“It’s the middle of the night,” Kiran drawled. “I doubt anyone will be paying attention.”
This seemed to frustrate Terletov more than anything else that had happened since we were herded in here. He released Eden with a mighty shove and she slammed against the stone wall before she could get control of her body. Her head smacked against the hard surface and her hands flew to her stomach protectively.
Kiran reacted before I could suck in a surprised gasp. He attacked Terletov with his bare hands, tackling him to the ground. Terletov’s nose broke open with a satisfying crunch of bones underneath Kiran’s fist. Kiran continued to pummel Terletov’s face even when the monster pulled the sword and sunk it into Kiran’s side.
Kiran barely seemed to notice, his fists never slowed down, his aggression never weakened.
“You don’t touch my wife,” he screamed in his enemy’s face.
Eventually Terletov’s men intervened and pulled Kiran back- it took no less than seven armed men.
Terletov stood up slowly and brushed the fight from his trousers as if they were stray crumbs. I cringed at the blood flowing freely from his face, even as he began to heal in front of my eyes.
I stole a glance at O and noticed she was leaned against Sylvia as if she were on the verge of fainting. I felt bad that this was the day she decided to wake up.
I was glad she was conscious again, but what a welcome. Yeesh.
After patting at his face with a handkerchief, Terletov took several moments to calm down.
“Your father would be so disappointed in you,” he spit out. “Look at you. Look at you defend her. You’re nothing but a lapdog to traitors of the Crown.” Avalon took a step forward at this and Amelia tugged on his arm, anxious to hold him back. “Do you know that he and I worked together to capture her? Did you know that he invited me to that dinner specifically to take her out of here?” I didn’t exactly follow what they were talking about, but I struggled to sit up and listen. “He wanted her gone, away from you. He saw how she was destroying the Kingdom he fought for, fought to keep, fought to strengthen. And he wanted her to disappear.”
“He didn’t approve of you either,” Eden hissed. “And you didn’t approve of him. I remember that you were disappointed with his weakness.”
Terletov chuckled and nodded easily, “Yes, that is true. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that.”
“Is that why he let you go?” Kiran laughed bitterly. “We’ve thought you escaped this whole time.”
“Of course he let me go. Why would he keep me? I carried out his plan.”
“Almost,” Eden reminded him gently. “You almost carried out his plan.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Terletov growled. I had to assume that Lucan’s plan had been to kill Eden, or something, from the soft taunting way she reminded him that she was still very much alive. “I’ve done something he couldn’t. The Kingdom is now mine, the Citadel is now mine and soon my own Magic will be mine. There will be no end then. We will eradicate the Shifter problem for good and by doing so we will create as many of these super Immortals as I want to.”
“Immortal humans,” I panted on the way to my feet.
“What?” he snapped, returning his attention to me with no small amount of reluctance.
“We’re Immortal humans,” I explained patiently. “Not super Immortals. That sounds stupid.”
The Throne room held at least thirty of Terletov’s men and only eleven of us and Lilly didn’t count. It was hard to see a way out of this and still my thoughts drifted to Jericho. He would come back eventually, and then what? Would he walk in here, right into their trap? Would he fight to save me?
What if he didn’t?
Or what if he did and didn’t make it?
He wasn’t like the rest of us in the room. The four members of royalty were the True Immortals, Jericho explained before and I didn’t think Ophelia was in much danger of losing her life either.
But Jericho didn’t have that forever guarantee.
He could die.
“Make that up on your own, did you?” Terletov leered at me.
I was standing now, pressed against a stone wall for support. I could feel my body rapidly heeling, but I couldn’t stand by myself yet. My limbs shook, my spine wanted to crumble in on itself and my brain wasn’t quite working at full speed yet.
Every once in a while a flash of pain would vibrate through my body so violently that my vision would black out for just a moment. This sucked.
“Er, the Gypsy lady,” I told him. It felt strange calling her a “queen” in front of Terletov. I couldn’t exactly place my hesitation, except that maybe I hoped to protect her by not associating with a title Terletov would covet. Not that he wanted to be a queen… but the royalty moniker in general.
“Ileana?” he laughed at me. “They took you to see the ancient Gypsy?”
“No,” I said honestly. “She came to see me.”
“And what did she say to you?” he demanded. “Tell me what she said.”
Okay, so Jericho and his friends weren’t the only ones that took her “prophecy” seriously. “Riddles mostly. I didn’t understand what she was talking about.”
“Don’t lie, Olivia,” he growled at me. “I do not forgive liars.”
“Well, maybe this will make sense to you then,” I snapped because I was actually being truthful with him. “She told me not to fall in love with Sebastian. We talked about The Twelfth Night; you know, the Shakespeare play. And then she called me an Immortal human and Ophelia a human Immortal. So there you go, you can figure it out.”
“Sebastian is who Olivia falls in love with in the play,” Terletov pointed out.
“Duh.” I know, real mature.
“She is… strange,” he finally conceded.
“I know.”
“Where is Sebastian Cartier?” Terletov’s shrewd gaze swung to the royalty pressed together on the other wall like a criminal line up.
