The harpies had left Oregon right away, as soon as we’d made the decision to fly. Last we’d talked to them, from our hotel room right before we’d checked out and left for our flight, they were almost home and stopping at a rental car business to borrow a few passenger vans. Eonza assured us they’d be able to pick us up when our flight landed.
Yet, here we stood, a group of Wild Women, two incubi, and a Hunter. This airport looked nothing like SeaTac or some of the others I’d flown into. It exchanged the hustle and bustle of crowds I’d seen in the larger airports for handfuls of people strolling to cars parked in the distance, or waiting for a hotel shuttle. Sitting out here, our group probably looked like out-of-town visitors here for a super secret badass convention.
“I wish we could call them and see how far out they are,” my sister, Celeste, complained.
The succubi leader, Marie, kissed Celeste’s hand and smiled. “Leaving our phones behind was for the best, baby. Now we’re untraceable.”
“Hey, Aleksander,” I said, turning to eye him as he sat away from us on a metal bench beneath the overhang as though it were his throne. He looked up from his hands with a questioning gaze. “Can you feel them approaching? What’s your energy radius when it comes to that?”
Aleksander probably liked jetting off across the country less than my aunt Renee. But despite his best efforts, the incubus had locked onto me through the one-way incubus mate bond, and so wherever I went, he did too. Aleksander stood. The incubi leader reached over six-foot-two. A smile crept along his lips as he made his way toward us. His black wool overcoat barely shifted against his dark slacks. He looked like New York in North Carolina. He gave me a nod as he passed and said, “You should know better, Faline, than to ask a man his size, energy, or otherwise.”
Marcus stifled a laugh.
I rolled my eyes.
Considering the circumstances—Marcus was my boyfriend and Aleksander claimed me as his future mate—the two men got along better than expected. They weren’t friends by any stretch of the word, but I suspected both wanted to do right by me and each thought the other would eventually give up.
Aleksander stood to the left of my aunt Renee and relaxed his body, his arms falling to his sides. Renee took a few steps back from the curb and joined us in watching the incubus work. My skin tingled in pulses, as though I could feel his energy growing to encompass the surrounding area enough to sense if harpies were nearby. I peered at my sisters and aunts to see if they felt it too. If the sensations vibrated through them as well, they didn’t show it.
The incubi leader spun on his heel and addressed his audience. “They will be here shortly.” He casually returned to his throne of a bench, retrieved his carry-on, and made his way to stand patiently at the curb.
He couldn’t have seen them when he’d made the announcement, because it was several minutes before the three blue passenger vans stopped at the curb and slid their side doors open.
“Thanks for picking us up,” I said to Salis, a member of the harpy flock, as I filed into the van along with my coterie, Marcus, and Aleksander. My sensitive nose picked up the faint traces of the rental van’s last occupants, and the rental company’s inability to fully erase cigarette smoke.
Salis gave a nod, her tawny ponytail only moving enough across her shoulders to readjust the brown feather woven into a small strand of braid among her tresses. With one sharp movement of her lean neck, she turned back toward the road, hitting the gas the moment Aleksander shut the sliding van door. After exiting the airport traffic and making her way over to the carpool lane on the freeway, Salis spoke. “Once we near town, we will break off from the other vans. Each is going to a separate location.”
“That won’t work,” Renee started in before I could ask Salis to explain her plan.
“We don’t have cell phones to communicate with one another,” Celeste clarified. She probably hadn’t yet realized she wouldn’t be sharing a bed with her lover Marie during this trip, let alone be unable to talk to the succubi leader.
Salis only stared forward through the windshield. Both my sister and my aunt had made statements, so in harpy fashion, our Wild cousin didn’t respond. She probably assumed the huldra were talking amongst themselves. During my time with them I’d gathered, if nothing else, the harpies were pedantic.
I reworded my coterie’s concerns and made sure to address the harpy. “Salis, they’re worried they won’t be able to stay connected to the other Wild Women groups, which is imperative to our mission here. Have you made provisions for this?”
I watched the harpy’s expressionless face through the rearview mirror as she spoke.
“Each house has a landline,” she said.
I figured the harpies would have already thought of everything we needed in the coming days. Unlike the Wild Women on this trip, other than my huldra coterie, they still had a group member missing. Only, we could all accurately guess where their mother was being held: in the North Carolina Hunter complex. The location of my mother’s prison was a bit more difficult to pin down.
My mother had gone missing when I was a little girl. Up until recently, I’d always thought she’d been killed by jealous succubi, angry at her for mating with a human male their leader had claimed. Multiple times, Marie had assured me her predecessor, who’d trained her to be a succubi leader, never would have commanded such a thing be done. Succubi healed and helped, they did not hurt and murder.
Through my own bounty hunter research skills and Marcus’s gathering of old police documents and Hunter intel, I now knew my mother had been taken by Hunters, along with a handful of other Wild Women, twenty years ago. According to the rusalki, the women taken at the time of my mother’s disappearance had long since died, but my mother still lived.
