Nick glanced at the map and turned the wheel sharply, crossing three lanes of traffic to get to the off-ramp. It wasn’t a great neighborhood, but he could see why Sotiris would have chosen it. An area like this, with its crime rate? No one would ask questions, because they wouldn’t want to know. Knowledge wasn’t always power in places like this. His engine screamed, waking neighbors and their dogs, as he braked to turn onto the street where Casey had stopped, or at least where her phone signal had paused before racing away.
“Shit, is that fire?” Damian was leaning forward to stare at a small house that did indeed seem to be on fire. “Is this the house? Is Cassandra in there?” he asked.
Nick shot a glance at his nav system. It was the right house. Fuck. Damian would be uncontrollable if something happened to Casey. “The signal’s moving, Damian,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “She’s not there anymore.”
“Then who the fuck is that?”
Nick looked up to see two men race out of the burning residence, but instead of calling for help or acting like people who’d made a narrow escape, they were standing on the dead lawn and laughing their asses off.
“She’s in there,” Damian growled.
“You don’t know—”
“I do, damn it. Stop the fucking car.”
The two laughing idiots had turned to stare as the Ferrari drew closer, but when Nick roared to a tire-scorching stop in front of the burning house, they made a dash for their own car. Damian was on them in an instant, slamming one into the vehicle they’d been trying to reach, and grabbing the other by the neck, holding him several inches off the ground.
Nick crossed to the one lying on the ground next to the car and lined up the laser sight on his Glock 23 so that it painted a red dot on the asshole’s forehead. The guy could see the light over the barrel, and knew what it meant.
“Where is she?” Nick demanded. “And where’s the Talisman?”
The man grinned, displaying an impressive set of sharp teeth. Impressive in the sense that the guy was out of his fucking mind and yet still functioning.
“The Talisman’s gone,” he said, blood adding a gruesome touch to his grin. “And so’s the bitch.”
Damian spun at the man’s words, his fingers still digging into the other asshole’s throat, still choking the breath from him. With an almost absent gesture, Damian tightened his grip and twisted, breaking the man’s neck. He tossed aside the limp body and, ignoring Nick’s laser sight, grabbed the pierced idiot instead. But the guy only laughed.
“What’re you going to do, big man? You can save the bitch or save the Talisman. But you can’t do both. What’s it going to be?”
A stricken look crossed Damian’s face when he turned to stare at the burning house. Nick wanted to believe that Casey was still alive in there, but, even if she was, he couldn’t set aside the thousands of people who might die if they didn’t recover the Talisman. “You take the house,” he said abruptly. “I’ll go after the Talisman.”
Damian nodded, then broke the pierced guy’s neck as absently as he had the other’s, before running into the burning building without even a heartbeat of hesitation. But that was Damian. He didn’t know fear. He knew loyalty and love, and he’d give his life for the people he cared about. Which now included Casey.
Nick moved almost as fast as his brother, racing back to the still-running car to slide behind the wheel and tear away from the curb. He punched the number for Lilia.
“Did you find her?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Nick said grimly. “Damian’s on it. I need the phone signal.”
“It should be on your nav system. I shared that with you earlier.”
Nick glanced at the map displayed on the in-dash screen, and there it was. Casey’s phone was still traveling due south on the I-355. Where the fuck was Sotiris going?
“Shit,” Lili swore, all the more shocking because she did it so rarely. “The signal . . . it’s gone.”
“What do you mean ‘gone’?” he demanded, knowing he sounded far harsher than he usually was with Lilia. He stared at the screen, which no longer showed any signal from the phone.
“I mean gone as in dead, kaput. No signal,” she said, confirming what he was seeing.
“How the hell does that happen? Is the battery dead?”
“No,” she said thoughtfully, and he could hear the soft tap of her computer keys. “They’ve either removed the battery, or crushed the whole thing so thoroughly that it’s simply gone dead.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they know we’re tracking the phone, Nick,” she said impatiently.
“Right. Okay, mark the spot it went dead. I’ll get someone out there to search the ground, see if we can find it. In the meantime, I’m going back to Damian. If anything’s happened to Casey, he’ll—”
“If anything’s happened to her, I will make it my personal ambition to destroy their virtual life,” Lilia snarled. “I will wreak such havoc on their credit history, on any financial or social interaction they have, that they’ll be reduced to living off the grid, in their car. If they’re lucky.”
Nick agreed with the sentiment. But he had ways of destroying an enemy that were far less virtual. And if they’d hurt Casey . . . well, she was his, and he would never again be forced to stand by while his people suffered. After a lifetime of rejecting everything his empire-building father stood for, he’d finally embraced what was very possibly the most important lesson his father had forced upon him: when attacked, you hit back ten times as hard and a thousand times more painfully. And Nick had had millennia to devise ways of inflicting pain.
IT WAS THE SMOKE that brought Casey back to consciousness. She coughed hard, choking, her eyes burning as she struggled to remember where she was. Something crashed near her head, sending embers flying, some of them landing on her bare skin, but when she tried to brush them away, she realized she was tied, hand and foot. The knowledge jolted her awake. She looked around, automatically taking stock of her situation. It wasn’t good. She was in a basement with piles of junk all around, flammable junk, and dotted amongst the junk . . . dancing patches of smoky flame, growing bigger by the second.
