by Hall, Marie
Asher cleared his throat. “Did she tell you anything else? Where the prophecy was located? With whom?”
“Not just whom. It’s with the Triad.”
“The Triad.” Luc growled, looking confused.
Asher’s hands immediately stilled. “Shit,” he muttered.
I frowned. “Am I missing out on something here?”
“Yeah.” Asher stood, hanging on to my hand. “We need to get to the hive now. I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on.”
“Wait!” Luc threw out his hand. “You’re going back to that desert?”
“That’s what Grace told us to do,” I said, frowning because I was still totally confused about Asher’s reaction to my mentioning that name.
“You’re not going alone. I’m coming with you.” Luc said it in such a way that I expected he was waiting for my denial of his offer.
“Good.” Asher nodded. “Because we’ll need you.”
Flinching as if completely confused by Asher’s reply, Luc said, “Give me a second to get Bubba up to speed on my duties for the day.”
The minute Luc traced, I whirled on Ash. “You planning to explain what that was all about when I mentioned the Triad?”
Grabbing my hand, he settled it on his rapidly beating heart.
“Priest, are you nervous?” I whispered, because there was no way my dangerous killer could be. Right? His pupils hadn’t just dilated, and his pulse wasn’t racing, it was all in my head. It had to be.
Cupping my cheek, he shook his head. “I’d be a fool to claim I wasn’t. Pandora, the Triad is no joke. I’m not surprised Grace couldn’t tell you much about them. Everything about that group is highly secretive and only known by a very few.”
“Then how do you know what I obviously don’t? She said they were just the head of the Order.”
He shook his head. “Pandora, since...” His nose curled as his lips pulled up. Sighing, he wrapped a strand of my hair around his finger and then sniffed it.
I grabbed his hand. “Tell me.”
“I can’t.” His jaw clenched. “Pandora, they’re bad. And they’re not human.”
“What? The Order is comprised of—”
“No.”
“But Grace said—”
“Doesn’t have the clearance to go that high. Little demon...” He grabbed my face, looking at me in such a way that I felt as if he were peering at my soul. “They won’t win.”
I swallowed hard.
Sulfur filled the room.
“Let’s go,” Luc drawled.
We were lying side by side on the top of a cliff that overlooked a gulch several miles below. Scrub brush and sage dotted the red landscape. The sun was unmerciful this morning, bearing down on my back with the heat of licking flames, breaking me out in a wash of sweat, soaking me through in minutes.
Luc had had the foresight to switch out of his sweatshirt and into an A-shirt. Asher’s boardroom clothes were pretty well ruined.
“Look.” Ash pointed at a dark hole carved into the rock face about a mile above ground. “It’s there.”
“The Order’s getting sloppy,” Luc drawled, swatting at a gnat buzzing around his face. “The trail of body parts leading us here was beyond obvious.”
I curled my lip. “They think I’m stupid.”
“No, they don’t.” Asher’s look was glacial. “They know you’ll recognize this as a trap. Because that isn’t the hive. That’s a decoy.”
Glowering, Luc scooted forward until his head hung over the cliff as if he were trying to get a better look. “You sure, Priest?”
Asher’s dimple poked out and I had to stifle the urge to dip my finger into it.
“Very. Stay here, I’m going to investigate.” He glanced at Luc. “Guard your back.”
“Against the knife you’re about to stab into it?” Luc drawled.
“Let’s get one thing straight here, Neph.” Asher narrowed his eyes. “I refuse to be goaded by you anymore, but not because I’m scared of you. I hate you.”
“Likewise.”
“But,” Asher continued on as though Luc hadn’t spoken. “It’s not about that. It’s about keeping Pandora safe. Whatever I feel for you doesn’t matter. Whatever you think of me doesn’t matter. Only she does.”
Leaning forward, Asher took my lips and I melted into his touch, sighing into his mouth. The kiss didn’t lasted nearly long enough, but my head swirled and buzzed all the same.
Asher’s gaze was heavy as he studied me. “You hear anything, you fight just long enough to get free and then you leave. You hear me? I’ll be fine. You leave, little demon.”
