The Quelling Tide (The Gifted Realm Book 7)

by Jillian Neal

  “L’enfermer et de me trouver, Malden!” Fitz shouted the orders to detain Vythica and to find him Malden.

  Officers sprinted out of the courtroom without any idea where to begin.

  Every strike of his foot against the pavement reverberated in Dan’s skull. He shoved through a crowd of tourists photographing the windmill over the Moulin Rouge. He pulled his phone as he sprinted towards the train station.

  Fitz leapt onto the train right behind him. “Answer, baby, please! Please!” Dan pled to the pitiless air around him as he heard Aida’s sweet voice on Fionna’s voicemail message. “Hi, this is my Mommy’s cell phone. She’ll have to call you back.” His heart sank to the ground.

  The malice and hatred that had been gone for so long returned with a vengeance. It filled him. It narrowed his eyes, blackened his heart, and permeated his soul.

  “You are a motherfucking son of a bitch, and when I find you so help me Haydrien I will end you myself!” Fitz spat into his own cell leaving a message as Malden clearly wasn’t taking his calls.

  Ending that call, Fitz touched another name. “Oliver!” He panted for breath. “Are you still with Maddie and Fionna?”

  “NO!” Fitzroy pounded his fist into the metal pole beside him. “My God, no get over to Maddie’s mom’s make certain my boys are all right. Bring them to me at the spa!”

  “Malden told them to leave.” Dan already knew what Oliver had informed Fitzroy of.

  “Told him I needed him at the trial!” Fitz spat furiously.

  Dan shoved four people into one another to make certain he was the first one off of the train. He dodged through the crowded Parisian streets and headed back to the spa. Fitz continued to try and call the female officers that were to have gone into the massage room with Fionna and Maddie as he ran beside him.

  The wind burned Dan’s face in his fevered sprint. He threw the glass door to the spa open with enough force to shatter the pane as it hit the brick building.

  “Eu quero meu Pai!” He heard Aida sob before he turned the corner to take in the scene. In her terror, she’d reverted back to Portuguese.

  “I want my, Daddy!” Dan translated it. Fiery tears formed in his eyes.

  “Get away from her!” Fionna shrieked. He saw her throw a more powerful shield than he’d ever have thought her capable.

  Fury like Dan had never felt before seared through his veins. He swung, but Malden ducked and threw Aida hard against a wall as he spun. Fitz leapt but Malden jerked to the left and out the shattered door.

  “Daddy!” Aida sobbed.

  Dan reached and lifted her into his arms. Her little hands flew to her head where she’d hit the wall.

  “Are you okay, baby?” He managed before he broke down completely.

  “He hurt my shoulder. He said I had to go with him or he would hurt Mommy!” She convulsed in her harrowing terror.

  Fionna moved towards him. She was pale and weak, wearing a spa robe and nothing else. She trembled in her walk as she tried to keep it tied around her.

  “He said you’d been hurt, but I knew he was lying. He took my phone. I couldn’t call you.” She tried to explain before the tears overtook her.

  Fitz was already back on the phone as the rest of Iodex entered the spa securing everything as they went.

  The ambulance he’d called arrived moments later. Dan raced Aida and Fionna out to the ambulance sealing the doors closed behind him.

  Aida’s shoulder had purple finger shaped bruises forming on it rapidly, and Fionna’s cheek was blazing red. Dan hadn’t seen it at first, but she’d been backhanded.

  “Mommy!” Aida tried to sit up on the gurney. Her face went white as a ghost. “I don’t feel good.” She managed before she folded over her stomach.

  Fionna held out her hands in effort to catch the vomit. One of the many Medios immediately stepped in and cleaned them up.

  “Baby.” Dan shook from the effort of not driving his fist into the side of the ambulance. He tried to help clean Aida up.

  She laid back and gasped for breath. Her tiny hand found Dan’s.

  “Are you going to find the bad guy?”

  “Oh, I’m going to find him, baby. Don’t worry.” Vengeance spiked his blood. It was a poison, a drug, he recognized all too well.

  “Dan, we’re safe. Please don’t.” Fionna pled, but he shook his head.

