The two Wilds with snake tails glided down the stairs while the rest of us followed as quietly as possible. Chen and Fan pulled their instruments from their carrying cases at their backs and held their fingers over the strings at the ready.
Blood stones of all different shapes and sizes covered the walls, and suddenly instead of damning the hemlock, I found myself thanking it. A layer of soot darkened some of the stones and my stomach heaved at the sight of them, the very stones taken from my sister’s prison. John had brought these, the evil male. I hoped I saw him soon; I yearned to pump poison into his veins and roots into his heart. The hemlock may have been restricting most of my Wild abilities, but thankfully it supported my ability to grow roots, something the plant and I had in common. I caught my aunt Abigale running a finger along a blackened red stone, a look of sadness in her eyes, and I urged her forward. She shot me a look filled with venom and I prayed to Freyja my aunt could soon know the sweet relief of revenge for her daughter’s pain.
The cement stairs and blood-stone-covered walls curved in a spiral until we came to the dark bottom and an even darker hallway. Thankfully, the other Wilds joining me on this rescue mission weren’t thwarted by poison running through their veins and caught the scent of the succubi galere from behind the door at the end of the hallway.
Gerda broke the steel door from its lock and hinges.
Bars separated us from a group of women from which a combined gasp escaped. Blood stones littered the walls in here too, but I didn’t need my nose to tell me. Marie and her succubi galere stood at once, shocked to see familiar and unfamiliar faces.
I rushed ahead and stopped not even an inch from the bars.
“You came!” Marie exclaimed, clinging to the bars that stood between me and her. “But how did you get past the Hunters?”
“They’re gone,” I answered, knowing full well we may have just walked into a trap. The sooner we freed our Wild sisters, the better. The possibility that we’d need to fight our way out any minute bore heavy on me. “How do we get you out?” I searched for a key hanging somewhere or a keypad on or around the barred door. Rod hadn’t gone so far as to explain exactly how the succubi were being detained, just where.
“Did you bring food?” Heather whined, standing from a wooden bench in the large cell. “They haven’t fed us and we’re so hungry.”
“Let’s concentrate on getting home first,” Marie said to Heather, patting the younger succubus on the shoulder. The succubi leader shifted her attention back to me. “The way to open the cell door is there.” She pointed to what looked like a metal box hanging on the wall. “Though I don’t know the code. I tried to watch them input it, but they noticed and covered it with their free hand.”
Patricia walked to the metal box and tried to open it. “Hold on, it’s locked,” she said right before she pulled the thing from the wall, exposing a small square of backlit buttons.
“I’ve got this,” Anwen said. “Everything is energy.” She held her tattooed hand over the buttons and closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed as her hand shook so quickly it seemed to vibrate.
The holding cell door clicked open and Marie rushed through, wrapping her arms around me. “You don’t know how glad we are to see you all!” Marie looked to the nagin, shé, and echidna Wild Women. “Thank you for trusting our rusalki friends and coming to our aide, sisters.” She pulled away from me and took turns hugging her new snake sisters. “There were more Hunters than usual, when we came in for our check-in,” she said over her shoulder to me.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, motioning to the dark hall. “We can compare notes back at the house.”
“They drugged our older members,” Marie said, motioning to the younger women to help the older Wilds stand from the benches they rested on, and walk. “They separated us from them in the beginning, and then after they enclosed us in here, they brought back our older members, groggy and weak.”
“They knew the older succubi were probably post-menopausal and wouldn’t be affected by the blood stones. They had to drug them to keep control,” I said. Who the hell told them, though?
Thankfully none of their elders were in the same shape I’d found Shawna after she’d been drugged by a Hunter.
