by Renee George
"Are you okay?" Grady panted the question, whose own breath coming hard and quick.
"Yes," I said. "Better than okay."
Chapter 14
Grady carried me down a long corridor past several doors before he kicked in the one at the end. I groaned with pleasure as he settled us onto a rumpled bed. The room was untidy but I didn't care. I was exactly where I wanted to be. I ran my fingers through his hair as he gazed down at me, his eyes full of hungry need.
"You make me feel like I'm full of energy. Is that a werewolf thing?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "I feel it, too, but I've never experienced anything like it before. I thought it might be a minion thing, but since you've been demoted..."
"Fired," I corrected. "I'm not a minion anymore. I'm free."
"And I'm not engaged anymore." He kissed me. "But I don't think I want to be free. Not from you."
"Me either." He kissed me again as his hips moved between my thighs. "Shoot," I said when he moved to my neck, "if sex feels half this good, I can't wait."
"It will feel even better," Grady promised.
"Oh, boy." I arched my body back to meet his thrusts against me and enjoyed the sensation of his mouth on my neck, my collar bone, and I only hesitated at moment when he cupped my breast and gave it a gentle squeeze. Pleasure built inside me as he rode against me. I began to pant and moan, and--wait, a minute. Was a woman standing on his back? It looked like Lara, Grady's mom. She was shouting, but I couldn't hear a word of it. "Stop, Grady," I said. "Stop."
He stopped. "What? Am I hurting you? What's wrong?"
"No," I said, flummoxed. I pointed past his head. He turned to look then tumbled sideways and fell out of bed. The woman disappeared.
"That was...that was..."
"I think it was your mom," I said.
He nodded. "She's not real. It was a vision. This is a dream. Just a dream."
I sat up. "I am not a dream. I swear it."
"And neither am I," a faint voice said. Grady's mom had her hand on his shoulder.
He started to move away, but I said, "No! Stay with her, Grady. She's a ghost. I think she must have been listening when I told you about my previous life as a ghost. She's trying to communicate with us. See if you can touch her back. Think about your mom."
"I'll try," he said, and I could tell the effort freaked him out.
"Ask her what she wants to tell us?"
"Mom, why are you here?" he asked, his voice tight with grief.
The most awful noise poured from the ghost, and then she screamed, "Run! Run, Grady! He is coming for you, and he won't stop until he has you.” She looked at me, her expression terrified. “Both of you."
"Who?" I asked.
"Bobby Broderick. He knows the deal is broken. He's known for hours."
The phone rang. It was Carol Ann. I scrambled to answer. "My dad," she sobbed. "He's got Randy. He's got everyone."
"How could he arrange all this so quickly?"
"He found another demon to make a deal with,” she said, sucking in a shuddering breath. “Daddy wanted me to pass on a message.” She paused, then whispered, “Kobal says, hello."
Oh crap! Kobal was the demon lord Charlotte escaped. He liked to think he was Hell’s entertainment director so messing with other demon lords or their minions wasn’t his usual fare. But to get revenge on a Madder sister, I supposed he'd made an exception.
Carol Ann's voice was high pitched and frightened. I could hear snapping and snarling in the background. "Daddy says he's coming for you." Her voice went even higher. "And he's bringing a pack of hellhounds with him."
“Hellhounds,” said Grady. “Are you kidding me?”
I took a deep breath. "How long until he gets here?"
"Any minute," Carol Ann said then the line went dead.
Grady's mom moaned loudly then suddenly she stilled and got very quiet. "He's here," she hissed. "Run!"
I shoved my phone in my back pocket as Grady and I got up and ran to the front door. At least ten vehicles had pulled into the driveway, blocking in both our vehicles. He grabbed me by the hand and led me down to the basement. "We'll be trapped," I said.
"Tunnel," he said. "Let's go."
"Does Broderick know about the tunnel?"
"No, no one does. My father was paranoid, even inside his own pack, and I never thought to tell anyone."
