Forty-Eight
Forty-Eight
HER
The portal’s on the west side of town, located under one of the Shadow warehouses. The first floor is a stereotypical room full of shelves that contain landscaping machinery, equipment, spare parts, and supplies. Witches and humans, not all of whom are involved with the Family business, stack shelves and pack orders. The floor manager rushes over and leads us into his office. He shuts the door behind him, then uses his magic to remove the floor behind his desk to reveal a set of metal stairs.
As I peer into the dark hole, Varius’ paranoia flares down our bond. Khalid descends, and the urge to stab him in the back, to eliminate a stronger threat before he eliminates me is making my fingers ache with need. I clench them into fists as I glance at my husband. The hairs on my nape rise. His paranoia’s been ricocheting off every nerve all morning, making me anxious that something’s about to happen.
His jaw tight, he nods at me to enter after Leno. He’ll go next to protect my back. I nod at him ever so subtly, letting him know that I understand we might have to fight our way out of here. I just don’t know if he’s paranoid because we’re going into a dark hole with no door he can open or because he doesn’t trust his brothers. Does he have a real reason to be on edge? Or is this just because Talon betrayed him and now he doesn’t know who to trust?
Knowing I won’t get any answers out here, I descend into the dark.
The metal steps clang beneath my shoes. My pulse stays steady as all my nerves fire. I touch the gun I have strapped to my waist. Varius is right behind me, and I relax a little from the feel of his presence.
Nothing lunges out of the dark to get me. Khalid, Krypto, and Leno are already continuing on, their backs to me, so there’s no immediate threat from them either.
Releasing my gun, I follow them down a hallway that’s only wide enough for one person to walk through at a time. The floor’s uneven, and I have to concentrate on my footing so I don’t stumble. The dullest of bulbs hang above us. Their ambience overlaps and creates multiple shadows per person, making it hard for our eyes to adjust. The back of my neck prickles. Claustrophobia starts to set in. Fuck.
“Is the rock too hard to work with?” I ask, trying to keep my mind occupied so I don’t shove past Leno and Khalid to run to the exit like a little bitch. Or worse, draw my gun and shoot them in the back. Varius’ paranoia is stressing me the fuck out.
“Nah,” Maddox says from behind Varius. “This is the last stand to stop whatever comes out of the portal.”
“I thought the other side was controlled by the Ezwail’ik Family?”
“It is,” Leno says. “But the werewolves on Blo?dyrio? fall under the Craving on the full moon.”
“Fuck. All of them?” The SCU keeps on top of Craved sups on Earth, but I saw a mad werewolf in North Korea while Dayne and I were on a job there. We had been hired by a Russian politician to kill the diplomat who’d slept with his youngest daughter. While in Pyongyang, we heard whispers of a gumiho (what they believed her to be) being experimented on. They were torturing her to see how fast she could heal and which wounds hurt her the most. When we found her, they’d forced her to change into her wolf form and were in the process of skinning her alive for her pelt. She fell into the Craving right after we killed the guy behind the glass, and she ripped her way through the entire compound.
We missed our extraction to go save her, so I was really annoyed when she ended up saving herself, then tried to kill us. Unfortunately, with her under the power of the Craving, we couldn’t let her live once she reached the exit. She would have slaughtered her way through the entire city, perhaps the country, killing without discrimination. If an undercover reporter caught wind of her before the SCU arrived to clean up, then our entire world would’ve been blasted open.
So I killed her. It wasn’t an easy fight, and by that point she was heavily malnourished, dehydrated, and already half dead from all her wounds. If she’d been at full power, I would have struggled even with Dayne’s help. Being under the Craving gives a sup extra strength. They do not heal any faster, but their wounds bleed less and their pain resistance skyrockets. In short, they become pure killing machines.
To survive an entire night when half the population goes bloodthirsty at once? Fucking hel.
“No, most of them chain themselves up with silver before nightfall,” Leno says. “But some of them like to spend the night out hunting in the mountains or other uninhabited places.”
“And let me guess,” I say, stepping over a lump in the floor, as if a tree root had grown under the tile, “the portal on the other side is in the middle of nowhere?”
“Yep. And then you have blood moons.”
