by C. M. Owens
Just as he opens his mouth to speak, there’s suddenly a black hole forming beside us, and Slade’s hands light up with power. Kimber steps out, and he curses as Thad follows.
But it’s the look in their eyes that has me worried.
“What?” I demand.
“Karma and Dice were taken. Chaz is with Roslyn.” Thad says, looking between us before his eyes settle on Slade. “As much as I hate to ask this, we need help. Roslyn is tracking them quickly. We gave her blood from everyone not long ago in case of something like this ever happening again. She’s on the trail, but we may need help busting in.”
“No,” Slade says before I can launch into action. “They could easily block your wolf if they wanted to—they’ve studied her and others like her for too long not to know how to circumvent such a possibility. They’ve been hundreds of steps ahead. They wouldn’t leave that detail unturned unless it was on purpose.”
“I’ll come with you,” I tell Thad, trying to remain calm, but feeling every molecule in my body doing all they can to explode with panic.
My sister is pregnant, and they have her. There’s no telling what they’re doing to her right this second.
“Fuck no!” Slade snaps. “Did you miss what I said? It’s a trap. They’re probably already dead by now, because they know these stupid fools will rush in blindly regardless. They wouldn’t bother keeping them alive at this point.”
“You can’t know that, and she’s my sister. My twin, Slade,” I plead, feeling my throat close up.
His eyes harden. “You expect to find sympathy from me?”
No, nor empathy. He wants his twin dead but can’t kill him for fear of it killing him as well.
“No,” I tell him quietly, walking quickly over to where Thad and Kimber have moved to during our argument. “But don’t expect me to do nothing.”
“It’s pointless,” he yells to my back. “I won’t come for you this time. You’re on your own if you do this!”
I don’t expect him to come for me, since I’ll die before I let them take me alive.
“Where is Roslyn?” I ask, staring at Thad. “You said she’s got their trail?”
He nods, reading his phone. “Zee is following her. Leah too. We don’t know these people like you do or the types of things we’ll encounter. We’re sure she’s been taken to the rings. There were three dark figures. They all looked like medieval knights.”
My stomach tightens with dread. I’d hoped they all died since they haven’t made an appearance since the rings. Not even one mention of them has been made.
“Harbingers of Death. They can’t use magic, but they’re made of it. Acidic fingernails, venomous bites, a poisonous touch, brutal, savage, mindless... They don’t have eyes, but they can still see somehow. Other than being creepy as fuck and dangerous as hell, they’re nothing more than slaves. They serve one purpose and it’s to inflict pain. Some of Slade’s scars were made by them. They were designed for torture.”
Thad swallows hard.
“If they inject the poison into their systems, they’re dead—or at least I don’t know of anyone to survive. It’s a slow, painful, brutal death. Black veins is a sign they’ve been poisoned, much like the blood-starved. They’re damn near indestructible with their armor—it’s cast from some type of poison itself. But if you can break the armor, you can break the monster inside.”
“Zee just sent a text. Roslyn is heading west, and she’s gaining speed,” Thad says, looking down at his phone.
I nod, but before I can go anywhere, a searing pain tears through my chest, and my breath leaves me in a rush as I collapse to the ground. An agonized scream tears through my lips... No. Not my scream. It’s from somewhere else... A cry for help. The desperate plea of a soul linked to mine.
Karma!
“I feel her,” I cry out. The panic. The fear. The rage. The pure heartbreak.
“Feel who?” someone demands.
Another scream leaves me, and suddenly I’m vacating my body, looking down on it as nothing but a red haze, seconds before I’m hurled away like a vacuum is sucking me in.
The same feeling hits me when I leave to possess another, but there’s nothing to possess.
Distant screams track me, but they fade as a myriad of noises and sounds pass me by in a whirl. There’s nothing but bright colors and chaotic nonsense slipping past me in the endless spiral that drags me too fast for me to look around.
Seconds before I slam into a room, I see the scene, and my heart hits my throat as the incubus falls to the ground, lifeless.
Another scream tears through my lips as I collide into the body not meant for possession, and hear the sobs of my sister inside my own head. No, not my head.
They killed him!
She recoils inside us... Inside us.
I’m inside her.
My eyes flick open as something powerful hums in my veins. The demons join together, stirring a flurry of violence and vengeance, and hollow, absent eyes stare through to the core of me.
Strength courses through me, unrestrained and raw. The room fills with a dark haze as the face of death staggers back. The chains break, pulling free from the walls in one hard tug.
“What the hell?” someone asks as the demons inside combine as one, tempered by nothing, controlled by none.
Something oozes from us, feeling so dark and incredible as it drifts through the air in a hot haze of red. It settles over the broken incubus who sucks in a sharp breath of new air.
He coughs and chokes on his blood as the knight looks between us and him, and he stumbles back another step.
“Bloody kill them!” a voice snaps.
The knight charges, and our hand flies up, slamming into his chest. His body sails backwards, slamming into the wall behind him. We cock our head, studying him. He looks so weak. Insignificant. Pathetic.
He tried to kill us.
Let’s destroy him.
