by Rae Foxx
The Fae took a few tentative steps forward, sending everything shifting more and all of us freezing.
"I swear if the ceiling comes down on top of us and Tommy doesn't get us out in time, I'm killing him," Howl said as we followed Finn, each of us putting our feet where his had been.
"How will you kill me, Howl?" Tommy laughed from behind me, the guy floating behind us on grey smoke. "You'll be dead."
"And you're a demon, easier to take down when we are both on equal playing fields." The two laughed at their mysteriously great joke, but I was staring at Tommy, who was now lounging on his smoke like an old lady in a swimming pool.
"Or, you could carry us all over there on your smoke, reduce the risk of the cave coming down altogether," I put my hands on my hips, raising an eyebrow at the demon who pushed himself through the air, his eyes dark as he leaned into me, his nose only an inch from mine.
"I'll carry you," he whispered and gave me a wink. "I'm too tired to carry the rest of them."
He pulled back and laughed, wrapping smoke around me as though he was going to carry me away.
"I would throw something at you if I wasn't afraid it would bring the whole cave down," Howl snapped, now abandoning Finn's path to take what looked to be a more stable path off to the right.
"That's probably a good call," I muttered, staring at the floor as it shifted and groaned again. "I'm actually surprised the whole thing is standing to begin with. I would have thought we would have taken the whole thing down the last time we were here. You know, with that witch..."
"And Saxon killed that vampire," Howl added on, his voice carrying over to us as he moved further and further away.
I froze. My leg was preparing to launch me forward freezing as I turned to Howl, apparently oblivious to what he had said.
"The vampire," I repeated, turning toward the section of rubble where Saxon had taken the hooded guy down. "What was a vampire doing down here if Katarina thinks Nicky is some bad guy to defeat?"
Everyone turned toward me, eyes wide, narrowed, and one jaw dropped slightly in the case of Finn. Tommy looked like a cross between frustrated that I hadn't figured that out and trying to hold in a laugh.
"I suppose the vampire couldn't have been working with Katarina. Perhaps he defected like Saxon did?" Finn offered, diplomatic as always. I shrugged, sure it made sense, but there was something else that wasn't adding up.
"I don't see Nicky partnering herself with someone unless they have something to offer. Hell, she only wanted me for my blood... and Katarina..." I stalled and shivered, Howl slowly turning as he picked the thought from my head. "She's holding Saxon hostage and sacrificing us so she can get her hands on that damn book..."
“And now we’re trusting them," Finn said, stalling as the floor shifted again. "Asking them to fight with us. Saxon is with them--unprotected.”
Tommy flicked the cigarette somewhere into the dark, the red speck of the ember fizzling out before it hit the cold stone “So what? He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself. And your mom is there.”
“Yeah, because she seems so ready to fight if things go wrong,” I growled at him and attempted to kick him, but the ground beneath me groaned in protest. “The faster we get the book and the info, the faster we can get Saxon out of there.”
"As long as we have no plans to actually give the book to her," Howl said, his voice carrying from the other side of the cave, the broken paths toward the center having set us out in the cavern-like spokes of a wheel.
"Nope. Not that dumb. After all, she told me it was etched with spells or some shit. There's got to be something in there that I can use to restrain her, grab Saxon, and make us some more enemies." Because we need more of those. I was beginning to think I was going to need some kind of punch card. Get ten enemies, kill one free. Morbid, but effective. I already knew who I would pick. "At this point, we will all have to go into hiding for a thousand years."
"I see nothing wrong with this," Tommy sighed, lying back on his cloud bed. "Think of all the relaxing... and the fucking..."
I could hear everyone's eyes roll from where I was scuttling over the pebbles and stone that were practically breaking apart underneath me.
"No hiding until we get Saxon back," I announced as I slipped on the stone, and slid down a small hill of broken rock into an absolute graveyard.
"Fuck!" I shrieked, as I kicked and flailed and tried to pull myself to a stop. The sharp edges of the stone cut into my skin, hands, and legs, my stomach getting sliced into oblivion. Guess I should have put on actual clothes before I went on an adventure into a subterranean danger zone.
