Twenty-Six
I walk outside to find my family. Lou’s trapped Krypto in a nine-foot-wide containment circle, and she and Maddox are sitting outside of it, trying to calm him down as he rages around the small patch of ground. His hackles up, his ears down, he snarls and barks nonstop. His eyes never leave the hole in the ground right in front of the flowers.
The twins are solemn as they finish packing the dirt in on top of Leno. Dayne, still in Maddox’s form, Khalid’s girl, and Stormie are grouped together off to the side, outsiders looking in. Mother stands stiffly beside Enoch, her back to the door, but as soon as I open it, she turns to face me.
Her cheeks are still dry, unlike everyone else’s, including my own. But there is an emptiness in her eyes, a dying part of her soul.
“Stefaan left. He got a call from Goodbye World,”
Mother says softly, pulling my attention away from Krypto.
“Did they take it down?”
I demand as I turn to her. It’d take fucking ages for a normal person to do, but the three women who make up the hacker group: Mickyla Hatch, Kati Vosika, and Ashley Quiett, all are specialized in electronic magic like Talon was. They are able to make Trojan horses to trace them back to the source or some shit like that. I’m not entirely sure as none of that is my forte. All I know is that they are the only people who can scrub stuff off the internet completely and make sure any downloaded copies all become corrupted too.
She nods. “He’s gone to organize the start of the kill list, but I told him to only make an example out of those who downloaded the video.”
I start to open my mouth in anger, wanting the Blacks to kill them all in the worst ways they can imagine, but she stops me.
“That many deaths, all with the same calling card, will call in the SCU and put more attention on the video. People will be looking it up out of curiosity.”
I clench my jaw as I’m forced to remind myself I can’t be Micha’s husband right now. I have to be a Boss. Otherwise, I’ll never see her again because I’ll make stupid mistakes like that.
I nod slightly, letting her know I understand. Then I turn towards Krypto as Lou releases her containment spell. The dog immediately runs to Leno’s mound, then starts digging at it with a whine.
“Stop!”
Maddox begs as he staggers over to him. He tries to drag him away, but Krypto twists around and bites him on the arm. My brother jumps back, tears rolling down his cheeks.
My heart twisting, I order, “Enoch.”
Breathing hard, my brother raises his arms, and a second later, Krypto is lifted away with his telekinesis. The dog howls in the air, a heartbreaking wail of desperation. After he’s deposited on the ground a few feet away, I order Lou to draw a containment circle on top of Leno.
Krypto doesn’t need to be trapped; I don’t see him trying to go anywhere, but the circle will stop him from being able to dig his way down. Then our brother can rest in peace, and perhaps his dog will eventually tire himself out and just lie down on top of him.
Once Krypto is placed inside the circle, Lou closes it with a small sob. Then she falls to her knees and watches as he immediately starts trying to dig his way to the person he loves the most. Maddox collapses beside her and pulls her into his arms. She clings to him, and he squeezes her like she’s a teddy bear being crushed for comfort.
My throat closing, I turn from them. I catch Khalid’s eye as he hugs his girl to his chest, both his arms around her. His lips press into her hair. I gesture at the garage, and he nods at me over the top of her. She squeezes him tighter before she lets him go, but instead of following me, he lifts her chin to kiss her. I let him take the moment he needs; as reaper, he suffers too much.
Striding towards the garage, I say, “Stormie, Dayne,”
in a clipped voice.
The two follow me instantly.
“You’re not to kill the captives,”
I tell Dayne as we enter the garage. “That’s no one’s right but Micha’s.”
“Agreed,”
he snarls as we head for the stairs. “But why aren’t we going after her while Maddox gets them to talk? Every second she’s with him –”
“I know,”
I cut in, hating how fucking useless I am to her. “I can feel her.”
She’s trying so hard to stay strong, but deep down she’s terrified. Antonio hasn’t started killing her yet either, and that’s making me paranoid. Is he still trying to talk to me? What if he didn’t accept my lack of an answer? What if my silence causes him to take both her eyes and ears? What if I made the wrong fucking choice?
