Cain’s final words to him echoed in his head.
She needs you….
And with that thought in mind, Jarrod Sterling took a deep breath and experienced an epiphany. As his evil twin faced off with him, Jarrod simply stood up straight, brushed off his clothing, straightened out his collar, and spun on his heel to turn away from the Terror.
It worked. Of all the attacks he could have utilized and all the defenses he could have launched – simply walking way and not battling himself was something the Terror had not expected. Its perplexed uncertainty afforded Jarrod the few precious seconds he needed to put distance between himself and his twin. And when one of the support columns nearby conveniently slid over to end up between the two of them, Jarrod thanked his lucky stars and all the fates. Now there was space and a barrier separating them.
The Nightmare Warlock broke into a run toward the place he’d seen Cain leave from, and as he did he spoke the words of a tracing spell, weaving them together with tried and true transport magic. Ahead of him, a hole tore open the chaos dimension, its edges swirling and crackling with physics-defying magic.
Jarrod Sterling sprinted right up to that hole and jumped in.
Chapter Forty – The Monsters territory garage, Austin Texas
Once Magnus had told her he was going to at least take her discomfort away, Annaleia began to feel much better. He hadn’t healed her, but her wounds no longer hurt and she wasn’t thirsty. Now she just felt peaceful.
It afforded her the luxury of thinking clearly, which is what she did as the transport bent time and space around them on its way to their destination.
She’d never been in transports that lasted so long. When she’d first learned the spell, she’d learned it was really more like a flash, a brief and blurred passage through something indistinct, and then pop – she’d be where she wanted to go. But these last few transports had taken eons comparatively speaking. The magic they had to meld through in order to safely carry their passengers from point A to point B was immense. And the spell had been changed drastically to allow the easy transport of more than one person.
That was something that didn’t used to happen too. Transport spells used to be single-use only. Two people if the caster was extremely powerful and practiced. But now? They were carrying small armies here and there.
No wonder they were taking so long.
Wonder…
Annaleia stared up at Ares’ profile from where he still held her in his arms, refusing to let her down. And she actually did wonder. She took in the strong line of his jaw, the rakish stubble, the curl of his black hair against the collar of his jacket. She rested her cheek against his chest and inhaled the scent of leather and motorcycles and darkness. She saw his dark eyes spellbinding and already glowing and focused on the portal’s edge. She listened to the absolute silence amongst the powerful men around her, punctuated only by the crackling energy of the transport tunnel.
And she knew. She knew there was something Ares wasn’t telling her.
She turned her head and angled it so she could get a better look at her sentinel where he stood beside Ares. She caught him in profile too. His attention also seemed to be focused on what lay ahead.
What is it? she thought, returning her attention to Ares.
But then she noticed something. She’d gotten to know him so well while they were in school together. It had been long ago, another lifetime. But some memories never seemed to fade. And this was one of them.
There was a certain look Antares got sometimes, when he was filled with a kind of insecurity or hesitation. It was the opposite of confidence, which was why she took note of it. Confident was the face he normally wore. So it really stood out to her when he was uncertain. She’d caught it here and there, such as the time he’d given her a gift for no reason. It wasn’t her birthday or a holiday. He’d just wanted to get her something.
Those were the only kinds of gifts Annaleia really liked. To her, they were the spur-of-the-moment signs of affection that meant someone was truly thinking about you. Whereas, receiving a present on specific day such as a birthday or anniversary or Christmas meant people were thinking about a date, not about you.
Ironically, it was that gift that had led to the single scar on Anna’s body that she would not want to lose if she had the chance to rid herself of them all. That one, she’d sustained falling off a skateboard. Ares had been so overwhelmed with guilt, berating himself for giving her the board, vehemently regretting the decision as he patched her up. But that first board was the start of something for Annaleia. She’d been given a decidedly unacceptable gift for a young lady in the late sixties and that alone made her love it more than anything she’d ever been given. The fact that it came from Ares was gravy. And after that fall, she’d stubbornly ignored his pleas, and she’d gotten right back on again.
She’d learned to ride pretty much everything from then on out, including waves.
But the whole day before he’d given her the board – wrapped up in purple wrapping paper with a gorgeous satin lavender bow – he’d behaved differently. She could tell he was trying hard to hide it, but she’d always been able to read him.
She remembered how he’d moved his hands pretty much non-stop. She remembered his half-hearted attempt at aloofness. She recalled the distracted manner in which he would clench his jaw and run his hand through his hair or simply shove both hands into his pockets and start pacing. Most of all, she remembered how focused he became.
His gaze would slide to nothing in particular and he would grow quiet, as if he were mulling over every single possible outcome to something and planning out how he would deal with each one.
Ares had that focus again now as he stared at the end of the portal. And it hit her. He was uncertain. He didn’t know what was waiting for them at the transport’s end any more than she did.
That was the thing he wasn’t telling her. He wasn’t telling her that there was something unknown, something potentially dangerous or frightening waiting for them. When there wasn’t supposed to be anything but friends who had defeated the chaos god or at least temporarily trapped him.
“What happened, Ares?” she asked him softly.