He didn’t give me even a moment to respond. Standing, he gathered darkness to him like iron shavings to a magnet until he was nothing but a tower of shadow amidst the radiance of sunlight. The shadow swirled and moved, disappearing off the edge of the cliff and melting into the darkness beneath.
I smiled, realizing now how close Asher must have always been by my side. Hidden in plain sight.
“Boy scout for real?” Luc scoffed.
I shook my head. “Do you ever stop? Seriously? Has there ever been a moment that it went through your head that maybe enough is enough and you’ll leave it alone? Ever?”
His face was cold. “What do you see in him, Dora?”
“The list is too long for casual conversation, Luc. Can we just focus?”
I studied the entrance of the cave, hoping at some point to witness that funnel of shadow slide into view, but all I saw was a lot of bouncing sagebrush. Obviously this was a decoy; more obvious was that we’d probably be set upon soon. I waited for the Order to make their next move.
“What Vyxen told you,” Luc whispered. “It wasn’t true.”
Glancing at him, I quirked my brow. “Which time?”
“I wouldn’t rat you out, Dora. You and I might have some bad history, but you’re still my priority.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why if I was his priority he’d been screwing around with Vyxen for so long, but then it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t the fact that Luc had sought comfort outside my arms that bothered me, it was the fact that his life was one giant blank for me. I’m not sure I’d ever really known him at all.
“Right.” I nodded. “Whatever you say.”
I was turning back to study the cave entrance when he grabbed my arm. “Dora, you have to talk to me. At some point you have to stop shutting me out.”
“That’s rich.” I chuckled. “You want to know the truth? Then here it is in all its unvarnished glory. Do you love me?”
His lips twisted.
I shrugged. “Well, Luc? It’s a really simple question, requiring either a yes or a no. What’s it gonna be?”
This time he was the one to turn around to stare at the entrance of the cave.
I snorted. “You killed us, Luc, not me. You holding on so tight-fistedly to some stupid sense of ‘demons don’t show emotions.’ Demons can’t admit to having feelings, or needing, or wanting.” Rolling a little to my side, I bared my heart-shaped scar. “You might have marked me, but this is all you’ll ever get of my heart. One time, if you’d only said it once, my eyes would never have strayed. I would have accepted you sleeping around, doing whatever you needed to do to feed your demon, confident always in the thought that your heart was mine. But you never shared it with me. You gave me no hope. That’s why it’s Asher. Because he’s not afraid to show me. He’s a complete and total enigma, but he makes me feel treasured.”
The entire time I’d been talking, Luc’s jaw had been grinding side to side. “I could have made you feel all those things,” he snapped.
“Are you really so blind? You think killing a gaggle of innocent children because I disappeared was your way of proving your love? Or letting me walk headlong into danger was a way of showing me, or carving me up when all I asked was for you to reciprocate?”
“You chose him!”
Moved to pity, I framed Luc’s face. “Oh, Luc
.”
And I let him hear my pain, my wish that things had turned out differently. “You were the breath of my breath and the heart of my heart for so very long. You can’t just turn those things off overnight. I’ll always love you, and I hope that someday you’ll understand that. I needed more than you could give me and that’s not your fault. But I will always have your back.”
His fingers grasped mine and a sheen of primal, raw anguish shone in his eyes. I averted my own, giving him some semblance of privacy, because I knew he wouldn’t want me to witness it.
It took several minutes before he was able to speak, “You understand that once the family discovers we’re harboring a priest they will turn on you?”
I gasped and turned to him. “Are you threatening me?”
“As tempting as it would be to rid myself of him, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Then they don’t need to ever find out. He doesn’t look like one, nor does he pulse like a monster does. So as far as I’m concerned, they’ll never figure it out unless you tell them.”
Whatever else he might have said was lost at the sudden roaring grunt behind us. Then there were two, then three, and then a whole choir of grunts and groans coming from all directions.
