I backed into a wall and flattened myself enough to take in my surroundings and formulate a plan of attack. Bark rose to my skin and I willed tiny branches to grow from my palm, at the ready. The hemlock kept the branches from being very strong, though the fact that I was able to grow even weak branches meant the poison was wearing off. I’d forgotten to ask the rusalka how long the substance would stay in my system. I felt roots push from the tips of my toes and I peered down, thankful I’d forgotten to grab my shoes from the van when we’d gotten back to the house.
Other than the shuffling and yelling in the downstairs great room, I counted nine Hunters on the main floor, grabbing Wilds and throwing them into the bedroom Marcus and I had shared. I assumed the harpies, my sisters, and aunt had been stuffed in there too.
Okay. I took a breath to calm my huldra who wanted blood NOW.
If my coterie and the harpy flock were in my temporary bedroom and unable to get out, I could assume the Hunters had redecorated the quilt-covered walls with blood stones, or maybe just piled the place with them. Which meant me breaking down that door to get to my Wild sisters would result in my capture as well, if the hemlock had lost its strength enough to protect me from the effects of the stone.
“They’ve got blood stones in my room,” I yelled to Patricia and Renee. “And probably the rest of our coterie and the harpies!”
My coterie elders wasted no time. They fought two Hunters who held the arms and legs of a succubus and were attempting to carry her to my room at the end of the hall. I knew the captured succubus used her abilities to change their perception of energy because the two males grimaced in pain as they slowly walked, as though each step caused them agonizing pain.
My aunt Abigale shoved her palm into the face of the Hunter who held the succubi’s arms. Before he had time to drop her and push my aunt’s hand away, strong branches shot from her palm and bored into his skull through his eyes, causing a quick death. He fell to the floor with a thud, taking the succubus with him. From the floor, the succubus kicked her feet free of the living Hunter and hurried to stand and face him. With her right hand she punched him in his nose, a tactic to hold his attention, while with her left hand she thrust her open palm onto his chest and screamed. The Hunter fell to the floor, dead.
My aunts jumped over the bodies and bounded for my room. I desperately wanted to join them, to make sure they weren’t overpowered once they entered, but I’d be more of a hindrance than a help at this point. From the sounds of it, I was needed downstairs. I pushed off from the wall, ready to rush down the narrow stairwell and burst into the great room, when the snake Wilds erupted through the front door singing their ear-piercing war cries as the two shé played their stringed instruments. Calle and Gerda, the echidnas, shot forward, their legs already changed, and thrashed their tails through the air, clotheslining two confused Hunters in the process.
“In here!” Abigale yelled to the newcomers, and the echidnas whipped around to join the elder huldras.
The shés continued playing their instruments, their snake eyes scanning the area, as they followed my aunts down the hall and into my room. The nagin kept close behind, their hands in the air and at the ready to make the Hunters do as they wished. Once I saw that they’d all made it into my room, and heard the terrified screams of males, I flung myself onto the stairwell and nearly flew down the stairs. I landed on the polished cement flooring with barely a thud, and crouched to take in the scene around me.
Two blasts rang out from a gun, but the depth of the sound it made reminded me of the tranquilizers the Hunters had used on the mermaid’s island. I paused, ready to spring back upstairs, when the instruments grew louder followed by the unmistakable thumps of bodies hitting the floor above me.
Heather and Mason held their own, working together to force a fighting Hunter up against the great room wall with arms splayed. Against the two of them, he didn’t stand a chance, so I let them do their thing.
Every scream I heard, every cry, every roar, I yearned to catapult myself to the main floor and check on my coterie and the harpies. To be away from my coterie killed me, but to be with them could put us all in worse danger. Last time my sister was in trouble and blood stones covered the walls, I had no choice but to let my huldra take complete control. I’d blacked out and came to minutes before my huldra turned her wrath on Marcus. With the hemlock still in my system, but waning, I didn’t know how the blood stones would affect my huldra. Who knew who my huldra would hurt today, with no rusalki here to pull me out? Still, I listened for the voices of my coterie, and if any one of them called for me, screw the consequences.
