Temptation by Fire

by Tiffany Allee

  …

  I couldn’t keep my mind off Ava. Was she okay? Had her story actually fooled the demons?

  My chest tightened. She’d better be fucking okay.

  The crunch of dried mud warned me of Franklin’s approach, and the sound echoed weirdly through the long tunnel. Between the near total lack of noise other than the sounds the Venators made, and the closed in feeling of the tunnel, the place made my hair stand on end.

  “Walker won’t even pick up her phone,” Franklin said.

  I clicked on the light, double checking my salt lines. The line was difficult as hell to see, since the color matched the floor beneath it. We couldn’t afford any mistakes.

  “Are you surprised?” Caleb asked as he inspected the other side, scanning the salt line there. “We got her cell leader taken.”

  “I got him taken,” I said. “I should have helped him with Thomas.”

  Surprisingly, Caleb didn’t take the bait. But he didn’t argue with my assessment, either.

  “No one can blame you for that,” Franklin said gruffly. “But that’s the kind of decision that separates cell leaders from the crowd. You gotta keep your emotions in check, and remember what’s important.”

  Like I needed reminding I wasn’t going to get the promotion to cell leader. I’d spent so much time setting up exorcising Thomas so I could get my own cell, only to end up with the entire plan falling like a house built of matchsticks. Because of Ava.

  Because I’d forgotten who I was: a killer.

  Not a fucking lover.

  Caleb snorted. “And what’s important, then? If not taking out the fuckers who dragged us into this bullshit life in the first place?”

  Huh. I hadn’t expected any kind of understanding from Caleb. The man wasn’t exactly friendly. But then, he hadn’t been raised in this life, either, as far as I knew. Something—some demon—had probably dragged him into it, too.

  “What’s important is the fight. Killing as many of them as you can. A person isn’t important, but people are. You both would do well to remember that,” Franklin said.

  Caleb didn’t respond to that, and neither did I. What was there to say? Franklin’s message was crystal clear. But I wouldn’t allow Franklin to drag Ava into this life for any longer than she had to be in it. Franklin wasn’t happy about it.

  Tough shit.

  I could barely breathe as it was, knowing that she was with Hugh and Thomas without backup. Knowing that if she didn’t convince them to come to this place, she was as good as lost. Knowing that no matter how this all turned out, she would be gone from my life for good soon.

  But fuck. Truth was, she’d had to go into the pit with the demons. Because they’d not only kill Miriam, but would find a way to capture Ava and torture her to use her powers. Her heading out of town for a few weeks would never work now. They’d track her across heaven and hell to capture her.

  She’d never be free.

  Franklin seemed to think she could get the demons down here. I had to trust in that, no matter how much I hated it. My only comfort was the fact that the demons had a hell of a reason to keep her alive. Her gift.

  And no matter what Franklin said about the value of the individual, Ava mattered. Too much.

  The strength I saw in her gave me confidence. Somehow, she’d convinced me that she might be able to pull this off. That she was tough enough to see it through to the end. And she’d promised we’d see each other again.

  I was holding her to that promise.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ice. I slept on a bed of ice. Shivering, I hugged myself, or tried to. I couldn’t move my arms.

  “Ava.”

  Hands clapped and Thomas’s handsome features suddenly took up the whole of my vision. Scrambling back with my feet, I scooted away from his face, from the wave of cold he sent down my body.

  “Are you all right?” He didn’t sound concerned with my answer. They didn’t need me to be all right, just conscious and talking.

  “I’m fine,” I muttered, resisting the urge to run my hands up and down my arms. I straightened up from the couch instead.

  “What did you see?”

  I shook my head to clear it. Karson. Miriam. Dammit. Hugh’s certainty that Miriam would save him had overpowered the pain he’d felt. But Miriam wouldn’t help them. My mind rebelled at even considering the thought that she would betray me. I scrambled to think. I needed time to sort through this. I needed to warn Karson, just in case.

  Because my visions always came true.