“I’ve heard of those,” I say, but then I pause. “What are they again?” My knowledge of Blo?dyrio? or any of the other Seven Planes other than Halzaja is sorely lacking. And I only know a bit about the plane of the angels and demons because Lou is a summoning progeny and is obsessed with eknor demon culture.
“It’s when the moon turns dark red, triggering all the werewolves and vampires to fall under the Craving,” Varius says, and I turn my head to look at him. I like the fact that he’s answering me too. He normally ignores me in public so no one knows I’m his weakness. A slow smile curls my lips, lighting me up on the inside.
His eyes heating, he grabs the back of my head. My feet root to the floor while he steps up to me. He ducks his head, and his lips cover mine, kissing me until I’m breathless.
I start to reach for him, but he pulls back, then nudges me to keep moving. I stumble forward even though all I want to do is ride his cock right here, right now. Our blood bond has strengthened substantially since last night, and his arousal is amplifying mine.
“The blood moon’s cycle can’t be tracked,” he continues as we walk, and I focus on that rather than leaning against the wall and telling him to get down on his knees in front of me. He has teased me with the idea of having him at my mercy too many times, and mama wants it.
“It’s random and comes without warning.”
Wait, what are we talking about again?
“Some people say it happens when Artemis comes down for a hunt.”
Oooh. Yeah. Now I remember. “Wait. Artemis as in the Goddess of the Hunt?” I ask, turning my head. “That can’t be true, can it?” The gods haven’t been seen on any of the Seven Planes in...forever, as far as I’m aware. Granted, my knowledge of these things is actually pretty bad. If it doesn’t have anything to do with my family or job, I’ve been too busy to pay attention to it.
He shrugs. “There are hundreds of thousand dead when the blood moon ends, so perhaps.”
My jaw drops. I stumble over a bit of rocky ground, and I turn to catch my balance. Keeping my eyes on my feet, I say, “Fuck.”
“Most of those are probably due to the two billion wolves and vampires going crazy in an instant all at once,” Leno adds. “The wolves don’t have time to chain themselves up, the vampires can phase, and no one’s activated the wards. It’s an absolute massacre in every village, which is why all the large settlements on Blo?dyrio? only allow vampires and werewolves to enter during the day, year round.”
“Shit. That sucks. It’s their home world.”
Leno shrugs. “They never had huge cities before people migrated over anyway. I don’t think many of them care.”
“Mmm. So do Craved sups find their way to the portal often?” I ask as Khalid nears a bend in the narrow hall.
“Once a decade or so,” Varius says. “But we don’t want to be caught off guard.”
The hallway turns, then widens into a corridor. Now five people can walk side by side. It stays like that for a long stretch before rounding another corner and expanding once more. It does this a few more times until twenty people can fit side by side. They’re choke points, I realize, places where the defending party can hold off a much bigger army.
“So if there’s only one wolf coming through every ten years, what’s with the design?” I ask.
“It was made during the Great Extinction, and no one’s ever decided to change it.”
I whistle as I feel the weight of history all around me. The Great Extinction happened around two thousand years ago if memory serves, when a vampire called Sebastian the Ancient Destroyer teamed up with a descendant (a child of the gods, who are not gods, just like gods are not the titans they hail from) known as Rakian the Rise of Ragnarok.
In their war across the Seven Planes, they completely destroyed one world, Persic, causing it to continuously fold in on itself like a paper fortune teller. Earth was cut off from the rest of the Seven Planes in an attempt to save it, and Christianity was born to make them forget the old gods and the world they were no longer to be a part of. Gaera, once a plane of picturesque paradise, created by the elementals, fell into decay. Its rivers started drying up. Its forests and plains started dying. I assumed the planet would’ve been close to uninhabitable by now, but considering my wand came from there, I guess it’s still stable enough to hold life.
“That’s really cool,” I say.
The corridor soon opens up into a cavern, its manmade material giving way to natural stone. Rugged brown walls arch into a ceiling of stalactites that hang a few feet down. At the back is a wall made of swirling pink and orange mist. Dozens of men in store uniform laze around the place. They are all here for security if shit hits the fan, but for now, they are just bored out of their minds.
“I thought portals glowed?” I murmur as we approach.