Through the open lower level double doors, I noticed Marie and four succubi standing on the back patio in two lines, their backs to one another, looking out. Each succubus held both hands out in front of her, palms flat and upright, to keep the two rows of Hunters on each side at bay. But that’s all they were doing and it seemed the Hunters were waiting for the succubi to weaken before they pounced.
Energy has to come from some place, and without fuel, or food, for the past couple days, the succubi were running on empty.
I, on the other hand, happened to still have a small amount of hemlock poison pulsing through my body.
Before me stood a row of five Hunters with their backs to me, facing the succubi. In front of them stood a row of two succubi who had their back to a row of three succubi who had their hands held out to ward off another row of five Hunters. I thought to take out the row of males with a bowling ball approach, but changed my mind mid-run and decided to go with the money approach. Six steps away from the first row of Hunters, I jumped into the air and spread my legs, willing roots to grow from the soles of my feet—poisonous roots.
Each foot slammed into the back of a Hunter and my roots broke through their black shirts and bore into their tattooed skin. I willed a portion of the poison to release from my body as I wrapped my arms around the neck of the Hunter in the middle of the two screeching out in pain, trying to slice my roots from their backs. Middle Hunter wasted no time pulling his dagger from its sheath. He tried to plummet the thing into my arm, but my thick, russet bark held the blade at bay long enough for me to shove the fingers from my free hand up into the flesh under his chin and shot vines from my fingertips.
I didn’t will my fingers to release poison, but the middle Hunter fell seconds after the other two. I had two left. I pulled my vines and roots back into me, and jumped from Middle Hunter’s back to crouch behind the row’s remaining Hunters.
With me representing the huldra coterie in the best of ways, the two rows of succubi banded together to take down the five Hunters on the other side of them.
The two Hunters in the closest row of five, before I’d whittled their numbers, turned their attention to me. I flashed a smile from where I crouched. I hadn’t realized it earlier, but my huldra was antsy and the more the poison left my body, the stronger my huldra became. Letting her come out to play felt pretty damn good.
“So are you two boys from Washington or Oregon?” I asked, which took them off guard.
“Oregon, demon bitch,” the one on the right answered. He looked to be near the tender young age of eighteen or nineteen; not even the faint hints of stubble graced his chin.
“Now, now,” I chided. “You must be new to the brotherhood, aren’t you? Because I’m not a succubus. But hey, real quick, are any of you here from Washington?”
The Hunter on the right spoke again. “They’re in that room upstairs.”
The Hunter on my left elbowed the younger one and chided him for giving me information. “Shut up.”
Huh, so the Washington Hunters were guarding the Washington Wild Women along with the harpies, which they probably hadn’t thought they’d find. I should have assumed as much.
Before I could thank the young Hunter, they unsheathed their daggers and rushed me.
“Faline!” Out of nothing but pure, dumb, reaction, I turned toward the open double doors, toward Marcus’
s voice.
And paid the price for that costly mistake.
Thirty-Four
“Faline!” Marcus called for me again as the younger Hunter grabbed my arms and pulled them behind my back, hoisting me up to my feet in the process.
The other Hunter put his dagger to my throat and pushed. The blade hit bark, so he trailed it up my jaw, across my chin, and pushed the tip against my right temple.
I froze.
“You know the one move, the one way to kill anyone?” he whispered into my ear as he brought his face within licking distance to mine. “It’s a sharp object to the brain, through that sweet, sensitive spot in the temple. It’s a humane death, though, not one fit for a Wild Woman such as yourself. But,” he shrugged, “it’ll have to do.”
“You’re not from around here,” I said, trying to speak evenly and stay calm despite the fact that one move from him meant certain death for me. If I kept him talking, I kept from dying.
