by Anna Windsor
Jack came off the bridge on two wheels and swept north by the most direct route he could follow. A group of leather-clad Sibyls was already waiting when he screeched to a stop at the rendezvous point and bailed out, fastening his body armor, then checking his stash of clips and flashbangs. OCU SWAT poured out of his van with Saul, and out of other vans before they even came to a full stop behind him.
Bela and Camille came toward him with Duncan and John and a group of Sibyls Jack didn’t recognize at first glance.
“You’re sure it’s the Smith Infirmary?” Bela looked at the ancient, boarded castle rising toward the sunlit sky less than two blocks away. “Positive?”
“We checked the other options,” Jack said. “This is the only one that makes sense with the descriptions we got.”
“There’s terrible energy here,” said one of the smaller Sibyls, and Jack realized with a start that Elana had come, that the old, blind woman had suited up in leathers like she planned to fight alongside everyone else. “Strange and muted, but under the surface—terrible. We’re in the right place.”
Before he could say anything to Elana, he counted two more too-short Sibyls, one with thick white braids and the other with ropes of gray hair wreathed with clouds of smoke. Mother Yana from Russia. Mother Keara from Ireland. A taller Sibyl standing next to them had ash-blond hair pulled tight against her regal head. Jack knew Mother Anemone right away.
“Mothers don’t fight,” he said, more to himself than anyone, trying to wrap his mind around the sight of Mothers in leathers.
“Andy’s too important to the future of water Sibyls,” Elana told him. “We have to get her back. And Sibyls do not surrender their children, not ever. If we all fall, Sibyls from all over the world will come, wave after wave, until the child is freed.”
Two golden Cursons lumbered into view, each with a Sibyl on their backs, and Jake Lowell landed with his wife, Merilee, a few yards from them.
“Get to them,” Jack barked at Saul. “Keep them reasonable until we get Neala and Andy out of there.”
Saul hauled ass toward Neala’s parents and extended family, taking Astaroths and Bengals with him to add another layer of calm, rational persuasion.
Jack waited another sixty seconds for arrivals, then began positioning OCU squads and Sibyl units on the outer periphery. Most of the New York City Sibyls would form a primary assault line with OCU snipers and officers laying down cover if needed, and acting as a human protective wall with body armor and riot shields. Astaroths would handle the air attack, and Cursons would move in if the Ari Seneca creature or the supermobsters made an appearance. The Mothers—they could do whatever they wanted. Jack knew better than to say a word to them.
As for Jack, Bela, Camille, John, Duncan, and Neala’s parents and family, they’d be the tip of the spear. Jack motioned for Saul to bring Riana, Cynda, Merilee, and their husbands into position with him and Andy’s group. They’d make the breach and get to Andy and Neala at all costs.
All right, sweetheart. Jack narrowed his eyes at the weird-ass castle. Here we come.
“We’ve got surprise,” Saul said to Jack as they lined up beside him. “We’ve got overwhelming force. We’ve got superior elemental power, especially with four Mothers in the game.”
Jack gave Saul a glare to shut him up, but Saul wasn’t finished.
“If I were a total idiot,” he went on, sounding a little more tense with each word he spoke, “I’d ask what could go wrong.”
Jack checked his Glock. “Who the hell knows. Let’s go find out.”
Andy …
This time, Andy’s dreams didn’t scare her. She didn’t bother looking at any of the nightmare images. She treated them like a passing slideshow. Like practice. That’s all they were, all they had been all along, just the universe giving her what she needed to get ready, even if she hadn’t understood at the time.
With a calmness that almost scared her, Andy forced herself awake with complete understanding of where she was and what she had to do. The dog-shit taste in her mouth nauseated her, but she shoved it to the back of her awareness and took stock before she opened her eyes.
Somebody had put a robe on her. A man’s robe. Big and black and heavy. Shackles cut into both wrists and her ankles, and she knew instantly the cuffs had projective traps built into the elemental locks. Her fingers brushed tiny, warm fingers, and immediately Neala gripped Andy’s hand.