“He went out for a bit. We were out of milk,” Eden answered with a straight face.
Before Terletov’s head could explode, a knock on the door pulled his attention. One of his slightly greenish men opened the door and gestured for him to join him in the hall. Terletov looked us over for another moment and then marched from the room.
I instantly relaxed against the wall I had propped myself on. It wasn’t that we were alone now; the aggressive guard stood carefully on watch all around us. But Terletov’s energy was especially insidious and I couldn’t help but breathe easier with his absence.
I met my sister’s gaze across the room and gave her a reassuring smile. She lifted her eyebrows until they disappeared behind her swooping blonde bangs. Sylvia put her arm around O and that seemed to relax her some, but not much.
Kiran and Eden whispering to each other drew my attention back to them and I watched silently while they seemed to form some kind of plan. Eden lifted her eyes and met my curious stare.
She mouthed, “On three,” and then looked pointedly at the men that were holding swords and guns. When she returned her focus to me, she mouthed, “Don’t get hit.” And then made a gun with her fingers.
Right, don’t get shot. It didn’t matter what kind of Immortal you were, those bullets put you down for the count. I could at least be positive I was not entirely immune to those.
Eden gave everyone a meaningful glance and the same instructions. I pushed off the wall and readied my broken body for a fight, ignoring my various aches and pains. This might be our only shot to get out of here.
Her fingers tapped against her jeans. One. Two. Three.
The color blue exploded out of her like a thousand indigo smoke bombs at once, dousing the room in hazy darkness. I inhaled the healing power of the smoke I did not understand but chose to accept anyway, and went to work.
Guns started going off in every direction, so I dropped to the floor and shot my Magic out from down here.
I connected with several pairs of feet, and
sent them slipping backwards like they’d just stepped on an electrical banana peel. Once they were down, I could kind of make them out because the smoke was thinner down here.
I launched myself at the guy nearest me and went to work clawing at his face with my short fingernails and injecting him with as much Magic as I could. He had a gun in his hands that we started wrestling for. I couldn’t let him get another shot off.
We were grunting at each other, ripping and punching, our bodies slapped against the hard floor and every once in a while, the hard metal of the gun would connect with a sharp smacking sound against the stone. Similar struggles happened everywhere around us and nobody could tell which side was winning.
A gun went off, followed by a sharp shriek and then the sound of a body dropping to the ground. Another infusion of blue smoke darkened the room again and I had to assume helped whoever had taken the bullet.
It was impossible to stay hurt with all the smoke around us, which was both good for us, but also bad because we couldn’t get the upper hand on the guys who held all the weapons.
Eden seemed to read my mind because she called out to the room at large, “You have two seconds to get the upper hand and then I’m taking it back!” With her warning, I leaned down and bit the guy that I was wrestling with on the neck. I had hoped for a vampire like feel, but in reality it was more like a mangy dog with how viciously I grabbed hold of his jugular. Eden called out, “One! Two!”
I tasted blood on the guy’s skin and then the smoke disappeared. The guy beneath me let go of the gun, surprised by my savage attack. I turned it on him as quickly as I could and unloaded two shots right into his chest.
He fell limp immediately and I looked up just in time to fire my gun again- straight into the crotch of another bad guy.
Oops.
I hadn’t really meant to be so cruel, but it just happened to be at my eye level.
The door opened right as we were in the middle of the melee and I turned my gun to shoot whoever walked through the door. As soon as the body appeared I planned on unloading the rest of the clip as fast as I could. I didn’t know what was left in the weapon, but whatever was there would find its way to Terletov’s chest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man raising his sword to bring it down on me, but I forced myself to stay focused on the door.
In just another second…
Jericho.
Oh my goodness, it was Jericho.
I swiveled around and shot at the man just three inches from me. His sword was raised over his head and I could feel the heat of the blade as it arced down toward me. I fired the gun at his abdomen and threw myself backwards. I didn’t quite escape the sweep of the sword tip and it sliced open my own stomach as the bullet ripped a hole through his. He dropped to the ground and I cursed at the horrifying pain.
I fought against the blinding agony and pushed to my feet, swaying only once I’d gotten all the way up. I swallowed back the nausea and then opened my eyes just in time to fight off another attacker.
The room was mass chaos, blood, gore and Magic seemed to be leaking everywhere. My gaze swung wildly around after laying out another henchman who trained his gun on me. Bullets whizzed around me and everywhere I turned it seemed I had to dodge another sword.
My sister pressed into the corner, covering Sylvia with her small body. They appeared to be going unnoticed so far, but I couldn’t imagine it would stay that way for long.
Swinging back the other way I found Jericho just a few feet away from me, fighting off three other bad guys. The room had filled with his team, all come to save the day.
Sebastian, Xander, Xavier, Seraphina and Roxie all expanded our ranks with some serious fire power and some even worse attitude. They were on a mission.
“Where’s Terletov!” I heard Avalon shout at the newcomers.
