In the past few days, he’d felt the throbbing and swelling of muscle tissue moving beneath his flesh. His turn was just hours, maybe even minutes away. And he had one chance to decide now. Open the box and truly embrace the darkness of his nature, or walk away from it as Cain and all the others before him had.
Who would he be when he opened it? What would he be?
Gripping his chin, Layla turned his face toward hers. Her eyes were manic and wide with terror. “You must do it, Abel.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you die and so does everyone else you love. I knew this years ago. You will be our salvation.”
Icy claws of terror snaked down his spine. She’d planned this for years, perhaps even decades. Her plan had been long in the making. Sociopath, that’s what she was. Doing what she thought best, but at the expense of everyone and everything, and yet… and yet…
If he embraced his destiny, maybe she was right, maybe he could save them all. He didn’t know anything of a war or a prophecy involving his aunt, but he had felt the cold touch of death just minutes ago and could not deny that what he’d felt, what he’d seen, it’d been as real as his mother’s nails digging into his jaw now.
Something dark and evil was coming. Something that could destroy not only his family, but all the world with it.
“Mom?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
Her jaw clenched.
“How do you know all this? Who do you work for?”
A little cry spilled from her lips, and then her chin trembled violently as one fat tear after another plopped off the tip of her nose. “I work for the very devils planning this,” she softly admitted.
There wasn’t an inch on his body that didn’t ache, didn’t hurt. But he had to know the truth. Know everything.
“How long? How long have you worked for them?”
What must have been only five seconds of silence felt like an eternity before she finally said, “Since before I met your father. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with him, Abel. But I did. And then I had you boys. And I watched Cain become a rager, and the prophecy—I discounted it, believed it couldn’t be true. I was stupidly hopeful. But then I felt Sin’s presence begin to awaken. The horsemen of the Apocalypse walk amongst us once again. The groanings of birth pains have begun, just like prophecy said they would.”
She’d glanced down at her feet as she’d spoken, but now her bloodshot eyes looked at his. “I did what I had to do, what I vowed to do, to keep my family alive, keep you all safe from harm, but the Triad has lied to us all.”
Her words were nothing but gibberish to him. She’d mentioned the Triad once before, but he had no foundation with which to base her words on. Or the horsemen. The apocalypse was merely something of myth… or so he’d always thought, but he heard her sincerity, felt the truth of her convictions in the fingers she’d slipped through his own.
Layla was terrified and, in her own way, still trying to save her family.
“Are you betraying who you work for by telling me this?”
The shattered look on her face was acknowledgement enough.
“What will they do to you when they realize that you didn’t bring me here just to torture me?”
Her lashes fluttered against the tops of her cheekbones when she slipped her eyes shut.
Abel wasn’t sure he could ever forgive her for the lies, for what she’d done to him, to his brother, or to Adam. But his brain understood what his heart could not; his mother was betraying all she was, all she’d been, for them.
“They’ll kill you, won’t they?”
“Open the box, Abel, make my sacrifice count.”
One thing was beginning to bother him. This prison was secure. Unlike the movies where prisoners could bust out at any time of the day, there were wards of power set in place everywhere. The guards were shifters of such enormous strength that very few of those locked up in here could ever have a hope of escaping past them.
“Who released the prisoners tonight?” he asked softly.
The sides of her mouth twitched. “I needed to get you alone, needed to disrupt the camera feeds to tell you the truth. You weren’t meant to escape. Yet.”
“Yet? Am I supposed to escape?”
“Open the black box. And then none in here can stop you.”
Flint
* * *
Adam, bless his heart, could trace, a nifty little trick where he shifted into particles of free-floating atoms and then moved through the world literally at the speed of light. But the coolest part about his talent was that whatever he held onto as he did it would do the same.
One by one, he’d traced each of them—Seth, Eli, Cain, Rhi, Janet, and herself—from Tennessee to Colorado in less than a minute. But from there the hunt had gotten trickier.
Janet had been invaluable then. In an abstract way, Flint had known that Janet and Rhi were much older than they physically appeared to be. In fact, they were probably older than Adam himself. Janet’s memory banks were extensive, and she knew the approximate location the wolf pack resided.
Unfortunately, the countryside was large with hundreds of miles to cover. Which was what Janet, Rhiannon, and Adam were currently doing while Flint sat tucked away in a remote section of forest with the other three, awaiting their return.
Cain and Seth were scouting the perimeter. Eli had stayed back with her, his eyes shifting as he glanced through the night, making sure no predator—either mundane or supernatural—could catch them unawares.
Flint played with a vine she’d called out of the ground. What she’d once feared, she now craved as it brought her calm and peace of mind.
The others had been gone close to two hours at this point and just sitting here not talking wasn’t doing much to help her frazzled nerves.
“Eli,” she said after a minute.
“Hm?” He didn’t look back.
Honestly, she’d had no idea what she’d been about to ask until the words flew out of her lips. “How exactly do you bond?”
There was a choking kind of cough, and then he whipped around, his silvery eyes wide in his face.
“You and Seth bonded, right?” She pressed on. “So is there like a blood exchange or something?”
