Broken Angel (Book 1 in the Chronicles of a Supernatural Huntsman series)

by Shannon Lee Martin

When I got to the hospital ward Holly was already in a gown and tucked into bed. Dahlia lay on the pillow with her head nuzzled behind Holly’s ear, using her brilliant red curls as a soft nest. I touched my friend’s forehead softly with the back of my hand. She was out cold.

  A nurse came from the back room. “I thought I heard someone,” she said.

  She was an older, plump woman. Her brown wavy hair was pulled up into a tight bun on the top of her head. The uniform they supplied her with reminded me of an old fashioned candy striper. She wore a white apron tied around her waist. Her black shoes were flat and sensible. She didn’t smile at me—she just looked at me with questioning eyes.

  “She’s my roommate,” I said and pulled my hand from Holly’s face. “Also, I wanted to see if you could do anything about the cuts on my leg.”

  The woman stood with her hands on her wide hips as she tapped a foot on the pristine, white tile floor. She sighed and rolled her eyes before she said, “All right, let’s have a look, then.”

  I set myself down in the armchair next to Holly’s bed and worked carefully at untying my boot and rolling up the leg of my pants. It was difficult, considering how tight they were.

  The nurse gasped at my exposed leg. “My word, child! How are you not writhing in agony?”

  For the second time that night, I shrugged my shoulders and sat back in my chair. I didn’t want to see what had shocked the woman, so I avoided looking down at all costs. My eyes drifted to the ceiling where bright fluorescent lights brightened every corner of the room. Again, I reached for the part of my neck containing the wing-shaped birthmark. My skin was hot to the touch.

  The nurse ran off to the back room and came out with supplies tucked in her apron and the crook of her arms. She set everything down on a cart and wheeled it over.

  “What happened, dear?” she asked as she grabbed a bottle of something and applied it to a white rag.

  “Redcap attack.”

  She placed the rag flat onto my leg so it covered the entire wounded area. I winced as it stung like a thousand hornets attacking all over. Tears welled up in my eyes. I widened them so none would spill out.

  “My, my, my, that’s just awful,” she clucked her tongue. “You’re lucky to be alive, dear.”

  I unclenched my jaw and gave a slight nod. “So I’ve been told.”

  “You were with your friend, here, when they hit her, I take it?” She took the rag off my leg and applied more cleaning solution before she dabbed at the wounds.

  My muscles tightened and I raised in my seat to get away from the pain. I dug my nails into the arm of the chair and held my breath. She stopped for a second so I could answer.

  “Yeah, I had the others help her out while I distracted them.”

  I wasn’t trying to brag. I didn’t think of myself as a hero for what I had done. In fact, I thought it was stupid. I had risked my life for someone I barely knew, who I would probably never see again once we graduated from training. If I had died, the thing that killed Danny would live on and continue to kill innocent people. But something inside me wouldn’t let me turn my back on Holly. She needed me. Just like Danny had needed me. I stopped someone in my life from being killed.

  “You’re a brave young woman,” the nurse said. She looked up from my leg and into my eyes with the loving softness of a mother cleaning her hurt child. “You need to stay here for the night. Dahlia might not get to you since your friend’s injuries are critical, but I can check on you and make sure you haven’t contracted an infection. Those redcaps can be nasty little buggers.”

  I tried to stand up, but the pain of my ravaged leg hit me hard. Without meaning to, I looked down and immediately felt a dizziness in my head. I took a deep breath. From my thigh down to my ankle there were deep, ragged gashes, each at least six inches long. Flesh hung loosely from the edges of the tears. All the blood drained from my face.

  The nurse saw me and took my arm to help me to the bed. “I’m going to give you something to help you sleep,” she said as she hurried over to the tray and back. She handed me two large white pills and a small cup of water. “I’ll stitch you up while you’re asleep. I promise, you won’t feel a thing, dear.”

  The thought of somebody sewing me back together made my stomach do backflips like it was on a flying trapeze. It gave a lurch and I covered my mouth with my hands. Nothing came up. I tossed the pills into my mouth and threw back what little water I had.

  It only took about five minutes for the pills to affect me. My head felt as light as a cloud and all the muscles in my body relaxed. My neck felt like clay as it swayed. When my vision blurred, I decided it was time to lie down. I didn’t think I could fall asleep, knowing what would happen once I did, but the second my head hit the pillow I was out.

  For most of the night, I didn’t dream a thing. My mind was a peaceful blank slate where I could hide from all the horrors of my life. There were no mysterious hooded figures, no dead bodies, no redcaps trying to tear me apart—there was nothing, and it was just what I needed.

  But slowly the blackness of my empty mind warped itself into the shape of a door. It wasn’t a door I had ever seen before. It certainly wasn’t the door to Danny’s bedroom, where most of my repetitive nightmares started. This door was made of a plain dark wood and had a shiny gold doorknob. Next to it was a high-tech keypad like the one outside the armory. But I didn’t have to enter a code. The door opened all on its own.

