by Amelia Jade
“Argh!” she cried out, dropping eight feet to the ground to land in a heap, pain exploding all over her body from the impact. It faded swiftly though, telling her that nothing serious had happened.
“NO!” The shriek came from the downed woman, who had gotten to her feet. Miniature tornadoes appeared in her open palms, and she startled hurling them at the forest.
Petal watched in awe and horror as the tornadoes grew in size as they shot forward. When they reached the trees the trunks exploded under the force of the wind. The woman continued to hurl them from left to right, obviously trying to hit whatever had struck her.
“I won’t lose to you this time!” she shouted, walking a path of destruction across the forest.
“HYPOCRITE!” someone yelled. Petal was amazed to realize it was her.
The woman turned to look at Petal. She had begun to lose some of her features, the wind aspect creeping back in as she lost control of the situation.
“You heard me! You want to kill us for destroying the valley, but look at you. One little hissy fit and you’re destroying acres of forest! Why do you deserve the valley more than we do, if you can’t even keep it alive?” By the time she finished Petal was on her feet, facing down the woman. She’d dealt with bullies her entire life, and this one was no different, except for the whole controlling of the wind bit.
But if Petal was going down, she wasn’t going to do it without giving her a piece of her mind.
“I’ll kill you for that!” With a shriek she raised a hand at Petal.
“You were going to kill me anyway!” She yelled back. “Oh shit!”
The woman flung a tornado at Petal.
She turned and ran sideways, but not before she saw the same gray and white shape come shooting out of the deep woods like a rocket. After that Petal was forced to duck for cover as the tornado shot by, slamming into the side of the house. Wood exploded everywhere, peppering her with pulverized pieces of siding and walls. She screamed and kept running, until she’d gotten far enough out of the path of the damn thing to be out of danger.
Then she turned. What she saw made no more sense to her than anything else she’d seen that day. After all, why wouldn’t a massive wolf be fighting someone made out of wind? That was clearly the next logical step, right?
Even as she watched, the wolf tore a chunk of flesh off, exposing the wind-form underneath.
24. Grudge Match
Lex
His jaws closed around the Auri’s forearm, ripping the cloak of human flesh from the wind sprite.
The shriek that came in response to his attack threatened to burst his eardrums, far more sensitive than those of a human. Lex shook his head to clear it, but the delay had bought the Auri time to recover. A blow from her other arm sent him tumbling across the ground.
“I will not be bested by a mangy mutt!”
Joke’s on you, lady. I beat you once a century ago. I’m gonna do it again.
She held out both hands, and the air around her began to congeal as it swept around and around. The wind sprite wasn’t forming a tornado anymore, but instead she was fashioning a hoop of pure wind energy. It would be deadly to most anything in its path.
Fortunately for him, he knew how to defeat it. It almost irked him that sprites like Gabrielle here had such limited memories. She’d tried this same thing on him a century earlier. It hadn’t worked then, it wouldn’t work now.
Werewolves were death to magic. Not the effects of it, which is why he’d fled her tornado assault earlier. The exploding trees were real enough and would have killed him if he’d stayed put. But her wind ring? He snorted, expelling air out through his noise, sounding more like a sneeze in his wolf form than anything.
Lex pawed the ground as Gabrielle Wortley raised her hands above her head, ready to unleash her weapon on him.
Then he growled. The low sound grew, and grew as he used his own innate abilities. The gravel and wood around him began to shiver and pulsate, expanding outward in ever-increasing waves.
The Auri unleashed her weapon at him at last. It sped toward Lex like a runaway freight train, the air so distorted with energy it hurt to look at. But as it approached he stood his ground. When the blur was within ten feet or so Lex unleashed the growl he’d been holding, punctuating it with a single sharp bark. The sound lashed out and disintegrated the hoop like it had been made of fragile glass.
Lex didn’t wait for her to come up with something different. He shot forward, ducking below her swinging arms and ripping another chunk of her flesh free. There was no blood, the rubbery skin-like substance pulling off her body and disappearing moments later as he exposed more and more of her true form. The Auri could cloak themselves in a human-like layer of skin and hair, but it wasn’t real. He repeated this pattern for several minutes, ripping chunk after chunk of fake skin from her body.
Eventually the wind sprite gave up the act, and just like that the rest of her disguise was gone, leaving nothing but the pure wind body.
Now Lex could truly begin to harm her. He shot forward again. The Auri tried to create a wall of wind in front of her, but aside from a soft breeze through his fur Lex felt nothing as he smashed through it. Magic didn’t have an effect on him. He hit the wind sprite square in the chest and bore her to the ground, teeth ripping bits of wind free as if it were real.
Gabrielle bellowed and her arm came across her body, clubbing him aside. Lex yelped as he rolled, slamming hard against the metal of the firepit. Something gave way inside him…a rib probably. Pain pulsed out from the injury with every breath, a distraction for sure, but not one he was going to give in to. He’d been hurt worse than that, and more times than he cared to admit, too.
As long as you win, nobody cares how badly your ass got beat during the fight.