  Mistaking my head shake for a refusal, Hugh moved closer, sending my goose bumps into overdrive.

  “You will tell us what we want to know, Ava. It’s up to you what kind of condition you are in by the time we are done.” Moving so fast I didn’t have a chance to duck, he reached out and touched my cheek.

  I shivered. “Fine.” I stepped back from him and took a slow breath to calm myself. Were the sigils on my back still there? Were they working at all? I couldn’t be sure. “Just please, don’t hurt me. Promise you won’t hurt Miriam.”

  “Of course.” The grin reappeared, grotesque and evil, plastered on Hugh’s face like a Halloween mask.

  “Tell us what you saw,” Thomas demanded, from where he stood beside Hugh.

  I wiped a bit of saliva from under my bottom lip on my sleeve. Embarrassment heated my cheeks, making me irritated with myself. I didn’t care what these demons thought of me. Why would I care if they watched me spit on myself in the midst of an intense vision?

  “I saw you,” I said, nodding my chin toward Hugh. “You held something, a necklace. You were excited. Though to be honest, it was pretty ugly, so I’m not sure—”

  “What else did you see?” Thomas interrupted.

  I shrugged around the stiffness in my shoulders. “You were making me wear it,” I said finally, letting out a long breath of air with the admission. They were buying it. They seemed to be, anyway. Damn. The plan might work.

  “Anything else?” Hugh asked, the tremble in his voice belying his otherwise calm demeanor.

  “Miriam was there, too. And Thomas.” I gestured toward the man in front of me with my chin, and then frowned. “Weird.”

  “What?”

  “We were all wearing the same clothes that we are right now.”

  “Where?” Hugh asked, his keen interest showing through his attempt to play it cool.

  “A…a cavern. But not natural. Concrete walls.”

  “Like a subway tunnel?” Thomas asked.

  “No. The space wasn’t big enough for that. And it was really dark.” I closed my eyes, loath to do so with demons around me, but I had to sell it. Give them just enough to think I’d seen the place in a vision, not in person. “There were tracks on the ground. Like for a train, but they were closer together than subway tracks.”

  I opened my eyes to see Thomas and Hugh sharing a look. A long moment passed where I got the creepy-crawly feeling again that they were talking to each other silently. Franklin said that his research had indicated Hugh would know of the place where we’d laid the trap. Franklin thought if I could get them this far into buying into the whole thing, they’d follow me the rest of the way. I hoped he was right.

  “I believe I know the place you speak of,” Hugh said finally. “But it is a large area. To narrow it down, we will require some of your blood.”

  Relief hit me—they were buying it, and faster than Karson had thought they would.

  Thomas shuffled around papers in an end table drawer, looking for something. Hugh pulled out a knife, and fear drowned the bit of relief I’d felt. Karson had warned me about this, but the idea of holding out my hand for Hugh to cut me with a short knife still made me want to run away and forget this whole thing.

  Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. I held out my hand.

  One sharp prick and blood dripped from the wound onto a map that Thomas produced. And if Hugh had cut me a little deeper than was strictly necessary…well, I wasn’t going
to dwell on that when I was already nervous enough to puke.

  “Picture the place you saw in the vision. Concentrate,” Hugh said.

  Eyes shut again, I concentrated on the deep hole in the ground. On the dirty walls and oppressive feeling of being under that much earth. The dark place that I knew would forever haunt my nightmares if I made it through the night.

  The place where we’d spent today setting our trap.

  “Ahh…good,” Hugh muttered after the incantation was complete. “I know a quick way in.”

  I glanced down just in time to see my blood coalescing over a spot on the map. The right spot, thank goodness. But watching my blood move, seemingly of its own volition, made my stomach knot. I looked away.

  Thomas drove us near the location my blood had specified. Hugh sat in the back seat with me, an amused expression on his face as he watched me try to scoot as far away from him as I could get in the small space.

