It took several seconds to lock onto the man she knew had to be there, vile and repulsive with evil motivations stirring his desires. She didn’t care if the man felt any presence of her intrusion. She knew it wouldn’t hurt him, but some could sense the invasion by a build-up of pressure, if they knew what to equate that pressure to.
He didn’t.
Without a shred of remorse, she began to, bit by bit, pick the man’s brain apart.
* * * *
Joaquin met the first attack with a roar of rage, sending the men before him in a careening arc into the night. Blue light lit the sky as Diego hurled an energy bolt right into one of the vehicles. Screams soaked the air a beat before the large, lumbering machine ground to a halt and exploded.
“They are showing no fear.” Diego’s frustration was only a momentary observation as he turned to land behind another soldier. Death was swift as the man slumped to the ground in a heap.
“It has to be the drugs they took to surpass the deterrent of the ward.”
Joaquin felt Diego’s agreement as he cleared a swath of yet more uniformed soldiers. “We need to know what they used. The ward will have to be modified.”
Joaquin agreed. He knew the intricacies of the wards and realized any modification would have to be applied immediately to prevent this from happening again.
Thick clouds surged in towering piles in the sky, lightning and thunder coming to his call to blanket the world in a black abyss. The three were at no disadvantage at all without light. It only added to the humans’ confusion. Nathan was across the clearing in front of the house, releasing months of anguish and energy on their attackers with single-minded attention. Joaquin dove into the fight with an equal zest and determination to avenge Lily’s pain, striving to obliterate any man who dared to be one of the unlucky to intrude tonight.
There were more vehicles and soldiers than any of them had anticipated. Once a way to be able to get inside the barrier had been found, Hawthorne must have been prepared with more reinforcements. Joaquin’s gaze spotted a single vehicle separated in the trees and knew David had done as much as he could to stop their progress. Three were dead. One was critically injured. Silently, he wished the brave man who had lost so much a fast journey to peace.
Speed was of the essence as they blocked and removed the encroaching line of men, fighting them with swift retribution. Gunfire and bullet flashes streaked through the night. Their weapons meant little to Joaquin. Diego was creating a definite line of death, each blast purposeful, every attack sure against those that cared nothing for the people inside, only their orders.
Spotting a trio crouched low, skulking through the trees and heading for the house, Joaquin lifted his hands. Lightning arced and snapped overhead with deadly intent. The flash was blinding as it crashed into the earth, shaking the ground with its power, leaving hissing, sizzled sounds in the air and burnt scorches behind. All three men lay twitching on the ground as the sheer power of natural electricity stole their last moments.
A nearly indiscernible wave touched his mind. He closed his mind, knowing Lily did not need to see or know the details about the bloody battle being waged. Sending her sweet comfort and love, he continued. Decimation littered the ground as bodies fell one by one, or as the remaining vehicles stalled or exploded before Diego. Joaquin commanded the night sky as he methodically counterattacked the invasion, one strike at a time. Gradually, the proof of their determination showed in the lessening ranks facing the three.
Nathan’s face was snarled in a ruthless mask when Joaquin looked his way again. Another body fell like a boneless rag, horror his victim’s last expression, and not just the horror of the death surrounding him. Something was off with the younger man’s actions as he dove for another soldier with a flying leap. Nathan’s demeanor had changed completely from methodical to something much darker, much crueler.
Joaquin immediately relayed his concern to Diego, who leaped up from the ground in a rush, seeking his young friend.
“Stop him!” Diego sent a final killing shot into a group, the explosion tossing the four men like sticks into the air.
Joaquin didn’t hesitate, making the connection himself to realize what was happening. Lunging for the young blond, he literally tore him away just before his teeth sank into the jugular of one of the soldiers. Joaquin locked his arms around his bucking, snarling body. Diego landed before them and efficiently ended the soldier’s life.
“Nathan!” Diego didn’t raise his voice, but in the next instant, it was as if a roar had silenced the clearing. Blue eyes challenged Diego, talon length nails ripping and raking at Joaquin to be freed. No one and nothing moved. Again, Joaquin felt Lily’s light worry. He did the only thing he could, offering his reassurance, hiding their latest battle from her.
“Nathan, resist.” Diego stood before the younger vampire, his gaze unblinking, locked on angry blue eyes. Irises that were too large glared at him with a risen rage. Fangs glinting stark white showing he’d attacked more than one. Blood still stained his lips.
With no show of emotion, Diego lifted his hands and wrapped them around Nathan’s head.
The young man fought harder, yanking like a wild creature against Joaquin’s implacable strength where he remained locked around his frame.
