Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
CHAOS
“Merri is gone.”
Malice’s words hung in the air like a fucking grenade in the seconds before hell rained down on all of us. A range of emotions flooded me all at once: fury, disbelief, shame, and above all, fear. She couldn’t be gone. If she were, that meant I’d failed her in every sense of the word.
“What do you mean, she’s gone?” Grim asked, voice low and measured.
“Exactly what I said. Just beyond the gate, I found evidence of heavy magic use.”
“What kind of evidence?” I asked.
“Residue on the ground. It was a portal.”
Jaw clenching tight enough to send a spike of pain through my temples, I took a long, slow breath. “Where to?”
“How the hell should I know?” Malice snarled.
“So there’s no way to track her?” Grim asked.
Malice shook his head, a slight feathering of a muscle in his jaw the only outward sign of his agitation. Sin was unusually quiet, but I was too consumed by my growing fury to care.
“Don’t just fucking shake your head. Do something useful.” I stepped forward, getting in his face as I confronted my brother.
“What else would you have me do?”
My vision turned red. “The words of a true coward. Giving up at the first roadblock.”
“How is this on me? I chased after her while the rest of you stood around with your cocks in your hands.”
My hand wrapped around Malice’s throat without my brain giving permission.
“This is your property. Where are all your fucking cameras? Where is the security you promised when we came here? She’s just gone.
Vanished. And we have no recourse? This is all your fault.
We don’t even know if she took off on her own or if someone snatched her.
” The walls shook as my power lashed out, the thin thread of control I had on my violence stretched too far.
“You think someone took her?” Sin finally piped up.
There was a soft undercurrent of hope in the question, as if it was somehow better that she was kidnapped than fleeing on her own.
I guess in a fucked up way, I could understand the logic.
Kidnappers meant enemies to fight. If she left on her own .
. . well, that was just on us for making her think she had no other options.
“No,” Malice wheezed as I tightened my grip.
“Release him, Chaos,” Grim commanded. “He can’t tell us anything with a crushed trachea.”
With a growl, I released him, but not before shoving him away and causing him to stumble backward.
“Why don’t you think foul play was involved?” I spat.
Malice rubbed his throat. “The wards were only breached once. If she were taken from within, I would’ve known. There would have been at least one more breach.”
Sin’s shoulders slumped as his hope was snuffed out.
“So what the fuck do we do now?” I demanded, fists clenching and unclenching at my sides. Lamps and other knickknacks rattled as my power filled the room. If I didn’t get ahold of it soon, walls would start coming down. But since that was the least of our problems, I didn’t give a fuck.
“She’s not so stupid as to leave the property, surely.”
As a unit, Malice, Sin, and I all swung our gazes to Grim, who stood at the base of the stairs with his arms crossed over his chest.
“You have to be joking,” Sin said, incredulity bleeding from every word.
“Why would I be?”
“Because if it weren’t for your callousness, she would still be here with us, safe and where she belongs,” Malice said.
“My callousness? Convenient for the rest of you to forget the part you played.”
“What fucking part? You were the one who yelled at her,” Sin reminded him.
“And what did the three of you do? That’s right. Nothing. Your silence was your complicity, so don’t you dare put all of this on me. Every one of you is just as much to blame.”
Sin’s face cracked as Grim’s shot struck true. I knew that each of us was beating ourselves up for the part we played, but I had little interest in self-flagellation. My anger was firmly pointed in a different direction.
“We have to find her. She is in danger out there, wherever she is. There is no scenario in which our Merri is safer than when she’s with us. Her mates.”
I may have spoken to the group as a whole, but my focus was on Grim, driving home the point that we belonged to her.
He might not be ready to accept the truth, but I could no more deny it than I could the mantle I’d taken up.
I was War, and I was hers. To Grim, those two truths were mutually exclusive. But they weren’t. I was proof.
“How do we do that? Mal said she’s lost like dust in the damn wind. You can’t track a portal’s destination.” Sin took a seat on the second stair and rested his head in his hands, murmuring to himself, “Fuck, kitten, why didn’t you give us a chance to fix this?”
