Chapter 10
Stryke led everyone back to the forward operating center. The mages had already constructed a magical dome, and now that the storm was no longer pouring in, damage assessments and repairs were underway.
“Sir…uh, Taran.” A sandy-haired male with a scalp laceration and worry in his eyes looked between Stryke and Taran. “Mr. Stryke…”
Stryke made an impatient gesture at Taran. “He knows more about this operation than I do.”
The guy nodded but still addressed them both. “Our communications are completely down—radio, sat phone, personal devices. We have no way to call for assistance.”
Stryke automatically checked his wrist comms, and sure enough, there was no signal.
“A simple storm shouldn’t have knocked out the comms. Radio, sure. Maybe satellite. But the tech in my comms device network is practically bombproof.”
“But is it evil proof?” Cyan asked. She was staring out into the night, at the eerie, undulating fog that persisted despite the intense wind. It rolled and boiled like a living thing, unbothered by wind and rain that should have ripped it apart.
Evil . Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of a disruption of that sort before? When he’d assigned the team to reinforce the network against any and all potential threats, they hadn’t even considered demonic energy.
He wheeled around to Twila. “What kind of readings are you getting from the fissure?”
Gaze fixed on half a dozen screens in various states of functionality, Twila scrubbed a bleeding hand over her face. “The seismic equipment is broken, and I’m not sure the temperature readings are reliable. They’re fluctuating wildly.”
Cyan frowned. “Can I see the photos I was looking at earlier?”
As Twila brought up the images, Taran leaned close to Stryke. “Sir, can I talk to you? Alone?”
“Make it quick.” Leaving Cyan to study the images, Stryke followed Taran to his office, just off the FOC. Once inside, Taran closed the door and turned to Stryke.
“I didn’t want to say this in front of the technomancer, but all our problems began after Quillax recertified the magic that’s sealing the breach.” He jammed his fingers through his wet, dark hair, flinging droplets onto the lockers behind him. “It could be a coincidence, but the day after Quillax left, we lost one of the sensors. Right after that, we started getting seismic readings from beneath us. They were small at first. We logged them but didn’t think too much about it. Geological activity has been reported in this area for decades.”
“You mentioned the seismic readings in your last report.”
“Yes, but then they got stronger. And each time, something weird would happen right afterward. The octopus, the sharks. Yesterday, when the demon-shark thing attacked, it followed an abnormally intense seismic event.”
“Do you still have the body?”
Taran shook his head. “It disintegrated after it died.”
“Which means it was a demon and not an Earth creature transmogrified by evil.”
“Yeah. Who knows how many have come through?” He made a come-with-me gesture. “The creature disintegrated, but it left slime everywhere. We have samples in the lab-slash-secondary-emergency-care office.”
When they entered, Stryke frowned. “Where’s Dr. Arapago?”
Taran paused, then gestured to the covered body on one of the two exam tables. “He suffered a sudden catastrophic decapitation event.”
Stryke wasn’t sure he’d heard that right. “A what?”
Taran opened the door to the fridge. “The demon bit his head off.” He took a Petri dish off one of the shelves and slammed the door closed. “We need a new doctor. A medic, at least.”
“Where are the other injured?”
“They’re in their quarters. We didn’t have enough beds in here. Or a doctor who’s still alive.”
“The medical personnel were on that chopper,” Stryke said grimly. “But I can look at your staff’s injuries.”
“You get some medical training from your uncle?”
Everyone knew Stryke’s uncle was the famous—or infamous, depending on who was talking about him—founder of Underworld General Hospital. But most people didn’t know that their species possessed innate abilities that affected the body or the mind…for good or bad. Stryke’s ability was the same as his father’s, whose gift was well suited to his work as a paramedic.
“All Seminus demons have one of three abilities. Mine doesn’t heal, not like my uncle’s, but I can stop bleeding and reduce pain, and I can boost the body’s natural ability to heal.”
He could also cause bleeding and pain, but he didn’t see any reason to point that out.