“Nathan, you are not this creature. Resist.” Deep, understanding, calm. The tone of his voice was a balm. Gazes locked, battled, but Diego would not let him go without a fight. Joaquin waited for the moment that would define the rest of their lives. He knew there was no return from the insanity of bloodlust. It was the deciding line between their humanity, and the loss of the Brethren’s.
“Resist, my friend. You are not lost.” Diego didn’t move, didn’t release him, simply held him still, his eyes trained on him as if boring into his soul. Silence stretched as the three stood, one fighting himself and everything around him, one bringing him back from the brink, and Joaquin refusing to let the beast have the freedom to tear through Nathan as he knew it could.
With hard twitched jerks, Nathan calmed as if drained, his body growing pliant in Joaquin’s clutched hold. His clawed hands fell, leaving behind welts and thin scratches on Joaquin’s arms.
“You must learn to control the lust in you, Nathan,” Diego cautioned, but without reproach. “Killing is not your life. Blood will not give you what you have lost.” Wise words. Joaquin silently agreed.
A shudder shook the thinner frame in his hold and his head lolled forward. Diego released his hold on Nathan and stepped back. “Go to ground tonight and regain yourself. It is not a punishment. You were not made to kill. Do not let this”—he waved a hand behind him absently to the mangle of bodies—“drive you to kill for the wrong reasons. Never to feed, Nathan, never for the blood. Never give in to the bloodlust when you are killing. The two can never meet. It will destroy you.”
“I know,” he choked out, shame radiating off of him. “Just so angry. So much, gone.” He lifted his head and inched forward out of Joaquin’s hold, turning to face them. His eyes had returned to normal and, except for the distraught strain on his face, he looked like he always did. “I’m sorry.” The bleakness Joaquin had thought Nathan hid with his arrogance was no longer below the surface. His loss lay across his features like newsprint.
Joaquin didn’t know Nathan’s history or the loss he’d suffered when his life had been stolen from him, but he knew the life they now all shared was far from easy. That was one fact he knew irrevocably. Nathan was young in many ways, and the strength to combat the lure of bloodlust wasn’t always easy to find. There wasn’t a night since his conversion that he hadn’t waged some level of the battle with himself.
“Thank you for…” Bitter self-disgust drew Nathan’s gaze away, unable to look at the patient understanding standing before him.
Diego curved a hand over his shoulder. “I would save any brother, any friend.”
Swallowing, Nathan blinked, then met their gazes. “I will rise when I’m ready. If you need
me, call out to me. I will hear you.”
“I know. You are, and will always be, our friend.”
Nathan formed a hand over Diego’s forearm, then laid a hand on Joaquin’s shoulder. “My brothers.” With a grim, final nod at each, he shifted, lifting slowly skyward with large, gray wings.
“Will he be all right?”
Both watched the owl disappear over the treetops. Concern lowered Diego’s voice between the men. “As much as he can be after coming so close to the edge. He has a long battle ahead of him. You know as well as any how difficult that lure can be to resist. He will return when he is ready. Nathan is young, but determined. He will need guidance. Sending him to ground was the only option for now.” Diego turned and stared out into the mess of the woods, a sea of bodies and mangled metal that had been Hawthorne’s force. “Let us clear this and return.”
Joaquin understood Diego was anxious to return for Tani. In just the same way he needed to be with Lily. Reaching out unconsciously, he wanted to connect with her, needing to feel her warmth, her laughter.
And found a deathly quiet that rooted his feet to the ground.
“Lily!”
His body froze. There was only a lonely echo of his own mind as he reached out and found…nothing.
A chill swelled and crashed over his soul and thunder answered, booming overhead. “Lily, answer me!” he commanded.
Stretching his senses, he caught a faint whisper of her, only a breath. Cinnamon.
She was outside? He knew it as surely as he was standing on his own two feet. She was weak, even weaker than she had been before he’d been forced to leave her inside with the others to deal with Hawthorne’s men. She was supposed to be with the others in the house. What was she doing outside? “Talk to me, Lily.” He was having a hard time finding her as he opened his mind completely and scanned. She had been on the porch. Her scent still lingered.
He was standing in the exact same spot she had been in less than a heartbeat. Drawing a breath, her scent enveloped his senses. Reaching out, he sought even a trace of her. Nothing but a void opened before him.
“Is Hawthorne among those dead?” Had he been part of the invasion after all? Had he managed to follow David through the wards? Joaquin shot into the air, anger and fear stretching him to his limits. What was she doing outside? What had she been thinking? He couldn’t take another episode like the escape from Hawthorne’s compound. The wounds on her fair skin had dug deep into him, as deep as they had sliced into her skin. It killed him a little at a time to see her being hurt, abused, wounded in such ways.
“No. I do not see any sign of him.”
“Something has happened to Lily. She isn’t answering me.”
