“Great,” I said. “According to the rusalki, Faline will be spending roughly a half hour outside in the morning, in their courtyard. They give her outside time daily.”
Elaine shot me a look. “The rusalki.”
I’d thought to keep their coven unmentioned to the mermaids, after what Faline said transpired in her kitchen between Olivia and Elaine over the news that the rusalki killed the mermaid’s sister, Gabrielle. But the mermaids who’d shown up to help at the rusalki’s forest didn’t seem to have any issues. And we didn’t have time to skirt around uncomfortable topics and prance around to avoid stepping on toes. Not when it came to rescuing Faline, to having her safe in my arms.
“Yes,” I answered and then continued on with the subject at hand, the topic that transcended bad blood between Wild Women groups. “Their fallen sister, Azalea, has been keeping an eye on Faline and the others at the complex, gathering information. We only get one shot to enact the final blow against the complex; it needs to be as destructive as possible.”
Which was why I suffered myself enough to work with the rogue Hunters alongside Aleksander, training the men how to fight with Wild Women and not against them. With Hunter DNA coursing through their veins, it was no easy task. The alae offered to join us tonight in the woods, to give the rogue Hunters a taste of tapping into their Hunter strength and fighting techniques with Wild Women present, but not as their foes.
“Despite any issues we may or may not have with the rusalki, we have a much larger bone to pick with the Hunters,” Sarah nearly growled. “They’ve driven us from our island home, fragmented and dispersed our shoal, manipulated those within our ranks to do their bidding for fear of their sisters’ deaths, and now they’ve taken Faline, the one Wild Woman raised by the Hunters’ lies to break from their cage of fear and reach out to unite us all. We will be there tomorrow.”
Elaine added, “We look forward to killing anyone wearing that black uniform.”
I made a mental note to remind the rogue Hunters to dress differently than their brothers.
“Here’s the number to the house where we’re staying.” Shawna handed Sarah a folded piece of paper. “We’d leave the barrier between the home’s basement and this tunnel open, but we can’t be sure who else knows of this entrance.”
“Thank you,” the mermaids said. The women exchanged smiles and nods and each turned to head back to where they came from.
I re-centered the flashlight on the dark path ahead of me, walking silently beside Shawna and Olivia. Inside I buzzed with impatience to see Faline again and raged at the thought of what darkness she was currently encountering at the hands of my ex-brotherhood.
Twenty-Two
“Good news,” John announced as he burst through the door of the tiny bedroom they’d been imprisoning me in.
I turned to meet whoever entered my room face-to-face. From the dresser I glared at the leader of the Washington Hunter complex.
“Your blood came back clean. The drugs are all out of your system.” The man motioned his head toward the door where Clarisse strolled through carrying the red shawl.
I wondered if Azalea saw this, watched how willingly the woman did the men’s bidding, oppressed another woman to stay in the men’s good graces. Still, I said nothing.
Freyja, keep me strong. I absently reached up to stroke the Freyja charm on my necklace, but found nothing there. The Hunters had removed it when I’d been brought here. I could only imagine why, with their poor excuses of an explanation about it being demonic or of the occult or some bullshit that basically meant any deity without a penis was an evil creation meant to lead humans and supernaturals astray.
Clarisse seemed more confident with John around. Without hesitation, she shook the shawl to unfold and threw it over my back to drape across my shoulders. “This looks good on her. Don’t you agree, father?” Clarisse asked, taking a step back to get a better view of her handiwork.
John was her father? Was this biological or more like a spiritual leader sort of father?
John paused a moment, as though her speaking threw him off. He quickly composed himself. “Submission always looks good on females,” he agreed. “It increases the feminine qualities, softens them, makes them more appealing.”
I tried to un-hunch my shoulders, push against the weight of the bloodstone fabric and fragments woven in the shawl. The weight gave ever-so-slightly, but it wasn’t enough.