I was jerked away from Luc, pulse hammering, when the rabid eyes of a starving zombie leaned into me. Hands were all over, maggot-infested corpses tackled me to the ground. I was able to writhe and twist enough to keep their mouths off me.
“Luc!” I screamed, glimpsing him through a break in putrid bodies, but he was also surrounded.
Realizing I didn’t have time to worry about him, I twisted, telling Pestilence to wake the hell up. It was game on, and I wasn’t losing this time.
Pestilence, unlike Lust, loved war. The tingling fury of his power juiced me up. His touch wouldn’t do shit against dead bodies, but fighting with him was like the equivalent of getting a speedball shot of testosterone straight into the vein.
Aware that I had to prevent getting bit at all costs, I kicked out with my foot, shoving two bodies away and loosening the grip of the other three, getting them away from me just enough to scramble to my feet. Reaching into my back pocket, I grabbed my go-to weapon, the katana fan, and flicked it open.
“Come get me, MFers,” I taunted.
The five of them came at me all at once. Knowing I would have to be the aggressor to have any hope of keeping them on their heels and within the “safe zone,” I took just enough of a running start so that when I dropped to my knees, I was able to skid outside the reach of grabby arms. Now behind them, I hopped into a squat and sliced through their Achilles tendons.
They didn’t grunt or groan like they were in pain, but the moment they took that first step, they dropped like scattered bowling pins. Dead or alive, you still needed that tendon to walk.
Grinning, I blew them a kiss. “Slimy bastards.”
After that, it was easy to pick them off one by one. They were still dangerous, but all I had to do was slide one over at a time, drive my blade down their neck, punt the head aside, and move on to the next until finally all bodies were secured.
Luc had four of them down; his kills hadn’t been as clean as my own. Skulls were concave and oozing gray matter from the cracks. Luc was solid on his feet. His eyes flicked to me, and then, nodding, he grabbed the head of the final woman and ripped its head from its shoulder.
“You all right? You get bit?” he asked me the second the threat had passed.
“No.” I wiped my mouth, smearing rancid blood across it. Disgusted, I flipped up my shirt and wiped it off—no way was I licking my lips. Zombie ooze was the foulest stuff on Earth. “You?”
“I’m fine, and this was way too easy, wasn’t it?”
“Much.”
Narrowing his eyes, he looked back at the cave, and for a second I knew he was wondering what might have happened to my priest. Sighing, he said, “Let’s go.” Rushing to me, he made to grab my arm.
“We’re not leaving.”
“Dammit, Pandora, you really gonna do this now? Asswipe told you to hightail it the hell out of here if something like this happened. Wouldn’t be surprised if he set this whole thing up.”
A snappy retort was right on the tip of my tongue when I felt the prickle of sonar brush against me.
“Dora, let’s—”
“Shh.” I placed a finger against my lips. “Stop talking.”
His brows twitched but he did stop to listen.
Now that I was aware of the movement, I noticed the pitch wavering like the swell of a wave. Up and down, over and over again.
“You feel that?” I looked at him.
But I knew he did the second I saw him brush at the fine hairs on his arms, which were suddenly standing on edge.
“Sounds like some sort of a frequency wave.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Two guesses where it’s coming from, first guess doesn’t count.”
We both turned toward the cave entrance across the gully.
“I vote no.” He clamped his lips and crossed his arms in a way that made his biceps look twice as large.
“I’m not leaving him. He wouldn’t leave me.”
“I’ll follow you if you can explain how two sets of zombies got the jump on us without us noticing. I don’t trust him, Dora.”
“You don’t have to, Luc, but I do. And I’m going.”
Just as I was set to trace, he tried to grab my hand.
“Don’t!” I jumped out of the way. “Don’t touch me. I’m hopped up on Pestilence—I’ll knock you down into the valley if you do.”
Narrowing his eyes, he yanked my hand into his and I felt the power surge leap into him.
But maybe because he’d been prepared for it, he was able to clench his teeth and hang on. The surge didn’t last long, but it was enough to break him out in a wash of sweat and turn his normally bronzed skin ashy.
