I nodded. That made sense; not everyone could scent the air the way I could. The weres and shifters definitely could, their animalistic side making it almost second nature to them.
“Grey is hurt and bleeding,” I said, cutting off as a low moan filtered back to us through the shrubs.
“I’m calling in backup,” Alex said, grabbing a radio from the loop on his jeans.
“You can’t, they’re not prepared for this thing,” I said, remembering the glow of its blue eyes as it had sucked the life from me. The human police wouldn’t stand a chance against it. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that even Division 6 was in over their heads with this one.
Ignoring me, Alex pressed the big black button on the side of the radio. It came to life with a staticky crackle.
“This is agent Alex Hayworth, calling in backup…” he said, moving away from me as he continued to give details of our location.
Another moan floated toward us, but this time, and without waiting for Alex, I started forward. Scrabbling up the embankment in front of us, I clawed my way to the top, digging the toes of my boots into the muddy ground as I used the roots of the fir trees as leverage to boost my body up to the top.
“Wait,” Alex said. I ignored him, sliding forward onto my belly as soon as I reached the top of the slope.
The caves were visible from here, the opening to the largest one sitting fifteen feet above my head in the side of the grey slate rock. The light slanted down onto the mouth of the cave, illuminating only the opening and little else beyond. The creature could hide out just inside the opening, and I wouldn’t see it until I was practically on top of it.
Shuffling forward, I pushed up onto my feet as the ground evened out beneath me.
The scent of Grey’s blood was stronger here, and it ignited panic inside me.
“Faith, get back here,” Alex said, using my surname as a kind of handle.
I didn’t look back at him, instead pushing out from between the trees as I headed toward the base of the slate rock and stared up at the open cave mouth. Grey was up there somewhere, he had to be.
Another groan floated down to me, and my heart rate picked up.
“Grey,” I said, sliding my hand against the rocks in search of a grip. “I’m coming, Grey, just hang on.” The first grip was easy to find, and I made quick progress, dragging myself up the sheer rock face toward the cave opening.
My hand closed around one tuft of grass that slid free of the rock face, sending shale and small stones skittering down the rocks. Digging my feet into the footholds I’d found, I sprang up, my hands closing over the lip of the cave entrance.
I swung there for a moment, gathering my strength for the final climb. Despite my strength, dragging my body up using only my hands wasn’t as easy as they liked to pretend in the movies, but I did it, rolling over the edge. Without wasting a moment, I hopped to my feet, then crouched low in the cave mouth as I stared into the inky darkness.
It was impossible to make out anything beyond the vaguest shapes of the rocks that seemed to fill the cave. Worse, there was no sign of Grey.
He hadn’t sounded far away… was it possible the cave had magnified his voice? Or had the creature dragged him further inside when I’d called out to him?
“Grey?” I called out into the darkness, and my voice bounced back, slamming into my face like an open-handed slap.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled to life. Something was wrong.
“Jenna!” Grey’s shout sent my heartbeat into a frenzied gallop, and I turned.
Grey was standing at the base of the rock face alongside Alex. My heart sank. I’d been tricked.
My niggling feeling of unease grew as something at the back of the cave rustled. I turned back to face the cave mouth once more, and the blue eyes of the creature appeared. The darkness I’d thought was just the cave’s lack of natural light coalesced into one mass, forming a hulking figure that sped toward me.
“Help!” it called out to me again, using Grey’s voice, and I knew it was mocking me.
Before I had a chance to get out of its way, the creature’s sharp talons raked down over the front of my body. I raised my arm to protect my face, and its claws sank into the flesh of my arm. Seizing its opportunity, the creature slammed into me, shoving me backwards out of the mouth of the cave.
My hands wind-milled uselessly in the air as I fought to regain my balance. I reached out to grab the creature; if I was going to fall, then at the very least I would take it with me if I couldn’t use its bulk to pull myself back up. But my hands slid pointlessly through the creature’s ethereal body, and my last chance to stop my fall slipped through my fingers.
Air whipped past me, and I hit the ground with enough force to knock the breath from my lungs. The rocks I landed on dug into my body, and I felt my ribs crack, pain lancing through me as the world went suddenly black.
Chapter 15
The sound of screaming brought me out of the darkness, ragged screams that cut through the cocoon of pain. As I fought to the surface of my consciousness, strong hands cradled me, and I became acutely aware that I was moving. Each forward stride jostled my already aching body.
A low moan escaped my lips, and I opened my eyes, staring up into Grey’s face. His eyes were ringed with dark circles and his cheeks were sunken. He looked half-starved, and his expression was more than a little crazed.
“What happened?” I asked as Grey glanced down at me, and I suddenly realised he was carrying me. We were moving fast through the trees, and I couldn’t help but marvel at how surefooted he was considering the terrain.
“Shifters,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. When he turned, I caught sight of the blood that covered his cheek and reached up to brush my fingers against the smear.
“It’s not mine,” he said, as though he could read my mind, and maybe he could.
“Shifters?” I repeated, my brain a confused mish-mash of memories. I shook my head and planted my hands against his chest. “That’s not possible,” I said. “Please put me down.”
