by Jenny Allen
Lilith’s eyes flickered to the doorway nervously. If someone burst in spraying the room with bullets right now she’d be a goner. There was no way she could force her muscles to move yet, but the doorway was still empty. She watched Chance as her crept silently forward, heading for the wall, his gun held loosely at his side. So why was Chance in full body guard mode?
That’s when she felt it. A mixture of fear and exasperation that wasn’t coming from anyone in the room. There was someone in the hall, someone who wasn’t entirely sure they wanted to know what was in this room. He’d sensed whoever was outside the door.
Lilith lowered herself down to the floor as her brain snagged on one simple train of thought. The effects of Cohen’s blood had worn off on her at least twenty-four hours ago and they’d been dwindling before that. Somehow, Chance was not only still experiencing them, but they were stronger than hers and she’d just had Cohen’s blood. Maybe Luminita did know something about Chance after all, maybe she hadn’t been bluffing.
A hollow metal thwack pulled Lilith right out of her unraveling thoughts. She scrambled around the side of the table Chance gripping the door handle and the boot of someone lying on the ground just outside the door. Metal door to the face probably wasn’t what that guard expected.
Before she could even move, alarm rang down her nerves. She could sense several people now and they weren’t trying to be stealthy. The sound of boots stomping quickly against tile echoed from down the hall. In the blink of an eye, Chance slid out of the door and slammed it closed. Shit.
Obviously, he wanted her to stay put, but how was she supposed to do that? If he died out there… No. Chance was right. She could barely move through the cramping and spasms in her legs and her arms were shaking so bad she could barely grip the gun much less aim it. She’d just be one huge liability and, as he pointed out on the plane, he was better on his own in situations like this. Well, she sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there are do nothing. There were still other’s that needed her help.
Lilith scrambled over to Timothy first. Sure, Cohen was in worse shape, but she’d need Timothy’s help if she was going to get him out of here. Tim was still passed out but his breathing was regular and deep.
The big problem was the metal collar around his neck and the accompanying chain attached to the floor. She seriously doubted she’d miraculously find a key lying around so she needed something to pry off the chain. Something long, thin, metal. Her keen eyes darted around the weakly lit room until they caught on an iron poker sitting on the counter with other miscellaneous tools. What were the odds? Guess Luminita wanted to ensure she had every possible torture device at hand for her screwed up ritual. For once, Lilith was glad she’d been so thorough.
After a couple of attempts she managed to pry the chain off the metal loop in the floor with a loud clank and a few broken tiles. Of course, the sound didn’t even stir Timothy. She didn’t expect it to since he’d slept peacefully through all the yelling and blood-curdling screams. A few sharp slaps to the face wound up doing the trick. As soon as he groggily opened his muddy brown eyes, Lilith shoved the fire poker into his hands.
“Tim. We’re getting out of here. All of us.” His chiseled face held a hundred questions but she wasn’t going to explain everything right now. There was no time.
Lilith jumped to her feet, stumbling a few times and finally limped over to Cohen’s table. She pushed two fingers against his carotid artery, saying a prayer under her breath. “Come on.” Finally, she felt a weak throbbing beneath her fingertips. He was still alive. With relief flooding over her, Lilith gently shook his shoulders and his eyes began to roll under his sliced eyelids. Blood was everywhere, welling in the corners of his eyes, trickling down his ruined face. It was hard enough for her to swallow her father doing this to someone he hated much, but for Luminita to do this to someone she claimed to love?
“Andrew! You need to wake up!” Croaking murmurs were his only response. Crap. Her shaking hands scrambled desperately at the straps as her eyes flicked from the door to Timothy as he groggily got to his feet.
Muffled pops echoed from outside setting Lilith’s heart racing again, her eyes locked on the door as her fingers fumbled with the another strap. She kept straining, trying to pick apart the things she felt out there, to just figure out which one was Chance, but it was like trying to identify someone in a lineup based on the color of their soul. She wasn’t even sure what she sensed was real much less able to identify who it belonged to. It was all a wriggled mass of pain and fear.
Finally, Lilith tore her eyes away from the door. Staring holes into it wasn’t going to help Chance and sure as hell wasn’t going to help anyone in this hellish room. With renewed purpose and laser focus, she attacked Cohen’s restraints one by one.
