire blood splattered all over him made me sick. As the tension in the room deflated, Rylan’s wings retracted into his back, and he walked over to me.
“I heard a commotion down here,” his voice was deep and gravelly. He shot a look at the four unconscious men on the ground.
“Yeah, shit hit the fan fast down here, but I’m alright. Are you?” I asked as I scanned his body for anything that wasn’t healing.
“I will be fine,” Rylan assured me, his voice gruff. “This was a setup. The vampires were lying in wait within the woods behind the facility. The one I took upstairs beckoned them when he did not appreciate my interrogation methods. They are all pawns for their master.”
“A setup? No one knew we were coming here except the other Guardians.”
“The master vampire behind this must have learned Guardians were in the area. I am sure he knew we would come here to investigate once we realized something was going on in the park, and he devised this trap to kill us. A vampire cannot be behind the unusual activity here. He must be under someone else’s control. I need to find the master vampire before he alerts whoever is controlling him.”
“Right now?” I asked with alarm. I looked at the four men on the ground. “What am I supposed to do with them? What if visitors come in?”
“Move them to the break room behind that door. Lock the front door, and flip the open sign over to show it’s closed. I will not be long,” Rylan ordered. With that, he exited the Nature Center and took to the sky.
I did as I was told. Trying to drag each guy into the back room took much longer than I’d anticipated. By the time I had dragged the fourth body into the back, I was sweating. How was this more work than kicking their asses?
Once they were all out of sight, I locked the front door, flipped the open sign to closed and pulled the shades down in the windows. That’s when I realized I had blood from the fight on my hands. I looked around the room. Everything I had touched had blood smeared across it. With a groan of annoyance, I grabbed paper towels from the bathroom, wetted them, and went about cleaning up any evidence of a fight. I swept up the glass from the broken display case. Then, I tried to clean up the mess from the ceiling.
Finally, I gave up cleaning. It was going to take more than a broom and a dustpan to remove the debris from the damage. So instead of cleaning, I decided to do some investigating. If the park rangers had been affected by the dark magic here, then maybe they had been unconsciously, or consciously, covering up events in the park that would otherwise bring a lot of attention from the police.
First, I checked the back room. I looked through the old filing cabinets, checked employee files, and then the logbook. Nothing there stood out to me that would indicate a cover-up. Next, I made my way upstairs to where Rylan had encountered the other vampires. The room was trashed. There was barely any drywall left hanging; thick black liquid coated the edges of the jagged glass of the broken window, and was splattered over the two desks. One computer was smashed beyond repair, but the other one looked like it was in working condition. I skirted around the massive hole in the floor to get to the computer.
I sat down in front of the old monitor and wiggled the mouse. Someone had already logged on, no password needed. I began sifting through the files saved on the desktop. At first, there was nothing. There were some reports of injured hikers, a few sick animals that had to be put down, but nothing out of the ordinary. Just as I was about to give up and go back downstairs to wait for Rylan I noticed a file marked “Them.”
Curious, I clicked on it then gasped.
There were hundreds of pictures in the file. Many were of the same thing. A group of hikers lined up on the ground next to each other, their hands tied in front of them, and a bullet hole in the middle of their foreheads. Their clothes had been ripped down the front and a large ‘X’ had been cut through the flesh on their chests.
Other pictures showed deer, foxes, rabbits, elk, and bears hanging from their hind legs from tree branches. They were completely gutted, with no intestines, bones, or blood. It was just their flesh dangling from low hanging branches. Then, there were the pictures of the birds with no eyes. Their wings had been removed, leaving behind just bloody stubs.
One picture stood out from the rest. In this one, a group of people were lying on the ground with their stomachs cut open and their intestines pooled around them. A small symbol was drawn on their foreheads in their blood. In the middle of the bonfire was a large wooden stake, burning. On the top of the stake was a man’s head, his mouth hanging open at a strange angle. Posing in the picture were three park rangers standing beside the mass of dead bodies looking at the camera with vacant stares.
I leapt to my feet and made it to the trash bin just in time as my breakfast came back up. I placed my hands against the wall and gasped for air. My stomach rolled, and I heaved again. I didn’t hear Rylan walk up the stairs or enter the room, but suddenly he was by my side, rubbing my back. Absentmindedly, I noted that sometime between his departure and now he had found a shirt.
“Did you catch the vampire?” I asked weakly.
“He has been taken care of,” Rylan assured me. “What has caused you to be so upset?”
I pointed to the computer but didn’t make a move towards it. I had seen enough. Rylan walked over to the old piece of technology and glanced at the picture. With a sigh, I turned and leaned my back against the wall. I watched Rylan click through each picture, his expression grim.
“What do the symbols on their bodies mean?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know the answer, but I asked anyway.
“I am not well versed in the tongue of the gods. I will have to ask the others,” Rylan said without looking at me. “But it is clear that these are sacrifices to them. It appears Jasmine’s theory was correct; her ability to compel the rangers had been thwarted somehow. It is clear the rangers have been covering up their involvement with missing hikers and visitors to the park. Whoever has tampered with black magic so we cannot sense it must have also done something to protect the minds of those that serve them.”
