Stone Goddess (Isabella Hush Series Book 3)

by Thea Atkinson

  It was obvious he thought Absalom's threat to harm his father was an empty one, and maybe he didn't care about the women, but I did.

  And Absalom knew it. I shook my head. I wasn't running. I would never run again.

  I couldn't look at Maddox or his father as Absalom edged closer. The chains were heavy in my arms, cutting into the skin of my breast. I could barely hold them aloft anymore.

  Absalom scanned me head to heal as he drew closer to me. He was working out his plans even as he closed the distance between us. I could see the inner workings of his mind written clearly on his face. He obviously assumed he could take control of at least one of the prizes so within his grasp.

  He was counting on Maddox rounding on his father, saving the master of the order he so revered and leaving the human women to their fates. But would Maddox also make an attempt on me? He wasn't sure, and so he ordered his greys with one motion of his hand to surround his father while he advanced on me.

  He didn't plan to lose any of his leverage.

  I had the feeling he wanted to open my mouth, inspect my teeth. He rounded me, circling ever closer and murmuring to himself.

  "Yes, perfect. She should be pleased."

  I swallowed convulsively as he stopped in front of me. His black eyes pinned to mine.

  "You've been to hell, yes?" he said.

  "Isabella," Maddox warned and my eye tracked the sound of his voice. He was as still as a mouse under a hawk's gaze.

  Absalom smiled broadly as he regarded me. He knew the truth of his question without me answering.

  "I thought so," he said.

  Over his shoulder I could see Maddox tensing. It truly did look like he couldn't decide who to save: his father or me. The thugs were less interested in the virgins in the corner now. They were rigid with expectation, standing to the ready for Absalom's orders.

  We were at an impasse. One that everyone in the room was uncertain of.

  "How long did you have the stone, woman?" he said and smirked. "Not long enough by the scent of you."

  "You're one to talk," I said, waving a hand in front of my face. The length of chain clinked against itself.

  He smiled as though I'd made the most delicious jest.

  "What you sense as stink is the fragrance of ritual." He held up his hands to show me that they were changing in front of me from human hands to something else. Something claw-like and feral.

  "One taste of your blood, that's all," he said.

  From over his shoulder, I could see Maddox tensing to strike the grey that crowded him. His father behind him was edging for the gaggle of women.

  I needed to stall, I realized. Neither of them was going to just accept the impasse. I almost sighed out the relief that those women would be spared.

  Maddox lunged at the same time his father did. A flock of women broke through the ring of greys blocking them and tore in every direction. Maddox hoisted the grey over his head, crushing its skull in as though it were an aluminum can. The grey's legs twitched and blood spilled black and viscous, raining over Maddox and the floor.

  His father slipped in the fluid. A grey grasped him by the throat.

  One moment Doyle was standing and the next, I heard a sharp crackling sound as the grey dropped him backwards over his knee. He collapsed onto the floor, rolling over after a long moment to his knees. He hitched himself upward and fell again. My stomach lurched at the sight of him cradling a fractured leg.

  Bone shone through the blood and flesh.

  He cried out as the grey advanced on him, murderous intent on his face.

  Absalom spun around at the sound. His movement knocked over a chair. I used the distraction as though it had all been planned.

  I put my hands around Absalom's throat, fully intending to choke him until I felt no give anymore. But I realized my hands were still wrapped around the collar. With a blaze of inspiration, I snapped it closed around his neck.

  The other end, I tossed toward the fire gate. I watched mesmerized as he began to disintegrate in front of my eyes. Small pieces broke off and while he struggled against it, that was the moment that Maddox hefted his father onto his back.

  Next I knew, we were running headlong toward the door, and something snarled from beyond the portal.

  CHAPTER 20

  I was out of breath already by the time we rounded the doorframe and headed down a tight alleyway filled with cardboard boxes and red dumpsters. Rats skittered ahead of us in the darkness and the rotten stench of old fish assailed my nostrils.

  The adrenaline and fear was robbing me of energy.

