Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1)

by Victoria Thorne

  Arisella scowled. “We definitely don’t have time for that. Be thankful your human’s here so you can say goodbye to him.”

  “No one’s saying goodbye to me,” Dylan spat.

  A loud crash emerged from inside the house, like the sound of the front door being ripped to splinters.

  “Gods,” Adrian whispered. “We can’t leave him here now.” He faced Dylan and spoke rapidly in a hushed voice. “If you choose to go with us, you must understand that where we are going is not safe for you, and you may die.”

  “I understand.” Dylan had turned as pale as the sheet that was on the car.

  The next resounding reverberation that echoed through the house was enough to send everyone scrambling into the car. Before I could even comprehend what was going on, Adrian had already claimed the seat beside me and pressed a button on the rearview mirror that opened the garage door.

  “Drive!” Adrian commanded.

  I didn’t have to be told twice. I saw the two caecus demons burst through the door to the garage, just as I smashed the key into the ignition and yanked the car into reverse. I backed out of the driveway and raced down the street at the speed of light, violating countless traffic regulations along the way.

  The caeci released shrill screams and tore down the street on all fours after us.

  My colorless knuckles trembled on the wheel as I blew through stop signs and red lights. Luckily, it was still early in the day and barely anyone was on the road.

  “Turn right here,” Adrian directed. “We’ll get rid of them once we reach the freeway. For a little while, at least. They’ll still be able to track us.”

  I did as he said, taking a direct route to the freeway while earning infuriated honks from everyone I passed. Once we hit the freeway and traffic became thicker, I lost sight of the caeci. Hopefully they had been hit by cars.

  I couldn’t believe that they had been able to match the speed of the car. Perhaps that was one of the reasons they were such deadly trackers. No one would ever be able to outrun them.

  “We lost them,” Adrian confirmed, and I heard everyone exhale hugely in relief.

  “What were they?” Dylan asked with knitted eyebrows.

  “Oh, right. You can’t see them,” I remembered.

  “I could still hear them – and smell them.” Dylan shuddered.

  “They were caeci. They look like mutilated corpses, so you’re not really missing out on much,” Arisella said.

  “How long will I be driving?” I asked.

  “Nine hours, maybe more depending on traffic. You may want to drive a little more slowly though. We need to make sure they’ll still be able to follow us.” Adrian produced an ancient-looking map from the glove box, and I frowned.

  “Dylan, could you load the directions on Google Maps?” I called to the backseat. The last thing I wanted was to get hopelessly lost while caeci were on my tail.

  “Sure thing.” Dylan sounded pleased, as he watched Adrian fold up his outdated map.

  “As vintage as that map looks,” I said to Adrian apologetically, “technology is probably going to be more efficient.”

  “You’re probably right,” Adrian admitted.

  “Anyway, you and Arisella look like you could really use some sleep,” I said. “I’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

  It didn’t take long for Adrian and Arisella to slip into quiet slumbers while Dylan fed me the occasional direction from the backseat. This was the most at peace we had all been, maybe ever.

  The sunlight danced on my fingers as I drummed them lightly against the wheel. Beside us, the trees morphed into one green, indistinguishable blur. The thought of caeci running in the woods alongside us chilled me.

  I watched the miles register on the odometer, knowing that with every one, I left my home further behind.

  Hadn’t I just done this? Hadn’t I just moved to a whole new place to escape my problems?

  I shook my head. No, my problems had just gotten worse. This time, I didn’t feel confident in what I was doing. This time, I had to live with the guilt that came with abandoning my family.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I dragged the back of my hand over my eyes in an attempt to shield myself from the sunlight that streamed in through my red eyelids. My neck throbbed from the awkward position it had been placed in. I groaned as I forced myself into a sitting position.

  We were still in the car.

  I could feel the miniscule vibrations of the road in my bones. I turned over in my seat to stare out the window. We were still driving through a woodsy area, although, from what I could glimpse of individual trees before they flew past the window, a different woodsy area than before.

