Chapter 25
rune
. . .
Allison looked nothing like the Aura I thought I’d known.
She smelled the same, though, with the sharp floral scent that coated her.
Imp magic popped off her in brittle waves, the stolen shimmer of supernatural energy that she was never supposed to carry.
I couldn’t stop myself from wondering who the imp was that had been hurt to give her access to that power.
Her blue eyes, once bright and bubbly when she’d sat with me in the first-year house, were now icy, hard, and rimmed in anger. The pixie cut she used to wear had grown out. Her hair hung straight and glossy to her shoulders, framing a face that had hard frown lines carved into it.
Beside her stood her father, Jeff Whettlock. He was older, with glasses perched on his nose and a lab coat splattered with the faint shadows of long-scrubbed bloodstains. His expression was tight, jaw clenched, and blue eyes sharp with calculation.
The hissing above us stopped, and the walls that had fallen down sucked back into the ceiling.
“Okay, venom baby, the tourmalyke gas is disabled. They should wake up in a few minutes depending on how concentrated it was,” Slater told me.
“Wow, Allison, you look like shit,” I greeted her with a fang-filled smile.
Her hate-filled gaze narrowed at me as she moved aside, making way for a woman with blonde hair and green eyes to run out of the safe room.
She came at Dimitri, who was still unconscious, with a knife, fast. Faster than a human should’ve been able to move.
I moved, catching her wrist mid-swing, fingers tightening until her bones shattered and the knife clattered to the floor. I kicked it back away from the other Whettlocks. My venom coursed through her veins as I chose Cthulhu’s strand to kill her with.
She went rigid, terror seizing her expression as she dropped to her knees. Her skin turned wooden as roots escaped her eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, hollowing her out.
I wanted the Whettlocks to suffer for what they’d done, and Zuko’s fae spider’s venom was one of the most gruesome venoms I’d found.
“What did you do?” Allison screamed, her face twisting into horror as her gaze stayed glued to the woman’s corpse at my feet.
“She tried to kill my mate,” I replied, venom dripping from my fingers onto the woman’s hollowed-out wooden face. “I reacted. This is the venom from an earth fae spider. I do believe I’ll give her hollowed-out corpse to said spider.”
“Susan!” Jeff’s voice cracked.
Allison’s breathing hitched. “Mom—”
“Oh, she was your mom?” I gasped dramatically before a smile slid over my lips. “How tragic. How does it feel to have the life of someone you care about snuffed out in an instant? That’s what you’ve been doing to so many supernaturals, after all.”
Allison’s gaze snapped to me, hatred burning in her eyes.
“Rune Bloodwyne,” she spat. “You fucking monster!”
Slater’s voice echoed through the comms. “Rune, bad fucking news. Tourmalyke gas is in every level of the facility now. I’m working on it, but the saturation is off the charts.
Agents are dropping like flies, but thankfully Drecken used his magic to wipe out most of the humans.
Corin and I are hacking all of their systems to stop the gas.
You’re the only one at a hundred percent right now. ”
Jeff Whettlock smoothed out his coat with trembling hands and tried to step forward, palms raised as if he were innocent.
“I know you think we’re trapped, and we can see that you’ve put some magic ward around our facility, but did you know I designed this facility with a failsafe?
If we’re compromised, which we are, all levels flood with tourmalyke gas.
Enough to knock out an army of supernaturals.
Enough to keep you from hurting my family. ”
I snorted, glancing at what used to be his wife. “That seems to have worked out well for you so far. Surely you heard how poorly your gas worked at our formal. You don’t really think that’ll work this time, do you?”
He flinched. “That was a prototype. This is refined. From our reports, it still affected everyone but you. This time we’ve improved it, making it more potent.” He glanced up at the vent. “That’s why you’re alone right now.”
Dimitri pushed up from the ground just as Jesper, Zuko, and Koa pushed to their feet and used the wall to stand on two legs. Through the bond, their anger burned steady but strained.
“Not alone,” Jesper muttered.
Allison’s face scrunched up with rage as she looked at my mates.
“Tourmalyke might not work on you,” she hissed at me. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t kill you.” She yanked something from her belt. It was a slender rod with metallic prongs at the end, humming with electrical energy.
It was a shock prod that had been heavily modified.
“Careful,” Slater shouted in my ear, clearly hearing the whine. “That thing’s frequency is off the charts. Don’t let—”
Allison launched herself at me with a scream.