I snuck a quick glance at the succubi who still fought hard with waning strength and had only taken out two Hunters for their troubles.
“Well, you’re perceptive,” the Hunter answered in his southern accent. “I’m from North Carolina.”
If I lived through this, my next stop would be his home complex. I had to keep him talking, so I thought of more questions, ones that wouldn’t piss him off enough to drive his dagger through my skull.
“What brought you out west? It couldn’t have been the sun,” I tried to say jokingly.
He scoffed.
“Don’t talk to her,” the younger Hunter piped in, still holding my arms behind my back and facing my hands down. “You told me to shut up when I talked to her.”
The older Hunter kept his eyes on me, studying my face, as he answered his brother. “This is different, she’s about to die.”
Well, that didn’t sound promising for me.
“The complex got a little too…full,” he went on. “So I put in for a transfer.”
“Full of Hunters?” I pushed further, just watching and waiting for him to be done with me.
He scoffed again, clearly unhappy with the direction his Hunter organization headed in. “Whores. It’s full of whores.”
“Dude!” the other Hunter exclaimed with wide eyes.
A wry smile grew on the slightly older Hunter’s face and I knew we were done talking. He pressed the dagger’s tip harder against my temple. I fought to wriggle away, grew vines to wrap around the younger Hunter’s hands and squeeze them to loosen his hold on me, but nothing worked. He only cut my vines with a painful slash of his dagger. The blade’s tip bore into my temple. Blood trickled from the wound as the older Hunter pushed slightly harder with each breath, reveling in his slow kill.
When I’d had enough, when I knew I wouldn’t make it out of this one, I let go.
And I let my huldra free.
Only this time I didn’t black out completely. Like standing in a closet, its door opening and closing quickly, blanketing me in darkness and then showering me in light, my huldra flickered in and out. She moved quicker than I thought possible, slipping from the Hunter’s grasp by dropping out from under them. Pain sliced along the side of my face where the dagger cut against my skin, but it was muted and I knew it wouldn’t kill me. She killed the older Hunter first, with his own dagger, twisted his arm enough to plunge the dagger’s tip into his right temple.
I gave in as she released my inner beast and allowed me to watch from the sidelines. And my inner beast, the suppressed wild part of me? Yeah, she was pissed.
We, my huldra and I, turned our attention to the younger Hunter.
“I’m not a demon, asshole,” I heard myself say, but in a guttural voice, animalistic. “I’m a motherfucking huldra!”
I lunged at him and slammed into his brick wall of a chest. He grabbed my ponytail to yank me down to the ground, but I flipped up and kicked him in the groin. Out of what I assumed was instinct, he released his hold on me to cup his jewels.
My huldra and I went in for the kill. And when we were done with him, we helped the succubi finish off the rest of their Hunters too.
Our band of bloodied Wild Women tromped up the stairs to help on the main floor.
They seemed to have everything covered, especially since the succubi’s snake Wild sisters were fighting in full force against the few Hunters still standing, so I made my way to my temporary room. My huldra wanted her coterie and as thankful as I was that she was playing nice with me, I wasn’t about to try to stop her for reuniting with her family. I passed the front entry. The door had been left open, a Hunter’s body lay on the cement porch and two stunned Hunters hung from the old oak tree in the yard. Aleksander stood below them, his arms raised as though he’d flung the men onto the branches with the sheer force of killer energy.
I grabbed the knob to my room and swung the door open, nearly pulling the thing from its hinges. “Shawna!” my huldra called in that animalistic voice. “Shawna!”
“I’m here, Faline! I’m here!”
I caught sight of my sister standing over a dead Hunter, her dreads a mess, her shirt torn, blood streaked across her arms and jeans.
I thought to run to her, to catch her in my arms, to mutter thanks to Freyja for keeping my partner sister safe.
But the sight of Marcus in the middle of a standoff with an older Hunter who resembled him in the eyes and chin, froze me in place.