“Only when they’re about to be used,” Leno says.
“Ah.” I swallow the rest of my questions as a muscular man with a shaved head and face tattoos comes up to us. A dragon curls around his left eye, and the name Daymara is written in cursive on his cheek.
“Boss,” he says as he looks at Varius. “What can I do –”
“Get everyone out.”
He hesitates a second, then turns and yells for everyone to get upstairs. There’s a moment of confusion given the gate is just starting to glow.
“Out, now! Boss’ orders,” the man repeats.
The atmosphere changes instantly as they realize that it’s Varius fucking Shadow who’s just entered. Everyone jumps to obey, and the cavern starts to clear.
“We’ll be up until you come up,” the soldier says as he turns to leave with his men. “Or if any of the protection runes are activated.”
I glance at the runes he’s mentioned. Fifteen blue circles cover the floor in front of the portal. On closer inspection, I realize they’re not fully complete, with a gap of a few inches left on each one. They’re similar to a summoning circle for eknor demons, but the runes around these will be to stop outside forces from breaking in rather than the other way around.
The five of us split, so Khalid, Varius, and I step inside one of the circles, and Leno, Krypto, and Maddox wait in another. They won’t activate until a witch casts a spell to delete that gap.
Lifting my eyes to the portal, I watch as it grows ever brighter until it matches the intensity of the setting sun. The surface of it ripples like water, and the first silhouette starts to push through.
It’s humanoid and nowhere near as tall as a werewolf in wolf form, but it could still be a vampire under the Craving. Werewolves might have unmatched speed, but vampires can phase. They could reach us in the blink of an eye.
Fuck. I wish I still had my magic.
My teeth clench as my anger at Varius comes bubbling back.
“When did you claim her?” Khalid demands as another silhouette joins the first.
The question is so out of the blue that it puts me on edge. But then Varius’ paranoia slams into me, and I have to curl my toes to fight the urge to run. My hand brushes against a knife as I shift subtly towards my husband.
“This isn’t the time,” he says.
“I killed our little brother and came back to a wedding,” the reaper says softly. “You will give me the fucking time.”
My pulse spikes as two predators face off.
The urge to stab Khalid before he can react makes my fingers twitch. His gaze shifts to me, and I freeze.
“A little more than a week ago,” Varius says tightly. “But I loved her before then.”
My eyes widen as sudden giddiness breaks through my fear. “Oh my gods. Did you fall first?”
I turn my head to look at him while keeping Khalid in my peripheral. I’m excited, not stupid.
His lips move so subtly, it can’t even be called a twitch, but I can feel his love for me, the joy he gets from seeing my excitement even as he keeps his eyes on the cold gaze of the reaper. “Karaoke night,” he says, and I preen.
“Bonding night.”
“You’re bonded?” Khalid demands, but neither of us get the chance to answer as the first creature steps out of the portal.
All of our gazes go to the white-haired man who’s built like Henry Cavil in The Witcher. He’s soon followed by a woman with a neck so skinny it makes her head look too big. An image of one of those bobble head toys pops into my mind, and I roll my lips in, chastising myself for being rude.
“Henry” disappears back into the portal immediately as… Fuck. “Bobble Head” –I’m so going to Hel, but gods, if I don’t go there laughing– walks towards us. Her head bobs as she moves, and I am dying on the inside. I keep my face completely expressionless though. As an assassin, wearing masks is all just a part of the game.
“Varius,” she purrs as she stops in front of him. Using her right hand, she taps first her left shoulder, then her right in an off-world greeting. She doesn’t once acknowledge Khalid or I.
“Zara,” Varius says, way too friendly for my liking. He repeats the gesture. I wait for him to introduce me, but he never does.
Forcing a smile, I say, “I’m Micha,” just as she’s about to say something. She ignores me. “His wife,” I add.
“You got married, and I wasn’t invited?” Zara says with a pout.
“It was last minute,” Varius supplies.
“Ahhh.” She nods knowingly, then looks at me like I’m some baby-trapping hoe. But it’s the fact that Varius doesn’t correct her that irritates me the most.
“I –”
“Let us talk, Micha.” His tone is cold, flat, and final.
