by Bethany Shaw
Noah frowned and stared at the house. She was right. The door was ajar and one of the flowerpots had been knocked over leaving dirt all over the porch steps.
“Stop here and stay in the car,” he told his sister.
Elena eased to a stop on the side of the road. Ethney threw her door open and ran to the house. Noah cursed under his breath and sprinted after her, the overwhelming urge to protect Ethney and find Claire flared up inside him.
Ethney was ahead of him and already up the steps. Thankfully, she didn’t go inside by herself. Who knew what was lurking inside, if anything.
She pressed her back to the door and peered in as best she could before nodding at him. He crept inside, scanning the front room and then motioning her in. She slipped inside behind him and he pointed for her to go to the right while he took the left. Ethney nodded and then crept through the house.
Noah blew out a breath and moved into the living room. The TV was still on; whatever game had been played was paused. One of the chairs was overturned and a smear of blood trailed from the couch to the opposite end of the room leading to the kitchen.
He followed the trail while keeping his ears open for other movement. The only thing he heard was the soft, barely noticeable footfalls of Ethney as she made her way upstairs.
The blood smear went into the kitchen where the sliding door was left wide open. He went outside and scanned the beach. Nothing. No one was in sight.
He ground his teeth and pumped his fists at his sides as he came back in. There were still a few more rooms to check, but he already knew they were empty. Claire and the others were long gone by now.
Still, he made his way into the last few rooms downstairs to confirm his suspicions. Footsteps thumped behind him, but he didn’t need to turn around to know who it was.
“The house is empty,” Ethney said from behind him.
Noah nodded and turned, his eyes fixated on the guardian. “Yeah. There’s blood in the front room.” He swallowed hard. “Whose is it? Claire’s? One of the other girls?” Bile crept up his throat at the thought of one of them being harmed.
“Aric. He must have put up a fight. His is the only blood here. The others are unharmed—physically.”
“How can you be sure?” Noah asked.
“The smell. I recognize the scent.”
“You think they’re alive?” he asked slowly. He hoped and prayed they were. If they weren’t there would be hell to pay.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation, “he’s building an army. Once the full moon comes, they’ll turn into mindless drones and follow his every command like the others. He just has to keep them prisoner a few more weeks.”
At least Claire was alive, but she was right back where she started. They had to find her and the other girls and help them.
Ethney dug out her phone and put it to her ear. “Daire, something’s happened to Aric. I need your help.” She paused for a brief moment and then prattled off the address and hung up. “He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Noah?” Elena frantically called from the front door.
“Crap,” he mumbled before pushing past Ethney and meeting his sister at the door.
“Is everything okay? Where’s Claire?” Elena asked, her eyes darting to Ethney when she appeared in the front room.
“The men I told you about took her,” Noah said trying to keep his voice calm. If he lost it so would Elena.
“Took her?” she asked. “What do you mean took her?”
“It’s fine. We’re going to get her back.” Ethney didn’t give Elena a chance to say anything before she went to the stairs and took them two at a time. She emerged a moment later with some of Noah’s clothes in her hand. Bypassing them, she made her way back through the kitchen and out to the beach.
“Noah, what is going on?” Elena shoved her way past him and further into the house. She gasped and slapped her hands over her mouth when she went into the living room. “Is that blood? Is Claire hurt?” Elena didn’t give him a chance to answer before she followed the trail the same way he had. She walked out onto the back porch and halted abruptly.
It only took Noah a second to find out why. A giant black dragon was landing on the beach. The waves lapped against its enormous feet and its wings hung in the water. They flapped a few more times before falling to the dragon’s side.
The dragon’s body contorted as the bones beneath the thick, rough skin popped and pulled until the beast shrank in size and disappeared completely, leaving a tall, muscular man in its place.
Noah blinked a few times, his mind fighting to process what just happened. It was one thing to know it was possible, but seeing it first hand was something else entirely.
“What in the world?” Elena asked. She took a few steps back and collided with him. She screamed and lost her balance, nearly falling over, but he caught her before she hit the ground.
Elena spun around and beat him on the chest. “What in the hell is going on, Noah?”
“We can’t stay here,” Ethney said as she came up the porch steps.
Elena spun back around and stared at Ethney and then to the man who transformed from a dragon who was now dressed in Noah’s clothes.
“Grab anything you need and we need to leave. Brockwell wants all three of us and if he finds out why Elena is here then he might kill her,” Ethney said. She walked past them and back into the house.
“What?” Elena whispered.
“No one’s going to hurt you, Miss,” Daire said taking a step toward her.
Elena backed up until she was standing on Noah’s feet. He wrapped his arms around her and said, “It’s okay.”
“Daire.” The guardian nodded at Noah.
“Noah Hawthorne. This is my sister, Elena.” He hugged his sister a little tighter as she began to tremble in her arms.
“Nice to meet you. Sorry you got involved in all this. And don’t mind Ethney, she’s just riled up about everything that’s going on.” His eyes darted to the door she disappeared into. “But she is right. We need to leave.”
Yes, they did. The sooner they left the better. “We have a car just outside.”
