Chapter 10 - Drake
The words barely registered. If it had come from anyone other than Oz, I might not have believed them. But I trusted Oz implicitly.
“Do you know anything else?” I asked, already beginning to pack things up. Liv helped without question, though I didn’t miss the worried glances in my direction as I kept talking.
“Not right now. How fast can you get here?”
I glanced over at Liv. “I’ve got a couple of things to take care of first. Give me an hour or so.”
“Get here quicker if you can.”
I hung up and turned to Liv. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted to—”
“Don’t be,” Liv interjected, shaking her head. She was already collecting everything and shoving it back in the backpack. Her face had grown pale, but her smile stayed in place, if a little more hesitant than before. “Let’s get out of here.”
Before we left, I made sure the guards had returned to guard the entrance. “Don’t leave until I’ve come with your relief,” I ordered them. “Me in particular.”
They nodded. If they had any questions about why I had been in the underground spring with my mate, they were smart enough not to ask. I nodded in satisfaction and turned to Liv.
“We’re going to have to go fast,” I said, and she nodded.
I should have run straight to meet with Elias and the rest of them. Instead, I shifted and bent down so Liv could climb on my back. Her fingers gripped the fur between my shoulder blades as she got settled. Then, I took off, bolting back through the desert toward our house.
As we ran, I tried to get my thoughts under control. Something had torn down the wards. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t know much about magic, not as much as Rachel or Emma, but I knew enough to know that nothing should be able to do that. Not unless they were incredibly powerful.
Thoughts of what it might be continued to swirl, blocking out all other thoughts. The picnic with Liv, as nice as it had been, was as far out of my mind as it was possible to be.
We got home, and Liv slid off my back. I shifted back to human and ushered her back into the house.
“What are you—” she began, then stopped when the cell phone in my backpack began ringing. I pulled it out.
“Forget Town Hall. Get to the oasis,” Oz said, his voice tight, an almost bewildered or uneasy tone to it.
“Be there in a sec,” I responded before hanging up. I turned back to Liv.
“Stay here,” I growled.
She hesitated in the doorway, chewing her bottom lip the way she did whenever she was really worried, the way she had since we were kids.
I knew that look. She didn’t want to sit by, helpless.
She wanted to do something, but we both knew she couldn’t.
Not about this. That wouldn’t stop her from hating sitting idly by.
“Please,” I added.
She didn’t answer at first, some conflict warring inside her. After a moment, her shoulders sagged, and she nodded, eyes weary.
“Just get home safe, please,” she said.
“I’ll do my best,” I promised.
Before she could say anything else, I shifted.
I could still feel her worry through the mating bond.
The fact that whatever had happened was making my mate this worried only intensified my own rage and that of my wolf.
Whoever was behind it, the wraith or the threat the Oracle warned me about or something else entirely, they were going to pay.
Before I left, though, I padded forward and gave Liv a reassuring lick on the cheek. She giggled. That, at least, was something.
I turned and sprinted down the road, racing as fast as I could for the oasis. Oz hadn’t told me what to expect, but I knew the tone of his voice well enough to know that whatever had happened, it was bad.
When I arrived and shifted back to human, I came across an entire crowd of people swarming around, all their attention directed at one spot. A ripple of unease spilled through the air, making the hair on the back of my neck prickle.
I pushed through the crowd, searching for Oz, eventually finding him with Sam, Elias, and a few other guards. “What’s going on?” I asked when I got up to them.
Elias glanced at me, lips curling down. I could tell he was tempted to demand what had taken me so long.
“I was out with Liv. I wanted to make sure she got home safe,” I said before he could demand an explanation.
That was enough to pacify him. He understood the need to protect mates. He nodded.
“The wards dropped an hour ago,” Elias said. “And then he showed up.”
I followed his gaze and blinked. A tall man in an impeccable suit stood at the edge of the oasis.
I called him a man because there wasn’t any other way to describe him, but there was no way in hell he was human.
His fingers were too long and angular, his features just wrong enough to be noticeable and unsettling, and his eyes were charcoal-black, not a hint of white to them.
A demon, and not a lesser one like the imps and other things that had been running amok these past few months. This was a high demon, the kind the others bowed to.
He regarded us impassively as we stalked toward him.
“Who are you, demon?” Elias snarled.
The demon smiled, its teeth too sharp, the smile unsettling.
“Azaret,” it said. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Alpha. I’ve heard a great deal about you and the rest of this town. I must say, the descriptions don’t do it justice. It’s rather lovely here. I can see why so many covet it.”
He spoke as if giving a bland assessment of an interesting piece of art or maybe a fancy car.
That wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was the thinly veiled threat looming in that conversational tone.
He wasn’t hiding it. It reminded me a bit of how stereotypical mobsters would threaten people.
Nice town you got here. Would be a shame if something happened to it.
Elias seemed to get the same impression because I could hear his growl as he glowered at the demon. He stepped forward, and Azaret watched him with interest. The demon’s eyes sparkled with amusement, like he was a lion watching a kitten trying to be fierce.
“What are you doing here?” Elias demanded.
“I’m here to give you a warning,” Azaret said with a smile that would have made milk curdle. “One that would be in everyone’s best interest if you accepted.”
Elias folded his arms, eyes narrowing.
“Let me guess,” I said. “It involves us leaving the oasis and never coming back?”
Azaret turned that smile onto me. “Why, yes, that is more or less the general concept. And here I was worried that I would have to spell it out for you. It seems your kind isn’t as unintelligent as I had been led to believe after all.”
“And the message is from the wraith, I’m guessing?” Elias asked.