He reached for a picture on the wall behind a pool table. It unlatched and swung open like a door. Behind it was more like a crawlspace than a tunnel, and when Grady hefted me inside, I tried not to let my phobia of tight spaces freeze me in place. Instead, I crawled as fast as I could toward the back of the house, intent on getting out into the wide open as soon as possible.
Before I could punch the panel to get out, Grady grabbed my arm. "Wait," he whispered.
I felt the panic starting to build. I had to get out. Then I heard the man outside.
"They're not back here. And the windows and the door are locked."
Once he left the area, Grady said, "Now, go."
I was never so happy to comply.
We ran through the woods at the back of his property until we hit a street. How he'd managed to make very little noise over the rocky terrain is beyond me. And he was wearing motorcycle boots! Even in my Sketcher's Go-Walks, I had made enough noise to alarm crickets and tree frogs for miles. Grady's long legs were hard to keep up with, and after a mile, I told him, "I'll find a place to hide. Go on without me. I'm just slowing you down."
Without hesitation, he scooped me up and ran even faster, leaping over parked cars and fences like they were nothing. Pure exhilaration coursed through me. "Where are we heading?" I asked.
"Where else," he said. We passed a sign that said, "Lover's Leap." "I had the dream for a reason."
"Uhm, maybe you had the dream, so you would avoid the place when the time came."
He shook his head. "Trust me."
I nodded, but I would have felt better if Leonard had fired me next week and not today. I suddenly felt the crushing weight of my mortality. Oh, Leonard! I wondered if this was his idea of a cruel joke. Free me so I could die at the hands of a crazed werewolf and a bunch of hellhounds. Gah!
Grady carried me up the hill, and he moved fast on swift, silent feet. He came to an abrupt halt at the fenced area with a clearly marked sign that said, No Admittance Beyond This Fence. I tried to tug away from him, but he kept his steely grip on my wrist.
Grady lifted me over the fence, and with the grace of a large predator, he leaped the chain-link with ease.
I looked over the edge of the cliff. It was a good sixty to seventy feet straight down to an inhospitable terrain. "What now? Because unless you can sprout wings and fly, we aren't going to be able to climb fast enough to put any real distance between us and that pack of rabid wolves."
Grady's eyes were like silvery, green pools as moonlight made them glow. "I will protect you, Eliza."
I resisted losing myself in the heat of his embrace, forcing my hands, that wanted desperately to reach out for him, to hold still. "I can't let you do this." I looked over the edge. What were the chances a werewolf would survive this fall? I knew what my chances were. Zero.
I wet my suddenly dry lips as I stared up at Grady. "Let's do it. Whatever happens, no regrets."
His black hair fell down the sides of his chiseled cheeks like inky shadows, and his eyes glowed with defiance, and something else. My heart swelled to breaking.
He lifted his hand to my face and brushed something wet from my cheeks. Was I crying? Maybe. "I am yours, Grady Conrad. Whatever happens, I will face it with you. Even this leap. But I'm afraid. Not because I'm worried I'll get hurt. I'm worried for you. I know you'll do everything to protect me, but who will protect you?"
"I will," said Leonard. The demon lord was standing on the other side of me. Since Grady wasn't reacting to him, he was only showing himself to me. "I will protect him this once. After all, he is one of my children, as you put it."
I closed my eyes for a moment and whispered, "Thank you."
In my ear, Leonard said, "Oh, and you're fired on Monday. Enjoy your last weekend as a minion." Then he was gone.
I took Grady's hand, our fingers intertwined. I smiled at him. "Let's protect each other."
"Something happened," he said. "Just now. What did I miss?"
"We have a fallen angel on our side." I grinned. "And I've just become hard to kill again."
"You're not a minion again, though, right?"
"Just until Monday." Howls and yips in the distance shook me from my reverie. "Are you ready?"
"On three," Grady said. "One, two," and we jumped. We held hands as we plummeted. I'm pretty sure I screamed, but then the shadow of two wings against the rock face appeared and Grady and I floated down the last ten feet.
"That was surprisingly not fatal," I said. The wings evaporated.