Daire inclined his head. “I’ll give you a minute.”
Noah waited until the dragon was safely inside the house before he turned his sister around to meet her eyes. Her skin was pale and her eyes were wide. He took her clammy hands into his. “I haven’t been lying to you. There’s a lot going on.”
“You never said anything about dr...dragons!” she said her voice hoarse. Her gaze snapped up to his. “That’s what he was, right? A dragon?”
“Yeah. We have to go with them, Elena. The man who took Claire might come back for us.”
“And he’ll kill me?” she whispered.
“He doesn’t want you to cure us, but I’m not going to let anything happen to you and neither are Ethney or Daire.”
He knew he couldn’t really speak for the guardians, but something told him the pair would protect Elena regardless of what happened to him. Elena was their best ticket to finding a cure and he got the sense the two were honor bound to protect the innocent.
“Come on,” Noah said taking his sister by the elbow. “We need to go.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He didn’t have an answer for her. The guardians must have somewhere else they could go, but he had no idea where that was. “Someplace safe,” he finally answered.
Elena closed her eyes and blew out a breath before nodding her head. Tears shimmered in her eyes, but she put one foot in front of the other and went back into the house.
* * *
“We’re staying here?” Noah asked as Ethney steered the car down the rest of the long drive.
“Yeah. What’s wrong with it?” she asked. Her eyes flitted to the rearview mirror, holding his gaze briefly before going back to the road.
Noah frowned. The shack, if you could even call it that, looked like something out of a bad horror film. The broken shutters lay on the ground alo
ng with flecks of paint had been chipped away from the siding and the debilitated porch looked ready to collapse at any moment.
“I feel like I need a tetanus shot just looking at it,” Elena said, clearly thinking the same thing he was. She wrapped her arms around herself, but leaned forward a little as if to get a better look.
He had to agree with his sister—the place was one wind gust away from toppling in on itself. He stayed in safer-looking places on missions overseas in Iraq.
“It’s close to the ocean and secluded,” Ethney said. Those two things were about the only things the shack had going for it. “The inside is better than the outside,” Ethney added when she finally pulled the car to a stop. She shut off the engine and handed the keys back to Elena.
“I hope so. I need a clean, sterile space to work,” Elena flushed and cleared her throat. “I mean, I can’t have things contaminating my samples.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure it will be fine.” Noah patted his sister’s hand and then got out of the car. He hoped Ethney was right. He’d hate to get some other weird condition because a sample became tainted. His life was already screwed up enough!
As if to mock him, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He dug it out and looked at the caller ID—his boss. “Commander,” he answered.
“Hawthorne, how soon can you mobilize?” Commander Jack Douglas asked.
“As soon as you need me to,” he said. “What’s going on, Sir?”
“We’ve been keeping eyes on Brockwell. It looks like he is getting ready to move. The attack needs to happen tonight. We can’t risk the group breaking up before we can take them out. I’ll text you the coordinates for our rendezvous.”
Commander Douglas was always one to take immediate action and for that Noah was thankful.
“Sir, they have some children being held against their will,” Noah said. He met his sister’s gaze for a moment.
“Understood. We’ll do everything we can to ensure no innocents are hurt.”
“I’m still bringing the two operatives with me as we discussed earlier. They are somewhat experts in this field,” Noah said.
“I’m aware of the young woman and men you’ve been keeping company with. They seem to appear whenever these incidents do. However, I believe the man has been compromised and is now being held prisoner by Brockwell, too. Who are these people? I haven’t been able to get any ID on them. They certainly don’t work for any unit in the government. Who do they work for and can we trust them?”
Noah nodded his head even though Douglas couldn’t see him. “Sir, they want this to end as much as we do. They are special operatives that answer to someone much higher than even we do.” That was about as close to the truth as he could get. The Commander would think he was nuts if he disclosed the guardians’ boss was a Greek goddess.
There was a long pause and he wondered if his commanding officer was going to go back on his word. “Very well.”
The line went dead and Noah held the phone in his hand. It chimed a moment later with a new text message. He opened it up and read it to himself. The attack will commence at dusk. In four hours meet to go over the details.
Claire would be back by tonight if all went according to plan—it had to; he couldn’t lose her, especially not after everything they’d been through the past few weeks.
Chapter Nine
Men and their guns. Ethney watched as the men and one woman on the team assembled, cleaned, and test fired their weapons in the abandoned warehouse. They seemed to be fascinated with the things.
Ethney didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The weapon was heavy and so loud you could hear it a mile away. Why on earth anyone would want to alert a target was beyond her.
Consequently, when Noah offered her a semi automatic rifle she lifted her brow and shook her head. No way. A sword maybe, but a gun, I’d rather use my hands. Plus, the proximity to the water would allow her to manipulate it if needed. Her magic never failed her and she trusted it more than she did some primitive weapon.
Daire was going to have a bit of a problem, though. His dragon was huge and would be easily noticed by the rangers, as would his fire. He opted to take the crude weapon and, to her surprise, knew how to use it pretty well, too. At least he kept hitting all the targets the men had set up for him.