All of my kicking and flailing was pointless. The broken rock continued to shift, my mates yelling, the ground groaned, and I landed against a wall of bodies.
Dead. Fucking. Bodies.
"Oh my god," I gasped, trying to kick my way back up the debris, and away from the horrified open-mouth stare of the dead woman who laid atop of the pile.
The cave, in all its shifting, had created a burial ground. It was still fresh with the scent of death and the beginnings of rot. And blood. Oh god, the mixed deliciousness of all of that blood was doing a number on my senses.
"What is --" Tommy said as he slid into the air over me, his face paling at the open-air graveyard before him. Even Finn, who was now trying to make his way down to me, looked shocked.
Bodies were contorted in all kinds of ways, limbs tangled one over the other or dismembered altogether. I couldn't tell where one body stopped, and another began. Bodies were divided in half by shafts of rock that had fallen from the cave. Others were missing arms or legs. God only knew where the fuck those pieces were. Each face was frozen in a look of terror, impending doom, or somewhere in between. Most of their eyes were still open as though death had surprised them, paused them right in that moment of sheer terror at their last breath.
Which, I mean, I guess it had. I hadn't expected to erupt in an orb of light and bring down an entire cave either.
I lifted myself to standing, trying to find a path around the bodies when I stopped dead in my tracks. The uniformed guy below me had died in a scream, vampire fangs protruding from his jaw, the lower half of his body caught mid-shift. His fingers were covered in fur, stubby little fingers that ended in claws that were not human. Same with his legs...
“What the fuck?” I asked and touched the tip of the fang, making sure it was real. These were no shifter or wolf fangs. They didn’t belong to any other animal either. These were fucking vamp fangs on a wolf. “Half breed. More of them..."
"More of them?" Finn asked as he reached the bottom of the rockslide, Howl yelling down to us from far above.
"What do you mean more of them?"
"All of them..." Tommy cut in before I could explain. "They are all half breeds."
The decrepit crypt was pockmarked with dead hybrids of all shapes and sizes. Even with a thousand-page journal, I couldn’t have inventoried the different mixes of creatures that lay before us. Some of them I didn’t even recognize. Animals with pentagrams burned into their palms. Vampire with the pointed ears of the Fae.
Every foreign, illegal mixture of supernatural lay dead before me.
"That fucking, lying, bastard of a rat’s ass." I hissed, and everyone turned toward me. "Nicky. She rules that no one could interbreed. Shunned me for being half and half... and all along she was building herself an army. I thought it was just Danvers..."
"Danvers?" Finn asked as Howl swore and began his own decent. "What does Danvers have to do with any of this."
"Danvers is a vampire shifter... well a vampire," Howl explained as he reached us. "Not that any of us have seen her shift."
"I've seen her shift," Tommy said, finally relinquishing his black smoke cloud to join us. "I've seen her shift a lot. never seen any fangs though..."
"Well, I've seen them, and they are real," I mumbled kicking aside a half-formed lion paw, complete with pentagram as I made my way toward what was left of the Dais.
The thing had sunk down into the graveyard.
The epicenter of my explosion.
"Shit." Tommy snapped, running his hand through his hair. "Bitch was doing more than I thought. Not that I'm surprised. I was gone for decades before I came back. Danvers was the only one then. All of this," he gestured to the mass grave, "she must have created this while I was with you."
"So, you didn't know?" I asked, catching him in the eye. I knew better than to trust the demon outright, but the guy seemed so shocked. As if he had let himself down for not figuring this out.
Which I guess he did. You would think demons would be better at espionage than this.
"Nope," Tommy said, pulling out a cigarette and popping the thing in his mouth. "I would have told you too. The last thing we need is to be ambushed by a hybrid army--"
"Which we were," I interrupted. Tommy’s face paled a little, but he shrugged one shoulder, sucking his cigarette dry.
"We will be again. If I know Nicky - this isn't her biggest card to play. We need that book."
