Chapter Twenty-Two
Dimitri
I grin. I know that I can trust him because although he doesn’t love her like I do, he loves her like a sister, and I know that he hated not being able to see her. Although he’s kept his distance in order to keep her safe.
“She did die,” I explain.
“No fucking way, I knew it,” he grins. “Alright, quick, tell me what’s going on before you go psycho, or rather an evil psycho because you have always been a psycho.”
“Fuck you,” I grin. I have really fucking missed him. “She’s in the Choosing.”
“That’s not good. Even if she is a supe, she’s not a very strong one and was able to pass as fucking human. She’s going to die. For fucking certain this time,” Kar replies angry for her.
I nod, “The Choosing is brutal, and she shouldn’t be a part of it.”
“Agreed. What’s the plan?”
“I’m going to kill the team that called for the Choosing,” my smile is sharp. “No team, no Choosing.”
Kar’s smile is as dark as mine, “One second.” He pulls out his phone and starts tapping away. It only takes him a few moments, and he looks up. “The team that called it is called the Draconian Team. Neith is actually with Evander’s team, and by all appearances, is happy there.”
“Of course she is. Evander is extremely important to her,” I reply with a smile.
“Get this,” Kar says, his smile falling. “Coen is on the Draconian Team. Apparently, he can’t fly or shift.”
I shake my head, “That’s not right. Not only would Coen never put Neith in danger, he loves her as much as I do, but he’s incredibly strong, and shifted early, there’s no way that he can’t shift. There’s something going on there. I would be willing to bet that it has something to do with the Draconian Team. Who is the leader?”
All confusion clears from Kar’s face as he replies, “It’s fucking Kylen. Coen told us he had it out for his team at the academy. It’s about the only thing that he did fucking tell us. We don’t even know who Coen’s actual team were, but it obviously wasn’t Kylen’s.”
“Definitely not. Coen liked to keep everything separate. It speaks of his hatred that he told us about Kylen,” I reply.
“Exactly,” Kar agrees. “So it’s incredibly unlikely that he’s willingly on his team. I know we haven’t seen him for years, but he wouldn’t put Neith in danger.”
“No, he wouldn’t. Something is definitely wrong,” I reply with a frown.
“Agreed,” Kar says. He puts his phone back in his pocket, “Well, it won’t be a problem for much longer. We’ll kill the team and question Coen. If they are controlling him somehow, like you’re being controlled, then hopefully that will end when the rest of the team dies.”
I nod, and pull out my own phone, “I’ve got the jet meeting us at the hangar, we need to go now.”
∞∞∞
Somehow, I managed to stay completely in control on the flight back home, but as soon as we land, I know that something is wrong.
“Kar, you need to split up from me. Something's going to happen,” I warn him.
He doesn’t question me. He just nods and disappears. Blending into the crowd. I walk for ten more minutes, and I’m nearly at the gate when I suddenly find myself surrounded by SID agents.
I fight.
Not because I don’t want to be taken in, but because I can’t be taken in, not right now, Neith isn’t fucking safe.
I have to keep her safe.
Casimir’s gaze locks with mine in the fleeing crowd, he grins, lifts his fingers, and flicks something at me. I don’t move quickly enough, and the tiny dart pierces the skin at my throat, and I feel the hold, the control, take over my mind again.
Fuck.
Kar
C asimir is here, and he shot something at Dimitri. I fucking saw it, and I would bet my left nut that it was the serum that has been keeping Dimitri under his control. The good news is that he’s been taken in by SID, which should give him enough time to attack it and get rid of it again. I saw all of this in a passing glance as I jogged by with the other fleeing people, trying to look like I was terrified. I know better than to stop and help. It would just end up with me being arrested too and Neith is in danger.
I know Dimitri, this Dimitri anyway, and he would kill me if I tried to help him. I need to find Neith. I need to tell her about Dimitri, and I need to try to stop this team just like Dimitri and I had planned. It gets a bit more complicated without him, but I’m sure her team doesn’t want her to go into it; maybe they’ll help.
Shit, they’re on the other side of the law, so maybe not. I need to get to the Draconian Team and take them out before she gets pulled into the pocket realm where the Choosing is held. I won’t be able to follow her there. As I step out of the airport, I realize that the fucking pilot set us up, and instead of being at the airport closest to SID, I’m on the other side of the fucking country.
My hope of getting to the team before the Choosing is fading quickly, but Neith is my little sister in every meaning of the word apart from blood, and I will not allow her to go through something that is more than likely going to kill her. Even if she is apparently a supernatural. Which, to be honest, blows my fucking mind and makes me incredibly fucking happy at the same time.
My phone pings with a notification. They’ve been pulled into the Choosing already. How? Why? Usually, it takes a week or more between the announcement and the teams being pulled in.
