Chapter 37 Asher
ASHER
After taking Dev out to go hunting for food on Jada's property for a while and giving the big menace some much-deserved belly rubs for protecting me so well months ago, it's almost three in the morning when I finally slip back into Jada's guest room.
Just like I did with Heidi's room earlier when Kaenon let me know a random ghost had wandered in, I salted this room's perimeter to keep restless spirits out, just in case. I'm sure some people get it up for supernatural exhibitionism, but not me.
She has a conveniently giant-ass bed in here, and the others are already asleep in it. Heidi is sleeping in the middle of the bed, wrapped in silky sheets and nothing else, the rosy glow lingering on her beautiful, bare face making it obvious that they were up to more hanky-panky.
It's hard not to smile, seeing her look so blissfully satisfied.
One boyfriend, my ass.
This is where she belongs—surrounded by people who adore her.
Kaenon is spooning her naked, his face nuzzled close to her neck.
Zak is on the other side of Kaenon and is clearly the type of person who flops around like a fish in his sleep, because one of the nude half-demon's arms is thrown haphazardly over the ancient warrior, while one of his legs is almost off the bed.
Ian is exactly the opposite on Heidi's other side, perfectly still as he sleeps while holding one of her hands.
Apparently, he's the only one who managed to get back into his underwear before crashing.
As silently as I can, I take off my boots and lie down on Ian's other side, yawning before turning over to get some rest. When I drift off, I sleep better than I have in what feels like months, knowing Dev is back—and knowing that the most gorgeous woman I've ever seen is resting so peacefully nearby.
That all shatters when the screaming begins.
I jolt awake, my heart pounding and head already splitting from the noise. Ian is screaming and clawing at his head beside me, Zak's screams cut off into choking as he falls off the bed, and Kaenon is thrashing and jolting as if he's being electrocuted, crying out.
But it's Heidi's quiet sobbing that rips through me the hardest.
"Heidi? Heidi!" I shout, reaching over Ian to try to wake her.
"He's lying…n—no… that's…stop," she's weeping, locked in some nightmare.
I shake her gently, touching her face and calling her name, but her sleep doesn't budge.
Kaenon's scream changes abruptly into a snarl.
I glance at him—and then immediately remove Heidi from the bed when I see that Kaenon is shifting.
Rearranging discarded pillows and blankets on the thick rug, I carefully lay her down.
Then I heave Ian off the bed and set him beside her so that the lethal claws now sprouting from Kaenon's hands and tearing at the sheets don't get him, either.
When Kaenon finishes shifting, he's…a fucking sabre-toothed tiger. He's still trapped in sleep, though, snarling and hissing and clawing like he's fighting for his life.
Their screaming isn't stopping. My head throbs, and my left ear starts ringing.
Heidi's sobs are still wracking through me to rip at my heart—not even a magical rousing spell I usually use on knocked-out comrades wakes her up. The others are in no better shape. Frustrated and pissed that I feel so helpless, I look between the four of them, desperate for a solution.
An incubus. That's what this has to be. Thanks to Arati's blessing on my back, I've never had an incubus inside my head, but I know they can make it impossible to wake up as they weave dreams and nightmares.
Kaenon writhes again on the bed, but the sound of his snarl changes. I have to do a double-take because he's suddenly a giant wolf now instead of a sabre-toothed tiger.
What the fucking hell? I've never heard of someone shifting into two different animals.
Unable to stomach another second of their screaming and sobbing, I decide to take a shot in the dark and try something, anything.
First, I grab Zak from where he's fallen to the ground.
He's thrashing in his sleep, too, making my life harder for the hell of it until I can finally put him beside Heidi and Ian.
I want to try this with Kaenon, too, but I don't want to get my face clawed off, so it'll have to wait.
Wrapping my arms around Heidi, Ian, and Zak as best as I can, I try to focus through the migraine that's starting to pulse painfully through my head to summon my holy magic armor once again.
Power thrums through me as Arati's blessing jumps into action. Faint white light glows around me before it quickly spreads to them.
