As they ran, Demons began popping up around them. No matter how much she saw it, Myriad swore she would never get used to the suddenness of Demon teleportation. Clearly the Mind Demons Noah had contacted were working overtime to bring reinforcements to them. The Enforcers blazed into form, assorted warriors coming quickly in their wake.
Noah had to crash bodily through the charred front door, skidding across the floor as he shot through, barely in balance. He fell in a rare moment of awkwardness, soot and melted debris sliding beneath his feet. His fall brought him face-to-face with a body, and he suddenly found himself looking into the open, vacant silver eyes of his brother-in-law.
“Gideon…”
His shock was written all over his voice and face. He slid to his knees and leaned over his sister’s husband, feeling for a pulse. Noah had never known such fear as he did in that horrible moment. Not even when he had seen his mother’s violated body upon her death had he allowed himself to feel such a debilitating, paralyzing emotion. He had been forced to be strong then, for Legna’s sake, because she had been but a babe when she had seen her mother in that state. But this he felt and felt deeply. Just as Legna would—
“Legna!”
Noah’s head snapped around as he reached out, mentally screaming for her, demanding she answer and searching with all his power for her energy signature.
“Legna!”
Jacob and Isabella came rushing into the half-destroyed house. Isabella cried out in despair when she saw Gideon’s lifeless form. But she was rudely pushed aside when Siena burst into the house and moved to see what had so horrified everyone into standing so stock-still.
“Gideon!” the Queen gasped, dropping swiftly to her old friend’s side.
He could not be dead. He was too old, too powerful! If he was dead, that meant that Elijah…
Siena pushed the thought aside violently, reaching for Gideon’s throat as Noah gained his feet and ran up the stairs three and four at a time.
“Is he…?” Bella dared to begin to ask.
“We need a medic in here!” Siena screamed, her voice echoing in the desolate house. “Where is Elijah?”
“Elijah?” Jacob demanded. “Elijah is here?”
“Yes, he is here somewhere. I felt him when I woke earlier. It is what led us here. I know he is here. Where is he?” Siena asked urgently, standing up and looking all around herself for signs of her new husband. She was breathing hard enough to hyperventilate, coughing on the residual smoke seeping through the room. She searched her thoughts and her soul for any sign of Elijah’s consciousness, his powerful presence suddenly vacant from her awareness, clouded by her panic.
Jacob and Isabella took her vacated position over Gideon, and Isabella gasped when she realized she had just knelt in a pool of the Ancient’s blood. Closer now, under the charred clothing and soot from smoke, she saw he was severely wounded, burned and also bitten, his flesh torn as if he had been brutally attacked by a pack of wild animals.
“It was animals. Dogs, wolves, and snakes. Venomous snakes!” Jacob hissed.
Jacob, the tracker to the end, turned over Gideon’s limp hand, pulling several long blond strands of hair from between his fingers.
An Elder Body Demon, a medic in the warrior corps, hurried into the house, followed by about a half dozen other warriors, who immediately took to searching the house. The medic joined Bella and Jacob, laying hands on the Ancient Demon.
“He’s dead,” he murmured. “But only just. Move back.”
The Enforcers did as commanded, leaving the medic to do what he could in peace, their sense of duty firing through their joined minds.
“Ruth,” Jacob said needlessly, snapping the fine blond hairs between clenched fingers.
The name drew Siena’s full attention.
“Ruth?” There was nothing but rage and pain in the Queen’s eyes as she repeated the cursed name. “That bitch did this?”
Furious, the Lycanthrope Queen made a low, dangerous sound. All she could remember all of a sudden was how she had first found Elijah, bleeding, in agony, and close to the end of his mortality because of his last encounter with the Demon female who had betrayed her kind. Driven to a near emotional madness, she barely recognized the weak whisper of scent that drifted into range of her senses.
