Rayna ran at Lena, hands still tied behind her back. She jumped and kicked but Lena ducked and Rayna soared over her, landing on her feet. Lena threw a punch that met Rayna’s jaw, and with her arms tied behind her back, she lost her balance and fell to the ground.
Lena was immediately on top of her and the cats roared in the background. I was there in an instant and used both hands to push the bitch sideways. She flew towards the stairs, cracking the bottom step as she hit the ground.
I dropped down beside Rayna and slipped a blade from my sheath. Footsteps came clattering down the steps as I cut through the leather binding and suddenly Lena was beside me. Her foot met my face before I had a chance do anything but cut the ties.
Brock had reached the bottom of the steps. Head down, he rushed towards me and knocked the wind out of me with his shoulder. Pushing me back like a linesman, he slammed me into the wall. He kicked me in the face and I slid to the ground, my head snapping against the concrete. Everything went black.
I came to after a few seconds, my face against the cold floor. Brock had Rayna by the hair and flung her off Lena, who looked the worse for wear. The parts of her face that weren’t covered in blood were swollen with bruises.
Rayna hit the ground on the blood-smeared symbol and leapt quickly to her feet. Brock and Lena moved to either side of her and began circling. The wounds on Rayna’s arms still bled steadily. Blood trickled down off her elbows and splattered on the cold gray floor. The painted symbol reacted.
It started to glow, no longer a dark smear of dry blood but a bright red light. The symbol wavered and rose off the concrete floor. It floated around Rayna’s waist and Lena’s eyes opened wide.
“You’re the one?” Lena exclaimed.
“The one?” Rayna eyed the symbol that moved around her.
“The one we’ve been looking for! You’re the key,” Brock said with excitement.
Rayna backed up out of the pentagram but the symbol remained alight. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Brock and Lena closed in on her with a new hunger in their eyes. “Not you, your blood. Your blood is the key.” Lena’s voice rolled out in a seductive purr that didn’t match her bloodied face.
I silently got to my feet and stepped towards them. Brock had his back to me and Lena’s focus was all on Rayna. Rayna shook her head and opened her mouth to argue, but she’d seen what had happened and didn’t know what to say.
Lena lunged to grab her and Brock moved in after her. I ran forward and slammed the butt of my blade against the back of Brock’s head. He crumpled to the ground.
Lena got Rayna in a tight hold and they rolled end over end, each trying to gain the dominant position. The werecats roared in the background and slammed themselves against the cage doors.
I waited for Lena to be on top of the scuffle before I reached down and grabbed her by the throat. I felt my magic flare up within me, and with that additional power I took a few steps and threw her. Her skull crunched against the wall and I was sure I’d knocked her unconscious.
The concrete broke at her impact and rained down on top of her. Her limp form crashed onto the top of one of the cages. Her body weight and the chunks of cement crushed the bars, and with the structure compromised, its door broke off its hinges.
The panther crept out of the cage, its golden orbs observing me. It growled deep in its throat as it stalked towards us. I reached down and helped Rayna to her feet as the panther turned its attention to the second cage.
With a single graceful stride, it reached its companion’s prison and swiped at the door with long claws, fully extended from thick black paws. It hit the door several times to no avail before looking back at us and growling.
Rayna moved towards the cat and reached for the door. She pulled the pin and backed away from the huge cat baring long white teeth. The panther pushed its nose against the door and emerged with supernatural grace. The pair rubbed against each other before turning their attention back to us.
I reached for Rayna as she backed up and our fingers interlocked. We froze as they approached. They pressed against Rayna, brushing against her legs and pushing themselves between us. They circled her, keeping one between her and me. At the instruction of a deep growl, I stepped away.
One of the cats reached above her knees, while the other was as high as her hips. Seeing a house cat doing something like this would have been cute, but watching two werecats molesting her legs was less than comforting.
Rayna didn’t look panicked – she seemed to be enjoying this, and I wasn’t about to interfere. The felines circled and purred deeply before they turned and disappeared up the stairs in a few strides. Paws thumped above us before a loud crash reached our ears.
All our assailants were unconscious – for the moment – and we took that as our cue to leave. The bay window in the living room had been smashed out and shards were scattered over the floor. Doorknobs must be tricky for cats.
We slipped out the front door and let the darkness shroud us while adrenaline drove us forward. The moon and the receding glow of the lights from the house lit our way, and we ran with all the speed we could muster.
When we got to the Jeep, Rayna got in the passenger side and I drove. The roaring of the engine grounded me, comforting after the strangeness of caged werecats, magic symbols and Rayna’s blood doing who knows what in that basement. Right then, normal was good.
I pushed the pedal to the floor. Whatever the hunters had been looking for, they seemed to think they found it in Rayna. That could only mean things were going to be even less normal from this point on, and I wanted to get far away, fast.
~~~~~~
Chapter 23
The rear-view mirror was my best friend the whole drive home. I waited for bright lights to appear and run us off the road, but they never came. I exceeded the speed limit for most of the drive, just praying not to get pulled over. How would I explain a bleeding girl with possibly fatal wounds inside a vehicle neither of us owned?
