Chapter Fifteen
Standing in her backyard a week later, Wynter sighed. “Really, you don’t have to come with me.”
Looking up from the flower bed, Delilah pointed her spade at her. “We’re all going, and that’s that.”
“There’s no need.”
“Thanks to the price on your head, there’s every need,”
Anabel insisted, leaning back against an old oak. “You shouldn’t be going anywhere alone.”
Wynter didn’t fear that anyone would try kidnapping her again anytime soon. People were still a little cowed after what the Ancients did to Shelia. Her screams had apparently been heard far and wide throughout the city, and the story of how she met her end had circulated wildly. No one had even so much as looked at Wynter wrong since then.
She wasn’t worried that Adam would strike again soon either, considering he’d caused a thunderstorm just two nights ago. There’d been some damage to the town but not a lot, thanks to the quick intervention of the Ancients. Wynter hadn’t witnessed any of it, since she’d been at the cottage when it all kicked off.
“You can’t afford to get complacent, Wyn,”
said Xavier, lounging in the gently swaying hammock.
She frowned. “I’m not. I just figured you might all want to stay home rather than wait for me in what I noticed through the salon window was a very small reception area. Plus, you all planned to spend your day off work relaxing.”
Sat at the patio table, Hattie briefly peeked up from her book. “And we’ll get back to that once your trip to the salon is over and done with.”
In truth, Wynter hadn’t thought they’d choose to stay behind. But, thanks to the latest attempt to hand her over to Adam, it had been days since her coven had looked this relaxed. Though they weren’t wound quite as tight, they still hadn’t gotten over the incident. Mostly because she’d been missing for several hours and they’d failed to find her themselves—that failure seemed to sit heavy on their chests, despite her assurances that it shouldn’t.
It was no doubt why they’d insisted on a few precautions. Delilah had magickly boobytrapped the cottage. Anabel was creating—and hopefully not testing on herself—all kinds of offensive potions. Hattie had whipped up some of her special deadly teas to force-drink to intruders. And Xavier stood guard inside the shed while Wynter worked—something she’d allowed, since Cain had threatened to otherwise post Maxim inside, and she didn’t want Cain to be short of an aide.
Much like when the threat of Saul had hung over her head, Cain now checked on her a few times a day. Which she might have protested to if she didn’t know he needed to reassure himself that she hadn’t been taken again. He still hadn’t quite moved past that yet.
But then, that was no surprise, was it? Cain was an extremely powerful being. He wasn’t used to being helpless or thwarted. More, he wasn’t used to things being out of his control.
Waking Abaddon might have done a fantastic job of easing his tension and anger, but the Ancients were still struggling to wake him. According to Cain, some were losing hope that they’d ever have any success with it—mostly Ishtar and Inanna.
“Personally, I don’t know why you want to go to a salon.”
Delilah sliced her shovel through the soil. “Your hair looks fine.”
“There are too many split ends for my liking.”
Wynter stretched out a few strands. “It needs a trim.”
“I can do it for you,”
Delilah offered.
Wynter snorted. “Are you forgetting what happened the last time I let you near my hair with scissors?”
They’d been on the run back then, so Wynter had been content to skip a trip to the salon. She’d only wanted Delilah to take an inch off the length, but the woman had cocked it up like a boss. In the end, a professional hairdresser had had to cut off four inches just to even it all out.
Delilah’s back straightened. “Excuse me, I did a very good job.”
“You did a hack job.”
A huff. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“It looked like someone went at my hair with hedge cutters. In a panic. While blindfolded. And shaking like a shitting dog.”
“You’re exaggerating. Xavier, tell her she’s exaggerating.”
Wynter folded her arms. “You think the word of a habitual liar will honestly add weight to your claim?”
“Anabel, you back me up on this.”
The blonde frowned. “But then I’d have to lie.”
“And doing that doesn’t make you feel all warm and giddy?”
Xavier asked her.
“No,”
Anabel told him. “No, you’re alone on that one.”
Snickering, Wynter idly rubbed at her neck. The bite there tingled as her fingers skated over it. She wasn’t sure what the tingling was about, but it appeared to be a permanent thing. As did the bite mark itself. It no longer bled, but it hadn’t healed. It was still as prominent as it had been on the night Cain’s monster bit her. So she hadn’t been able to escape questions from her coven.
Wynter had talked around the subject, telling them only that it had bitten her during sex because it was all wound up after she’d been kidnapped. She didn’t mention the whole “binding”
thing. Cain had asked her not to reveal to anyone that his kind could tie their life-force to that of another. For him, the less people knew about the Ancients, the better.
