Wild Angels: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (Lilith and her Harem Book 1)

by May Dawson

  Levi was up. He wrenched the sword out of the fallen body. He limped towards us as fast as he could. Together, the four of us ran into the woods, leaving a trail of blood and fire.

  Chapter 22

  We ran hard through the woods. I felt the brambles and vines yank at my legs, but I just tripped and kept going. In my peripheral vision, I could see the guys and I could hear all of us breathing, our breathing loud and rough as we ran around trees and under the faint moonlight at breakneck speed. There was no breath to talk. There was nothing to say.

  Even flaming swords aren’t much of a weapon against a machine gun.

  Above us, I heard the sound of the helicopter engines. A beam of light swept through the trees, making me squint as my night vision disappeared, but I wasn’t sure if they could see us through the thick canopy of trees overhead.

  And then, one moment of luck. The sound faded away as the helicopter peeled off to the left. And suddenly, the three of us were back around the truck. Without hesitating, Ryker ran off to drag the brush out of our way back to the road; Jacob threw himself into the driver’s side, turning the key in the ignition, and Levi and I hustled into the backseat.

  Ryker threw open the passenger door, and as soon as his foot was on the running board and he was ducking in, he said, “Go, go.”

  The door slammed shut behind him as Jacob peeled out fast towards the road. The car thunked over the underbrush, clipped a sapling that sprang back against the windshield, and then we were out on open concrete. I grabbed for my seatbelt and yanked it across my chest as the ride suddenly smoothed out. Jacob shifted gears, pushing the car as fast as it would go, as we raced back down the highway.

  “Well, that was a clusterfuck if I ever I saw one,” Ryker said, his tone surprisingly light for a guy who was bleeding from the shoulder. “Jesus.” He pressed his hand against the wound, then winced as he pulled his shirt away.

  “You okay?” Levi asked, his voice low and rough.

  “Yeah,” Ryker said. “Just clipped me. How about you?”

  Levi said, “I’m fine. Took a pretty sharp blow to the head. Maybe a small concussion. But you know, head wounds don’t bother hunters much.”

  “Not a lot going on up there,” Ryker said.

  “It makes me feel better when you guys joke.” I said. I tried to figure out where to put my sword, and I finally set it down on the fabric floor, careful not to step on the blade. I unbuckled the sheath and let it slide off my shoulders. I felt suddenly light, and I realized what a weight it was to carry a sword. In so many ways.

  “I mean, that was a bad day,” Ryker said. “But we’re all here. Alive. I was just barely shot. I’m calling it a win overall.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Jacob said crisply. He nodded at Ryker. “Buckle up. Safety matters.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Ryker said, pulling his seatbelt out. He buckled himself in. I saw Levi reach across, wincing, and do the same.

  “There’s a distinct possibility that helicopter is looking for us on the open roads, and there aren’t many ways in,” Jacob said. “We’ve got to expect another battle on our way out.”

  “He’s not an optimist,” Ryker told me.

  “Someone has to be the realist trapped with all you idiots,” Jacob said, without rancor. I saw troubled golden eyes flicker to the rearview mirror, checking on Levi, no matter how harsh he was with his words. He glanced over at Ryker, and there was a faint twitch in his cheek, some suppressed emotion. “Could you stop bleeding on the seats? That’s real leather.”

  “Nope,” Ryker said. His hand was pressing over the wound again, and he leaned back, looking up at the tan fabric ceiling of the Rover. “I’m going to grind this blood into your seats. It’s going to look like a murder scene. What do you care? You stole it anyway.”

  “I worked hard to steal it,” Jacob muttered. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  A few times I thought I heard the phantom sound of distant helicopter blades, but it always faded away.

  We made it from the country road onto the highway, and Jacob settled down to 90 MPH, trying to blend in with traffic while still beating tracks home.