Shaking off the impact, Lex surged to his feet, eyes flicking between the bodies strung up around him. Fire burned in his yellow eyes as he turned his head to focus on the sprite. Four people had died during his watch. Two of them because he’d left Surrey to go find Petal. A single moment of selfishness on his part had resulted in the deaths of innocents. The fire became an inferno as he stepped forward.
Not anymore.
A century before he’d been content to banish her when she’d started to lose control. Lex had hoped that a hundred years in the Underworld would convince her of the error of her ways. Obviously he’d been wrong, and she’d spent the entire time stewing over the situation. And along the way someone had taught her how to amplify her spells with human blood. That spoke of a larger player in the game, but dealing with that would have to wait until later. For now, he needed to deal with Gabrielle. Permanently.
The sprite laughed crazily as he came closer, opening her arms wide, inviting him to leap at her. Lex wasn’t stupid though; he was aware of her strength. Her magic may slide off him, but she could still kill him easily if he wasn’t careful.
“Well, come on then!” she challenged. “Let’s get this over with, little puppy. I remember you, you know. I’ve learned a thing or two since last time.”
Lex felt a moment of fear at the sudden lucidity in the Auri. She had never pretended to know who he was until just then, acting like the unhinged wind sprite he’d expected. Now though, she was revealing a bit of knowledge that he did not want to hear. If she knew who he was, she knew his capabilities.
Before he could hesitate and overthink it, Lex pushed off, running right at her. He bent low like he was getting ready to leap, and Gabrielle laughed in anticipation. But Lex never completed his leap. Instead he stayed low to the ground. His jaws opened and he clamped them around her ankle. A twist of his head and he pulled powerfully. The Auri shrieked in pain and his teeth crunched through the foot, separating it from the body as he severed the connection.
“You beast!” she shouted, trying to club him with her fists as she fell to the ground.
Lex was long gone however, darting out of reach. He ran around behind her, jumped onto the sprite’s head, and ri
pped some of her wind-hair from her body, pulling it right from the skull. Gabrielle hollered in pain. Instead of spinning, she drove an elbow backward, catching him in the side. Lex rolled free and came to his feet.
The game continued for several minutes, but it was obvious from the start that the woman was outclassed. On his fifth pass he took her right hand, and then on the eighth, her left arm from below the elbow came away. Finally he snapped her left shin. Limbless, the wind sprite fell to the ground. It wouldn’t take her long to regenerate, but it was more than enough time.
Lex raced back to the side of the house, past a startled Petal who had been watching everything around the corner, and to the carport. Stacked next to the door into the house were supplies used by the maintenance crew, including stuff that had been stockpiled for winter. His teeth ripped open a bag, taking a mouthful of the contents.
Wincing in distaste and trying not to spit them out, he returned to the backyard. The Auri had already fixed one hand, and was working on a foot. Idiot, he thought. Should have done the feet first, so you could run off. Too late now.
When Gabrielle saw what was slowly spilling from his mouth, causing his lips to pucker up and eyes to water, she started freaking out, dragging herself across the ground with one hand in an attempt to escape.
Lex just calmly walked up to her and opened his mouth.
“NOOOOOO!” she shrieked as the salt crystals ripped into her ethereal body, pinning it to the ground.
He walked up to her body, slowly depositing drool-covered clump after drool-covered clump of road salt on her. The more he covered, the more the wind seemed to slow within her form. Gabrielle continued to struggle. But she was trapped, and they both knew it. Last time Lex had taken it easy on her, simply ripping her head from her body, forcing her back to the Underworld. This time he had pinned her body into his world.
Several clumps of salt penetrated her face and skull. He’d had more than he needed, apparently. With distaste he spat the rest from his mouth, most of it tumbling across her features, pulling them away.
Your time is up. He couldn’t speak in his wolf form, but his eyes conveyed the point well enough.
With that he bent down and tore her head from her body. Power erupted from the spot as the salt contained her essence, keeping her from fleeing back to the Underworld. Lex was pushed back several steps by it, but unharmed.
One last howl of wind in the air reached his ears, and then there was silence. Blessed silence.
He immediately turned his attention to the side of the house, his eyes catching Petal’s. She was safe, and aside from a cut on her arm that he’d seen, she seemed unharmed. He hadn’t scented much of her blood when he’d run by, and when he’d been running for his life, she’d had enough presence of mind to engage in a verbal battle with the Auri. So her mind was in one piece as well.
Lex blessed his lucky stars at the good fortune. If Gabrielle hadn’t been quite so obsessed with destroying Surrey, she surely would have wasted no time draining Petal of her blood, in which case Lex would have lost his mate forever.
He trotted over to her, ready and willing to tell her everything now. After all, how was he going to hide the fact that he’d just done battle with a spirit of the air? Not bloody likely.
But as he got close Petal’s eyes went wide with fear, and she started yelling at him to stay away. A piece of chopped firewood from the stack alongside the house came flying at him. He ducked and paused. What the hell?
“Stay away from me! I’ll call animal control! They’ll kill you!”
