Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
“Wren.” Xavier's cool, heavy hand lands on my shoulder, gently turning me around. His other hand is on my waist, keeping me from falling in case I pass out. Right. I’m drugged up. I blink several times, reacquainting myself to the physical realm. Everything is as it was just seconds ago.
Inhaling slowly, I grip Xavier’s arm and turn, lips parting as I suck in a breath.
“Toni,” I whisper and Xavier makes a move to hug me, comforting me because he was—just a moment ago—certain my brother was dead. Instead, he freezes, fingers pressing into the skin on my waist.
“What did you do?” he asks, voice a hoarse whisper.
Pain registers on the palm of my right hand and Xavier gently grabs my wrist and turns my hand over. A fresh wound bleeds in the center of my palm from where the tip of the quill pricked me.
I signed the contract in my own blood.
“He’s alive?” Zeke mumbles to himself, hearing Antonio’s heartbeat before my brother starts to stir. More smoke and flames billow out of the portal and Xavier picks me back up. The sedative is working hard to knock me out, and I know it’s a battle I will eventually lose.
“Get Toni,” I say weakly and Zeke looks at Xavier, who gives him a curt nod. Despite my struggle to keep my eyes open, I can see the disdain on Xavier’s face. He’s going to be mad, I know. But I don’t care.
Toni is alive, and right now he’s slowly starting to sit up.
“Wren?” he croaks out and I push against Xavier’s chest, looking through the smoke.
Antonio is wobbly as he gets to his feet, looking at his wrists.
I don’t know how much he remembers or what state he’s in.
And how the demon was able to bring him back is beyond me, but it’s not something I’m going to question.
Ever.
Zeke leaps over the flames and goes to Antonio, putting his arm around his shoulders and helping me leave.
“Gia,” I say in protest. “She was in here.”
“Take her,” Xavier tells Theo, who’s back by his side.
“Do not let her go.” He says something in Spanish to his brother, and puts me in Theo’s arms. If I wasn’t drugged up, I would so use magic to put him to sleep and then would drag his unconscious body out of here.
Being passed around like a baby is not okay.
Theo holds me tighter and not nearly as gently as Xavier. Another lower-level demon rises from the pit, possessing a body on the stairs. Zeke and Antonio leave first, not stopping until we’re at the end of the parking lot of the warehouse.
“Put me down,” I grunt, trying to break out of Theo’s hold.
“Why, so you can run into a burning building and pass out?” Theo retorts. We both know I won’t win a battle of strength against him.
“I want to check on my brother.”
“Fine.” Theo lets me go and, normally, I would have been able to catch myself.
I’m too loopy to land gracefully, so I fall, hitting the ground hard.
“Oh, shit,” Theo says under his breath; he didn’t mean for me to crash onto the ground like this.
Pain radiates through my left hand, going all the way to my chest. My stitches were ripped open and the flesh around it burns like a motherfucker.
Antonio is standing still, rooted to the spot. He keeps looking at his wrists and then at the building, which—holy shit—is going up in flames.
Xavier.
For the first time, I’m glad I’m on the ground because everything spins around me and it’s not from the drugs. The weight of it all is crashing down on me, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what I just did to get my brother back.
“Wren,” Antonio starts, voice thin. “What happened? I don’t…I don’t remember. Maybe?” He tips his head and then quickly inhales, eyes widening. “Oh, fuck.” He pitches forward, on the verge of panicking as everything rushes back to him.
“Hey,” Theo says, tone gentle enough to surprise me. Antonio looks up, and in a split second, Theo has caught his gaze. “You are fine. Calm. Pay no attention to anything else you hear. Until I tell you otherwise, your mind is at ease and you are only recalling happy memories.”
“Yeah.” Antonio’s entire body relaxes. “I am.”
“I’m kinda jealous you can’t pull that trick on me,” I say as I struggle to get to my feet. Theo comes over and helps me, and we walk to Antonio together.
“I don’t understand what just happened,” Zeke starts, looking at the bloody wounds on Antonio’s wrists. Like Theo and Xavier, he’s able to control himself around blood. “He should be dead. He was dead. There was no heartbeat.”
“That’s a very good question.” Theo rounds on me, eyes narrowing. He heard Xavier and echoes what was just asked. “What did you do, Wren?”
My lips part as I inhale, ready to tell him, but then something explodes inside the warehouse. My heart plummets to the bottom of my chest and cold fear washes over me.