Clenching my teeth, I swallow my words. We might be married and bonded now, but I know he won’t hesitate to punish me. My lack of control reflects badly on him and the Family, and he is all about the fucking Family.
She smiles triumphantly, and my jealousy simmers so hot I can’t feel anything else. The portal glows softly behind her, and I focus on that as she and Varius talk.
Dozens of people come through the portal. A quarter of them are Zara’s men. Of those that remain, two thirds are carrying backpacks, marking them as the people we are smuggling in. They’ll be forced to work for us for the next five years before they’re given IDs and set free. All the fees they’ve already paid go to Zara’s Family as off-world money means nothing to us. We get their labor.
Maddox starts to lead them upstairs to get them out of the way. Varius doesn’t want anyone here to witness the exchanging of silver so we can take Antonio by surprise.
My eyes fall on those that remain. These are the poor bastards that the Blood Fangs have demanded. One of the stipulations of our treaty is that they get to use our portal to buy and sell humans six times a year. So they gave us a list of six women to pass over to Zara’s Family to round up and collect a few weeks ago. They will then supply six humans as payment. Aleric wanted to come exchange them himself, but Varius refuses to let any outsiders enter the warehouse.
“Who’s missing?” Varius asks as he nods at the group of seven girls surrounded by Zara’s men.
“The succubi killed herself last night,” she says, looking annoyed. “We can add one to the next batch, though, if you still want one. Alternatively, we’ve brought two fae with us as a replacement. They’re twins.”
He heads over to them. My stomach twists as I follow, urging me to set them free, but vampires have to eat. If these people don’t die to feed them, then someone else will. Just think of them as cattle, Micha. No one would bat an eye at farmers buying stock.
A young woman catches my eye. She looks terrified.
I look away.
Pigs have the intelligence of a three year old. Some of them play video games for fun. I wince. These facts aren’t helping me as much as I hoped they would. I stop, unable to get all the way to Varius.
Bobble Head Bitch notices and smirks at me. Grabbing one of the twins by the arm, she hauls her in front of the Boss of the Shadow Domain.
“Fae blood might not be as sweet as succubi, but it packs more of a punch.”
“What Court is she from?”
“They’re both rejects, so probably half-bloods.”
Disinterest comes down our bond.
“But we can leave them here,” Zara hurries on. “You can take a bit of blood to your client and see what he thinks?”
He thinks about it for a moment, then nods. She smiles at him in a way that makes me want to stab her in the face. “I’m glad we can still please each other,” she purrs.
Anger pushing me on, I manage to walk the rest of the way to Varius. Neither of them look at me. “They’ll count as one,” he says, his full attention on her.
Her smile tightens. “Of course.”
Pulling out his phone, he sends a text to Maddox to bring back all six women. While we wait for his return, Zara leads us over to the crate of silver. When Varius confirms he’s happy with it, she shuts the lid. By that time, his brother is back with the six women for the exchange. They’re chained together, linked by collars around their necks.
Zara smiles wide as her men swap which group they’re guarding. “It was a pleasure doing business with you,” she says as she bows her head at Varius, but I’m short enough to notice that she’s taking the opportunity to run her eyes all over his body.
My jaw tightens as I fight the urge to hit her. Just a few more seconds, and I’ll be out of her damn company.
But just then an image pops into my head of her down on her knees, sucking his huge cock. His hand is in her hair as he thrusts inside her mouth.“That’s it, baby,” he grunts. “You’re taking me so well. You’re going to swallow for me, aren’t you?”
My chest tightens as I realize she’s a telepath. She smirks at me, her smile hidden from Varius by the bow of her head.
“That’s just one of the many things we’ve done,” she says telepathically. “You might have his name, you fucking bitch, but I’ll always have his cock.”
She sends another image to me, this time with his cock in her pussy. She’s sitting on his lap, and he has his face buried in her boobs. His hands are gripping her hips, guiding her to go faster. “Fuck, Zara. Your cunt feels so good. Ride me just like that. Fuck, baby. You’re going to make me cum. Yeah. I’m going to cum in your tight little pussy.”
Straightening, she smirks at me.
“Until next time,” she purrs as she reaches out to touch my husband.
But I move faster, fueled by pure rage.
Pulling out a knife, I stab her in the fucking face.