He leaped over the porch rail with a weightless grace, landing silently on the balls of his feet. He could hear Diego destroying the last signs of the troops, and would soon be taking care of the vehicles. By morning, not a sign of their attack would be apparent, or left to be found.
Tension knotted his body. There was an empty feeling in his soul without her touch there, without the sound of her voice. She was too weak for anymore abuse, and she still wasn’t answering his searching. Shadows crept along the forest floor, filling the spaces between the trees, offering no answers.
Diego’s reply wasn’t anywhere close to what he needed to hear. “She is not in the house with the others.” Joaquin had already been aware, but the confirmation sent a shiver up his spine with the implication.
“Open yourself to her, completely. She is your soul, even as human as she still is.”
Joaquin listened to the voice in his head. “How? I can feel her if I’m close, but she’s not responding. I can’t hear her.”
He sensed Diego’s correction, knowing he was too busy to come. “This is deeper. You are half of a whole. Even apart you know where the other lies, what the other is feeling, thinking. It is the gift they are to us that makes us complete.”
Joaquin closed his eyes and, instead of seeking outward, sought inward. Searching for the beat of Lily’s heart, for her warmth, for the light of her soul. Frozen in time, he listened to what he couldn’t hear outside with even his keen hearing.
Crickets chirped on the low breeze, branches bending and shaking against one another, creating a timeless music in the darkness. Then, unbelievably, he felt her, heard her.
His eyes snapped open. There was no hesitation as he leaped upward, soaring over the trees.
Chapter Twenty-one
Lily’s head ached. Her mouth felt dry. Blinking sent shards of agony into her brain. The whole process made her dizzy so she left her eyes closed. Slumping against the porch where she must’ve lost her balance and fallen, she drew a breath, then another. Screams were fewer, the mangled crash of metal louder. Thuds and crunches were echoed in the silence only by the thunder overhead. She knew the storm was Joaquin’s doing. Dark clouds and lightning. She recognized when he was pissed. She heard a few try to retreat, calling to one another to be heard over the screams of the dying. Try was as much as they could do. There would be no escape, not tonight, for anyone.
Her limbs felt leaden, the dead weight of her exhaustion keeping her immobile for precious seconds. Drawing her waning strength inward, she forced herself to straighten, then gain her feet. Clutching the railing in bloodless grips, she hefted herself up to roll over the top one leg at a time, sliding down to the ground only a foot or two beneath where she hung. Exhaustion made the process excruciating. An aching mechanical movement. Shadows lay deeper on that side of the house. There were no soldiers. There was only Lily.
And one other.
The bastard had escaped David’s planned suicide attack. She had seen every bloody second of David’s death in Hawthorne’s depraved mind. The only one in the Jeep to know how David suffered, he’d leaped clear right before…
She swallowed, and closed her eyes, saving her strength where she stood, propped up like a loose cotton-stuffed doll against the porch base. She would only have one chance to do this. She was weak with the coming change and exhaustion, and weaponless. Like a coward, the commander of the trained force dying for his mission stood in the shadows watching, waiting, calculating as he witnessed the vengeance wreaked on those before him by three men unlike any he could envision.
She saw them through his eyes. Merciless, cunning, bold and fearless. Killing machines. Each gift or skill Hawthorne discovered, he quickly catalogued in his brain. The very discovery she knew Tani and the others feared was standing in the thickest shadows watching every moment, enraptured with a new greed undetected by any of the men fighting to keep those inside safe.
Hawthorne would find a way to harness those abilities, the same as he had been doing to the girls. He had been one of the guinea pigs for Tenerio’s DNA mutation cloning. And he had enjoyed the power. She felt it on him now, like sheep’s wool over the wolf. It wasn’t his power, only a fake skin, and he needed constant infusions to maintain it. His overpowering, twisted hunger to find the girls became apparent with this discovery. With them no longer available, his stolen gifted powers were reversing, his own body destroying what he so hungrily wanted to be. If he was the kind of success Tenorio had envisioned, then the DNA experiments had been more successful than any of them had imagined. Resilience seemed to be the only failing with the current experiments, which made their success all too real, and too dangerous to ignore.
Lily found the truth in the corrupted pathways of his mind, discovered his pleasure at being chosen, the thrill he’d enjoyed with the stolen ability he’d been chosen for. It only made him crave it more now that he’d tasted the power ripped from the girls with any means available. Hawthorne, while powerful in his own mind, was only a cog. And the man didn’t even know it.
She would be doing him a favor, provided she could do it. Killing the man was impossible. Lily would never be able to kill, but her fury, her bitterness at the world stolen from her because of this man and Tenorio, fueled her even when her body wanted to lie down and slee
p for weeks. She had found another way to strike back. Not just by rescuing Claire, but by reading the man she detested with every bone in her body simply because he had been one of the abusers under Tenorio’s control.
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