“Come on, Prince Charming,” he scoffed, giving Blaine a light smack on the cheek.
Blaine’s eyelids fluttered as a small Sowilo healing rune glowed on the outside of his forearm. I had the same one, obviously, but had never ignited it before. He coughed again, this time with a little more relief.
“That’s more like it.” Val straightened up, wiping the blood from his hand. “Don’t want to leave your mate waiting now, do we?”
Realization seemed to dawn on him, because Blaine’s eyes flew open with a start. He painfully angled his head in horror over to the opened driver’s door of the car. At me still inside. “Kat…”
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
He kept muttering the word as he tried scrambling up from the pavement. Resistance sent him back into the ground though, and he let out a stifled yelp. Considering the amount of blood soaking his entire body, it was safe to assume he had more than just a few broken ribs. His whole face was even masked in red. The pain didn’t keep him down for long. Using the door for leverage, he managed to lift himself enough to stagger upright. The Mage gnashed his teeth the instant he stood. Limping on only one foot, he hobbled around the backend of the car towards the passenger side.
“Not so fast.” His brother pressed his boot into Blaine’s left ankle. It was already bowed at a grotesquely unnatural angle, and the pressure only snapped it further, sending the young man crumpling back to the ground in blinding pain. Val just shook his head with a bemused chuckle. “That’s why I told you to turn it off. So long as you still have your emotions, pain will continue to be your greatest weakness.”
“Why?” Blaine seethed. His entire body shuddered from unadulterated agony, but his eyes were bright and alert, ablaze with a murderous rage.
“Why?” Val mocked.
“I told you I was going to take care of it. You didn’t need to hurt her!”
“Is that right?” His brother only smiled, kneeling down in front of him. He fetched out a small vial from his jacket pocket and dangled it in his face. “No worries. I already did ‘it’ for you. ”
Blaine lunged forward, forcing Val to grind his foot harder into his brother’s twisted ankle until the boy aguishly fell back against the bumper of the ruined car. “What did you do to her?”
Val shrugged, admiring the tiny vial still in his hand. “Just got your buddy, Daniel, to line the rim of her soda can with my special formula. A few more minutes, and she would’ve been as dead as a doornail, regardless.”
“Then why do this?” Blaine sneered, gritting his teeth as he gestured at the wreckage.
“To teach you a lesson.” He rolled his eyes, exasperated. “Be grateful, brother. At least you get the luxury of bringing her back.” Despite the cruel mask he was donning, the restraint in Val’s voice was all too obvious. “You’re not ruining this for us, not out of petty sentiment.”
“I did everything you said. I told you I’d handle it!”
“Then, pray tell, where were you speeding off to?” Val’s gaze shifted over the backend of the car, down the vacant stretch of road. “You obviously knew there was something wrong with her. And this place is crawling with private roads and scenic views. You could’ve taken her to any one of them and just waited for her to die so you could work your magic. Yet, here you are, having gone out of your way to head to…where else?”
I took a closer look down the winding path to the quadrangle road sign in question. It was blue with a large white H printed in the middle of it. Beneath, it read, “5 Miles.”
The hospital.
Blaine had been trying to take me to the hospital.
***
Like a kick from a mule, my body rocketed backward and I stumbled away from Blaine as my vision snapped back into place. I couldn’t fight the tears. My entire body was shaking with an emotion I would never have a name for. And his eyes… His eyes were so wide and petrified that it only shattered what little there was left of my sanity.
“You killed me!” I had screamed at him, time and time again. “You killed me!”
His answer every time: “I brought you back.”
I’d always assumed he meant that he resurrected me after he purposely crashed his car. But the figure in the road… I’d seen it that night.
“No.” I just kept shaking my head, stumbling back, back, back. I tried to speak, tried to find the words I needed to express the chaos in my mind, but all I found was a handful of spare letters. “Why?”
Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell me?
Why?
Why?
Why?
