The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 30

Quinn

Iwoke up next to a warmly scaled body. Lance had stayed with me the whole night in the cave’s deeper room, but sometime while I’d slept he’d morphed back into his dragon form.

I didn’t mind. For a supposed reptile, he was awfully hot-blooded, and his scales were so smooth they felt almost silky against my skin. In his longer body, he’d been able to curl himself right around me, spooning me from behind with his tail tucked around my front so that I was completely engulfed in his affection.

I had about ten seconds to appreciate the peacefulness of the moment before Rollick’s lilting voice echoed from the other end of the cave. “Any mortals around here who wanted to run a rescue mission should probably stop sleeping in.”

Lance stirred as I sat up with a jolt. The demon was agreeing to go after Jonah? I didn’t want to give him time to change his mind.

The dragon shifter stretched cat-like while I yanked my panties and shorts back on, and then sprang up into his human-like form. He grabbed me to press a quick kiss to the crook of my jaw with a much more upbeat energy than he’d shown yesterday. Maybe our talk… and all the other things we’d done… had helped him even more than I’d dared to hope.

“Who are we rescuing?” he asked as I tugged him with me toward the entrance to the cave.

He’d slunk off before the rest of us had discussed that part of the catastrophe. “The sorcerers had a little kid,” I said. “The shadowkind that attacked yesterday took off with him, probably to try to make him work whatever magic he’s got on other monsters. We can’t let them do that.”

Lance let out a humph that I couldn’t decipher. He might not have been keen on doing anything that helped a sorcerer, child or not, but he wouldn’t want our enemies using the boy either.

We found Rollick standing near the mouth of the cave, looking ridiculously dapper in his tailored suit in the middle of the rugged environment. I’d have thought he might have adjusted his fashion sense a little to fit the setting, but then, maybe it fit his personality to refuse to bow to his surroundings. My men seemed to wear pretty much the same thing all the time, so maybe shadowkind had particular clothes they found most easy to conjure, whether because of their nature or out of habit it was hard to say.

The demon motioned to a plate next to the heap of blankets that’d been supposed to serve as my bed, and I realized someone had gone down to the settlement again to make me breakfast. Scrambled eggs, a piece of toast, and an apple waited for me.

I didn’t know whether Crag had gotten more ambitious with his culinary skills or if one of the others had taken a stab at feeding me. It was hard to picture Torrent working over a stove with his tentacles serving in place of his wrecked hand, but even harder to imagine Rollick lowering himself to playing cook for a mortal.

“What’s the plan for the rescue?” I asked, sitting down on the blankets and wielding the fork.

Rollick propped himself against the rocky wall, alternating between watching me and peering down into the valley. “I’ve been able to confirm that the kid was taken to the camp of sorts that those idiots have set up in Utah—the one you found.” He tipped his head to Lance. “I’ve set up a few distractions that I believe should draw the ringleaders away for long enough that we can crash their party without having to do battle with them directly.”

Somehow that information both relieved and unnerved me. “Are you sure you can’t tackle them head on? We could end this whole thing today if you took them down.” Or was he still avoiding showing how invested he was, even now that they’d chased him out of his home?

Rollick’s grimace suggested he wasn’t happy about the situation either. “They’re clearly powerful beings with a lot of powerful underlings, and they’ve already advanced their human-style sorcery beyond what I expected. I don’t think I’d win against all of them on my own or even with just the four of you backing me up. Maybe if I summoned an entire army… but that would take days to organize, and they’d almost definitely catch wind of the activity, and then they’d stash the kid somewhere even harder to find. Which I don’t think is what you want?”

“No.” I swallowed a mouthful of eggs, finding my mouth had gone dry. “But is that what we’d do next—after we get him out? Raise a whole army?”

“I don’t know,” Rollick admitted. “I’m only going along with this whole rescue effort so I can get a better read on what we’re up against. If we can simply pick them off using more cleverness than might, that’s vastly preferable to staging a full-out war. To both me and you. There’s no way there wouldn’t be a lot of mortal casualties if it got to that point.”

Lance’s good spirits had dampened as we’d talked. He adjusted his weight from foot to foot restlessly. “Is it a good idea for me to go with you? If they work their new magic on me again…”

Rollick focused on him. “Do you have any reason to believe the being that imposed their power on you was a shadowkind on a similar level as yourself?”

Lance shook his head. “I didn’t see him, but whoever it was, he felt very… large. And old. Heavy.”

I remembered the sense I’d gotten of the being that’d arrived at the settlement after the other shadowkind had killed the sorcerers. “That’s got to be the one that came to collect the organs.”

Rollick nodded. “It seems doubtful that the ringleaders would be letting any of their underlings partake. They want as much of the ability as possible for themselves. So if we’ve diverted them from the camp, then you won’t have anything to worry about.” He splayed his hands, offering a crooked smile. “And if we don’t manage to divert them, then we’re most likely screwed anyway.”

“Very comforting,” I muttered.

