Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
BECKS
When I blink, white fills the entirety of my vision, and so my first thought is that I’m blind. Slowly, blurry shapes start to appear, contrast in a sea of white, until slowly the space around me takes shape.
A stark sterile room. Blinding halogen lights. The beeping of a machine. A too-small bed that my feet hang over.
I recognize where I am.
The Order has a small surgical and medical center in one of the subfloor levels of their headquarters. I’ve been here before—the first time I ended up in the human world with a stab wound that almost killed me. I haven’t been back since.
Everything hurts, even my eyelids, which feel like they’re weighed down by concrete.
With an extreme amount of effort, I sit up, groaning from the pain.
What happened? Why am I here?
My mind is completely blank.
My vision swims, a blurry mess that’s making me nauseous.
I shake my head and it feels like my brain is knocking against my skull like the die inside a Magic Eight Ball. Pressing the heel of my palms to my eye sockets, I will the room to stop moving.
Giving up the fight, I close my eyes and sink back against the twin-sized hospital bed with another groan. The door across the room opens and I crack my lids.
Kade strides in, mostly unscathed except for a few cuts high on his cheekbone and forehead. It almost looks like he was clawed.
A run-in with a tiger shifter?
There was a clan that had been giving the Order some issues recently.
Glancing down at myself, I realize that my torso is heavily bandaged. Was I part of that run-in as well?
Kade grabs the folded metal chair in the corner of the room and drags it next to my bed. I cringe at the sound it makes as it slides across the floor, my ears as sensitive as my eyes.
What the hell happened to me? I haven’t been this weak since I was stabbed by Shadow Striker.
“How are you feeling?” Kade asks after he takes a seat, his face a grim mask. But Kade is a stoic guy by nature.
“Like someone put me through a blender and then poured me out.”
He nods, like it’s an accurate description. “You were in pretty bad shape.”
“Still am. Tell me the other guy at least looks worse.”
Kade’s brow rises. “You don’t remember what happened?”
“Help me out. My brain isn’t functioning so well right now,” I say, tapping my head lightly.
He leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “You were about to go through the portal to the creature world, but then the demon showed up and attacked. You took a pretty bad beating.”
I rack my brain, trying to remember. All I have are fragments of the last few weeks. Bits and pieces. I can remember a cabin in the mountains. Early season snow. Running from something.
Emotions follow next, slipping in without memories to anchor them, leaving me disoriented.
Fear, but not for myself. Worry. Concern. Protectiveness.
Threaded through it all is something warmer. Joy. Happiness. A sense of rightness, like I’ve finally found my place.
Love.
“The demon took Haven,” Kade says, and with those words the missing pieces snap into place like a puzzle, smashing through the mental block with the force of a hundred sledgehammers.
Haven. I have to find her. I have to get to her before the demon kills her.
I throw the thin blanket aside and swing my legs over the edge of the bed, pain roaring through me as I drag myself upright and stand.
“Whoa,” Kade says, shoving to his feet as well. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Where did it take her?” I take a step, but the floor tilts under my feet.
Kade’s hand snaps out and grasps my bicep to steady me. “Do you really think you’re any use to her like this?”
I pin him with a glare. “Do you really think I’m going to let that stop me?”
Kade and I are locked in a standoff, one I don’t plan to lose. I’m not officially part of the Order, so he knows he can’t stop me from going after Haven. But I also don’t know where to start. I was unconscious when the demon took her. Kade’s my best bet at finding her, and he knows that too.
Finally, he heaves a sigh and runs a weary hand down his face. “I couldn’t follow it because I was trying to keep you alive.”
“But you have an idea where it took her, don’t you?”
The reluctance I read on Kade’s face tells me he does.
“I’m not staying in this bed either way, so you might as well tell me.”
Another sigh. “Can’t you just trust that we’re taking care of it?”
The look I give him makes my answer clear.
“Okay. Get dressed. If you can make it upstairs to the strategy room, I’ll fill you in with everyone else. We have no time to lose. We’re headed out in an hour.” He heads for the door but pauses before leaving. “You need to prepare yourself. We may be too late.”
I set my jaw, refusing to consider that possibility.
