I was paralyzed. No. Fuck. “Help me,” I whispered, and the person who’d dragged me came into view.
Rook.
I tried not to whimper as he squatted down in front of me. “You are either shit at giving messages or bad at following orders. Neither of those are very helpful to me right now. So, I’ve decided you will be the message.”
He picked up my completely limp arm, even though I tried so hard that I cried attempting to pull it away. He took it between his fists and twisted, and the cracking sound of bones breaking echoed around the forest.
“Ahh!” My scream lit up the evening air. Then, he unfurled my hand, and I was helpless to stop him. “Please, don’t. Please, please, plea—” he cut off my begging with another scream as he snapped two of my fingers at the knuckle.
He stood up, stomped my knee, and my body went white with pain. My whole body was pain.
“That should be enough of a message, but if not...” He snapped a finger at the car idling on the shoulder of the road. A man hopped out, and he was huge with a permanent snarl on his face. I was crying so hard now my body was shaking with it. The huge man dropped a bundle of wrapped rags beside me.
“If not, I think this should make my point just fine.” With that, they strode away back to the car, leaving me lying broken on the road, Christopher alive but injured in the car, and Enit… where the hell was she?
The car roared away and I screamed. “Help me!”
I looked at the bundle of rags, finally able to reach out with my good hand and pull them apart.
I wished I hadn’t.
I screamed and screamed until my voice went hoarse.
38
Monster
Something was wrong. I could feel it.
You’re right, Wati added, and if my gut feeling hadn’t been enough, that would have sealed it. Wati was hardly ever wrong.
I was in the woods outside the Academy, but I turned and headed north east. I didn’t fight the pull that was dragging me that way.
Carmen. Something was wrong with Carmen. I shifted as I ran, my clothes falling off behind me. I was faster in this form, running like death through the wilderness. I was one with the earth, even if I was decay to its life.
Something inside me twisted, urging me to go faster, and I listened. I moved faster than I’d ever had before, so fast that the trees were merely a blur in my peripheral vision.
Then I smelled it. Burnt rubber and gasoline. The sound of screams made my heart stop.
Mouse. No.
I didn’t even remember running that last mile, but I was bursting from the trees onto a car accident. But it wasn’t an accident. My mate was in the middle of the road, her body bloodied and broken as she screamed.
I shifted as I got closer, needing my human hands, my human voice. I fell to my knees. “Mouse? Sweetheart?” Her wild blue eyes turned to me, and the relief on her face broke my heart. And then she passed out. I shook her lightly, but she didn’t wake up.
I needed help, I needed paramedics or something. Why didn’t I have a fucking phone? I got to my feet, sprinting to the car. Her brother was hanging upside down, blood dripping from his face onto the roof of the car. I looked through the other window, and in the back was her sister, the little Omega, bent up and broken like a doll. Beside her was a phone. Thank fuck. I wrenched open the door, checking the Omega’s pulse.
Alive. A relieved breath whooshed from my lungs. I didn’t move her in case her injuries were severe. Grabbing her phone, I had a moment of indecision. Who the fuck did I call? 911? No.
The Alpha. I’d call the Alpha.
Looking through her phone, I found Brody (Dad) in the contacts and called it.
He answered on the third ring. “Enit, baby, did you forget something?”
Oh shit. “This is Monster, the uh, Wendigo. There’s been an accident, about five miles out of Dark River. You need to get here fast.”
I hung up the phone, and it rang again almost instantly. Bobby’s name lit up the phone. I answered.
Bobby’s frantic voice came through the phone. “Enit, have you seen Mouse, some—”
“Bobby, it’s Monster. There's been an accident and you need to get here. Now.”
I gave him the same directions I’d given her parents.
“I’m coming.” Then the line went dead. I dropped the phone into my pocket, desperate to get back to my mate, but knowing she’d hate me if I let her brother die of blood loss. I shifted a finger to one of my razor sharp claws, using it to cut through the belt. He dropped suddenly, but I let him down as softly as I could.