“We could sure use you then—”
Cyan burst inside. “Hey, sorry to interrupt.” She sounded breathless as she forced the door closed with her shoulder. It was an inner door, but two freshly torn openings in the outer doors created a wind funnel out there. Shoving her wet, windblown hair back from her face, she addressed Taran. “How did Quillax embed the spells on the drill casing?”
“He used the submersible pod.”
Closing her eyes, she let out a little groan. “I was afraid of that.” She turned to Stryke. “I need to go down there.”
“Why? Can’t it be fixed from here?”
She shook her head. “I tried.”
“There’s got to be another way.” Stryke gestured at the single, tiny window and the swirling fog. “Using the submersible while evil is bubbling around us is too risky.”
“We don’t have much time.” She wiped water from her cheek with the back of her hand. “The spell is disintegrating. And whoever wanted the rift open, wanted it to happen slowly. They weakened the mages’ ward as well.”
The rig rocked again, and Taran reached out to steady himself on the wall. “Sir, if the seal breaks wide open, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of demonic monsters will flood into the human realm. These aren’t demons that can be rationed with. These are animalistic beasts. They give other demons nightmares. It’d be like Jurassic World , except with dinosaur-sized demons that make even the velociraptors look like house cats.”
Stryke knew all that. But he didn’t want to lose Cyan. DART would freak the hell out if they lost another of their people because of StryTech. Stryke might freak out a little too, but only because she was proving to be a great asset on the Reaper project.
Yep, that was the only reason.
Liar .
Whatever.
“How much time do we have?” he asked her.
“Best guess?” Cyan blew out a breath. “Twenty-four hours. Maybe thirty, if we’re lucky.”
Damn, he’d hoped for double that. “Okay, let’s use the time to come up with another solution. And we need a plan to make using the submersible safer. Taran, get your people on that. I’ll go down to the crew quarters and do what I can for the injured.”
“What do you want me to do?” Cyan asked.
“Work on getting communications back up. We need help.” He felt around in his pocket for his injector. He’d need his next dose soon, which would leave him with three more doses. After that, he’d be in trouble if he didn’t get off this rig or get a supply brought in.
He’d been stupid to leave without grabbing another one. But that was how he lived, wasn’t it? Daring Death to take him and making it easy for the bastard.
Clearly, being a genius didn’t mean he was smart about everything.
The communications were fucked. All of them.
No matter what Cyan did, she couldn’t get any piece of equipment to operate, even with magical assistance. One of the crew, a hyena shifter named Ubundi, did his best to repair the machines that had been damaged in the helicopter crash. But according to him, the satellite had been destroyed, and the radio, while functional, seemed to be blocked by the malevolent fog surrounding the rig.
Cyan tried using magic to boost the signals, but nothing she did affected transmissions, which led her to believe that the fog had grown thicker.
“I think we’re screwed.”
Ubundi nodded. “I cannot do anything else here. I will make sure the submersible wasn’t damaged.”
Good idea. She hadn’t thought of that. Without a way to get down to the enchanted glyphs, the seal on the breach would continue to weaken until it broke, releasing evil toxins into the human realm like radiation from a damaged nuclear reactor.
“Check the lifeboats too,” she said. “They may be our only way to get out of here if worse comes to worst.”
“I will do that.” He took off.
“We got new images!” Twila shouted. “Yes!”
“The camera is working again?”
“Thanks to whatever you did.”
Cyan had sent a generic repair spell into the equipment with few hopes of success. Thankfully, it had worked. The camera hadn’t been physically damaged, but a power surge had killed it. Fortunately, the fine weaves in her spell had patched all the burned-out components. The fix was temporary but obviously enough to relay some updated images of the damaged glyphs deep below the surface.
She hurried over to Twila’s station as the other female threw the images into the air like half a dozen big-screen TVs.
“How do the glyphs look?” Twila asked.
Cyan’s blood chilled as she compared old images to the new ones. “They’re degrading. Faster than I thought.” She peered more closely at one that had begun to peel away from the pipe. If that one went—
The floor beneath her rocked so violently that Twila stumbled and would have fallen if Cyan hadn’t steadied her. All around them, metal groaned and creaked as the platform shuddered. Outside, something screeched.
