by RS Black
He grabbed my arms, his calloused thumbs so gentle.
“I do believe you, little demon. I always have.”
“I love you.” I breathed the words, feeling as though it were vital, as though my life depended on me saying it. “You know that right? No matter what.”
He still didn’t know about the machine, still didn’t know what I had planned, and if it all went wrong, if I didn’t return from this, I wanted him to know that right to the bloody, bitter end, I was his.
His head cocked and something that looked a lot like fear passed through his eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”
I smiled, feeling sure in my motives, sure in what I had to do. He would try to stop me, and I just couldn’t let him.
Rising up on tiptoe, I kissed his lips, throwing all my hunger, all my adoration, and all my love into it. Wanting him to feel my soul.
His kiss was rough, hard, almost punishing, but laced beneath it I felt his undying love for me.
My anchor, my strength, my Ash.
“‘Strong walls shake,’” I whispered.
His voice was gruff as he said, “‘But they never collapse.’”
Hugging him hard, I nodded. “Let’s go kick some Triad ass.”
Chapter 24
Asher
Pandora had been a woman possessed. It’d been all I could do to convince her to slow down just long enough to bring the entire family along.
But she’d shaken her head, adamant that the group must remain small. Because there was a secret entrance, a way inside she’d learned while imprisoned, and a large group would compromise us all.
My gut was screaming at me that this was wrong, that it was impossible after months of not knowing for her to suddenly wake up and remember it all as clear as crystal.
But what did I know of brain trauma?
Not much.
I trusted Pandora with all my soul. So against my better judgment, I’d finally gotten her to agree to bringing along only one of each of the major deadly sins.
I was still worried that she’d not had the opportunity to fully grasp and learn how to work Pride, Wrath, and Greed, but she’d sworn up and down she wouldn’t need them.
Five hours later, Cash, myself, Bubba, Greta, Vyxyn, Kane, Keltse, and even Luc—because he’d given me no option in the matter—circled around Pandora as we made our way through dense underbrush deep in the heart of the Ozark mountains.
Morning was just visible above the horizon when we finally broke through a thicket of trees and scrub. A giant gray structure stood like a sentinel about three hundred yards down the hill in front of us. It looked like an abandoned mill. All the windows were darkened, save for one that glowed like a beacon in the predawn light. Somewhere an owl hooted, and crickets began to chirp themselves awake.
I glanced at her.
Pandora was gazing at the structure with eyes as big as saucers and hugging her arms to herself. I knew she wasn’t cold, dressed as she was in black leather from head to toe. But she was terrified. I could read it in the fine tremors that snapped and popped along her cheekbones.
Greta, a pale-skinned neph with unnaturally pale blue eyes and hair as dark as deepest shadow braided tightly to her head, wiped her palms down the front of her cinnamon-colored jeans.
“I don’t like this, Luc.” She turned to him.
Pandora hissed, bristling as though furious that Greta would speak to him like he was the leader of this operation.
She’d said nothing to me, but I knew something had happened that night with Sloth. Something he’d done to her. I glared hotly at him.
Luc wouldn’t look at either of us.
“What do you sense?” he asked Greta.
As a Wrath neph, she was probably the most skilled of fighters, able to turn anything, even a sheet of paper, into something lethal and deadly in her hands. I really wished Pandora could have had the opportunity to train with her.
Glancing at Pride, Greta shrugged. “Cash, do you feel it too?”
The red-haired neph nodded and then seemed to scent the air. Because the inherent nature of Pride meant he would suffer agonizing bouts of crippling fear if he were every wrong, Cash would never speak unless absolutely certain of his answer.
“Yes.” His deep voice echoed loudly through the eerily silent woods.
“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” Pandora snapped, knuckles turning white as she dug her nails into the branch in front of her.
Sighing, Greta pointed to Creatus. “It’s empty, Dora.”
“No.” Cash shook his head. “Not empty. There is life, but maybe only a soul or two. Nothing more.”