“Christian.” Our heads snapped to Malice, his eyes flashing with renewed purpose as he elaborated, “He can do a locator spell. We don’t need to know where the portal went if we can find the object of our desire herself.” He moved toward the front door, only stopping when I scoffed.
“Why the hell should we trust him? His wards are shit and frankly don’t fill me with any confidence after what’s gone on the last few days. Do you think he’s even up to the task?” I snapped, my rage taking on a new target.
“Do you have a better idea?”
No. I didn’t.
“Even if it fails, we have to try.”
Grim’s voice was so soft that I knew his facade was finally breaking. Death was proud. Perhaps even more proud than any of us. But when push came to shove, none of us would let that cause our fall.
“He’ll need something of hers to help track her.”
Sin was on his feet before Mal had finished his sentence. “I’m on it!”
He blinked out of existence and then, in the span of a breath, reappeared with Merri’s hairbrush and a pair of lace panties.
Without a word, I snatched the panties from him and shoved them into my pocket. “You’re not giving these to Christian.”
“Dude. Finders keepers. By rights, those should be in my pocket.”
“You wanna try and take them from me?” It might have been a playful challenge, if not for the tremor that shook the floor hard enough to crack the marble beneath us.
Sin held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Brush it is.”
“You’re going to fucking pay to repair that,” Malice growled at me.
“Put it on my tab.”
We filed out of the door, our current goal giving us purpose and, frankly, a sense of control I knew we desperately needed. If we had a next step, it meant there was still a chance of finding her. Of getting her back.
The part that worried me, though I refused to admit it aloud, was what happened when we ran out of steps. The horsemen with a purpose were terrifying. But when all hope was gone? When there was nothing left to lose? I didn’t think anyone wanted to be around if that eventuality came to pass.
In moments that felt like years, we found ourselves standing outside the groundskeeper’s modest cottage. I’d never darkened his doorstep for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them, I had no need to interact with him beyond what was unavoidable. I wasn’t what you’d call a people person.
“Why isn’t he answering?” I grumbled.
Malice frowned. “He was in his garden a while ago.”
“Maybe he’s taking a shit,” Sin offered.
We all glared at him.
“What? Humans do that. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
“So was the shower,” I muttered.
“Wrong,” Sin said with a smile that made me want to punch him. “We’d hear the water running. Unless he was destroying the toilet, a shit would be mostly silent.”
“Your brain is an exhausting place to exist, isn’t it?” Mal asked.
“Nope. It’s very exciting. Just ask—” The light dimmed in Sin’s expression as he swallowed back the rest of what he was going to say.
Merri.
For a second, everything felt normal, but just that fast, we all remembered what we were doing here.
“Fuck this,” Grim said, shoulder-checking the door and stepping inside.
His body stiffened not two feet past the threshold, the shift in his energy filling the small space. I knew what I’d find before Grim stepped to the side simply based on his countenance.
He confirmed it not even a second later. “He’s dead.”
Yes. Dead was the only explanation for the husk on the floor in the middle of the small living room. Christian’s face was locked in a scream of horror, eyes bulging, cheeks sunken, mouth opened impossibly wide due to the way his lips had receded.
“What the fuck happened to him?” Mal asked, approaching the corpse slowly. “I just spoke to him less than an hour ago.”
“Well, it’s safe to say he didn’t die of natural causes.” Sin nudged what was left of Christian with the toe of his boot. “He had every ounce of his life force sucked out of him.”
I moved closer and crouched down, recognition dawning as Sin’s earlier words landed. “It was Merri.”
“No. She wouldn’t do that,” Sin protested.
“Who the fuck else can suck souls out of bodies? We already established that no one else entered the wards, so that leaves you and Merri. That’s it. Did you kill him?”
Sin deflated, sighing and dragging a hand through his hair. “Fuck. It was her, wasn’t it?”
“But why would she?” Malice asked.
“Is it really so hard to believe? We’ve all seen what humanity is capable of when backed into a corner.” Grim stood to one side of the corpse, gaze locked on Christian’s eternally screaming visage.
All I could manage was a grunt of assent. Something he’d said struck a nerve within me, unearthing memories long since buried.