John, in a cheerier mood than usual, exhaled and called in two Hunters who’d been waiting outside the open door. “Let’s get this started!”
The two Hunters moved to each side of me and began escorting me from the room, with the expectation that I join them. Glad they hadn’t yet put hands on me, I did as expected, walking between them down the hall after John.
Clarisse walked ten feet behind our row.
Keep me strong, Freyja.
They led me down a wide set of carpeted stairs to the first level. No light streamed from the stained glass windows situated near the vaulted ceiling. We made our way along the reddish-brown tiled flooring of the large and open entry of the monastery-turned-complex, past a lone water fountain standing in the center of the circular entry, and toward a set of elevator doors.
“What was that?” Clarisse asked from behind the group.
No one paid her any attention. Not until she screeched and ran to the Hunter on my right, clinging to his arm. Eyes wide and hands shaking, Clarisse begged the Hunter, “Did you hear her? Did you hear?”
John paused his whistling and turned right before pressing a button on the elevator panel. “What is it now, woman?” he said, his jovial attitude gone.
Clarisse froze. She grabbed her head, squeezing her skull, and fell to the tile. “She’s in my head! Get her out! Get her out!”
Neither of the Hunters moved from my side, but John ran to the writhing woman on the ground. “Who’s in your head? The huldra?” He shot me a glare before returning his focus to the brown-haired woman screeching and clawing at her head, ruining her bun.
“No, don’t make me tell them, please, don’t make me,” she screamed.
Clarisse’s body froze in an eerie stillness.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose and my instincts told me to back up, get away from whatever transpired on the entry way floor. I stood in place between the hulking Hunters.
John pulled his dagger from the sheath at his waist and knelt beside Clarisse.
Her body writhed again, only enough to curl into the fetal position and freeze. “I tried to escape you, father. I tried to become one of them,” she muttered under her breath, her words quick and slurred. “One of them!” she yelled.
John flung his arm back and positioned his dagger right above her boney back, at an angle to penetrate her heart from behind. “How is this possible?” he demanded. “Have you sold your soul?”
“I killed a Wild Woman because they refused to make me one of them,” she whimpered, her lips barely moving.
The two Hunters at my sides fidgeted, staying in position, but straining their necks to search for the unseen cause of Clarisse’s struggling.
John stood slowly, his focus on the young woman at his feet. She muttered a string of words incoherently. I glanced around the room, in search of a rusalka.
Azalea? I thought.
Clarisse’s body shot up and hovered, her feet dangling inches from the ground. Her chin rested on her chest and her eyes fluttered behind her closed lids. John ran in a circle around her, shoving his dagger into the air, within inches from her loose clothes and skin.
“In her weakness, she’s sold her soul to them,” he gasped, jabbing his dagger at nothing but air. “She’s possessed!”
A handful of her brown hair, loose from her bun, raised straight up from her head. She jolted her head up to stare, her eyes filled with insane fear, into my eyes. Her mouth opened, a silent scream on her lips. The sound her lungs produced rushed out past her tongue in an ear-splitting octave that left the Hunters
and me covering our ears against the pain.
The chunk of hair standing straight up looked as though it held her in the air. With unseen scissors, made of birch I guessed, the chunk of hair separated from Clarisse at the scalp. In an instant the woman dropped to the tile floor in a sprawling heap.
John rushed to kneel beside her. He checked her pulse. “She’s dead,” he said quietly at first, contemplatively. “She’s dead!”
He jolted up and rushed me, his dagger still at the ready in his right hand. He shoved a Hunter out of his way and wrapped his left hand around my upper bicep. “Any mercy I would have shown is gone now,” he seethed.
He yanked me toward the elevator and slammed his finger onto the open button again. When the doors opened, he jerked me into the elevator and hit the basement button with the palm of his hand.
The two Hunters hurried to join us before the doors shut.