And then the vampires were there. A blonde one with ancient tattoos riddling his face hissed at me, backing me away from the boy’s prone body. Another one, who looked so exactly like him that they could only be twins, placed a hand on his chest.
“Lucius, this is Carmen’s Wendigo. He called us. He’s not a threat. Go. Find that fucker and when you do, bring him home so we can rend him limb from limb for what he’s done to our young.”
The ancient vampire glared at me again, and then he took off down the road so fast that it was almost like he teleported. I looked at the reasonable one. “I found them like this. I knew something was wrong, I could feel it. But I didn’t want to move them—” I choked on my words.
The blond vampire nodded. “I’m Nico. Tell me more. Was he still in his belt?”
As I was explaining that I cut him down, another vampire appeared, a huge, tattooed and scarred one, with death for eyes.
“Squeak has been tortured.”
My heart fell to the pit of my stomach and all that remained was rage. Someone had tortured my mate?
I growled so low that the sound wasn’t even close to human. The big one narrowed his eyes at me, but then he crawled into the back of the car toward the broken little Omega. “Enit, baby, open your eyes,” he cooed like he was speaking to a child, and I guess he was. He ran his hand down her arms and legs, checking for breaks. “Enit Baxter, open your feckin’ eyes before I ground you for life,” he shouted, and it worked.
She stirred but didn’t wake, but I could hear both of their exhales of relief, and a third one from the boy Alpha. Nico was with him.
“I’ve just broken my leg. Hit my head. I’m fine. Where’s Carmen?”
That was all I needed as I ran back toward my mate. I could tell her that they’d be okay now. I skidded to a stop, two more vampires leaning around my girl. Her eyes fluttered open, and she searched the faces around her. “Monster?” I fell to my knees, ignoring her parents. They could take a knife to my throat and I wouldn’t leave her.
I grabbed her unmangled hand. “Enit? Christopher?”
“Alive,” I murmured softly.
She cried some more. “The kid? Is he dead?”
I frowned, confused, until I worked out that one of the vampires was working on a kid. I could hear his thready heartbeat. “Alive too. We’ll get you all to a hospital and you’ll be fine, I promise.”
Bobby’s truck screeched to a halt beside an old Impala, and the man I recognized as the Alpha of Nîso pack barrelled out. A pretty woman who looked all of twenty but I would bet was Mouse’s mother climbed out of a van along with the two Lycanthrope founders of Eden Academy. She must have gone directly to the Academy for help.
They ran to the big scarred guy. “X, what have we got?”
I missed whatever the hell he said because Bobby was beside me, reaching down to touch Carmen’s face. “Baby, what happened?”
“Rook.”
His name was a curse on the wind, and it would be his death knell. Because I was coming for him, and I was going to inflict pain until he begged.
I had no control as I transformed, my body elongating and stretching into my Wendigo form. I roared my pain, my mate’s pain, into the wind and hoped that wherever this Rook was, he was close enough to hear it.
A change in the air pressure told me that others were shifting, and the shapeshifter Alpha transformed into a tiger.
A tiger that was snarling at me.
Bobby transformed into a giant grizzly bear, and he reared back on his hind legs and growled at the shapeshifter Alpha, standing between me and what he saw was a threat... My brain kept stuttering around, as I tried to grasp the idea that the little Alpha was going against his own Alpha to protect… me.
The redhead was there, Carmen’s mom, and she was glaring at the Alpha. “This solves fucking nothing, so get over yourself, Alpha,” she said with scary calm.
The malevolent magic swirled back around me as I shifted back to human. I was fucking this up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t…”
Carmen groaned again, and I dropped back to my knees. “Best. Stalker. Ever,” she groaned, and I laughed. Actually laughed.
“Sorry I wasn’t faster. Mouse, I’m so sorry.”
Bobby was still a bear and he roared so loud that my eardrums would have shattered if I hadn’t been supernatural.