Then suddenly her head perked up, her ears and whiskers twitching forward. She was quite a sight, few of the Demons present having seen her Wereform before now, finding the sleekly furred and formed female cat as powerful and intimidating as she truly was, her wild fear and racing bio-signs apparent to even those who did not naturally sense such things. Jacob knew, as he would know with any wild creature of nature, that she had caught the scent of what she had been looking for.
“Elijah,” Jacob whispered.
Siena growled, the half-cry of the puma making warriors step back out of age-old habit. Lycanthropes were a tough breed and nothing to mess with, not even in peacetime, and they knew to give her a wide berth. But the Enforcers followed her as she raced out of the door with her remarkable speed.
“She’s going to kill herself,” Jacob bit out, rushing after the heedless woman.
“How…?”
“The sun,” Jacob explained to his less experienced mate. “It makes her kind sick. It poisons them. She’s strong, but not that strong. There isn’t even a cloud in the sky or a tree to shade her.”
But Bella knew what was propelling the Queen. She had once knelt in Jacob’s blood, just as she had Gideon’s a moment ago, terrified he was about to die. In that moment, nothing could have stopped her from doing everything she could think of to defy fate in order to save his life. It had been Gideon who had saved him then, but now it was Gideon who was in need of being saved by his own miraculous skills. But who could work that miracle? She had only ever seen Gideon perform such feats.
The physician, in this case, could not heal himself.
Jacob and Bella ran after the Queen, but she was powered by the speed of the cat that she was. Only Jacob would have been able to match her, but he refused to leave Bella behind in this dangerous situation.
Siena tore over the lawn at full speed, but that speed downgraded visibly to her pursuers the longer the sprint became. She was heading for a distant tree line as her gait shortened, began to become awkward, dragged as if she was running through a sea of water instead of air.
“I have to catch up with her. She is never going to make it in this sunlight,” Jacob shouted to his wife.
“Catch her! I’m fine,” she insisted, pushing at his shoulder to urge him to the speed he was capable of.
Siena was blinded by tears, heedless of the nausea and weakness dragging at her struggling body like thousands of claws bent on rending her to shreds, working to slow her down and freeze her in position just short of the goal she needed to reach so desperately. The Queen fell over her own feet, crashing clumsily to the ground with a painful jarring. The strike on the ground seemed to burst her apart, her frantic sobs, held trapped within herself until that frustrating moment of impact, blinding her as she tried to stagger to her feet.
An outraged cry of wild terror echoed into the morning air as she struggled halfway to her feet, forcing herself forward with hands and feet and any other part of herself that would gain the purchase to propel her toward her goal.
Siena reached the tree line just as Elijah’s form solidified suddenly before her, reaching for the frantic crash of her propelled body. He was overwhelmed by the emotions of his mate that had drawn him there, her feelings of distress having lured him like a clamoring beacon. She was so hysterical with paralyzing panic that she hadn’t heard a single thing, felt a single feeling he had tried to communicate to soothe her.
They crashed into each other as she finally reached him, his opened arms scooping her up as she threw herself awkwardly against his body. She pushed herself into him, and into him again, forcing him to hold her tighter to keep her from harming them both in her desperation. She was so violent as sh
e grabbed at his body that her feet came up off the ground, her arms nearly throttling him. She held on to him as if the world was ending and she needed to meet doomsday with him from the inside of his body, or his soul, whichever she could reach with all her efforts.
Her claws retracted to safety as she reached for his face, cupping it with desperation as tears fell over her furred face and dripped onto him, her soft lips trembling with sobs as she kissed him. She could not even breathe she was so upset, her padded fingers inspecting his scorched and wounded body frantically. It was merely battle scarring, nothing lethal, since this time his surprise at running into a pack of magic-users at Gideon’s had been buffered by the fact that the open area had given him visual warning. In fact, he had been the one to surprise them. He had been fighting them, chasing them into the woodlands even as he picked them off one at a time with hailstones, lightning, and hurricane-force winds that blew right past any defenses they tried to throw at him.