“Are you okay with the plan?” Noah asked as he came to sit down next to her.
“No. This isn’t what we agreed to,” she huffed and pumped her fists at her side. Neither Ethney nor Daire were happy about them grabbing everyone from the group to bring in for questioning. The newly turned would go to the house where Elena set up her lab; everyone else would go to some black ops holding facility.
“I’m sorry.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I’m sorry we let the government get involved. I should’ve known it wouldn’t be easy.” She fixed him with a glare. “Just so we’re clear, those lycanthrope need to be extinguished before the full moon or they’ll try to infect others. You could be aggravating the problem.”
Noah heaved in a deep breath. “I’ll make sure they know that. Mick’s the commanding officer on this op. He’s a good guy. I’ll talk to him.”
She hoped the team would listen to Noah. If they didn’t, the lycanthrope problem would intensify.
“Do you know what you need to do?” he asked in an effort to change the subject.
“I’m going to stay on the beach. My power is strongest near the water,” she told him. They wanted her to go in and help infiltrate the house, but that would be too far from the water. She needed to stay where she was strongest. Plus, she could catch any stragglers. The rangers might not kill them, but she would take out as many as she could. There was no hope for the lycanthrope. They were insane and ravenous. It would be doing them a favor to put them down now.
“I’m stationed by the back exit. Will I get to see your other half?” Noah asked as a small smile spread across his face. He picked up her arm and trailed his thumb over her mermaid mark.
“If the situation calls for it. Why? Do you want to?” she asked curiously. No one but the other guardians ever discovered what she was and what she could do. Was it something that interested him? She shouldn’t care. With that thought she jerked her arm out of his and crossed her arms over her body.
Noah shrugged. “I’ve seen Daire and Aric, I’m interested to see what you look like, too.”
“I’m nowhere near as big as they are. It’s just a fin. Nothing special.” She got up and took a few steps back from him, spinning on her heel.
Noah trotted after her. He grasped her by the shoulder and she whirled around to face him; heat surged through her from his touch causing her to shrug away from him.
“What?” she asked.
“We never really talked about last night.”
“There isn’t anything to talk about. I’ve already told you how I feel.” She swallowed down the lump in her throat and glanced over his shoulder. Confrontations weren’t her thing and the fact she actually liked Noah exacerbated the situation.
“Fine. Let’s get through tonight and then let Elena work her magic. When she figures it out, and I know she will, then we’re going to revisit this conversation.” He took a step forward, closing the distance between them, and put his hands on her shoulders to meet her gaze. “There’s something here. I’m not walking away from it.”
“If she figures out how to cure you then we’ll talk,” she whispered. She couldn’t get her hopes up again only to have Noah die.
“She will,” Noah said.
Ethney narrowed her eyes. “How can you be so sure?”
“You don’t know Elena. She doesn’t know how to fail. Having my and Claire’s lives on the line, she’ll figure it out. I know it.”
He seemed so sure. She opened her mouth to tell him not to get too hopeful, but didn’t. Let him have hope. It couldn’t hurt anything.
“For your sake, I hope you’re right.”
Noah closed his eyes.
“Yeah, me, too.”
One of the men called out for everyone to gather around. She assumed it was Noah’s friend, Mick.
“We need to get ready to move out,” Ethney said. She licked her lips and then took a few steps back needing to create distance between them. “I’m going to swim there. I won’t be in the convoy.”
“Are you sure?” Noah asked.
She couldn’t be cooped up in the car with him. “I’ll meet you there.”
Ethney didn’t give him a chance to respond before she spun around on her heel and took off. She grabbed the bag she brought with her off a bench, slung it over her shoulder, and then shoved the door open to the warehouse, letting the sticky humid night air wash over her. She breathed it in. The aromatic sea salt from the ocean calmed her frayed nerves and she inhaled and exhaled deeply before walking down to the ocean.
The waves clapped against the shore sending a spray of water into the air. The droplets landed on her as she let the water soak into her skin for a moment before removing her clothes. She folded them neatly and then stuck them in her waterproof bag.
Ethney dipped her toe in the sea first and then took a few steps in. The water was pleasantly warm. She waded in waist deep before diving under the surface. The water moved past her as she closed her eyes and willed her change. She pressed her thighs together until they became one, her scales rippling from her toes to her waist as her tail formed.
Flipping her tail, she dove deeper so she could skim her fingers against the grains of sand on the bottom of the ocean floor. A few fish fluttered past her and she smiled watching them move. It was so much easier to be in the ocean away from everyone and everything. Part of her wouldn’t mind permanently living in the murky depths away from all the problems of the world, but there was also a part of her that craved human contact and relationships. Besides, she had a job to do. With that thought in mind, she pushed back up toward the surface.
Popping back above the water, she watched as Noah’s team finished loading up and drove down the rickety road toward Brockwell’s camp. They’d be there in a few short minutes.
She dove back beneath the surface and moved her tail rapidly. The water soared past her as she moved through it, bubbling up around her in a comforting frothy foam. If she weren’t in a hurry, she would take the time to enjoy it.