Grey shook his head, and I could see fear reflected in his eyes.
“They’re everywhere, Jenn. We were overrun. I thought you were dead.”
Something was very wrong. He hadn’t called me Jenn in a very long time, and hearing him use the nickname he’d given me when things had been different between us hurt my heart. But that wasn’t all I felt.
Fear and panic clawed at me, but they weren’t my emotions, and I tried to push them back. My last memory was of the creature slamming into me, but as Grey spoke about the shifters the memories of their attack formed inside my head. The only problem? I was a complete stranger to the actions playing out like a movie inside my memory.
I didn’t remember fighting a man who shifted into a bear, his claws raking down over my arms as I raised them to defend my face from his blow. Glancing down at my arm, I noticed the bloody wounds under the sleeve of my jacket.
“Stop!” I demanded, and Grey paused. His eyes were a little too wide, and there was far too much white showing around the dark irises. I’d never seen him so frightened. He usually prided himself on hiding his emotions, bottling them up and making him almost impossible to read. It was one of the things that made him such an asset for Division 6.
“Alex? Where’s Alex?” I slid from Grey’s arms. My legs were unsteady as my booted feet hit the dirt, but at least they supported me.
“The shifters grabbed him…” Grey trailed off and glanced over his shoulder. When he turned to face me once more, he grabbed my arm and attempted to drag me across the uneven terrain. “They’re coming. We’ve got to get out of here.” His panic didn’t sound as intense as it had in the beginning; clearly whatever magic was working on him was starting to lessen.
“Grey.” I placed my hands on either side of his head and drew his face down toward mine. “There’s nothing there, the memory…” I paused. Trying to pull him out of whatever nightmare the creature had
trapped him in was a long shot. I could completely relate to how he was feeling. Even though part of me knew what I, too, was remembering wasn’t real, an even bigger part of me insisted it was all true. And with the memory came the panic that hung at the peripheries of my mind, threatening to overwhelm me.
“It’s not real,” I told him. “It’s in your head. It tricked us, and now it has Alex.”
I wasn’t sure how I knew the creature had Alex, but considering I couldn’t hear him crashing through the undergrowth alongside us, it seemed a safe bet.
Grey shook his head and tried to glance back over his shoulder again, but I held his face firm.
“Stop. Listen to me. It’s a trick. I don’t know how the creature has used your mind against you, Grey, but I know you can feel it.”
He stopped fighting me, but I could still see his doubt. “You’re sure about this,” he said. “Because I swear, Jenn, I know what I saw.”
“When have you ever run from a fight? When have a few shifters ever frightened you like this? That alone has to prove to you that this is bullshit,” I said, keeping my grip firm on his face.
I could feel the tension slowly seeping out of him as the doubt and fear in his eyes receded. But I knew the fear was still there, lurking, just like my own. It wouldn’t take much to tip him over the edge once more.
“We have to go back,” he said, sounding far more determined than he had just seconds before. “Oh Christ, Jenna, what have I done?” He turned to face me, and I instinctively knew what he was thinking.
He’d left one of his own behind. The creature had caused him to turn his back on his own partner. Yet something inside him had made him scoop me up and take me with him.
“We’ve both done this,” I said, remembering the way the creature had used Grey’s voice to lure me up to the mouth of the cave. I’d been convinced that he’d been there, hurt and at the beast’s mercy.
Squaring my shoulders, I released my hold on Grey. I didn’t move too far away, though, as I studied his expression, his every move. The last thing I wanted was for him to relapse under the creature’s control. If that happened a second time, I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to pull him back out.
Grey slid his jacket back and pulled a long, wickedly curved blade free of its sheath. It blended so well with his clothes that I hadn’t noticed it before. He’d obviously spelled the blade in order to conceal it, allowing him to carry something so lethal, so completely intimidating, without risk of inciting panic and fear in those around him. Whatever spell he’d used was pretty neat. Perhaps one day, if we got through all of this, he’d teach it to me.
The handle was black and ridged to give him a better grip, which also meant that any blood that happened to end up there wouldn’t cause the blade to slip as he used it. Grey caught me staring enviously at the knife and gave me a secretive smile.
“She’s a beaut, isn’t she?” He twisted it so the sharp edge caught the light.
“Does the groove not weaken it?”
“Nope,” he said, sliding his finger up through the groove. “Stops the blood from spilling down over the handle. Keeps everything so much neater.” He spoke of spilling blood like it was nothing at all, and his sudden callousness sent a shudder racing down my spine.
When I’d known him, he hadn’t been so cold, so quick to violence. What had happened to him in our years apart?
He pulled his hand away from the blade and met my eyes. “I hope you’re right about this,” he said as he turned and started back in the opposite direction.
“I am…” I whispered. But I really wish I wasn’t. I kept that last part to myself. Grey was already conflicted enough without having me add to the confusion. But I had a feeling that we were about to walk back into a scene that belonged in a nightmare, and I was almost certain that what we would discover would be more than either of us were willing to live with.