Dimitri is going to be pissed as fuck.
I’ve got to go. I’ve got to be close for when she does come out. She needs to know what’s going on with Dimitri and that it’s not him, and it has never been him saying and doing the cuntish shit he has been doing for the last few years. We need to kill Casimir, and she is going to be instrumental in making that happen. No one is as good as an assassin as Neith is, and that was when she was, by all appearances, human.
I need to find a place to set up my gear. Once I can get on my laptop, I should be able to find out where she’s staying, and then I can make sure that I find her as soon as she is out of the Choosing and she will be coming out of the Choosing she’s going to fucking decimate it.
It doesn’t take me long to find a little B&B to stay at for the night, and despite how hungry I am, the first thing that I do is set my laptop up. I use a combination of magic and normal hacking in order to find what I need, and while I can’t find where she is living, I have managed to find a town that she has visited more than once, and it’s not too far from SID. It seems to be a small and predominantly supernatural town, so I can almost say for sure that she lives near there.
I book a room in the only place that seems to have any available and on closer inspection and a look on their website, it seems to be really fucking cute and not a suitable place for someone like me, but I owe no loyalty to the organization that Dimitri and I left. My only loyalty is to Dimitri and Neith, as it always has been. Coen is included in that as well, and we need to figure out what’s going on with him too. Dimitri’s right, Coen loves Neith as much as he does, and there is no way that he would put her in danger.
I will admit that it was difficult to stay loyal to Dimitri, especially after what he put Neith through, but it’s because of how he treated Neith that I knew that there was something very wrong with him.
I was right, something dark and evil was controlling him, and I have never been so fucking relieved that I was right.
I will help him, but the first step is telling Neith, and that means that I need to make a homebase in this little sleepy town, for however long it may take. I make sure that there is absolutely no way for anyone to track me or where I’m going.
I grin, I’m disappearing.
Neith
“I s everyone okay?” Evander asks before our eyes have even cleared from the light that accompanied the portal magic.
We all sound off that we’re fine and by the time that we’re done, our eyes have cleared, and I can see that we’re standing outside of a big stone building. For a moment, I think that we’re outside of the SID Training Academy, but then I look up and up.
“Holy shit,” I mutter, as I realize that what I’m looking at is definitely not a big country house, but in fact, a mother fucking castle.
“Do you guys see a castle, or have I lost my mind?” Griff asks from somewhere beside me.
I would check exactly where he is, but I’m too busy looking up and studying this giant and amazing building. There’s an ancient feeling about this place. Something about it is calling to me. Which is really weird because it’s a building. Not just a building, but a fucking castle. Did I mention that already? It doesn’t matter. I feel like I need to mention it again because it’s a fucking castle. I know that I’ve been to the Dragon’s keep, and their castle is pretty fucking impressive, but whereas the dragon castle has more of a stronghold look, big and blocky, with short square turrets. This one has ones with pointy roofs, and it looks like it’s out of a fairytale and has an entirely different feeling about it. One that I can’t quite describe.
It's magical.
“It’s a castle,” Doc replies to Griff.
“Where the fuck is it though?” River asks the question that we all should have probably been asking rather than looking at the castle.
“In front of us,” Raiden teases, and I snort despite the inappropriate timing of the joke.
“Haha, fucker,” River replies. “I meant, where is the castle? I’ve never seen it before.”
“Me neither,” Van replies.
Everyone is understandably still on guard, and I drag my eyes away from the sheer height of the thing to have a look around us, noticing that everyone apart from River, who can’t speak while shifted, is still in all of their magical glory and ready to fight should we need too. While I still have Betty and Asael locked and loaded, so to speak, I probably should have looked around us before looking up.
The thing is, I don’t feel like I’m under threat, and the voices are weirdly content. If they had been screaming at me, I would have paid more attention when we first got here. It occurs to me that it’s for that reason that I probably won’t ever turn them off. Even though I can’t hear them properly, and even though that drives me nuts, they do manage to communicate with me fairly effectively, especially when I need a warning, and for some reason, they warned me when the kelpies were in danger.
“We’ve got all of our bags with us,” I point out as I look toward our feet, a thought occurs to me and I continue, “either it just randomly pulled in extra stuff which would be weird, or we’ve been pulled into the Choosing already.”
“If you’re right, which I’m starting to think you are, then that might explain why the announcement was put out,” Reed suggests.
“I’m starting to think that Ty may have been taken over by the same entity or magic that he was taken over by when he told us that prophecy,” Raiden suggests, his eyes still on everything around us.
“That would make so much more sense,” Doc agrees. “Ty wouldn’t deliberately do something that we asked him not to unless he didn’t have a choice.”
“Which means he was under duress when he made the announcement and made the call, or he really did have absolutely no idea that he had done it,” Evander suggests.