“Xander has Alexi!” Jericho called back with a casual shrug of his shoulders. “The diversion won’t last forever! We should probably get going!”
“You lead!” Avalon commanded him.
“Get me Sylvia and Ophelia first.” Jericho’s gaze met mine and he lifted his eyebrows in this cocky way that made me feel silly for doubting where he’d been or his ability to save us. Of course, he would come.
And of course he would put my sister first.
That was just the kind of good guy he was.
I gave him a smile and then mouthed, “We need to talk.”
“I know,” he mouthed back across the fray.
And he did know. I could feel it.
Part of me couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized he was back at the castle the moment he got here. His Magic was everywhere around mine, completely solidified inside and outside of mine as a combined entity.
We were united.
We didn’t need marriage, or sex or even more than a few hot make-out sessions. The intensity of our feelings for each other was so strong that we had come together in this perfect connection naturally. And as I gazed into his brightly lit green eyes from across the bedlam between us, I knew…
I loved him.
I did.
I had been falling in love with him for so long now that I hadn’t even noticed I was already gone.
He had saved me. And not just from acute peril, but from myself.
I had been alive, but not really living. I had been going forward but without direction. My goals were nothing more than markers to measure progress, but there had been no feeling behind them, there had been no passion.
Jericho had given me all of that: life, purpose… a future.
I hadn’t known if I wanted this world, or how I would live out this endless existence and give up my humanity. But that wasn’t the point.
None of that was important because no matter what happened beyond this moment, I didn’t want to do it, or be it, or live it without Jericho.
Whatever he was, I wanted to be. Wherever he went, I wanted to go. And that was it. That was the simplicity of love.
But it was everything to me.
Except that this was the absolutely worst place to have this epiphany.
Good thing, Jericho could cover for me.
He appeared in front of me with a knowing half-smile and held out his hand to me. “Ready, Liv?”
His words pressed down on me as more significant than even this life or death moment. “Ready.”
“Then let’s go,” he ordered gruffly. “And when we’re safe, we’re finally going to have that talk.”
“Yes, sir.” Okay, just because I loved him, didn’t mean I had to stop being a smart ass.
His smile grew, “Introduce me to your sister so she’ll trust me, you mouthy wench.”
Mouthy wench? Brat. Still, I was smiling. I then realized that O was next to us, shaking from fear and hugging Sylvia. The battle raged around us.
I had to shout to be heard, “O, this is Jericho! Jericho, this is my sister Ophelia!”
“I’m her boyfriend,” Jericho explained as if this was the place to come up with titles.
“Your boyfriend?” O cocked her head back, completely surprised by the news.
“I told you there was a boy,” I grinned at her.
She looked up and down Jericho’s restless frame. He stood before us in all his coiled muscle, tussled hair, chiseled face and overall sexy glory. She shook her head and then looked back at me as if she didn’t understand how someone that good looking could be a real person.
Shaking herself out of it, she said, “Get us out of here alive, and you can have my approval.”
Jericho shot her a devastating grin. “That’s the plan.”
And then he moved into action. His team surrounded us as if they had this exactly planned out and cleared a path to the exit. More gunshots and swords clashing sounded out behind us, but Jericho was pushing us through the door before I could turn around and assess the damage.
Out in the hallway was more fighting chaos. It seemed some of the Titan Guard had been freed and there were more
of Terletov’s henchman to create quite the battle.
“This way.” Jericho took off, jogging through the darkened corridors as if he knew exactly where we were going. Which he probably did. He got on a radio and shouted some instructions to Xander, but then tucked it away and focused on where to lead us.
After a few fast turns we seemed to be descending into the castle instead of finding a way out. I forced myself to trust Jericho and his friends, even while nerves continued to prick at my neck and arms.
“Where’s Eden and Kiran?” Jericho suddenly growled when we’d rounded yet another turn and stood before a set of stairs that led downward.
Avalon seemed to think really hard about this, like really hard. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and didn’t say anything, but everybody seemed to be waiting on his answer.
Finally, he looked up with a horror-stricken face. “They were detained.”
“What do you mean, detained?” Sebastian snapped.
“The Guard fell,” Avalon quickly explained. “There weren’t enough of them. They… he… he stopped them.” A string of curses came next and then he shook his head violently. “They want us to go on. He’s… Terletov’s found out about the babies, but Eden’s promised him his Magic back.”
More cursing spewed from all the men and most of the women around me.
“They want us to go on,” Avalon kept explaining.
There was a way he was communicating with Eden or Kiran right now, that was obvious. I just didn’t understand how they were talking. Although at this point, it didn’t really matter. I was far enough into this world, that I knew how often the impossible happened.
“No,” Sebastian said vehemently. “We’re not leaving them behind.”
“They have a plan,” Avalon growled. “And they cannot be killed.”
“That does not mean we abandon them!” Sebastian shouted back.
Everyone looked around frantically, waiting for us to be found. But it had been quiet for a while as we descended into the bowels of the castle. I had a feeling that Terletov and his men didn’t know about this section we were traveling and it gave me hope that this was a way out.
The Relentless Warrior Page 32