I dodged the first swipe of the prod by an inch. The second nearly grazed my ribs; I twisted, dodging it again.
Her imp magic flared, trying to tangle my footing, twist perception, and make me misjudge distance.
It did none of that.
“Stop dodging!” she shrieked, her hair whipping around her face.
“Um, no?” I chuckled as Jeff circled behind me. I let him. I waited until I felt his hand snag my arm.
“Get off her,” Jesper snarled, but I felt how weak my mates were through the matebonds.
“Tourmalyke gas has been deactivated on all levels,” Slater updated us.
I bucked up, using his grip as leverage. My body kicked up, legs swinging over him and out of the way of Allison’s next thrust toward me.
The prod drove straight into Jeff’s chest as I landed behind him gracefully.
He convulsed, making a Fates-awful sound as the device unleashed the full force of its charge. The prod was designed to knock out a supernatural, not a human. He dropped like a rock, smoke curling faintly from his jacket.
“Dad!” Allison screamed, flinging the prod away as if it had struck her and not him. “No! No, no, no, I didn’t—” Her hands fluttered helplessly over his chest, imp magic sparking uselessly around her fingers.
“Damn,” I muttered. “Nice hit.”
“This is your fault,” she spat at me, tears spilling over. “All your fault!”
“That’s a big accusation for a human who electrocuted her own father,” I said flatly, taking a step toward her. I tilted my head. “Aw, look what you’ve done. You’ve killed him.”
She scrambled backward, away from the bodies of both her father and mother, chest heaving, hair wild, and eyes spilling over with tears.
“Why?” I asked roughly, venom dripping from my fangs and fingertips.
“Why did you become our friend? Why pretend to care? To comfort me when I vented to you about Darian, when all you were doing was collecting ammunition to use against us later? Why the drude? Why send someone into my dreams to force me to relive the shit he did to me?”
Allison let out a bitter, broken laugh. “As if you supernaturals can feel actual emotion,” she laughed painfully. “You think crying over him makes you human? Makes you a victim?”
Allison didn’t look at either of her dead parents; her gaze pinned on me. “You’re monsters! All of you, but you put a pretty face on it. You pretend your pain matters more than ours.”
“Funny, because from where I’m standing, this entire facility is built on the pain of supernaturals being tortured to death!”
“You killed my mate,” she whispered. “Darian…he ended up being my mate. I found out in year two.”
Realization crashed through me in an icy wave.
“Darian was your mate,” I repeated slowly.
“Yes.” Her eyes blazed with fury. “He told me everything. He told me you lied. That you paid people off to fake stories about him because you hated that he rejected you. That you couldn’t handle being left by him.”
“I never paid anyone, and I never once lied. You were with me several times when he tried to get me back in year one.” I let out a harsh laugh.
“I wanted nothing to do with him! If you’d wanted the truth, you’d have looked at what he did to me.
To others. The drude you sent to torment me?
He made me relive memories I had buried. ”
Images flashed in my mind of ice crystals in my lungs, Darian’s hand over my mouth, and his magic cutting off my air while he whispered I was overreacting.
“He hurt people,” I told her. “He used his power and drugs to trap them and hurt them without their consent.”
She shook her head violently. “You’re such a liar! He told me you twisted everything—”
“Did he tell you about the woman he almost killed with ice magic by freezing her lungs?” My voice dropped. “What about the girl who ended up in the infirmary because he shattered her ribs with ice?”
She flinched. “No…”
“Yes. Darian is nothing to mourn. If you were smart, you would’ve rejected him.” I stepped closer.
My mates’ bonds were flickering back to sufficient strength now.
“No…” Her brow furrowed with disbelief.
“Why the resistance network?” I pressed. “Why build this? Why kidnap kids and lock them up while pumping them full of toxins to steal their magic? Why any of this?”
Her breath hitched, raw.
“My sister,” she choked out. “Cynthia. She was twenty-five. A medic. She went out on a mission to deliver vaccines to one of your villages and never came back. We found her in a ditch a week later, drained of all her blood. A vampire fed on her and left her to rot.”
Real, deep pain flickered across her face.
“I watched my parents break,” she whispered.
“Watched my mother stop sleeping. Watched my father bury himself in work just to keep from drinking himself to death.
And all your Supernatural Council did was say they'd look into it. Nothing happened, and no vampire was brought to justice. So, yeah.” She lifted her chin, tears still tracking down her cheeks.
“We built something that would change things.”