“Puta! Shut the hell up!” Carmen gave Piper a hard shove to her shoulder before she was laughing again and Piper was grinning. Anna couldn’t help but smile too.
That faintness was back again for a moment, rendering her slightly unsteady. But this time Piper unknowingly held her up through it, and Anna just chalked it up to being giddy. Immense happiness joined the store of relief inside her, a cocktail more wonderful than the vast majority of the things she had experienced in her life.
There were only a few moments that had ever been happier than this. One of them had been seeing her baby brother born. But all the rest of them had been….
Anna was slowly released by Piper so she could get into it with Carmen again, the two now alternating between pushing each other and hugging each other. Their shared trauma most likely united them in a way that nothing and no one would ever be able to break.
Anna took the chance to look for – there.
All the rest of them had been with him.
When their eyes met, it was the same. It felt the same now as it had all those years ago. He was like a port in a storm for her. Solid. Real. From day one, from minute one, when she’d rounded that corner to find a tall, dark fortress of beauty standing in the middle of that white painted hall, he’d been the enigma at the center of her world – like a god of night trapped in human form.
But she must have been tired, because normally she could think through her little bouts of desire. Normally she could prioritize.
They were not alone, and what had happened with Randall Price? And Victor Maze? Where was Magnus? She wanted to thank him – had he vanished already?
“Ares,” she whispered, suddenly realizing that she was looking at the ground. It was indistinct. She was sort of losing focus. “What happened with Price?”
“He’s been taken to a holding facility,” he told her.
All around them, the Monsters and other wardens were breaking up into groups of friends or acquaintances. Some had taken drinks from the bar or the fridge and were spreading them around. Others were reclining on the couches or settling into the saddles of the motorcycles in the garage.
“And what about Maze?” she asked, feeling that she needed to ask while she still could. As if soon she wouldn’t be able to.
“Escaped,” he admitted. “For now.”
Damn, Anna thought. “And… that girl. The one who was here, the homeless one.” She had a vague recollection of a woman covered in layers of clothing and grime – and blood. She’d been the one Victor had used to… to –
“She’s safe. She was here earlier. But the sovereigns are seeing to her now.”
Annaleia’s memory of the woman was indistinct; the entire ordeal had been so much like a nightmare, blurred at the edges by untold amounts of fear. But one thing she knew solidly was that the woman Victor had used so repulsively would be appallingly damaged after such a hideous event if she were not taken care of. And if anyone could take care of someone like that, it was the sovereigns and wardens.
“Good,” she said. It came out as a whisper.
She swallowed hard and forced herself to look around as a weird chill set into her body, cutting deep hard and fast. She hugged herself as she took in the garage scene. It seemed to have become an area of celebration, and Annaleia wondered why she didn’t feel like celebrating with the others. Why suddenly so cold and uncertain? She was after all happy, right? She’d saved her friends. Magnus had healed her. The scars were gone. Everything was perfect… wasn’t it?
She suddenly reached out as another spell of light-headedness swept through her, this one much worse than the first two. She managed to brace herself against something hard just before her head seemed to expand and her legs trembled just a touch beneath her weight.
She heard noises in the distance, people bullshitting. She heard Piper talking with some guy. Then she heard Carmen laughing. But the sensation that moved through her as the faint feeling subsided was akin to the sense one got while watching a movie when the twist is introduced. You could always tell it was that time in the film because it was the moment when the characters fully believed that everything was okay. They would be laughing and joking, but the viewer knew better because the music had turned dark and ominous. The tension would build because everything was about to go pear shaped.
“Shhh, you’re trembling Raindrop,” Ares whispered in her ear.
“Cain,” said Ares. She felt him straighten behind her and she looked up – into the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. The Monsters warden clan leader was standing over her.
“How are you feeling, Faith?” he asked gently. When he spoke to her, the entire world was quiet for her but for his words.
She wanted to tell him she was fine, that Magnus had been amazing, and that everything was good now. Couldn’t he hear the laughter like she could? Surely that meant it was all fixed and right? But as she stared up into the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, it was the truth that came inexorably from her lips instead. “Not so good,” she whispered honestly.
“I can imagine,” he said. “But there’s a reason for that.” Then he glanced around. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
And suddenly Annaleia, Ares, and Cain were standing alone in the middle of a deserted store parking lot. What the hell? Anna thought, wondering how in the ever-loving world he had managed to do such a thing. A wordless transport? Of not one but three people? Without a portal?
But Cain didn’t seem to want to talk about wordless transports, because he said simply, “We haven’t gone far. A little privacy is simply in order.” Then he looked down at Anna’s body as if seeing something beyond it, something no one else could see. It was one step beyond x-ray vision. “Faith, do you remember when you and Lily Kane had a talk about those ghost scars of yours?”
Anna blinked at the rapid change in subject. She felt scatter-brained and unable to focus – and then she looked back up into Cain’s eyes, and felt promptly grounded. She nodded.
“Do you remember what she told you about how they got there?”
Anna recalled the words with some effort. But when she did, she nodded about that too.