Andy slowly let her lids open, and she took in a new set of details. She and Neala were lying side by side in an elementally treated cage barely large enough to hold the two of them. Andy’s right arm and Neala’s left had been secured to the sides of the cage, and they both had intravenous lines running from their forearms out of the cage. Andy couldn’t see what, if anything, those lines had been attached to, but she thought she knew.
At the moment, the lines didn’t seem to be active.
“Scared,” Neala whispered as Andy confirmed to herself that they were in the makeshift laboratory. She recognized the patched, rotten floor, the new beams and construction lights running across the raised ceiling, and the peeling paint on the walls. Sunlight streamed in from around a makeshift tarp-and-board cover on the hole Andy had blasted in the wall the night before.
Andy squeezed Neala’s fingers. “Don’t use your fire.”
The little girl sniffed. “Bars bite.”
Andy couldn’t use her elemental senses, but instinct told her the room had a full complement of Coven members. Rebecca’s strange energy crackled now and again, and the raspy, heavy breathing of the Seneca monster was hard to miss. They were all talking in low voices, moving equipment, clearly setting some plan in motion.
Where are the assholes with the MAC-10s? Just about that fast, her law enforcement experience answered that question. Probably on the perimeter outside the lab, along with whatever Coven members aren’t in the lab.
The sharp stench of sulfur made her eyes water, and in that moment, Andy knew her first moment of panic. Too much like her dream. Exactly like her nightmares. She got hold of herself by breathing, by working through one of Elana’s shorter relaxation exercises.
The sulfur wasn’t coming from the Leviathan demon, but probably from the chemicals the Coven had selected for whatever insane experiment they were about to run.
Neala’s hand shook against Andy’s. “That lady took my fire. She died like demons in battle. My fire killed her.”
“She made a choice,” Andy whispered, letting her voice harden to the sharpness of a fire Sibyl Mother and hoping for the best effect. “You had nothing to do with it. The bad guys killed Siobhán, not you.”
Neala pondered this for a few heartbeats. “I should have kept my fire.”
Andy channeled Jack before she even let herself think. “No way. She took it on purpose. Not your fault.”
But this—what’s happening to you now—is my fault. I could have changed the flow at so many different points.
Andy kept herself breathing evenly, trying to think, but for a few seconds, she couldn’t help where her mind traveled. She realized she had been telling herself she wasn’t afraid of feelings, her own or her quad’s or Jack’s or anybody else’s. She had been telling herself she was taking steps toward being a full member of her fighting group. She’d let herself get close to Jack—but had she gotten close enough? Had she let him get close enough to her?
And what about Dio? I could have forced the issue with her before she got hurt, or when she sent us away from Motherhouse Greece. I could have gone after feelings more deeply with Bela and Camille at the house before they left, or even with Jack at the brownstone or the townhouse.
Fuck.
I ran away just as fast as everybody else, didn’t I?
Andy gripped Neala’s hand and tried to keep herself in the present, but she had to admit the truth to herself. If she had quit letting people push her away, if she hadn’t fled from feelings and people right when she was about to get closer than ever, the flow could hav
e changed. It would have changed, and she and Neala might not be chained up in this horrible place.
So many opportunities, and I wrecked them all—but I swear to God, it ends here.
“It ends here, Neala,” she said aloud, “because I’m going to end it. We’re going to play battle now, only we’re not really playing. Do you understand?”
Neala’s fingers went still in Andy’s grip. “Battle for real?”
“Battle for real.” God, she hated that the kid had to go through this. “That’s right. And you’ll have to fight better than ever.”
A few more heartbeats, and then in a scared but also determined voice, “I burn things for you.”
Baby fire Sibyls. Gotta love them. “I need you to stay safe and get home to your mother.” Andy swallowed in spite of the massive lump in her throat over Neala’s courage. “No matter what happens to me, no matter what happens to anyone or anything in this room, that’s your job. Understand?”
“I burn things for you.”