Her mind froze for a moment, her thoughts nothing but white noise and fear. She was going to die. Tied to a chair, exhausted, too hurt to move, much less free herself, with the fire now burning hot enough that she could feel it on her bare skin. Her lungs were straining for air, short panting breaths that were making it difficult to think, and for some reason, her brain conjured up . . . Damian. Her own personal warrior god, who’d survived a thousand or more years trapped in a prison of stone, who’d held onto hope while buried for centuries in the utter darkness of a cave. If he could do that, then damn it, she could do this. She might die anyway, but at least she’d go down fighting.
She looked around with fresh determination, memory clearing her thoughts like a splash of ice-cold water. She remembered Sotiris’s pierced and tattooed henchman bragging about his piercings, telling her about some of the ones she couldn’t see, about how much it hurt when he was strung up by the steel loop in his dick, or the pins in his back, and how much he loved the pain.
“But you know what’s even better?” he asked, flashing a short, very sharp-looking knife in front of her eyes. “Cutting someone else,” he told her, the gleam of insanity so obvious in his eyes that she wondered how Sotiris had managed to contain him. He placed the flat of the blade just under her eye and scraped downward, not hurting her, not drawing blood. Not yet. But the point of the knife was so close to her eye that she could see it reflecting the orange and red. . . . Wait. Orange and red? She didn’t dare turn her head, but she slid her gaze sideways and saw the first licks of flame among the boxes.
Her pierced friend followed her gaze, then straightened with a curse. “God damn it, you
fucking pyro. I told you to wait.”
A second man appeared on Casey’s other side, a classic Zippo lighter in one hand, and a wild look in his eyes that made the pierced asshole seem sane. Where did Sotiris find these guys? He giggled. “It’ll burn slow.”
“No, it won’t, you fucking moron. Damn it.” He spun away, staring around him at the tinder-dry boxes, the old wooden furniture. “Shit. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“What about her?” the pyro thug asked, trailing the still-warm Zippo over her cheek.
“What about her, fuckwad? You wanna stay and fuck her while she burns, have at it. But I’m leaving.”
Pyro’s breathing increased, as if he was excited by the possibility. Casey swallowed hard. She didn’t know what would be worse—dying in a fire, or having this creep rape her. Wait, yes, she did. The smoke would get her before the fire ever did, so she voted for fire over rape. Definitely.
“I’d love to stay,” Pyro hissed in her ear, “but the master has such wonderful things planned. So much destruction.” He licked her cheek, and then, laughing, flicked the Zippo open and tossed the open flame onto something she couldn’t see, before shoving her chair over and slamming her head onto the hard floor one more time.
She’d lost consciousness then. She remembered that much. The blow to her head had been one too many. But, as grateful as she was to be alone and awake, her future looked pretty damn bleak. She couldn’t make out much from her position on the floor, but she could see that the wooden stairs and bannister leading out of the basement were dotted with flame, almost like a deliberate pattern. Pyro’s work, no doubt. But what worried her was the knowledge that he had to have used an accelerant for the pattern. And if there was more of that scattered around, the whole basement could explode into flames at any minute.
It would have been easy to simply lie there and go to sleep at that point. To accept the inevitable and let the smoke do the rest. But fuck that. She wasn’t going to die for her enemies’ convenience. She took stock of her situation.
She was still lying on her side and tied to a damn chair. Her lungs were burning, but at least the air was a little better down on the floor. She tested the ropes holding her and knew she’d never break them. Everything else in this basement was junk, but the ropes were new. On the other hand, the chair was part of the junk. It wobbled loosely when she moved and the seat under her ass, when she’d been upright, had been falling apart.
Twisting her head around, she focused on a stack of more solid-looking, wooden boxes and started scooting backward in that direction, thinking she could smash the chair—and herself, but, hey, no one said it was a perfect plan—against the boxes until something broke. Preferably the chair, not her bones. But once she started moving, she realized two things: one, it was damn difficult to move tied up the way she was, plus it hurt, and two, when she’d hit the floor that last time, the impact had actually cracked the wood under her left arm, weakening its connection to the chair. She pulled hard and it broke away completely.
Score! she thought to herself. Moving was easier now that she had greater flexibility in at least one arm, and she managed to drag herself over to the outer wall, with its row of three, high-up windows. Only one of those was uncovered, and that was only because someone had ripped away the tattered black cloth that had been nailed over it. She’d have to reach the window, break it, and then climb to the outside, and all with a chair tied to her ass.
“Damn it,” she muttered, trying not to think about the fact that the smoke was getting thicker, the fire hotter. She searched the junk closest to the window, looking for something she could use, something within reach, and found an old length of galvanized pipe. Wielding it awkwardly with her left hand, she smashed the wood holding her right arm until she had both arms free. She still couldn’t reach her legs, since they were tied to the back legs of the chair, which meant she could only stand in a hunched-over position as she began crawling over the junk below the window, dragging herself upward, inching closer to the uncovered window.