“We’re running out of time,” Cyan croaked, her throat clogged with terror.
Between the demonic danger and the threat of the platform collapsing into the sea, Cyan felt like she was on the verge of hyperventilating. Drowning in a dark body of water was her second biggest fear, right after being raped, tortured, and eaten alive by demons. All those things could happen on this death trap.
She needed to get down to the glyphs immediately.
The rig stopped shaking, but Cyan’s nerves didn’t. This assignment sucked.
Get it together. You’ve been through worse .
Absolutely. Losing loved ones was way, way worse.
Cyan used a trick her mother had called emergency mode to put her fear aside and get shit handled. Still, as rattled as she was, she made sure everyone in the FOC was okay and then made her way to the crew quarters. Stryke had said he’d be administering first aid until his “ juices ran dry .”
The guy had a lot of flaws, but no one could argue that he didn’t care about his people.
Wind howled through the cold passages as she traversed the winding hallways. Pipes ran along the corrugated-metal walls, some finished with painted paneling, others paneled with naked wood or steel, none of which did much to muffle the screeches and growls that rose from the sea below. She’d had to dart outside twice to get from one building module to another, and she’d nearly been knocked off her feet both times by what she hoped were wind gusts and not the air displacement from really big demon wings.
Please let them be squalls.
The rain had stopped, but the fog clung to her in the form of damp, cold droplets. It weighed down her hair and made her clothes stick to her skin like wet sheets. When she opened the hatch to the crew quarters, the warm, dry air welcomed her like an embrace. She was so sick of being wet.
Rubbing her arms in a futile attempt to dry herself, she hurried down the hall to the first room, but the four bunks were empty. Two beds in the second room were occupied by two bandaged males lying prone in their bunks. All four of the bunks in the third room were taken up by injured guys, but there was no sign of Stryke.
“You looking for the boss?” one called out from where he was sitting on his bunk.
“I’m looking for Stryke.”
“We heard a scream.” The guy braced his elbows on his knees and dragged his hands through his mop of blond hair. “He ran outside to see who it was after the rig stopped shaking. We’d have gone with him, but he told us to stay.”
A guy with about a dozen gashes across his chest and arms nodded weakly. “If Stryke says stay, you stay.”
Shit.
She didn’t think about how stupid it would be to go back outside. She just did the stupid thing and ran out into the piercingly cold night.
A chill instantly spread across her skin, but it wasn’t from the cold. The air felt heavy and sinister, seeping into her as she moved to the railing and craned her neck to check out the decks below and above. The mist thickened and thinned randomly, making visibility inconsistent…several yards in one direction and only a couple of feet in another. Sometimes, she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face.
“Stryke?”
An eerie silence settled all around her. Even the crash of the waves against the metal structure seemed muted.
“ Stryke ?”
A loud crash made her jump. She wheeled toward the sound, wondering why she’d come out here without grabbing the ax mounted near the exit. Sounds of a struggle came on the echoes of the crash.
Heart pounding, she followed the sound of pained grunts and fists on flesh.
Crack .
That sounded like metal striking bone.
She slipped on the wet deck as she scrambled between equipment and beams, ducking at times beneath cables as thick as her waist. The fog thinned just as she heard a thunk.
She looked up to the level above her. Dark liquid dripped through the metal grating near where Stryke stood, holding a wrench, a slimy black thing twitching at his feet. He kicked at its body, shoving it toward the platform’s edge.
Cyan mounted the stairs and reached him just as the demon tumbled over the side and into the sea.
“Stryke, are you okay?”
Gaze still fixed below, he nodded. “Thing killed Ubundi before I could stop it.”
Shock sapped the moisture from her mouth. “Where’s his body?” she croaked.
“Down there. He’s gone.”
She looked down at the churning sea and swore she saw something with tentacles and lots of teeth.
“Let’s go inside where it’s safe,” she said, turning back to Stryke.
“You go. I’ll catch up.”
She stared at him through the dense tendrils of fog that swirled in the space between them. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”
He didn’t look at her, but she swore he said something like, “I couldn’t save him.”