  My violet eyes stared back at me from their reflection in the window. Disconcerted, I looked away and turned my attention to the inside of the car.

  Thirty minutes after we had left, Dylan insisted that we switch places. He knew I was too tired to drive for seven hours with nothing to distract me from the monotony of the interstate. So we had pulled over onto the side of the road and switched places with the frenzy of a Nascar pit stop crew, without so much as waking up Adrian and Arisella. In the back seat, I wasted no time de-plastering my irritating, mud-colored contacts from my eyeballs. They felt like burning films on my eyes, and removing them immediately after school had always brought me a welcome wave of relief.

  “Good, we’re all up now,” Arisella yawned in the seat beside me. Based on the empty water bottles and the heap of saturated black napkins and clothes at her feet, she had rubbed most of the caecus blood off herself and changed into new clothes while I slept.

  “Where are we?” I asked. The sun was hanging low on the horizon, as if it were hesitant to touch the tips of the farthest trees.

  “Halfway through Louisiana,” Dylan answered. “We’ve been driving for a little over six hours. And I’m proud to announce that I have successfully burned through an entire tank of gas, so now no one can keep me from satisfying my need to pee.” Dylan shot Arisella an exultant look.

  “Disgusting,” she muttered.

  “There’s a gas station coming up in two minutes. I better not see anyone racing into the bathroom ahead of me.” Dylan directed this toward Adrian.

  “I highly doubt that’s going to be a problem,” Adrian assured.

  Dylan recklessly pulled into a dilapidated gas station below a sign with grimy fluorescent lights that spelled “Roy’s Gas.” He barely even waited for the car to come to a complete stop before dancing off in the direction of the bathrooms. I couldn’t help smiling after him.

  “He’s quite a character, isn’t he?” Adrian was leaning up against the car in faded blue jeans and a gray American Eagle shirt in a way that made him look like he was born to be on the cover of a magazine. It just wasn’t fair.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  Arisella had gone inside the gas station to browse, leaving Adrian and I to ourselves. I could feel Adrian studying my simple human movements as I shoved the nozzle into the car and waited for the tank to fill.

  “Could you stop that?” I blurted, surprising myself.

  “What?”

  “Watching me. It makes it hard to concentrate.” I kept my eyes fixed on the pump.

  “Well, what would you want me to do instead?” Adrian looked amused.

  “I don’t know.” The pump clicked and I pulled it out of the car. “Watch the forest for caeci.”

  “Where are you going?” Adrian called as I briskly walked away from him into the gas station.

  “Inside to pay.” I waved the receipt behind me as proof. “Don’t worry. I’m perfectly capable of doing this myself.”

  Ignoring everything I had just said, Adrian remained two steps behind me. He looked like he was about to join me at the register until Arisella hissed at him from across the store, beckoning him to come.

  Adrian groaned, looked at Arisella then me, and went to his sister.

  I handed the receipt to the sh
ort, pudgy man at the register. He looked like he had more hair in his beard than I had on my head, and he smelled as if his diet consisted solely of beef jerky. I imagined his name must have been Roy.

  “Evenin,” Roy rasped. I could smell stale cigarette smoke on his breath. “You look like you’ve been on the road a while. Where you headed?”

  “Natchez, Mississippi.” I pulled a hundred dollar bill out of my wallet and waited for the change. Matt had always supplied me with more money than I ever had a need for. “Is it much farther?”

  “A couple hours out.”

  “Well, if buffalo can’t fly, explain these,” Arisella whispered loudly from the other side of the store, poking her finger into a bag of frozen buffalo wings.

  “Aris, I don’t think that’s actually buffalo…” Adrian argued, but even he sounded unsure when he said it.

  Roy judged them with narrowed eyes.

  “They’re foreign,” I said quickly. Technically it wasn’t really a lie. “I’m sorry, but I just remembered that I should get food. Would you mind waiting while I find some things to add to the bill?” None of us had eaten all day, and I couldn’t have been the only one who was starving.