“Then we’d better hurry, because if we are, we’re all damned.”
Getting dressed is more difficult than I expected. I move like an ancient shifter, wincing and groaning as I pull on a shirt and change my pants. At one point I consider going sock-less because bending over almost made me pass out.
If this was any other scenario, I’d admit I was too injured to go on a rescue mission.
But there isn’t anything in the world that would keep me from finding Haven.
Good thing I’m a fast healer with a high pain tolerance.
Bad thing that we’re in the middle of New York City.
If I could shift into my dragon form, it would speed up my healing, but there’s nowhere close for me to do that unseen.
I make it up to the strategy room just as Kade is starting the brief. There aren’t as many of us here as I expected, just a handful of humans and creatures. Less than a dozen. I recognize all of them.
They nod when I enter the room and take a seat next to Violet, the human who used to be part of the Florida chapter of the Order.
She relocated to NYC after the battle in Central Park.
I don’t know her well, but Talon and Locklyn are close with her.
She gives me a wan smile as I settle, and I ignore the pity in her gaze.
“Thank you, everyone, for being willing to be part of this mission,” Kade starts.
“As you all know by now, we failed in securing the asset, and now the demon has her. It’s our top priority to get her away from it.
I won’t sugarcoat it. This mission is high risk.
The demon’s powers are formidable, and we’ll be up against its followers as well.
There’s a good chance we might all not come back from it.
But securing the asset is of the utmost importance. ”
I grit my teeth at Kade’s repeated reference to Haven as “the asset,” but I keep my mouth shut.
Jeremy, seated at the far end of the table, raises his hand. “If this objective is that important, why are there so few of us?”
Kade crosses his arms, his expression hardening. “Ideally, we’d go in there with a full contingent of members, but our organization has been breached. You’re the only ones I trust right now.”
There are murmurs around the table. By now, most of them must know about Ares.
“It’s not ideal,” Kade says, quieting the side conversations. “But if we’re going into this fight, I’d rather go into it with those I’m confident will have my back. This is a stealth mission. If all goes to plan, we’ll be in and out quickly with the asset and a large team won’t be necessary.”
“And if it doesn’t go to plan?” Jax asks, a young wolf shifter who’s a good fighter but a bit of a hothead.
Kade’s gaze slides over to him. “Then we’ll adapt. But keep in mind that if we don’t get the asset away from the demon, and soon, the world as we know it is over. Its power will be unparalleled, like nothing we’ve ever seen, and it will be gunning for every man, woman, and child on the planet.”
Silence follows that comment until someone speaks up. “Okay, where do we begin?”
Kade spends the next half-hour briefing us.
The demon has been working with a vampire clan.
He believes that is who has been feeding the demon information over the past year or so, trying to locate Haven.
Kade’s had members of the clan tailed the last two weeks, and several were spotted coming and going from sewer entry points throughout the city.
He believes that’s where the demon took Haven.
“How do we know he hasn’t already taken the asset’s power and killed her?” someone asks, and the question stabs a sharp pain to the middle of my chest.
“Besides the fact that we’re still alive?” Kade asks with a raised brow. “We think it might be waiting for a celestial event to ascend to its full power. Perhaps the lunar eclipse where there’s a blood moon, which is in two days. If this information is correct, then we have a little time.”
“And if we don’t?”
Kade stares the guy down. “Then we’re already dead.”
“Where did you get this information?” I ask, and Kade glances at me. The look on his face says I’m not going to like his answer.
“Ares.”
Yep. Don’t like that.
“And you trust him?”
“It’s the best intel we have at the moment.”
So no, but we don’t have any other choice.
“Something else you all need to be aware of is that the demon’s powers seem to have grown,” Kade says, addressing the room.
“There has been a string of recent murders up and down the New England coast we think are linked to the demon. We didn’t initially put the pieces together because its M.O.
changed from young women in their late teens or early twenties, to being far less discriminant.
We think there’s a chance it’s killing to grow its magic. ”
“Why do you think that?” Violet asks with a frown.
“I’ve seen it myself,” he says, his gaze tracking over to me. “Becks has experienced it.”