I wasn’t sure if Blaine could hear those thoughts, but I suspected as much, seeing a faint tremble ravage his body. My chest tightened all the more. Someone so seemingly resilient was standing before me, visibly gutted and vulnerable.
I finally managed to take a step forward, but he immediately cowered back.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
“You tried to help me.”
He scoffed, redirecting his eyes to the floor. “A lot of good it did.”
“It…it wasn’t your fault.”
He matched every step I took toward him, refusing to let me come closer. His back finally met with the wall, only inciting his chest to rise and fall faster.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Stop.”
“You brought me back.”
“Please, stop,” he pleaded, his voice so weak the words were barely audible. Blaine flinched, as if my very touch singed him, feeling my fingers cup his jaw. I angled his face to meet mine, and he forced his eyes shut.
“Look at me.” Please. He heard the word spoken only to his mind, and all attempts at control vanished. I’d never done that before. I’d never felt my thoughts travel through that bond. But I’d felt it this time. His eyes snapped open. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What difference would it make? It was still my fault. You’d still hate me…” He tried pulling away, but I secured my hold on him.
“I don’t. I can’t.” I didn’t fight back the tears pouring from my eyes. “You scare me—terrify me even—because I don’t know who you are. You’re the caring stranger I met at a party, and the man I thought I killed, and the crazed lunatic who’s as damned as he seems, and the boy who’s so beautifully broken… I am scared of you, but I can’t hate you.”
Blaine stopped breathing.
Why did you put a hex on me?
He laughed the strange sort of laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all. “I didn’t.”
My hands slipped from his face. “…What?”
“I never put anything on you.”
“But your mark…”
“I never put anything on you.”
What did that mean? Who put it there? Did Raelynd? How?
His finger ran over the bottom of my lip, tracing the curve of my mouth. “Tu es meus verum coniunx.”
He said that to me once before, the night of my Great Rite. What did it mean—
His hands dropped to my jaw, angling my face up to meet his as he repeated the words against my lips. He kept saying my name, and his every touch was the cure to an ache I didn’t even realize I had. “I never meant to hurt you.”
I was suddenly sobbing, remembering the last time he had tried to tell me, when I had lashed out at him, when I had told him that no one could ever love him, that no one could ever care about him.
Chapter 30
Thank You For the Venom
The low grunt sent ice prickling up my spine as I pulled away, watching Blaine’s jaw tighten. We didn’t need to look down to know what runes had ignited.
“Go back inside,” he ordered. “Lock the door.”
I turned, and immediately regretted it. The being standing at the end of the hall appeared human in the dim lights, but as it emerged from the shadows, its full features proved it to be far more formidable. The creature didn’t appear to be much taller than Blaine, but its nake
d body was built of muscle upon muscle upon muscle. Every vein in its body bulged out, the color a sickly black over its hardened gray skin. The beast roared, stressing our eardrums as the tyrannosaurus howl bounced off the high ceilings of the corridor.
If its body didn’t do you in, its mouth certainly would. What was with these creatures’ aversion to clothes and penchant for serrated bites? The beast had what happened to be a human-esque nose, but its jaw jutted out into a sharp point like a reptilian snout, revealing an equally ferocious set of teeth, so massive that they rivaled a raptor’s. It even had an elongated tongue that wove around its notched bite, as if preparing to clean for its next meal.
The beast didn’t have claws, for those same serrated teeth made up the jagged ends of its fingers. They even protruded out from the muscles in the center of its chest. With the simplest flex, the teeth atop them shifted, stretching out like a Venus flytrap, ready to clamp its carnivorous snare shut the moment the beast’s arms locked you in. And same as the previous creature Blaine and I encountered, it wasn’t affected by the wave of magic the Dark Prince threw at it.