“You’ll do it if you want to live. Or we can just end this right here and right now. It’s all the same to me in the end. Your corpse is as good as any other when we release the lions.”
I barely had the energy to sneer up at the Roman guard standing outside my cell, his burly arms folded over his chest.
“I will not perform for you,” I snarled, the shackles binding my wrists and ankles clanking ominously as I shifted my weight.
The goal was to keep my muscles loose and ready, but after weeks of travel and captivity with barely any food or water, there was only so much I could do to fend off the pain.
“You will. They always try to resist before we send them out, but trust me, once you are in the arena, there will be no other choice. Kill or be killed.”
The bastard had been right. Memories of bodies swam through my mind.
Friends. Innocents. Slaughtered by my hand so I could live another day.
Oaths meant very little in the end, especially when all that remained was your mortality.
I broke my word time and time again, even after my escape.
The survive-or-die mentality was the only thing I held on to.
And once I finally met my death, lying atop a pile of those I’d killed in battle, I found myself faced with one last choice. The ultimate test of the theory.
“Not where you expected to end up, is it, Spartan?”
Blood bubbled up my throat as I coughed to clear it. My breathing was nothing more than ragged, shallow drags as I slowly drowned. I’d killed the man who’d managed to strike a blow before I could dodge his spear, but this time I wasn’t fast enough. He had run me through and dealt me a mortal blow.
“It’s what I deserve,” I spluttered.
The man hovering over me swam in and out of focus as he made a musing sound low in his throat. “That’s a matter of perspective.” More blood dribbled down my chin, and the man squatted down, his body blocking the sun. “You’re running out of time.”
I wanted to say something cutting, but it was getting harder to form words.
I settled for a glare and hoped it conveyed all that I couldn’t say.
Every beat of my heart came slower and slower, but the sound of it in my ears was overwhelmingly loud.
I knew the truth. With each valiant pump, my heart was speeding along my demise, my blood flowing into the earth below, filling my lungs, going everywhere but the places I needed it to.
“It’s very important that you listen to me, warrior. This is your only chance for survival.”
I tried hard to focus on the man’s face, but it was cast in shadow. Why wouldn’t he leave me alone and let me die? Again, I attempted to force the words past my lips, but all that came out was a wet grunt.
“War is in your blood. It is what you were born for. Are you ready to lay down your sword for good, or would you like a chance to continue what you started? To right the wrongs, punish those who deserve it, topple empires, and mete out justice when needed?”
This time I blinked, and apparently that was enough to indicate that he had my attention. Meting out justice seemed pretty fucking great right now.
“You will be immortal, Spartan. But in order to gain such a gift, you will have to sacrifice. You will never again fall ill. Never again know a killing wound. But you also will never again live as a human.”
Humanity had proven to be the most terrible part of the world. Why would I miss it?
“Unfortunately, this is going to require more than blinks and gurgles. I need to hear you accept. A simple yes will do.”
With every passing second, my vision dimmed until all I could see was a pinpoint of light. It was now or never. I didn’t have the luxury of time to weigh my decision.
“Y-y-yesss,” I rasped, just as the light faded.
“He has the same residue on his fingers that I found outside the barrier,” Malice said, snapping me out of my reverie.
“So he provided Merri with the portal spell,” Grim concluded.
“Do you think he helped her willingly?” Sin asked, eyes trailing over Christian’s corpse.
“Doubtful.” My response was low and filled with frustration. “What good would killing him do if he gave it to her?”
“So she killed him, stole the spell, and fled.” Malice paced in front of the body, his distress mirroring my own. “Where would she go?”
“Not to Lilith. Too obvious,” Grim answered.
I glanced around at the others, waiting for someone to offer an alternative. But there wasn’t one. Merri didn’t have other friends or family to turn to. Which meant she was out there alone, with more enemies after her than I could count.
“We can’t know where she’s gone, but we have to find her. There is no other option.”
“How do you suggest we do that, Chaos? Do you have a locator spell in your pocket? Any secret magic up your sleeve?”
I ignored Sin’s jabs because he was right. We were woefully unprepared for something like this. Glancing from man to man, I sighed before finally admitting, “I have no idea.”