He smiled at her. “That’s good,” he said as if he were genuinely praising her for doing well. “Then you remember that when you revive someone, you’re marked for it not once, but twice.”
Again she nodded – and the slightest hint of what he was getting at winked at her from the depths of her thoughts. Magnus, she thought. He could only heal me once.
Now Cain’s praising smile beamed. “Ares doesn’t deserve you, Faith,” he said out loud. But Ares didn’t contradict him. Their eyes were on Anna. “Keep going, ” Cain prompted.
Anna frowned, blinking. In her head Cain said, Just remember, Faith. When you resurrected two people at once, you opened up all of your scars.
Anna thought about that. His words played over and over again in her head. All of your scars… all of your scars… ALL of your scars!
Oh no. Now she understood. That was what he’d meant.
She’d not only opened up the wounds on her physical body, she’d reopened her ghost scars, those wounds that she’d sustained in some hard to reach place that represented the “other person” she had become as a Withered.
Annaleia was two people, and had been ever since she’d come back from the dead. It had been discovered that all Withered were like this. But because she was different than the Withered before her, when she sustained injury while reviving the dead, the damage took hold twice. Other Withered didn’t have this problem. But other Withered also couldn’t resurrect.
Because Magnus could only heal one person when he came to her aid, he’d only managed to heal one set of wounds. And now somewhere inside, in some strange place where she was Withered and not just Annaleia, she was proverbially bleeding to death.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” Cain told her. He broke eye contact with her and looked over her shoulder at something standing behind them. She and Ares turned
together to find Jarrod Sterling striding toward them in the parking lot. “Right on time.”
As he joined them, Sterling met Anna’s gaze and said, “You were amazing, little one.”
Anna blinked. “You saw that?”
“I did,” he told her with a small smile. “But I’m afraid…” in his eyes flashed something deeply painful, “this is where we part ways, Annaleia.” He looked away. “You need to leave here with Mace, and you need to go without delay.”
Sterling extracted something from the inner pocket of his suit coat. It was a small black pouch with gold thread piping. “Once the spell is activated, time will slow for you both,” he said, looking Ares in the eyes. “Don’t ask me how this was achieved,” he said with only a slight inflection of warning to his deep voice. “Suffice it to say, Michael Clemens is not the only warlock with cause to probe the less traveled halls of legerdemain.”
He opened the pouch, pulling from it two smaller pouches, these in the form of satin embroidered tri-fold pockets, secured with small gold hooks. These, he displayed in his other palm, where the gold embroidery and locks caught the light from overhead street lamps.
“At activation, a form of stasis will commence, encapsulating both participants. However, this is not an identical stasis. There is a relationship duality here, a yin-yang if you will. It will recognize one of you as the one who initiated the spell, and therefore as the….” He trailed off and cleared his throat, looking at the ground.
Annaleia knew damn well what it was he didn’t want to say out loud. She knew what word he hadn’t been able to give voice to because she knew him. Intimately. Jarrod was an incubus and she had slept with him.
On more than one occasion.
She knew what he preferred. Every man around her right now was like that. Hell, every member of the Monsters clan was like that. And most wardens in general. Fuck, she realized suddenly as she thought of the vast majority of the males she worked with in a supernatural capacity. Every single one of them was assertive. Alpha. Dominant.
She swallowed hard and looked up at Ares. The word described him to perfection.
Jarrod continued as if they all knew exactly what he meant. Because they did. He busied himself by deftly opening one of the two satin pouches. “The stasis will maintain the health and awareness of both parties until the spell has completed, and that won’t happen until the activator decides it’s time.” He paused here, and a very incubus smile claimed his handsome features. “I suppose that part is a little one-sided too.” He shrugged helplessly. “What can I say? I’m no angel.”
Then he lifted his chin and looked Ares in the eyes. That was a powerful look right there. She knew that look personally. “To that end, I’m sure it comes as little surprise to you dragon, that the spell will have a few other choice effects as well, and those aren’t any more fair.” He looked absolutely un-apologetic when he added, “Just remember it was first and foremost a Nightmare who refined and amplified the spell.”
Ares surprised Annaleia by not saying anything in return. Instead, he remained stoically still, his gaze hard and unwavering.
Sterling pulled a shimmering chain from the small wallet pouch he’d opened. It was a fairly long chain, one that could be placed over the head without needing to be unclasped. At the end of the chain was a simple round, smooth pendant of a white-gold metal. Upon the pendant was a carving. Anna squinted, trying to get a better look at it.
But Sterling reached out, gently taking her hand and turning it over to place the pendant directly into her palm. He was slow to release her hand when he said, “The symbol is a modified Vesica piscis, the circles overlapping one above the other rather than side by side. Within that overlap, a charm has been placed.”
She ran her finger over the lines and images unfolded in her mind’s eye, images of eclipses and blankets and night falling. She stopped her finger, suddenly half-afraid that by touching it, she had been unintentionally activating it.
But Sterling smiled and shook his head. “Don’t worry, beautiful. You can’t activate it.” He looked up at Ares. “Only he can.”