  Roy grunted okay, and I went to the back of the store to load my arms with granola bars, water bottles, and potato chip bags.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw a shiny black sedan slide into the pump across the lot. Two slender men dressed in matching dark clothing emerged from it. They looked like they were going to a funeral.

  In the frozen-foods corner secluded by stacked boxes of beer, Adrian and Arisella were too busy bickering to notice that one of the men had entered the gas station. The stranger glanced at Adrian and Arisella before quickly losing interest.

  I lowered my eyes in an attempt to avoid attracting attention to myself, but I didn’t have to be looking at the stranger to know that he had locked his eyes onto me. He moved stealthily across the store toward me, before stopping to pick up a bag of nuts on the next aisle. He was still watching me.

  Time to go.

  I hurried down the center aisle and out the exit, knowing the stranger was on my heels. In the back of my mind, I registered that Roy was calling that I had forgotten my change.

  I had managed to make it to the car and chuck the food into the backseat, before I felt a hand grab me by the arm and spin me around. Something cool and sharp was pressed to my neck, forcing my head up against the side of the car so that I could look into the eyes of the murderous stranger. Or rather, so he could look into mine.

  “An Irisbourn,” he breathed, his lips peeling back to reveal his teeth.

  “Stop,” I choked. I felt hot, sticky wetness running down my neck.

  The stranger’s dark eyes glittered. “How very, very unfortunate for y-” His words broke off suddenly as he lurched forward and a disgusting, wet gurgle rose from his mouth. The pressure on my neck disappeared, and he crumpled to his knees in front of me, revealing Adrian directly behind him, redness spattered across his gray American Eagle shirt.

  It was only then that I saw the black, needle-like blade lodged in the stranger’s back, and the identical one in his hand.

  Further behind Adrian, Dylan and Arisella stood frozen.

  “Let’s move!” Arisella shouted, bringing us all to our senses.

  We all got into the car, Adrian and I in the back and Dylan and Arisella in the front, as the enraged second funeral man sprinted toward us from his car across the parking lot.

  Dylan sped away, leaving the reality of what we had just done behind us.

  I pressed my palm into my neck in an attempt to keep the blood from spilling out of me. I had no idea how deep the wound was. All I knew was that it burned like hell.

  “Let me see.” Adrian pulled himself closer to me and removed my cupped hand from around my neck. I felt a new stream of blood trickle out, and he pulled his shirt off over his head and pressed it against the base of my throat. Even though I might have been dying, I couldn’t help staring at his chest. Damn, he was cut.

  “It’s superficial,” Adrian breathed with relief. “But it should still be bandaged.”

  “Seriously? Was it really necessary to take off your shirt?” Dylan groaned from the driver’s seat. “We have sterile first aid equipment in the back.”

  Adrian just smirked and leaned over the seat to retrieve the medical kit.

  “You killed someone,” I stated while Adrian calmly cut a square of gauze, “and left him in a gas station.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, he was Bloodbourn. And about to kill you, I might add. Now hold still.” Adrian replaced his shirt with the gauze and fastened it into place with medical tape.

  “Tell your conscience to relax,” Arisella advised. “Adrian murdered a murderer.”

  “Guys, as much as I hate to interrupt your discussion about the murder Adrian just committed, I think Bloodbourn #2 is following us.”

  Without a doubt, the black sedan from the gas station was riding our bumper, although the windows were too dark to see inside.

  “Keep driving and stay calm,” Arisella instructed. “We’ll lose him on the next interchange.”

  It took about fifteen minutes for the bleeding at my neck to completely stop, and then thirty more to get rid of the Bloodbourn sedan.

  We drove into Natchez just as the final traces of sunlight were shrinking from the sky. A relatively small city on the edge of the Mississippi River, Natchez alternated between perfectly preserved antebellum mansions and abandoned houses that were barely standing. Maybe during the day, the city might have provided a pleasant throwback to the eighteen hundreds, but at night it just looked unwelcoming and ghost-like.

  Dylan cleared his throat, breaking the silence. “Hey, hasn’t that Lexus been behind us for a while now?”

