Contents
Title Page
Rights
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Sneak Peek!
Also By Jessica Gadziala
About the Author
Stalk Her!
The Healer
Seven Sins MC #2
—
Jessica Gadziala
Copyright © 2021 Jessica Gadziala
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.
"This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental."
DEDICATION
To everyone who read, loved, and demanded more from this world.
You guys just continue to make dreams come true.
Chapter One
Ace
The scream tore through the canyon, echoing back the same ear-splitting sound, but hollowing it out, intensifying it.
It was a familiar sound.
A hellish sound.
I tried not to let any sort of hope swell. We'd been through this half a dozen times for the past year with no results.
None of the spots ended up having enough energy left in them for Lenore to open up the Hellmouths like she'd been able to once before.
The night we lost Red and somehow got stuck with the demon version of a puppy and his curmudgeonly older brother.
Since then, though, nothing.
We'd traveled across the country, up into Canada, down into Mexico. And while Lenore claimed each of the spots had the right energy she could sense, none of the spells she'd tried could break through the earth, open up way down into the depths of hell.
So there we all were, standing in a deep canyon in Utah in the middle of the fucking winter. No amount of moving around, or layers of clothing seemed like they could chase the chill away. It had burrowed through my skin, muscles, organs, and was deep in my marrow, a constant and distracting sensation.
"Keep going," I demanded, getting a hard look from Lycus, not liking it when he thought I was getting pushy with his woman.
The ground trembled beneath our feet, a small hole emerging a few feet in front of Lenore, the earth crumbling down inside as the heat rose up. I only barely resisted the urge to place my hands over it, warming them like one might with a campfire.
Minos stood back from our gathered circle, knowing there was no way for him to go back, that he was stuck on the human plane for eternity, never dying, never getting a break from his misery.
That was part of the reason we needed to get back so badly. I'd already lost two of my men to the Claiming. I couldn't afford to lose Aram, Seven, Drex, and now Daemon and Bael.
It seemed like the longer we were on Earth, the more susceptible we became to pesky human needs and desires.
None of us ever could have known that, prepared for it, since there had never been any records of demons leaving hell and getting stuck in the human world for as long as we had. Or if anyone had, they'd never made it back to hell to tell their stories.
Who knew what the fuck could happen to us if we stayed another hundred years. Two hundred.
We had to get back.
I'd made peace with the idea of leaving Minos, of leaving Ly. Even if doing so made me feel like a failure as a leader. It was my place to guide them, to teach them, to protect them if necessary.
I'd failed.
I hadn't had the knowledge.
And they would suffer for it, staying here in this dumpster fire of a world while the rest of us went home, got to get back to work, continued to fulfill the lifestyles we were made for.
Fire and brimstone and all that.
Anticipation skittered over my nerve endings, giving me temporary relief from the cold that clung to me like death, its cold fingers raking its long nails over every inch of skin no matter how many layers I piled on, how warm we kept the heat.
"I like it here," I heard Daemon complain under his breath. Young and stupid, he thought his destiny was between the thighs of a human woman, so he buried himself between as many as possible.
"Shut the fuck up," Bael, his older brother growled, positioning himself slightly behind his younger brother's shoulder in case he got any ideas about running off, trying to stay here.
"Get back," Lenore said, voice a little tight as she herself moved back several feet as the ground kept falling inward, as the heat got more intense.
It was the most comfortable I'd felt in a year and a half. Since the last time Lenore had been able to open a Hellmouth. And not just because of the comforting warmth. But the promise of getting back to where we were always meant to be, doing what we were meant to do.
Sure, we kept ourselves busy here.
We had house parties and went to rallies. We passed around drugs and our bodies and our voices, whispering encouragement to the humans, bringing out their innate, often barely-buried evils.
The fire always needed fuel and we'd been feeding the flames for generations.
I figured that when we got back, we would be praised for making the best of a bad situation, would be welcomed with open arms, given good positions again.
We had to be directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of souls in the underworld at this point.
That was nothing to sneeze at.
"Why is the screaming so loud?" Aram asked, looking over toward me for confirmation.
They always looked to me. Which was fitting. I was the eldest. I'd been in charge since we all accidentally found ourselves on the human plane. I tended to know and remember more about our ways, our history.
I had no answers for him, though.
Hell was full of screaming, of course, but when Daemon and Bael had been pulled through one of the Hellmouths, we hadn't heard it.