He looked down at her, and that uncertain expression became tinged with frustration. He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Now he looked apologetic. “Cain won’t tell me.”
Anna closed her eyes and rested her head back against his jacket. “He’s a tool,” she whispered.
The guys behind them laughed softly. Ares said, “Yes. Yes he is.”
The portal began to open. Magnus nodded at Ares and stepped in front of them, determined to be the first one out just in case. But as soon as he entered the garage, he came to an almost immediate stop. Anna stared at his broad back as he turned to glance over his shoulder at Ares first, and then Annaleia. His eyes held hers.
She said, “Ares, put me down.”
This time, he complied, slowly lowering her to her feet. She got her boots under her and he steadied her while Magnus moved further into the room so the others could exit the portal. Dante, Rafe, and Nate moved out around them. Anna heard the portal zap shut, but as was customary now, it lacked the lightning-crash thunder that used to accompany transports. Most people had learned how to incorporate spells that negated the noise of space closing back up again when they cast it. Magic had come a long way in a short period of time, relatively speaking.
Anna followed Magnus and Ares into the garage, her eyes scanning the room and everything in it. It was quiet. She knew there were people there; she could feel as well as hear the rustling of their clothing, mostly leather. Which she could also smell. She could smell engine oil too. The walls were lined with bikes. She’d wager the vehicles in that room were worth millions put together. Maybe more. This room was Ares to a fault – leather, engines, treasure.
This was the Monsters clan territory, reserved for their use when they were in Austin. And she knew they were all there. She could feel every
one of them in that room now. It was a powerful sensation to have all thirteen of the Monsters wardens in one location. Her skin buzzed with the effects of their combined power. It was almost too much, like becoming a little tipsy. Or high.
But… no one was talking.
And that was terrifying enough to waylay any inebriating effects they would have otherwise had on her.
There were others there as well. A few men and women who didn’t wear the Monsters clan jacket but had airs about them, of wisdom and experience – the sovereigns. And then there were other wardens there as well, from clans across the country and even the world. They weren’t talking either. And everyone was looking at her.
When they’d gone half-way into the room and the others there had parted for them like a biblical sea, Ares and Magnus finally separated as well, stepping to the side to allow her to see what would turn out to be the first of two hard truths she would face that night.
Annaleia wasn’t sure what she was seeing at first. Her eyes moved over the scene in front of her, making their human eye mathematical retina-cornea assessment of what was there. But it wasn’t registering. It was true what they said about the brain needing a little longer to process something it didn’t want to see.
And then when her brain did process it, she didn’t believe it.
She closed her eyes, absolutely positive that the two women lying dead on the cement ground were not the two women she thought they were but two other people entirely. She was sure her eyes would now confirm that for her. They’d been playing tricks on her, that was all. She was tired and she was scared and she did have an excellent imagination.
But when she re-opened her eyes, something like dry ice, both hot and cold, but heavy like a black hole, grabbed hold of her body somewhere around her chest and began to pull on her. It squeezed and dragged. Her eyes moved over the scene completely of their own accord. She had no control over them now. She was being simultaneously smothered and burned in frozen carbon dioxide. Or maybe drowned in liquid nitrogen.
The eyes she’d completely lost control of slid from one body to the other, and then to the bedraggled, dirty young woman who sat curled in a ball, rocking back and forth and whimpering a few feet away. Her body was covered in copious amounts of blood.
Their blood, her brain told her. It’s their blood.
She couldn’t have told anyone what her body was doing after that. All she knew was a ringing in her ears and the distant, muffled sound of Cain’s voice.
“She wouldn’t do it, no matter how he threatened her,” he was saying. “So Maze grabbed her knife hand and used it to kill them himself.” He paused, perhaps out of some sense of propriety. She couldn’t have said. Ringing. Faint voice. Nothing else.
“Forcing her to have any part in this at all was traumatizing enough to her that it fed him the energy he needed to disappear. This time without a trace.”
Anna was moving again, this time moving forward like a puppet on a string. She watched herself as if from a distance or in a dream, vaguely and bordering on numb as she stopped directly between the two bodies.
And then, quite suddenly, she was dropping to her knees – and her mind chose that unfortunate moment to boomerang back into itself, fully immersing the entirety of her in the first horrible, horrible truth of what had transpired.
“No,” she said quietly. The word was so quiet, the whisper was a ghost’s plea, desperate but trapped in a world of its own.
They’d made her believe this wouldn’t happen. They’d never come out and said it, they hadn’t made any promises, but Anna realized then that she hadn’t truly thought, not for one tangible instant, that this might actually come to pass. She’d entertained the concept in random passing, experiencing brief segments of anxiety over the idea. But in the end, Annaleia had fully trusted that all the wardens and all the sovereigns and all the fantastically powerful people around her would be able to keep her friends safe.
And not let them come to harm.
Anna saw her hands reaching out, one on either side, and felt her fingers slid over the unmoving, slightly cooler hands of her best friends. These were the two, the only two humans on Earth, that she’d loved and trusted enough to share her secret with. She’d let them into that part of her life knowing they wouldn’t run. They wouldn’t get scared and they wouldn’t judge. They would understand.