Azaret nodded. “Right again, wolves. Yes, the wraith and I currently have an arrangement of sorts. He asked me to emphasize the sincerity of the message.”
“You have to know he isn’t on your side,” I said. “He’s going to turn on you the second you’re no longer useful to him.”
Azaret raised an eyebrow. “Shocking, and here I thought our relationship was a perfect union and that neither of us would dare betray the other for our own merit. I’m nearly a millennium old, pup. I know how these games are played far better than you ever will.”
“Then why are you helping him?” Oz asked.
He chortled, the sound seeming to reverberate all around us. “Can’t you feel the magic thrumming through this desert?” he asked. “It’s all over, and ripe for the taking.” He inhaled deeply, as if he could smell the magic. For all I knew, he could. “The things I can do once I tap into that power...”
A ripple of alarm rumbled through the watching people at the threat. Personally, I didn’t want to imagine what he might be able to do with that power, and I had no intention of his ever giving us a demonstration. At that moment, all I intended was for this demon to go home in pieces.
Azaret watched us, looking to see what sort of threat his warning had elicited. He tilted his head, one eyebrow raised as if he thought he wasn’t receiving the reaction he had yearned for as we continued staring out at him.
“You’ve given your message,” Sam said. “Now you can leave.”
Sighing, the demon regarded us, as bored as if he were sitting through a three-hour-long documentary about paint drying. “I take it that means you are going to refuse this kind offer?”
“Correct,” Elias barked.
“I would reconsider, wolf,” Azaret said. He gestured around us. “A storm is coming. You saw how easily I removed your wards. I can do so again. Leaving now would save far more lives than trying to fight before your inevitable surrender after countless deaths.”
There was some truth to his comments. He could disable our wards. With that, there was only so much we could do to protect ourselves against him. I wasn’t sure what storm Azaret was warning of, but I knew that whatever it was, we were all in danger if we didn’t prepare for it.
I glanced over at Elias, even though I already knew what he would say. I had known it the second Azaret gave us the offer in the first place.
“No deal,” Elias snarled. “Get the hell out of our town before you wish you’d never set foot here.”
The other wolves nodded, snarling their approval as Elias remained resolute.
Azaret watched the display with a raised eyebrow, his lip tilted a fraction upward, as if he found the whole display amusing. He didn’t respond as a swell of heckling rose toward him. Several of the male onlookers stepped forward, as if ready to spring forward and attack the demon.
Azaret remained unfazed as he took in the threats.
He didn’t seem surprised by any of it. He had expected the refusal.
The warning had been more to establish himself as a credible threat, to make us understand precisely what we were dealing with.
He hadn’t expected us to pack up and leave.
Part of me thought he didn’t want us to in the first place, because it would prevent him from being able to torment us. He was a demon, after all.
“Such bravado and theatrics,” Azaret sighed, then shrugged. “Very well. I offered you a chance.”
He snapped his fingers.
The sound seemed to carry over the cries and shouts, as if a gunshot rather than the small click of finger against thumb. Before the crowd had even registered that a threat was coming, imps and other lesser demons swarmed down like a flock of birds, seeming to pour into the oasis from all sides.
“Get everyone out,” Elias ordered seconds before he shifted into his wolf. He lunged for the nearest imp, jaws snapping around its neck and shaking.
The crowd of people began rushing toward the exits, fleeing from the pavilion.
Oz and I pushed through the throng, charging toward one of the streets to keep it clear, attacking any demon or imp in our way as we tried to forge a path for running pack members.
Several men stayed behind along with the guards, ready to fight.
Pandemonium ensued. At some point during the furor, after the civilians were gone and I had thrown myself back into the fray, I felt a jolt of panic that wasn’t my own shoot through me.
It took me a moment to realize it was Liv through the mating bond.
I hated the idea of her worrying. As I continued lunging after the demons, I tried to send reassuring, soothing emotions back toward her.
At some point, a path cleared, and I could see Azaret watching over everything.
Here it was, the chance to end things. I sprinted toward Azaret, determined to reach him, to find a way to take him out and end all of this once and for all before it got too out of hand.
Azaret watched me near, that faint, amused smirk still dancing on his face.
“Until next time, wolf,” he said as I approached.
He vanished as if he had never been there at all, leaving us to deal with the swarm of demons still spilling into the pavilion.
The fight continued for some time, the bodies piling up even as more demons emerged, as if the whole thing was a Sisyphean task. I thought we were going to keep fighting for hours, until we were all wiped out. It seemed hopeless, a never-ending fight.
Then, the demons vanished, spilling out of the oasis, running out of the town, leaving us alone with the bodies that littered the ground, shifter and demon both.
We paused, the square strangely quiet after the tumult. Elias shifted back to human, and the rest of us soon followed.
“They probably could have killed all of us,” Elias commented, his eyes narrowed. “You saw how many there were. You know he has to have more of them skulking around. So why didn’t he just end us right here and now?”
I glanced around, still panting from exertion as that rage and fury continued to build and roil inside me. “Because he wants us to be afraid,” I said. “He’s a demon. He likes to play with his food.”
None of the others responded, but we all looked out at the destruction across the oasis. A few hours earlier, everyone here had felt safe. They had come here to play and enjoy a summer morning. Instead, what they had gotten were demons, death, and devastation.
I hadn’t thought Silver Falls would experience something worse than the wraith.
It hadn’t seemed possible, not here, not with the desert protecting us.
Looking out at the chaos, replaying the scene that had just happened over and over again in my mind, I realized that we were in for a lot worse in the coming weeks if we weren’t able to put a stop to Azaret.