  I let my head fall against the cool glass of the window. I felt exhausted. The adrenaline that had kept me going now just made my legs feel restless and aching; I wanted to curl up and go to sleep. But I also couldn’t quite slow the frenetic beating of my heart, an anxiousness that wouldn’t pass. I couldn’t stop thinking about the awful things I’d seen tonight. The spray of blood. The sight of Levi with a gun barrel pressed to his temple, the flash of fear in his eyes no matter how brave and stoic his face was. Ryker, going down with a bullet in his shoulder. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to make my breathing calm, because I felt like I was going into a panic.

  “Hey,” Levi said, his fingers brushing over mine. I took his hand in mine, grateful for the sense of warmth and peace that always flowed between our bodies. Ryker glanced over his shoulder, and then he groaned slightly as he eased in his seat, before he reached his arm back over the seatback to offer me his hand.

  I took Ryker’s hand, briefly resting my forehead against the black, mysterious run tattoos that ran up his exposed wrist where his long-sleeved t-shirt sleeves had been pushed up. As always, I felt a spark of excitement and courage when I touched Ryker; with him near me, I could imagine myself as the girl who could come to savor a fight, to love the rush of adrenaline. The girl who ran towards danger and not away, with a sword in her hand and bravery in her heart. The girl who could walk into the Far and save her sister and anyone else who needed saving.

  I raised my head, wondering why that had all flickered through my mind as I touched Ryker’s wrist. I squeezed his hand in mine and let go. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Touching you never hurts, Ellie,” he said, his voice low and husky. “Even when it does.”

  It began to rain, fat drops splattering against the window. The tires hummed over the wet concrete, carrying us home. Beaten. Tired. But still together.

  We were an hour into our journey when I saw Jacob glance into the rearview mirror. The way his eyes cut away was sharp, and I could sense his restless tension as his hands shifted on the steering wheel. The car sped up, weaving in and out of the few cars left on the road.

  I sat up, the last of my sleepiness falling away. “Jacob?”

  “Shh,” he said. “I don’t like it when you talk at the best of times. Don’t distract me.”

  I reached out to gently shake Levi. He startled awake at my touch on his shoulder. Ryker was already sitting up, running his hand through his short dark-blond hair. “What’ve we got?”

  “I think we’ve got a tail.” Jacob swore. “We can’t lead them back towards the house.”

  “Get us on a quiet road.” Ryker pulled out his cell phone, looking for a route. “Somewhere civilians can’t get in the middle.”

  That was the opposite of my natural reaction to someone following me—always stay in public—but I was in a new world now. The car rose over a sharp hill and I felt it sail briefly into the air, my body rising weightless against the seatbelt, before the car slammed back to earth.

  I was driving. Ash twisted in her seat, one hand braced against the dash; the terror on her face didn’t fit with her glittery prom-queen tiara, pinned into her auburn curls, when she looked at me. She parted her lips to say something.

  I gasped. But the flash of memory was gone.

  I did remember, though, trying on those tiaras with my sister in Claire’s, months before the prom. “The actual prom queens might be mad we’re crowning ourselves,” I had joked. She was frowning, trying to get the comb in the crown to grip in my always-slippery, fine hair, but that had made her smile slightly, her chin rising. “We’ve got to crown ourselves. No one else will ever recognize we’re royalty.”

  “There they are,” Ryker said. He opened the glove compartment, and I saw the glint of a gun in his hand. “Wish I could get to the rifles.”

  “You’re not goi
ng anywhere with that shoulder,” Jacob said. He swore. “I should’ve made you drive. I was worried you’d be a worse driver than usual, losing blood.”

  Ryker turned, wincing, and it was obvious that Jacob was right; it was going to be hard for Ryker to take aim when he only had one good arm.

  “Give it to me,” Levi said, reaching for the gun. “Told you that you needed us along.”

  Jacob snorted. Ryker opened the sunroof in the car, and cool night air rushed in, the buzz of road noise distracting when I was already on edge.

  “Hold,” Jacob said. “What’s off this exit?”

  Ryker rapidly flicked along the route he had pulled up on his cell. “Looks like some quiet country roads that parallel the highway. We can rejoin the highway in about eight miles, once we take care of them.”