  “You’re certain this is the place you saw in your vision?” Thomas asked, eyeing the dark alley doubtfully.

  “No idea,” I lied, putting as much exasperation in my voice as I could manage without sounding silly.

  “Below,” Hugh intoned, “is the place she described. We can enter through the basement of this building.”

  “Oh?” Thomas asked, doubtfully.

  “Freight tunnels were built far beneath the city in the early 1900s. They’re only sparsely used now by utility companies, except for the parts that have been expanded to be used with the subway line,” Hugh said.

  “Aren’t you the history buff,” I muttered.

  Hugh bared his teeth at me, a cruel facsimile of a smile, and his voice took on a singsong quality that made him infinitely more creepy. “I was here when they built it. Gone when they sealed it. And now I am back again to reveal it.”

  I suppressed a shiver. It made sense Franklin would choose this place then, if he knew Hugh’s history.

  It was risky, leading them underground. The idea of being trapped in that dark place with the demons made me nauseous with fear. If this didn’t work and we were down in those tunnels with the demons…well, I had a feeling it would be the kind of scene horror movies were made from. Even if they didn’t kill me because they wanted access to my powers, I had no doubt they’d kill everyone else. Or worse, leave the others alive to force me to help them whenever they wished.

  But Franklin hoped the location would lend credence to my claim. They might assume that the jewelry had been rediscovered and then hidden there by Venators long dead.

  “Can we get this over with already,” I asked, injecting a whine into my tone. “I want to get away from you crazy people.”

  “Of course. Once we get that necklace, you’ll be free to go,” he said.

  Yeah, right. Pictures of Karson raced through my mind, and I struggled to keep my calm façade in place. Hugh had been certain that he’d escape during the vision I’d just had, and he’d wanted nothing more than to kill Karson. Crap.

  Miriam wouldn’t betray us, wouldn’t betray me. I knew that, knew it down to my core, but my visions always played out exactly how I saw them in my head…unless I changed them with my actions.

  Thomas led the way, with Hugh behind me. Ensuring I wouldn’t run, no doubt.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “Miriam was here in the vision.”

  “So?” Thomas turned around to face me.

  “So if she isn’t here, we may not find it. My visions always happen exactly how I see them. Changing things might screw this up.”

  He just stared at me.

  “By not bringing her here, you may be preventing whatever takes place for you to find it.”

  “Bring her in,” Hugh said from behind me. “It’s not like two of them will be more difficult to handle than one.”

  Thomas stopped again, irritation plain on his face when he turned toward me this time. “Fine,” he said briskly. Then he pulled his cell phone out of his jacket and turned his body away from me, speaking in low tones.

  “Five minutes,” he said, snapping his phone shut.

  The air filled with enough tension to choke me as we stood in front of the dark alley and waited for Miriam to arrive. Relief rolled over me when the dark SUV rolled up next to us. But when the door opened and a man stepped out to open the passenger door, I tensed.

  Unlike the demons, no chill rolled off him when he pulled Miriam out of the car. But he had a collar tattoo, like Karson. Human, then. Maybe bonded somehow to one of the demons through blood.

  Miriam couldn’t stand right. Dried blood stuck to her face, around her hairline and nose. Someone had wiped her face, but it was done quickly, probably as they drove, and it did little to disguise the abuse she’d endured.

  Nose swollen and eyes puffy and bruised, Miriam looked like she was in worse shape than the picture had shown. I blinked back tears and reached out for my friend, pulling her away from the man who had hurt her.

  Miriam shook in my arms, and I touched her gingerly through my gloves, careful to keep my hand under her elbow. A horrible noise came from Miriam’s face as she breathed, wet and thick. A broken nose? Probably.

  My fingernails dug into the glove of my free hand. No matter what it took, the demons were going to die.

  “Let’s get in there,” Thomas said.

  “I didn’t see him in the vision,” I said, voice thick. I nodded to the man who’d brought Miriam.

  Hugh stared at me for a moment, then frowned and said, “Go home, Don.”