A person can search the world over for a friend like that and never find one. Lots and lots of people did. They lived their days by interactions with acquaintances, nothing more. And they died with obligatory funeral attendees as the only people who saw them lowered into the ground.
Annaleia Faith had been lucky enough to find not one, but two. They’d promised her they would always have her back. She could hear Piper speaking in her head right now… “We got your six, babe.” And Carmen… “Yeah. Me and the cringa here got your back, bruja. You count on it.”
“I didn’t have yours though.”
Annaleia lowered her arms and closed her eyes and like a condemned prisoner who’d reached the end of the green carpet, she faced the second of the hard truths that had been thrust upon her.
She could save one of them. She could bring one of them back. But only one.
She had to choose.
She barely heard herself speak this time when her somewhat splintered spirit finally whispered, “Not again.”
Chapter Forty-one – Austin Texas
When Jarrod exited the portal in an alley outside the garage he knew belonged to the Monsters, he was met with a familiar feeling, one that made his chest feel tight. This is it, he thought. Whatever it was, whatever was going to happen, it was happening now. His vision was coming true.
He was going to lose someone he cared about.
As he ran into the building and up the concrete stairs, preparing the pass code that would allow him into the otherwise invisible and warded level of the garage… he knew. He knew who it was he was going to lose.
On a deeper level of his consciousness, in a place he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge was even there, he knew that he’d known all along. He’d tried so hard to ignore it, act against it, take measures to prevent it. But one way or another, his goddamn visions always came true.
So he’d done the only thing he could think of that might make it right again. It was his only option left. And when Antares Mace and the Monsters had shown up on Sixth and Jarrod had realized that his last best hope wasn’t going to happen, he’d tried with every fiber of his being to take it in stride.
He’d remained calm. He’d stayed on the sidelines. He’d been a fucking team player and distracted himself with plans and chaos gods and enigmatic clan leaders who could get inside his head. He’d been good, damn it. He’d never gone full incubus or caused anyone to live their worst fears or used the darkest of his dark magic spells, the ones he kept quiet about, the ones he had no idea why he’d ever learned.
All the while, Jarrod had steadfastly maintained some sort of stupid, worthless hope that there was still the slightest chance everything would be okay. It was pigheaded, really. Deep down, he knew that too. Yet, that was exactly what he did even now as he took the stairs two at a time and spoke the words of the entry spell that made the new level appear before him, stretching out the levels above and below as if he were Harry Potter about to catch a train at platform nine and three-quarters.
Except it wasn’t a platform but a garage level, and it wasn’t a train but probably more like a motorcycle. And if anything, Jarrod was a Malfoy, not a Potter.
He transitioned through the barrier as if getting an electricity bath like Nicola Tesla. And as he stepped out the other side, he slowed, taking in his surroundings with a now fulfilled sense of dread. It was the exact same scene from his vision; a large group of people, mostly in black, were gathered closely together. At their center was something important, something that bowed their collective heads and silenced their lips.
Sterling found himself walking forward. His feet now moved
as if he were in that vision, in that dream, drawing closer to the ruinous subject of his personal prophecy with each step. As he moved, the sea of faceless onlookers parted for him. Did they know he was meant to be there? Could they sense that fate would have him look upon that final image? Is that why they stepped aside until at last, he’d waged his way to the center and was steeling himself to his core.
Before him lie two dead bodies, not one. Jarrod blinked, at once confused. He vaguely recognized these women, but they were certainly not vital to him.
The woman between them was important to him. However, she was very much alive.
She was injured and had been bandaged. But she was alive.
Across from Jarrod stood Mace, Cain, and a few of the Monsters clan members Jarrod recognized from earlier. There was also a man there who was very obviously a sentinel. They had a look about them of perfect proportionality, a kind of attractiveness that was classical, like the subject of an Italian renaissance painting. By the way the sentinel couldn’t take his eyes off Annaleia, Jarrod imagined he was her sentinel.
But why was he there?
“Anna….”
Annaleia startled where she sat on her knees between the bodies, each of her hands grasping ineffectively onto one of theirs. Slowly, she straightened, turning to look at him over her shoulder.
Oh no, he realized when he saw the look in her eyes. Oh no, it’s this again.
And there it was.
This was the reason he was there, the reason he’d had the vision. It had to be. This right here was the reason the wardens and sovereigns had parted and allowed him through. It was because they knew he’d been there that night fifty years ago. The night she’d had to make a choice like this one.
Annaleia Faith was being forced to make the decision she hated more than anything in the world. Circumstance had thrust upon her the same one she’d faced fifty years ago, the night she became Withered.
Jarrod had been there that night.
She’d been faced with so much that fateful day. It hadn’t been a simple matter for her to give herself up to him. It had meant so much more to her than casual sex. She’d had to come to grips with dying, coming back to life, seeing her family dead – saving them. And then Jarrod had… he had taken her to his bed, this tiny figure filled with so much turmoil and so many choices. It seemed so callous now. He’d been desperate and time had been short, but despite the anima, the life he’d seen in her even then, Anna was so much more.
Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon Page 30
