Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
Blake’s people seemed frozen in place—either by magic or by shock—as quiet, easily frightened Kes regarded me with an uncharacteristic frown.
“Not much help, are you?” she announced in a deep, growling male voice.
To their credit, our enemies tried. But they were human, and before they could even reach for their stolen magic, the slender half-fae was on them in a whirlwind of blows that somehow sounded meatier than her tiny fists would suggest.
A few minutes later, all eight were lying on the floor, tightly bound by cut-up lengths of electrical cords and gagged with the same tape they’d used on me.
And then—finally—the tape was ripped off my mouth, the bonds sliced from my arms, and my rescuer crouched by my chair with a look of annoyance.
“Do I have to do everything around here?”
I shrugged. “Somebody had to be the bait, and apparently, I’m more fun to torture.”
“Fine, but next time you do the work and I get to be the distraction.”
“Did you get them out?” I must have sounded a little worried, because I got an eye roll in response.
“Relax, the kids are safe. They were already freaked out by the haunted house vibes, so they didn’t put up much of a fight.”
The words might be grumpy, but I could hear just as much relief as I was feeling.
“And Jeremiah?”
“Monique was right. He didn’t go willingly. He figured out something was wrong and hacked the game. Found a link to the chat where they were doing their recruiting. He was going to rat them out, but they tracked his IP address and kidnapped him.”
But we’d found him in time. He wasn’t going to be a test subject. Wasn’t going to lose his family, his future, or his home. Now, all we had to do was get him back to that home safely.
“Anyone else left in the building?”
I got a long-suffering sigh.
“I didn’t exactly have time to explore the entire facility, but I took care of everyone on the first floor.”
The deep voice coming from tiny, feminine Kes was really messing with my head.
“Can you stop with the glamour now?” I begged. “There’s no one else here to see you, and honestly, it’s freaking me out a little.”
I heard a brief huff, then the air shimmered oddly, giving off a whiff of some unfamiliar magic.
And then Kes was gone…
…leaving behind a tall, dark, muscular figure with golden eyes, long braids, and a terrifying set of fangs that were bared in a slight smile.
“That was seriously the most impressive glamour I’ve ever seen,” I admitted as I stood up and stretched muscles gone stiff and painful from the bindings. “Even I would have had a hard time telling the difference in the dark.”
Impressive or not, we’d definitely taken a bit of a gamble.
Had Heather been a part of the welcoming committee, she would have immediately known that “Kes” wasn’t who she claimed to be.
And had Blake not been convinced by my warnings about touching his prisoner, he would have figured out in a hurry that there were a lot more muscles inside the glamour than there ought to have been.
“Any unexpected issues with the security system?”
“Nothing my magic couldn’t handle.”
I shook my head. “How did I not know goblins could do this kind of thing?”
As it turned out, Shane hadn’t been lying when he said he got my phone number by magic. Sufficiently powerful goblins could use their magic to circumvent human tech—a fact very few people were aware of, and one we’d had to swear never to reveal.
Shane shot me a disgusted look. “Why do you think? If we went around talking about it, how many goblins do you think would be left?”
Okay, so he had a good point.
Shane eyed me as I swayed on my feet, feeling like my head was spinning in three different directions.
“Your magic back yet?”
I winced. “Shot you before, have they?”
His silence was answer enough.
I held out a hand in front of me and tried to summon my fae power… but got only a single blue spark that sputtered in my palm and then died. “Not yet, I guess.” Hopefully, it wasn’t going to take too much longer.
“So what’s our play?”
The gateway was right there. Still swirling with all its magical colors, leading to exactly where I wanted to be.
Home. Helping to defend my family and my city.
If that gateway collapsed, I had no way of knowing how long it would take us to get back. No way of knowing how far we were from the battle front.
But if we went back before we pinpointed our location, and the gateway collapsed, we would also have lost our chance here.
A chance to hit Blake where it would hurt him the most, so that even if he succeeded in turning humanity against us, he would lose the one thing that had enabled him to bring his endeavors to this point.
“Where are the kids now?”
“Looking for another hostage that was brought in last night.”
“And you just let them go alone?”
Shane’s look was deeply sarcastic. “Tell me, Kendrick, exactly how much luck do you think you’d have convincing six teenagers to do something they didn’t want to do?”
