Chapter 10
Rosabel La Rouge
“…and you know what else she did? She called all my brothers, too—tell her, Tal. She called them and told them to talk to me and tell me to behave —can you imagine? Can you fucking imagine how pissed off Radock was?” Seth said from the backseat.
Yes, Seth was in the backseat, riding with us to West Virginia, and I’d had to stop Taland from violently dragging him out of the car when we found him there a couple hours ago.
Madeline had given us a car, so we were driving behind the SUVs and the trucks of the rest of Selem and the Council, and Taland had been happy that we’d be riding alone, but then Seth had already been in the back, waiting. Claiming he’d rather ride with me than with his brothers because they didn’t let him talk and I was a great listener.
The look on Taland’s face…
I still giggled every time I remembered it.
At first, I regretted not letting Taland kick Seth out of the car, but then I was thankful for him. Because it was almost one in the afternoon and we were on our way to another fight that could potentially kill us all and I had no space in my head to worry because every corner of my mind was occupied with Seth’s stories about him when he was a kid, and about his friends, and about his girlfriends, too, all the “crazy exes” he’d had to “go through” he said. The perfect distraction, and I even laughed a few times.
Then, Seth continued to tell us about the fights he’d picked at school, about how he’d created a system to challenge himself, how he’d felt mighty smart to come up with it.
“It was all Kaid’s fault,” Taland muttered, just when I thought he was focused on the road ahead, on the SUV where his brothers and the Mergenbachs were riding, and the other cars and trucks and vans of the Council and the IDD soldiers and agents Madeline had sent here with us.
A lot more were behind us, too. To see them through the side mirror made me feel like I was going on a mission with my old team.
“It was, it was,” Seth confirmed. “He taught us spells when we were this big.” Grabbing our seats, he pulled himself between them and almost came all the way to the front, then held up his hand to show us how big he meant. “All kinds of spells—to fight and to manipulate, even kill spells, too.”
I looked back at him, suspicious. “Kaid taught you kill spells?”
“Yep—when I was eleven,” Seth said.
“He taught me when I was nine,” said Taland.
And I shook my head. “Who taught him a kill spell?” Those were the most dangerous kinds of spells out there, able to stop a heart in an instant. Dangerous stuff—I only ever learned a couple at the training academy with the IDD. Kill spells were not common knowledge and one needed special permission to even learn them just like one needed a permit to carry a gun around in some states.
“Radock,” Seth and Taland said at the same time.
“Not only that but Radock made him responsible to teach it to us,” Seth said, laughing. “So, imagine my teenage self walking around with two kill spells in my memory, and I felt like I had a loaded gun with me even when I couldn’t do magic. Just the idea that I knew words that could kill someone on the spot gave me a boost of ego—never mind that I couldn’t kill shit yet.”
“Wow,” I whispered because what else was there to say? On the one hand, I couldn’t believe that Kaid or even Radock would tell his brothers kill spells at such a young age, and on the other, I envied them so much. To have brothers with whom you did mischief or who told you things you weren’t supposed to know or who just made you miserable every day for the fun of it—yes, I envied that so much.
“You know what else he taught me?” Seth said. “A dream haunter spell—and, boy, did I have my fun with it for a while when I first got my feather.” He laughed and laughed as I shook my head.
“A dream haunter,” I said, and I asked Taland, “Really, was there a forbidden spell or curse that you guys didn’t know growing up?”
Dream haunters were considered curses—not dangerous per-se, except for the fact that they gave you the worst possible nightmares, all tailored to your own thoughts and fears, the kind that could leave you without sleep for days. They could ruin lives, which was why they were considered forbidden, and you could actually go to jail if you were arrested for doing one.
“Unlikely,” said Taland with half a smile on his handsome face—a smile that made me think about all the things he’d done to me just before we were on our way, even though we’d only gotten an hour.
“There was this kid—Jace, who lived in the Blue House with us…” Seth started, telling story after story about how he basically tormented Jace in his sleep because Jace was a big kid and he beat the shit out of him whenever he got him alone during the day.
Meanwhile, half my attention drifted back to the mansion, to Poppy and the talk we’d had about Taland. How relieving it had been to tell her the truth about everything, even the Iris Roe, and even Fiona had been there and had heard everything. I hadn’t cared and I’d felt free for the first time in my life.
Even better when Poppy was so happy about it she literally did a dance in the kitchen before she grabbed me in a bear hug.
Before leaving, I told her about Taylor Maddison, too, and asked her to make sure she was okay at all times if something happened and I didn’t make it back. Just in case.
And even though she insisted that there was nothing in the world that could kill me, Poppy agreed to check in on her regularly without Taylor knowing about it. That was good enough for me.