  I clutched at my chest and willed my legs to carry me just one more step.

  I hung over my knees, dragging in frantic breaths.

  "Don't you have somewhere we can go?" I gasped out in the general direction of Maddox's retreating back.

  He reached behind for me, his fingers waggling past his father's waist.

  "This isn't my bazaar," he said. "The bastard switched out the portals somehow. We're back in the ninth world."

  The ninth world. Home. That was comforting, if you didn't count the sound of a half dozen sets of dogged feet pounding the asphalt behind us.

  "I thought you weren't afraid of anything," I panted out as I clutched at the wall, and seeing it laced with excrement, grimaced and scraped my palm against a clean section of brick.

  "I'm not," he said giving me a queer look. "But you should be."

  "What is it?" I said, using the question to sag against the wall instead of leaning on Maddox's arm.

  Maddox eased his father against the wall, holding him there pinned between brick and back as he caught his breath.

  It was his father who took up the gauntlet of informing me what we were truly running from.

  "I recognized that claw," he said. "Absalom is more than just a soul-eater. He's a shape-shifter."

  I cupped my elbows, not daring to ask the question that was utmost in my mind, averted my gaze from Doyle's naked haunches as he clung to Maddox's back.

  "Chupacabra," Maddox said, not paying attention to the wild way my eyes were traveling the space around me, trying to take everything in at once. "Do you agree, Doyle?"

  His father nodded. "He'll have our scent. There won't be a good enough place to hide. And if there is, we got a tribe of greys to face before we even think about finding a haven."

  He dragged his gaze over my clothes, ratty and askew from the run, but fetterless at least.

  "You ever face greys before?" he said but didn't want for an answer.

  Maddox snorted. "She's human, Doyle. Newly aware of Kindred."

  Doyle looked displeased but not at my ignorance. He leaned his head against Maddox's shoulder with a wince, pain etched in the skin around his mouth.

  "They're creatures from the first world with impressionable bodies. Kind of like blanks. A soul-eater can siphon out their essence and fill the body with their own intent, keeping the souls of the creatures as hostage."

  My knees regained a bit of strength and I made the effort to stagger along the alley to swallow up the uncomfortable distance between us. I much preferred to have Maddox at my back where I didn't have to see Doyle's bone shimmering against the blood and tissue of the wound.

  "I'm guessing Absalom is a soul-eater?"

  I'd never heard the term before but it sounded positively awful. I felt a new empathy for the creatures who'd attacked us.

  Maddox hoisted his father a bit higher on his back and Doyle sucked in a breath.

  "It's dark magic that he filled them with, that's for sure," he said. "I could barely withstand them. You can bet those greys will do his bidding until the body dies or he returns their souls."

  "So," I said. "In other words, they're the Terminator. Nice."

  Maddox sighed. "And I don't like killing them since they are at heart a peaceable Kindred. But they do have a doggedness about them that might make that impossible."

  I thought I saw in his face regret about the ones he'd taken ou
t in defense of his father and me.

  Doyle let go a resigned chuckle. "Nice is for kittens and rainbows. A soul-eater can suck out human energy too. And it can swap it. I'm guessing that's what he's after."

  I perked up. "You guess?"

  He nodded and caught my eye in a viselike stare. "You're a conduit for Lilith. I don't think he's a goddess acolyte, but it's obvious why he wants you. He wants to perform the re-animation ritual."

  My head snapped up at that. "A conduit for what now?" I said. "Ritual to do what exactly?"

  Maddox had already begun pacing back up the alley, seeking the open street.

  I had to run to keep up.

  "Maddox," I said. "What is going on?"

  In that moment the sound of trash cans being skittered across asphalt sounded behind us. Several of the greys entered the back end of the alley, and spying us, came at us with all the speed of lightening.

  Maddox was already sagging beneath the weight of his father.

  I gripped him by the arm.

  It was clear we couldn't out run the greys.

  His dad was slowing him down that was obvious. I could tell he didn't want to let him go, but that he knew I was right. He couldn't carry the man on his back forever.

