Why couldn’t she move? If this was a dream, why was she frozen in place? It was like invisible ropes had her tied down. But not just her legs or her arms, every inch of her was immobile.
She couldn’t blink.
Couldn’t groan.
She couldn’t even feel herself.
Flint floated above her body. But not really. It was bizarre. She could see her skirt hiked up, exposing the edge of her pink silk underwear. See the blood staining the side of her face, the indention at her left temple that made it appear as though her skull was crushed. When had that happened to her?
She could hardly remember anything. Only a flash of red-hot pain and then waking up dazed in this surreal place where nothing made much sense at all.
The woman, dressed in a black robe, knelt before her and pushed Flint’s hair off her shoulder. Her right hand framed Flint’s face; her left rested on her back. And that hand was scarred and withered.
It was such a memorable hand. But the thought was as fleeting as the sight of a feather tossed in a breeze.
The woman wasn’t the only one around. There were others. Females dressed in black leather with swords strapped to their backs fanned out behind her. Their membranous eyes blinked rapidly as if in fear or agitation, their features all the same—cold, aloof, and haughtily beautiful. They looked menacing and powerful. Almost like Wonder Woman, except more Stepford Wife-ish.
Hidden in trees were even more of them. Creatures neither human nor vampire, but who sported fangs and bloodshot eyes. They watched her as she watched them.
“That’s why I had her bite you,” the woman in the black robe whispered, “why I had her test you in that way. If I’d been wrong, you would have died. But I suspected you were so much more. The way you move—I can’t believe my mate never caught on. Still…” The woman played idly with the tips of Flint’s hair. “I can’t quite figure you out. You’re… different.” She cocked her head, sounding confused yet intrigued.
Soft fingers fluttered gently against Flint’s brow. They were cool to her heated flesh. How was she able to feel the touch of that woman’s hands, feel the grass, feel the coolness of night, and yet be outside herself all at the same time?
Was she dead?
The thought was so jarring she gasped, trembling violently. This was a dream; it had to be a dream. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t.
Right?
“You’re no demon. They’ve a”—the strange woman continued on without skipping a beat—”a scent about them. Sort of like sulfur, yet oddly appealing. Especially when they’ve bonded themselves to you.”
She laughed, and the sound of it reminded Flint of a song. But what song? Hadn’t someone teased her about that before? There was a name tied to a song… but every time the title got within reach of her consciousness, it evaporated like fog rolling over still waters.
“I wonder, Flint, have you smelled them? It’s different for each of us, but they say whoever you scent is the one to whom you belong. I see the way you look at my oldest and the way he looks at you.” There was a soft snort of laughter. “I’ve come to make this all better. To fix everything. They don’t understand. They don’t know what’s going on. The truth behind the Order. They just don’t know, but I’ll make you see, I’ll make you know. They’ll understand eventually. They’ll have to…”
The crazy words trailed off, as though the robed woman had lost the threads of her thoughts.
Flint trembled from head to toe as she tried to will her body back to consciousness. Screaming at her body to wake up. Tried to tell herself to get up so that she could run away. Get away from this dangerous woman who was so familiar.
She swallowed, feeling something strange beginning to happen inside her. She was two separate things—spirit and body—but she was also one. The tingling, it wasn’t in her spirit; it was happening inside the body. Tingles, all up and down. Like kicking over a nest of ants and watching as they all rushed out at once. Except with this nest, the ants were inside her.
The ground groaned.
“My queen.” One of the Stepford amazons stepped into Flint’s line of sight and interrupted the robed woman’s ramblings. But this one was dressed differently than the others. She was in casual jeans and a fitted print shirt.
The amazon looked familiar to Flint too. Like someone she’d seen walking through the halls of her school at some point.
Why couldn’t her brain make the connections? Everything was so fuzzy and disjointed.
“What?” The queen turned and snapped, her features still well hidden beneath the deep hood of the cloak.
The amazon was youngish looking—she couldn’t have been much older than Flint in fact. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot, but there was an alien quality to her movements that wasn’t human at all. In her hands she carried a black, covered object that was huge. Easily taller than her and clearly heavier than her small frame, but the girl acted as though it was nothing.
The queen vibrated with anger, and for a moment Flint was sure she’d be witnessing something violent and gruesome, but then the queen’s eyes alighted on the bundle in the girl’s hands and she nodded. “Get him to the compound quickly. All of you go and keep a watchful eye on our package, save for the royal guard. I’ll be there soon.”
And like a puff of smoke, all but the haughty, frightening queen and her amazonian vanguard in leather vanished.
Hive!
She remembered, the name coming on like a bolt of lightning. This was the hive. They’d been searching for the hive. And if this was the hive, then that meant the woman in black was their queen.
Flint knew her.
For just a second, a flood of warmth pulsed through her because if she knew that, it meant her brain would finally be able to fit the last piece of the puzzle in place. But no name came to her. There was a giant blank with a song she didn’t know playing like elevator music in the background.
Frustrated and feeling the need to weep, Flint willed herself to think. She’d spoken to the queen before. In a different place, a different time, when things had been… safer?
