Chapter 24 – Ava Jade
AVA JADE
T he drive wasn’t a long one. No more than five minutes and the car whose trunk I was currently folded into began to slow, and then stop.
Judging by the curvy path they took, and the steady inclination of the road, I guessed we were no more than a few miles from the Docks. Maybe three. Four at a maximum.
I didn’t know if knowing where I was would help me, but I would take any information I could, tuck it away in the back of my mind in case I should need it.
Like the fact that there were at least five of them, but no more than seven. In two vehicles. One a sedan, whose trunk I was currently in, and the other, the dark SUV that drove us off the road.
I knew Diesel was here. And Tiny. The others I couldn’t be sure of.
I also knew that I was fighting a high I wished to hell I hadn’t decided to ride, and that in about three more seconds, I’d have the ties binding my wrists together at my back completely sawed off.
One, the sedan’s ignition shuttered to a complete standstill.
Two, the doors clicked open.
Three, a key slipped into the lock on the trunk, and the latch popped.
The ties snapped apart, but I kept my arms behind me as the trunk opened, the almost total darkness brightening some under the dappled light of the full moon through the black bag.
Roughly, someone gripped my arm, and I clutched my wrist to keep my arms from popping apart as he hauled me from the trunk and threw me against the rear fender.
I grunted as the blow to the back of my knees almost sent me to the ground, giving me the perfect opportunity to play it up the injury, and bend, groaning so I could slip two fingers beneath the back of my dress and snatch a blade from the garter on my thigh.
I wondered if I could kill them.
I mean, would that be breaking the rules?
The guys said to try not to, but if push came to shove? If they actively tried to kill me? If killing them was the only way to ‘pass’ the trial?
The other vehicle pulled up nearby and the headlights flashed over me before going out as the ignition shut off.
I sensed more than knew it when Diesel St. Crow stepped out of the other car, like a shift in the air. Similar to how it felt when one of his sons entered a room. As though they disturbed the fabric of the universe, taking up far too much space for beings their size.
I lifted my chin, waiting.
A second later the black bag was pulled from my head, and I blinked, disoriented and a bit nauseous from the bumpy ride in the trunk.
My lips parted, and a tremor of dread ran down my spine like an icy fingertip. Before me were six men, but I didn’t recognize any one of them. It was too hard to tell in the masks.
A wolf. A bear. A stag. A panther. A snake. And a crow.
Their faces were fully covered by their animalistic masks, dark hollows where their eyes should have been. And in each of their hands, a crossbow.
Motherfucking crossbows.
I assessed my surroundings, finding myself ensconced in dappled darkness, surrounded entirely by trees. The road we’d driven in on was a dirt one. The air smelled of cooling earth and still warm wood with an undercurrent of something unpleasant, like sour mulch…or decomposing corpses.
“Untie her,” someone said, but when the bear, Tiny, stepped forward, I loosened my hands, showing him the empty one. No need to let them know I was armed yet.
“Hmm,” someone grunted, a sound of surprised approval I thought might’ve come from Diesel.
“What is this?” I asked, folding the blade in my hand so it laid flat against my wrist, hidden from view, but easy to throw in a hurry if I needed to.
“Escape or stay alive until dawn and you will have passed the trial,” the snake said in a voice I didn’t recognize.
“That’s it? There aren’t any rules?”
The bear and the wolf shared a look, but no one replied, and I understood they didn’t expect me to last very long.
“You have a one-minute head start,” Diesel said, his voice ringing true even through the crow mask he wore. I hated that it looked similar to the ones Becca had custom made for the guys. “Don’t waste it.”
“Fifty-nine,” the snake said excitedly, limbering up his legs for a chase. “Fifty-eight.”
“Fifty-seven,” the stag joined the countdown, adjusting his hold on his crossbow.
I sent one last look Diesel’s way, letting him see that I would not go fucking quietly, before I bent, tearing the bottom of my dress away and kicking off my heels.
And then I was running. Drawing on the part of myself that I would need to survive.
My darkness bloomed to life, spurred to wake by the adrenaline pumping through my veins.
Making my vision clearer. Senses sharper.
It was the darkness that whispered sweet nothings in my ear when a sharp rock cut deep into the fleshy underside of my left foot. And when a tree branch whipped across my face, leaving a potent sting in my right eye that forced it closed.