The succubi followed my aunts and me, with the other snake Wilds bringing up the rear, just in case we were attacked from the front or from behind. Out of all of us, the succubi were currently the weakest, having spent time confined among blood stones and without food. Yet, when we made it to the main floor and out of the building, no one stopped us. We weren’t powerful sonars or Dopplers, but I trusted the fact that we didn’t sense one Hunter or human on the premises. It also worried me—not enough to slow our pace, though. I hoped Marcus and Aleksander had been able to get in, set the explosives, and get out because I didn’t sense them either. Although, the hemlock still pumped through my body, so maybe that’s why.
Once they were away from the blood stone, the succubi regained a bit of their lost strength and scaled the iron fence with the rest of us.
“Heather,” I said under my breath as we raced through the trees and ferns.
“Yeah?” she asked, picking up her pace to run beside me.
“We don’t have room in the van for all of us, so Mason should be here to offer a ride,” I said through a mouthful of hair my ponytail gladly supplied to my open mouth. As I briefed Heather and her succubi sisters on how we were going to get them away from the complex, I listened for an explosion behind us. Each second of silence ticking by amped up my worry for Marcus. If it didn’t happen by the time I made it to the cars, I decided to double back and look for the ex-Hunter and the incubus.
“Other than the succubi, the snake women will return without the van,” Chen inserted herself into the conversation.
“We huldra can go with Mason, too,” I said, holding my ponytail to keep it from finding its way into my mouth again. “The succubi will still have to squish in and forgo the whole seatbelt thing, but it’ll give them more room.”
Chen gave a nod and sped forward.
The sound of gravel crunching beneath car tires caught my attention and I raced for the road leading to the Hunter complex, declaring that whoever is catching a ride with Mason needed to follow me. I spotted a lone incubus, hurrying up the road to save his love.
I jumped into a nearby evergreen and bounded from one of its sturdy branches to the branch of the next evergreen until I stood in the last tree lining the gravel road. A huge explosion shook the earth and rattled my head, knocking me from the branch and onto the hood of the incubus’s candy apple red Tesla Roadster. I peered into the car through the glass roof. Mason slammed on the brakes and I thought quick enough to use the momentum to back-flip onto the ground in front of the car.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed “Did you hear that?” He rushed from the car to where I stood.
We turned toward the blast and peered down the gravel road. Orange flames licked the dark sky and illuminated everything around the complex. Billows of smoke rose; tiny embers twinkled like stars in the dark tendrils. The wrought iron gate with its daggers pointing to the sky, looked to hold back evil incarnate…or at least the fire that would burn all the evilness down. I thought of the soot on the blood stones, the ones taken from the last Hunter complex fire I’d walked away from. Hopefully the blast blew the stones to smithereens.
“Yes” I said on a breath of relief. “They did it.”
After our little group pulled ourselves from the bewitching scene before us, Mason made sure I was okay from nearly being hit, which of course I was fine, if not a little sore. He looked at the hood. “This is Aleksander’s. He’s going to kill me for that dent.”
I ran my hand over the hood and felt a definite dip in the red aluminum. I wiped the dust from my hand onto my jeans. “Just tell him I did it,” I said with a smile.
“Did I miss everything?” he asked, peering towards the complex. “Everyone got out okay, I assume?” He looked toward th
e direction I came from. “Where’s Heather?”
If I wasn’t so paranoid about the Hunters not being at their complex to greet us, and so awestruck with how the flames lit the dark early morning surroundings, I would have laughed at the way Mason changed subjects at the speed of light.
“You missed nothing. They weren’t there,” I answered. “And Heather is…” I turned to point toward the woods we came from, and stopped mid-sentence when the young succubus ran from the tree line and straight into the arms of her incubus.
He picked her up and spun her around, showering kisses on her exposed skin from her neck up.
My aunts paused to smile at the display of young love. I smiled too. Ah, romance between two supernaturals, accepted for who their hearts beat for. Must have been nice. I scolded myself for the bitter reaction. Still, it had to be nice to not have to use code phrases to say they loved each other or only kiss when no one was looking.
I snapped out of my moment of self-pity. We had a job to finish.