When I made it back to my room, I froze by the door and had to pinch my arm to convince myself that this was real—Taland was in the bed, naked, waiting for me with one of my books in his hands.
The way my heart fucking burst at these small, ordinary things. I craved a simple life with him so badly it wasn’t even funny.
Then Taland made me come with his mouth first, then his cock, then his fingers, just like he said, but to his horror, we’d only gotten one hour before Fiona came to the door to tell us that they were waiting for us downstairs.
Now here we were. We’d eaten. We’d rested as much as we could, and we were driving to what the original Council had called Perria back in the day—what was now a mountain site in West Virginia.
Seth kept on talking. I was starting to think he was nervous—more nervous than before, and unfortunately so was Taland. I could tell by the way his eyes darted from the windshield, to the rearview mirror, and to me lightning fast every couple of minutes. I could tell by how white his knuckles were, too, and by how furiously he switched gears while he drove.
To be honest, so was I.
There was a good chance that David Hill was waiting for us with an army of revived Laetus at the end of this road. Even though I laughed at Seth’s jokes and interacted when it was appropriate, the closer we got to our destination, the heavier the situation became. The more real the whole thing seemed—we were actually doing this.
“Hey.” Taland reached for my hand on my lap, kissed the back of it, and held it there over the stick for a little while. “We’re going to be okay.”
I nodded, and even though I was starting to feel like I had rocks in my stomach, I smiled for his sake. “We will.”
“Are you guys even listening to me?”
Seth stuck his head between our seats.
I laughed. “We are. You were telling us about when Aurelia pulled that prank on you and your friends,” I said because I had been listening to him as well. Only with half my attention.
“Good,” Seth said and sat back again before he continued to tell us his story.
I kept my hand over Taland’s because it felt so much better when I was touching him. But eventually even that didn’t help. Eventually, the gravity of the situation fell on me and no amount of Seth’s stories or Taland’s warmth calmed me down.
And the worst part was that we were already there.
Breathing wasn’t helping. Wishing we’d stayed behind now wasn’t doing anything, either.
What the hell were you thinking?! my own mind kept screaming at me. Both Selem and the Council have joined forces to come here today, and I thought I was ready for something this big ?!
Goddess, I was going to throw up.
“We have movement.”
I blinked my eyes and focused on Ferid, who was standing next to a soldier dressed in a dark blue uniform that covered his face almost all the way, and he’d whispered something in the ear of the councilman.
“It seems he has close to fifty men with him,” Ferid said, his cheeks paler than usual as he looked at Helen.
“David is here,” Radock said, and she nodded.
“We’re expecting a visual from the drone that he took down as soon as it was close enough,” said Helen, looking at a tablet one of the soldiers had given her—could have been the same guy who was still standing behind Ferid.
“You okay?” Taland asked me, and I nodded automatically.
“Yep. You?”
He could probably tell from my tone of voice alone that that was bullshit, but he said, “Same. Look at me.” I did. It was almost three in the afternoon and the sun was still high up in the sky and he looked really, really good in it, but he still looked better in the dark.
A silly thing to notice in this situation.
“We’re together just like before,” Taland whispered.
The Iris Roe. The Devil’s Regah chamber. Madeline’s office while the Council themselves were trying to find a reason to end me.
We were together.
Some of the panic and the fear faded. “Together,” I said.
“And we’re going to walk out of here just like we always do.”
“Like always,” I repeated, the words giving me life.
“Just another fight we gotta win.”
Taland winked at me. Impossible not to smile.
“There,” Helen said, taking our attention to the screen of her tablet as she held it up. “He’s there. And he’s not alone.”
Every drop of blood in my veins froze when I saw the short video that drone had captured, that replayed over and over again because it was only four seconds long. But in it we could see perfectly fine what was going on down that road that snaked around the foundation of the first and smallest mountain and went to the other side.
A hole in the ground, like a large bowl in the valley between the mountains, possibly a hundred feet wide, with escalators and all kinds of tools and woods and metals about, like it was a construction site. Grey rocks and dirt everywhere, and the ground was dug all around the edges of the mountain farthest to the left made of yellowish and light grey rocks, with a few trees growing on the sides as if by accident, and with a landing that extended right over that valley, wide enough to fit several people.
Right now, though, only one was standing on top of it, on his knees doing something I couldn’t even see because the moment he noticed the drone in the sky, he jumped to his feet and raised his hand toward it, and white flames burst out of his skin just before the magic reached the camera.
The video started again.
This time, Radock pressed pause, and he moved the video forward and back so we could see everything that was happening clearly—Hill on that landing, kneeling in front of what could have been eggs, with three pieces of paper in front of him. He had been chanting before he saw the drone and stopped to attack it.