Once more Andy let herself be amazed by the strength of fire Sibyls, age notwithstanding. She shifted herself carefully in the shackles, and got a full view of the horror spread around them. The cage had been placed on two large metal tables that had been bound together. Two more metal tables had been lowered and placed beside them. On one table lay Siobhán’s body covered in what Andy had to assume were Griffen’s ashes. On Neala’s side of the cage, Tarek’s semi-alive figure looked pitifully small and thin. The huge pole had been removed from his furry chest, but a dagger protruded from his heart and his legs and wrists had been firmly shackled to his table’s four corners.
Intravenous lines ran from Andy’s wrist to a bottle with brownish liquid, probably the source of the sulfur stench, and the lines from Neala’s wrist ran to a similar bottle on her side of the cage. The bottles had been hooked to intravenous lines in Siobhán’s and Tarek’s wrists.
They’re planning to bleed us. Andy clenched her teeth. Whatever’s in those bottles will mix with the elemental power in our blood, and who knows what happens when it runs into that half-alive demon and that dead body.
Her dream-images and Dio’s nightmares made a ghastly kind of sense now. Blood rituals. Tarek rising from the dead. Bartholomew August coming back in spirit if not in body.
Couldn’t happen. Couldn’t be allowed.
Andy knew that when she summoned her elemental powers, the traps in the shackles and bars would attack her and her energy. The harder she fought them, the faster she would die, but she figured she could make enough of a shield for Neala to safely melt her way out of this hell.
In low, careful tones, she explained the nondying parts of her plan to the little girl.
Neala shook, tears streaming down her small, pale cheeks, but she nodded as Rebecca came to stand over them and stare into the cage.
Andy met the girl’s cold gaze and kept her face expressionless. She hoped Neala was doing the same.
“We’re ready to begin,” Rebecca said. “As I promised, we’ll make it fast.”
The girl’s blue eyes sparkled like hard diamonds in arctic sunlight. To Neala, Rebecca said, “Thank you for allowing our friend Tarek to regain his strength. I haven’t yet decided what to do with him, but he’s the only one of his kind now. He deserves better than a captive existence.”
To Andy, she said, “I don’t know what will come of this attempt, but I hope to bring back a creature with aspects like my own father.”
Father. Of course. That bastard of a demon fathered who knows how many children with all kinds of elementally powerful women, trying to restart his race.
“Bartholomew August,” Andy said aloud, wishing more than anything that she had her dart pistol and a few Keres to lend a hand.
“You killed him.” Rebecca sounded more clinical than angry.
“I did and I would again.” Andy quietly started her fight with the cuffs and bars, beginning to gather her elemental power but not yet attempting to send it outward.
“I should hate you for that like my brother Griffen did, and maybe I do.” The girl’s smile was way shy of sane. “In truth, I feel nothing about it. I feel nothing about so many things. Sometimes life gets confusing.”
Andy forced herself to look the girl straight in the icy eyes. “Don’t do this. Take your sideshow freaks and your brother’s formulas and get out of New York City. You can carry on your father’s work somewhere else, find the meaning of life—whatever. Just don’t start by killing children.”
Rebecca actually seemed to consider this, but too quickly she dismissed Andy with a flick of her delicate-looking wrist. “I don’t think I have to leave. This is the only real home I’ve known, and I believe I can build what I need right here—a better lab, a proper collection of paranormal creatures, and several strong Covens to protect Ari and me while we develop genetic injections.”
She reached down and opened the clamp on Andy’s intravenous line, and Andy watched as her own blood rushed through the thin tubing into the brown liquid. The mixture instantly began to drip in the line leading to Siobhán’s body.
Andy drew a slow breath through her teeth as Rebecca opened Neala’s intravenous line, then turned back to the Seneca monster and the Coven members present in the lab.
Don’t lose it. Keep focus. Hold it tight.
Which was hard, given that Tarek and the corpse on the table next to Andy started to twitch and jerk.
Time’s up. Here goes.
