The crypt I had been kept in was no less creepy once we started down the hallways. Moss covered the stones, and wall sconces filled with fire created eerie flickers of light as we walked. Only ten steps gone, and I missed my cell already. This was a shit night.
Decay and rot filled my nostrils as we walked deeper. Were all witches obsessed with disgusting things, or did I just really hit the jackpot with these three?
They kept the hallways and rooms dark, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. Walking with them felt like stepping back in time to a medieval dungeon, which of course led me to the thought that if they liked to keep shit medieval, then whatever torture was awaiting me was going to make waterboarding feel like a day at the beach.
Finally, we came to a wide mouthed opening, and I was not thrilled to see a stone altar surrounded by what I could only imagine were satanic symbols. Mama sent me to Sunday school where they didn’t teach this kind of mumbo jumbo, but the fact that it looked like it was written in blood gave me a pretty clear idea that this was some serious shit.
“I don’t think I’m really cut out for the whole human sacrifice thing.” I frowned as the whip around my neck pulled tighter, sending me towards the altar.
“And I’m not really cut out for fucking small dicked assholes, but here we are.” The black haired woman yanked hard, and I collapsed onto the stone altar.
“Wait, are you fucking me or murdering me because I gotta tell you I’m getting a lot of mixed signals here,” I spat out after gasping for air for a few moments. She dropped the whip, and I hurriedly unwrapped it from my neck.
“In this coven, we conceive by making a sacrifice to the demon Belial. We use a human vessel, carve out the summoning spell onto their skin, use their blood for the ritual, and then when the demon possesses them, he uses the human’s body to impregnate us,” the blonde explained happily. Oh so very happily.
“Listen, I have a mate, a vampire. She’s probably going to come busting in here any minute to rescue me, and I would really, really, appreciate it if my penis was not inside any of you when she gets here. She might get the wrong idea, and I don’t want our first fight to be-”
The black lightning was back, so hard and fast this time I thought my lungs would fry inside my chest. The old woman stood over me, her hand squeezing into a fist, and I felt my heart squeeze along with the motion.
“We know of the vampire,” she spoke calmly down at me though I writhed uncontrollably with pain. “We are unconcerned with her, and our patience with you grows thin. Many men can be sacrifices. You are not special in any way, so shut the hole in your face, or I will cut your lips off and feed them to the crows.”
There was no way to really know if Onyx was coming for me. I left her my tags, hoping she would put the pieces together, but there was always a shot she wouldn’t care. She didn’t seem too interested in having a mate in the first place, so if Satan’s baby mamas took me out tonight, it might end up being a good thing for her.
They tied me down to the altar with thick leather straps, and though the lightning continued to course through me, it did not affect them as they touched my skin or even the metal of the clasps on the bindings.
Fucking witches.
The black haired one climbed on the altar, then straddled me. She pulled an obsidian blade out, with a pewter handle that was etched with symbols that I again didn’t understand, but I was guessing they didn’t say live, laugh, love, in Latin.
She slid the knife up my shirt, cutting it in one clean motion. I would have been impressed if I wasn’t strapped down to a satanic altar.
When my shirt was gaping open, she tilted the dagger down as if she was going to stab me. Instead, she began to carve my skin.
I didn’t bother trying to see what she was carving; it didn’t matter. Instead, I gritted my teeth hard against the pain, and tried wildly to buck her off of me. Being possessed by a demon and raped by a witch was not my idea of a good time.
The blonde witch punched me hard in the face, harder than I would have thought she could punch but still, not nearly the hardest I’ve ever been hit. My lip was gashed from being rocked against my teeth from the punch, and after a minute of letting it bleed, I spit in the raven haired witches face.
Her eyes darkened with rage as my blood slid down her cheeks, but it was the old woman who reacted, once again scorching my insides with lightning.
“I’m going to enjoy killing you after,” the raven witch glared down at me, jabbing the knife in harder than before, and carved while I screamed from the pain of the black lightning.
Abruptly, the lightning stopped, and I heard gunshots. Three shots in rapid succession.
Onyx had come to save me… thank you, sweet baby vampire Jesus.
~
These witches were about to piss me right the fuck off.
They weren’t as easy to kill as normal humans because they protected themselves with spells. And the stronger the witch, the stronger the spell. Usually, if you filled their asses with enough lead though, they’d go down.
I could smell my human inside and could feel his embarrassment at having me come to rescue him. Part of me wanted to rub it in his face, but a bigger part of me wanted him to show me what he was made of tonight.
To prove to me that he wasn’t completely hopeless and that our relationship wouldn’t just be a lifetime sentence of me babysitting him.
Would that actually happen? I had no idea. He had talked a pretty decent game at my house last night, but maybe that was all it actually was, just big talk.
A lot of people were like that in life, but I was the opposite. I didn’t speak a whole lot, but I would gut you in the streets and walk right over your corpse like you were nothing if I had to. I kept telling people not to fuck with me, and they kept ignoring me and winding up dead.
It was a hard knock life.