His creature hadn’t again surfaced in the bedroom, but she’d occasionally noticed something move behind Cain’s eyes while he took her; she knew it was his monster. Knew it wanted to make its presence known to her.
“Right, I’m done.”
Delilah removed her gloves and tossed all her gardening tools into her basket, adding the rolled-up kneeling mat just before she stood. “Let me wash my hands and then we can go.”
“You might also want to wash your nose.”
Wynter pointed at it. “You got some soil there.”
“Why would someone want to eat hair pie?”
Hattie asked no one in particular.
Delilah made a choking sound. “What?”
Hattie tipped her chin toward her book. “A man here said he’s going to go home, find his wife, and eat some hair pie. I’ve never heard of it before.”
She tapped her chin. “I wonder if it’s some sort of strange exotic delicacy.”
Oh, dear God.
“It could be,”
said Anabel, tipping over the hammock when a silently laughing Xavier seemed about to answer the old woman’s question.
He hit the ground with a thud. “Ow.”
“I fail to see the appeal in a lot of those delicacies,”
Hattie went on, prim. “Especially fried tarantulas and bird’s nest soup. Very not my thing.”
Anabel sidled up to Wynter. “Just this one time, let her believe her own assumption,”
she said, her voice low.
Having absolutely no desire to explain to an old woman that eating hair pie was slang for oral sex, Wynter shrugged at the blonde and whispered, “Fine.”
Shortly afterwards, they made their way to one of the city towers and used its elevator to ascend to the town’s manor. Outside, they walked along the streets en route to the only hair salon at Devil’s Cradle, which was run by lion shifters.
It was cooler up here than in the city. The hue of the sun was now a deep gold as it began to set. The sky was a swirl of pretty colors—mostly purples, oranges, and pinks. Silhouette shadows stretched along the ground like dark fingers.
“It might not be so easy to get an appointment,”
Delilah warned her.
Wynter gave a slight shrug. “I don’t mind pre-booking one.”
“I don’t mean I think they’ll be too busy to fit you in, I mean that there’s a chance they won’t want to.”
Dodging one of the many sapling trees on the sidewalk, Wynter frowned. “And why wouldn’t they want to?”
Delilah fired an incredulous look her way. “You can’t not have noticed how many people won’t dare meet your eyes these days. They’re afraid they might accidentally offend you and earn Cain’s wrath.”
“That’s dumb.”
“That’s fear,”
Xavier cut in. “Most had never seen the Ancients indulge in a little torture. They’d heard stories, of course, but stories can be twisted, exaggerated, or incomplete—as I often demonstrate. So there was a lot of ‘oh, the Ancients probably aren’t really that pitiless.’ Until Shelia.”
Anabel nodded. “The woman died hard.”
Wynter halted. “Are you saying that people think she should have been given mercy?”
“No,”
Anabel quickly replied. “Far from it.”
“No one’s judging Cain or Ishtar for what they did,”
said Xavier. “Least of all us. It’s not like the Ancients didn’t warn people what would happen if they chose to do favors for Adam. But although people don’t blame Cain for how far he went in avenging you, they do worry that he’ll react just as badly to the merest slight on you.”
“Not that that makes you completely safe,”
Hattie chimed in. “There are some who are too stupid to heed fear.”
“And some who get off so much on taking risks that it trumps their sense of self-preservation,”
Delilah added.
Wynter eyed the Latina. “Kind of like you, really.”
Delilah gave a slow nod. “Kind of like me.”
Xavier frowned at something behind Wynter. “Hey, what’s that?”
She turned. Stilled. Felt her stomach roll and her jaw drop.
A thick, orange-tinged, smoky mass stretched way up into the sky . . . like a humungous cloudy wall. Only it wasn’t a cloud. Or smoke. It was a huge-as-fuck force of sand.
And it was heading right for the town.
Wynter’s heart slammed against her ribcage. Oh, no.
“There’s more of them!”
shouted Anabel.
It was only then Wynter realized that stormy walls of sand were coming at the town from all sides. And they were coming supernaturally fast. Flumes of whirling dirt zipped in and out of them, all but hoovering off the ground whatever they touched. Dust devils.
Oh, this wasn’t good. Like, at all.
“Move!”
she yelled at her coven, urging them toward the ice-cream parlor way up ahead of them.
Sounds of alarm went up as others spotted the walls of brown air. People scrambled for shelter, but it was too late. There was no escape. Not when the looming gusts rushed at them like a tidal wave from every angle. They swept across the town, all but engulfing it. And it was like the day turned to an orange-hued night.
Grains of dust pelted Wynter’s skin, feeling like tiny little bites. She staggered as the various winds slapped her hard enough to sting, taking her breath away; whipping her hair one way and then another so that it lashed her cheeks.