Andy opened herself to the full might and power of her water energy. She didn’t just crack the windows or edge open the entrance inside her essence. She threw open her inner floodgates, accessing every bit of flow and water she could find, sense, or touch.
Instantly, the cuffs threw off a stunning cloud of energy, dulling her mind and senses, crushing her awareness into so many bits and fragments. Then the strength of the elemental locks on the bars added weight and pressure.
Andy let go of Neala’s hand. She shoved against the elemental locks and projective traps expanding across her senses and energy. The pain came so fast and harsh she knew right away it was killing her, but she kept right on turning herself into an utter, absolute mirror for the world’s water. She’d draw it all if she had to. She was a Mother, after all. And a decent Sibyl and a good cop, and a good friend, and a woman who had loved some pretty fabulous guys. All of that and the soul-deep wish for Neala’s safety gave her strength. All of that gave her definition and identity as she struggled to keep her own shape against the power trying to course through her essence.
“She’s fighting the locks and traps.” The Seneca monster’s voice sounded like growling from a hound of hell.
“They’ll hold.”
Rebecca’s confident assertion didn’t soothe her pet beast. “Assuming is dangerous. Assuming gets you killed.”
Shouting rose outside, and the Coven men reacted in a hurry. Andy’s fast-blurring vision let her see them running out of the lab as the under-Coven rushed in to take their places.
Something must be going down. Something that required big elemental firepower.
Jack.
That thought gave her a major boost, and just as fast, Andy knew she was right. Jack hadn’t run out on her after all. He was here, trying to do something to try to save the day. Maybe he’d brought help—though she’d need half the city and the Motherhouses, too, to get her out of this alive.
“Are we okay?” the Seneca monster asked, moving close enough for Andy to see the mottled, cobbled mess that functioned as his face. Saggy, wrinkled flesh. Lumpy jaws. Ridged forehead. Bristles of black fur jabbed out his cheeks in different directions, and his ears seemed more feline than human.
“We’re fine,” Rebecca assured the thing. “I don’t sense anything amiss for us now or in the near future.”
The monster seemed to consider this. “How near?”
God, it can think for itself, too. Andy knew that wasn’t good.
“We’ll get out of this lab alive,” Rebecc
a said with all the conviction of a teenager who believed she could never die—and never be defeated. “No worries.”
Tarek and the thing on the table next to Andy twitched again. Something groaned. Andy didn’t want to look at whatever was trying to rise and find life beside her, so she stared into Neala’s face.
The child’s eyes fluttered, and her cheeks went pale.
Andy focused everything she had on their shackles and the bars holding them hostage.
“Ready?” she managed to whisper to Neala even though it took most of the energy she had left.
From seemingly far away, she heard Neala’s mumbled answer. “Ready.”
Andy clenched her fists and doubled her efforts. The shackles chewed into her skin, sucking away most of the water energy she pulled through her body.
Let it flow.
The bars burned her arm and backside, gripping her like long metal talons, pulling her into the bite of the treated steel. Blood streamed from her nose, from her mouth, from the wounds on her arms.
I can do this. I can. I absolutely can.
She was breaking the traps. Somehow, her energy was enough—or turning into enough.
She saw herself in the flow of the water. She saw herself as the flow, the source of its direction and strength. Boards cracked and split under the cage. Patched metal shrieked and gave way. Water rushed up so hard and fast it battered Andy like fists, and she fought to keep the force of it on her side of the cage even as she struggled to wrap Neala inside the stream, to insulate her from the bars, to place at least a film of water between the shackles and her skin. Not much protection, not very much at all—but enough?
She heard the child whimper and splutter as the water tore out the intravenous lines in her wrist. Tarek let out a howl on his table, bashing claws and feet against the metal. Neala ignored him and burned her own wound until it stopped bleeding. Then she melted off her shackles and crammed her wrists and ankles into Andy’s swirling water energy to cool them. The cage shifted on its tables, beginning to slide back and forth as waves sluiced beneath them.
Andy barely perceived the world around her. She had thought dying would be a lot harder than this.