Chapter 16
I broke through the trees first. I was faster than Grey—my gorgon nature tended to give me the advantage in situations like this—but a niggling part of my brain said that Grey had deliberately hung back. I wasn’t entirely convinced that it had been a conscious decision on his behalf; it was more than likely the residual trauma the creature had left with him, slowing his progress.
I knew how that felt. The tiny voice in the back of my head that I so often relied on to keep me safe was currently screaming at me about how every step I took toward the cave mouth was the worst idea I’d ever had. All I wanted to do was turn around, tuck tail, and run as fast as my legs would carry me back to the original crime scene.
Instead, I clutched my karambit a little harder, allowing the handle to dig into my palm. At least the pain helped keep some of the panic at bay. I could thank the Goddess for small mercies where that was concerned.
The clearing was empty, the kind of stillness that tended to follow a massacre. Tilting my head back, I opened my senses and drew in a deep breath.
The scent of pain, despair, blood, and viscera slammed into me alongside pheromones like fear and panic. It was almost impossible to tell who the panic and fear belonged to. At least it had been, until Grey moved up beside me.
The salty tang of his skin tantalised my senses, and it took all of my strength not to turn and bury my face against his warm chest. Gripping my blade tighter, I tightened my shoulders and moved further into the clearing.
The scent of blood, fresh and fear-filled, hit my nose as soon as I reached the centre of the clearing. Crouching down near the ground, I found what I was looking for, and my heart sank.
“Whoever bled here—” I started to say, and then hesitated as I met Grey’s dark eyes.
“Spit it out,” he said, rage colouring his voice.
“I don’t think they could have survived,” I said finally. “There’s too much of it. It’s soaked into the ground.”
I could practically sense the blood beneath me as it continued to cool and soak into the dirt.
“I can feel it,” Grey said, his voice tight, and I knew it had taken great effort for him to even squeeze out the words.
“The blood?” I asked. Despite him telling me that his family had once practiced blood magic, that he had abandoned them to it and chosen a different path for himself, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask whether he missed it. But judging from the way he spoke, as though each word was dragged from somewhere down inside him, I had my answer.
“Yes.” Curt and clipped. I watched as he closed his eyes and dropped to his knees, his hands digging into the soil before he raised them and dragged them down his face.
When he opened his eyes once more, his gaze was wild, almost feral, and power whispered on the air. It slid over my skin, questing, searching for something only he knew to look for.
His face was bloodied and dirty, the black, fertile soil and red blood an intoxicating combination alongside his dark eyes and hair. I could almost imagine him raising his hands to the sky, spilling blood on his blade before he set his magic free.
“Grey,” I said, unsure whether I should disturb him. I’d never seen him like this. So utterly free.
His eyes met mine, and without thinking, I drew my blade up in front of me defensively.
The wild look in his eyes slipped away as though I’d slapped him, and he blinked, staring down at his bloody and dirty hands as though surprised to find himself on his knees in the middle of the clearing.
“What are you getting from the blood?” I asked, choosing to ignore his momentary lapse.
“Pain,” he said quietly. “Fear…” He shook his head and glanced back at me. “More like terror.”
I nodded. Everything we felt was the same.
“It’s Alex,” he said, pushing up onto his feet. “And you’re right, no one could survive losing this much blood.”
My heart sank. I didn’t want to be right. Alex had been a know-it-all irritation, but I definitely hadn’t wanted to see anything happen to him. In fact, quite the opposite. He was far too young and gre
en to be out in the field like this. If this was Division 6’s new game plan, they had lost their mind. Sending children out to kill monsters was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard of. It would only end in heartache.
Not that Division 6 would care. They would pretend, bitch and moan about how awful it was, and then they’d find another kid to feed to the creatures that went bump in the night.
As though he could sense the direction of my thoughts, Grey moved up next to me and bumped his shoulder against mine.
“This isn’t your fault, Jenna. This,” he said, spreading his arms wide, “this is all on me. If I hadn’t gone chasing after the thing, you two wouldn’t have had to come after me.”
“You were doing your job,” I said, keeping my eyes fastened on the churned-up leaves and dirt beneath my feet.
“I should have waited for backup,” he said.
“Why do you do that?” I asked, anger clawing its way up the back of my throat.
“What?”
“This,” I said, jabbing a finger toward him. “Always taking the blame for their mistakes. You know it was wrong for them to send someone like him out here, and yet you stand there and pretend that you’re somehow the cause of Division 6’s mistakes.”
“I’m not, I’m—”
“Don’t,” I said with a shake of my head. “I don’t want to hear any more excuses. Let’s just find him. It’s the least we can do after we left him to face the creature alone.”
I knew it was unfair. I knew my words were cruel and utterly uncalled for. Grey had been tricked, just as I had been when the creature had used his voice to lure me into a trap. We were both equally to blame. Alex had tried to stop me, and I’d ignored him.
It hit me then that Alex had called out to me, tried to stop me from going after the voice I’d assumed was Grey’s. Had he known what the creature was doing? It hadn’t occurred to me to ask what Alex was, or even if he had any particular abilities beyond the parsing of scents.
Grey stalked ahead of me, and I knew from the rigid set of his shoulders that my words had struck a nerve.
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