Reckless
Page 28
And then she couldn’t think anymore because she was going to crest the pinnacle of a terrifyingly high cliff.
“Are you there?” He grunted. “Can’t hang on.” He swiveled his hips one more time, and that final movement touched off a spark inside her.
They shattered in each other’s arms at the same time, and when she blinked again, she felt the very essence of Cain breathe inside her.
Chapter 20
Flint and Cain wound up being found by Adam an hour later. The greed Nephilim wouldn’t look either of them in the eye, but every so often he’d cast them dubious glances and she knew he knew.
Cain’s fingers were clutched tightly in hers as they walked toward the sole remaining tent of what’d once been a thriving night circus. Shouts and roars trembled the earth beneath their feet with each step.
Apart from Abel’s obvious cries, the night was hushed. The twins and Rhi glanced up the minute she and Cain got to the entrance, all of them giving the couple a brief once-over, and Flint didn’t know whether to squirm or hold still, so she held still.
She’d expected words, expected someone to tsk-tsk her and ask her what in the hell she’d been thinking bonding with Cain, but none of them said anything about that.
Rhiannon jerked her chin in the direction of the noise. “Grace is inside there.”
Flint frowned. “Grace?”
She hated how coldhearted she and Cain must look. It was obvious she and Cain had done... stuff. Gah, just thinking about sex made her stomach flip. She wanted to tell them it wasn’t what they were thinking, that she and Cain hadn’t planned any of it. That it’d happened mostly to save her life, but the little seed of conscience pricked at her, because she’d be a liar if she claimed that was the only reason why it’d happened.
To everyone else, though, it must look like she and Cain didn’t care enough to come back with the rest of them and make sure Abel was safe, make sure the rest of them had come out of it relatively unscathed.
She blew out a deep breath when no one looked at them.
“How did Grace find out about Abel already?” Cain asked a second later with a voice much less harsh than usual.
Seth’s brow twitched, and Flint’s cheeks continued to burn.
Eli was picking at his thumbnail as he said without looking up, “Adam went and grabbed her.”
“Is Abel okay?” she asked.
Rhiannon gave her an ugly scowl. The sight of it curled like black ice down Flint’s spine.
“You would have known if you guys hadn’t run off to go sex it up like two pumped-up lust demons,” she snapped.
“Hey.” Cain stepped in front of Flint, blocking her just slightly from Rhiannon’s furious glare. “You need to just relax. Right now. You don’t even know what happened or—”
“What, Cain, what?” she snapped, her eyes aglow with flame. “You gonna make up some excuse why that was okay, huh? What you guys do is none of my effing business, but when it comes to your brother, you should have at least kept that thing in your pan—”
Another roar, much louder than the last one, caused everyone to stumble back on their heels.
Cain didn’t wait to hear the rest of what Rhiannon said; still holding tight to Flint’s hand, he slapped the tent flap aside and dragged her in behind him, and Flint’s heart sank to her knees.
At the center of the ring was a large metal cage, and locked inside it was Abel, still a pillar of ebony monstrosity, howling and slamming repeatedly into the bars with the madness of a rabid dog.
She sniffed, heart breaking for her friend. “We should have been here,” she whispered, not so much to anyone else as much as simply stating a fact.
Cain squeezed her fingers tight. “This isn’t your fault, Flint. I thought he would be okay, I thought he was in safe hands, I didn’t mean to—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his words before Grace snuck up on them. For such an old woman, she could be ninja stealthy when she wanted to be.
Flint hadn’t seen her grandmother since touring the cave—what was it now, like a week ago? Not long at all, and yet her grandmother looked haggard and more tired than she remembered her being.
Grace latched onto their hands.
“Nana.” She slipped into old familiar names, needing the comfort of family in that moment. “What’s wrong with him?”
Adam sat kneeling in front of the cage, hanging his head, a powerful man who skated the edge of violence in everything he did. And right now Flint couldn’t help but feel that in this moment, Adam was as broken as his wife’s soul.
Her grandmother’s lips thinned. “Come. Come sit, please, dear.” Grace gestured at an overturned stack of crates.
She didn’t speak again until they’d both taken a seat.
Blue eyes met blue eyes as Grace said directly to Cain, “He opened the darkness inside his mind.”
Flint had no idea what that even meant, but Cain jumped to his feet, running down the long aisle to Adam, and her heart fractured further as he dropped to his knees beside the man he’d never once called his father. Adam didn’t glance up but clapped Cain’s back as they knelt in front of Abel.
Abel was clawing his fist through the bars. With a little more light on him, it was easy to see that what Abel had become was an abomination.