Ian's screaming stops as he jolts awake, no longer tearing at his own hair. Heidi does, too, with a soft gasp as tears continue to drip off her face.
Zak wakes with a pained cry and immediately turns onto his side to throw up. When he's done, he looks weak, visibly shaking as he glares at me and chokes, "Don't you fucking ever—ever—use that holy shit on me again."
Right. For a second, I completely forgot he's a half-demon. Holy magic is painful for infernal beings.
"Asher?" Heidi's whispers, her voice unsteady.
Thank gods.
Ignoring the slight exhaustion from using that particular spell, I scoop Heidi up and adjust to sit, holding her naked body close. Kissing her birthmark gently, I study her worryingly pale face.
"Are you all right? What was that about?" I demand.
More tears fill her beautiful eyes, leaking over her cheeks as she whispers, "I…I think Veld was here."
My normally sunshiney, flirty, brightly smiling empath is terrified.
I don't know who this Veld is, but he's not going to be breathing much longer for putting her into this state.
Ian sits up too, staring at nothing in particular in the room. "I'm going to fucking kill that incubus."
"You know him?"
"No. I just heard him speaking gibberish in my head."
Kaenon's snarls finally die off on the ripped-up bed. For a second, there's just a massive sleeping wolf there—and then he shifts back into human form, sitting up with wide eyes, chest rising and falling with labored breathing.
Heidi is watching him, confused and still too pale. "So you were the wolf I heard."
The ancient warrior sees us all on the floor, his brow furrowed deeply. "Yes. And that…that was a warning. He taunts us with his cruelties."
Not for the first time, I thank Koa that Jada is a brilliant inventor in her own right.
She must have enchanted the translation devices she made for our team years ago so they wouldn't break on shifter bounty hunters when they shifted on the mission, since the metal shell around Kaenon's ear is still intact.
"Explain what you mean," I press.
"First, you must understand the atrocity that is Veld and Nivarrah."
I listen as Kaenon explains that long ago, Veld started tormenting Nivarrah, his "fated one," by rubbing his unwanted relations with other women in her face.
Nivarrah lost her mind and murdered the fae king's niece before she was sentenced to the same merciful punishment as Veld, being used for scientific experiments.
And how, when Heidi woke them up, Veld pinpointed her as someone he could use to torment Nivarrah.
"He was here, in my head again this night," Kaenon grits, rubbing his temples. "Tormenting me with a dream that he had spirited my mate away. I chased him into the woods, trying to reach her, but when I arrived, all that remained was her beautiful coat hanging upon a branch."
I don't understand why he looks so sick until I realize he means her deer's coat.
Veld is fucking sick.
I look at Ian, expecting him to share his dream. The look he gives me says he's not about to share whatever Veld was torturing him with before he moves closer to touch Heidi's face, flinching slightly at whatever she's feeling.
"Sunshine? What was your nightmare about? Whatever it was, I swear we'll make him pay for it," the thrall adds.
Heidi curls up tighter to my chest like she craves my protection. As shitty as this early morning is becoming, that little show of her trust in me goes right to my head and makes me feel like a fucking god.
"It was the same bad dream I told you about before," Heidi tells Ian. "Except at the end, I remember now that…he was touching me. All over. Just…laughing while I panicked. That's all."
Furious bile rises in my throat at the thought of this woman stuck inside her own head, left to that sick fuck's amusement. I don't know what dream she's talking about, but from Ian's furious expression, it must be bad.
Godsdamn it.
After getting my pals at the RLHNA involved in all of Everett's demands for Marwood's sources to print a retraction for all the libel and the ways they've slandered Heidi's name—followed by them hopefully taking that chancellor down a few pegs—I hoped the threats against Heidi would start to diminish.
Finding out that there's a powerful incubus sex offender on the loose who has her in his sights just to make his very deadly woman jealous?
Ian is right. Somehow, we're going to find this piece of shit and make him pay.
