23. Briar
brIAR
“ A bsolutely fucking not!”
The words rip out of Elias as his body jerks forward, and the sudden surge of movement presses his throat tighter against the knife dad holds there.
The sharp scent of fresh blood cuts through the air as the blade bites into his skin, a crimson bead welling bright against the moonlight before slipping down his neck in a thin line.
“Shut the hell up,” Dad growls, the sound gritty and lethal in a way I’ve never heard from him before.
His lean frame is rigid with fury, the glint of his silver rings catching the faint light as his hand clamps harder around the hilt of his knife.
“You will keep your lips sealed, or I’ll make you regret ever drawing breath.
There will be vengeance for whatever your part is in our daughter’s suffering. ”
Elias’s lips thin into a tight line in response as a low growl rattles from him.
The sight of the blade so close to nicking a crucial artery sends my own pulse whooshing loudly in my ears.
I swear I can hear the grind of his teeth from how hard his jaw is clenched.
The blade digs deeper, another ribbon of blood trailing down his throat, but he doesn’t flinch away from it.
“We didn’t just go through all of that,” he snarls, voice vibrating with a feral edge, “fighting our way out from Terrance’s compound and getting dragged back from the brink of death after doing so, just to give up now.”
His words tear through the field, strong and defiant, and for a heartbeat all I can do is nod.
It mirrors my own sentiments. I didn’t just decide to get their unconscious bodies to the vehicle, struggle to learn how to drive here, and then heal them with my blood, to allow them to be left behind to fend for themselves now.
I could have just left them before but my heart told me not to–that isn’t going to change just because my parents are telling me no now.
Dad’s lips peel back in a menacing hiss, the steel of his knife trembling with how tightly he grips it, and the night feels one sharp movement away from shifting into slaughter.
The problem is, I can’t blame my parents for denying my requests to bring them. I can’t even say they are in the wrong for wanting to kill them. It’s such an incredibly fucked up and complex predicament to try to wade through.
Dante’s voice cuts through the strained tension, hoarse and shaking.
“Elias. Remember what I tried to drill into your thick-headed skull about snapping back when you shouldn’t?”
The barrel of my father's gun digs into his temple as soon as his lips move, black metal gleaming cruelly under the moonlight. Still Dante tilts his head forward just enough to be able to find his cousin’s face.
His voice wavers under the fear I’m sure he’s feeling the full weight of as he presses on, “Don’t make this worse for us by acting like we don’t need to atone at all for what we’ve done. ”
Elias’s mouth opens immediately to fire back, despite the warnings.
“I took a fucking bullet for her when you were both passed out and it was just me and her fighting those guards off! So don’t act like you think I feel innocent in this.
” His throat bobs against the blade once more as his gaze falls to the grass at his feet, voice barely a whisper as he adds, “My own guilt drove me in front of her.”
I hear a sharp inhale from my mom at that, but it doesn’t seem to faze my fathers in the slightest. I can practically hear them all thinking as you fucking deserved in response to Elias’s admission.
Dante nods his head slightly before his attention flicks to Callum, softer and akin to a pleading expression.
“And I need you to know, if we don’t make it out of here, that it isn’t all on you, so please don’t carry the weight alone.
You can’t be blamed for everything when it was my father who forced us all into this.
We all tried to avoid it well before Briar was involved. ”
Callum’s jaw flexes once before he drags his bottom lip between his teeth, blinking and unfocused in his attention.
I can truly see how much his guilt eats him alive, and once again the sight of his raw fury breaking open that container of my blood in the lab comes surging forward.
“Please,” I beg, turning into my mother’s side, clutching at her arm like she’s the only one who can possibly be broken through to. “Don’t let them die. Don’t let this end here. Bring them back with us to Sanguis.”
Mom’s gaze sharpens, her mouth hardening into a line as she shakes her head, her words firm and immovable. “Briar, you’re asking too much. You don’t understand the risk. We can’t just drag human hunters into the heart of our city.”
My chest tightens with her refusal, but still I can’t accept it.