“Go!” Blaine demanded, but I didn’t move. Not when I saw an exact replica of the monster on the other end of the hall over Blaine’s shoulder. Each wielded a large tool of some sort in their hands, and as the flat metal end illuminated in the dim light, I could see that it was some kind of medieval sledgehammer. He wouldn’t have been able to take on both of these things alone.
And Blaine knew it. He shoved me over to the library doors and yanked me inside. To my relief, he followed after me, throwing the locks into place. The ornate bronzed doors prove to fend off the assault as the metallic material pounded and thudded from the opposing side as Blaine and I raced down the main aisle back to the study area. The remains of the Sagax’s smoke dissipated upon our arrival. Seriously? Was this woman really that useless when it came to confrontation?
Val appeared to share in the sentiment, because he suddenly cursed. “Gee, thanks a pant-load, lady.”
Before either of us could give the command to leave, Val and Reese immediately met us at the door.
“Don’t bother. We already know,” growled Blaine’s brother. “She just said as much before pulling her whole Keyser Söze vanishing act. How bad is it out there?”
The crash of metal exploded across the towering ceilings as the doors finally gave in, no doubt. “I don’t feel like staying around long enough to find out,” said Blaine, yanking me backward.
Val grabbed Carly as Reese barked at Mark to run the moment we reached the reading center at the end of the study hall. We all raced down the main aisle to the other end of the library, hitting identical bronze doors. Blaine threw all his weight into it, and it proved useless. The damn things wouldn’t give.
“Watch out!” I yanked him sideways as a sledgehammer suddenly swung right at him from behind. The mallet drove past us and pounded into the column beside the frame of the doorway. The annihilating impact sent bits of stone raining down on us as Blaine and I fell to the floor.
Quickly recovering to our feet, we looked up to see the other half of the Gruesome Twosome charging right for us from the other end of the library. A scream lodged in my throat as Blaine pounced up in front of the closest creature. The beast heaved its arms to the side, preparing to drag the hammer right into him. Blaine lunged rearward, his back hitting the library doors.
The club drove precisely into his position, but Blaine managed to sweep out of the way with not a second to spare. The bronze doors thundered as the hammer obliterated a hole right where the locks had just been. Blaine swooped into action, grabbing the handle of the sledgehammer. The creature and he fought for its possession as the beast tried to pull him in. Val hauled Carly away from the assault and dove right into the other creature’s path as it, too, tried to make a play for us. He wasn’t as lucky as his brother. The beast barely managed to haul him up against its chest, allowing its secondary set of teeth to snap shut. The serrated chompers clamped down on Val’s right arm, pinning his blade to his side.
The Mage cast the creature his darkest smile, not the least bit affected as the ferocious bite drew blood from his bicep. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”
Seeing where his knife was positioned, I grimaced. Bad way to go.
Sure enough, Val pressed the blade against the beast’s exposed genitals, and with the flick of his wrist, he sliced the entire package clean off. The creature bucked and roared, snapping its jaw at anything and nothing as it crumpled down onto the floor in a blithering heap of cries and moans and pooling black blood. Blaine nailed the other creature in its jaw, snapping its head up before it could take a bite out of him. He’d lost his blades in the midst of the scuffle, and I immediately snatched out my own, leaping on the creature’s back as it prepared to pull Blaine in for a second time.
Before the beast could haul him to its chest, I jabbed Reese’s pocketknife into the creature’s brainstem, just as Blaine had demonstrated with the creature in the mall parking lot. The beast lurched backward, hurling its weight into the end of the book aisle. With me still clinging to its back, the wind was ripped clean out of me from the crushing impact. When I didn’t let go, it threw itself forward, and repeated the maneuver. Only this time, I did let go. I barely managed to snake myself out of the way just as it rammed itself again into the end of the bookshelf. Without my body providing the necessary space, the creature had inadvertently thrust the handle of my blade only deeper into its brainstem. As soon as we heard the sickening squish, the beast collapsed onto the floor, not five feet from its creepy companion.
“What the hell were those things?” bellowed Carly, shaking like a leaf as she cowered into the corner.