Downward movement threw my stance off, and John tugged my arm painfully to keep me in position. I looked to my fingers, willing vines to ease from their confines. But nothing came to my aid, not with the bloodstone shawl draped around my shoulders and fastened at my neck like a choker.
The elevator hit the bottom floor and the doors sprang open to reveal a surgical-looking underground with white, empty walls, white tiled flooring, and steel doors. John wrenched me into the hallway and pulled me to match his quick pace. A woman’s sobs echoed from behind one of the steel doors and my eyes filled with tears. This was where they kept the women they were selling, the human trafficking victims. It had to be.
“Let’s get this over with,” John commanded as he stomped down the hall, his Hunters moving quickly to keep up with us. “As soon as the seed takes we can be done with this abomination. The sooner I can dispose of it, the better.”
Twenty-Three
Doubt isn’t a regular piece of baggage I carry around. That’s not to say I don’t have baggage. I own my fair share, just like the rest of the world, aspects of myself brought on by upbringing and mistakes—pieces of my own thinking that I’ve fought against and tried to stay on top of. For example, maintaining a certain degree of closeness with women took an embarrassing amount of effort on my part. Growing up with no sisters and no mother, in a culture that flowed with the pride of a brotherhood, created a sense of wonder and fear when it came to the opposite sex.
During the awkward teen years, I watched those in my brotherhood who’d grown up with sisters and mothers, saw their familiarity with females in the way they’d converse with their female cousins and the Hunters’ wives during holiday celebrations and birthday gatherings. As we aged, though, nearing our own Hunter careers, their comfort with females mattered less and less, as we were expected to estrange ourselves from our sisters and mothers and female cousins, and draw closer to our brothers, our father, and our leaders.
When I’d first left the brotherhood, I felt like a lone wolf, unsure how to operate within other packs, but unwilling to return to his own. I had been truly alone. My father had continued contact, though it grew strained and shallow—our discussion topics relegated to politics, work, and weather. Now here I was, trying to figure out how to interact with women on a casual basis again. Funny how life is cyclical like that.
By the light of a moon barely visible above the blanket of trees circling us, I surveyed the small group of rogue Hunters before me in the forest clearing. These men were not alone and would never be alone, even after leaving the brotherhood. For that, I envied them, because they would always have a part of their foundation, their brotherhood, beside them. When I left the brotherhood I had no one.
Still, my rarely seen bag of doubt weighed on me as I considered the reality of our situation. Did these men have what it would take to fight and kill the very brothers they grew up with? The men who’d covered for them during their early years of Hunter training when they’d dropped their dagger or failed to study the night before an important exam on Hunter history?
I thought back to my first time fighting my brothers, to the day when I had to walk past a line of them on their knees in front of Wild Women I’d never met, as they, one-by-one, breathed their last breath. Just remembering their faces, the confusion and pain, made my stomach knot and my throat tighten.
“Remember why you’re fighting,” I started, bellowing out to the men in the clearing, with the exact sentence I used to keep me fighting forward. “These are your brothers you’ll be killing. The Wild Women you’ve been conditioned to hate will be taking down the men who used to be your allies, with their energy manipulation, their speed, their talons, and their song.”
I didn’t know why, but I left the huldra out of my speech. Maybe out of a sense to protect the coterie who held my highest loyalty, or maybe out of my desire to forget the scenes playing through my head.
“I cannot express this enough—it will be the hardest thing you’ve done.” I paused to let that sink in. “Trust me, deciding to leave the brotherhood is nothing compared to standing by while a Wild Woman chokes the life from a childhood playmate.” I watched their faces and gave that a beat to sink in.
“In these moments you’ll need to have your reason for fighting solidified. So, I ask again, why are you fighting? What and who are you fighting for? Figure it out before tomorrow morning, and ingrain it in your skull. If you think it’s hard, keeping this a secret, that you’ll be rushing their complex tomorrow, just know that this secret is nothing compared to what you’re about to do. Trust me, you will need to repeat your reason for leaving, for fighting back, over and over from the moment you step foot on the complex property as an invader, to the moment you wash your brothers’ blood from your skin tomorrow night, to the wee hours of the next morning, when you are tossing and turning, unable to unsee what you wish you could.”
