Triggered (Blackbird Book 1)

by Aly Westman

  My body moved with a speed it was not used to, as if all mental strings in my brain that were holding me back, snapped and I was running off pure emotions. With half a shovel stick in my hand I stabbed and hacked my way through every one of those damn demons. Their forms began losing shape and disappearing in a fog as I sucked in their energy source, consuming it for my own use.

  The rain began pounding as hard as my heart and that was the only thing that woke me from my murderous haze. I shook my head, intending to wipe the thick black blood off my face, but accidentally smearing it more.

  “Ava don’t!” Seth ordered.

  I blinked the rain from my eyes a few times to see Seth and Corey standing in the yard, Quinn had his arms wrapped around Ava as she tried to push him away. “Damion!” Ava screamed.

  Normally it took me a while to get back into myself. To leave the emotions I consumed behind and find myself again. But as Ava screamed my name I was there. I was there for her. “I’m good.” I said yelling over the sound of the pelting rain. “I’m safe.” I nodded to Quinn and he let go of Ava.

  Her gorgeous green eyes were wide with fright, her beautiful brown hair pulled back as a few wet strands clung to her cheek. She ran for me, from here I could taste the worry in the air. I needed her. I needed her warm pink aura to consume me. Fuck what Seth or Ty say. She was mine.

  “No!” Corey and Quinn yelled and they both drew their guns. Seth ran and intercepted Ava, pulling her back away from me.

  “Damion!” She screamed again, her worry turning to panic and fear as she fought to reach me.

  The icky black fog consumed me, one minute I was there, the next everything went dark.

  Chapter 20

  Ava

  “You Goddamn son of a bitch!” Corey was screaming at the top of his lungs. He had run to try and grab Damion but… he didn’t make it. Just as his hand grasped Damion, it went through the fog as if Damion wasn’t even there.

  Seth’s arms were tight around me. “We have to go.” I screamed and struggled against his hold. “We have to save him! We have to get him!”

  Seth hoisted me up and over his shoulder and spun around. He held me as if I were a sack of potatoes as he jogged around the house and to the garage. I looked up to see Corey and Quinn running behind us. Seth tossed me into the passenger seat of the truck and ran to the driver seat just as Quinn and Corey got in. “Corey?” Seth demanded.

  “Fuck, give me a minute, I’m looking.” Quinn handed him the laptop bag and Corey went to work pulling it out as Seth peeled out of the garage.

  “Where are we going?” I demanded.

  Seth’s phone began to ringing and he pulled it out, cursing at the screen before putting it on speaker phone. “Real awesome fucking timing.”

  “What’s going on?” A rough male voice came on. I knew who it was without them even telling me, he sounded just like my father. I guess there was no denying he was actually my uncle.

  “Damion has been taken, we’re tracking him now,” Seth replied, his r’s rolling with his anger.

  “Where’s Ava?” The man seemed to be panicked for a second.

  “She’s here,” Seth insisted.

  “Got him!” Corey exclaimed from the back. “They’re moving, fast.”

  “Pull over Seth,” Ty demanded. Seth didn’t do anything, his jaw set, the muscles ticking. If anything I swear I felt the truck speed up, the city whizzing buy at an alarming rate. “Pull. Over. Seth,” Ty ordered.

  The truck began to slow down and I could see the raw anger boiling in Seth’s eyes, he contained it well. Seth pulled over to the side, punching the steering wheel, horn blaring. I jumped as he did so, the level of fury he showed was frightening… But I understood it.

  “Take her to the Ranch,” Ty said after a few moments of quiet.

  I looked back at Quinn, he held his head in his hands, his fingers fisting his hair in frustration. Corey looked like he was ready to punch something, or throw his computer.

  “Take her to the Ranch.Then–” I grabbed the cell phone and quickly ended the call. For good measure I promptly turned it off so he wouldn’t be able to phone back.

  I turned around and looked at all three of them. “Damion saved me. You all did.” I looked directly at Seth. “If you take me to that Ranch, and leave me behind while you go after him, I swear to God I will run to those demons. I will go for him with or without your help.”