When the Hunters recently abducted another collection of Wild Women—my partner sister Shawna being one of them—my hunt for the truth began. What I found were answers knotted in oppression masquerading as protection, lies about our kind costumed as history, and the trafficking of women whose humanity had been stripped away and replaced by objectification.
At first I only sought to get my sister back. It was the mermaids who had burned down the Washington Hunter complex. But their pyro tendencies lit a fire within me, an insatiable blaze to destroy each and every Hunter complex in the United States. Not only would I retrieve every Wild held in Hunter captivity, but I’d burn their prisons to the ground in the process.
“Where will we be staying, then, in relation to the succubi galere?” Celeste asked our harpy driver. If, earlier, she hadn’t realized she wouldn’t be sharing a bed with Marie, according to the need in her voice, she did now.
“Your coterie and the shé will stay in town; you’ll be in the historical district,” Salis answered in her regular emotionless tone. “The succubi galere will stay at a larger vacation home near the mountains. This will keep them away from the human emotions of the town’s population, help them to gain their strength for the battles ahead.”
Damn, the harpies’ preparedness impressed me.
“The phone numbers to the other houses, where your comrades are staying, will be written beside the phone in the house where you’ll be staying,” Salis finished.
Salis exited the freeway and drove down what I remembered as one of the main roads in Burnsville, where I had once booked Gabrielle and I a room at a little motel she deemed beneath her. I smiled at the memory of bantering with the mermaid and wished, once again, that she’d trusted me enough to tell me why she’d felt the need to double-cross the Wild Women by working with the Hunters. I refused to believe she was mean spirited and wanted us to fail. But she would never be able to tell me. She was dead.
“Isn’t that the motel?” Marcus whispered into my ear in a low voice as we passed the one-story brick motel lined with white doors and framed in off-white siding.
I suppressed an almost purring tone when I responded, “Yes, it is,” with a smile and a wink. In one of those motel rooms, Marc
us had admitted his real identity as an ex-Hunter. He’d confessed that he’d realized I was a Wild Woman. And best of all, within one of those floral-covered motel rooms, we’d made love for the first time.
If our fellow passengers knew what we referenced, they didn’t make a show of it. This town held good memories as well as hard ones.
“So, Salis,” I said, speaking louder and clearer to keep any possible questions about the importance of the motel at bay. “I’m curious, what was your thought process behind which houses you placed us in?” I realized my query could be seen as questioning her decision rather than seeking a deeper understanding of her strategy, so I clarified. “Your flock is quite strategic in all things, and I’m wondering which strategy is at play here.”
Salis peered at me through the rearview mirror for a breath, her light eyes studying mine, then returned her gaze to the road. “I have already explained why I placed the succubi galere in the foothills of the mountain.”
“True,” I responded. “But why put us in the historical district? And where exactly did you place the foreign Wilds?”
“The shé, nagin, and echidna are on their way to a residential home in a newer community,” Salis answered. “Not one owned by any of us, but rather an empty rental a business associate has agreed to allow us to access for the time being.”
“And the one we’re staying in isn’t owned by you either?” I asked, trying to judge how easily the Hunters may or may not be able to find us.
“It is indirectly owned by us,” she responded. “Passed to us through our flock’s paternal grandparents but left in their family name.”
She knew of her parental lineage? And had been given property through the father’s line? Her statement brought up a slew of questions I promised myself to ask her later. Unlike my sisters and I, the harpy flock—Eonza, Salis, and Lapis—all had the same mother. Now, I wondered if they had the same father, too. They did bear a shocking resemblance to one another, which wasn’t something you often found among Wild Women sisters. Did their father know he’d mated with a harpy? She’d said the house was from her parental grandparents, so I wasn’t sure if that meant from her mother’s grandfather or her grandfather.
After a few more turns our car slowed. Mature trees lined the quaint street, standing between the sidewalks and the well-kept traditionally built homes, spaced a comfortable distance apart. Salis pulled into the driveway of a house unseen from the road, with evergreen bushes acting as thick natural privacy fences. She parked in front of a brown detached garage trimmed with beige and merlot. The two-story home matched the garage, except for the dark red brick at its base, which not only covered the face of the porch in the front but wrapped around the sides of the house, maybe four feet between the ground and the light brown painted wood siding.
“It’s a Craftsman home,” Olivia said with awe. “I love this architectural style.”
Olivia had a thing for houses, especially historical houses. Our coterie’s research guru found the buildings in which history happened as interesting as the people who made history happen. Her afternoons of coming home from the library with new-to-her exciting facts about old things felt like another lifetime ago. Those days we weren’t running from the Hunters—or to them—and we had time to pursue interests outside of scouting our next plan of attack. There weren’t many historical homes open as museums in our area of Washington, but before life had gotten crazy, Olivia liked to take day trips to walk the creaky floors of houses of the past. Most of the time she’d brought Celeste with her, but sometimes Shawna and I joined too.
“Your coterie,” Salis finally continued after turning off the ignition and twisting her tall, lean body in her seat to face me, “were chosen to stay in this home because its historical aspects could be of use to you.”