Keltse sidled up to Luc’s side. He draped a hand over her shoulder absentmindedly, but his eyes were for Pandora alone.
“Maybe we should go? Keep looking. We might be—”
Pandora turned to me. “I’m not wrong, Ash. I know this place. This is it.”
“But you said five—”
She swiped a hand through the air. “But it’s not yet been five months. I’m going in. Whether any of you follow or not, doesn’t matter to me.”
I gripped her by the elbow as she turned, feeling more furious with her now than I ever had before. “You will not go in there alone.”
“I have to do this,” she gritted out, but her eyes were tearing up. “I have to. I’ve come this far. There might be a clue, something, someway.”
Heaving a long-suffering sigh, Luc nodded. “She’s right, Asher. You know she’s right.”
Exposing her fangs at him, Pandora turned her back to him. That made me want to punch Luc in the face all over again. I was going to find out what that bastard had done to her.
Bubba finally spoke up, riffling fingers through his hair as he stared at the compound. “Cash, you sure about what you’re feeling?”
The golden-eyed neph clipped his head hard once. “One, two souls tops.”
Bubba cocked his head and shrugged at me. “Seems pretty straightforward to me, Priest. Dora’s right, we’ve come all the way out here. Let’s see what we can find inside.”
Vyxyn nodded her agreement too. “Might as well make this trip be somewhat worth the time spent.”
Maybe it was just me. Wrath, Envy, Greed, all of them, every last one of them, was looking at me like I was being overbearing and stupid. I didn’t trust any of the others, not really. They’d all lie, cheat, and steal to get what they needed or wanted.
But I saw the entreaty in Pandora’s eyes and felt the certainty in my heart that if I said no, really said no, she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t go.
And then she’d always wonder, always question what we’d missed.
I couldn’t do that to her.
I glowered at all of them. “Fine. Get in, get out. That’s it.”
Every step we took toward the compound made me shake my head, filled my blood with adrenaline. Gritting my teeth, I knew this was a trap.
Red lights dotted the overhang, winking in and out. As we walked across the lawns, I felt the eyes of cameras everywhere. Their electromagnetic pulse buzzed against my flesh like an angry hornets’ nest.
“Sheeyet.” Kane rubbed the fine hairs on his arms and whispered, “Do not be afraid, our fate cannot be taken from us. It is a gift.”
Vyxyn snickered, tossing Kane an evil grin. “Dante isn’t gonna save us from this trap, Greed.”
“Eyes and ears open, all of you,” Luc said, staring straight ahead at the steel door that stood wide open before us.
Pandora had stopped walking and now stood unmoving at the front of the pack. I cut a path through Kane, Bubba, and Luc, standing just to the side of her. A gentle breeze carried her scent to me. I grabbed her hand.
“Pandora, this is a trap. You know it. We enter here and—”
Her cold fingers brushed my jaw as her eyes silently pleaded for me to understand. “‘Strong walls,’ Ash. Look at us. We are mighty. Whatever they have in store behind these walls, we can handle it together.”
Then, without a backward glance, she walked through the door. I had no choice but to follow. The others padded in silently too.
Our footfalls echoed like gun cannon in my ears.
Creatus was nothing but an empty shell full of rooms. The halls were littered with papers, doors had been flung wide open, chairs had been tossed to the floor. Filing cabinets stood open and empty.
We broke off into groups, some going farther down the hall, others poking their heads through one room after another. I stuck with Pandora, kneeling when she did, gazing at the papers that’d been black inked and scattered haphazardly around us.
Picking up a stack of them, she gazed sightlessly.
“Ash.” Her voice quivered, and my heart broke.
I’d wanted her to find her answers, I did. But I was grateful that for now there was nothing here.
Pandora wasn’t yet strong enough. The nightmares of what’d been done here were still too fresh, too personal for her to be at the strength she needed to be to battle something as powerful as the Triad.