"Agreed," Finn and Howl said together, both disgusted at agreeing with the demon.
"The less time Saxon spends with the Fang-Banger, the better." We all turned toward the shattered dais, carefully treading through bodies and shifting stone to reach the bits of stone that hopefully concealed the book. As though it were indestructible, the bowl that she had used to summon my father lay on a bit of stone, a ribbon of light falling over it like it was summoned by some higher power.
Stereotypical God rays. They were freaky and unwanted, just like the stale blood that still coated the inside of the uncracked surface.
"Ew." I covered my mouth as I caught a mouthful of the stench that was drifting from the bowl. My blood smelling off to me now, maybe because of the new senses.
Covering my nose and mouth, I searched around the bowl, picking up rocks and boulders with a burst of vampire energy fueling my muscles. Howl and Finn took up the search with me, tossing rocks to the side and simultaneously trying not to fall through the cracks to their death or break their ankles in the process. It didn't take long for all of us to come to the same conclusion.
"It's not here."
“They have the Nascence book, your father, and a hybrid army," Finn said, staring into the ray of light like it was going to give him some fucking answers. "Their reign of terror won’t stop with us. It is rumored to be the book to bring the end for a reason. They will go after the humans next and any creature who gets in their way. We have to end this before Nicky implodes the whole world.”
“Thanks for the warning, but the book isn’t fucking here," I snapped, throwing a rock at the bowl with the intent to crack it. It shifted and rolled onto its side. Not a crack was there. I could have sworn the ray of light even moved alongside it. "Kalensa should’ve put a fucking tracker on that thing if it was so important.”
Howl’s face lit up, "Maybe she did."
Howl didn't give any more explanation before he shifted, his clothes falling to ribbons as his massive wolf appeared, the cave shifting and groaning in the change of weight.
"Fuck!" I shrieked, trying to keep my balance as Howl ran toward the bowl and stuck his white snout inside, coating it with the foul-smelling red.
'It's his smell,' he said as his wolf howled, and I quickly translated to the others.
"My father’s scent... It's not mine. It's his. It’s so pure--so distinct. It’s because he’s the original," I sniffed at the bowl myself, my wolf--vampire powers blending to enhance the smell, to pull me right in the direction that he had left. "They left a thick trail behind. I bet we can follow it right to Nicky. Maybe find Scarlet and the twins too. We are going to need them.”
Chapter 8
“Get on my back!” I yelled to Finn, right before I shifted into my wolf and turned to follow Howl, who was already making his way back to the broken staircase we had used to get down here. The pieces of fabric that I was trying to pass off as clothing disintegrating with the force of my shift, the bits looking like ribbons as my black wolf burst into being. Finn jumped on my back without hesitation and leaving Tommy to float in his bit of black smoke, smoking a cigarette and curling his lip.
"If you expect me to ride Howl out of here you must have hit your head on that fall," He snarled before sucking and puffing on his cigarette like it was a nipple. "That ain't going to happen."
‘He’s not riding bitch on me. He can poofy, poofy smoke there for all I care.’ Howl answered.
"You weren't invited," Finn said as I began to move. Tommy was predictably using his demon powers to follow us. "You can clearly take care of yourself."
The two glared and snarled at each other, or I thought they did, I was already padding my way up the staircase and through the school in my pursuit of Howl and the vile aroma of my father.
Students screeched and jumped out of the way as we ripped through the school, everything going on as normal even though a massive cavern underneath the school was collapsing.
Yeah, that was a recipe for disaster. Another thing to add to my to-do list. Get the book, defeat Nicky, retrieve Saxon, defeat the vampire queen, evacuate the school which needed to come sooner rather than later. But Saxon came first.
From now on, this harem was not sold separately. Fuck all these bitches and their stipulations. Never again would I let anyone make a deal like that.
Every step I took through the halls rumbled and rattled beneath my paws. I wasn't sure why the students weren't freaking out with each microearthquake. Probably because they couldn't feel it. My vampire-shifter-witch blood was clearly doing more weird things to my senses then making me want to drink blood.