  The big man nodded and got into the SUV.

  No lights shone from the alley save a streetlamp near the entrance where we stood, but the heavy, rotten scent of old garbage emanated from it. Hugh waved at a door that I couldn’t even see. Darkness seeped from the alley, but Thomas strode with confidence to a small distance away. Finally, my eyes adjusted enough, helped by one of the runes Karson had drawn onto my skin, and I made out the slightly lighter shade of the door, just barely visible against the brick of the building.

  Thomas gripped the doorknob and twisted, then shoved his shoulder into the door. It ground open and, as we walked past the entryway, I saw that the lock had been shoved through the wood of the doorframe. I shivered and glanced at Miriam. My stomach crawled at the sight of my friend’s face and the thought of what Hugh had expected Miriam to do during the vision.

  “This way.” Hugh’s voice rang clearly in the dark, and closer to me than I would have liked. But I held my place. Moving too quickly with Miriam on my arm would knock her over.

  We shuffled through the near-total darkness. Miriam whimpered and I resisted the urge to squeeze her reassuringly—I’d probably just hurt her, because I doubted they’d only injured her face. I kicked something, stubbing my toe. I stifled a cry. If my nervous sweating hadn’t smudged the night vision symbol that Karson had drawn onto my back, then it wasn’t a very powerful rune. I pulled out my cell phone to light the way. Surprisingly, the demons didn’t tell me to put it away.

  I followed the demons down a narrow stairwell that led to a basement area, struggling to help Miriam and keep my light steady. Then the demons stopped abruptly. The bright light of my cell phone screen revealed a large set of elevator doors.

  “There are still elevators going down there?” I whispered, as if my voice might rouse something scary from the dark. Stupid. I was traveling with the scariest things out there.

  “Some areas are still used by utility companies,” Hugh replied, his voice booming far too loudly.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” Thomas said. He didn’t sound as confident as Hugh. If I had to guess, I’d almost say the demon was nervous.

  Freaking demon should be nervous.

  Hugh hit a small button that lit up. It didn’t have an arrow pointing down. There was only one direction this elevator went. Only one destination. Deep underground.

  The elevator doors opened with a quiet ding, and we piled in. Miriam gripped me tighter, and I wished, more than anythin
g, that I didn’t have to take her down into this dark hole after what she’d been through. But she was safer than up there with the man who served the demons, where she could be killed.

  Tense, I took great care not to touch the demons, even though it meant staying in the middle of the elevator and supporting Miriam’s increasingly unbalanced weight by myself.

  The doors opened, and for a moment panic gripped me. The dirty, concrete walls looked unfamiliar in my cell phone light. Forty feet below the surface, inside egg-shaped tunnels that were only seven and a half feet high and six feet wide, claustrophobia was immediate and fierce.

  Miriam murmured something indecipherable. I inhaled a long breath of damp earth that held a scant trace of other old smells, metallic and machine. I forced myself to scan the area in front of me as calmly as possible using my small light. My mind calmed when some of the features appeared familiar. That clump of long-dried mud. The old piece of equipment off to the side that looked like it had come out of an engine built before I was born. It was one of the four potential entry points that Franklin and Karson had shown me earlier in the day.

  “According to the blood, it should be just north of here,” Hugh said, heading down the right tunnel.

  Holding as much of Miriam’s weight as I could bear, I followed Thomas and Hugh slowly. The walls felt like they were closing around us, and sweat dampened my forehead and slid down my back, probably destroying what was left of my runes. I tried to control my panicked breathing, but I knew my fear was obvious. Maybe it would help.

  The demons moved farther into the cave to search for the spot I’d seen in my vision. I searched for the oddly shaped rock Karson had set out for me and tried to stay close to the demons, but not too close.

  There. The rock that I’d jokingly told Karson looked like a cloud. Five more paces would do it.

  “Should be somewhere around here,” Hugh said. Scrapes and shuffling echoed through the concrete cavern.