“Lilith.” The raspy voice nearly made her jump out of her skin. She looked down as Cohen tried to blink, the blood from his sliced upper lids filling his eyes. A ragged murmur panted from his lips as his muscles twitched in pain.
“Don’t, Cohen. Just keep them closed. You’re okay for now but we have to get you out of here.”
“I just w…thank you.” She could see the considerable effort it took just for him to speak, the incisions near his mouth breaking the thin clots and oozing fresh drops of blood. As much as she’d hated him at times, as much trouble and pain as he’d directly and indirectly caused her, he didn’t deserve this. Lilith swallowed hard on her tears and forced her mouth into a faint smile.
“You can thank me when we get out of here.” She couldn’t help the doubt creeping into her voice, but he didn’t seem to notice. Cohen was in such rough shape and he was losing a lot of blood…
The creaking sound of the door swinging open knocked Lilith right out of her morbid thoughts. Lilith snatched her gun off the table and aimed at the door, trying to keep her arms from shaking by sheer will.
“Lily! We have to move right now!” Chance raced into the room with a wild panic in his eyes. He stopped short when he saw Timothy awake, free and ready to bash his head in with a fire poker. “Tim. You ok?”
Lilith took advantage of the distraction to unbuckle the last strap, carefully easing it away from Cohen’s bloody torso.
“What the hell are you doing?” Chance rushed around the table and caught her wrist, gripping it firmly and pulled her to her feet again. The angry scowl returned, marring his handsome face.
“We have to help him…” Lilith tried to shove his hand away, but he held on with a secure grip. She knew in her gut that he wouldn’t hurt her, but for a moment, her nightmare flashed before her eyes. That same grip wrapped around her throat, squeezing the life out of her.
“The hell we do! I am not risking my neck or yours out there to protect him.”
In a wave of fury, Lilith wrenched her wrist away from Chance and glared up at his handsome face. Her eyes held his in a stare as unyielding as the grave. “I am not leaving him behind, Chance! He’s innocent…”
“Innocent?!” Chance stepped closer, looming over her with every inch of his full height which was a good six inches over hers. “He’s the one that gave away my location. Those were Luminita’s men waiting for me in Knoxville. He nearly got me killed and I’m sure he’s the reason you were strapped to that fucking table. He was playing us this whole time. He’s done nothing but lie, Lily! If you save him now, he will only bring more death to our lives.”
Part of her wanted to listen to Chance, just walk away. He wasn’t completely wrong. Cohen had lied to them, had played them, but Chance was wrong about Luminita. She completely betrayed Cohen in every possible way. He was so blindly faithful to the one light in his life Farren hadn’t snuffed out that he never even saw it coming.
“Look at him and tell me he wanted this!” Lilith nearly screamed the words. Chance would never really know. He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen him suffer, hadn’t watched him beg the one person he loved not to do this, hadn’t heard his screams. Those screams…they were going to bring a
fresh torment to her nightmares. Lilith turned back to Cohen with hot tears in her eyes as she tried to slide her arm behind his shoulders.
As soon as she touched his skin she jerked her hand back. His entire body was a dark vortex of emotional and physical anguish spiraling down into nothingness. The blood in her veins, Cohen’s blood, it craved the darkness, the agony. It was drawn to it, pulled into the swirling mass of tortured memories that prayed for the bliss of oblivion. There was a reason Ashcroft tortured his victims to feed. It was powerful. Sick, twisted and disgusting, but powerful.
Lilith gritted her teeth and shook off the hypnotic pull of Cohen’s pain. She had to get a grip. She couldn’t exactly rescue Cohen if she couldn’t touch him. Lilith forced her arm under him, ignoring the sensation of hot pokers stabbing across her skin. After a lot of winces, groans and yelps from both of them, she finally got him sitting upright. He still couldn’t quite open his eyes though the bleeding seemed to have finally stopped. She wished she could say the same for the deeper cuts on his torso.
Lilith turned to find Chance and Timothy standing there completely dumbstruck. “What the hell happened?” Chance stared at the painfully deep slices, reading the words, before his eyes drifted to Cohen’s face. Apparently, he hadn’t paid any real attention to Cohen’s injuries when he’d scooped up his blood for her to drink.