With a scream so raw and primal, our hand shoots out again, and the knight falls to the floor with a clank and a garbled groan. The loud man who was shouting orders now cowers in the corner, his eyes wide and horrified as we near him with the measured steps of a true predator.
Let’s break them.
Let’s slaughter them all.
Paint the world with their blood.
It’ll be so pretty. Their screams will feed us. Their pleas will seduce us.
And we’ll be their only fear.
The hissing darkness drives us forward, and the incubus disappears from sight as we send him away.
He needs to heal.
“You like to watch?” we ask the visionary as he shrinks farther into the corner, his hands uselessly grappling the wall.
We need to kill.
“Watch this,” we tell him as the armor bursts into ashes and we do something so horrifying to the harbinger’s body that the visionary turns and vomits.
They all need to die.
“Your turn,” we say to the sobbing visionary.
Chapter 24
CHAZ
I curse as Roslyn stops, sniffing. I never should have left. I could have possibly stopped them from taking Dice and Karma. Karma pissed me off, saying things I was too stubborn to hear.
I left them unprotected.
Now they’re gone.
Kya’s sister is gone.
She’ll blame me forever, and I deserve it.
Roslyn sniffs the air, and I turn on my senses, finding them useless once again. They didn’t leave a trail. Not even a small one.
She releases a howl, and I rush to her, stumbling to a halt as my eyes widen in disbelief. Dice is on the ground, his body slashed and seared with dark, charred lines.
Roslyn whimpers as I drop to his side, hearing the steady beat of his heart. I’m not even sure how he’s alive right now.
Scrambling, I grab my phone, and I call Gage.
“Did you find them?” he barks.
“Dice... He’s in the woods close to the old battlefield
. Find us—”
He appears suddenly, and his breath staggers when he sees the bloody remains of our barely breathing friend.
“Get him to Dray. Now!”
He puts his hands on Dice, and they vanish together. How the fucking hell did he end up here of all places?
Just as Roslyn starts to charge again, something appears in front of me. It takes two seconds too long to realize it’s Slade... but that’s not what has me dropping to my knees.
Kya’s body is limp and lifeless in his arms. My entire soul feels like it’s being ripped out of me at the sight of her. She looks so fragile and still, no color remaining in her once vibrant skin.
Rage, grief, and pure fury burns through my veins as a roar slices through the air, emerging from something so deep inside me that I almost let it fully take over to avoid the pain.
My chest caves in as I heave for air, almost finding it impossible to breathe. Slade says nothing as he slowly places her in front of me, carefully laying her cold, still body on the ground.
At the first feel of something wet on my face, another roar shakes the ground, causing the trees to bend and groan with the force of the attack on their roots.
“Good. You’re pissed. Now find her.”
My eyes snap up as I ride the edge of feral and sane, barely holding myself together as my hands dig into the dirt, gripping onto anything to hold me in place, as though I’ll disappear if I let myself.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I growl, slowly climbing to my feet.
He’ll finally die.
My fist slams into his face so hard and unexpectedly that he flies backward on impact, his body smacking into a tree with enough force to knock it up, pulling the entire thing out of the ground.
He curses as he pushes himself up, and fire flies from my hands. He disappears and reappears right beside me, slamming his fist into my ribs.
“Get mad. Get desperate. Find that point inside you that can find her and save her before it’s too late.”
I can barely see as the dragon’s vision shifts, turning into a heat signature that merely outlines his shape in red surrounded by blue and green.
“She’s alive,” he tells me calmly.
Those two words have my vision slowly coming back, and I shake my head, trying to understand.
“But she won’t be if she doesn’t have a body to come back to. Find her. Your instincts demand you claim her. You can find her before the she wolf. She left to possess, but whatever force called her won’t send her back to her body. She’ll likely be dead or lost forever if there’s nothing to be possessed when she comes out.”
Every fiber in my body becomes attuned with her scent, and the beast inside me lets out a low, dangerous growl that vibrates everything around me as the world seems to stop moving around us.
Leaves freeze mid-drop, the air silences, and the creatures of the forest halt as time and space seem to cease in existence.
Echoes of screams find my ears, distant but not too distant. I lift her into my arms, breathing her in deeper, hearing the screams become more pronounced. My head jerks to the right, and I shakily exhale.
“You made me think she was dead. I should kill you.” I cut my eyes toward him, but he doesn’t even flinch.
“You’ve found them, haven’t you?” Slade asks, his voice cool and deadly.
“Keep up.”
I disappear, holding Kya to me like she’s a glass doll. My feet hit the ground inside a dark tunnel, and I look around, trying to figure out where exactly I am.
It takes Slade a matter of seconds to catch up, proving he’s good at trailing the tail of a transport.
A sick feeling invades my throat when I look down to the body that’s on the ground. The skin has been peeled off, and the man chokes on air as blood oozes freely to the floor.
Slade covers his nose, turning away like this is too disgusting for even him.
“What the fuck could do that?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
He reaches for Kya, but I hold her tighter, glaring at him like I’m daring him to touch her. His eyes narrow. “Can you fight without risking her body? Or can I hide her so we can find out where the hell she went?”