I’d forgotten. This had been her first encounter with such a thing. Sure, Hellhounds were terrifying, but they still just looked like black wolves on a massive scale. These beasts were the things from your darkest nightmares.
“Lich,” said Val, using the fabric of his pants to wipe the blood from his knife. “They’re hired trackers, meaning whoever hired them shouldn’t be far behind.”
Blaine tossed his weight into the doors again, and with the lock busted, they flew open. The six of us hurried our way through the labyrinth of hallways. Unfortunately, in our desperation to escape, we seemed to have lost track of where we were. It wasn’t very hard, seeing as how every hallway in the second floor was identical to the one we just came from. Eventually coming across an unfamiliar stairway, we decided that getting to the ground floor was the best objective.
Blaine suddenly cussed, looking out through the second story window. “We’ve got a problem.”
“What?” Amid the suffocating darkness outside, I couldn’t distinguish much of anything.
But then a shadow zipped across the lawn. Then another. And another.
“We’ve got company,” the Prince growled. “And lots of it.”
***
The only way to reach the other wings of the school was from the main hall, forcing us to retrace our way back to the front entrance. I started to race across the foyer when Blaine suddenly pinned his arm against my chest, forcing me to a stop. I looked over at him, seeing his gaze fixed upward. My eyes drifted from the dark pool staining the lobby floor up to Blaine’s line of vision. Everyone else followed in suit. Carly threw a hand over her mouth to catch her scream as Reese and Mark cursed.
No, no, no, no!
Blood trailed off the ends of Madsen’s fingertips as he lay strung upside down from the rafters, his face frozen in a state of primitive horror from the gaping wound sliced in the middle of his chest.
All our gazes fell to the fallen bulletin sign for Madsen’s seminar. The word “Traitor,” was painted in crimson red smears across his picture.
“As the good ol’ Bible says, ‘Show no mercy to wicked traitors.’”
The six of us whirled around to face the unwelcomed lilted voice, finding no one in any of the adjoining hallways. A soft, birdlike whistle fol
lowed, pulling our attention back up to the lower half of the rafters.
“Same goes for you, boyo,” the stranger added, gesturing to Reese. He swept the cap off his head, swinging off the beam beneath him. The Irishman landed as gracefully as a cat onto his feet, despite the fifteen foot drop. His pinstriped vest and matching shirt were pressed with such deep wrinkles that it looked like he’d just woken up from a two-day bender and hadn’t bothered to change his clothes.
Normally, it would have been next to impossible trying to determine if he was a Mage or not. Unruly dark hair framed the Irishman’s forehead and cheekbones, the only parts of his body I could see that weren’t covered in tattoos. With his sleeves rolled up, the pale blue lights emitting from his left forearm highlighted the remaining ink on his skin. Strange tendrils snaked up his neck, their intricate designs crawling up over his jaw and chin. The one side of his neck had a seared handprint of black and red with the warps in the palm made to look like the outline of a ghoulish face screaming. And the other side…a snake wrapped around two crossed blades, consuming fire. My drawing.
Chapter 31
Getting Away With Murder
“It’s one thing to fight alongside them when you are one,” the Irishman continued, pointing the tip of a twelve-inch Bowie knife towards Blaine and me. “But to betray your own heavenly duties to save them… Now, that’s just sacrilege. Like father, like son—no doubt.” The stranger gave a wicked grin as he surveyed Reese. “Oh, I’m gonna have fun with you.”
Blaine let out a low laugh. “I wouldn’t threaten him in front of the lady,” he said, nodding to me. “Things won’t end well for you. Trust me.”
“I don’t make threats, Prince. I make promises.”
The world thundered behind us. I looked at the base of the dual front doors, seeing shadows lurching from underneath the doorframe. Our little get-together was about to become an all-out event.
Covetous: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Marked Mage Chronicles, Book 2) Page 32