He twisted his lips, looking suddenly nervous and twitchy.
Which totally made her more curious than ever.
“Well, um, yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s how Seth and I did it.”
She cocked her head, sensing a but in there. “Yeah…”
Biting his bottom lip, he grimaced. “You should really ask Cain about that, Flint. I don’t know if I should—”
Twisting her lips, she shook her head. “He refuses to tell me anything. And I’m done being babied. I really want to know. Is it sex? Is that it?”
She hadn’t really expected blood, but she wanted to rule out the possibility. Judging by the way Eli’s jaw had just dropped, she was pretty her hunch was right.
Taking her answer from his lack of one, she nodded. “So we have to have sex and then we’re bonded for life. Of course.”
She rolled her eyes. And now it made sense why Cain had freaked out, because if he’d just out-and-out said they’d needed to have sex, well, she might have called him a liar on that one, because Mom had drilled into her just about from birth that guys had one thing on their minds, and how convenient was it that to bond they’d need to have sex? Right.
Eli grunted. “Look. It’s not as simple as that.”
“Then what is it?” she snapped and crossed her arms. “Because it sounds as simple as that.”
Flint wasn’t angry. But she was annoyed. And she wasn’t even sure why. She was pretty much eighteen. Her dad had given her the talk, several mortifying times over. She was a big girl, and she got to decide when it was the right time.
Of course, it wasn’t just a simple matter of scratching a raging, hormonal itch either though, ’cause bonding sounded much more permanent then just some first-love r
elationship crap.
Okay, so maybe she was a little angry.
She lifted a brow when he failed to say anything.
He gesticulated with his arms, pointing at himself and then at her and back and forth. “It’s—”
“Permanent?” she supplied.
“Mystical,” he said at the same time and then frowned at her. “No. I mean, yes, it is permanent. For him.”
She narrowed her eyes. “But not for me?”
“No. Well, in a way. God, are you sure you wouldn’t rather just talk to him about this?” He scrubbed the back of his head.
Flint tapped her foot. “Just spit it out, Eli. So we have mystical sex, and Cain can never leave my side again? That’s what you’re saying?”
He sighed. “In a way, I guess. If you bond to him, he’ll have the ability to calm himself without the use of fists to get him there. He’ll also be stronger, more focused in battle.”
“All good things. So what do I get out of this deal?”
She wasn’t being mercenary, but so far bonding sounded extremely skewed in Cain’s favor and not so much in hers. She loved Cain, of that she had no doubt. She was also fairly positive, like ninety-nine percent sure, that he was the only one for her. Ever. But it was that one percent that bugged her, because what if she woke up one day and decided she’d moved beyond bulging biceps, rippling abs, thick-as-tree-trunk thighs—her breathing hitched as her heart beat faster.
Okay, so maybe she’d never grow tired of those things. But Cain was moody. Temperamental, some might even say. Violent. He’d killed before. Lots of kills actually.
But then, hadn’t she almost done the same in that trailer? And tonight if they found the compound and they had to fight through an entire army of shifter soldiers to get at Abel, wouldn’t she do the same thing without blinking?
So for the sake of argument, she was just going to toss out the killing stuff. Which left the moodiness.
And if she were being totally honest with herself, she was also moody. And capable of violence.
Again she remembered what she’d nearly done to that bug in the trailer, what she’d wanted to do, and what she’d probably done to Graham.
She also remembered that it was Cain’s voice, his gentle cadence, that had dragged her back from those desires.
He could be so thoughtful when he wanted to be. The way he’d held her for the past few nights. Not even trying to get fresh, he’d cuddled her in her bed, and they’d been alone. No dad to interrupt them, but he’d been a gentleman every time. He’d held her when her world had shattered, he would never stop looking for her, never stop protecting her, never stop loving her…
Her stomach twisted at the dawning realization that even though bonding with Cain was a forever thing, she wanted it. She wanted him. All of him.
As if Eli understood she needed time to think through all the angles, he didn’t say anything for a moment, until finally, “You’ll have one of the most powerful of all monsters in this world at your disposal. Flint, if you bond to Cain, you own him. Body, mind, and soul.”
She opened her mouth to say… something, but the strong scent of sulfur suddenly prickled against her skin.
Adam traced right beside her then. “We found the compound.”
Adam had traced the rest of them to where Janet and Rhiannon already waited, deep in the forest where there was nothing remotely modern, making it all the easier to spot the compound.
It was a dark building surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. Men—lifted straight out of nightmares, creatures of human and wolf origin—marched back and forth. Their heads were thick and shaggy with fur. They looked more like werewolves of legend, not quite man and not quite beast, dressed in combat fatigues and carrying black rifles strapped to their backs.
Between them ran Dobermans and German shepherds, snapping and snarling at the slightest sound.
Flint grabbed her stomach as the dark sky began to gather with thick curls of lightning-filled clouds.
Cain glanced up. “Flint? Is that you?”
She wet her lips, feeling her power began to crackle and burn through the very tips of her fingers. The tattoo on her arm slithered just beneath her skin.