Okay, he had a point. I was barely able to handle one. And besides, no one was likely to risk hurting Blake’s precious “test subjects.”
“Then our priorities are still the same as we planned. We try to figure out where we are, and find a way to destroy the artifacts. Then we take everyone home. Gateway or no gateway.”
Shane nodded. We turned to go, and as if they had been waiting for my decision as some kind of signal, that was the moment Blake chose to launch his offensive.
One by one, the screens on the wall erupted with scenes of violence so appalling, it was difficult to believe they were real. There was no sound, only images, but it was no less horrifying for the silence as the crowds of protesters scattered, shock and terror written across their faces.
The cameras were stationary, so even as I silently begged them to show me what was happening, I could only see so much.
Broadway Avenue splitting down the middle, opening up beneath the feet of unprepared humans—swallowing a luckless few and dividing the crowd in two.
A black gryphon diving out of the sky, scattering protesters and knocking a handful of them to the ground.
Roots erupting from the earth, cracking the sidewalks and trapping struggling victims beneath their winding coils.
Fires that flared and then disappeared unpredictably, leaving buildings smoldering in their wake.
And as the silent battle raged, I felt a surge from the battle within—a rising tide of emotions that must have come through the bond.
Callum was furious—whether at the picture Blake had sent him, or the senseless violence tearing the city apart—and for a moment, I actually took a step towards the swirling colors of the gateway, as if being pulled by an unseen force, desperate to return.
“We have to trust them.”
I whirled on Shane, feeling a sudden wave of helpless anger. “Trust? That’s ironic, coming from you.”
He didn’t flinch. “Believe me, no one is more surprised than I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Your family has their own tasks, just like we do. Trust them to handle it.”
Trust… Drat him. Trust, even when I could see what they were facing.
Trust, when I knew that the very heart of our home might be overrun by enemies.
Trust, when it seemed that forces on every side were arrayed against us.
Trust, even when I could feel all these emotions through the mate bond and knew that Callum was suffering…
But Shane was right. They were all trusting us to have their back, so no matter how much it tore me apart, we could not fail.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You aren’t wrong. I’m just…”
“Feeling torn in two?”
I nodded, and when our eyes met, I saw the banked glimmers of rage in his golden stare.
He was afraid too. The person he loved was also somewhere in the midst of that chaos, and he could do nothing to help her.
“Okay. Let’s go do this so we can go home. They can hold the line until then.”
We left the control room and jogged through the wide hallway that had been teeming with people only a short time ago—now empty. Passed through the double doors and took the stairs leading down, but instead of only two flights we went three—all the way to the bottom.
“This is where the kids headed,” Shane told me. “They had a little freedom to explore, but they said they were never allowed down here. If Blake’s cache is in this complex, this is the most likely spot.”
The hall we entered was narrow and the ceiling low, as if we were in an underground tunnel of some kind.
Fluorescent lights flickered, and water dripped from overhead in multiple places.
There were no signs of habitation, but still a strange itch developed between my shoulder blades and only grew as we kept moving.
“Someone is coming,” I murmured to Shane, and his minuscule nod indicated that he heard me but didn’t want to alert enemies to our presence.
I reached for my magic again and felt the slightest trickle of power… but not enough. Not yet.
The sound of running feet from up ahead sent my heart into overdrive and tensed my muscles for attack…
But as they came around the corner, it proved to be a pair of panicked teenagers who took one look at us, screamed, and skidded to a halt, preparing to run the other way.
Oops.
Shane had been wearing his glamour when he rescued them.
“Wait up!” I called after them. “We aren’t your enemy! We’re just trying to get out of here!”
The smaller of the two—a tiny blonde girl—looked back over her shoulder, her face twisted with suspicion. “Where’s the woman who saved us?”
Shane growled under his breath, and suddenly the air rippled again as his Kes glamour settled into place. “That was me.”
The two teens’ eyes went huge, and the boy stared from me to Shane and back again, his gaze watchful and tense and somehow very familiar…
“You’re Jeremiah,” I breathed.
He took a step back. “How do you know my name?”
I glanced at Shane. “What did you tell them?” Or rather, what hadn’t he told them?