  “Great,” Jacob said. “Let’s go meet some new friends.”

  He jerked the wheel, quickly cutting across the highway, and we took the exit so quickly that I swayed hard against the seatbelt, my head jolting against the glass.

  “Jesus,” Ryker said, “Try to wait to make the airbags deploy until we need them.”

  At the last minute, a black pick-up truck behind us accelerated hard, jerking to the right too, and they fishtailed around the exit right behind us.

  “There they are,” Jacob said. His hands tightened on the wheel. “Get ready.”

  Levi released his seatbelt. His broad-shouldered frame elbowed his way up to stand, his legs braced on the seat beside me; I took in his lean, denim-covered legs and the way his t-shirt had ridden up to expose his chiseled six-pack of abs as he braced himself in the sunroof. I leaned forward, touching his thigh tentatively. “Tell me if you need anything.”

  He smiled quickly at me. “Thanks, sweet girl.” Then he pushed his head out, leaning back with his back braced against the opening, those powerful arms braced in a triangle, holding the gun as steady as he could from a speeding car on a curvy country road.

  He squeezed off two shots in quick succession. The sound was muted over the rush of road noise, the car going over a hundred miles an hour now.

  “Stay low,” Ryker warned me, but I couldn’t resist looking out over the top of the seats. Another shot went off. Levi’s shoulders pushed back against the kickback. I watched the windshield of the pickup truck explode into thousands of cracks.

  “He got them,” I said.

  “No return fire,” Ryker said, almost to himself, as if he were trying to make sense of what was happening.

  “They’re after Ellis,” Jacob said.

  “That’s getting old,” I said.

  “Yeah, I don’t get it either.” Jacob muttered.

  The pickup truck crashed into our trunk, bumping us forward, and Levi dropped back into the car in a hurry.

  “This is as fast as this thing goes,” Jacob promised.

  “Next time steal something with a V-8, would you?” Ryker asked. “They’re trying to get broadside. Don’t let them get around us.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “I’ll go back up,” Levi said, his hand braced in the sunroof still, but Ryker shook his head.

  “Too dangerous. Belt in—if they bump us again, I don’t want to lose you.”

  I was still watching as the passenger in the truck behind us shattered their windshield with an axe so that the thousands of cracks fell away.

  Jacob took a bend in the road so hard that my head banged into the window again. Levi swayed against me before he managed to get his seatbelt on. He reached out to grip my shoulder, his eyes on mine worried. “You okay?”

  “You’re the one who’s all wounded,” I said, touching his cheek; the frenetic beating of my heart slowed just a little, touching him. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”

  “Don’t waste your worries on me. I’m tough.”

  “So am I,” I promised him.

  “I don’t doubt it, sweet girl.”

  The pickup truck made a mad dash around us. Levi pulled away from me, cranking down the window to try to take a shot at them as they passed. I saw a grinning face in the passenger side window as the truck pulled even with us, and then the roar of the gun going off deafened me, and I didn’t see that grinning face anymore; they must have ducked low. Levi squeezed off a second shot, but the truck was accelerating, getting around us now.

  “You got to turn this thing around,” Ryker said urgently.

  Jacob was slamming on the brakes, downshifting. I felt us start to turn, but we were still going too fast, and we slid sideways across the road for a second.

  The truck in front of us slammed on their brakes. Our car slammed into the bed of the pickup truck.

  I felt the car start to roll, yawing helplessly out of control, and I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out. All I could do was gasp as the air left my lungs. The world was a blur.

  I hadn’t screamed as the car rolled. Ash’s skirt rose in a billow of blue satin. For a second, time hung. The car was upside down.

  And then time moved again, and everything crashed down.

  Chapter 23

  I ran into the woods, chasing after Ash. Her skirt was a flicker in front of me, always lost amongst the shadows of the trees just seconds before I reached her. Once I felt satin swish through my fingers. I tried to call to her, but she couldn’t hear me. Or wouldn’t hear me.