Adam nodded. “No, that’s good, Flint. You bring a storm straight out of hell. Can you do that?”
“I… I think so.”
She wasn’t entirely sure she was doing this. She was nervous as all get-out though, and considering that her hair, which had just been lying flat against her shoulders a minute ago, was now snapping like charmed snakes, it was probably safe to assume this was her doing.
Seth snarled. “This is a suicide mission. How in the hell are we supposed to infiltrate that compound without getting caught?”
All eyes turned toward what seemed like an impossible situation. Seth was right. And Flint was pretty sure they’d all been thinking the same thing, though no one had been bold enough to say it.
“We’ll distract them and rely on our shadows,” Adam’s starry-eyed gaze pierced through Rhi and Janet.
Flint frowned when she noticed a sheen coating Janet’s face. It wasn’t rain, even though drops of it had begun falling.
“Ja?” she asked quietly, clutching her friend’s wrist. But Janet seemed unfazed by the contact.
Suddenly backpedaling, Janet knocked into the trunk of a tree as she grabbed at her chest. “Oh my God,” she croaked, then slumped down at its base.
Everyone dropped to their knees beside her as the horrible, gut-wrenching truth settled in Flint’s brain.
“Abel’s dead?” She hadn’t realized she’d said it until Ja shook her head.
“No. No. Oh God, it’s worse. So much worse.” She whimpered, and then her head lolled to the side, her breathing growing shallow, and Adam had just enough time to throw his arms out to catch her when she slumped forward, almost lifeless.
“Janet!” Cain barked, unmindful of the fact that just a few hundred yards away from them was a very dangerous vanguard of shifters who would hunt them down in a New York minute if they were discovered.
But that was the least of Flint’s worries. The night was rocked with noise. And not just from the storm barreling down on them.
Breaths short and stuttery, she whipped around, staring at the compound as the building literally seemed to shudder like a living thing in the midst of its death throes. A horrible, nightmarish sound howled, like the cry of a monster dragged up from the very depths of hell, deranged and fueled by madness.
All of them stopped what they were doing. Even Adam, clinging tightly to a passed-out Janet, couldn’t seem to rip his eyes away from the shadow spewing like a geyser out the front door.
They’d not really had any plan to getting Abel out, except distraction and hoping that a few of them actually made it out of there alive. But the shadow that wasn’t actually a shadow at all, more like a pillar of darkest ebony and as broad as some orc straight out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, was ripping through the pack of shifters and guard dogs.
The killing tower—whatever the heck it was—was besieged on all sides. Soldiers milled from the doors, hacking away at the monster with swords, some of them shooting at it.
Like a village of ants, a wave of soldiers literally seemed to manifest from thin air, coming out of tunnels hidden in the earth itself, from windows, from doors, so many soldiers that Flint’s stomach went topsy-turvy as all moisture left her mouth.
How were they ever going to be able to get to Abel now?
A crack of lightning struck the tree they all hid under, lighting the branches and twigs on fire, and even the heavy press of rain wasn’t enough to extinguish it. And then a tingling rush of power shot down her arm, through her hand, and she gasped as the sword of truth blazed like hottest flame before her.
Cain jumped to his feet, then held an arm in front of her as though he once again meant to tell her to stay back.
But she felt the primal rush of the earth running through her veins like
a jolt of adrenaline. This was her high, her new drug of choice. The world reached out to her, embraced her as its daughter, as its true heir, giving her strength.
Vines crawled up from the ground, wrapping themselves around her ankles, and even the trees at her back groaned, leaning forward as though waking from some long-dead slumber.
Janet moaned, her nails clutching at Adam’s shirt. “Save him. Save him,” was all she could mutter.
Adam’s jaw clenched. “I’m getting her as far away from here as possible. I’ll be gone only a few seconds. Can I trust you all to hold down the fort?”
His eyes blazed like jewels.
The others had readied themselves. Rhiannon was nothing more than shadow with hellfire eyes, and Seth and Abel were snarling and rolling their shoulders as their bodies continued to morph and grow and turn into something monstrous. Cain was half altered, but his eyes were still just as blue as a cloudless night.
His hair was plastered to his face, and he had to blink the rain from his eyes, but it was easy to see his fear for her written across his pinched features.
The thundering of feet pounded up the hillside. In minutes they’d be surrounded by soldiers. The roar of the beast continued to cry out in the midst of the small army.
Adam traced, taking Janet to safety.
There was no time for her to say anything other than, “Okay.”
And then pandemonium was upon them.
Flint tried to keep Cain in sight, but after a while surviving became the primary objective. From one blink to the next, he became the monster his cousins already were, flinging one shifter after another off him, tearing his fists through chests as he ripped out hearts and guts, making sure none of the soldiers would get back up and follow them.
Flint tried to stick by his side. Vines thick with lethal thorns stabbed into shifters, causing them to howl, slowing them down enough to give her and Cain just enough leeway to beat a slow-moving retreat away from the worst of the crush. Whenever Flint could find an opportunity to whack her sword at something, she would. But being surrounded by so many trees made movement near impossible.
The Complete Tempted Series Page 58