He had only broken off when he had felt Siena’s arrival and her highly panicked distress. He hadn’t even realized she had come awake until she had entered the closer proximity. He had mistakenly thought that between his efforts and her sleeping state, she would remain blissfully unaware of the danger he was facing.
“Get a medic,” she sobbed, gasping the words out as her terror and pain continued to overwhelm her body and soul. “Get a medic. Please. Goddess, please! Don’t just stand there!” she screamed at Jacob who had finally, breathlessly, caught up to her and Elijah. “Get him a medic!”
Siena fell apart, not even seeing that Bella had also caught up to them, leaning hard into a stitch in her side. The Queen was lost in her pounding emotions, her body reverting to its human shape as she lost all strength and buried her face and fingers into Elijah’s scorched shirt and burned chest.
“Siena!” Elijah grabbed her arms and gave her a shake. “Calm down, kitten. I am not hurt!”
But as he tried to get her to see sense, he felt her wobbling limply in his grasp. Her head bobbled weakly as her strength seemed to bleed out of her with the suddenness of a mortal wound. He heard Bella gasp, and, out of the corner of his eye, was aware of her hand covering the appalled opening of her mouth. The Enforcer was near to tears herself as she watched the Queen collapse so hard and fast. Elijah had to move with the reflexes of the wind, changing his grasp on her in order to hold on to her, keeping her from dropping like a stone. The hands that were grasping at Elijah’s shirt went lax, her gold eyes closing halfway as they rolled back into her head.
“Siena!” Elijah bent to lift her into his arms, but she was dead weight now, her body suddenly locked into the rigidity of a seizure that made it impossible to do anything but follow her down to the ground.
The worst part of it was when his mind went completely blank of her presence. Elijah had never known such fear as he felt when she seemed to vacate his soul so suddenly. Not even when he had faced his own death a week ago had he known this kind of terror. The sudden silence after so much pain and panic tore at him, leaving him with open wounds in his spirit that outstripped the pain of those on his body by massive proportions.
Then he was forced to watch her body lock and release in wave after wave of rigid muscular contortions, her skin fading from gold to gray to a splotchy red, her clenching teeth tearing at her own tongue so her mouth filled with blood that spilled over her face and into her slackening hair.
“No! Siena, don’t do this!” Elijah shouted as he bent over her, holding her thrashing head between his hands in an effort to keep her from further injuring herself on the rocks and forest debris scattered underneath her.
“We have to get her out of the sun, Elijah. She’s killing herself,” Jacob commanded, a strong hand on the warrior’s shoulder to try and draw his attention.
“Wait,” Bella said, gently urging her husband aside as she reached for Siena. “I can absorb her power. If it works like it did on Legna when she was Summoned, her weakness to the sun will disappear as Legna’s vulnerability to the pentagram did. It could keep her just as safe as Legna was. It will give you the time you need to get to safety without allowing the poisoning to advance any further from continued exposure.”
“Bella, don’t!” Jacob warned, trying to grab her to stop her. But his mate pushed his hand aside, turning glaring violet eyes up to him. “Damn it, Bella, you have no clue what you will do to her or yourself if you do this! Stop fighting me every time I try to protect you!”
“Would you rather I let her die?” she demanded. “Should I let someone I love as a brother, who has treated me like family since the day I arrived among you in spite of everyone else’s condemnations, be deprived of his soul mate? Should I protect myself and allow an entire people to be deprived of their Queen?”
“Not at the cost of my soul mate, Bella!” He was breathing harder, edging toward a volatile alarm, a condition he was not prone to unless her safety was at stake. “You do not know what will occur if you do this. You could end up killing her,” Jacob argued, his hands fisting at his sides as he forced himself not to reach for her again, “or yourself.”
“The possibility of death is a risk all of us take the minute we wake up in the evening. My safety is in jeopardy every time I accompany you to destroy the Transformed or track those who need enforcing. You don’t make a stink about it then, so stop doing it now.” Bella turned her attention back to the Lycanthrope female, feeling Elijah’s frantic gaze on her. “Everyone step back. I don’t know how to narrow my abilities yet. I don’t need to draw all of you in.”