“I should have known,” his father seethed. “You are weak as a sniveling little girl.” The man styled his thick, silver hair very much like his son. It was as though I stared at an older version of Marcus. Unlike the other Hunters, a silver dagger emblem attached to a black ribbon, hung around his neck. Marcus’s father was a Hunter leader, and from the looks of it, high up in the chain of command.
John scaled from the open bedroom window, making his escape. Marcus’s father was the only Hunter left, and surrounded. But Marcus only stared at the man, both with their daggers drawn. My aunts and sisters had already left the room, to check on the other Wilds. Only Shawna, Marcus, and his father remained.
Marcus’s father jabbed the dagger forward, shocking his son, and throwing Marcus off balance. Rather than taking a step back, Marcus jumped to the side and hit the dresser with a crack, flinging him back toward his father, toward the dagger. His father’s dagger scraped his side before I rushed in between them and pushed Marcus onto the bed, away from the blade. I shot a thin branch from my palm, but his father made quick work of slicing through the plant with his dagger, sending scorching pain up my hand and arm.
“He’ll never belong to you,” his father jeered. “His Hunter blood will always bring him back to his roots.”
I flung my other hand up and shot vines from my fingers, but before they could wrap around the man’s neck, he spun on his heel and catapulted himself from the window, landing on his feet and running in the opposite direction of the front yard, where I presumed Aleksander finished off the Hunters in the tree.
Marcus jumped from the bed. “They left!” he yelled, leaning out the open window. He pulled himself back inside. “Damn it!” he punched a hole in the wall. “I let them get away!”
I let my huldra slink back to her resting place, pleased from a job well done as I stood, stunned, beside Shawna. What kind of power did Marcus’s father hold over him that he caused his son to freeze up in his presence?
“You let him go,” Shawna uttered. Tears filled her eyes. Her hands shook and bark stayed thick across her skin as though it wasn’t safe to let her guard down. As though Marcus was no longer safe to her. “You let my captor go.”
Thirty-Five
Our total Hunter body count for the day topped out at eighteen. Marie assured us that once she and her sisters had gotten something to eat and drink, they’d dispose of the bodies. Their snake Wild sisters offered to help, and as curious as I was about what they did with dead bodies, I asked no questions. The harpies looked disgusted by the idea and didn’t offer to help.
As expected, one of the neighbors called the cops from all the commotion, but Aleksander shifted the energy surrounding the property, settling a peaceful calm over the place, that somehow caused the cop car, its siren blaring, to drive right past.
Marcus only sat on the bed in our room, his head in his hands. After my best efforts to comfort him, and my assurance that he’d done what he could, he’d asked me if he could have some time alone.
My coterie and I, along with the harpies, incubi, and Rod, cleaned and treated gashes for one another and stuffed any blood-stained quilts, wall and bed decorations, into large, black trash bags.
“We’ll cover the expense of not only the Airbnb rental, but the damages too,” I assured Aleksander as I stood, taking in all the destruction around us. The full trash bag on the ground beside my leg only held a tiny portion of what was left to clean up.
Aleksander shrugged as though whether we paid or not was no big deal to him.
When only morose silence greeted my offer, I thought to bring up another topic, anything to get people talking. “So Rod, how’d the Hunters know we were going to visit them? I mean, it seems perfect timing to me that they came over here during that small window we were at their empty complex.”
All eyes swung to me and the claimed ex-Hunter.
I hadn’t meant to accuse him—Marcus had assured me Rod was trustworthy. But, the words were out and I couldn’t take them back.
“Well,” Rod started, calmly, as though he were deescalating a tense situation in a way that only a decorated police officer could. “I think it’s safe to assume the Hunters took the succubi galere as bait to draw your group to their complex.” He paused. “And from a strategic standpoint, I’d say they were waiting, in their vehicles somewhere, for a lookout to give word that you’d set foot on their complex before entering your temporary home.”
Wild Women Collection Page 50