But Hill wasn’t the only one on the rocky walls of the mountain or in that bowl-like valley below. Soldiers dressed in white were everywhere with machine guns in their hands as they walked around the excavators and the piles of dirt on all sides.
Halfway up the mountain where Hill was, Alejandro Ammiz sat on the rocks with one leg over the other, looking around with a cigar burning between his lips.
“Is that…a skeleton?” someone asked—could have been Aurelia.
My stomach turned as I followed her shaking finger moving closer and closer to the screen to point at the shade behind the mountain right across from where Hill was.
Indeed, that was a skeleton standing—and it wasn’t the only one.
Memories from the book in Madeline’s office spun in my mind as I took in the three rows of skeletons, which I was sure continued deeper behind the mountain where we couldn’t see. Actual skeletons standing on bony legs, wearing armor and helmets over their skulls, swords strapped to their hips, as still as statues.
Every hair on my body stood at attention when I realized what they were.
“He’s found them,” George said reluctantly as he looked down at his own tablet. “The soldiers who are stationed nearby can see all—thirty skeletons so far, all wearing armor.”
“The Delaetus Army is truly here,” Helen said, as if she was more fascinated by that fact than anything else.
Surreal.
The others were already talking, and I half heard them, though most of my attention remained on Hill.
“We have soldiers surrounding them on all sides. They will take care of David’s help, while we take care of him,” Helen continued.
“As you can see, he already has the vessels, I imagine for all thirty of them, if there aren’t more,” Radock said. “We have to stop him before he uses those vessels.”
“What the hell can he do with those? Are they eggs , is that it?” Seth asked before I could because I had no clue how the hell a soul vessel worked, either.
“They are artificial eggs, yes, as the eggshell preserves harvested souls the best way,” said Flora, a murderous look in her eyes. She looked completely feral, though her hair was pulled up neatly in a bun over her head and her red leather suit fit her perfectly. It was her eyes that seemed even more fiery under sunlight. “I imagine he’s been making the vessels for a long time now.”
“The Devil helped,” said Taland from my side. “Word in the Tomb was that he put anybody who crossed him in an egg eventually. I thought it was just an expression.”
Goddess, they were sick. Not the first time I heard of it—that woman whose case Cassie was working on had taken the souls of twenty familiars for herself, but Hill and the Devil had done it to people. They’d actually sucked the energy out of people. And they hadn’t used it on themselves like that woman had to keep herself young. No—they’d put them inside fucking eggshells .
“He needed more,” I said, my voice small. “In the Regah chamber, the Devil said that Hill needed more soul vessels.”
“Well, it seems he got them,” Radock said with a flinch. “We can still stop him. It should take him a long time to complete the transfer of those vessels to the skeletons. We can get to him fast.”
“Eight of us,” Helen said, looking at him. “I believe eight will suffice to begin with.”
“Agreed,” said Radock.
“I’m going. I need to see that prick die,” Aurelia said.
“Me, too,” said Zachary.
“And me,” said Flora.
“I have no trouble staying behind,” said Natasha, and it had surprised me that she even came all the way here. At her age, it was a miracle she could walk straight. She had to be well into her eighties.
“Very well. Flora, Ferid and I from our side,” Helen said to Radock, then turned to me. “You, too, Rosabel.”
“I am not on your side,” I said, and I knew I shouldn’t have bothered because now was not the time, but I couldn’t help myself.
She wasn’t offended in the least, though.
“Regardless, you have the bracelet. We will need it in the fight,” said Radock. “And I imagine Taland won’t stay behind, so”—he looked at Helen again—“the three of us, and the Mergenbachs. My brothers will be on standby.”
“Not fair,” Kaid said, at the same time Seth cheered, “That’s what I’m talking about!”
“We will be watching,” George said when Helen handed him her tablet.
“Madeline will, too. She will guide the soldiers through the cameras we have on our persons,” Helen said, and I flinched. “There is no way that he can win this. The odds are in our favor.”
Except…something told me that that wasn’t going to matter much. It was Hill we were talking about. A man who’d fooled both sides for decades, had pitted them against each other, had planned and plotted to his heart’s desire from a position of power.
“We might be walking into a trap, too,” said Taland before they all spread out to go prepare. “We should take that into account.”
“He knows we’re here, and there’s a good chance that he saw it coming, true,” Radock said. “But even if he prepared a trap, he won’t win. He’s not only outnumbered, but neither he nor Alejandro have more power than we do right now.”
I wanted to believe him. I did. “What if he has a bracelet? Another bracelet,” I asked because I had felt exactly how much power that thing had, how much magic it could unleash at once, and in the hands of someone like Hill…
“Well, then I suppose it’s lucky you’re here,” said Helen, then turned around and walked away with her head high together with Natasha and George.