“Take comfort in the fact that I know what I’m doing, and I’ve been pulling off whatever I want to for thousands of years,” Rollick said, and turned back toward the valley. “Torrent and Crag are searching the sorcerers’ houses in case there’s anything in there we can use. I’d like to move out as quickly as possible, but since I’m not letting you out of my sight again, stubborn sorcerer, I’m hoping we can find a thing or two that might allow you to defend yourself a little better during this escapade.”

I guessed the steak knife I’d still managed to hold on to wasn’t likely to cut it. I sat up a little straighter, swallowing the last of my eggs and stuffing the apple into my messenger bag for the trip. “Definitely. If there’s any way I can hold my own without the rest of you worrying about me, I’ll take it. We can head down there now. I’ll eat the rest of my breakfast during the drive.”

Rollick shot me an amused glance with a brief flick of his gaze toward Lance. “Somehow I don’t think there’s anything you could do to prevent a whole lot of worrying from your devotees. But at least having you armed may mean they can focus slightly more on the task at hand rather than protecting that mortal body, as lovely as it is.”

I hid my wince at the guilt his casual remark provoked. He was right, but I didn’t know how to change that. I’d already tried running away, doing whatever I could to escape our enemies and this situation, and it hadn’t kept them safe. Was there anything that could?

It seemed more and more certain that the only way I could really protect them was by stopping the fiends that were after me, whatever it took. And this rescue was the first step toward doing that.

As I got up, Crag appeared on the ledge outside the cave in gargoyle form, his wings already unfurled. “We’ve got something that might be useful,” he told Rollick. “Can’t handle it easily ourselves, though.”

I stepped toward him. “Bring me down, and I’ll take a look.”

It killed me that he hesitated before reaching his arms out to me, as if he thought the simple embrace he’d used to save me from danger more than once might now injure me. I wrapped my own arms around his neck and tucked my head beneath his chin. “I’m okay. Let’s go find whatever I can use to make sure I stay that way.”

He grunted, but there was no denying the tenderness with which he held me against him as he lifted into the air. He didn’t say anything as we glided down to the courtyard where I’d spoken with the sorcerers yesterday. When we landed, his hold on me tightened for an instant before he let go. “It isn’t pretty. They left the bodies.”

I got a preview of what he meant before I’d even moved away from him. By one of the bashed-down doors, a body was sprawled, the arm slumped across the threshold. Blood splattered the doorframe. A meaty scent already tinged with a hit of rot carried on the warming morning breeze. The sound of buzzing flies made me shudder.

Torrent materialized in a different, less bloody doorway nearby. He beckoned us over with his good hand. “One in here was using a weapon I think you should be able to handle. It worked decently well for her. She took down a few of the creatures before they overwhelmed her.”

As I headed over, Rollick and Lance appeared alongside us after their slightly slower journey from the cave through the shadows. I braced myself before stepping into the house.

The smell got thicker, but at least it wasn’t quite as putrid as the lingering stench in the sorcerers’ house back in Florida. I averted my eyes from the stream of blood that’d trickled across the floor from the doorway to the kitchen and followed Torrent to what appeared to be a family room at the back of the house.

Another body was sprawled there, a woman whose face I vaguely recognized from the silent bystanders yesterday… and whose torso was gouged open from throat to pubic bone. Her chest was a mass of shredded tissue. I caught one glimpse of it and jerked my head to the side, my stomach flipping over.

Oh, God. And they must all look like that—Victoria and Ivan and Jenny, and all the others who’d never introduced themselves. Would the monsters decide to do the same to Jonah after all? They might have already…

With my hand clamped to my mouth, it took me the better part of a minute to get my nausea and horror under control. My gaze settled on a crumpled heap in another part of the room that was steaming dark smoke. Torrent stepped over to it.

“This is one of the shadowkind she shot,” he said, and held up a contraption about as long as his forearm. It was made of metal and wood and looked like a combination between a crossbow and a gun. “The bolts are half iron, half silver. There are a few scattered around here and more in a room in the basement, but I can’t handle them easily.”

“Of course not.” I girded myself and stepped into the room to pick up the bolts he indicated, each like a shiny metal pencil with an especially sharp tip. When I’d stuffed the handful into my bag, he led me down a set of stairs to the basement, which was thankfully free of corpses.

The storage room he’d mentioned was stacked with dusty boxes. One shelf held a plastic carton that appeared to be full of more of those bolts. I grabbed that and spotted a dagger similar to the one I’d found in the other sorcerers’ house.

“I’ll take this too,” I said. The last one had come in handy.

As Rollick obviously remembered. “As long as you don’t stab that one into any of us,” he said dryly from where he’d followed us to the doorway.

“Don’t be too much of a jerk, and it shouldn’t be a problem,” I retorted.

My gaze fell on a few faded but relatively modern-looking notebooks stacked on a higher shelf. I picked one up and flipped through it. It appeared to be a journal, written in a messy but readable scrawl, the dates in that one from a few years ago.