With an angry curse, she tossed the sheets aside and moved down the hall with purpose, kicking open any doors that weren’t already open, growling and muttering like a woman possessed when she was met with one empty room after another.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
We walked down the long hall until the rooms began to shift, no longer looking like offices, but more like prison cells. Heavy steel bars guarded empty rooms containing nothing but a cot and a toilet.
My fury mounted as I saw for myself the conditions they’d kept her in.
Blood stained the cement floors a dark brown in spots. Marks that looked like they’d been made by claws being dragged across them permanently gouged the floors. Pandora never looked right or left as she moved with purposeful strides to the cell all the way in the back.
Along the way, her family had joined us, each of them tossing one another worried, concerned frowns.
This had to be a trap. So where was it?
Pandora stopped in front of the final cell with a blank stare. I stood beside her, unable to rip my gaze away from the scratches on the floor, from the blood that’d been painted not only on the cement but also onto the walls.
She gripped the bars, and not knowing whether she planned to walk inside or not, I shook my head. “Don’t go in there, Pandora.”
Her look was dead, and I couldn’t help but flinch, feeling it like a visceral blow to my gut.
“They took everything.”
And no longer was it her and I and her family. Now it was just Pandora and me. Forgetting about everyone else but her, I turned her toward me.
“I know they did.”
“No!” She shoved me back, and the tears were streaming now. I didn’t fight her rage; I gazed at her calmly, accepting her emotions, knowing they weren’t for me.
“No, you don’t know. This was supposed to save me.”
“What are you talking about?” Luc retorted.
She pointed a finger at him, her entire body vibrated like a tuning fork as her face contorted with rage, but her eyes were still blue, still Pandora’s.
“You can just go to hell,” she snarled and then slammed her palm into the bars, rattling them so powerfully that the walls cracked. “Now I’ll never get better. It’ll never go away.”
“Dora, baby.” Bubba stepped forward, holding up his hands in a gesture of passivity. “We won’t stop looking. I vow it, girl.”
Wiping at her nose, she shook her head. “It won’t work like that. They left us nothing. Nothing to trace. Nothing to follow. There isn’t a damn thing in here that’s gonna help now. They took the machine, the only thing that could have sucked these demons out of me. It’s all fucking gone!” She kicked the bars, and this time the wall didn’t just crack, it groaned.
The halls echoed with the sounds of clapping hands. “Brava, Pandora. Brava.”
As one unit, the demons around me hissed, crouching into fighter’s stances as a thinly built, middle-aged man with glasses seemed to materialize as if from shadow behind her.
I was two steps from Pandora’s side. Just two steps. I should never have allowed that type of distance between us, should never have let up my guard for even an instant, because in the millisecond it took me to realize that, enormous bars dropped from the ceiling on either side of us.
They penned the demons and I in while keeping Pandora out, alone with the strange man.
“Pandora!” I screamed, rushing the bars, and then hissing the moment I touched them and dropping to my knees as the sensation of fire ripped up my arms. I should have seen the blood coating them, should have paid attention.
“Angel’s blood!” Luc and Bubba both cried as they too jumped back, clutching their hands to their chest.
Suddenly we were all huddling into the center, and Pandora was shaking her head, moaning long and low beneath her breath.
“Not you. Not you. You said I’d never see you again.”
“False memories.” He grinned as if letting her in on a secret. “Almost all of it. Aren’t I clever. Never saw this coming did you, nephilim?”
“Pandora!” I wheezed through the unbearable agony that still burned through me. I didn’t know who the man was, but she did, and I could see the terror building in her gaze.
All around me it was chaos as the nephilim imprisoned with me tried whatever they could to get out. Breathing through the agony of my scorched flesh, I shoved to my feet and gritted out, “I’m coming.”
The little man laughed. “Actually, you’re not. None of you are.”
I couldn’t sense a pulse of monster from him. In fact, when I scanned his body, he was nothing but a giant blank. Which meant he was more than a mere demon, or very, very human.