“Have you ever come across someone you couldn’t compel?” I asked curiously.
Rylan looked up at me with a bleak expression. “No.”
Oh okay, so another reason to be concerned about what was happening. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Rylan deleted the file with the pictures and pulled up the security program. Quickly, he removed the footage of when we’d arrived and the brief fight off the hard drive. When he was done, I followed him down the stairs and watched as he checked over the four park rangers I had brought into the back room. When he confirmed that they would be alright, it felt like a weight had lifted off my shoulders.
“We can’t just leave them here,” I protested when Rylan suggested we leave. “What if vampires come back and see them as a snack?”
“We cannot be here when they wake up. I was able to remove the evidence of us being here on the security camera, but if I cannot compel them to forget they saw us, they will panic and call the police,” Rylan said with a frown. “The vampires have been taken care of. These men are safe.”
He took my hand and pulled me towards the front door. We left the Nature Center and peeled out of the parking lot. Instead of heading back to the house, we headed towards the nearest city. Our drive was quiet. All I could think about were those pictures. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to unsee everything. Unfortunately, closing my eyes only made it worse. I could see their faces clearly. The bloody writing on the naked bodies. That head with the jagged flesh dangling from where the neck had once been…
I opened my eyes, reached over, and placed my hand on Rylan’s leg. I needed the contact. Rylan reached down immediately and grabbed my hand. I looked over at him, and he pulled his eyes away from the road to look at me.
All
those people in those pictures… I started but trailed off.
We will stop this, Rylan assured me. The confidence in his voice was absolute.
How? I demanded. This whole situation seems to be spiraling out of control.
With the others here, we will have more eyes and ears to find whoever is behind this, Rylan said. Hopefully, the others find something on their search that will help us.
“Could you decipher any geological features in the pictures that would help us locate where they were doing… whatever they were doing?” I asked out loud, breaking the silence in the truck. I was getting frustrated that we were nowhere closer to finding answers than we had been when we arrived.
“The hikers were all being sacrificed. The group of people dancing around the fire were paying homage to someone, or something, and sacrificed themselves,” Rylan said with a sigh. “I will have to check the map and explore the area more to have any idea where in this park it all took place.”
The sacrifices could have happened anywhere in the park. There was no way we would be able to find the place these bodies had been, even with the help of extra Guardians. The park was simply too big to find a singular, unknown location. With a sigh, I turned my attention out the window and stared at the trees flying by.
“Mae,” Rylan’s voice pulled me from my thoughts twenty minutes later.
We were passing a small abandoned town. It was eerie to see all the boarded-up homes and businesses. Trash littered the streets, and plant life had begun growing through the cracks in the street. Most of the buildings were built into the side of a rocky hill. The abandoned structures blended in with the stone colors of the hill, giving the whole town a feeling of caveman times. As we passed a gas station that looked like it was from the fifties, I noted that it was still in use. It was probably one of the only businesses still running in this ghost town.
Scattered along the rocky hillside, I noted that there were odd statues of creatures crouching above the town. They had strange demonic looking faces and large bat-like wings that stretched out behind them. They looked oddly out of place here. I rolled down my window and twisted in my seat to keep an eye on the strange stone statues. A cold chill ran down my spine as I stared up at them. I counted four but who knows how many we had passed before I had noticed them. They didn’t look all that old. In fact as I stared at them they looked like they had just been freshly chiseled from the stone they were made out of. But the town was practically abandoned. Who put those statues up there?
Afraid I wouldn’t be able to find it again if I took my eyes off the statue, I reached down to grab my purse and tried to find my phone so I could take a picture of it. Did Rylan know what those statues were for? I opened my mouth to ask when I realized he was already speaking.
“I’m sorry. I was distracted. What did you say?” I asked, turning to face him.
“It appears you are getting a handle on using your power. How are you feeling?” The pride in his voice caused me to pull my attention away from the statues. I looked at him and smiled.
“It was easy to call on. I was able to burn just that vampire and not the entire building. I guess I do have at least a slight grip on my power. I think meditation is actually helping. But…” I paused, frowning as I pictured the creature going up in flames.
“But what?” Rylan pushed gently.
“Rylan, what if I had killed that vampire? It would have been the second time I’ve used my power to intentionally kill something. Both the Kraken and the vampire were attacking us. Both were monsters. I felt terrible killing a living thing, but I would do it again if I had to. But what if the next thing to attack me is a human? I don’t think I could live with myself if I killed someone. I think living with the guilt would be worse than suffering in hell,” I said.
I reached up and ran a shaky hand over my mouth.
“Trust me, you are not going to hell,” Rylan said and to my surprise, he chuckled. When he caught me giving him a look he chuckled again. “I would never allow your soul anywhere near such a place. If a life needs to be taken, I will do it. Let us just hope you are never in that position.”
His grip tightened on my hand, and he sent me a sunny smile. I wasn’t sure why he was suddenly in a good mood, but I appreciated the effort he made to bring me over to the bright side, even if it was just for a while.