Gritting my teeth, I force my panic down. He has my number. He doesn’t need a soul doll to communicate with me. If he wants to torture her so I’ll do what he wants, then me having Khalid ‘hang up on him’ and act as if I don’t care about her anymore is the best way for me to protect her.
I just have to keep bluffing even when he tries to call it.
“And you’re able to ignore her?”
Dayne spins on me, the air around him becoming electrified. His eyes darken – literally. Not just with emotion like how it’s meant in books, but with color, his sclera graying, his brown irises turning black. I am reminded of when I hit him with my hybrid strength. I should’ve knocked him unconscious then, but he stood up like it was nothing.
My eyes narrow in curiosity, but I file the questions away for later. Right now, all that matters is my wife.
“We need a better plan,”
I say, ignoring his accusation. If it was just us two, I would tell him the truth, that feeling her suffering is breaking me bit by bit, but I don’t trust Stormie. She’s right behind us, and though her parents died fighting on our side during one of the coups, she might blame me for their deaths. So instead, I just focus on the facts as I head into the basement.
“Antonio wants to bring his wife back from the dead. Micha’s only a small part of that plan, so if we can figure out –”
I stop mid-sentence. Mid-step, halfway down the stairs.
There is a moment of silence, and then Dayne breaks it. “What the fuck?”
Not knowing how to answer him, I continue down the stairs. The dying werewolves that were thrown into the cells earlier were all in pieces and bleeding from multiple holes. Now they’re standing in a single line behind the bars. They haven’t been healed though. Their wounds are still gaping, but seeping black smoke fills them. The boy I talked to, the one without legs, stands on two solid replacements – matte rather than gloss.
Eerie silence deafens our ears as we draw closer. They were all screaming, crying, or pleading the last time I was here. Now, nothing.
“Fuck. I do not do zombies,”
Stormie mutters. I can smell her fear, but she doesn’t run back up the stairs. She watches our backs as Dayne and I stop in front of the first cell.
They don’t react to our presence at all.
“Their eyes…”
Dayne murmurs.
They’re filled with the same smoke-like substance that’s inside their wounds. Tendrils of it are still leaking out of the edges, curling out before they vanish. Is this what I would have done to Krypto if Louise hadn’t healed him?
My arm hair rises as my fingers twitch down at my sides. A foreign feeling tugs at me, like a newborn whale’s instinct to swim to the surface. A dog’s prey drive being activated as soon as something small takes off.
I can play with these things in front of me.
Control them like they’re dolls...
All their heads snap in my direction.
“What the fuck?”
Dayne jumps back, his hands raised. Electricity crackles between his fingers.
Stormie throws up bubble after bubble as she shrieks in fear. As terrified as she is, at least she’s being smart about it.
Closing my hands into fists, I kill the urge inside of me.
All my life, I have wanted magic, but with my wife gone, this moment just tastes like ash. Colorless and numb.
“Release them, Stormie,”
I say, somehow knowing they won’t do anything unless I tell them to. Yesterday, I would have stayed down here all night, too excited to sleep, testing the limitations of the gift I have been given, but today, all I want is my wife.
Turning on my heels, I head for the exit. Khalid’s just entered, and his face is expressionless as he scans the room. “We’ll do this upstairs,”
I say, and without a word, he heads back up before me, then sucks the cars into his shadows.
The three of them spread out in the now empty space, and each one starts drawing two circles of runes, one inside the other. Red energy pours out of their forefingers, glowing neon as they create a rune by pushing their power into it. Then the light fades, the magic becoming dormant until it’s activated. It’s going to take a few minutes for them to draw them all, so I stand with my arms crossed, trying my best not to focus on the pull of my girl. If I do, I’ll run to her, and she doesn’t need a headless fucking chicken.
My shoulders tight, I look over at Dayne. I don’t know anything about his past, and though I will continue to trust him just because Micha does, I need to figure out what he’s hiding. Is he a hybrid like me? Does Micha know? Is that why she didn’t bat much of an eye when I told her what I was? All she was concerned about was how she managed to get pregnant when all hybrids are infertile.