Speed was key here.
Escape was the goal. I had no doubt they would find me if I tried to hide.
But first I needed to outrun the distance their crossbow bolts could travel, and then I needed to find my way out of these woods, onto a road, to somewhere there were houses I could break into or cars I could hotwire.
If there were no rules that meant I could use any means to escape. I just needed to find those means , and right now it looked like all there was for miles as far as I could see were trees and darkness.
Twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty…
The countdown continued in my head, and I veered right on a whim. They would expect me to run straight forward, to put as much distance between me and them in sixty seconds as possible. They may not have expected a deviation.
Four, three, two…
The rest of the countdown finished out in my head, and a renewed burst of energy seared like white hot lightning down the length of my body, propelling me faster until I was sailing over the uneven earth, launching over fallen forest debris and dodging low hanging branches like it was my fucking job.
Just stay ahead of them . If they can’t catch up to you, they can’t shoot you.
It had to be a scare tactic. The guys had made it clear they cared what happened to me, which I was still processing, so the Saints wouldn’t…
they wouldn’t actually shoot me, right? At least, not kill shots?
Maybe that was why they were using crossbows.
I liked my chances against a crossbow versus a gun a lot better.
An arrow thunked into the tree directly beside my head, and I hit the ground with a gasp, my eyes widening.
Wrong.
I was so wrong.
I was also up and running again, distantly hearing the brush of booted feet over the ground behind me. Someone shouting far off to my left. Someone else shouting back, also far in the distance.
Whoever was on my tail, though, they were closing in.
Was it wishful thinking to hope it was only one? That the others spread off into five other directions?
Gritting my teeth, I kept running, and the next low hanging branch I found, I grabbed hold of instead of sliding beneath, pulling myself up to the next branch and the next.
Until I was at least fifteen feet from the ground and would be absolutely fucked if there were more than a few of them following me.
Or at a very good advantage if it were just one.
I held out my blade, peering down through the sparse leaves of the old oak tree, breathing quietly. I steadied myself with my free hand planted against the rough bark of the oak’s trunk.
He came less than twenty seconds later, crossbow up and ready as he moved stealthily through the brush and bramble. The snake.
I leaned forward on my toes, trying to get a better angle as he approached and the branch I perched on creaked under my weight.
The snake jerked his head up, raised his crossbow, and fired. I dodged the bolt by a hair, falling, and threw, having to curve the blade to account for the lower branch.
I reached for a handhold, but my fingers clutched at nothing, just empty air as gravity worked against me, pulling me back down to earth. With a grunt, I hooked a leg out, catching myself on the branch below me to hang upside down. Brutally tearing something in my knee.
Dammit .
I drew the second blade as I flipped from the lower branch and prayed to land anywhere that wasn’t on my face. It was a surprise to land on my feet, though the ache in my knee sent me bending to one side to account for it.
It surprised my attacker even more, though.
His eyes went saucer wide at the sight of me, more or less unharmed while he clasped his hands around the blade protruding from his gut. Hands slick with red.
His crossbow was discarded on the ground, two bolts scattered around it.
He went for the handle of the blade, but I lifted another and it flashed in the moonlight, drawing his attention. “As much as I’d love to have that back,” I hissed, careful to keep my voice low. “If you take it out, you’ll die, and I’m not entirely sure what that means for me.”
I wasn’t not sure what I expected, maybe for him to suck it up and take his defeat like a champ, bow out of this stupid hunt like the harmless reptile he was pretending to be, but that’s not what he did. Not by a fucking long shot.
“She’s over here!” he called, his voice carrying in the night, and my skin iced over with a new layer of cold sweat.
I reeled back and kicked him hard in the knee, satisfied to hear him cry out in pain as he slumped to the ground in my wake. I stomped on his crossbow too for good measure.
Run, bitch, I scolded myself. You got this.
But my knee was aching, and every step felt like another thread torn in whatever was holding the whole fucking hinge joint together. I pushed through the pain anyway, resolved to get the fuck out of here.
I stopped, only for an instant to hear sounds of pursuit, but I heard something else instead. Faint. Super distant, but it was there.
Music.
Dance music. A house party?
Or was it…
It could be…