“I’m here for my human!” I screamed loudly enough for them to hear me wherever they were in this creepy ass graveyard maze. “Bring him out, and I’ll let the rest of you live!”
They must have owned the graveyard, crypts, mausoleums, and groundskeeper’s home because everything was in shambles. Not all witches liked death and decay, but these ladies certainly did.
All around me, graves were dug up, and corpses were missing parts. These bitches were up to some seriously dark shit.
I told Ryker not to fuck with witches.
When he didn’t come back with his breakfast, I knew they must have gotten to him. But, there was nothing I could do until the sun went down.
His trail was easy enough to follow, and the closer I got to him, the angrier I became. Last night, before he had come to my home, I would have shrugged this incident off and, honestly, hoped that he died so I could be free of an attachment I didn’t want. Now, I was more angry than I had ever been that someone had decided to take what was mine from me.
Ryker was mine.
Two witches came from the dark ahead of me. I could hear them chanting, but before they could raise their hands and send whatever they were incantating at me, I lit up the night sky with bullets.
I was a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of girl, and if I had to kill every bitch in this place to get my human back, then I was glad I had brought extra bullets.
The witches might be in their home, but this was my element. All I knew how to do was hunt, capture, and kill.
One of the witches deflected my bullets with a shield she had conjured out of silver light. The other one, however, took two shots to the head and went down fast.
One more to go, and you’ve passed the only guards they have on the outside perimeter, I told myself as I talked myself through the motions.
Silently, I crouched down, using the gravestones to block me from her sight, and began using the light of the shield to find the last remaining witch.
She was mumbling again, words I didn’t understand, which was never good. I had dealt with witches many times, and I knew that they could conjure spirits to fi
ght for them. I had literally fought ten foot tall “rock men” just to get to the asshole on the other side.
Around me, I heard the harsh crack of caskets opening, and I knew I was in for a foul fight.
The witch was using necromancy. All around me, coffins opened, and the dead shambled out of their graves.
They weren’t zombies in a traditional sense. Their corpses were moving by the power of her magic as though she were a puppet master, so shooting them in the head wouldn’t work. The only way out of this mess was to cut them down long enough to reach her and kill her. Cut off the head, and the snake dies.
I holstered my guns and pulled the sword from my back. As much as I loved my hand babies, in this situation, a sword was going to cause a whole lot more damage.
She wasn’t a particularly strong witch, certainly not the strongest I had ever faced. And because of that, it took all of her focus and power to keep the corpses moving. They were slow, almost like a 70s horror movie, because she didn’t have the power to move them any faster.
Charging at them, I arched my sword back and forth, hacking off limbs as I growled out a battle cry. No point in being quiet now; they knew exactly where I was.
Putrid blood splattered across my face as a head came roughly off of a pair of shoulders. The smell gagged me. blood was the giver of life, but dead blood was one of the worst things I could imagine.
Wiping my face, I glared at her through the small crowd of dead heading my way. Her arms were shaking, and her brow was twisted with concentration. She couldn’t keep this up for much longer. She would collapse from exhaustion, the dead would fall, and I would spike her in the chest for making me experience the horror of dead blood.
In three hard strokes, I sliced through the ambling corpses in front of me. She tried with all of her might to force their bodies back up, but she couldn’t. Little witch bitch was out of juice.
I kicked her down with a heavy boot to the chest. Thank God for steel toes.
Looking up at me, she didn’t beg for her life. She didn’t even seem afraid. With all of the dark magic they practiced here, she was probably excited to go live with her demons.
True to my word, I raised my sword high above my head and plunged it down into her heart. For a few moments, I stood there, watching the blood rush out. I wouldn’t feed off of her. I didn’t want to know what witches tasted like, but I still felt myself momentarily dazed by the sight of her blood.
With an annoyed grunt, I swung my sword high and took her head off then found the other witch and repeated the motion. If they were practicing necromancy, there was a chance the other witches could bring their sisters back if their bodies were whole. I wasn’t really in the mood to fight pissed off zombie witches though, so why take a chance?
Now that the fight was over, I went right back into stealth mode. They knew I was here, but I didn’t need them to know where I was coming from. They obviously had no plans of bowing to a vampire, so I would have to go in and get my human. It was respectable choosing not to kneel when you were outgunned. Stupid. But respectable.
I entered what looked like an underground, stone labyrinth. The smell was worse down here, the rotting mixed with both fresh and ancient decay.
Following the stone hallways, I tried to use my link to my mate’s feelings as a way to help me choose to move down either the right or left fork. If I felt him stronger one way, I would choose that path then go back if the feeling began to fade. He was like a beacon to me on this rescue mission.
Normally, I could smell for blood, but the very idea of breathing in so much dead blood repulsed me. I’d rather use my link to him to sort it out.
I could feel frustration, nervousness, anxiety and, most of all, embarrassment from him. I knew this wasn’t the way he wanted to try to win me over in our two weeks together, but at some point, he would have to admit that he simply was human.