  “And if they take you?” Seth asked. It was like he was searching for something as he looked into my eyes, challenging me. “If they torture you?”

  “Well fuck, I survived the first damn time. When I first met you guys I wasn't afraid, because I thought there wasn’t anything you could do that could hurt me as much as those black eyed assholes. I was wrong. For every bruise, every cut, they give Dame, that will be my fault. If they kill him, his blood will be on my hands. I already have my father’s blood on my hands and I refuse, refuse, to put anymore there! Either you take me now to him, or I will leave your asses behind on the side of the road and get him myself.”

  Seth moved forward, his hand sliding behind my head as he pulled me into him. His lips crushing mine and claiming me with as much ferocious energy as I felt. He pulled back quickly, his eyes bright. “Get in the back, I need Corey up here to navigate.”

  I nodded, a stupid smile spreading across my lips. I crawled over the seat and sat in the middle, beside Quinn. Corey gave my hand a squeeze before jumping up over the seat and into the front.

  Corey said something to Seth and Seth peeled the truck off the side of the road, spinning around to go the other direction. I sat back in my seat and looked over at Quinn, his leg was bouncing again. “Do we have enough weapons in the back?” I asked Quinn, but he was deep in thought, his thumb rubbing over his bottom lip. “Quinn.”

  “What? Sorry.” He frowned, his mind wasn’t here.

  “Are there enough weapons? The bullets didn’t seem to really affect them,” I said.

  “Yeah, no, I mean. There are more weapons, no, the bullets didn’t do shit.” He looked down at his feet, his leg bouncing like mad.

  I needed to distract him. “How does Corey know where Damion is?”

  Quinn took in a deep breath and I swear it was slightly shaky as he let it out. “A GPS tracker, we all have trackers in us.”

  “Like, in your shoes or something… or through your phones?” I wondered if Damion still had his phone on him.

  Quinn relaxed slightly and sat back, his mind able to focus on something else. “They started out in our phones, but we lost them everytime things turned south or they were stolen. Also, when the phone battery dies there is no signal to track. We started putting the tracker in our shoe but Damion kept losing his shoe. Like, all the time.”

  “And it wasn’t both shoes,” Corey said, leaning over the front seat to look at me. “It was always one shoe, and always the one that had the tracker in it.”

  “So Dame has been abducted before?” I asked them.

  Quinn shrugged and looked at Corey. “We all have a time or two. Sometimes it goes with the job, being the bait and all.”

  Huh, interesting. “How many times?” I asked.

  Seth laughed but it was tight, no humor in it. “All together or separately?”

  “A few times, a handful of times.” Corey smiled as if trying to put on a show for me, “Don’t worry, we always make it back within a few hours.”

  I sat back, looking out the window at the sprawling night city we drove through. “So where is it? The tracker device thingy. If not in your shoe then where?”

  Quinn held his arm out to me, palm down. He touched the back of his forearm and pushed around a little bump. “Feel it,” he said. His skin was warm beneath my fingers, and a little rough. The bump felt like a little pill inside of there.

  “Why did you put it there?” I asked. “It must be annoying, so close to bone. I would think putting it in muscle would be better.”

  “It would be,” Quinn said.
“But we put it there for a reason. We needed it easily accessible to ourselves.”

  “What for?”

  “A Hail Mary,” he whispered, taking his arm back. “If… for whatever reason… one of us was beyond saving, we would take the tracker out and toss it, so the others wouldn’t go looking.”

  I froze. “Damion wouldn’t–”

  “No,” Seth said sternly. “We will get him back.”

  Corey turned back around, directing Seth where to go. Quinn’s leg, which had stopped bouncing at one point, now started up again.