Oh. Right. She didn’t know it was him. With a sigh, letting his head hang, Lex stopped advancing and retreated a bit. Petal was obviously a little unhinged at the moment, and who couldn’t blame her. Changing in front of her was probably not the best idea. Regretfully he turned and ran into the forest. Once he was out of sight of her he angled around toward the front of the house and headed down the driveway to her work truck, hoping he’d find a change of clothes.
Showing up naked, while better than a wolf, was still probably not the best bet.
25. Den Life
Petal
“What the fuck was that?”
She leaned against the stacked firewood, a piece still hanging from her hand as she watched the white and gray wolf disappear into the forest. He had to run a lot farther now to reach the edge, after the…the…whatever the fuck that thing had been, had destroyed it with her tornado bombs.
Tornado bombs? Christ, listen to you. How the hell are you going to describe this to anyone? “Oh yeah, Jay, she just started throwing miniature cyclones from her hands that got bigger until they started destroying trees.” Yep, may as well just call the white-coats now and lock me up in a lab. ‘Cause I’m going crazy.
After a minute of heavy panting Petal managed to get herself back under control.
“Time to leave.”
Right. That was absolutely the first thing. Get herself out of the property, and then back to the truck. Lex would come along soon, and then they could call the police. At least the families of the four missing people could get some closure, and have the bodies recovered for a funeral.
“Closure,” she muttered. “Wouldn’t that be nice? I’d love some answers right now.”
“Answers about what? Whoa!”
The sudden presence of someone behind her sent Petal into a spin, where she hurled the wood in her hand at the spot the voice had come from. Before she’d finished releasing it she had picked up another one. Two more followed before her brain caught up and told her she knew the voice.
“Lex?” she asked, stunned at how weak her voice sounded.
“Hi.”
“Lex, I…there was, but then a wolf, and the thing, the wind, it was, and the trees, and people. Dead. They’re all dead, Lex.”
“I know,” he said, stepping forward, his arms open. “I know.”
Petal was confused. How could he know? He’d just gotten there. But then his arms closed around her and she slumped into them, feeling weak.
He whispered into her ear over and over again that it was okay, that he was there now. She could relax. Petal slowly broke down. When the tears began to fall Lex grabbed her in his arms and they sat down. She felt so tiny and small curled up in his lap, but his big, powerful arms assured her that she was okay. That now it was fine. The sobs came at last, racking her whole body as she shook from the trauma of her experience.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have gotten here earlier,” he told her, stroking her hair with one hand, the movement slow, methodical, and relaxing. She leaned into him harder, never more appreciative of him than just then.
“I don’t understand.” She didn’t. Her brain was having a hard time reconciling what she’d seen with what Petal knew was possible. None of it made sense. “Am I sick? Am I hallucinating?” She pushed herself back from Lex. “Tell me the truth. Don’t pamper me.”
He shook his head. “No, you aren’t going insane, or imagining things. I’ll explain it all to you when you’re ready to hear it.”
“I’m ready.” Somehow she wasn’t surprised to hear that Lex knew what was going on. It just made sense that he did.
Lex smiled softly, shaking his head. “No, you aren’t. Later.”
“I want to know now, Lex. I’m already getting tired of thinking I’m crazy, and it’s been ten minutes.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
He sighed. “Okay, let’s get back to the truck, call the police. They can come and deal with the bodies. Once we’ve done that and left, I’ll explain everything. I promise. Okay?”
She considered that. “Yes. Let’s deal with this first. Then you tell me everything. No more secrets.” There was a pause as she thought of something. “Is this what you wanted to tell me about earlier?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Well, maybe you were right in waiting.”
They both laughed over that, and Lex got to his feet, still holding her
to his chest.
“You’re strong, you know.”
He smiled.
“Really strong.”
“Stop it,” he said, his tone a mix of joking and seriousness.
Petal let it drop, content to deal with the situation now before pressuring him for answers. Now that her brain was starting to work, several things were starting to coagulate, thoughts and theories coming together. Nothing that she was ready to confront him with, but she had a suspicion.
Lex showed her how to work the radio in the truck, calling in to the shop and arranging for the police and emergency services to arrive at the location. With the report of four dead bodies, it didn’t take long. What did take forever was sticking around to give the interviews. Three different detectives wanted to talk to her and Lex.
They’d come up with a story that Petal had lost control of her vehicle and it had ended up in the ditch. She’d then gone up to the house to look around for help. She’d stumbled into the backyard and passed out from the scene there. Lex had arrived, saw her truck, and come up to find her. She’d come awake at his touch, and together they’d retreated to the truck and called the police.
The police weren’t sure what to make of everything, including the sacrifices in the backyard. But all the evidence corroborated the fact that neither of them had been out that way until today, so the police let them go. One of the constables gave them a ride back to Lex’s truck. He quickly swapped in a spare tire and they were off, back to the shop to get his truck.
Vince didn’t put up a fight when Lex said they were going home for the day, and wouldn’t be in tomorrow. Nobody questioned the fact that she was going home with him either. Petal didn’t like it, not because she was ashamed of Lex anymore, but because she was his boss, and that was against corporate policy. But even she really didn’t care just then.
After what had happened today, everything was going to change.
***
The truck turned off the side road and began to head up a narrow, windy road.