Behind her, the fire was spreading, with a thick smoke now blanketing the ceiling, making it harder to breathe the higher she climbed. She heard a distant siren that might be the fire department coming, but she wouldn’t last that long.
Gripping the pipe in one hand, she crawled ever higher, surprised to discover a workbench of some kind just below the window. When she managed to clamber up onto it, it gave her a solid surface from which to swing the pipe. The glass shattered with a satisfying crack, but behind her, the fire made a whooshing sound as the cold air rushed in from outside to feed the flames. She didn’t turn to look, didn’t need to see. She could feel the heat growing against her back as she broke out the remaining glass in the window frame and saw her next problem. She could wiggle her way out that window, but the damn chair wasn’t going to fit. She screamed in frustration.
DAMIAN SMASHED through the locked front door of the house and found the back of the small structure almost fully engulfed. He turned for the hallway and the two bedrooms, tearing them apart as he searched for Cassandra, convinced she was alive and in this house somewhere. Nico had his expensive car and his technology, but Damian had his gut. And it was telling him she was here.
Feeling sick at all the possibilities of what could happen, he raced out of the last bedroom and into the hallway, terrified that they’d left her in the kitchen at the heart of the fire. But on the way, he caught sight of an ordinary wooden door. He touched it in passing and slammed to a halt. It was hot, so hot that it wouldn’t last much longer. There had to be a basement behind it—the heat was too intense for anything smaller, and the layout of the house permitted nothing else. Once again, his gut spoke, telling him Cassandra was down there in the heart of that fire. He took a step back and kicked open the door, flying back on his ass when flames erupted from the opening.
“Cassandra!” he called, his voice drowned by the steady rumble of the flames. He turned and raced from the house. He was fearless, not stupid. He’d never make it down those stairs through the fire, but there had to be another way into the lower level. He tore around to the back of the house, sucking in great lungsful of air as he went. If it was this bad for him after just a few minutes in that house, he could only imagine what it must be like for Cassandra. Was she conscious, injured, or even bound? Was she watching the flames come closer, her lungs filling with smoke, killing her slowly with every breath?
He rounded the building to the sound of shattering glass, followed by a woman’s angry scream.
“Cassandra!” he roared and drew his blade. “Stay back!”
“There’s no fucking room!” she shouted, and despite the anger, despite the hoarse growl in her voice, it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.
He dropped to his knees and saw she was right. His blade was preternaturally sharp, but he could as easily cut her as the wall, which was his target. Thinking quickly—which was, after all, what he did best—he ripped off his leather jacket and wrapped it around the blade to shorten it to a workable length. The edge would cut through the leather and then his hand soon enough, but he wouldn’t need much time, and he would heal.
Using the blade like a long knife, he sliced through the old stucco and wood wall, until the opening was big enough that he could reach through and drag her out, cursing when her body got hung up on even the larger opening.
“I’m tied to this damn chair,” she croaked, choking out a sobbing laugh.
“Hold on to me,” he ordered, sheathing his blade. Her arms came around his neck, and he reached behind her to break away the remnants of a wooden chair, until finally, he could pull her all the way through the window and into the fresh air. Picking her up in his arms, he carried her to the far back end of the big yard next to a tall chain-link fence. It might have been safer to head for the street, but they were away from the burning house here, and the smoke was blowing i
n the opposite direction. Besides, he didn’t know the situation on the street yet, didn’t know if Sotiris had more men about, or if the human authorities would accost him the moment he appeared with Cassandra in his arms.
She clung to him for only a moment when he stopped at the fence and put her on her feet, coughing so viciously that he worried she couldn’t stop. But eventually, she managed several deep breaths, and her fingers loosened their grip on his arm. And then, avoiding his eyes, she stepped back and asked, “Do you have a knife?”
“Cassandra,” he murmured, frustrated and angry at the events that were tearing them apart.
“I need a knife, Damian.”
“I’ll do it, damn it.” Gritting his teeth, he pulled the blade from his belt and cut through the remaining bindings on her arms, then reached for her wrist, which was swollen and bloody, still wrapped in lengths of rope. “Let me—” he started to say, but she snatched her arm away.
“I’ll do it,” she insisted, her hand trembling as she reached for the knife.
“Stop it,” he said impatiently. “You’ll cut yourself and only make it worse. Let me help you, damn it.”
She pursed her lips angrily, but nodded and held out both wrists. Damian took one of her hands and carefully slid the sharp blade beneath the ropes. She hissed in pain when the back of the blade touched her raw skin, but he held her steady and sliced through the rope with a single move. Taking her other wrist, he did the same, then put a hand on her hip. “Hold still.”
She stiffened beneath his touch, but he did what needed to be done, quickly removing the remains of the chair and the ropes from her legs. “We need to treat those rope burns. They’ll fester.”
“I’m aware of that,” she snapped. She drew a calming breath through her nose, but then destroyed the image with another bout of coughing. Panting, breathless, she said, “We should leave before the authorities get here—”
The Stone Warriors: Damian Page 30