  And then we emerged into a clearing, where the moonlight fell across our faces, and she turned.

  Her lips moved to say Ellie, her expression fond, even though I couldn’t hear her.

  I couldn’t hear anything. It was like I was deaf.

  And then Ash fell away, her form dissolving, whispering away in the wind like so much smoke. I cried out, but I couldn’t hear my own desperate voice anyway. It was like something here was sucking the sound away.

  I fell out of the dream world into a second clearing, and the moonlight was on my face, and I lay on my back looking up at the lacy edges of the trees dancing and the narrow sliver of the moon. I could hear peepers and crickets in the woods, making their small, musical sounds, and the rustle of the leaves in the trees. I could smell the faint scent of decaying leaves. I bit down on my lip, afraid to speak, afraid I still wouldn’t hear my own voice.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  It was a man’s voice, and I jerked upright. It felt like my head would split in two, and I grabbed my forehead, trying to push away the blinding pain. Through the desperate pounding of blood in my head, a constant rush that buzzed in my ears now, I said, “That usually means there’s damned good reason to be afraid.”

  “There’s no reason to be afraid of me. Your sister brought you here so we could talk. Just talk. That’s all.”

  I rubbed the heel of my hand against my head, still trying to hold it together, and squinted at the man who squatted down across from me now. He was handsome, older, wearing a suit that didn’t quite square with the woods around us. His dark eyes seemed kind.

  It took me a second to connect him with the man I’d seen on the computer monitors. “Mr. Joseph.”

  “You can just call me Andrew,” he said. “Hello, Ellis.”

  He was so near me, his eyes steady on mine. He smiled confidently and extended his hand for me to shake.

  I slammed my aching head forward, banging my forehead into his nose. He fell back, making a small sound of shock, and sprawled across the slick leaves.

  My head exploded with new pain, so bad that my vision went black for a second. I scrambled to my feet, despite how it made my head pound, despite being blind. I had to get back to the guys.

  “Ryker!” I screamed, taking a few desperate steps forward, my hands in front of me. I blinked frantically. My vision was wet and blurry after the shock of slamming my head into his. “Levi! I’m here!”

  “Ellis,” his voice was a rasp. “You can run, but I’ll still have your sister.”

  I turned back. “What do you mean, you have my sister?”

  “You think your sister deserves
to be trapped in the Far?” He seemed self-satisfied, and when I looked back at him, my vision finally clearing enough to see his face, his eyes didn’t seem so kind anymore. “You two are connected. But she would pass into Heaven if it weren’t for the way I bound her. Before the accident. Before she was killed. Part of her soul is in my little box, and only you can free her.”

  I felt desperate to know what he knew, and that desperation made me furious, knowing that anything he told me might well be a lie; I needed answers about how I could save my sister from the Far, but I couldn’t trust that anything he said would bring me closer to the truth. I almost could just walk away from him. Almost.

  “Ellis, you can bring her back to life.” He spoke with low, fervent tones, like a preacher. “Don’t be angry. I just want my wife back, my child. You can walk into the Far. You can bring them back. All three of them. I see now I made a mistake trying to trap you.”

  “You sure did,” I said.

  “You’ll need me to bring your sister back,” he said. “I have the technology to bring her heart back to beating life.”

  “You want to make Ash into a zombie?” I repeated, my voice flat. “I’ve seen this movie before. I’m not helping you.”

  He held a photo out to me. I stretched my arm out to take it cautiously, unwilling to come into range of an attack. But he seemed almost timid in his own way. He shook the photo at me, and I took one slick edge between my fingers before I took a step away, getting enough space to look at it.

  My sister’s pale face, her dark hair pulled back away from her face in a tight braid. She was almost unrecognizable, her face thinner than I’d ever seen her, her cheeks hollowed. But I did recognize her. Tubes ran into her nose, and her lips were chapped, parted slightly.

  “She wasn’t cremated,” he said. “We have her body. She died that day, but we restored her. We’ve done what we can. Now only you can bring her back.”