I study him as he moves in a crouch, making a circle barely big enough for a person to stand in. He looks normal, isn’t moving any faster than expected. Perhaps I should get into a proper brawl with him when there are no witnesses, see what he can actually do.
Khalid finishes his containment circle first, and he pulls his shadows into it immediately. A small pink bubble rises out of them, holding one of the chimeras. The beast shifted into his human form in an attempt to give himself more room, but Stormie’s magic just shrank around him so that he’s forced to lie on his back along the curvature of the wall, scrunched up, with his legs in the air. There’s no room to stretch out at all. He has been like that for hours, and he’s struggling to breathe what little air remains in his cage.
The bubble pops, and his limbs splay out uncontrollably. As soon as he touches the runes, a web of bright-red energy shoots up in a cylinder around him. The smell of burning flesh permeates the air, and he screams as he jerks his arms and legs in. He scoots into the middle, then tries to stand, but his legs are too weak. He collapses immediately, hitting the edge of his cage and burning himself all over again.
The second wolf Khalid pulls out, inside Stormie’s circle, is lying in his own piss and sobbing, but despite how easy he’ll be to break, it’s the third one I want the most. The one with the limp arm. The fucker who helped kill Leno. The one who raped my wife in his werewolf form.
The two of us stand in front of him, radiating with a need to rip his bald head off his shoulders. He stares up at us, his green eyes full of a bravado I’m going to enjoy destroying.
“How’s your brother?”
he taunts as he climbs to his feet. Careful not to touch the runes, he leans towards us with a sneer. “I enjoyed tearing him apart almost as much as I did your wife.”
Dayne yells as he charges from behind us. Khalid throws up a barrier in front of Micha’s friend though, and he slams into it, then falls to the floor. The reaper knows what the wolf’s trying to do. Containment circles are near impossible to break from within, but a single brush of the outer ring will shatter them easily.
“When I ripped her cunt open all the way to her ass –”
Khalid isn’t fast enough to stop me.
Swiping my foot across the runes, I destroy the spell so I can throw a fist at his face. The wolf would have been ready for it had I been a mere witch, but I’m a fucking hybrid.
More, I’m pissed.
So my knuckles slam into him hard enough to dislocate his jaw. He staggers to the side, and I kick down at his knee. It cracks apart, bone pushing out of his skin. As he drops to the ground, I grab his arm and pivot behind him, yanking it up at the shoulder.
He screams, finally able to fucking register that his piss-poor attempt at escape is never going to happen. Slamming my foot between his shoulder blades, I shove him forward hard as I rip his humerus completely out of its socket. His skin tears at the joint, but his muscles and tendons still keep it attached.
I pivot to the side, tossing him over onto his back. I slam my heel into his balls, then drop on top of him, straddling his waist. Able to imagine all too well what he did to Micha, I hammer my fists into his jaw. I’m careful not to hit his nose though. I don’t want to send any shards into his brain, don’t want to kill him and let him off that easily or take that right from my wife.
His jaw fractures, then shatters, cutting through his skin like pieces of glass. Blood covers my face, arms, and chest. He wheezes harder, unable to breathe through the mess that is now his face.
My body shakes as I imagine all the pain this fucker caused my wife.
I want to kill him.
I want to shove a dildo up his ass so deeply that the only way his shit can come out is through his mouth. I want him to choke on it. I want him to suffer. I want him gone from this fucking world because he doesn’t deserve to breathe on the same world as my wife.
But she might want to kill him herself.
She might need to in order to heal after all they’ve done to her.
Emitting a broken, hoarse cry from the void in my chest, I punch him one last time. Then I shove to my feet and face the other captives. Blood drips from me – his and mine, my knuckles having split apart in my rage, my fingers broken.
Breathing heavily, I demand, “Tell me about his plan to resurrect Siome.”
He’s hurt my girl.
Now I will hurt his.