Chapter Nineteen
Mae
By the time we got to an actual city, it was well past noon. Lunch was quick. I hadn’t gained much of an appetite since we’d left the Nature Center, but it was nice being away from everyone else to spend time with Rylan. It was strange sitting at a table surrounded by normal people. Just a few weeks ago I would have been terrified that I would have caused the building to crumble over our heads. Now I sat here like one of them, with the most handsome man that walked this Earth.
When we left, I caught women and men staring at Rylan. They sent him seductive smiles and suggestive winks. Rylan didn’t seem to notice the attention he was drawing, but I certainly did. But instead of being jealous I just grinned. He was a hundred percent mine. Let people admire him; he truly was a treat for sore eyes.
Before we headed back to the house, we stopped at a hospital. I waited in the truck while Rylan walked in through the front door. Ten minutes later, he walked out carrying a massive cooler. He put it in the back of the pickup and climbed back into the cab.
“What’s in the cooler?” I asked curiously.
Rylan turned to me with a smirk. “Dinner for the others for the next few days.”
Oh. I leaned back in my seat and tried to hide the disgust on my face. The ride home was relatively silent. I mulled over what had happened that morning. The more I thought about the events, the more I focused on the positives rather than the negatives. I’d just kicked three grown men’s asses. It never occurred to me that one day I’d be using my MMA training again. Yeah, my moves had been a little rusty, but I had done it.
“What are you grinning about?” Rylan asked curiously, pulling me from my thoughts.
I chuckled and told him, “It felt good to use my fists again. I used to train so much back in high school and my early years of college that it came back naturally. Once this is over, I want to join a gym and get back into it.”
Rylan smiled and nodded. “When this is over, I will find you a good trainer.”
“You know…” I said, “the only reason you and Arthur were able to kidnap me both times was because I was wearing those stupid bracelets. Any bout of adrenaline would have sent me into convulsions and without them I would have accidentally brought the city of Chicago down or destroyed that brick house in an attempt to escape.”
“You may have been able to stop a normal man,” Rylan conceded with amusement. “But you would not have gotten away from a Guardian.”
That was probably true. I smirked, already knowing the answer to my next comment. “Maybe you and I can become vigilantes together.”
Rylan’s deep scowl made me laugh.
“No,” he snapped.
“Oh, come on. How cool would it be if you and I went after the bad guys? Everywhere we went we could eliminate crime and the world would be a safer place. We’d be unstoppable! We could be like the Avengers or the Justice League minus the costumes… Unless you want to dress up?” I teased.
“Absolutely not,” Rylan growled. “Supernatural beings do not interfere with human issues unless it affects the supernatural world. Even if we did, I would not want you in harm’s way.”
“I’m human,” I said with a frown.
“As human as I am,” Rylan muttered.
“So is that a no on the costumes?” I asked sweetly, ignoring his comment.
Rylan sighed and rolled his eyes. One corner of his mouth pulled upwards in a half-smile.
“Fine, as long as I do not have to wear tights,” he answered.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Rylan’s answering grin brightened the cab of the truck. It felt good to laugh.
�
��You know I wasn’t really a vigilante. That’s a strong word to describe what we were doing,” I told him. “Really it was just a bunch of kids beating up a few people every now and then. We never killed anyone, thank goodness. I wasn’t like Frank Castle or Oliver Queen.”
“Who?” Rylan asked, obviously confused.
“Oh come on, you’ve been around for forever and you’re telling me you don’t know who either the Punisher or the Green Arrow are? They were comic book vigilantes and then they had their own TV shows for a while,” I told him. “But they killed people, so they toed the line between right and wrong.”
“Sometimes getting rid of the problem, rather than locking them up only for them to direct crime from inside a prison, is better,” Rylan said softly.
I looked at him curiously.
“Is that what you did… or do, I guess?” I asked.
“There is no supernatural prison,” Rylan told me. “If criminals do not want to die by our hands, then it is best not to be a criminal.”
I stared at him in surprise. There were obviously a lot of things I still didn’t know about the supernatural world.
***
Forty minutes later, we pulled up in front of the house. A flashy yellow sports car that had no business driving down the gravel drive to the house was parked out front. Leaning against the car was a tall and beautiful woman. This Guardian wore designer clothes that hugged her curves and showed off strong arms and curvy legs. She had a severe jawline, a sharp nose, and dark eyes that narrowed at us. Her dark wavy hair was pulled back into a high ponytail.
“She is early,” Rylan growled with displeasure. He threw off his seatbelt and opened the door. He looked back at me and warned, “Stay in the car.”
Rylan shut the door and walked over to the female Guardian, who straightened as he approached. I couldn’t hear them talk, but the woman looked far from friendly. Her jaw was clenched tight as she listened to Rylan talk. I was so involved watching the two of them that I didn’t notice another car pull up until I heard two car doors shut behind me. I flinched at the sound. I turned around in my seat to see two of the most gorgeous people I had ever seen walk up to the back of the truck. They split up, one going around the car passing the driver side, the other coming to walk past the passenger door of the truck.