“Maybe they knew more than they wanted to tell me,” I said, stuffing those into my bag as well. “I’ll read through their notes when I have a chance.”

Rollick motioned to me. “Come on, let’s make sure you’re prepared to use that thing.”

I couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. We tramped over to the cliffside, and Torrent handed me the crossbow. It was heavier than I expected—I needed two hands to steady it—but the mechanism looked simple enough. Without help, I figured out how to arm it with three bolts, which appeared to be as many as it could hold at one time. Then I puzzled over how exactly to ready one to fire.

Rollick stepped closer, examining the weapon quickly and then showing me a metal fixture I needed to pull into place. “You’ll aim using the sights here,” he said, tapping a notch.

I held the weapon at eye level with both hands, curled one finger around the trigger, and squeezed hard. The bolt smacked into the rock just an inch below the darker spot I’d been aiming at. Not bad for my first try.

Now that I knew what to do, it only took a second to ready the next bolt. I fired off the other two in quick succession, managing to hit my target dead on the third time. My arms were aching a bit from the strain of keeping the crossbow aloft and still, but that was a small price to pay for self-defense.

“It’ll be harder with moving targets—and when you’ve got to worry about more than one,” Rollick said. “You’ll want to shoot at whatever’s closest and keep your back to as much shelter as you can find.”

“Right.” I dragged in a breath and looked around at the other men. “Better than hitting them with a shovel, anyway.”

Torrent cracked the smallest of smiles. Crag still looked intensely grave. Lance bounced over to point out where the bolts I’d fired had landed so I could quickly snatch them up. Their ends had blunted with the impact, but at that speed they’d probably still penetrate flesh. It seemed wiser to keep them just in case.

I didn’t know how many battles I’d need this weapon for.

“Do you want to practice more?” Torrent asked, shooting a sideways glance at Rollick.

The demon had been hurrying me along, but I couldn’t say he was wrong to. Every second we lingered here was another opportunity for the shadowkind marauders to decide the little boy was better eaten than enslaved. But I didn’t want to falter in the middle of our raid either.

I reloaded the blunt bolts into the bow. “I’ll do a few more rounds.”

For several minutes, I went through the motions of readying and firing and reloading until the movements started to feel more comfortable and I could hit a head-sized target from several feet away while walking slowly. I doubted I was going to get much more competent than that in the limited time we had.

Rollick had apparently decided we were using his car. He’d already grabbed my backpack from the backseat of the jeep and tossed it in the trunk of his sedan. I guessed that made sense when the invaders had seen the jeep when they’d launched their attack, if they’d been paying much attention to it.

“Get in,” he said after I’d lowered the crossbow, opening one of the back doors. “Crag, you stick close to her. We don’t know what we might encounter on the way there.”

I clambered onto the buttery leather seat, and Crag sank down on the other side, in human form now. He sat so stiffly that I was afraid to even reach over and take his hand.

I studied him as Rollick gave Torrent and Lance some instructions I couldn’t hear. As the demon got in and started the engine, Crag’s muscles tensed, and I was suddenly sure he was going to fade right into the shadows rather than stay where I could see him.

I caught his arm before I could second-guess the impulse and cringed inwardly at his immediate flinch.

“Don’t,” I said, unable to keep the pleading note from my voice. “I’m not scared of you, and you shouldn’t be scared either. It was a lot better that I got a bit banged up than that Lance sank his claws into me.”

Crag allowed himself to look at me as the sedan lurched forward over the uneven ground. Even with my voice quiet, Rollick must have been able to hear me, but he didn’t offer any comment this once, thankfully.

The gargoyle’s voice came out low but rough. “I don’t like how easy it is to hurt you without even meaning to. I thought—I thought it wouldn’t happen, but I still can. It could happen without me even touching you.”

My chest clenched at his words, but I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s very likely.”

He pulled his gaze away. “There was a woman once—she was stealing wallets at the hotel club. I went to frighten her into thinking better of doing it again. But she—when she saw my true form—it startled her so much that her heart failed. She died.”

Oh, shit. Suddenly his reactions—all the way back to when we’d first been sparring, how careful he’d been of me, how long it’d taken before he’d let me get a clear look at his gargoyle body—made so much sense. And that moment yesterday had brought all his past anguish rushing to the surface just like it had for Lance.

“You know that won’t happen with me,” I pointed out. “I have no problems at all with seeing you as a gargoyle.” But the reassurance sounded weak even to my own ears.

Maybe it wouldn’t go quite like that, but I knew better than anyone how fragile my health could be. I couldn’t promise him I’d live forever or that nothing we encountered together would push me past my breaking point.

Crag wrapped his fingers around my hand just for a second and then let me go. “I’ll protect you in every way I can. But that also means it’s safer for you if I keep a little distance.”

I didn’t know what to say to that at all. An ache clamped around my lungs like a vise.

These men cared about me so much, but it was getting harder to say that having me in their lives was all that good for them.