“Come on,” I said, motioning to Aleksander’s damaged car. “You two can kiss all you want in the backseat. We need to get out of here.”
The two lovebirds ran hand-in-hand and slid into the back of the car, where they did, in fact, continue kissing.
My aunts and Eta squeezed into the small car with me and the intertwined young ones. Eta sat in the backseat and my aunts shared the front seat, Patricia sitting on Abigale’s lap.
We only drove down the road for a couple minutes before the black van full of succubi barreled out of the woods. The echidna followed closely behind them, some on foot, some on tail. They slowed and let me go in front. I hit the gas as the van kept steady in my rearview mirror.
“I assume this is your leader’s nicest car?” I asked the only male in the vehicle.
Mason pulled his mouth away from Heather, who sat on his lap, for all of two seconds. “This is his fastest car, tops out at 250 miles per hour. He wanted to make sure I got you out of here in time.” Aleksander didn’t think about the van that’d be following us. No way would I push this baby to a speed the others couldn’t keep up with.
I eyed Mason in the rearview mirror then returned my gaze to the gravel road.
The Bluetooth in the car rang and I eyed Mason in the rearview mirror again.
“You can answer it; it’s just Aleksander,” Mason said, before going in for more suck-face time. I felt bad for Eta, who had to witness the whole thing.
I pressed the dash screen. “This is Faline,” I announced.
Aleksander’s low voice rumbled through the speakers. “Faline? You’re safe? The blast didn’t get you right? We wanted to give you ample time to move far enough away.”
I turned the volume down. “Yes, yes, and yes.”
“Then you’re on your way back?” he asked with a little less rumble.
“Also yes,” I answered.
He sighed. “Good, good. Okay then, we’ll be on our way soon. Meet you at the house.”
“Wait,” I almost yelled into the car’s dash. “Can I talk to Marcus?”
Aleksander scoffed as though my request bothered him, which it probably did seeing as he’d proclaimed his undying love and devotion for me and I still chose Marcus instead.
Aleksander spoke to me again, “I’ll let him know you’d like to speak with him. See you soon.”
The line went dead.
It wasn’t five minutes later that my cell vibrated in my back pocket. Marcus!
“Yes?” I answered hurriedly as I turned from the gravel road onto pavement.
“Ah, it’s so good to hear your voice,” Marcus said on a sigh of relief.
He was rushing to his truck, I could tell by the thuds of his quick footfalls. I was fine, he was fine, everyone was fine. “We got ‘em, baby,” he said through quick breaths.
“The Hunters weren’t there,” I said. “I wonder if they captured the succubi to weaken us and then left for the east coast, leaving the succubi to starve to death. Maybe somebody tipped them off that we were planning to head there next.” Which I had been, before I’d gotten sidetracked with the whole succubi thing. I couldn’t say that though because the sidetrack herself smooched in the backseat.
“Fuck! So we just blew up their building, but not the actual enemy.” He shared a few words with Aleksander. “You think the mermaids told them your plan?” he asked me, putting words to the uncomfortable questions in my mind.
Damn, that man got me sometimes.
“It’s one theory floating through my head,” I said.
“What are the other theories?” he asked.
I hadn’t fully fleshed out the others. “Hey, I’m about to merge onto the highway and don’t want to get pulled over by a Hunter cop for using a cell phone while driving and having more people than seatbelts in the vehicle. Meet me back at the house to finish this discussion and maybe, if everyone is up for it, plan to leave for the east coast in a day or two?”
For the last few days I’d thought we were screwed, that all our plans were nothing but lost hopes and the reality of being an American Wild Woman came full force as a stinging slap across my face. But it turned out we’d only been derailed by a few days. And now we had more Wild Women to help us and more knowledge on how to overcome our enemies. Thanks to the ex-Hunter and the incubus, our enemies had one less stronghold. Two complexes had gone up in smoke. There were two left to level with flames, or explosives, or whatever else we had at our disposal.