  “No!” he demanded. He would make her no promises, not now, not after this.

  Acid fury rose in his throat his eyes flashed dangerously. Fionna began to sob. He grabbed a flannel blanket, tore the plastic off of it, and covered her body.

  “Heal them and take them to the Parliament!” Dan ordered the ambulance driver and Medios.

  He grabbed Oliver’s collar and jerked him forward as he delivered Alex and Alfred safely to Fitzroy. “If anything happens to them, I will kill you after I kill him! You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.” Oliver managed a half nod before he climbed in the ambulance with Fionna followed by three other officers that Fitz ordered as his back up.

  “Dan, please be careful!” Fionna begged in a sobbing outcry. “Just please don’t….” She started to beg again but stopped. She knew better. Her eyes closed in defeat. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, and I will be right back.” Dan vowed without question.

  “I put a tracer on his phone a week ago. I know where he is.” Fitz held up an enhanced radar map of Paris with a pulsing red sonar dot moving out of the city. It took them less than a full second to know precisely where Malden was heading.

  “He’s got a guy with him. Do you want back up?”

  “No!” Dan ordered an officer out of his car and took it for him and Fitzroy.

  His cell rang as Fitz drove like a bat out of hell.

  “What?”

  “Sir, it is Oliver. Zhey’re taking Mrs. Vindico to the hospital to check zee uh enfant.” He managed through broken English. “It is precaution. I am going with her. Madam Fitzroy and zee children and Elite is as well.”

  “Tell her I’ll be there as soon as I take care of this.”

  “Yes, sir. I vill.”

  “She okay?” Fitz swerved around an oncoming bus.

  “They’re taking her to the hospital to check on the baby.” Dan used most of his control to keep from vomiting, as he recalled his wife’s beautiful face glowing red, and his baby girl’s tiny shoulder swollen and purple.

  They roared through the Red Light district with sirens blaring and lights blazing alerting everyone to their path.

  “Turn off the sirens!” Dan demanded.

  Fitz silenced the car and turned off the flashing lights. “You okay?” He braced for the incoming rage.

  “What the hell do you think?”

  Fitz wasn’t offended. He just nodded as the car flew further and further out of town.

  “This is unbelievable! I thought he killed the kid when he killed her.”

  “He wanted a son. He always had. I bet he never knew about Vythica.” His voice held no tone. The fury had drowned every other emotion. “Haydrien needed more money than he was able to access when I killed Wretchkinsides. He used what he’d taken to get the photographs of Rainer and Emily on their honeymoon hoping to get several million from the press. He put the hit out on Vitrio, and then came after me.”

  Fitz parked the car a block from the house. The same place they’d left the car all those years before. Dan pulled a pistol from the glove box as Fitz popped the snap on his holster. They chambered the weapons and moved past an outbuilding on the property of the abandoned, derelict home.

  Vile revulsion washed over Dan’s body. He’d been here too many times before. Moving like the well-synchronized machine that they’d always been, Fitz and Dan kept their backs pressed firmly to the warm steel of the shed. Their pistols were drawn by their faces.

  Dan ducked and took in the house. He kept most of his body behind his make shift shield. He could see two men through the shattered windows of the house set
off by the overhead sun slowly making way across the sky.

  Malden was pacing and shouting angrily. He didn’t have his father’s patient, ominous calm. He wasn’t the spider waiting endlessly to web the fly. He was nothing more than a bastard child trying to prove his worth with no real ability to do anything at all.

  Both men were in the back of the house maybe twenty yards from where Fitz and Dan were hiding.

  They needed to maneuver around the shed and move to the front of the house to take them without being seen.

  Dan motioned to the ground. Fitz nodded as they lowered themselves into a low crawl and stayed hidden in the high grass.

  Dan halted Fitz just before they fell from the shadow of the shed. He held up one finger and motioned to the side of the house. Fitz shook his head. If he took out one through the window, Malden would know they’d been found.