I thought back to the whispered conversations shared in the middle of the night between Faline and me, over her sleeping sister, Shawna.
At first, I’d fought for morality reasons. I’d fought for what I believed the Hunters had done to my mother—the miniscule trail of breadcrumbs left that painted a picture of deceit, manipulation, and murder. But after those nights, filled with inner turmoil and Faline’s comfort, her acceptance and listening ear, I began fighting for more than morality, more than ethical beliefs and the inkling that my mother had been at the receiving end of the Hunters’ control. And it made all the difference.
I began fighting for Faline. For a future with the woman I loved, an existence not governed by the Hunters and tradition, but by us.
“I fight for love,” I continued. “And I suggest you do the same. Fight for the love you deserve, a love of your choosing, a love free of shame and gossip and secrecy.”
The men grew somber in contemplation. I’d hit a nerve. Good.
“You may have those things now. I don’t know. But what I do know is that if the Hunter establishment, as a governing force, isn’t taken down, you may not have that again.” I took a breath and gave them a moment to sit with that thought. I paced in front of them, down the line of seven men. “You know as well as I do what they’re capable of. And if we do not fight for love, if we do not fight for freedom, we may very easily lose both.”
A woman’s melodious voice came from behind me. “Freedom for loved ones is the very thing the Wild Women began fighting for when they rose up, if I’m not mistaken.”
I swung around to peer in the direction of the voice, in the direction the men suddenly shifted their gazes to.
A tall, tan woman, with sweeping black and silver hair, who looked to be in her fifties, stood at the edge of the tree line.
When she had all of our attention, she spoke again, her Spanish accent saturating each word. “It began as the desire to free loved ones and it has morphed into a thing of absolute beauty—the desire to free themselves.”
“Are you alae?” I asked, though her accent had already answered that question.
“No.” She looked toward the woods, behind her. “Though they are only minu
tes away.”
“But you are a Wild Woman?” I clarified. “Here to help us practice for tomorrow?”
She studied my face before leaving the tree line and making her way toward me. Her dark green cloak shifted as she moved, revealing a long white dress underneath. As this unknown Wild Woman approached, I expected to feel my Hunter react, but I only met with acceptance at her close proximity.
“I am not here to help them,” she said, without so much as looking in the direction of the rogue Hunters. “I have come to help you, Marcus Garcia, son of Paul Garcia.”
Her features intrigued me—her forehead, somewhat wide like my own, the shape and set of her nose and how her eyebrows—thick and dark—matched her face perfectly. She felt, she looked…familiar.
I gave a slightly uncomfortable laugh. “Well, it seems you know a bit about me and yet I know nothing about you. Are you a friend of Faline Frey?”
The woman studied my face, squinting her eyes as she stared into mine. “I’ve never met the huldra,” she said. “No, as I stated, I only came on your behalf.” She tilted her head as though she were reading an inscription across my face that she couldn’t quite figure out.
Her expression shifted in a breath, from deep in thought to jovial. “Ah,” she said as she turned in place to peer at the direction in which she’d come from. “They have arrived, our alae friends.”
The group of fire-wielding Wild Women entered the circular clearing and stopped short when they rested eyes on the cloaked woman less than an arm’s length in front of me. The alae leader, Ailani, bowed first. Her sisters soon followed.
“Madam,” she said, coming up from her bow. “We are honored with your presence.”
“The honor is all mine,” she said graciously, giving a small bow to Ailani.
“Did the pregnant harpy and her bad choice in mate bring you to this land as well?” Ailani asked, her sisters following close behind in a huddle. A few trained their gazes on the rogue Hunters and held fire in their palms as what I could only image was a warning.
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