Then the big scarred vamp was there, checking her over. “Squeak, we’re going to move you. I think you might have internal injuries.” A hand landed on my shoulder, and I looked up into the golden eyes of one of the Lycanthropes.
“We have to move her. If I could get you to stand back?”
I nodded, scrabbling backwards, holding down my Wendigo as she screamed in pain when they shifted her onto the stretcher. They rushed her to a van where her littermates lay prone. The Lycanthrope looked back at us all. “Stacey is prepping for surgery, but we could use the extra hands,” he said to X, and everyone nodded. They loaded my mate into the van and closed the doors, and I wanted to howl in pain.
A hand rested on my shoulder, and I looked over to see that Bobby was human again.
“Let’s go. We’ll meet them at the Academy.”
I climbed into the passenger seat of Bobby’s car. I tried not to notice how his hands shook, or how pale he was.
We’d both been so close to losing our heart, and it was a fear I would never forget.
39
Flint
I swear, I thought my heart stopped when Bobby banged on my dorm room door and told me Carmen had been in an accident.
But it hadn’t been an accident. It had been a message, one that I heard loud and clear now. I had to go back. I would endure centuries of being bound if it would protect her. He’d broken her slowly, methodically, as well as severely injuring her siblings. She’d never forgive me for the pain I’d brought into her world.
Christopher had a broken leg, a broken collarbone and an acute concussion. Enit, sweet little Enit, was even worse. She hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt and the crash had tumbled her around like she’d been in a blender. Her brain had swelled, and a rib had punctured her lung. Both of those had been repaired, but on top of that she’d broken her pelvis, ankle, both wrists and a cheek. Stacey—who was honest to god like sixteen, maybe seventeen at the most but everyone seemed totally okay letting her do brain surgery—had operated for hours, and now Enit was in an induced coma.
And my girl. Carmen had ruptured her spleen, and they’d had to operate to remove it. She had a concussion, but it was hard to tell what injuries had been from the accident and what had been from Rook dragging her from the wreck and breaking her. Her arm, fingers and cheekbones were Rook’s work. The bruising across her chest was from her seatbelt, and the broken nose and cheekbone could have been from Rook or from the airbag. The glass embedded under her skin.
He’d tortured her.
I leaned to the left, and threw up in the trash can beside me. Sammie wrapped an arm around my shoulders, but I shrugged him off. The waiting room held Monster and Bobby too, as well as Cara and Bohdie. Carmen’s parents were in the rooms with them, each by a bedside if they weren’t out there hunting Rook.
Layla poked her head around the door. “Flint? They’ve stabilized the boy. We’d like you to come and identify him if you can?” Her voice was soft, like she didn’t want to ask. I wish I didn’t have to go.
Another person broken because of me. Because I needed to be free. How many lives was my freedom worth?
I nodded, standing, and Sammie stood too. I turned to tell him to stay in case Carmen needed him, but he shook his head before I could speak. “I love you. You need me too.”
I swallowed hard, building my walls back around myself. I didn’t acknowledge him as I followed after Layla, no baby in sight today. She led me back into the hospital wing, pressing a hand to a biometric lock beside the door.
“For his safety,” she murmured, but I didn’t see how.
We stepped into the room, and my heart sank to my knees. The kid on the bed was a mass of bruises, like he’d been kicked around. But despite the fact his face was swollen and bruised, I knew who he was. I stepped toward him, grabbing his hand gently.
“Milo.” His eyes fluttered, but didn’t open. “He’s been walking my dreams, asking for help. But I couldn’t help.”
I rested my forehead on the clean white sheets, breathing through the panic and despair gripping my chest. “I couldn’t work out where they were, what he was trying to tell me. I’m so fucking sorry, kid.”