“Don’t you guys have a word or something that lets whoever you are speaking to know that you’re in danger?” I ask.
The guys share a look.
Van shakes his head, “No, we don’t. But that’s a really good idea. We should have one.”
“Betty,” I suggest immediately. “It’s easy to work into a conversation, you can say something like, how is Betty, or I saw Betty, and we will all know that it means that whoever we’re speaking to is in trouble.”
River grins, “I’m good with that.”
“Agreed,” Griff adds, with everyone else nodding along.
“It settled then. If you’re in trouble, mention Betty,” Van says with a smile.
“We should really try to figure out what’s going on here,” Ransom says, getting us back on track. “My magic isn’t reacting like we’re in danger, but I don’t like how exposed we are out here, and if it is the Choosing, then we shouldn’t even be here. Not yet.”
“If it is the Choosing, does that mean that the Draconian team is here somewhere?” River asks.
Evander shrugs, “Probably, it wouldn’t make sense if we were here, and they weren’t.”
“Well thank fuck they didn’t get zapped in right here with us, that wouldn’t have gone down well,” I point out.
“Alright, let’s head toward the doors then, I guess, and see if we can find someone who knows what’s going on,” Van suggests.
We all pick up our bags, Van grabbing my extra one for me, and then we start to cross the vast and ornately decorated courtyard. It’s exactly how you think a castle should look, not a fortress castle, but a fairytale kind of castle.
We’re completely alone, no one is out here, and we’ve managed to have a reasonably lengthy conversation, which makes me wonder if anyone is going to show up to tell us what’s going on or if we’re here by ourselves. No one was expecting us yet, and although Ty said that there would be people at the castle with us, they may not be here yet.
I think that it’s pretty safe to say that something has gone wrong and that we aren’t supposed to be here this early. I just hope that if we do find someone, they aren’t going to assume that we’re intruders and we end up in some sort of dungeon because this place absolutely has one, and while I think it would be interesting to see it, I don’t want to get first-hand experience of one.
No, thank you.
I don’t do well at being trapped and confined. Not many people do, to be fair, but as I have been trapped and held captive before, I definitely don’t want to revisit that now.
“Reed, it might be a good idea to pull in your magic,” Raiden suggests. “We’re fairly certain that we’re at the Choosing, and we don’t want to accidentally scare the shit out of the people that Ty said live and work here.”
Reed nods and immediately pulls his magic back, “Good point.”
Reed and Raiden use their supernatural strength to pull open the truly enormous doors. I mean, why do they need to be that big? What are they, giants?
Oh, my gods.
What if there are giants here? That would be so fucking cool. I’ve never seen a giant. They have their own realm, and humans aren’t welcome there. I’m not sure why any human would want to go there in the first place, to be honest. It would be far too easy to get squished.
I have no idea if supernaturals can go to their realm, and now is probably not the time to ask the guys. I force myself to pay attention again just as we walk through the doors.
We walk into a cavernous room that is laid out similarly to the Training Academy but on a supersized scale, and instead of carpet and wood, it’s all stone. Like the academy, there is a set of stairs at one end, but these are made out of rough-looking stone. There are banners and tapestries on the walls, and suits of armor, with weapons and all sorts dotted around the huge room as well as doors leading off the room.
Standing in the middle of the room is a group of three people who are staring at us with their mouths dropping open. Their skin is varying shades of purple, and they all have big, pointed ears sticking out through their hair. Each one of them has different colored hair and in varying styles and lengths too, much like humans would.
Movement behind the man catches my eye and I try not to show my surprise as I realize that it’s a tail, similar to a cat’s tail, and the same color as his hair. A quick glance at the others shows that they have tails too. I study them all closer to see if I can spot anything else, and sure enough, their fingers are all tipped with thick claws instead of nails.
I have a feeling that in a fight, they would be a formidable opponent. I suppose it makes sense to have the people who work and look after the castle be able to protect it too. Especially since I imagine that it could get pretty intense between the teams, and I guess there is a risk of fights breaking out if someone decides that they don’t want to behave themselves. There needs to be a way for the fights to be broken up without making the situation worse.
Plus, I can feel the strength that these three are giving off. They definitely aren’t weak, and it would be foolish for anyone to treat them as such.
“Excuse me,” Evander calls out. We all move closer while they continue to stare, so he continues, “We just got pulled here, and we aren’t really sure why. Is this the pocket realm where the Choosing is held?”
There’s silence for a moment before the woman, who looks to be someone who might be in charge and is dressed in a dark full skirt and high-necked blouse, finally clears her throat.
“Erm, yes, this is,” she replies. Her expression clears, and she smiles, “I’m so sorry you’ll have to excuse my confusion. It’s just you weren’t supposed to arrive for another eleven days.”