“She’s trying to recreate Ashcroft, Chance. That’s why she wanted the book. She thinks she has to recreate Ashcroft’s torture for it to work. Believe me, Cohen sure as hell didn’t ask for this. He just trusted the wrong person.” She watched everything sink in, the puzzle pieces clicking into place. She could feel his conflicting emotions buzzing across his skin like static electricity.
“Chance. If we don’t get Cohen out and Luminita gets away, what’s to stop her from continuing her sick ritual? What if she succeeds?”
Chance stared hard at Cohen’s face, weighing all his options. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. He did. That much she could tell, but he was still hesitating. Probably weighing how much of a liability Cohen was against how wrong it would be to leave him here. After several tense seconds, he released a weary sigh and swung his eyes to Lilith. The statement in that look was unmistakable. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
“Can you help with him, Tim? I’ll take point.”
Obediently, Tim hurried forward and carefully helped Cohen off the table and onto his feet. Before Lilith could take her place on Andrew’s other side, Chance lightly gripped her hand and pulled her close. His lips brushed against hers in the barest whisper of a kiss before pulling back. It was just enough to melt the jagged tension pulling at her nerves. “That’s why she wanted you…to turn him?” Lilith nodded softly and buried her face against his chest. She would never be able to explain it, but in that moment for some reason she felt embarrassed.
“Wait!” A commanding bark from the far corner caught them all off guard, but Lilith knew that voice. It would haunt her nightmares forever. Before anyone else moved, Lilith snatched her pistol off the table again and stormed into the corner.
As soon as Farren’s face came into view a hard anger deep in her gut sprang to life, gnawing and biting at her insides. The monster inside was trying to claw its way out and Lilith wasn’t sure she even wanted to fight it.
“Don’t just stare, get me out of this thing.” Farren’s fingers tugged at the thick metal around his neck, the chains tinkling against the tile as he moved. Lilith stood there, her eyes fixated on him like laser targets, her hand flexing around the heavy weight of the 9mm in her hand.
“Let’s get out of here. Leave him here to rot, he’s not worth our time or bullets.” Chance slid his hand over her shoulder but Lilith’s eyes were still burning holes in the young man with the old eyes. The one that killed her father like he was swatting an annoying fly. The one that tried to kill her just to torment his grandson. She couldn’t leave him here. She couldn’t take the chance that he’d be rescued. He needed to die. He deserved to die.
“Lily, you aren’t a killer. This wouldn’t be self-defense, it would be murder, no matter how much he deserves it.” Chance was right, but she just couldn’t make herself walk away.
“Release me, now!” Farren’s voice boomed with authority but to Lilith it seemed like a harmless façade now, hollow and empty. “I’m your only ticket to freedom. Free me and I’ll make sure the council doesn’t hunt you down.”
Rage licked at her insides like a roaring forest fire. Even now, chained to the floor, he was threatening them. It would never end. They would never be free, no matter what he said. He’d betrayed his fellow council members and she was pretty sure they weren’t going to take it lying down. He would lose everything and she knew precisely where he would place all the blame.
“Lilith.” Chance’s smooth voice filled her ear, his warm breath tickling across her skin. The pounding in her head eased, leeching the anger away with it. “He’s powerless now.” As soon as the words left his lips, she knew it was true. Farren would blame them, but even if he managed to survive the judgment of his own people, he’d lose everything.
“Let’s go, Cherie.” She nodded softly, swallowing the lump in her throat, the gun falling to her side. As much as she wanted to put a bullet in his head, ultimately Chance was right. She wasn’t a cold-blooded killer like Farren. She could only pray that he died in this room along with his hollow threats.
“Wait! Andrew! You can’t leave me here. You are my grandson. You’re one of us!” Lilith laughed darkly at Farren’s desperate pleas. She knew the truth about Farren and he had never considered Cohen a true incubus. She turned to follow Chance, when Cohen leaned away from Tim and quickly snatched her gun right out of her hand.