  Sweat dewed on Dan’s forehead as he edged through the undergrowth of the unkept shack. He could feel it pooling on his back as the midday sun beat down relentlessly. He tried to shut down the thoughts swirling violently in his mind. He needed to concentrate, but everything that had happened to him since the last time he’d been to this house, all of the horrific loss, all of the tremendous gain, tallied in his mind. He dragged himself along the ground.

  ‘Please be careful,’ Fionna’s voice echoed against his skull. He was in the worst possible position he could be in should he be seen. He kept his eyes trained on the windows on the side of the ramshackle house and forced his shield out over himself while praying that Malden wouldn’t see the brilliant green glow.

  ‘I want my Daddy,’ Aida’s terrified peal fractured his heart and fury and hatred bled from the recently mended seams. They made it to the front porch, and he allowed himself to breathe.

  Relief flooded through him as he panted silently. He pulled himself into a seated position and leaned against the lattice work that had once constructed the wide front porch, gone decades ago. The entire building was tilting off of its foundation, and Dan tried to shut down the memory that forced its way through all of the barriers he’d erected in his mind when he’d arrived on the property.

  The last time he’d been on that porch he’d taken out two of Wretchkinside’s men through the front window. That’s how the glass had the second pane had been shattered. He remembered the sound of the glass exploding in the night.

  He’d ducked and barely gotten out of the way in time after shooting the powerful electrical cast. Glass rent the night sky and return fire echoed all around him.

  He’d been certain for a moment that he was done for. At that time in his life, he’d welcomed the end, but the pulsing, relentless, fury had saved him again. Determination had bound him back together. He wasn’t dying by Cascavel’s gun. The viper would go down first. Dan would make certain of that.

  He’d leapt through the window he’d shattered, slicing his legs. The feeling of the jagged shards piercing his skin had only driven him harder.

  Fitz had come through the front door. The house was crawling with Wretchkinside’s men. They’d fought. They’d taken out man after man, but Cascavel had escaped. He’d slipped through his fingers once more, and Dan had lived to fight another day.

  Memories of all of the days between that night and the present moment ran through Dan’s mind like one of Aida’s flip books. His heart thundered in his chest. The funeral, the sleepless nights, the endless days, the liquor, the drugs, the grueling work, the cruel relentless fight for every inch he gained. Cascavel, the German board, Pendergrath’s sneering scowl, the after party, the house in Alexandria, Sydney, his angel appearing to carry him on, the hospital, the baby, the loss, Kauai island, the leis washing out to sea, the wedding, what they’re love had created on their wedding night, the little girl that held his heart in her tiny hands. It spiked his blood as it pooled heatedly in his veins.

  Fitz elbowed him and ripped him forcefully from his abstraction. He held up two fingers and gestured to the window above Dan just slightly to his left.

  Dan pointed to Fitz and then moved his finger in a low semi-circle showing Fitz that he should move on the ground to the front porch and take out the man in the window.

  He then pointed to himself and to a window on the side of the house indicating he was entering that way nearest Malden.

  Fitz nodded and began edging towards the front of the house. Dan slid on his ass ready to leap in a single sinewy move through the window that no longer contained any glass at all.

  ‘Please be careful.’ he heard Fionna’s voice reverberate through him again. Clenching his jaw he set his shield firmly, once again. He’d never set it that night. Either too arrogant, or too desperate, he wasn’t certain the reason, but he never had.

  He listened between his heartbeats thundering in his ears. The men were still talking. No one aware that anyone else knew where they were. Malden had no idea Fitzroy had tracked his phone, but he was about to find out.

  Leaning forward he saw Fitz slide his body into position at the front of the house. They shared a nod and in the length of one heartbeat Dan sprang through the window and Fitz clobbered the accomplice knocking him out cold on the thin floorboards.

  Malden took aim and shot. The bullet ricocheted off of Dan’s shield and onto the sparse wood floor, missing most of its slats. Fury propelling his every move, Dan tackled Malden driving all of the air from his lungs as he fought for control of the gun. When their skin connected, he felt it. Something sickening twisted inside of him. That one piece of malignant energy in his soul recognized its kin. It infuriated him.

  “Did you think you would win you motherfucking assshole?” Dan chanted as he jerked the gun out of Malden’s hands and tossed it to Fitzroy.