Maybe?
God, why was it so hard to remember? She knew she needed to remember, knew this was important. They’d been searching for the queen. They needed to know.
But she couldn’t even remember who they were right now.
The queen turned back around. Flint wished she could see beneath the hood, could see the face instead of just hearing the voice. A memory kept trying to jog itself loose, like a half-remembered thought stuck in the back of her brain. It was right there, almost at the surface, but the harder Flint tried to connect the dots, the more blurry things got.
Blades of grass crawled up Flint’s calf—her calf! How was that even possible?
This was much more than a mere dream; she knew that now. The sensations were too rich, too visceral to just be a fantasy.
She frowned as the grass thickened, becoming vinier and sprouting thorns. Hissed when a large hooked one sank so deep into the meat of her thigh that she felt it scrape bone.
Gasping, she glanced down at her body lying prone on the ground and could only gaze on in horror as blood began to stain the tattered ruins of her once pretty dress.
Panicked, she screamed, crying out for help. For someone to come save her from not just from the madwoman but also from nature itself as more and more thorns dug through her flesh.
No one noticed.
The grass was rooting inside her body from the points of contact where her flesh touched earth.
But how did no one notice the thickening blades of grass, how jeweled and rich the bed she lay on now was? How could they not smell the sudden, concentrated scent of blood spilling down her thighs, her stomach?
Unless… unless the queen could control nature? But half-remembered thoughts came to her. The queen could create life, yes, but only monsters. She held no sway over nature.
So who was doing this?
Though she couldn’t see the queen’s face, Flint
sensed her smile as she said, “You are the key to all this, Flint. I had to decide who to take. My firstborn is strong now. But it is my youngest who’ll be the more powerful of the two. I’ll make sure of that.”
Then the queen’s hands shoved Flint’s face to the side, exposing her neck, and before she knew what was happening, sharp teeth sank into her vein.
Feeling the fire of pain that raced through her, Flint tried to slap a hand against her neck. But of course she couldn’t.
In this strange world between life and death she couldn’t feel her flesh. But her soul, spirit—whatever the heck she now was—was still tethered to it somehow. Connected in such a way that anything that happened to the body, she felt.
Here, in this spirit world, it was cold and yet warm all at the same time, and the very air itself prickled with power.
The pain was exquisite. Sensory. Like someone had sliced her open, exposed her nerves, and dipped them in acid. The scream was stuck in the back of her throat, and deep down she knew something was wrong.
Something powerful flowed through her veins. Like poison, she felt it ripping through her insides, but there was something else inside there too. Something maybe even a little bit stronger, a little more primal—and dare she even think it, ancient—was waking up.
Her spirit body dropped to its knees and she hung her head, losing herself to the terrible overload.
She wanted to claw her skin off. The way her blood suddenly boiled inside her. How the blades of grass beneath her felt a lot like lying on a bed of nails. The wind sweeping across her thighs like the burn of electricity. It was horrific, and yet… she’d never been more alive. Like something dormant had suddenly been roused deep inside her soul.
“Stop,” someone gasped.
But Flint was confused.
Had she said that? Or someone else?
No longer could she focus on the scene around her, the queen sucking on her neck, or the royal guards standing at the ready behind her back, because the world was shattering with noise and chaos.
The way a beetle sounded as it marched across the ground. Like heavy little stomps of chain-mailed feet. The way a worm burrowed beneath soil, like a slow-rotating propeller, its whoosh echoing in her ears. And the way the wind whispered through the leaves, its melody plucking at her soul and bringing tears to her eyes.
“No. No!”
The queen’s shriek finally pierced through Flint’s haze, and her spirit glanced up just in time to witness the queen forcibly thrown off her physical body—as though by an invisible hand—against the base of a tree.
Flint’s body still lay on the ground, unmoving and unflinching, covered in blood and thorny vines on all sides now.
The royal guard surrounded their queen, swords drawn, hissing into the woods as their alien eyes scanned the trees for the threat. One of them came toward Flint’s body.
But now her body wasn’t simply lying there, it was seizing, kicking up dirt and debris as it curled in on itself. The groan of the vines banding tighter around her made it hard for Flint’s spirit to catch a breath. She clutched at her neck as terror pounded like horses’ hooves inside her muddled mind.
“No. Don’t touch her!” The queen snapped at the guard who had a sword pointed at Flint’s throat. But her voice sounded thick and heavy, like she’d suddenly developed a lisp. “We still need her.”
Flint had been so consumed by the lack of breath that she’d failed to notice until now that the queen’s hood had been pulled back to reveal the woman’s true identity. And all the images she hadn’t been able to piece together suddenly locked into place.
Layla’s ruined visage gazed down on Flint’s body. Her lips were cracked and oozing blood. Her hands shook as she pointed at Flint’s body.
“I believe I know what she is now. Grab her. Grab her quick!” Layla coughed, rubbing her throat and grimacing with each swallow.
The guard who’d held a sword to Flint’s body sheathed it and knelt, leaning forward as though to scoop Flint into her arms.
But before she could, a large fissure opened up in the earth just in inch away from where Flint’s body lay.