Thank Freyja, this actually worked out for us.
“Sounds good,” Marcus replied as he shut a door behind him. “How far out are you?”
“Twenty minutes or so.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a little more than twenty,” he said. “Oh, and Faline, you don’t know how thankful I am that you’re all right.”
“Me too, Marcus,” I said, and thought to add our code phrase. “You know how I feel.”
Thirty-Three
The sun woke as we neared the outskirts of Portland. Rays of pink and orange threatened to swallow the dark sky. I took a right and slowed as I neared the yellow house. I parked by the curb closest to the front yard to give the succubi the driveway spot so they’d have less of a walk to the comfort of a safe space.
As I marveled at how easy the Tesla’s oh-so-smooth handbrake was to secure into place, my phone vibrated again. I’d set it in the center console, so I only had to glance at it to know Marcus was calling again.
“Hey,” I answered. “How many bad guys you think I need to bring in to be able to afford a Tesla?” I ran my fingers along the perfect inner stitching of the black steering wheel.
Marcus laughed, caught off guard. “It depends. How open are you to working for the mob on the side? I’m sure your skills would come in handy in locating snitches.”
He joked, of course, but I played along because why not? “Snitches are the worst. Snitches get stiches, I’ve always said.”
“Then you’d make a perfect addition to the mob’s illegal payroll and should be driving your own blood-money Tesla in no time. But hey,” he said, changing the subject. “I’m calling to let you know we’re running behind.”
“Okay,” I said, stepping from the car with a sad goodbye to the machine. I winced when I caught sight of what I’d done to the hood. “Well, we just got here.”
“We’re not too far behind,” Marcus responded. “Maybe seven minutes or so. There was a cop following our car and we didn’t want to stop and wait for him to approach the vehicle to find out if he was a local Hunter or not—two Hunters and incubus may look suspicious. We also didn’t want to lead him to you all.”
“Rod’s with you?” I asked, pressing the lock feature on the key fob and walking up the cement path.
I reached into my pocket for the key to the front entrance, but remembered I’d left it with my sisters. I hoped they hadn’t accidently locked us out.
“Yeah,” Marcus replied. A turn signal sounded in the background and I looked for signs of the
truck of men down the street. Nope, must not have been turning onto our street.
The succubi galere moved a little slower than usual, but they made it up the porch steps soon after I realized the front door wasn’t locked.
“All right,” I said, walking into the entryway. Marie broke off from the group and headed downstairs, in search of Celeste, no doubt. “That’s weird.”
“What?” Marcus asked.
“My sisters and Patricia aren’t here to greet us.” I paused and for the first time, noticed the faint scent of cologne—intruders. “Celeste wouldn’t miss seeing Marie for the world; she should have met us in the yard.”
I clicked my tongue and each Wild Woman within viewing distance stopped and focused on me. Some stood on the stairs, others in the hall. Everyone froze.
I whispered, knowing my two aunts would hear me, and hoping the succubi and incubus would pick up on it too. “We’re not alone.”
“Shit,” Marcus exclaimed. “Alek, go, go go!”
The car’s engine revved on Marcus’s side of the phone. I thought to end my call, but opted to keep him on the line, just in case he needed to hear what came next.
A closet door at the beginning of the hallway flung open, smacking a succubus in the head with enough force to drop her to the ground, bleeding. Instantly, bedroom doors opened and Hunters dressed in black shirts and cargo pants rushed us. Screams echoed through the stairwell and hall, making it impossible for me to listen for more hiding men.
Marcus shouted into the phone at me, but I couldn’t pay him any attention, I had to keep my sisters safe. A cluster of Wilds turned to run out the way they’d come in, but a handful of black-clad males shoved the front door open and filled the entryway behind us. Another group of Hunters ran up the deck steps and piled through the back sliding glass door. We were trapped, stuck, with every obvious exit blocked by at least two Hunters.
Wild Women Collection Page 49