Not so distantly, a sound like something wet slithering on metal sent a chill up her spine.
“Stryke,” she said with growing urgency. “Let’s go.”
His head swung around, and she drew a sharp breath at the gleaming gold burning in his eyes.
“I can’t,” he growled. “It’s not safe.”
A warm wave of arousal washed over her, and instantly, she understood. “Did you bring your medicine?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crushed injector pen. “This contained four doses.” He closed his eyes. “Blade was right. I’m an arrogant asshole. I couldn’t save him.”
“Er…yeah.” He wasn’t making sense. None of this made sense. Maybe he was experiencing a nervous breakdown. Too much stress or something.
“You did everything you could for Ubundi,” she said calmly, but his eyes popped open, and he looked at her like he didn’t understand.
“Not Ubundi.”
Not Ubundi? What was he talking about?
Something in the fog snarled, and closer, something hissed. She decided to worry about whatever was wrong with Stryke later.
“Okay, we’ll deal with it inside.” He didn’t move, but he did open his eyes. Somehow, they glowed even brighter, a molten gold that made her feel like whiskey flowed through her veins. She burned in the best way. “Stryke.” She extended her hand. “We really have to go inside.”
The wrench clattered to the deck, but he still didn’t move. Fiery turmoil as violent as the stormy sea filled his expression, drawing her in with a sense of almost morbid fascination. She wanted to touch that fire. See how badly it would scorch her.
She stepped closer, her heart pumping so hard she could hear it over the roar of the wind. Desire fluttered in her belly, even as her brain screamed that they were in danger. Screamed that he was the danger.
“Come on,” she whispered, taking his hand.
His grip snapped closed on her wrist, and he wheeled them both around lightning-fast, slamming her against a huge tank. He pinned her wrists above her head and pressed his big, warm body against hers.
Teeth bared, his face inches from hers, he growled, a sound that relaxed her muscles and turned her core liquid. Oh, wow. So, this was why lust demons were so dangerous. Here they were in a situation that could get them killed, and all she wanted to do was strip off her clothes and let him do whatever he wanted to her. Right here. In the cold rain. Likely with demons stalking them.
“Go…inside,” he gritted, even as he pushed his pelvis into hers, the hard ridge of his erection making her instinctively roll her hips against it. He sucked in a harsh breath, and the gold in his eyes swirled.
“I’m not going in without you,” she said, her voice sounding more breathless than she’d like.
“Yes, you are.”
Did he understand what he was saying? Did he really want to send her away? What the hell was wrong with him?
Her lust turned to instant fury, something she was far more comfortable with around him. She jerked angrily out of his grip. “What is your deal? If you stay out here, you’ll get killed!”
“I know. But I won’t make it easy on them, and I’ll take out as many of those bastards as I can.”
Oh, gods. He was serious. He really was prepared to fight to the death. And he wasn’t even bothered by the idea. It was all just very ho-hum.
“Stryke, you don’t have to die. Come inside.”
He laughed, kind of a maniacal laugh timed perfectly with a flash of lightning. “Twila is mated, and you said you wouldn’t fuck me if I was the last male on Earth.” He turned back to the railing and looked out into the darkness. “It’s okay.”
Dammit. He was right, and he was being completely and frustratingly logical about it. Again, with the ho-hum.
She stepped next to him. “Yeah, I said that. I don’t like you—”
“I’m well aware.”
“Yeah? Okay, Mr. Smartypants, are you aware that I’m also incredibly turned on right now?”
She hated that she’d said that, but it was the truth. She didn’t like him, but damn, he was hot. No doubt the lust pheromones he was putting out were to blame for a lot of what she was feeling, but she was also honest enough with herself to know that he was an attractive male no matter what.
And maybe the crush she’d had on him for years wasn’t completely gone. Also, she’d seen how he took care of his employees. He was a dick, for sure, but he wasn’t a complete monster.
He inhaled, his broad chest expanding and making her wonder how his muscles felt under his soaked shirt.