  “Hell, I think he’s right.” Arisella twisted around in her seat. “I can’t tell if it’s Bloodbourn though.”

  “Hmm, I wonder…” Dylan mused, as he took a sharp right turn at the very last second. The Lexus just barely managed to follow suit. “Yeah, they’re definitely following us.”

  “Great, how are we going to get rid of them now?” Arisella grumbled.

  “I’m going to start by running this red light.” Dylan slammed his foot into the gas pedal, his eyes on a yellow light that was two hundred feet away. We all held our breath as he narrowly avoided sending us to our fiery deaths in a stream of traffic.

  “Of all the impulsive decisions!” I shouted, slamming my foot into his seat.

  “We got rid of the Lexus though, see?”

  I wanted to slap the triumphant smile off his face.

  Flashes of whiteness between the trees claimed my attention, and I squinted into the darkness.

  “Caeci are here,” Adrian said with irritation.

  “And Bloodbourn #2 is back,” Dylan gulped, as the black sedan turned into the lane beside us.

  “How did this happen?!” Arisella stormed. “It’s like they knew we would be here. How could they know that?”

  I groaned as a sudden realization struck me. “I may have, uh, told the cashier at that gas station in Louisiana,” I admitted.

  Arisella swiveled her head around, openmouthed and bug-eyed. “How could you be so stupid?”

  “Arisella,” Adrian admonished. “She didn’t know this would happen.”

  Without any warning, Dylan swerved hard right, sending the tires squealing as we jerked to one side of the car. I clung to my side with all my strength, so I could keep myself from toppling onto Adrian.

  “Can you all please be quiet?!” Dylan hollered. “Now that I’ve singlehandedly lost the sedan, can we focus on escaping the caecus things? For Christ’s sake, I can’t even see them!”

  “Take a road down by the river.” Adrian tossed the three travel backpacks out of the back, so he, Arisella, and I could pull ours on. “It’ll be harder for them to follow us out without the cover of the woods.”

  Dylan took another sharp turn, and then
another, until we were speeding alongside the ebony waters of the Mississippi River.

  “Oh, shit!” Dylan exclaimed, hitting the breaks and sending us all lurching forward. “It’s a dead end.” Sure enough, the road ended in a cul-de-sac in front of a large, abandoned warehouse.

  “You are a terrible driver!” Arisella screeched with wild eyes, making Dylan shrink into his seat.

  “Everyone out,” Adrian ordered. He kicked open his door and pulled me through it after him.

  “We’ll have to do it in the warehouse,” Arisella muttered to her brother. She was practically dragging Dylan by the scruff of his collar.

  Do what?

  For only the second time, I watched Adrian produce a thin, black blade from the flesh of his wrist. He proceeded to wedge it under one of the plywood boards that had been nailed over the nearest window. The blade looked so thin, I was sure it would snap, but it was the harsh crack of the wood that I heard instead.

  “Aris,” he hissed when he had pulled the board back far enough to create sufficient space for a person to enter.

  Arisella gracefully pulled herself through the window and landed with a soft thud on the other side.

  “Okay, send them in,” her voice echoed from within the warehouse.

  Adrian nodded toward me, and I tried to slip in through the window just as fluidly as Arisella had, but my backpack caught on the plywood. After awkwardly wiggling around like a distressed worm, I managed to free myself, only to fall flat on my face on the other side.

  Even Dylan got in more easily than I had, much to my frustration.

  Adrian let the board fall shut behind him as he somersaulted in with the dexterity of a gymnast.

  “Show off,” Dylan muttered.

  Now that the plywood had fallen back into place, the warehouse returned to its original pitch blackness. I couldn’t so much as see my hands in front of my face.

  Above us, chains rattled eerily in the rafters. The air felt damp and chill on my exposed skin, making me feel more vulnerable.

  I jumped wildly at a sudden fleshy touch on my hand.

  “Relax,” Adrian whispered, his hand sliding into mine. “It’s just me. We need your blood for the pons. I’m going to need to cut your hand. Is that okay?”