Rayna hadn’t stopped bleeding and I had started to worry. Her wounds weren’t closing like they should’ve. It hadn’t occurred to me before that she would react this badly to the silver. We didn’t have a first aid kit in the car, so we used my shirt. I’d taken it off sometime after we hit the freeway and ripped it into strips. Rayna had managed to tie them around her wounds, and although the blood was soaking through, they would have to do until we got back to the condo.
“What the hell happened in there?” Rayna’s voice was strained, frightened, and exhausted. I kept my eyes on the road and stared into the darkness ahead while I tried to come up with an answer. “Chase?”
My words came out in a whisper. “I don’t know.”
The silence that followed was not the uncomfortable kind, but a silent understanding. For the past few weeks, demons had been snatched up for reasons unknown to us – at least until thirty minutes ago – and now we’d painted a target on Rayna’s back.
I tried to imagine what was racing through her mind right then, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. A few hours before, we thought we were going to talk to somebody, maybe get answers to our questions. Despite knowing who the hunters had been looking for, we were still left wondering why.
I took my eyes off the road and glanced over at Rayna. The reflection of her face as she stared out the window revealed how worried she was. “We’ll figure it out,” I said. I wanted to reassure her, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“I know.” She pulled her gaze from the darkness and looked at me. “I know,” she repeated. She tried to seem confident, but sounded distant and afraid, and her effort just made me feel worse.
The rest of the drive home was quiet. I regretted not having waited for Marcus since we had no idea what Rayna’s blood had done to that symbol. Now there was a whole new set of issues to deal with, topped with keeping Rayna safe.
Once home, I directed Rayna to the kitchen table and grabbed the first aid kit. The strips of s
hirt she’d wrapped around her arms were blood-soaked and dripping. She winced as I pulled them from her skin and started cleaning the wounds. The cuts were deeper than I’d thought and hadn’t even started to heal. Multiple gashes on each arm were still full of blood that ran down her arms and off her wrists. I had to grab towels to protect the floor, and though I tried several bandages, I still couldn’t slow the bleeding.
“It’s the silver,” she said. “It’s stopping my blood from clotting.”
I tried wrapping the wounds again, putting plenty of pressure on them, but it was useless. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.
“I don’t know what else to do. What do you usually do when you get hurt like this?” I asked.
Rayna’s eyes glazed over and her breathing slowed. “I’ve never been hurt like this.” I applied more pressure but nothing was working. “Chase,” she said, her voice weak. “You’re going to have to use your magic.”
I froze as she said it. It was one thing to make light in a dark room, and another to try and heal myself, but to use it on somebody else, most of all Rayna…that I wasn’t sure of. Water was a powerful element. One minute it can heal and the next drown, crashing over its victim. I wasn’t comfortable with that possibility.
“It’s not safe, Rayna. I could do more damage than good.”
“You have to. Please,” she said. She was losing consciousness. “There’s…nothing else.”
Marcus had said that without proper training, my elements were unstable and I could end up doing more harm than aid, and I knew he was right. Every time I’d gone against his advice, something bad had happened, but as I watched Rayna’s body slowly go limp, I knew we were out of options.
I was preparing to call upon my element when Rayna collapsed and fell off the chair. I dropped to my knees to check her pulse. It was there, but weak. I closed my eyes and reached for my magic.
I thought of rain coming down from the sky, warm drops hitting my skin, and a lake on a windless day, like a mirror reflecting the sky. The magic filled me, very different from the fire. The power was cool and calm, rather than hot and unstable. The water flowed inside of me, smooth and slow.
I put my hands over Rayna’s wounds. Even though some powerful water elementals could heal others simply by focusing on the necessary healing mentally, I couldn’t risk it. This wasn’t the time to be experimenting, and magic is always more powerful with touch. I pictured her blood clotting and no longer dripping from her arms. I imagined her wounds closing, the skin knitting itself shut, then water running over the lacerations, washing the blood away. I focused those thoughts and let the images cycle through my mind. I put all my energy into willing them to become truth.
I pushed the magic from my core into my arms, and I felt it in my veins, moving down into my wrists and through my hands, until it left through my fingertips. The cool, tingling sensation almost broke my focus, but I strained to hold on to the power, letting it move through my palms and into her body. The magic seemed to take on a will of its own, until I was no longer pushing it, but letting it pour out of me. Rayna lay motionless on the floor, but the wounds had stopped bleeding. New skin grew until the cuts were nothing but tiny scars in her pale flesh, then they disappeared completely .
I sat back on the floor and stared at my blood-soaked hands. The towels littering the floor were now all dark red. I moved my fingers over Rayna’s neck and felt her pulse pounding harder against her skin. Though her arms were still bloody, the wounds had disappeared, but I didn’t feel the satisfaction I should have. Instead I felt anger, anger that Rayna had almost died, anger that the answers we searched for nearly cost us our lives. Now that the hunters knew who they were looking for, all their energy would be focused on Rayna. We had been lucky, but our troubles had just begun. Only answers would rid me of my anger and guilt, and only one person could provide them.