  I wondered what it would have to take, for you to decide you weren't worth saving. When it came to being trapped in that swamp water I never once even thought of someone coming to save me. I didn’t have anyone. I watched my father die, my high school friends or people I worked with probably didn’t even register that I was gone, they knew my dad was weird and didn’t want me there. I sat in that water and prayed for no one, not even to a god. I knew I was a lost cause. However if I had this in me, if I knew someone would come for me, maybe then I wouldn’t have lost so much hope.

  Quinn’s hand slid into mine, his fingers intertwined as he gave me a little squeeze, holding on.

  Chapter 21

  “I feel like I should be tired,” I said as Seth pulled into a warehousing area, we had just come off the highway. I missed the sign stating where we actually were a while back, it had been hours of driving. Corey was shocked how quickly Damion’s tracker was moving but he had been still for the last two hours. He was confident whoever had Damion had made it to their destination. I wondered if this would be a Hail Mary case. “I’m practically buzzing.”

  “That would be adrenaline,” Corey said. “We are close.”

  “It doesn’t even look like bad weather,” I commented as I stared out the window. The sky was clear, it wasn’t dark out but it was getting there. I vaguely had a thought that these types of things always had to happen in the dark.

  “Okay, there should be a building of some sort or another a block down, we can park there and suit up, Dame’s tracker is showing me he is just behind that building,” Corey said, closing his laptop and shoving it into the bag.

  “Like, in the alley behind the building? Or in another building?” Seth asked.

  “I don’t know, I just know he is on the east side, it’s a tracker, not a camera.” I could almost feel Corey roll his eyes from here.

  Seth made a noise but followed the directions and parked the truck behind an old warehouse. We all got out of the truck at once. The air was cool with a slight breeze. Seth stood staring at the building in front of us, I followed Quinn to the back of the truck, he opened it and Corey began digging out some black duffel bags.

  There was a noise, metal on metal screeching which had Corey flinching. I spun around to see the cause only to find Seth jumping from a large rectangle garbage bin and grabbing a metal fire escape ladder. He easily pulled his body up with his arms and scaled the ladder until he was on the roof and disappeared from sight.

  “Should someone go with him?” I asked.

  “He’s just scouting it out.” Quinn waved him off.

  I looked back to the bin and then the ladder. Quinn and Corey seemed to be discussing what weapon to use since the bullets were useless. I slowly backed away, once I was confident they weren’t paying attention, I booked it to the garbage bin.

  I had more grace than Seth, so when I jumped on the bin there was no screeching noise, the other two still didn’t notice. I jumped for the ladder and missed. Okay, so Seth had more height on me. But I wasn’t one for giving up. I wasn’t as strong as I used to be but my muscles remembered how to move just fine. I pushed off the bin, planting the ball off my foot on the wall of the warehouse and pushing off again, giving me that extra height to reach the ladder. I smiled with triumph but it slowly faded as I struggled to pull my own body weight up. Okay, I was really out of shape. If only Dad could see me now, he’d have me downing protein shakes and running damn marathons in the backyard.

  With much struggle I made it to the top. I looked back down at the others and they seriously didn’t hear a thing. I turned back and quietly walked across the roof and towards Seth. He was kneeling low and looking down over the raised ledge of the building. The roof beneath me was gravel and a rock kicked from my shoe and hit his leg. He spun quickly on point, knife in hand and ready, but the moment his eyes met mine he relaxed and turned back around. He said nothing as I kneeled next to him and looked down.

  Below was a smaller warehouse, the massive garage doors were open and I could actually see in, even with the quickly darkening sky.

  Damion sat tied to a chair in the middle of a circle, an intricate design all around him with black candles spaced out evenly along the circle. “What is it?” I asked.

  “A summoning circle.” Seth frowned. “I just don’t get it, he’s still alive. Usually they sacrifice something. And he can’t be possessed.”

  “Because of the tattoo?” Seth nodded. I looked back and Damion’s head lulled to the side as he tried to lift it. “He looks in rough shape.”

  “I see no one. Not a single beast, and not a grey cloud in sight… where are they?” he mused to himself.

  “Do they always cause bad weather?”