There it was, that word again— lucky. Goddess, I hated it so much.
It didn’t matter now, though. Hill was just a couple miles away from us, and we weren’t leaving here without a fight. He wouldn’t surrender, and we weren’t going to just let him summon the dead army—that he’d even found them was horrifying enough. All those skeletons…
“Go ahead and spell your clothes, prepare. We go in in ten,” Radock said when we walked back to the SUV they’d been driving. The wide road that led here was blocked by IDD soldiers and their vans, and no civilian was going to be able to drive by here anytime soon, for which I was thankful. Open fields and forests and mountains on either side of the road, so nobody else would have to pay the price of Hill’s greed, at least. If everything went right, the world would never have to even know this happened.
“I think we should all go in, brother,” Kaid said, which earned him a slap on the shoulder from Seth.
“No, you stay out here. Keep an eye on them.”
“You don’t trust them?” Kaid asked.
Zachary snorted. “This is still the Council, the reason why Selem was created in the first place.” He looked behind him as if to make sure that none of them were close, but they weren’t. They’d gone to their own vehicles, the standard mission vans of the IDD farther up the road.
“Our war with them hasn’t ended,” Zach continued, his voice low now. “Right now, we’re in a truce because of David Hill because, unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to take him down ourselves, and he’s already gone too far. But this is not permanent.”
“As soon as this is over, as soon as Hill is dead, we disappear. There’s too many of them and I have people moving in closer when the fight begins to take us out. Do you understand?” Radock’s eyes stopped on me. “As soon as Hill is dead, we destroy everything he had, the scripts and the spells and the vessels he prepared for the Army, and we get out. There’s no telling what they can do once we win.”
Shivers down my back because he was absolutely right. When David Hill was no longer in the picture, we had to make sure that any scripts or spells to bring back the Delaetus Army were destroyed, just in case someone else in the future decided it was a good idea to try to conquer the world.
Or…someone from the Council.
Because I’d seen the way Helen looked at that video of Hill working on the soul vessels. The curiosity in her eyes—the greed.
No, we definitely could not trust the Council with any of what Hill had here. We had to destroy everything before we left.
Assuming we even won against Hill.
“Let’s focus on one thing at a time, though. Let’s focus on David. He will be hard to kill,” Aurelia said.
“But not impossible. Not with all of us together,” Radock said, then looked at me. “Not with that bracelet. If it ruined the Regah screen with a single spell, it can kill Hill, too.”
“He could be protected. He could have wards about him—” I said because the fear, the pressure of having to chant that final spell almost crushed me under.
But Taland was there to squeeze my hand when Zachary said, “And we’ll break down all the wards he has if we have to. But we will kill him.”
“A single kill spell,” Taland whispered to me, and when I looked at him, he winked. “What’s the shortest one you know?”
“Cheining,” I whispered with half a heart, as the words of the spell came back to me like my mind was trying to make sure that I remembered it right.
I did—it was a curse created by Apollo Cheining some four hundred years ago, and it was the shortest spell that they taught at the training academy. It made the heart basically explode in someone’s chest.
“Good one,” Taland said. “Use it.”
“I will.” On anyone that got in my way, I’d use it. At this point I wasn’t going to even bother thinking about remorse.
“We’re here now,” Radock said. “And we’re all powerful enough to survive this—I know it. So, keep your eyes open and your ears sharp, and do whatever you have to do.” He looked each and every one of us in the eye, and I couldn’t believe that that actually worked. It calmed me down, if just a little, to know that they were all in on this, too. “Everything else, we’ll figure out after.”
So, we went back to the car, and I used the bracelet to call the most powerful wards I knew on both Taland’s clothes and mine. They were not IDD uniforms by any means, but they would do just fine. I had a pair of leather pants and a leather jacket zipped up all the way, and Zachary gave him a thick leather vest to put on over his shirt. The magic that wrapped around us was what mattered the most.
“That’s enough. Save your energy,” Taland said when I considered doing a third spell, too.
“I’m fine. I feel great.” Which wasn’t a lie. Physically I felt great—save for my twisting stomach. My limbs were strong. My leg didn’t hurt at all. I was fed and hydrated, and even though we hadn’t exactly rested , I was full of energy. More motivated than ever because Taland was with me.
For now, I was happy that I had the chance to be here for real. As much as I hated to agree with anything Madeline said, I was happy that I got to be here and fight, try to win. Not a good guy or a bad guy—no, just a girl fighting a mad man who wanted to bring back a dead army and take over the world.
That’s all I wanted to be right now.
That’s all I was when we followed two dozen soldiers around the mountain together and made it to the other side.