~~~~~~
Chapter 24
I couldn’t leave Rayna alone while the hunters were after us, and she couldn’t come with me. Her wounds were healed, but I couldn’t put the blood she’d lost back in her body. She needed to rest. I refused to call Marcus, so I called the only other person I could trust.
Willy said he would help, his only condition being that he didn’t have to see, talk to, or be anywhere near Vincent.
Before he came over, I threw the soaked red towels into the laundry room and closed the door. I had a feeling Willy wouldn’t react well to large quantities of blood. I’d moved Rayna to the couch, cleaned her up the best I could and tucked a blanket underneath her. I didn’t want to explain to Marcus why his couch was covered in blood, and I wasn’t going to try to change her clothes.
The buzzer sounded and I let Willy up, but his barrage of questions upon seeing Rayna forced me to tell him what had happened. I tried to be vague, but there was no way to keep out all the details. After the update, he looked like he wished he had never agreed to come.
“Is she in danger here?” he asked, on the verge of panic.
“I don’t think so, not yet anyways. They don’t know who she is, only what she looks like, and they don’t know where she lives. I just need you to watch her for a while. I won’t be gone long.” Willy nodded and looked over at the couch awkwardly. “You can watch TV or something, okay? I just don’t want her to be alone when she wakes up.”
“I can do that,” Willy replied.
“I’m taking Rayna’s cell phone with me. The number’s on the table. If she wakes up, call me right away.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you Willy. I owe you one.”
Willy laughed “With all the ones you owe me, I should be living in a place like this.”
“Yeah, I know it.”
I had taken the time to change my clothes and shower, since the last thing I wanted to do was walk into a vampire nest covered in fresh hunter’s blood. I checked to make sure I’d wiped all the blood off my shoes and slipped out the door.
~~~~~~
Chapter 25
The sun was still low in sky and I took the Jeep to save time. Vincent’s warehouse looked worse for wear in the daytime. The windows on the upper floor were boarded up and the chain link fence surrounding the building was falling over. I wondered again why he lived in such a ramshackle place. For someone from a family so rich and powerful I’d expect a mansion of some sort, but who was I to question the living habits of the sunlight deprived?
I slipped inside the grounds through a hole in the fence, and my anger grew the closer I got to the building. I could feel the blood coursing through my veins and it felt like it was boiling under my skin.
The doors we’d gone through before were locked, but this time I’d come prepared. It took me a few minutes but I was successful with my lock picks. I didn’t have the same kind of magic as Rayna, so I had to resort to more mundane methods.
The warehouse was empty, which made me nervous, and the air smelled of stale blood. I knew the majority of the vampires would be sleeping, but the vamplings should’ve been watching the doors. I made it to the middle of the open space. Though it seemed eerily quiet, my anger fueled me onwards.
There was a balcony above the main floor, and multiple stairwells all led to metal doors with no handles. The only way up was an elevator, but it was key-operated and my lock picking skills wouldn’t help me override that.
My anger swelled and I let out a scream without fear of waking the dead. Vampires were strange compared to other demons. They drank blood to keep their bodies alive. They could reproduce, they had a pulse, and they breathed, but every sunrise their body died. Their eyes sunk into their heads, their skin sagged and decayed, and occasionally even their hair would fall out. It was one of the less glamorous things about being a vampire. But still, every night their bodies reformed anew.
The scream echoed through the open room and finally I got the attention I sought. The sound of multiple guns being cocked back made me to turn to face the five vamplings who stood behind me.
“Well, well,
well, I didn’t think you’d be quite stupid enough to come back,” the blonde said, with a rather disturbing smile. She and her companions formed a circle around me.
“What can I say? I’m a sucker for blondes.”
“Cute, but you’re not my type.”
“It’s the teeth, isn’t it?”
She lowered her gun slightly. “Because you kill our kind.”
I couldn’t contain my laughter. “Your kind? You realize you’re a human, right? I know some of you have this misconception that you’re one of them, but you’re not. Do you know how often one of you gets your wish to be turned? You’re an emergency snack, nothing more.”
“Shut your mouth,” she snapped.
I smiled. She did all the talking, which meant she was my ticket to the second floor. I scanned her body and saw the short chain with a single key around her neck.
“You and your group here are a snack. If the vamps were to turn you, they’d have to find new lackeys to watch over them, and that’d be too much work. If they were going to turn you, they’d have done it already. The fact that you don’t see that confirms that you’re frigging insane,” I said.
“You know, I’m going to enjoy this. It’d be too easy to shoot you, so I think I’ll hurt you first,” she said. She put the gun back into its holster and lunged at me.
I fell with her on top of me and she grabbed my neck, nails digging into my flesh. I held her hands with one arm and gripped her against me with the other, to shield me from the others’ guns. I rolled on top of her and let her roll back over me until we’d gained some distance from the rest, breaking up the circle.
I tore her fingers off my neck and forced one more roll so I was on top. I pulled her up with me as I stood. I kept one hand on her throat, pulled her gun from its holster with the other, and held it against the side of her head. A whine of pain escaped her lips and the other vamplings were on their guard. I kept my body behind hers and walked us back to where we’d started.
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