  He dropped him and sent me an entreating look. "Take him," he said. "I'll hold them back. Fayed's. As soon as you're able."

  Then he backed up, making sure I had crouched down next to Doyle. I sent him an encouraging look, as best I could create it, and then he spun on his heel to face the two the greys who rushed him.

  "Come on," I said, urging the old man. "We need to get out of here."

  He was as heavy as a fifty pound sack of flour and I couldn't imagine how Maddox had been able to just heave him up over his shoulder and run as though the man was nothing but a bit of fluff and feathers.

  The old man shook his head. "I'm not sure I can," he said.

  I caught his eye, and I was surprised to find that instead of being blue or green or brown like regular irises, his were blood red. They were so reminiscent of the stone that it made me shiver.

  "You can," I said, lowering my gaze to his whiskered chin. It didn't matter how prepared I might have been for that look, I couldn't keep it. It was too penetrating and altogether too creepy.

  "Thanks," he said. "But no thanks. You go. I'll hold off any that get by Maddox."

  "Don't say that."

  "Sweetness," he said. "Immortality is fine if you're young when you're made – but being 70 as an immortal really sucks. Do as I say. He needs us both and you can run. Now go."

  I couldn't lift him and he looked like he was in so much pain. I knew he couldn't travel. Maddox was working his way through grey after grey and I was beginning to think the inching progress we made was futile.

  I wasn't sure what to do. I couldn't just leave them both. I couldn't leave Maddox.

  Then the greys simply stopped.

  They retreated, backwards through the alley.

  They were gone into the shadows the way darkness filled dark crevices.

  I watched as Maddox's hand ran down along his ribcage. He swung around to face us; his face was cloaked in bewilderment and wonder.

  No sense running anymore," he said. "The stone has gone dark.

  CHAPTER 21

  Gone dark. I knew what it meant as soon as he said it. The stone was off this plane and into another. Meaning, it had traveled to Hell.

  Maddox ate up the distance between us, and stared down at his father who was holding his leg in stiff and awkward grip.

  "Find a drugstore, Kitten," he said. "And a men's store. This one needs shirt." He ran his palm down his sweaty chest. "Badly."

  He gave me a list of items to procure, and while I haggled in the first clothing store I came across still open, he got his father to a safer bench a few streets away that bordered a fenced off playground.

  We made it to my apartment without further incident and it was a bit surreal to sit on my chair watching the way my cat lay spread-eagle on Doyle's lap.

  He sat there next to me on the sofa, absently stroking my cat's tummy, the letters spelling out God is Love but lust is better peeking out from the souvenir shirt I'd manged to find. Maddox's shirt simply said: I shaved my balls for this.

  Maddox had done some sort of magic that he insisted was just plain ancient healing arts but I doubted a few cups of herbs from my cupboard and a few supplies from the pharmacy could have helped Doyle already. He was able to limp to the bathroom twice already and pee with the door open.

  When Maddox peeled up his Tshirt for the third time with disgust to look at his mark, it really hit me. Really hit me. Scottie was in hell. He had touched that stone and been transported through its magics to a place no person should ever have to go. Lucifer would greet the appearance of a living mortal in his realm with sadistic glee, but that wasn't even the half of it.

  I'd been there. I saw what he did with what he called his menagerie–-how he tortured them. He was the original sadist, the sociopath with psychopathic tendencies.

  I wanted free of Scottie, but I wouldn't wish that awfulness on him. What kind of person would that make me?

  Not that kind of person, that was for sure.

  "We have to get him out of there," I said.

  "Are you kidding me, Kitten?" Maddox said. "That man has ordered you throttled twice already."

  "A dozen," I said.

  "What?"

  I took a breath. "A dozen times. He ordered me beaten one dozen times already."

  Maddox just gaped at me.

  "By the gods," Doyle said. "And you survived it all?" He shook his head. "You are a crunchy piece of Saltzat."