"I guess we have a fallen angel to thank," Grady added. He pointed at a small hole in the side of the hill, barely wide enough for his broad shoulders. “There's where we're heading."
"Are you crazy?" I hissed. "I am not going inside that...whatever that is." I'd barely survived the crawl space, there was no way I'd keep it together in that tiny hole in the wall.
"It's an opening to the Cameron caves. It's a maze in there. We can lose Bobby and his hellhound pack in there."
I shook my head. "We can lose ourselves in there. Please don’t make me go inside."
"Then I will submit to Bobby and take whatever punishment comes my way," Grady said.
"You can't do that!"
"I won't leave you at their mercy, Eliza. So, you can come with me, or I'll save you the only other way I know how."
I smacked his chest. "You big, dumb fool."
His mouth quirked in a lopsided grin. "I've been called worse." He kissed me. "Now let's go before they catch our scent down here."
I stared at the tiny opening to the cave system and steeled my courage. "I'm petrified."
"I know this cave very well, and I won't leave you alone. Not for a single moment."
The angry howls grew closer. Bobby and his crew along with the hellhounds would be on us soon. I nodded to Grady and tried not to choke on my fear. "Okay." Several times, I considered turning and running straight toward a pack of shifters hellbent on tearing me apart. "I'll go inside."
Grady put his arms around me for a brief moment and kissed me again. "You are the bravest person I know, Eliza."
I appreciated the sentiment, but as we climbed the steep path to what I considered worse than doom, I was pretty sure it wasn't true.
And that's how I ended up sandwiched between Grady and the floor inside the damp cave.
Chapter 15
"Grady," his mom said, appearing to us both once again. "I'm here, son."
If I thought the small cave was cramped before, adding a ghost mom to the mix did not make the situation better. Or maybe she could. When Charlotte, Elise, and I had been ghosts, we often scouted ahead for Olivia to find where the lesser demons were to make it easier for her to find and dispatch them. It was part of what earned her such a scary reputation.
As his mother stroked his hair, Grady looked like he suddenly wished he could disappear.
"Mrs. Conrad, I understand your need to be close to your son, but if you could stop petting him for a moment, that would be real nice."
She stopped, and Grady's relief was palpable. "Thank you, ma'am. I know you want to protect Grady."
She nodded.
"Do you think you could find out how many werewolves and how many hellhounds are in this cave?"
She nodded again.
"Thank you kindly," I told her. And she let Grady go and went invisible again.
"Is it bad that I'm completely wigged that we're talking to my dead mother?"
"I think it might be bad if you weren't. But now that she's here, we can use her help."
"It's a good plan," Grady said. "How do you feel about me wolfing out?"
"Is it bad that I think it's kind of hot?"
"Yes," he said then chuckled. "I think I could love you, Eliza."
"Why don't you wait and see how you feel after we survive this mess."
"I think you already know how I feel."
"Hard? Horny?"
He chuckled again, and his hard and horniness poked at me again. "Guilty as charged."
His mom appeared, and I felt a blush warm my cheeks. I didn’t want Grady’s mom to overhear our conversation about Grady’s…um, erection. "I found two about twenty feet down, just past the first intersection."
"You ready," he said.
"Yep." Damn, I wished I'd brought those Lugers with me instead of the useless phone, but once again, they were sitting in my bag back at the farm. I'd been so excited about Leonard breaking the bargain that I hadn't followed the Madder motto, always be prepared to kick butt.
"Conrad!" Bobby shouted. "Come out and face me."
"And his minor legion of death," I added quietly. The one thing I was learning in all this was that Broderick was a coward who would stop short of nothing to get the power he wanted. "Maybe we should wait them out."
"You could stay here," he said.
"Try and stop me," I told him.
"I'm going to shift now."
"Okay."
He lifted himself as far off me as he could manage, cracked his neck then started his transformation. I should have been scared, but I wasn't. I was fascinated. The process was much quieter than I'd expected, but then again, the last time I'd seen him turn all wolfman, there'd been shouting and bench scooting going on. I was fascinated by the way his muscles rippled and his arms, legs, and torso elongated. His neck thickened, and his head doubled in size as fur sprouted out of his skin. The front of his face protruded into a short more wolf-like nose and long sharp canines grew on either side. His shirt once again was a mangled mess, but his jeans had managed to survive with only minor tearing in the thighs. Grady rolled off me and out into the cave corridor.