  “They could’ve found a person to possess.” He ignored my question, his mind focused on the puzzle before him. Seth stood up and walked along the roof, keeping his eyes trained on the small warehouse as he tried to look at another angle. He shook his head and walked back towards me. “It’s a trap, it has to be. Come on.”

  I followed Seth back down the ladder.

  “Are you good?” he asked as he jumped off the garbage bin and looked up at me.

  I laughed. “Yeah, I’m fine.” I let go, landing on my feet onto the top of the bin and then jumped off next to him.

  Corey was leaning against the truck, scowling at me as we walked back to him. “A little warning would be good. Not exactly smart to disappear in a place where demons are looking for you.”

  “I can handle myself, plus Seth was up there too.”

  “Yeah, only we didn’t know you were up there.” He looked at Seth. “Quinn went around the side to look for her, we didn’t think she could get up there.” Corey pulled out his phone and began texting something and a second later Quinn came around and jogged up to us.

  “There’s not a demon in sight. Damion is tied up in the middle of a summoning circle, he looks like he’s been roughed up but he’s alive.” Seth filled them in.

  “Yeah, I didn’t see anything around the side.” Quinn was a bit out of breath.

  “So what, we just walk up and get him?” Corey asked. Seth shot him a look.

  “I don’t want to leave her alone–” Seth pointed at me with his thumb.

  “I am trained, I can fight. I’m not–”

  “I was saying…” Seth cut me off. “I don’t want to leave her alone but I may have a job for her. Do we will have the hell’s canyon in the back?” he asked Quinn. I hated when he kept referring to me as ‘her,’ I had a feeling he did it on purpose, no way did he miss the massive scowl I sent to him everytime he did it.

  Quinn nodded. “The X-bolt? Yeah, it’s there.” They were talking about a rifle.

  Seth nodded and turned to me. “Can you shoot long range?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Good, I want you to take up position on the roof, if you move five feet to the left from where we are you should be able to get a good shot around Damion.”

  “And the bullets?” I asked.

  “They didn’t kill them, but they slowed them down. That’s going to have to be good enough for now.” Seth gave Quinn a nod and Quinn went to the back to retrieve the gun. “Listen.” Seth put his hand on my shoulder, turning me to face him directly. His blue eyes serious as he held my gaze. “If Damion attacks us, if his eyes are black… I need you to wound him. In the arm or the leg.”

  “You think he’s possessed?”
Corey asked.

  “It’s a summoning circle Core. Aves, can you shoot him without killing him?”

  “I never miss.”

  Seth nodded, that was all he needed to hear. Quinn came around and handed me a long range rifle with a scope, I had never used this one before however I had shot long range many times in my training.

  I took the rifle, double checked the safety was on, and then slung the strap over my shoulder. Quinn handed me a small container of bullets, I put the container in my waistband. I walked back over to the bin and hoisted myself up. It was easier this time, to jump off the wall and grab the ladder, though my arms burned a little as I pulled myself up until my foot could catch the bottom step and I could climb to the top.

  Just as I reached the top of the building I hear Quinn’s voice. “She barely even made a sound! Damn ninja.”

  “Yep, I’m hard,” Corey said.

  I smiled and shook my head before walking back over the the ledge. Damion was still in the same position, though he wasn’t trying to lift his head any longer. I took the bullets out and checked to see if the rifle was loaded, it wasn’t. I began loading it while also keeping an eye on things below, still no demons in sight.

  The guys came from around the corner of the building just as I found a good spot and set everything up. Seth had a large ass machete in his hand, Corey and Quinn both had handguns. I looked through the scope, my safety still on, and getting a good look of Damion for the first time.

  His lip was split, his left eye swollen, and he had multiple cuts and abrasions on his face and arms. But his chest was still moving, he was still breathing.

  I looked away from the scope, watching the guys as they cautiously approached the area. I could hear Seth say something but I was too far to actually make out what. Around the side of the building a man in a business suit began slinking towards my boys. I peered through my scope, I needed to be sure he was a demon. He could be a security guard for this area for all I knew.