It actually felt good to release some of that adrenaline, helped me to feel not so wound tight as I normally did after a fight with Pest juicing me up. “You okay?” I touched his shoulder.
Jerking his head, he muttered, “Hang on.”
Then he traced us both to the cave.
“Shit!” He cried out and clapped hands over his ears.
The vibrations in here were sonorous, moving through us with such force that I felt my insides quiver like jelly. Blood rushed immediately to my head.
The smell of death was bad enough, but the thick crush of bodies rapidly running our way was even worse.
The entrance of the cave wasn’t very wide. If he and I stood side by side, we’d easily be able to defend ourselves.
“Nothing passes, you hear me,” he barked out.
Those were the last words spoken before we were set upon. My fan wasn’t the greatest in such an enclosed space. Not the most practical of weapons—you needed room to flourish and brandish such a romantic piece of equipment. But with such limited space to move in, this job would require I get down and dirty.
Pestilence pulsed through my body in waves, oozing through my pores in a green rolling mist. I was bone-deep cold as his power rushed through me, but each time I used him, I was better able to control my reaction to that violent level of freeze. Curving my fingers, I flexed my elongated black claws and puffed out a jet of white fog from my mouth. The thrum of the fight filled me, and with a final leer I got to work.
It was easy enough to rip off their heads since most of their skin and muscle was already gone. What wasn’t easy was avoiding the bites.
One of the cannibals latched onto my elbow as I was yanking its comrade’s head off.
“Damn. It.” I growled when it ripped a chunk of meat out and swallowed my flesh with a slurpy sigh, then headed back in for more.
This zombie was missing all the flesh on its jaw so that it looked like it was giving me a perpetual bloody smile. I was just reaching for it to rip its head off when another one—a teenage female wearing torn fishnet stockings and black Doc Martens—craw
led over the body of an emaciated old man before wrapping its legs around my middle, forcing me back into the wall as it hooked its rotten arm across my throat. Smiling zombie licked its teeth with a tongue that flickered around like a serpent’s. The thing that struck me most about these undead wasn’t actually the smell or putrescent flesh, it was the cloudy blue eyes that hinted at no soul within.
They were mindless killing machines; that more than anything bothered me. These zombies were so stereotypical as to be a cliché. But I had no more time to ponder it when Smiler wrapped his fingers around my wrist and jerked up. Shuddering, I jabbed my good elbow into chubby fishnet girl who was cutting off my air supply.
Zombies were immune to pain—they were dead, they felt nothing. But the law of physics worked just as well on them as it did on the living. My jab was enough to force her to crawl higher up, giving me the leverage I needed to flip her over my shoulder.
Gasping, I briefly touched my aching windpipe. Luc was dealing with his own horde while trying to maneuver his way back to me.
“Dora, I’m coming.”
“Just fight!” I huffed, sinking my claws into the neck of the smiler so that his teeth could no longer reach me. “I’m fine.” I yanked hard and it was nothing to separate the bottom jaw from the top; without the flesh and very little muscle left, even a human could have decapitated him.
Luc spun around, slamming his palm down on the back of a zombie wearing a moth-riddled blue-jean jacket. The zombie fell hard to the ground. Planting his boot on the zombie’s neck to keep him immobile, Luc whipped a flip knife out of his pocket, and in one swift move, he severed the head of the female who was now suddenly on him.
Ichor splashed everywhere and I swear, that smell is so much worse than the rest of the bodily fluids. A sharp burst of pain flared up the nerves of my arm. Grimacing, I flexed my fingers, and even while Luc should be focusing solely on the mass surrounding us, he kept flicking glances at me.
I shook my head at him, knowing what he was thinking. I had this and I wasn’t going to let a bite stop me, even if my arm was currently tingling and the tips of my fingers were going numb from the toxin of that bite as it spread its way through my bloodstream. Sweating, I knew if I didn’t shift focus from my pain to the fight, I’d go into zombie shock again. Growling, I pushed off the wall. Barreling my body into a duo of them, I pinned one claw into a short brunette girl’s neck and the other into a man who looked sort of like a heavier version of Antonio Banderas.