He looked at me. I nodded. "Let's take him down." My bravado had very little to do with my fear of small spaces, but I won't lie when I say I was relieved to roll out after him. I shoved my phone in my back pocket again, wishing I'd carried my purse, or at the very least one of those waist packs I'd seen some people wear.
We moved silently down the passage, my heart racing as the yips and howls and shouting of Bobby's crew bounced off the walls. They sounded so much closer than I knew they were, so I calmed my fears as much as I could. I picked up a loose rock, since I had no other weapons but my charm, and I didn't think it would be all that effective against these fellas.
When we reached the crossing, Lara showed up again, her hand on Grady's hairy forearm. She put her finger to her lips then indicated, with some pantomime, one fully shifted werewolf on either side of the crossing. Since, I couldn't take a lycanthrope in a fair fight, I got down low with the rock. Lara smiled. She motioned us to hold up a moment, and with her hand still on Grady, she stepped out into the opening between corridors. The Marion wolfmen snarled as they lunged for her and ended up swiping at each other. I used their confusion as an opportunity to pound the left guy’s foot with the rock before bringing it up and smashing him in the testicles. He howled and dropped to the ground, his claws digging into my sides as I hit him in the face and on the head multiple times until he let go of me and stopped moving.
I looked over at Grady. His guy's neck was twisted far enough around that had he still been conscious, he could have checked out his own butt. I made an "ew" face and he looked at my guy and gave me a "pot-calling-the-kettle-black" face. Since he wasn't wrong, I shrugged. These fellas weren't dead, because without silver, wolfsbane, or the lycan flu, nothing short of ripping off their heads or tearing out their hearts, would do the trick. Which meant, Grady did not want to kill these men. He knew that some weren't masters of their own destinies, and these men could no more choose to defy their Alpha than I could have defied Le
onard.
Lara reappeared. "One down this way, coming fast," she said.
"I'll go low. You go high."
Grady smiled and flexed his massive muscles. I crouched, waiting for the next werewolf to head our way.
"Conrad! I always knew you weren't a real man," Broderick yelled, trying to bait Grady out into the open. I looked up to see if he was biting. I smiled when I saw that Broderick's words didn't even make him blink. I loved a secure man.
"Now," Lara said. She let go of Grady, and apparated in the corridor with her hand stretched out to Grady's forearm, just as the werewolf reached us. He skidded to a halt as I smashed my bloody rock into his shin and when he focused his attention down on me, Grady punched him with an uppercut and took him clean off his feet. We moved on down the line and took out three more of Bobby's men in a similar manner. Our fighting had stirred up the hellhounds and their roaring barks made me shiver to the bone.
"Just up ahead," Grady said, and I saw his face had gone back to almost human. "It's another way out."
He didn't have to tell me twice. I'd never been so ready for "out" after being "in" for so long. The path narrowed, my upper arms scraping along the smooth rocks, and I ran ahead. When I reached the opening, Grady yelled, "Stop!"
I turned back to see him wedged at the opening and having to change his form again to try and fit the space, and his mom was behind him, her face contorted with fear.
"Hurry," I said.
"That way's no good," Grady said. "They're waiting for us."
Before I could respond, two large hands reached into the opening, grasped me by the shoulders, and yanked me backwards. I struggled as Bobby Broderick encircled me into his hairy, super-strong, werewolf arms, but I couldn't free myself. Grady's mom must have seen this coming and warned Grady, but I'd been so eager to leave the cave I'd ran ahead and got myself caught.
A large black beast with red eyes and three tails rounded the corner of the hillside. "Hello, little Eliza," a man said, stepping out from behind the brutish hellhound. "Welcome to my show." Kobal, who wore a red coat with tails, black pants, and red shoes, bowed with a flourish. "Tonight's entertainment will slay you."