  "A saltzat?" I said.

  "A treat in my world made of salt and caramel," Maddox said. "Chewy on the inside, but crystallized chunks of tooth-breaking treat on the inside. We eat it with herring."

  I gave him a look of revulsion. "And you are revolted by my housekeeping?"

  He shrugged.

  Doyle leaned forward, not willing to let the topic go.

  "He beat you a dozen times? Really?"

  "By a proxy hand," I said. "I tracked everyone of those because they felt more like a betrayal. But the amount of times he beat me himself? Too many to count unless I wanted to drive myself insane with the guilt that I let it happen."

  I found I couldn't look either of them in the eye. All of those years I'd stayed with Scottie despite the times he'd taken a hand to me. I'd not been a woman who thought I could change him. I just always thought he was better with me in his life. I thought I softened him in some way. I still wasn't convinced I hadn't.

  But what he'd have been like without me, I wouldn't want to imagine.

  "I'll kill him," Maddox said.

  It was a nice sentiment, if not overkill.

  "There's no need to now," I said." "He's in hell, remember?"

  "Too good for him," he said. Maddox took to pacing.

  Doyle, however, slid closer, careful to do so gingerly so as to not dislodge the cat or his wounded leg. He pulled me close. His arm slid around the small of my back and he tugged me in, enfolding me in a fatherly embrace. I was stiff at first, awkwardly trying to figure out what I should do. He cupped the back of my head, ran his fingers down my hair.

  "Shh," he said, as though I was crying. "Shh. He can't hurt you. You're not to blame, child."

  I choked up. I couldn't remember my own father. I'd never known him. If I had ever met him, it had been in the small times when I'd been between infancy and toddler. I'd been in foster homes for as long as I could remember, not just bouncing from one to the other, but being tossed from one to the next. Halfway houses held me when a foster home wasn't available, and that was all too often. I was too difficult. No one wanted me.

  "Abuse is the fault of the abuser," he whispered against my hair. "No matter how much they deflect their own blame onto their victims. Stop blaming yourself. I know the type. We have them in the fifth world too."

  I w
iped my nose on his shirt and realized it was full of snot.

  I lifted my eyes to his. I expected those eyes to be soft and sympathetic, but he was looking down at me with mock revulsion. A playful grimace twisted his features.

  "Now that atrocity," he said directing his gaze to a slimy patch on his shirt. "You are to blame for."

  He shoved me away and with delicate fingers, he pulled the buttons loose. He peeled it back and turned to Maddox who was busily washing down my cupboards with soapy water because according to him, my house was a petri dish.

  "Got another?" Doyle said to Maddox, holding the material between pinched fingers.

  "Afraid not," Maddox said. "You're just going to have to suck it up."

  He frowned as he regarded the thing still hanging from his fingers. "Please tell me you at least have a place where I could wash the goo off," he said.

  Maddox jerked his chin to the left and his father followed the direction. He held the shirt at arm's length and marched away to disappear behind a door.

  I looked at Maddox. Now that we were alone, I felt awkward and needy. I cupped my elbows.

  "Is it over, do you think?"

  Maddox sighed. "I honestly don't know. The greys retreated. The mark is gone dark."

  I ran my hands along my arms, wishing I hadn't changed into my pajamas. I felt like I needed to be able to flee at a second's notice and ducky flannel pants might make me a bit conspicuous.

  I tossed the replica stone up in the air and caught it, studying the precision of it. He'd made it like he'd known it intimately.

  "I guess we don't need this damn replica anymore..."

  "Don't bet on it," he said. "Absalom isn't about to give up altogether. You don't think that was all about helping you, do you?"

  He poured the water from the bucket down the sink.

  "But the stone is in hell," I said. "So ipso facto – no issue." I felt pretty good about things actually. Despite the fact that we been chased through the streets, surely things had changed even for Absalom upon discovering that the stone had taken another mortal to hell.

  "Theoretically, yes," Maddox said. "But now he knows my father's alive and there's that issue of a conduit –"