His body wasn’t just enlarged the way Cain’s would get when he’d rage up, he looked like an alien. His eyes were entirely black. His body, his hair, claws, feet, everything. In fact, if he’d not been carrying Layla underneath his arm, she’d have not even thought for a second that her freckle-faced prom date and this... thing... could be one and the same.
“But how could they not know?” Flint asked, confused. “He doesn’t look like the rest of them do when they change, shouldn’t they have known the moment they saw him?”
Grace shook her head. “This doesn’t happen, Flint. Not often. Only once in history that I’m aware of.”
“I saw Layla.” She turned toward her grandmother, unable to look at the heartache below another second, but shuddering each time the cage rattled. “She told me he opened the black box.”
A single tear slipped from Grace’s eye. “Aye. And that he did, love.”
She clenched her jaw, terrified to ask any more questions, afraid of what she might hear. “Why don’t berserkers open that box?”
“It is a raw and untapped wellspring of nearly bottomless power. But it comes with a price, and instinctually berserkers must understand somehow to not open it during transition. I don’t hear enough about the berserkers as I should—what I know comes from my work with Adam and his carnival and my books.”
“So they saw him like that and just thought it was normal?”
Flint thought back to the relieved, almost ecstatic smile on Cain’s face when he’d come in search of her, claiming that Abel had been recovered and he was fine now. In no way had he made her think that he even had a clue about Abel, about what he’d become.
“His appearance is odd, but not abnormal. Shifts are different for everyone. Even though the three here rage up mostly the same, it wasn’t beyond belief that Abel’s was unusual, especially considering all he’d gone through with Layla. High stress can affect the outcome of their metamorphosis.”
She nibbled on her bottom lip, unable to keep from peeking back at Abel, who hadn’t quieted down even a little bit.
“So he’s going to stay like this forever?”
Grace didn’t say a word, but she didn’t need to. Flint read the truth in her eyes. Looking at her feet, she shook her head.
“How do they know for sure? He might still change, he might—”
Soft, gentle fingers covered her own. “We know, lass. Janet has not woken.”
“But can’t he just close that box up again? Isn’t there something we can do to fix this?”
“The darkness has taken him, Flint, he is not sane enough to even be reached.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “What happened to the othe
r berserker who opened the box?”
It took Grace a couple of seconds to answer. “He was put out of his misery.”
With a sniff, her grandmother got gingerly to her feet and walked out of the tent.
Flint didn’t even know what to feel right now. An overwhelming sadness clung to her. Shame at herself and Cain for not coming back sooner. Loss. Tragedy. And even hate.
Hate for Layla, for what she’d done to her own child.
If they’d only found him sooner, if they’d only gotten there an hour earlier, would it have made a difference? Lifting her knees to her chest, she laid her chin down on them and stared blankly ahead.
Time crept slowly past. One hour, two, three, four. No one moved. No one talked, even as Abel continued to rage. No one said a word.
Flint’s mind wandered. She was so tired every inch of her ached, but she couldn’t seem to shut her mind down, even when the sun began to shine weakly through the tent flap, heralding a brand new day.
But there was no joy in it.
Peeking quickly outside, she noticed that Rhi and the twins must have lain down at some point. They were passed out on the ground in a tangle of arms and legs, as though even in sleep they needed the comfort of touch.
Frowning, she looked back to where Adam and Cain still sat, only just realizing that their heads were bowed. Were they asleep too?
Getting up was almost more painful than sitting without moving for the past six hours had been. Her legs burned with the rush of blood after such tight constriction.
Abel was also beginning to quiet. He was no longer battering the cage with his head. Giving the bars one final shake, he slumped down, breathing like a bellows and staring at her with predatory, soulless eyes.
And for a second she hoped to God that with the fire spent he’d begin the morph back to normal, just like Cain would, but he didn’t. He remained as he was.
Bowing her head, she took a seat beside Cain, only to note that both he and Adam were fast asleep, their mouths slightly parted and their shoulders rising and falling heavily.
Neither of them had slept much during Abel’s absence. Now he was home, but it was too late.
Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes.
Needing comfort, Flint drew on the magick of her tattoo, calling forth her vines.
The tiny buds grew from the ground and soon curled into long, healthy stems that rubbed up against her like the gentle touch of a puppy’s tongue.
“I’m soulless too,” she whispered.
Abel stirred, but didn’t speak. His eyes never strayed from her face.
“I don’t know who I am anymore, Abel.”
She wasn’t sure if he could hear her, wasn’t sure if he understood what she was saying, but somewhere deep inside him lived the boy she loved like a brother. He was in there. No matter what Grace’s books said, no matter the bleakness of this situation or the utter hopelessness on the faces of her friends, Abel was in there.
So she talked to him, opened her heart to him like she’d always done.