Before she could even register what he’d done, a gunshot split through the air like thunder. She whirled back to see Cohen standing there shaking, gun raised and a hard look in his eyes. Lilith followed the line of the gun to Farren. There was an angry bullet hole just above his left eyebrow, a wet splatter of dark red against the white wall.
“I was never one of you!” His hysterical voice screamed the words with a visceral pain that echoed off the walls. The cuts around his mouth started to bleed again and she could feel the physical pain emanating from him like a blast of heat from a blazing furnace but he swallowed the cries and groans that threatened to break loose. Cohen just stood there, eyes focused on his grandfather’s corpse, panting angrily as tumultuous emotions tore him in a million directions.
Lilith couldn’t tear her eyes off the bullet wound in Farren’s head, in the exact same place he had shot her father. She honestly didn’t know how to feel. Relieved, vindicated, sick, afraid, sympathetic. They all rambled around her brain as everyone stood there, no one daring to say a word.
She forcibly dragged her eyes away from Farren’s body to meet Cohen’s blood-soaked grey eyes as he pushed the gun back into her hand. “Luminita may be bat shit crazy, but she was right about Farren. I couldn’t let him live to hurt anyone else.” There were tears in his voice but also a resolve made hard by decades of emotional torture. Farren’s legacy of anguish, manipulation and murder was finally over.
She nodded her head softly in understanding and cast one last look at Farren as if she just couldn’t believe he was really dead. “We need to go.” Chance’s voice was soft and tender as he slid a hand over Lilith’s shoulder. She reached up, squeezing his hand reassuringly.
“Let’s get out of this hellhole.”
Chapter 34
Chance took point as they made their way into the dimly lit hall. Cohen bit down on murmured groans as Lilith and Timothy supported his weight. He was trying desperately to be quiet, but every single motion tugged at the deep gaping wounds covering his chest, sides and stomach. Lilith tried to go slow and easy for his sake, but her brain kept screaming to run, flooding her body with a half dozen hormones that made her heart race and her muscles twitch.
Dim emergency lights and exit arrows cast the ba
rren hallway in an eerie glow, illuminating the neutral walls and white tile floors with splashes of red and yellow. The black plaques that sat vacantly next to the closed doors only added to the anonymous and creepy feel of the hall. The tiny hairs on the back of Lilith’s neck stood on end as flashes of déjà vu tightened her chest. She felt like she back in Phipps Bend, sneaking through the dark, trying to evade the evil clutches of a psychotic villain. It wasn’t much different. Ashcroft and Luminita were two sides of the same damn coin, but this time it was so much worse. There was no doubt that Ashcroft was far more deadly, but he hadn’t had a vindictive siren and a body-raising voodoo queen on his side.
They picked their way past several bodies on the floor, more of the anonymous SWAT style guards that Farren used. She watched Chance bend down and scoop up one of the semi-automatic guns and for a moment, Lilith considered doing the same. Until she realized that she’d probably hit everything except what she was aiming at. Once again she found herself wishing she was more like the Hollywood vamps. It’d be nice to have an instinctual knowledge of martial arts and weaponry.
The group was nearing a corner when Chance held a hand up and pointed toward the wall. Thankfully, Timothy knew what that meant and began steering Lilith and Cohen to put their backs against the wall. Once Chance saw that they were all in position, he held a finger to his lips and then crept closer to the corner. He crouched down low, the lean muscles in his back tensing like a panther ready to strike. He waited in that position and all Lilith could detect from him was an extreme focus.
Nervously, Lilith glanced back down the long hall and her eyes caught on something. Cohen was leaving a smeared trail of blood, a lot of blood, on the white tile floor, blazingly obvious even in the dim light. They might as well toss glow-in-the-dark breadcrumbs on the floor behind them.
Her eyes quickly flicked to Cohen who was resting his head against the wall, eyes half closed. The cross slashes around his eyes seemed to have stopped bleeding finally, but the deeper wounds on his torso, the names, were still seeping blood. Hypovolemic shock could set in at any moment. He was dying right here in front of her and she was powerless to help him. Even if she had time to stop, stitch up his wounds and get the bleeding to stop, it wouldn’t be enough. Hell, with as deep as Luminita cut it’d be a miracle if she hadn’t nicked an organ or perforated his bowel.