His hearing wasn’t as acute as a supernatural creatures, his eyesight, his speed, his strength… all of it lacked in comparison to us, and it made him an easy target for those of us who were predators.
What happened to him tonight, as long as he stayed with me or in the supernatural realm, would happen again. Now, it was up to me to decide if he was worth the stress of rescuing every time.
Up ahead, I heard a tone of voice that clearly rang asshole, and I knew it had to be him.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I blurted out as I walked into the room and saw him tied down to a stone altar, bleeding profusely, along with a black haired woman straddling him while holding the knife.
“Netflix and chill! What does it look like? I’m about to be raped and sacrificed to the devil!” he bellowed, and the three witches in the room turned to hiss at me.
“The human is my property. Hand him over,” I demanded, knowing they wouldn’t listen but giving them the opportunity anyway.
“We do not recognize the mating of vampires. We do not care that he was your property. As you can see now, he has found his way into the spider’s web. He is ours now.” A little blonde bitch giggled at me as she spoke, and I decided I would let her die slowly.
“The old woman has lightning hands!” Ryker screamed out in warning for me.
I opened fire on the witches, causing them to retreat momentarily. While they fled for cover, I pulled my sword and quickly cut him free.
“I need some weapons,” he told me the moment he was able to move again.
Opening my leather jacket, I handed him the Glock I kept in my inside pocket and gave him the hunting knife from my boot.
“They drugged me, and when I woke up, I was here,” he explained as we hightailed it back down the stone hallway I had come from. It wouldn’t be long before the witches were on our heels. They had retreated but only to gather themselves.
“Never fuck with witches,” I grunted out, slowing my speed so that I didn’t leave him in the dust. “Also, you’re going to have to help me fight. They look human, but witches are very strong.”
“I planned on it.” He gave me a side-eyed glance as we ran. “But you’re going to have to trust me. You’re going to have to let me have your back on this, or we aren’t going to make it.”
“Yeah, yeah, trust.” I shook my head. “Trusting is definitely one of my strong suits. I’ve got this.”
No, I did not have it. But I was a big enough person to admit that he was right. Now was the best time for him to prove himself and for me to see if I could do this whole “me and you together” thing.
My stomach dropped a couple of notches at the thought, but I pushed that away.
Just missing my face by an inch, a streak of black lightning struck the wall.
“The witches are back,” I called while taking a few shots over my shoulder.
“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” he grumbled. “You should have brought grenades, and we could have blasted the shit out of them in this hallway.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot my tank, too. That definitely would have helped.” I rolled my eyes. “You don’t always need bigger weapons. Sometimes, you just need to learn to fight better.”
For a few quick seconds, he took a stance in the hallway and squeezed off a few rounds.
Hisses from the witches filled the corridor, and I heard him scream out in pain as a vividly blue flame, conjured up by one of the younger girls, streaked past his face.
It wouldn’t leave a scar, but he growled out in rage. I liked a man with a good growl.
Up ahead, I saw the entrance to the cemetery and told him to move it double time. The graveyard would give us an excellent place to take cover from the witches.
Ryker kept up pretty well for a human. I could hear his breathing behind me, even faintly listened to the sound of his heartbeat. He was not out of shape, which was excellent. His heart did beat erratically, but I assumed that had more to do with the situation than with any personal feelings towards me.
We burst through the entrance, and moonlight bathed us.
“Here,” he
grabbed my hand, and I allowed him to pull me behind a massive stone angel crypt.
In unison, we reloaded our weapons and checked to make sure this was a good vantage point.
“Are these the best weapons we can have against a witch?” he asked, and I could feel his nerves on fire as we waited for them to appear.
“Not really, but the other weapons require spells and sacrifices and shit I just did not have time to do on my way over here to rescue your ass,” I snapped, and he suddenly grabbed me around the waist and yanked me to him hard.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, wide-eyed. This was not proper battle protocol.
“Thanking you for saving me.” He gave me a kiss that made my toes curl up inside their steel toed boots.
For just the smallest, tiniest fraction of a second, I forgot about the battle. I forgot about my training, about what I knew I was built for. In just that short of a second, all I could think about was how softly his lips caressed mine. How deeply he had created a yearning inside of me for him.
In one day, he had taken me from hating him forever to thinking he was maybe kind of all right.
In my peripheral vision, I saw a blonde head emerge.
Time to get back to business.
With a quick push, I broke the contact, and he didn’t fight me on it. He knew it was time to work.
As the women muttered up conjurations, probably calling forward more of the dead, I took aim.
I really wasn’t in the mood to fight a full army of the dead, and these witches seemed much stronger than the last ones I had faced alone.
There was no hesitation in my aim. This gun was an extension of my arm. I knew this tool better than most people knew themselves, and this is what I was trained to do.
Hot blue fire rained down on us as we sprinted between the gravestones, firing off shots and ducking desperately to avoid their magic blows.
Looking over, I watched Ryker, and realized he was the same. His shots were artistry, the bullets, brush strokes on canvas. Someone had trained him to do this just as I had been trained.
Forever Onyx (Vampire Brides) Page 5