She ducked her head and threw up her arm to shield her face, but there was no way to avoid the swirls of dust. No way to stop it from slipping into her ears, entering her mouth, or shooting up her nose.
Coughing, Wynter looked around for her coven. There was no sign of them. Because they’d ran? Because she’d been turned around by her wind too much? Or because visibility was plain shit? She didn’t know. She couldn’t see anything through the orange-tinged haze.
She stooped over to get some reprieve from the rougher blasts. “Get low to the ground!”
she shouted, only able to hope that her coven heard her. She then clamped her lips shut and tugged up the collar of her crazily flapping tee to cover her nose and mouth.
While she saw virtually nothing, she heard everything. Panicked voices yelling. Tree branches snapping. Hanging signs creaking. Objects crashing to the ground. The wild winds whistling and howling as they beat against hard surfaces.
Wynter flinched as something brushed by her at top speed. Something fast and almost ghostly. Dust devil.
“Where are you, Darla?”
a male voice demanded. “Where are you? I can’t—”
He let out a cry that gradually faded, as if he’d been swooped away by one of the mini tornadoes.
Wynter’s stomach bottomed out. Fuck, they needed to get off the damn street.
Easier said than done when her sense of direction was non-existent. There was just so much sand and noise and wind—she couldn’t get her bearings. Trying to look around would only lead to her getting more sand in her eyes.
Even if she knew where to go, she wasn’t sure she could fight against the power of the gale-force winds. This storm was so much more powerful than the blizzard.
Muffled cries of alarm came from Anabel, but Wynter couldn’t pinpoint the blonde’s exact location—the gale seemed to be sweeping the sounds around.
She jumped as another ghostly force whispered over her body as it zipped by at top speed. If the subsequent distinct crack was anything to go by, it had taken a damn tree with it.
A powerful blast of sand whacked her face and—
She hissed in pain because, fuck, that wasn’t just sand. There’d been a rock or something. It had hit her smack on the cheek, leaving it throbbing and stinging in a way that told her she was bleeding.
Fabulous.
There might have been something awing about the power of the storm if it wasn’t created by annoying elemental beings rather than nature.
Her heart beating hard with panic and adrenaline, she turned again and again, hoping to see or hear something that pointed her toward her coven. But with the wind roaring down her ears and bits of grit pelting her eyeballs, she was far too disoriented.
Wynter tensed as something mostly transparent shimmered in the hazy air. The force clashed with the winds. Pure power, she sensed. Old and very potent power.
Her pulse jumped. One or more of the Ancients had appeared.
The gusts gradually calmed and . . . it was weird, but it was like something was sucking the grains of sand upwards. She felt them leaving her hair, skin, clothes, nose, ears, everything. The grit went up and up and up, high above all the buildings, leaving the air clear once again.
Then all that grit turned to a fast-moving funnel that soon began to hum with the buzzing and droning of insects. Cain had clearly done what appeared to be his favorite thing and twisted the elemental power in a fuck you to the Aeons.
She turned to look at the manor. Several of the Ancients stood on the roof, including him. She couldn’t see his expression properly from so far away, but she knew his gaze was locked on her. Felt it drumming into her skin.
“Well, that went to hell fast,”
a familiar voice croaked.
Wynter spun to see Hattie cupping her neck while coughing like a chain smoker. The rest of her coven were spread out a little, so they too had clearly gotten tossed everywhere by the storm.
As they all made their way to each other, Wynter coughed and blinked hard. Her eyes stung like a bitch.
She took a moment to glance around. Thanks to Cain, there was no blanket of dust over the town. Hell, there wasn’t even a faint haze of it lingering in the air. Every tiny little bit of grit was gone. Hence why she could quite easily see that, fuck, the storm had left some serious damage in its wake.
Everywhere she looked, things were flipped, torn, broken, and crushed. One of the power lines was down. A sapling tree lay in the middle of the road. Debris was scattered all around, along with tree branches, flower pots, and business signs.
Worse than all of that, bodies were sprawled on the ground further up the street. At least five. Please just be unconscious.
Anabel stretched out her tongue. “Ugh, I can feel little bits of grit in my mouth.”
Xavier pulled a face. “Pretty sure I’ve got some stuck between my teeth.”
“Fucking Adam needs to die,”
said Delilah between coughs.
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Wynter took a long, ragged breath. She doubted the Aeons responsible for the almighty storm had stuck around long. They never did when sent to do Adam’s dirty work. Which was a shame, because capturing one would be fantastic.
Glancing toward the manor, Anabel rubbed at her arm. “I have to be honest, knowing just how powerful the Ancients are makes me nervous.”
Delilah snickered. “What doesn’t?”