I gripped his hand, hoping that he could hear me in his induced coma. I could hear Sammie and Layla speaking behind me, and then the door opening and closing. I whispered promises to Milo, about how he was safe now, how this pain will be short-lived and one day, when he was healed and grown, he’d look at this moment like it was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Minutes or hours later, two hands rested on my back, and I expected to see Sammie, but it was the younger members of his family. Madoc was there, his big white and blue wings out, and the little red-haired Attica.
Attica smiled down at me. “We’re here to help you both, Flint. To ease his pain, and yours.” As she said it, she rested her cheek on my head, and a wave of relief rushed through me. “It’s okay to feel angry. He hurt the one person you loved. But do you know what would hurt Carmen more? If you went back. If this was all for nothing.”
I tensed beneath her, but she went back to stroking my hair softly. Madoc looked at me, his smile sad, but he rested two hands on Milo’s chest until they started to glow. “I’m just easing his pain. My biological father was an Archangel. They’re meant to be good, right? But from what I know, he was bad. But his gifts aren’t bad. Just because I came from bad blood, doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. I can use the gifts I inherited to heal wounds of the soul.”
He paused, and the glow got brighter, and some of the tension in Milo’s face eased. “The men who raised me, my real dads, are killers and bikers, literally the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The heralds of the End of Days. Bad guys, right? But they loved and protected my mom and me. Adopted Sammie and Cara. Loved us so much that we never wondered if we were wanted. Attica’s parents? Fallen Angels. Actual Princes of Hell. And I swear to you that Attica is the purest person I’ve ever met.”
I grunted, and Attica stroked my back, cooing at me like I was a spooked horse, and I had to admit, it kind of did make me feel better. “What are you trying to say, kid?”
“You don’t have to suffer for other people’s mistakes or decisions. For someone else's evilness. You deserve happiness no matter where you come from. You deserve love.”
They were kids, they didn’t understand what they were saying really. I was a bad person if I didn’t go back. But I took their comfort anyway, and hoped they’d ease something in Milo too.
Three hours later, Milo still hadn’t woken up, and I had to wonder if he was hiding in his dreams. Attica and Madoc were asleep on either side of the bed, each with a hand touching a sliver of his skin, easing his pain. I crept to my feet, pushing the door open silently. Outside, Sammie rested in a hard plastic chair, his head tipped back, his mouth opened slightly as he slept.
My shoes squeaked against the linoleum and he sat up, his hand going for a gun that wasn’t there. “How’s the kid?”
I shook my head. “Still unconscious. I don’t know if it's medical
or if he’s hiding in there.”
Sammie stood, and before I could move away, dragged me into his arms. I steeled myself to the feelings washing through me, because if I leaned into it, I wouldn’t be able to do what I needed to do.
“Carmen is back in recovery.” With that, he started to herd me toward a different room, and I let him. Because I needed to see her, needed to know she was okay, even if it did make it harder to leave.
Bobby was still in the waiting room, but Monster was gone. “Where’s the big guy?” I asked, sitting beside him.
He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and I let him pull me into his side. “It got too much for him, so he’s gone back to the woods. I think he’s gone hunting.” Bobby’s normally congenial face turned vicious. “I hope he finds him and pulls his heart from his chest and then eats it in front of him.”
Me too.
Carmen’s mom walked out of her hospital room, her eyes rimmed in tears. When she saw us, she forced a watery smile. “She’s still unconscious, but you can go in if you’d like.”
Bobby was up faster than my eyes could follow, and Sammie and I were close behind him.
She was beaten and battered in the bed, looking small and weak. So unlike my fighter. She was bandaged and basically splinted completely still. Her leg was in an inflated balloon thing, her arm in an apparatus that kept it completely immobile.
“It looks bad, but she’s a shifter. She heals fast. She’ll be fine,” Bobby murmured to us both. Yeah, she’d be fine physically in a few weeks. Mentally though? Who knew how she was. She’d been tortured. She’d seen her siblings broken and hurt. And Milo…
I shuddered, and leaned forward until my forehead touched hers gently. “Love you, Sugar Plum.”
Rebels and Runaways: Eden Academy Book One Page 25