Which would be impossible, because a human couldn’t get the drop on us the way he had.
Pandora was shaking her head, taking miniscule steps back. Soon she’d brush against the cage.
“Pandora, stop! Don’t!” I cried, and then shoved her away through the bars just as she was about to fall back on them. The moment my arms brushed the painted steel I grunted, clenching my hands into fists and willing my mind to breathe through the agony.
She stumbled to her knees before him, and he glanced down at her with heavy lidded eyes and a softly smiling face.
“Miss me much?” He grabbed her chin, and I was going to kill him. I would end him, gut him, rip his heart out and feed it to the wolves.
“You leave her alone!” I roared, desperate to get to her.
Pandora wasn’t moving. She was only shaking, and moaning.
“Fight, Pandora! Fight him.”
Finally the bastard looked at me. “But she won’t. She can’t. See, she’s done exactly what I instructed her to do.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Luc grunted, and just like me he was on his knees, his hands bloodied, his breathing hard. “I saw you in her memories. Saw what you did, you fucking, no good—”
He rolled his eyes. “Ah, Luc. And to think we almost choose you.” He snorted. “My lovely Pandora.”
He patted her head, and through her whimper I could hear how much she didn’t want him to touch her. It killed me to see her so powerless; it was like watching her being raped right in front of me.
I spat. “You’ll fucking die, you prick.”
His smile was wide. “And she brought me a priest. One she swore she didn’t know. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.” He wagged a finger under her nose. “You all will do very, very well.”
“What are you talking about?” Pandora asked, but her words were nothing but a choked sound, as if speaking just that much was an effort of extreme will.
He placed a finger next to his jaw, tapping it thoughtfully. “I find myself in a most curious dilemma. Normally I wouldn’t talk to those about to meet their end. It creates attachments and all sorts of other issues when it comes time to kill. You know.” He shrugged, and the perversity of him, the way he continued to t
ouch her, it made me see red.
Made me hate him with extreme prejudice.
I clenched my jaw, and a whimper of sound rang out from behind me. It could have been Keltse, or Vyxyn. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.
“But this time, well”—he sucked in a breath—“this time I might just make an exception for you.” He smiled down at her. “Because you have been everything we dreamed you would be. So one time, Pandora, one time I will break my own rules. Ask whatever you want.”
“Who are you?” I spat.
His full bottom lip twitched. “What you actually mean to ask is what am I, right?” Smug arrogance glinted in the steel blue eyes. “Human. Completely. One hundred percent Homo sapien.”
Shaking my head, I said, “Impossible. I would have sensed you.”
“Actually, you wouldn’t have.”
My blood ran cold as I recognized that thick country twang. Dean stepped out from behind shadow, leaning a hip against the wall and giving me a hard, malevolent grin. “Guess I jumped sides again, Priest.”
“You traitor!”
His left brow twitched, as if this were funny, as if he hadn’t just dropped a bomb on me. “Y’all just do your thing. I’m only here for the bread.”
And then, closing his eyes, he smirked and looked for all the world as if Pandora’s life wasn’t collapsing down around our feet. Death had jumped ship, and my heart sank to my knees.
But Pandora seemed not to care about that revelation; her eyes were only for the man. “It’s you, isn’t it? The one Grace told me about. You’re the inside the Order.”
Pride glinted in his dark eyes when he looked at her. It made me sick, made me feel violent.
“Why?” she asked. “Why’d you betray them?”
He snorted. “Power. Why else? The chance at discovery. Do you know how long I’ve worked to create you, Pandora? You fought us like hell too. It’s probably why I’m just so damned proud right now.”
“You shouldn’t be.” I was relieved to finally hear the fire come back to her voice. She was still kneeling, but her body was bristling; she was regaining her power. “I don’t work for you.”
He frowned. “Are you sure about that?”
First one knee came up, then her hands shoved her off the ground, and I could sense the rolling shift of power.