“You should have brought a doll. We wouldn’t need to stash her body.”
He glares at me. “I didn’t think to bring a doll. Besides, a doll wouldn’t have provoked your instincts. Now hand her to me so I can hide her.”
With a hard kick, I knock out a large portion of the wall, and it crumbles away, leaving room for me to place Kya inside. My Lokie powers slide over the wall, covering it with the illusion that it is untouched.
“She’s hidden, now where—”
A scream from down the hall interrupts me, and I crush the man’s head beneath my boot, ending his torture as Slade starts racing toward the new screams.
He curses, and I taste bile in my throat as we reach the end of the hall and find the next corridor filled with skinless bodies, all of the men slowly dying as they bleed out. Holes are gaping through their chests, as though the monster that did this didn’t want to risk any of them surviving.
“What could do this?” I ask as we hurry forward, stepping over skinned body after skinned body.
“Nothing I’ve ever seen,” he says, pulling his shirt over his nose to help taper the stench of death, decay, and rotten flesh.
My stomach sinks with dread. What if whatever is doing this has hurt Kya? What body is she even in right now?
Dice wasn’t skinned alive. Whatever tried to gut him wasn’t this thing.
The ground groans beneath us as pipes begin to rattle all around. More screams guide us down another corridor filled with just as many flayed bodies with holes in their chests. These are mostly dead this time. It seems as though the kills become more efficient with each new hallway.
The putrid scent grows stronger, and I curse when one of the skinless hands reaches out and grabs my foot. My eyes find the man’s, but I see no hint of Kya in him, so I jerk away. He collapses, his eyes going into a blank stare as he finally dies.
Oddly, he’s one of the few that seems to have eyes. What happened to the rest of their eyes?
Slade’s fists light up with power, and mine light up with fire in response. We weave our way through several hallways of this underground kingdom we didn’t know existed. The tunnels are littered with breadcrumbs in the form of rotting bodies.
“What causes them to rot so quickly?” Slade asks, coughing as the smell grows stronger and stronger with each advance.
“Fuck if I know. How did Kya leave her body if there wasn’t something to go to that she could see? I thought she had to see what she was possessing?”
“I don’t know. Twins in the paranormal world are a rare and very curious thing. Somehow Karma called to her, and Kya’s instincts led her from there. I never should have fucking told her to trust her instincts.”
His voice is layered with fury and... fear?
My heart is pounding out of my chest with fear—fear that Kya is like one of these... In one of these skinless bags of meat.
I’m not sure what I’ll do if... I can’t even think about it. Everyone still alive will definitely die, and I may not ever come back from the abyss. With every step, the dread notches higher, and my fears get worse, causing the primal side of me to growl and threaten to emerge.
Slade skids through blood, slamming into a wall, his eyes wide and fixed down another hallway I haven’t reached yet. I stumble to a halt as my eyes land on the same thing Slade’s have.
There’s a huge square room full of various cages, all locked up with random people inside. They’re all gripping their cages in terror, watching the same horrific show Slade and I are.
Karma pushes her hand out, and skin flies off four bodies that are racing toward her. Her eyes are solid black with a red pupil, and her laugh is echoed, as though two voices are laughing at once.
Kya...
“Kya’s in there with her,
” I say quietly to Slade, watching as at least twenty men in black armor race after her.
“I know,” he says on a stunned breath. “This is really fucking bad.”
She spins, her foot kicking out, slamming into the chest of one, and he slashes her leg with his claws. There are several marks on her, but they all seem to be healing rapidly, the blood loss minimal.
I start to go in, but Slade rips me back. “She could skin you,” he says, his voice barely audible. “Create an illusion that doesn’t let her notice the ones in the cages. Cloak us all so I can get them out before Kya does something she’ll never forgive herself for.”
“She had to be the one to get Dice out,” I point out, drawing up the illusion anyway.
“Before or after she joined demons with Karma? Before or after she started skinning people alive? Do you want to chance it?”
Slade goes in under the cover of the illusion, breaking through the cage doors without making too much sound. Kya and Karma seem to be more focused on fighting or peeling the skin off the rushing bodies still pouring in.
They staged a trap for us, and turned it into a playground for true demons.
Newly released prisoners rush by us, racing toward freedom or dematerializing as soon as they can. I barely notice them because my eyes are fixed on the darkness spiraling around Kya and Karma as they share a body, demolishing everything in their path.
They smile when the screams grow louder, enjoying the torture and pain they’re inflicting.
I don’t notice that Slade has returned to my side until he’s right next to me.
“Ever wonder who the demon was that spawned the two of them?” Slade asks as the last prisoner is freed.
“Who?” I ask, still transfixed on the sight before me as the bodies continue to pile up.
They seem to be struggling to kill them as easily as they were, as though they’re growing weaker the more they exert force.
“I don’t know, but I’m guessing he was an evil son of a bitch. As soon as they drop, we’re going to have to rush in and finish off what’s left. You grab Kya’s body.”
Normally I wouldn’t take his orders, but I transport back to where I left her, snatch her from the wall, and return in less than a blink.