Then he took the empty larger pouch and both smaller pocket pouches and said, “I suppose I owe you this one, Mace.” He held all three items out for Ares to take.
Ares didn’t miss a beat. He took the items with zero hesitation and tucked them into one of the inner pockets of his leather jacket. “Yeah, you do,” he said simply. And then he sucker punched Jarrod Sterling so hard, the Nightmare Warlock went stumbling backward several steps to wind up sprawled on his back in the middle of the tarmac.
“Jarrod!” Anna cried out, at once mortified by the attack.
But when she tried to run to him, she found herself not only held back but lifted off her feet by a pair of strong and determined arms.
With her tight against his chest, Ares turned to Cain. The two exchanged a private look, one that Anna wished for all the world she’d been included in, and then Cain nodded at Ares – and the parking lot, Jarrod Sterling, and the Monsters warden clan leader vanished as Ares and Annaleia disappeared without a word.
Chapter Forty-four – The Dragon’s Den
When the world solidified around them again, Anna shoved against Ares’ chest. “Damn it Ares, put me down right now,” she seethed.
He smirked and bent to lower her gently, but she just jumped out of his arms herself and backed up several steps to look around and get her bearings.
She was in a cave. An honest to goodness cave. But this was not your ordinary run-of-the-mill cave. This was a cave that had been turned into a luxury home.
She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised or impressed at this point, given the people she worked with and the realms she’d had occasion to see – such as the fae realm, which could be surreal in its beauty. But everywhere she looked, details of wealth and opulence surprised and impressed her nonetheless.
The walls were not the gray limestone-like rock she would have expected. Instead they were a light tan color, nearly white, and veins of what looked like gold and silver ran through them. She stood on a kind of shelf balcony overlooking a larger part of the cave. There must have been another shelf above her, or perhaps several, because from that higher level, a waterfall poured into an extravagant pool below. The pool’s flooring was an inviting deep marbled blue, and it wound around a kind of spiral area to what appeared to be a separate hot tub. She could see the water bubbling in the tub and even make out the steam rising from it. It looked warm. Anna had the sudden urge to take off her clothes and step into it.
She bit her lip, hugged herself tighter, and kept slowly turning to take in more of her surroundings.
The balcony on which she stood offered perhaps the best view in the underground abode. From here, she could even see other shelf-like balconies on the other side of this part of the cave. Each was lined with safety railings of glass, carved wood, and gold. Access from one level to another was possible via carved-out stairs that sparkled with embedded crystals. However, that was not the only way to move from one level of the cave to another.
Annaleia could see the cylindrical glass of an actual elevator at one end of the cave. Its shining black doors were piped through with gold art deco lines to stunning effect. Anna was finding herself more lost to her surroundings with each passing second.
From where she stood, she could also see that here and there throughout the cave, alcoves featuring plush leather furniture and recessed lighting invited with things like bars or sitting areas or even what appeared to be a small library, its shelves stacked full with books. Small trees and other plants grew from outcroppings along the cave walls, their leaves unanimously healthy, some of the plants in bloom, and some definitely not from anywhere on Earth. She knew none of the greenery was plastic. She just – knew.
She also knew without a doubt that she and Ares were alone in this magnificent underground palace. Completely and totally alone.
Annaleia winced when she felt the pendant that was sti
ll clutched tightly in the palm of her hand bite into her palm just a little. She blinked and uncurled her fingers to glance down at the small medallion of white gold.
She had meant to simply look around, find out where she was, and then hit Antares with the boat load of questions she’d had boiling in her brain. Like, what the hell this pendant was for, and what was in the other pouch, and what the spell Jarrod had so obviously given to Antares was meant to do.
But it was basic common sense that when you were taken some place new against your will, or relatively anyway, you gained your bearings first. You did a quick scan to look for weapons and escape routes and locked doors and breakable glass, and then you took it from there.
So she looked around and saved her questions.
But she wasn’t expecting… this. The sound of the waterfall, so soothing and relaxing, was like a salve on her frayed nerves. As was the soft recessed lighting everywhere, their shed warmth as mesmerizing as Ares’ candy closet. And now Anna was feeling rather distracted.
She was disheveled, and she knew she had something very important to deal with. But that hot tub down there was admittedly pulling on her in a nearly inexorable way. And of course it would be so easy to just fix herself a drink there in that water-immersed bar in that little nook in the pool she hadn’t seen before. Then she could saunter on over to the hot, therapeutic water and slowly sink in, letting it glide and ripple its healing way all over her naked body….
From right behind her with his lips to her ear, Ares said, “I knew you would find that appealing, Raindrop.”
Anna flushed warm. She was still feeling weak, and she knew that inside – deep inside – something bad was happening to her. It was fatal. Fatal. It was just that at that very moment, she just couldn’t seem to care. Something else was happening to her. She felt for lack of a better word, unaccountably uninhibited. She felt sensual. And suddenly it didn’t bother her at all that she still felt weak. If anything, that hint of helplessness somehow only added to the prurience of whatever was waking up inside her.
Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon Page 32