“All the more reason you should not do this,” Jacob snapped, losing all sense of awareness for anything but the danger to her safety that was clawing at him relentlessly.
“Fine, then stay where you are. I’m doing this with or without your cooperation, Jacob,” she said hotly, the determination in her voice and the set of her stubborn jaw putting an end to her side of the argument. “Without is only taking longer.”
Elijah suddenly decided for all of them. He stood up and physically reached to haul Jacob back away from both women. The Enforcer struck the warrior’s hand aside, his dark eyes flaring with outrage that the Captain would try to strong-arm him from protecting his mate.
“Move back, or I will move you, Jacob,” the warrior hissed, understanding that Bella’s suggestion was the quickest, most plausible action to take to stop Siena’s agony. Had he simply tried to carry her to shelter, she would probably have died from the continuous exposure to the sunlight before he reached his goal. Even he was feeling the drag of lethargy that affected his kind in the sun, in spite of his own strength at resisting that very condition.
Jacob could have held his ground, but it would have clearly invited an altercation. Outvoted, he finally backed away and gave Bella the room she had requested. The only other solution would have been for each man to assert his need to protect his mate above the other’s through violence. In spite of the volatile emotions involved, it was not worth the price they would pay should it come to that.
Feeling her husband watching her with mental as well as visible anxiety, the Druid took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She reached out to touch Siena’s bare skin with tentative fingers, more to focus herself than for any other reason, and sought within herself to unlock the power that had lain tamped down deep in her body for so long now. Bella had not released this power from her repressive control since she had been attacked six months ago by Ruth and her brethren.
So when it flared to life, it was with a visible eddy that pushed at the everything like an artificial wind, making the trees bend with loud creaks of stressed branches, the leaves and grasses blowing and scattering in a circular tide outward from the Druid. Jacob felt his heart leap into his throat. He had never seen this exude from her before. Usually hers was an invisible, imperceptible ability that insidiously bled Nightwalkers of their innate gifts. It terrified him to see everything around her blow back with sudden violence.
A minute later, the
surge hit both males, even at their distance of several yards back. It propelled them both off their feet, slamming them to the ground in startled unison as all the capability of their elemental bodies was sucked out of them in a heartbeat.
At the same time, Bella robbed Siena of all her innate nature, from shape-shifting to the sensitivity to the sun that came with it. Unfortunately, Jacob also remembered a moment later that Bella not only dampened the innate abilities of Nightwalkers, she took on all of their characteristics.
Bella fell back onto her backside as all the power she had just invited into herself hit her hard. Suddenly the wind picked up and began to whip at them all. Then the grass began to grow at a frantic rate, becoming a tangled mass of blades in a heartbeat. Too much, too enormously powerful, the abilities she had stolen from them were out of her control. And as Siena finally fell into a relaxed loss of consciousness, Bella’s hair began to spread, forming into black, silky fur all over Bella’s body.
“Damn it!” Jacob bit out, staggering to his feet under the press of remarkable weakness, the power of which he had never felt before. He lurched over to his wife just as her form began to mutate painfully, her half-human body never intended to alter in such ways. One minute she was looking at him in wide-eyed shock, the next she was a violet-eyed jaguar, struggling to wriggle out of the confines of her jeans, T-shirt, and underclothes.
“Bella! Calm down!” Jacob said as he reached for her mind on both the level of an Imprinted mate and a creature of the Earth who could charm any animal he set his mind to. He worked quickly to free the huge cat of the clothing it was caught in, watching with actual awe as those eyes so eerily familiar to him seemed not to know him all of a sudden.
He had known that she could absorb and utilize Demon powers, but he would never have thought the same would apply to Lycanthrope powers. He had thought, until a moment ago, that the ability to shapechange had been as natural as a heartbeat for Siena, something Bella could not borrow or steal or use for herself in any way.
Elijah: The Nightwalkers Page 26