  Fitz had it unloaded in a split second as he threw Dan cuffs. Dan shoved Malden into a three-legged, wooden chair and bound him in cuffs. With a long piece of elastic cording that he casted and stretched he made certain he couldn’t move.

  “You are one fucking stupid son of a bitch.” Dan snaked towards Malden. Swinging his leg to the side he knocked the chair to the ground listening as Malden’s head hit the wood.

  “Did you not think?” Dan drawled as Fitz placed his boot on Malden’s rib cage. “Were you really stupid enough to believe that I wouldn’t turn over every single stone, that I wouldn’t hunt you down to the ends of the earth like a bloodhound in hot pursuit, that I wouldn’t end the bastard that dared lay a filthy hand on my little girl?”

  It was in Malden’s answering scowl that Dan saw it. His face was that of his mother, but he had his eyes, his cold malevolent eyes.

  Dan shoved Fitz away and quickly righted Malden’s chair. “That reminds me.” He swung his fist across Malden’s cheek feeling the retribution and release as his knuckles shattered his teeth.

  Abject hatred pulsed through him as he recalled Fionna’s cheek.

  “Daddy not teach you not to hit girls, you punk ass prick? Nobody, nobody hits my wife!”

  Fitzroy’s eyes goggled. He hadn’t noticed Fionna’s cheek. “I can’t believe you hit Fionna, and you’re still breathing quite honestly, Haydrien.”

  Dan took a step closer and leaned until his face inches from Malden’s as Fitz kept his pistol locked on his heart.

  “When I ask you a question you better give me an answer? You understand what I’m saying to you, motherfucker?” Dan spat then backed away slightly.

  “Come on Dietrech!” He dealt the blow watching as Malden’s eyes goggled. “Tell me, did you really believe that you’d make off with one of my girls, and that we would let you continue to pollute this earth by allowing you to draw breath?”

  Terror played in Malden’s eyes. He couldn’t hide it.

  “Gonna avenge him? Gonna try and rebuild what we systematically took apart piece by piece until it all shattered down around you in crumpled useless remains? Try to avenge the father that never wanted you. He obviously knew about you. She named you after his father. His grandson. A child of one of many unnamed m
istresses. Bet that made Grandpa furious when he found out. Heir to the Wretchkinside’s throne.”

  “You gonna kill me too?” Malden finally spat. “That’s right isn’t it? Vindico never has to play by the rules! Everybody feels sorry for him and he gets away with cold blooded murder!” Malden hissed like the snake he was.

  Dan chuckled ominously then moved back to Malden’s face. “Did you put your disgusting hand on my baby girl?”

  “You know I did!” Malden defied.

  “Then you already know the answer to that, don’t you?”

  Malden trembled but Fitzroy’s pistol never wavered.

  “Just one thing first.” Dan huffed as he toppled the chair back on its side. As Malden’s hand hit the ground he brought his boot down on top of it crushing every bone in the hand that had left the bruises on Aida’s arm.

  Malden screamed in searing pain as Dan and Fitz glared hatefully. “Yeah, I remember your Mom now.” Fitz huffed after Malden had piped down. “Vivianna Malden. Can’t believe I never caught the name. You know he killed her. She showed up wanting us to protect you, but you were never in danger were you Haydrien? He already knew about you. She’d been working her way through the organization, and Daddy found out. He hated that. It was her he wanted, not you.” Fitz began to piece together the remaining pieces of the puzzle.

  “Yes!” Dan staggered as his other Predilection began to seep through his awareness. “Vythica is only your half sister isn’t she? Vivianna told Nic that she was his as well, but he knew better.” Dan pulled Vythica’s face back into his mind’s eye. He’d recognized the vicious scowl but he’d credited to the wrong miscreant. “My God! She’s Cascavel’s!”

  That was why Wretchkinsides had allowed Cascavel to take on the Elite forces alone when he’d taken Samantha. That was what Wretchkinsides wanted. He never cared if Cascavel killed Dan or if it went the other way. He’d waited years to get his revenge.