Anabel shot her a narrow-eyed look.
Wynter quickly cut in, “I say we go back to the cottage and down some tea that’ll ease the pain in our throats.”
“Cain will want to see you,”
said Xavier.
“He can see me,”
Wynter pointed out. “He knows I’m fine. Besides, he and the Ancients will be busy ordering their aides to fix the damage.”
They’d also probably have a little meeting about the storm, even if only to moan about Adam—it was what they usually did after his stunts.
Xavier gave her a ‘fair enough’ look and waved a hand toward the manor. “Then let’s go.”
*
Standing under the hot spray, Wynter looked down at the dust sliding toward the drain. Yeah, it turned out that not all the sand had been plucked from her hair. Washing it away was proving to be a bitch. It clung to her worse than any beach sand. She’d had to shampoo her hair three times and condition it twice before she could be sure it was free of grit.
At least the grains were no longer in her mouth or eyes. Also, her throat felt better, thanks to the herbal tea Delilah had made the moment they returned home. It tasted like ass, but it also did its job well.
Once out of the shower, Wynter dried herself off, pulled on some clothes, and then tackled the wet mop on her head with a brush and hairdryer. Done, she headed down to the kitchen.
The coven sat at the table, all now clean and chatting amongst themselves. Wynter only distantly noted them, though. Her attention was snagged by the tall, lean figure standing off to the side. Cain.
Azazel was also present, and he was focused on Anabel, who was currently demonstrating that it wasn’t possible for a person to lick their own elbow. The Ancient didn’t appear to know what to make of her. But then, most didn’t.
Wynter walked straight into Cain’s arms, humming in satisfaction when he curled them tight around her. “You’re here.”
“Just this moment arrived. I expected to find you in our chamber.”
And he seemed so very confused that things hadn’t gone his way.
She felt her lips twitch. “What can I say? I like keeping you on your toes. I also badly needed one of Delilah’s nifty teas. My throat was raw from the storm. How’s yours?”
He gave her neck a soothing rub. “Fine. I wasn’t caught in the storm long, and I dealt with it quickly.”
Wynter licked her lips and then asked the question that had been gnawing at her. “Those people who were lying on the ground . . . were they dead?”
Cain’s expression turned dark. “Three were. The others were out cold.”
She closed her eyes. “Fuck. I really, really, really, really hate the Aeons. I’m guessing none were caught.”
“They fled too quickly,”
he confirmed. “Adam would have ordered them to retreat once any Ancients intervened—he won’t want us eating into more of his numbers.”
Tough, because they’d be “eating”
all of his people very soon. She refused to believe that the Ancients’ attempts to pierce the prison wouldn’t be successful.
Twisting in her chair, Hattie eyed Azazel from head to toe. “You strike me as a worldly man. Have you ever eaten hair pie? Apparently it’s an exotic delicacy of some kind.”
Oh, for the love of all that’s holy.
Azazel fought a smile and looked over at Cain, who was doing the same.
Wynter gave both Ancients a narrow-eyed “It’s not funny” look.
Delilah seemed to agree, since she’d ducked her head with a groan. Similarly, Anabel had shoved her face in her hands while cursing softly.
Xavier, on the other hand, chuckled like an idiot and then turned to Wynter. “See, this is what happens when we neglect to share important details with her.”
Sighing, Wynter tipped her chin toward the old woman and then told Xavier, “Take her aside and quietly explain before she presses Azazel for more info.”
Grinning, Xavier nodded, urged Hattie out of her seat, and then pulled her to the corner of the room.
Cain squeezed Wynter’s nape. “She’s an . . . interesting woman.”
Delilah snorted. “She’s a menace.”
“And completely shameless,”
added Anabel. “Which I think is why she and Xavier are so in tune with each other—he’s no better.”
“I heard that,”
he said as he and Hattie broke apart.
The old woman shuffled over to the table. “I can’t believe none of you told me the truth. I need to know about such slang. You know I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of George by looking clueless.”
Anabel’s nose wrinkled. “I hardly think he’s going to use that term, like, ever.”
“Perhaps not, but you still should’ve explained,”
said Hattie. “It’s not like I would have fainted like some unworldly maiden. Though, yes, it’s disgusting that some people put pubic hairs in their pies.”
Anabel jerked. “That’s not what—Xavier!”
She crossed to where he was bent over laughing and then tapped his forehead hard three times, ignoring his “ouch”. “Nothing up here but empty space I’ll swear it.”
He rubbed at the spot she’d poked. “That hurt.”
Azazel looked at Wynter. “No one can ever say that your coven isn’t entertaining.”
If one found “crazy”
entertaining then, no, it could not be said.