“What does it have?” Olivia half-joked and probably half-hoped, “a secret room hidden behind a bookshelf?”
Shawna snickered.
“No,” Salis said, unlatching her seatbelt and opening her driver’s side door. “For a long while North Carolina was a dry state. As was this county. As such, my paternal ancestors were bootleggers.”
Shawna quieted.
“We chose this house for you,” Salis went on, dead serious, “because it contains a secret underground connected to cursed passageways.”
Two
It didn’t take much of an imagination to view the old house as more of a museum than a home. Not that I believed the harpies opened it to the public and charged admission to humans who wished to see sheet-covered furniture and dusty old clocks. With heavy curtains drawn and an obvious lack of plant life anywhere to be seen inside the home, our new musty surroundings felt cramped and depressing. Olivia, on the other hand, looked as though she was in heaven.
“Why are there so many clocks?” I asked absently, already irritated by the clicking sound each clock made every time a minute passed. No way could I sleep listening to minutes tick by.
Salis answered, pulling a sheet from a flower print couch with wooden armrests. “I suspect it had to do with the home owner’s business below us.”
We all stopped our wandering through the first floor to watch her, waiting for the next part of her story. Except, it never came. Salis continued pulling sheets from the chairs and tables and bundling them up to toss off into an empty corner. The wooden floorboard creaked as she made her way around the parlor.
“Care to elaborate?” Celeste prodded.
Salis finished exposing the furniture. She wiped her hands on her slacks. The same slacks she’d worn the day the harpies left Oregon to fly home. I doubted they’d had time to change before picking us up from the airport. Other than her clothing, she appeared bright and fresh, like she’d recently woken from a great sleep, not flown across the country. I highly doubted I’d look as good in the same circumstances.
“I’ll do one better,” Salis answered, making her way to a floor-to-ceiling hutch in the dining room. She opened the center drawer of the hutch, which sat at the half-way point, under the glass-encased shelves where I assumed precious glassware once lived. Palm up, Salis felt at the top of the opened drawer until her hand found purchase. She pulled her arm out just in time for the heavy piece of furniture to move aside and reveal a narrow wooden door.
Salis turned the knob as though she’d done it a thousand times before. “Follow me,” she instructed.
“What happened to all the China from the cabinet?” Abigale remarked. “I would love to see the beautiful antiques.”
“We boxed them up for safe keeping,” Salis answered without turning around.
With the secrecy of such a place, the hidden lever and covered door, I would have expected more than the simple basement style stairs I traversed down. We moved single file, with Marcus in front of me and Shawna behind me. Marcus held his hand to the brick wall on our right. I saw just fine, but I held onto his waist at the ready to steady him in case his lack of night vision caused him to trip on some unseen thing. And also because his body felt like home to me and there was something about traveling to an underground place that made my skin crawl.
Maybe it had to do with the time I had been forced to wear a bag over my head to meet an incubi leader under the streets of Portland, where he not only proclaimed his lack of interest in helping the Wild Women obtain their deserved freedom, but also assured me that I too could hide like a sewage rat for the rest of my life.
Marcus would never ask me to hide my existence for the comfort of others. Not that Aleksander would ask that of me any longer. His footfalls sounded like he acted as caboose to our supernatural train headed for dank, musty surroundings. The incubi leader was now just as wanted as the rest of us. At least, we assumed so, since two Hunter leaders had to have seen him using his power of energy manipulation to fight and kill their kind as they left their men to die and retreated from the battle they’d begun in our Airbnb home.
I wondered if Aleksander still thought we didn’t have it that bad.
&nbs
p; Salis reached the bottom of the stairs first. Her steps echoed across brick as she walked to the far end of the room and lit two taper candles.
“No electricity?” Shawna asked, making her way around the room and running her fingers along the brick walls.
“My ancestors believed it to be an unnecessary risk,” Salis answered, placing a box of matches between the two candles on an old dilapidated table.
The glow from the orange candlelight revealed a new layer to the room from the one I’d seen in the dark. Liquid splashes stained the wooden table. Gouges had been cut into the brick walls in no particular order, as though large metal things had smashed against brick over and over.
Oak barrels lay on their sides, scattered at the edges of the room. A copper barrel atop four legs with a pipe coming out the top stood upright in a corner. The damp air stank of vinegar and yeast. Glass jugs littered the floor, some filled with liquid resting in wooden boxes, others empty and broken on the brick ground.
“Your ancestors were moonshiners,” Aleksander said with utmost admiration. “A difficult existence, but a noble calling indeed.”
The secret basement was a good size, but it felt small and cramped with so many supernaturals poking around.
“Did you know any bootleggers back in the day?” Abigale asked Aleksander.
The incubus let out a deep, short laugh. “Know them? I was one.”
It made sense. An incubus helping humans to access alcohol in a dry state and during prohibition. If the incubi wanted to have a good time, it helped if their human sexual interest was also enjoying themselves. Inhibition probably played a part too.
Wild Women Collection Page 52