“I’ll take responsibility for them,” I blurt out, my mind frantically trying to come up with a way to make this work. “If they come to Sanguis, they’ll answer to me. I’ll guard them myself if I have to. They won’t lay a finger on anyone while I’m there to stop them.”
Mom’s blue eyes begin to flare with crimson at the edges once more. “No.” The word cracks through the air. “I don’t want them anywhere near you. Not after whatever their hand was in it.”
I can’t deny her words, but my parents refuse to see what good the guys did in getting me out.
Two things can be true at once, is a sentiment I’m learning to come to terms with, but I can’t force my family into also getting that. Not when they don’t have my same lived experiences with these humans.
Frustrated tears sting my eyes, but I don’t look away from her as I take a deep breath and draw a line in the sand. “Then I will stay here with them.”
Her face goes slack, lips parting as if I’ve struck her harder than any weapon could. I press on before she can gather her fury, voice breaking, but resolute. “I promised to take them where their family couldn’t reach them, and if I can’t do that, then I will protect them here.”
Tension floods the field around us again, and for once, even Elias is stunned into silence as I turn to glance at the three of them. All share the same wide-eyed and parted-lip expression. Behind them my fathers bristle with barely restrained frustration and anger as their eyes bore into me.
“Briar, do not give your life up for them,” Dad pleads with a trembling voice.
My chest aches with the pain I hear in his words and Mom exhales slowly, her hand trembling as it tightens on mine and draws my focus back.
“Fine,” she whispers at last, though her jaw stays clenched tight.
“They’ll come with us for now, but not as free men.
” Her eyes glint with the finality in her decision, even as her voice softens.
“They’ll stand trial for their part in capturing and harming you.
Until then, they’ll be protected in our realm as prisoners. That’s all I can give you, Briar.”
The relief dies in my mind when a low vibration skims along the edge of my hearing. At first it’s nothing but a tremor under my skin, faint enough I think I’ve imagined it, but then it swells, a rhythm too mechanical to belong to anything natural.
I lift my head, my breath snagging. My parents are already turning toward the sound, shoulders taut and eyes narrowed. The sharpness in their focus tells me they hear it clearer than I do.
The guys must notice our stillness and the way all of us tilt our focus toward the horizon, because Dante whispers, “What is that? What do you hear?”
The sound moves closer and turns into the undeniable sound of the chopping thrum of blades tearing through the night sky.
Helicopters.
Before the thought can fully take shape and be said out loud, my mother moves. Her arm clamps tight around mine, her voice a fierce demand against the night.
“Use your portal ring. Now. We can’t be the ones to hold a portal open, in case we need to fight.”
The order slams into me and my stomach twists with unease as I nod, stumbling back a step as I glance done at the ring.“How did you even know I had the ring?”
The weight of her gaze snaps my eyes to her as she gives me a flat look. “Aunt Deva told us about it when we told her you went missing, and she told us she built a secondary tracking spell into the ring. We tried to track you with it, but something was blocking the spell from working.”
Alongside the rhythmic chopping of helicopter blades, the low growl of engines cuts through the night, and she grits her teeth, growling at me, “Now get that portal open before they’re on top of us.”
Her focus shifts to my fathers who glower at the humans in their grips as she snaps, “We will figure out the rest of this with these hunter boys once everyone is home and safe. Not a second before.”
I close my eyes and try to build the picture of our castle in mind, expecting to feel the warmth of the ring responding, but nothing comes.
Father’s reply is a deep command that distracts me from trying to focus on connecting with my ring’s magic. “I will not bring them there, Comoar? . As the King of Sanguis, I have a responsibility to our people.”
The weight of those words lands before I can stop it, and I hear the humans gasp with their realization of who we are. Who I am. The missing puzzle piece I never gave up to Terrance through it all.
Their gazes whip toward me, wide and disbelieving.
Callum’s words come out rough and shaking, his eyes fixed on mine. “You’re…the Van Helsing princess?”