“Hurry! Now!” Layla screamed, staring on in panic as tree trunks groaned, cracking straight down the middle.
The moment the guard laid a hand on Flint, the vines stirred like a disturbed hornet’s nest. She didn’t even get a moment to wonder why one of the thorns suddenly elongated to the length of a large sword, because from one blink to the next, that thorn slammed into the guard’s chest.
The amazon’s scream was horrific as she clutched at it, flailing like a fish on a hook as she tried with all her might to extract herself. But the land where she’d been kneeling opened, and she disappeared inside the earth with a final chilling cry.
“We need to get out of here. Now! Now! Now!” Layla scrabbled to her feet, ignoring the comrade she’d lost.
The remaining guards scooped their queen up and vanished as though they’d never been there at all.
The thorns had now crawled up Flint’s neck, and broad, jewellike leaves curled open, wrapping around her mouth and eyes.
She wanted to slap at her eyes, suddenly as blind as her body, which was lying cold and lifeless on the forest floor.
Flint screamed and screamed as the vines began to drag her under, and she inhaled dirt into her nose, her lungs, as she drew in frantic breaths.
Then she was spiraling down into a black so deep it was a void of nothingness.
“No!” was all she could scream, and then she was also gone.
Cain
* * *
They’d come at him from many different directions. He’d never seen so many hive in one place. His brain had screamed to go and find her, to protect her, but then they’d been on him, dragging him under in a wave of arms and legs.
Cain couldn’t remember much, except for the smell of their tainted blood everywhere by the time the last drone fell at his feet.
The groaning of falling debris and flickering lights was everywhere, confusing him. In full-on rage mode now, his only thought, his only concern, was finding her.
“Flint!” He roared with a voice that was no longer his own but pure monster, running through the gymnasium that was now ablaze with fire and thick black smoke. He’d told her to leave, to run far away, but he’d seen the look in her eyes. And his flesh had crawled with fear for her because he knew she wouldn’t listen to him.
Flint would come back to try to help because that’s what she did, but then they’d gotten separated and he’d not had a chance to force her to go before he’d been jumped by at least twenty drones.
“Please don’t be here, please don’t be here.” He wheezed and covered his nose against the unbelievable heat. Eyes watering from the thick smoke, he searched with his heart in his throat, sidestepping the twisted metal rods, bleachers, tables, and chunks of drywall as his gaze frantically sought out the one face he had to find.
But in the midst of mangled and burning corpses and tacky bits of flesh and bone, he couldn’t see her. Her blood wasn’t here though.
He knew her. Knew her scent.
The storm that lived inside her blood, the scent of rain. The colors of her soul.
“Not here. Not here,” he barked with each toss of a table, each glimpse of a body in a dress that did not belong to her.
“Outside! Janet says she went outside.” Eli came barreling up. The left side of his head had been split open and blood flowed down the side of his face. His eyes glowed the deep red of flame.
But Cain’s relief was short-lived. Just as he rushed to go find her, Eli’s fingers dug into his elbows. “We can’t find Abel, Cain. He’s not here. The queen took him.”
Cain roared, no longer even looking halfway human. He was his beast. Fully turned and ready to slaughter.
“Find her and kill her.”
Eli’s nostrils flared. “That’s not the worst part though—Rhi saw her.” The pause between words could have lasted only a s
econd but had felt more like an hour before Eli said, “It was your mom, man.”
Stunned, Cain could only stare at Eli, the words too huge to compute right now. He needed more time to think that through; all he had time to focus on now was finding Flint.
“We called Adam,” Eli said just as a heated red beam dropped from the roof, landing with a crash just a few yards from where they stood. “Cops’ll be here any minute now. We need to get out of here.”
“I’m finding Flint, you find Layla,” Cain snapped. “Get my brother back. Go now!”
With a hard nod, Eli jumped out of a blown-out window, running at breakneck speed for the woods behind the school.
Cain followed, and that’s when he finally caught wind of her scent. Thunderclouds and rain.
With a roar that sounded like a grizzly attack, he kept to the shadows as best he could.
The Order would kill them all if even one of them exposed themselves right now. The hive had done this. The hive would pay.
He was halfway across the lawn when he stopped. The scent here was stronger than any place it’d been before. Because it wasn’t just rain he smelled, but blood.
Flint’s blood.
“Oh God.” Panic clawed at his throat.
A shadow of darkness barreled down on him. Stopping mere inches away, it began to take form. Mercurial, fiery eyes stared into his own.
“Have you found her?” Rhiannon asked, her voice sounding like a ghostly wail.
Ignoring her question, he stepped around her and ran. Heart pumping furiously with adrenaline, he was getting closer to her. Could smell her everywhere now.
“Blood. So much blood. So much blood.” He sniffed, barely keeping it together. Stopping, growing more and more confused because her smell wasn’t just coming from drops of blood, it seemed to be literally seeping up from the earth beneath his feet in large waves.
“We’ll find her, Cain. We’ll find—” Rhiannon’s words were cut short when the land exploded fifty yards in front of them.
The Complete Tempted Series Page 34