"That's it," Lenore said, jumping backward, clinging to Ly as his wing moved out, wrapping around her protectively as the rest of us took another couple of steps back as bursts of flames danced out of the hole, hotter and redder than flames on Earth.
"Fuck," Drex growled, half hunching forward, pressing his hands to his ears as the screaming intensified. It was such a sound that it felt like it slipped under your skin, vibrated your bones.
There was a loud popping noise, then a body on the ground before the open hole it had burst out of snapped closed.
But the screaming?
The screaming didn't stop.
Because the screaming was coming from the form in front of all of us, curled deep into a ball, covering her naked body.
Naked, yes, but so covered in blood that you could hardly make out that fact right away.
"Oh," Lenore yelped, trying to rush forward, but getting dragged backward by Lycus. "Someone has to help her," she insisted.
"We don't even know what she is," Drex objec
ted.
"She looks human," Lenore said, but then shook her head at herself.
Of course she did.
We all did.
"I don't care who she is, can someone shut her up?" Drex growled, taking another couple steps back.
The woman's body convulsed hard, making the bloody hair slip off her shoulder.
And that was when I saw it.
A tattoo.
A familiar tattoo.
"Fuck," I snapped, rushing forward, dropping down on my knees, trying to reach out to her, but not seeing a single inch of her that didn't seem to be covered in a laceration of some sort.
"What's going on?" Lenore asked to my side as I felt Drex, Minos, and Aram move in around me. "Do they know her?" she added.
"That's Red," Lycus told her.
I'd been around for a long time.
I thought I was incapable of most human emotions, that my emotional range was set the same as it had been in hell. Rage and frustration were my dominant feelings most of the time.
But as my hand landed on what I thought was a safe space on Red's shoulder, and she let out a shriek as she wrenched away, I felt something unfamiliar, something I'd read about in books, but had never experienced myself.
It was something that made my stomach churn, that made my heart shoot upward. It was something that made a tingling, helpless sensation grip my system.
Fear.
This was what the humans talked of when they spoke of fear.
"What happened to her?" Drex asked, trying to brush the hair out of her face, cringing when he found her familiar features were unrecognizable. She was a swollen bruise.
"I don't know," I said, pulling off my coat, trying to cover her with it. "But we have to get her out of here."
"We have to get her a doctor," Aram insisted as he carefully bent down, scooped her, and pulled her to his chest.
"She'll heal," I reminded him. Because that was what we did. We healed. And usually pretty quickly.
I was trying to convince myself that she was so damaged from her trip, that coming through the Earth's core like that had roughed her up. Even as my logical side tried to remind me that Bael and Daemon had come from hell relatively unscathed, that all of us had once.
"We're going to have to gag her," Drex said as we made our way back out of the depths of the canyon, getting closer toward the area the humans were allowed to frequent. And despite it being the middle of winter and humans having no real natural defense against the cold, the idiots still went out and camped and shit no matter the weather.
Drex was right.
We had to gag Red.
Because despite being out, despite likely starting to heal, the screams were as ear-splitting as ever no matter how far we walked.
"Here," Bael said, ripping off a piece of his shirt, shoving it in her mouth.
"Lenore, give her your cloak," I demanded, getting a raised brow from Ly.
"We need to cover her completely or the humans are going to call the police. We all know that Red can't end up in a human hospital."
"It's fine," Lenore insisted, pulling off the antiquated garment I'd told her at least a dozen times made her stand out in human society—and not in a good way. She insisted it was something that reminded her of her upbringing, that she didn't care if it made her stand out.
Eventually, we made our way back to the SUV we'd rented to take this trip, none of us wanting to be on our bikes in the freezing cold if we could help it.
"What?" Aram asked, still holding Red on his lap in the car.
"I don't understand. She's not healing," I said, watching one small cut I'd been keeping an eye on for the whole drive back to our rental house. It was hardly more than a scratch. It should have healed in moments. But we were an hour into our drive and it was still bleeding and open.
"If you don't know, that's not good, right?" Daemon asked from the row behind us, looking over my shoulder. "You're the resident brain and all that."
He wasn't wrong.
And I had no answers.
"Maybe they just need to get cleaned out," Aram suggested. "Can't Lenore do some of her magical first aid on her?"
The only problem was, when we got back to the house and put Red down for Lenore to fuss over, not only did nothing she knew how to do work, but Red fought her every inch of the way. With fingernails, with teeth, with her fists and feet. Even with several of us holding her down, we could barely keep her still.