“Yes,” he rumbled, “I am aware.” His gaze caught hers, holding her captive as he swung around to face her. “I can feel the throb of your pulse against my skin. I can smell the scent of your desire. It’s like hot honey.” His hands formed fists at his sides. “It’s driving me insane.”
Oh . His words drew pictures in her mind, explicit scenes of him kneeling between her legs while she gripped the railing and threw her head back in ecstasy, the wind lashing her skin as his tongue lashed between her legs.
“Then why…?” She paused, giving herself a second to think. To try to think. The level of arousal she was feeling right now had flipped a primal switch in her brain, and logical thought was losing the battle against her physical needs.
“Why…what?” he asked, the seething anger from earlier rising in his voice again.
“Why aren’t you asking me to help you? You’re dying, Stryke. Why can’t you ask me to save your life? Why aren’t you begging me to do it? Hell, I’ve heard your species isn’t aversive to rape, so why aren’t you throwing me down right now and taking me like the lust demon you are?”
He looked taken aback. “Is that what you want?”
Now she was taken aback. “No. Hell, no. I’d fight you tooth and nail, and I promise, my species isn’t as delicate as we appear.”
No, her species had learned to fight dirty. They’d had to, since they’d existed for thousands of years without any special gifts. They might as well have been humans. In fact, they had so much in common with humans that they’d bred with them, nearly wiping out their entire race. It wasn’t until the invention of technology that their inherent spellcasting abilities had made themselves known.
“No,” he growled, “you aren’t delicate.” His gaze raked the length of her body, growing hotter and darker. “You’ve stood your ground against me since the first time we met.”
She shivered when his eyes locked with hers. His nostrils flared, and his chest heaved, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought he might test her resolve to fight.
Then, with a blink and a shake of the head, he tore himself away, panting, his head hanging, his hands gripping the railing so tightly she feared he might crush the piping.
Damn him! Damn him for putting her in a position where she had to save his life. She’d wanted him dead more than once, had wanted him to suffer the way he’d caused so many other people to suffer. Now, she needed to save his arrogant ass because no one would make it off this rig if he was dead.
That’s not the only reason you want to save him .
No, it wasn’t. Part of her wanted him to live because she was angry. Angry that he was giving up the way her mother had after her father died. She couldn’t watch anyone let go like that again.
“Damn it, Stryke! What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you not care whether you live or die?”
He didn’t have to answer. She could see it in his eyes. There was so much pain in them—agony that went beyond the physical symptoms he must be feeling as his needs went unmet. Wrapping one arm around his middle, he doubled over, bracing his shoulder against the railing.
Suddenly, a shadow moved behind him. A shape took form in the mist, a massive, tentacled thing.
Stryke noticed it at the same time. In a jerky but fast motion, he lurched at her, catching her arm and dragging her toward the nearest hatch. The monster came after them, the wet slap of its tentacles on the metal getting louder with every frantic footstep.
They reached the hatchway with a second to spare. Stryke flung them both through and slammed the door on the tip of one of the demon’s black, slimy limbs. A six-inch section of tentacle plopped to the deck as she spun the wheel, locking the hatch.
Outside, the thing screamed.
Terror, anger, and lust ignited, lit by an adrenaline dump for the record books, and she slammed her palm into Stryke’s heaving chest. “You decided to live? Why?”
“I couldn’t let someone else die.”
His words, the rough delivery that hinted at soul-deep trauma, cooled her anger, but that only made more room for arousal.
“So, you’re ready to let me help?”
“Are you going to make me ask again?”
“The way I made you ask for help the night of your mom’s party?” Boy, he had not liked being made to ask nicely for a favor. “No. Just tell me what you need.”
His fists flew at her, and she nearly screamed when they punched into the wall on either side of her head. His face was in hers, his body pinning her with its weight. He dipped his head, and for a second, she thought he was going to kiss her. But as she tilted her face up, he put his mouth to her ear, his hot breath caressing her skin, his damp lips tickling her lobe.
“What do I need?” His throaty voice vibrated through her, making her hormones dance. “I need to fuck you, Cyan. And, gods help me, I don’t just need it. I want it.”