  It was the Dark Artifacts room. I knew it in my gut. There was the endless shelves that reached higher than I could see, the ceiling somewhere hiding high in the shadows. And there was the man I saw before. He was wearing the same black cloak with the hood up and black gloves on his hands. Instead of standing in the doorway like I had before, I moved forward and approached the man from behind.

  Just as he was about to reach his arm out to grab ahold of the goblet, I gripped his shoulder and turned him around. Before I could see his face, I awoke with a start. The man’s presence lingered around me. I searched the dark hospital ward, but there was no one there.

  I sat up and tried to catch my breath. Sweat clung to my forehead and neck. When the sheets of the bed moved, they rustled against my leg and made me grimace. I pulled them aside and glared down against my better judgement. It looked like something out of a horror movie. Thick black thread stitched each gash together. The skin around each stitch was red and swollen beyond belief. It took everything I had not to gag.

  “Are you okay?” a soft voice said from the bed next to me.

  Holly was sitting up. She had a fresh white bandage around her head and Dahlia was nowhere to be found. The fact that Holly was awake was a good sign. It momentarily distracted me from my mangled leg. The nurse must have given me something strong for the pain, because there was a small red dot on my arm where a needle had stuck me, and even though my leg looked gruesome, I felt little to no pain.

  “Uh, yeah,” I stumbled over my words as I gathered my thoughts. “Just a bad dream.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I thought about her offer for a few seconds and decided that yes, I did want to talk about it. I had told Don about the dream the first time, and even though I received an explanation of what the goblet was capable of, that was it. He didn’t offer me any clue to who might want to take it or what we should do to stop him. In fact, I hadn’t heard a word from him since that night. It was time to open up to someone else and take things into my own hands.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said and turned on the bed to face her.

  There was a dim light coming from the back room. It was just enough to make out the lines of her face and her brilliant green eyes. She scooted to the edge of her bed and propped herself up on one hand as she leaned forward and listened intently.

  “I’ve had the dream before. I told Don, but he doesn’t seem to want to do anything about it. In the dream I go into a room that’s here in headquarters—the Dark Artifacts room.”

  Holly gasped and s
lapped her hand over her mouth. “I’ve heard about that room!” she exclaimed. “That’s where the Chamber holds the most evil of things that the Huntsmen find. It’s said to be the most dangerous room in the whole entire world. Sorry, go on.”

  “Anyway, so once I’m inside the room I see a cloaked man and he’s trying to reach this big black goblet.”

  She leaned in closer. I could see her eyes rounded into globes. She urged me on with a nod of her head.

  “That’s it. I always wake up after that. I mean, tonight I grabbed his shoulder and turned him around, but I woke up before I could see his face.”

  She sat back in bed. “It’s probably just a dream. Maybe you’re stressed out and it’s making you dream really weird and meaningless stuff.”

  “It doesn’t feel like a dream,” I pressed on. “It’s more like a glimpse into the future. I don’t know how to explain, but it’s just a feeling I have. If he hasn’t taken the goblet already, he’s going to.”

  “What does this goblet even do?” she shrugged her shoulders and ran her fingers over her thick curls.

  “Don brought it in when we came here. He said it has the power to unleash every demon in existence into our world.”

  Holly straightened her back as her jaw dropped. “Shut up! That’s…that’s—”

  “It would be the worst catastrophe this world has ever seen. It would be the extinction of mankind,” I interrupted her stuttering.

  She shook her head slowly as if she were in a trance. “What makes you think he hasn’t already taken it? I mean, if what you’re saying is true and you’ve seen him in there more than once, then don’t you think he’d have it already?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. There really was no way to tell if he had taken the goblet yet or not. “I don’t know, but if he hasn’t, then I have to stop him from getting it. And if he has it, then I need to get it back.”

  Holly let out a harsh, short laugh. “How are you going to do that? You don’t even know who he is or where to find him. You should just tell Head Buhari and she’ll take care of it.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to hear. I thought Holly would have been all for a private adventure together to save the world. Instead, she was telling me to pass it off to someone else. I couldn’t do that. This was my responsibility. Now that I knew about it, I had to stop it from happening. I couldn’t stop Danny from dying, but I sure as hell was going to stop this.

  “I can’t sit back and do nothing.”

  “What about your training? If you don’t pass, then you won’t be able to go after your son’s killer and this will all have been for nothing,” she said, stabbing me in the heart.

  I knew she hadn’t meant to cause me pain, so I didn’t lash out at her for it. In truth, she was right. I couldn’t do anything else to screw up my chance of becoming a Huntsman. It was my only way to get my revenge.

  “Tell the Head and she will have it figured out in no time. There’s only a handful of people who have access to that room, anyway.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said softly.

  The response satisfied Holly. She smiled and lay her head back down on her pillow. I did the same, but my eyes remained open. Guilt gnawed at me for lying to Holly, but I had to. I couldn’t take the chance of her stopping me from retrieving the goblet.

  The Shtriga