“A lot happened while you were gone from us. We never stopped looking for her. Hoping you’d come back to us.”
The vines wrapped tighter and higher around her calves, but they were also spreading out. Heading in the direction of the cage. Those vines were covered in thorns.
She frowned but continued talking when his grunting grew in pitch.
“I bet I look different to you now.” She smiled softly. “I’m a freak. I’m a creature—I don’t even know what kind. Fae, that’s what Grace calls me. I have dreams all the time. Walking visions. I saw you. When you tried to escape, saw you with Graham.”
Her body went absolutely still when a glimmer—the thinnest thread of warm brown—trailed lightning quick through his eyes.
“Are you still in there, Abel? Do you hear me?”
He roared and she started, looking to the left and expecting Cain or Adam to open their eyes, but they were like the dead, barely stirring before they settled down once more.
Take him below...
Had she thought that, or was she remembering those words? Eyes wide, she looked at Abel, realizing his roar had come from one thorny barb tearing through the bottom of his foot.
He yanked it out, only to have another and another and another crawl up his body. Unlike earlier, he was mostly too exhausted to resist her vines’ hold on him.
Ivy was now wrapped up to her waist, and the hand she had planted on the ground beneath felt the shifting of dirt deep below. The earth was going to open again; it was going to take her. But not just her.
It was going to take Abel too.
Wetting her lips, she jumped to her feet. Just like back in the forest when she’d felt the certainty of taking him below, she felt it now.
The earth brimmed with wild magick, magick connected to her. Magick to heal, to harm, or to consume. That was part of who she was now.
As she moved in Adam’s direction, her vines stuck with her, covering the tips of her breasts now. The thick, almost ropelike creepers surrounding Abel were halfway up his body, pinning his hands to his waist with thorns as broad and thick as an ancient shark’s tooth.
Running purely on instinct and terrified out of her mind, she ran up to the cage. She worried that if she let indecision sway her, she’d lose her chance at this last, vain hope.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she wrapped her arms around the cage, crying out when he head-butted her fingers, breaking each and every one.
The ground rumbled.
“Flint?” Cain’s groggy voice was a whisper, and because of their bonding ceremony, she knew immediately that he could sense her thoughts.
Burying her face against the cold cage, she shook her head. “I love you, Cain.”
It was all she could say before the earth pulled her and Abel under, cage and all.
She cried as Cain screamed at her, begged her to not do this, but it was already too late. A powerful rush of earth magick poured through her veins and exploded from every inch of her body, blasting like a cannon into Abel.
Entombed in a sea of dirt and vines, her last thought was a silent plea she sent up to Cain, still feeling the heady presence of his precious soul inside her.
I’ll bring him back, Cain. I’ll bring him back...
And for just a moment, she felt the warmth of his soul quicken inside her. He didn’t like it, but he had faith in her. In them.
The ancient magick, the very beating soul of the universe, wrapped them up. And Flint called for more and more of it, channeling everything she had from her into Abel.
She would save him.
She would make this right.
This was what she’d been born to do.
And then there was nothing more but silence.
~*~
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Notes, Dedications, and Such...
I’d had every intention of completing this series with book 2, but as is often the case, the muse leads and I follow. I realized fairly quickly into the writing of Reckless that the storyline would require one additional book before I could wrap up all loose ends. Possessed, book 3, is slated to be published sometime during the Fall.
This book is dedicated to all of you who sent me little notes of encouragement, letting me know how much you loved Flint and Cain and that you just couldn’t wait to read on in their continuing saga. Also, to my fan group. You guys are the bestest and I want to give you all squishy hugs for being so stinkin’ awesome.
Also to the ladies of WoUF and AIC, you guys are my rock. Thanks for being so awesome and special.
If you loved this book, please, feel free to leave a review. Those things are golden in our world. And I promise not to cry too loudly if it�
�s not a five star.
About Selene Charles
Selene Charles is the seekrit pen name of a NY Times and USA Today bestselling author. She’s also written under the name RS Black. Both Urban Fantasy writers who believes that a woman can do much more than to stand around helpless and waiting to be saved. She’s a lover of rainbows, Xena, and talking polar bears.
Make sure to sign up for her newsletter to find out when the next book in the Tempted Series, Possessed, will come out!
Bibliography
Selene Charles, Tempted Series
Forbidden, Book 1
Reckless, Book 2
Possessed, Book 3 (Coming Soon)
Completed Night Series, writing as RS Black
Night Series Collection (Books 1 and 2)
Howler’s Night (Book 3)
Red Rain (Book 4)
Table of Contents
Reckless
Author’s Note
Reckless, Book 2 Tempted Series
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Notes, Dedications, and Such...
About Selene Charles
Bibliography