My hands fumble with the ring in an attempt to avoid the situation at hand, twisting it again and again as I focus on the mental image of our home, but nothing sparks. No glow, no pull, no hum of power. Just silence.
My chest burns with frustration and I drag a shaking hand down my face. “Yes,” I snap, my fear of what’s going to happen to us if I don’t get this damn portal open weaving through every word. “Yes, I’m the fucking Princess of Sanguis, who can’t even get her damn portal ring to work.”
Dante snaps out of his stunned silence, his voice cutting through my panic.
“The ring,” he says quickly, eyes narrowing as if a thought just clicked into place.
“We know they had it in the lab. We don’t know what the scientists were doing to it before we grabbed it.
They could’ve tampered with it and disrupted its power. ”
My stomach twists. He’s probably right.
“Shit,” I hiss, looking to my mother for a solution.
Mom doesn’t even pause, already yanking her own ring from her finger with a sharp twist and flinging it toward me, the metal catching moonlight before my hand closes around it.
I was so frantic in my thoughts that it didn’t even hit me that they’d likely have their own portal ring. This is why I’m not the leader of Sanguis and never want to be. I’d crumble under the pressure of a split-second decision.
“Use mine,” she commands, her voice ringing over the rumble of the caravan and choppers nearing our location, each word clipped with urgency that leaves no room for hesitation. “Now.”
The thrum of power is instant as I jam the band onto my finger, my pulse hammering so loudly in my ears it drowns out the rest of the world. I draw in a breath and try to focus, but my concentration is fractured once more by the voices that clash around me.
“You may be the king,” my mother spits, turning on Father with a fury that is normally never used on them, “but I am the queen, and I will not let our daughter suffer another second. Not while I draw breath and I can stop it. I will not stand by and watch her break apart because you insist on clinging to political issues while the humans who carried her out of whatever hell she suffered are left behind.”
Father’s growl rumbles through the ground itself, his broad frame looming, black eyes burning with a darkness that makes the veins across his cheeks stand out like ink beneath the skin.
“Alina,” he snaps, the single word a warning, a refusal, the weight of a king’s command, “I swore an oath to protect Sanguis. I will not drag hunters into the heart of our people’s sanctuary. ”
The heat of the ring flares faintly, a tremor against my skin, but it isn’t enough to take hold, and I squeeze my eyes shut, fighting to block them out.
I don’t know how to bring the portal into being while their voices batter me from both sides like colliding storms, and all the while worry flows through me about if the guys will even be allowed through it.
“We will force her through the portal,” Dad growls out. “She can’t escape all four of us.”
Mom’s voice pitches higher as she yells, “And then what!? Risk her running away from us again the second we aren’t watching her?”
Papa’s deep timbre answers quickly, “So we never take our eyes off of her. Problem solved.”
My lips purse as I try and swallow the retort building within me. Fury whips around in my chest like an unchecked monster taking over. How am I supposed to picture our home when my family is reminding me of the shackles I feel when I’m there and how they want to tighten them now.
Elias’s voice breaks through their back and forth, meant only for me as he whispers. “Breathe, Briar. You can do this. Think of your room and the happy family memories there. Think of your mom waking you up. Think of one of your dads singing badly.”
They’re so specific, that for a moment my heart squeezes, realizing that he’s likely drawing from his own experiences from his parents before they passed. Still, his words provide an instant soothing effect as the related moments surface in my mind.
My enhanced hearing latches onto his soft words and I cling to them as I take deep breaths and push everything else out.
At last, the arguing fades into a silence, and in that space I seize the memories that have been slipping through my grasp as I imagine our home. The ring sears hot against my skin, light flaring in front of my closed eyes in a sudden rush.
When I open my eyes, a relieved sigh slips from my throat as an arc of magic flows outward from my ring in a sweeping glow, flooding the field with a glowing radiance. The portal blossoms fully open in front of us, its center rippling like liquid glass made of spiraling colors.
The hum of its power thrums through the ground, through my feet, and into the marrow of my bones.
It’s time to go home.