"I don't know what else to do," Lenore said later that night, so covered in blood that it looked like she'd been in one of those horror movies the humans loved so much. "I'm no healer," she added. "I only ever handled minor injuries in my coven. I... I don't know how to help her."
But someone needed to.
No, we couldn't die.
We could suffer, though.
And, clearly, Red was hurting.
She still needed to be kept gagged in case anyone within earshot could overhear her. Even with something muffling the sound, her screams were unrelenting.
I gave Lenore a nod, dismissing her, as I moved into the bedroom where Red was on the bed, a blanket draped over her damaged body.
"You gotta get someone," Drex said, moving in beside me. "You know what happens when someone is hurting for too long."
I did.
Because I'd done it to people over and over in the past.
Pain could drive someone insane a lot more quickly and easily than most would realize.
Drex was right.
This could go bad—worse—fast if we didn't help heal her.
"Alright. You get some drugs to get in her," I suggested. "I will find a doctor that can do something."
"How are you going to do that?" Drex asked, following me out of the room. "We're not like humans. They are going to realize. And then there will be questions."
"You let me handle that," I suggested, grabbing a coat that wasn't drenched in blood, and making my way out toward the car.
I didn't have a great plan. Which was unusual for me. Planning was what I did best. But there had been no way to prepare for this.
All I knew was Red needed someone to heal her.
And that I had to get that for her.
The consequences of it could be dealt with later. In a very final sort of way.
I rummaged in the SUV's trunk to find the couple of supplies I needed, shit normal people never kept around, but we always made sure we kept a supply of.
You never knew when you were going to need some handcuffs.
Or a gag.
Or even a suitcase big enough to stuff a body inside.
We'd learned that all the hard way over the years. So we were never unprepared if we didn't need to be.
And I needed to be prepared for this.
You didn't just go and snatch a human being off the streets without the right supplies.
At least not anymore.
Not with their alarm systems and large populations of do-gooders who wanted to step in and save someone in need.
I had no plan on who to take.
I watched two men in scrubs walk out first. Together. And each of them much harder targets.
It was an ugly but unavoidable fact that human women were just easier targets. Smaller, lighter, usually not as strong.
Then, like she was the one I'd been waiting for all along, a lone woman moved out the doors of the hospital, her hand raised, toying with the ends of her almost white-blonde hair, her brows drawn together, her lips pursed.
Beautiful.
There wasn't really any other way to describe her. Short, slight, with a pretty face with a sharp jaw, high cheekbones, and a lightly cleft chin, she practically looked half-fae under the harsh overhead lights in the parking lot.
She was lost in her own thoughts as she made her way down the lines of cars, making her way toward me, in fact.
Like fate.
If I believed in that bullshit.
You'd likely think I should have felt bad about my inten
tions.
Planning on snatching an innocent woman right off the street, taking her back to the house, using her to heal Red, then disposing of her because we couldn't exactly leave witnesses around who knew who we were, that we not only existed, but were part of their world.
That could never stand.
When we eventually all got back to hell, it would be the end of us.
We might not be able to die, but we could be made to suffer for all of eternity for that kind of fuck-up.
I had no intentions of having that be my future.
I didn't feel bad.
I had to heal Red.
Even if that meant sacrificing this human.
Chapter Two
Jo
I really didn't like my hair.
It was a silly thing to be harping on so much, but in between tasks all day at work, it was what I defaulted back to.
See, I had done it.
The thing we all say—when we are of sound mind and strong of heart—we will never do again.
I'd been tiptoeing that not-so-healthy mental line for a while, and after I subjected myself to a movie about a woman who "found herself" after taking off to a foreign country and falling in love, I had taken my wine-tipsy self to the bathroom with a pair of somewhat sharp shears and the belief that a new hairstyle would somehow shake me out of the funk I'd been in for months now.
I'd loved it as I stood there right after, adrenaline—and let's not forget the aforementioned wine—still coursing through my system.
But after a halfway decent night of sleep, a shower, and some fresh eyes, I had different feelings. Namely, ones that almost made me late for work because I was frantically trying to find a way to wear it that I liked.
You didn't exactly have a lot of options when you took your once waist-length blonde hair and cut it into a long bob that just barely brushed your shoulders.
I'd once heard that shorter hair made you look older, but it somehow had an adverse reaction for me. I felt like I looked like a child. Which was not what I was going for during my first month at my new job where everyone was already struggling to get to know me and gauge my skills.
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