Face the Dark (Hunters of the Dark #3)

by Dave Ferraro

  ***

  Felicia looked up from a microscope as Cameron entered the infirmary. “Hey, Cameron.”

  “Hello,” he replied, glancing around the room, his eyes resting on the werewolf restrained to a table, unconscious. Rachel’s bed was right next to it, which made Cameron feel a little uneasy. “Is it really safe with that thing in here?”

  “I gave him enough to knock out three werewolves for four hours,” she assured him. “It’s just fine.” She frowned. “What’s up? Forget something?”

  Cameron shook his head. “I was talking to Shanna and…she’s not good. She’s dead on her feet. I thought it would be for the best if we have some adrenaline nearby, just in case.”

  Felicia nodded. “Sensible. Just make sure Jade or Hunter administer it. It would probably be for the best if they worked alongside her anyway, monitor any changes.”

  “Changes?”

  Sighing, Felicia gestured for him to follow her. When they reached Rachel’s bed, Felicia lifted Rachel’s head and a trickle of sand sprinkled from her nose. “Sand is appearing all over. It’s not really hurting anything yet, but I’m a little concerned about where this is going. The longer she’s under, the more unpredictable this is.”

  Cameron nodded slowly as he watched her gently replace Rachel’s head onto the pillow, imagining Shanna in her place. Tessa had said Shanna wouldn’t be harmed by this demon…had she been lying? Or was the sand really passive? He began to feel a little anxiety in his chest as Felicia walked over to a cabinet and began to rifle around for the adrenaline. Could Tessa have tricked him into killing Shanna? But no…the situation with Trivillis had turned out alright once they’d tracked him down. She hadn’t lied to him yet. However, an uneasy feeling began to grow inside him nonetheless. She’d been wrong before. What if she was wrong about this demon too? And what if Trivillis was a distraction for him to deal with, not just to occupy the other hunters? He had made a deal with the devil, after all. It couldn’t all go as smoothly as Tessa professed, could it?

  “You okay?” Felicia asked, clapping him on the back. “You look as white as a ghost.”

  Cameron tried to clear the worries from his head and focus on Felicia. Worrying would get him nowhere. What was done was done. “Yeah, I’m just concerned about Shanna.”

  “I know. But she’ll be fine. We’ll figure out how to stop this monster.”

  “Yeah,” Cameron accepted the adrenaline from her, his fingers brushing hers as they changed hands.

  Felicia suddenly stiffened, her eyes growing a little wider as she looked at him.

  “What?” he asked with a frown.

  “Nothing,” she said, backing away and offering a weak smile. “It’s just hard to stay positive about the situation, right?”

  “Yeah…” Cameron’s eyes narrowed as Felicia’s eyes darted around them, as if searching for something. “Are you sure you’re-”

  His sentence ended in a gasp as she grabbed a glass ball from the counter, a paperweight that was weighing a stack of papers down, and threw it at him.

  He gasped and ducked out of the way before it slammed into the wall behind him with a loud crack. He looked back at it, shocked, and picked it up, staring at the crack in the middle of the clear glass. “What was that for?” he asked, looking up sharply as the door opened and Felicia slipped out into the hallway.

  “Shit,” he cursed, running after her. She knows.

  He shoved the door open without slowing and tore down the hall after her. “Felicia, wait!” he called. “You don’t understand!”

  She looked back at him over her shoulder, and the fear in her eyes told him that she was not going to calmly weigh anything he had to say to her. She was going to get help. From him.

  “Stop!” he pleaded again. He stopped in the middle of the hall, watching her as she continued to flee from him, faster than he could ever catch her. She was going to round the corner that would bring her down the hallway of the library if he didn’t stop her now.

  In a desperate bid, to which he gave little thought, he hurled the glass paperweight in his hand at her. At best he hoped it would knock her over so he could catch up and force her to listen. Maybe it would strike her in the leg. What he wasn’t expecting was for it to hit her in the back of the head.

  The sound was terrible. A loud crack that seemed to echo down the hallway to him, sickly and wet. He recalled the crack in the middle of the paperweight as he saw her crumple to the floor, the glass ball rolling away with a splash of red.

  Cameron stood stunned for a moment before he leapt across the space between them. He kneeled before Felicia and stared down at her face, which looked peaceful and relaxed. But there was a pool of blood collecting just beneath her hair that made his heart sink.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered as he gently lifted her head and turned her around. He gasped at the gaping bloody wound that her hair clung to, and paled at the amount of blood that was seeping from it. “Ohh…” he felt sick as he cradled her head in his lap, unsure of what to do. “Help,” he said weakly. “Help me. Tessa?” He licked his lips, then nodded to himself. “Please, Tessa!”

  “This looks like a mess.”

  Cameron started and turned to see the blonde girl leaning against the wall of the hallway behind him, next to a painting of a ship in a stormy sea. “Tessa, I need your help.”

  “I see that,” Tessa replied, pushing off of the wall and walking closer to him. “Is that the psychic?”

  “Yes. She knew. She suddenly just…knew everything. She tried to run…I…”

  “Ssshhh,” Tessa put a finger up to his lips. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt her. We’ll fix this, okay? No one will know it was you.”

  He blinked up at her for a moment, her blonde hair almost giving her an angelic quality. “You can’t save her?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Tessa sighed regretfully. “She’s already in the Shadow Realm. Her heart has stopped beating. Once a person is dead, not even my powers can help them.”

  “Dead,” he echoed, his face collapsing as he took this in. A sob escaped his throat.

  Tessa watched him for a moment. “You don’t need to be condemned for this.”

  Cameron swallowed hard, fighting to reign his emotions back in, then nodded. He looked back down at Felicia, her blood already soaking through his Jeans.

  “Here.”

  Cameron glanced up and saw a skeletal hand in Tessa’s outreached hand. He blinked as he took in the sharp black talons at the end, the elongated bone of its palms. “What is it?”

  “Common Australian Lycanthrope.”

  A chill ran up Cameron’s spine. “What do you…want me to do?”

  “Rip her wound with the claws.”

  “Ohh…I…” He looked away, tears clouding his vision. “I can’t,” he choked out.

  “You must.”

  He blinked away his tears and ran a hand over them before realizing that he was smearing blood over his face. He accepted the claw and did what he was told. “Now what?” he asked, handing the claw back to Tessa and staring down at Felicia’s body with nausea. He suddenly put a hand up to his mouth and swallowed the acid that climbed up his throat.

  Tessa patted his shoulder. “Almost done. Now you’ll have to wake that werewolf with one of the adrenaline shots. Maybe two, if that’s what it takes. But first, you’ll need to loosen its restraints. Don’t completely undo them. It will need to look as if he broke free. And you’ll need time to get out of its way.”

  He nodded, then frowned. “What about Rachel?”

  “She was never marked for Trivillis, remember? And the marks the werewolves have been after have been lifted with Trivillis’ death. The wolf will give in to its survival instincts. It will only think of escape. No one will be harmed as it leaves the premises.”

  Cameron nodded as Tessa retrieved the glass paperweight and looked it over with interest. “Almost d
one,” she encouraged Cameron as he walked up to the door to the infirmary. “Then it will look as if this never happened.”