Mmmm. Blood.
Okay, I was really starting to wonder when this ancient vampire blood was going to wear off because that student over there was looking mighty delicious.
Focus.
'We will get them out,' Howl whispered into my mind as we ripped out of the school and took off into the forest, my black wolf following his white one like the shadow to the bullet he was.
'First, we need the book,' I reminded him, picking up my pace. The quicker we found Nicky, the quicker we could be done with this.
On any day, my wolf took strides that were almost double Howl’s, mostly because I was near twice his size. But with the addition of the searing force of the vamp blood inside me, I ran like I’d snorted a six-pack of Red Bull. My body moved like some kind of liquid wolf dancer as my paws pushed and propelled me forward, the trees turning into a blur.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
My wolf whined, Finn swore and jumped off my back like he had been launched and two seconds later I landed headfirst against the wide trunk of a pine tree that I hadn't been able to avoid.
"Okay, this vampire blood is really messing me up," I moaned as I shifted back into my human form, leaning against the tree as I rubbed my head.
"What happened? You okay?" Finn broke through the brush like a bird, jumping over the undergrowth of the forest with much more grace than I had managed.
"The same thing that happened when I threw you guys into walls and tossed myself through the air. Vampires move fast." And normally don't launch themselves into tree trunks.
I didn't add that part. Finn's attempt to restrain his laughter made it clear he already knew. Tommy was already laughing as he black smoked his way over to us. He didn't even need to see what had happened to know. The wolf head imprint in the bark was enough.
"Damn," he said and gave a low whistle. "If you can do that, I would hate to see what Danvers and her shifter-vampire blood can do."
My blood must have turned to ice. I hadn't even thought of that, so much for the dance fighting queen.
"None of that will matter if I can launch myself into Nicky and rip her face off. Even Danvers can't stop what she doesn't know is coming." I shook my head as if it was going to dislodge the ringing that was vibrating there, but it only made it worse.
'I would highly suggest against that,' Howl said as he
pawed through the trees, his wolf out of breath from trying to catch up. 'But the less you try to move through trees the better. I do not think that is a skill a vampire possesses.'
"Ha ha," I rolled my eyes and trotted up to him, hoisting myself onto his back without asking and holding my hand out for Finn.
Howl's wolf gave a low grumble of frustration but continued on, pulling us toward the foul odor that was pulling us along like a raccoon and his favorite piece of rotten garbage.
My wolf had a hell of a nose but with the combined senses of wolf and now vampire, I was sure I could pick my father out of a crowd of people while blindfolded. Which was good, seeing as Nicky and her team of murderous villains weren't fitting into the dumb-as-shit variety.
The thick revolting aroma led us in and out of lines of trees, Howl’s massive wolf having to crawl under felled trees and even jump a small canyon at one point in an attempt to follow the scent. They’d known my father would leave a stink a hundred miles long, and I bet my ass they curved and swerved, trying to hide it from me. Too bad, Nicky. I win again.
I couldn’t wait to see her fucking face when I poked my new fangs out and showed her a real hybrid. As long as I didn't dive headfirst into a tree, I was golden.
Of course, that would have been a lot easier if the smell of blood and the sound of a thousand quickened pulses hadn't hit my nose. My dead heart gave one thump of exhilaration, all of my muscles tensing and threatening to recoil and send me into the air as though I had been launched by a cannon.
"Slow down," I hissed to Howl, trying to keep my need to sink my teeth into anything that moved at bay. Howl obliged his paws a slow thunder that matched what I assumed with the pulse of my heart. "Do you smell that? It's like a blood cocktail."
"I don't smell it so much as taste it," Tommy said, touching down as I slid from Howl’s back, the two of us slow stepping toward a line of tall pines and the bright light that was beaming through it.
Like golden rays welcoming us to the world's best buffet.
"They are here. Good, let's take them now." My mouth was full of saliva, my fangs fully protruding as I stepped forward, ready to launch myself into whatever amazing thing was on the other side of those trees.