Not wanting to push Heidi for more information, I simply hold her. At some point, we return to the bed, the others gathered close as they recover from their nightmares.
Zak flops onto the bed with his eyes shut. He's still nauseous-looking and beaded in sweat, which is probably my holy magic's fault.
Just as I'm deciding I need to relinquish Heidi's soft, warm body to one of the others so I can check on Jada and her quintet and possibly hunt the incubus with Dev, my phone starts buzzing on the nightstand where I left it earlier.
Ian grabs it for me, since I'm still cradling Heidi close. He checks the ID and snorts.
"Sure, why not piss off an ice elemental at four in the morning for not keeping my distance like he asked? Today is already turning out to be a bag of ass compared to yesterday."
"It is cock," Kaenon agrees, rubbing his face like he's tired.
Ian gives him a perplexed look before answering my phone, putting it on speaker.
"Need something, Evie?"
The thrall is clearly expecting to make Frost mad by answering. Still, there's barely even a pause on the other end before Everett demands, "Where's Douglas?"
There's a desperate, broken edge to his voice that I recognize at once.
In the last couple of months, ever since I've really recovered from the coma, the Amato quintet has reached out to me once or twice whenever one of them got really hurt while hunting the fiends in the Nether. Particularly whenever Maven got injured, even if it was mild.
The thing is, she can really only be healed from severe injuries through holy magic now—although thanks to the way her holy demigoddess blood interacts uniquely with magic, Silas can heal her a bit anytime he's fed recently on her.
If Everett sounds like this, it's because his keeper is hurt.
"I'm here," I tell him. Not one for stupid questions that I can just ask when they get here, I rattle off our coordinates.
"We're transporting," he says before the call ends with a click.
Kaenon looks at me, confused. "Who was that?"
Heidi sits up in my arms, finally looking a bit less pale and withdrawn. "That was my brother. Is he okay? Why are they coming here?"
"I think Maven is injured," I explain, gently moving her onto Ian's lap before I slip out of bed to get my boots back on.
Zak peeks open an eye, curious. "The telum is going to be here?"
"You're not going near her," I inform him immediately.
"Why? Worried a half-demon mutt like me's gonna hurt the world's oh-so-precious demigoddess or something?"
A sharp, humorless laugh escapes me.
"Not remotely. I just know this psychotic quintet—if their freaky keeper is hurt in any way, they'll be more bloodthirsty than usual.
Which means if you go up there and so much as breathe near her, one of those fuckers will probably snap your neck.
Just stay down here and try to go back to sleep," I add, looking into Heidi's eyes so she knows I mean her, too.
"I'll heal whoever is hurt quickly, and I'll be right back. "
A minute later, I'm knocking lightly on Jada's door. She should know she's about to have visitors, and if Crypt is with them, she'll have to invite that bastard siphon inside.
I didn't hear Jada's quintet screaming up here from Veld's visit, so I'm hoping he ignored them. Then again, my hearing isn't perfect these days.
One of Jada's quintet members opens the door, blinking groggily at me. "Oh. Asher. Is something wrong?"
At least I know we didn't wake them up with all that screaming.
"We might have company of the Amato variety in a second. If you don't want them inside, I get it because this is late notice. I can just go outside—"
Her mouth drops open, her eyes wide. "Are you serious? Yes, that's okay! We're all big fans. We'll be right down to welcome them." Then she looks down at her pajamas. "Oh, gods. I can't let the demigoddess see me in this!"
She shuts the door to wake her quintet while I go downstairs to the combined living room entry area.
I've just finished turning on lights, scooting the coffee table and couches back, and rolling a rug inside in case there's blood when Silas Crane's intense magical signature sears through my senses, telling me they're here somewhere.
The front doors of Jada's house are thrown open with a loud bang, making me swear.
Crypt motherfucking DeLune is standing at the doors he can't walk through since he hasn't been invited in.
The purple-eyed bastard is covered in gore and looks like madness personified as he calls over his shoulder urgently.
"This way. Quickly, Decimus!"