Xavier!
Turning, I stumble a few feet toward the building before Xavier comes running out, moving at vampire speed. He stops right in front of me, hands landing on my shoulders. He smells like smoke, and there’s a smudge of soot on his cheek.
“I told you not to let her go,” he tells Theo as he pulls me in for a hug.
“Gia?” I whisper in question.
“She wasn’t there,” Xavier tells me. “No one was. Whoever took her must have left prior to the fire.”
I close my eyes, both relieved and frustrated.
She’s alive—for now. Who the fuck knows what the Order is going to do with her.
Xavier steps back, looking me up and down.
Then he takes both my hands and inspects the wounds.
The torn stitches on my left hand look nasty.
Grit from the warehouse floor sticks to my torn flesh. This is going to be a bitch to clean.
“Hey, did you guys know there’s a building on fire?” Antonio asks, as calm and casual as if he was telling us about the weather.
“We should do something about that,” Zeke quips, sucking in air between his teeth. “Before the whole fucking town burns.”
“I can call the fire department,” Antonio says, patting his pockets. “Huh. Seems I’ve lost my phone.”
“The portal,” I start, shaking my head as I look into Xavier’s eyes. His jaw tenses and I can tell he’s holding back what he really wants to say. “Water won’t put that fire out and sending humans in…we…we can’t do that. They’ll see a literal crack in the earth that leads to hell.”
“It’ll look like an earthquake,” Xavier says. “The hellfire has ceased and the crack in the earth only goes down about four feet now.”
“You stuck your hand in it?” My eyes widen.
“I was curious,” he says with a shrug. “This will look like a freak earthquake that disturbed power lines and set the building on fire.”
“I’ll call it in,” Theo says.
Xavier trades my left hand for my right, bringing it to his face and inspecting the little pin prick in the center of my palm. His eyes meet mine, and he says everything without uttering a word.
“I would say I’m sorry, but I don’t want to lie,” I tell him. “I had to do it. It was the only way to bring him back.”
“Bring him back?” Zeke echoes, looking from me to Antonio and back again. “You made a deal with the demon?”
“I did,” I tell them, fighting against the sedative. For a fleeting moment, it takes over and I’m calm, wanting to sink into a blissful sleep. But then nerves prickle along my body jolting my mind awake. “I…I…I’m sorry. I don’t know what Marco gave me, but my head is all fuzzy.”
“Making important decisions when you’re not exactly sober isn’t smart, Wren,” Antonio says. Even unaware of what’s going on, he zinged me.
“Yeah. I know.” My head droops forward and I rest my forehead against Xavier’s chest. “I wasn’t drugged up when I talked to the demon,” I say quietly so only the vampires can hear. A few seconds pass and I look up at Xavier. “I don’t blame you if you’re mad.”
“I’m not mad,” he says right away. “I’m…I’m…” He lets out a sigh. Brows furrowing. “You made a deal with a demon, Wren.”
“I know what I did and I’d do it again. He’s fine.”
Xavier takes his eyes off me and looks at Antonio for a moment. “Is he? He was dead, Wren. For several minutes.”
“People die sometimes and um…um…” I can’t keep a straight train of thought. The little bit of logic I can access is telling me to sleep off whatever drugs are in my system and come back to this with a clear head.
“Curious,” Theo says, voice cutting through the night. His phone is in his hand, screen still glowing. “Weren’t you poking around in Tent City not that long ago?”
“I was,” I reply, words coming out mumbled.
“The same strange earthquake and fire happened there.”
“There’s probably one more location,” Antonio says. “These things tend to happen in threes.”
“The campground.” Xavier picks me back up and this time, I don’t fight him.
“Why?” Zeke asks.
“Hot spots on the Ley line,” Antonio answers.
“The demon the Order was trying to summon…” He trails off, brows furrowing as he hits a mental wall, mind confused on what happened and what Theo told him to believe.
“They needed power they didn't have, so they tapped into the Ley line.” He looks at me. “It’s what Wren’s been trying to figure out.
Something’s been going on for a while and we were ordered not to look into it. ”
“The demon is being controlled by the Order,” I tell everyone, lifting my head up. “They have some sort of sigil that binds it to them. I don’t…I don’t…um…um…”
“It’s okay, Wren,” Xavier tells me. “We can talk about it when you’re with it.”
“I, um, think she told me,” I mumble.
“You’re not making sense,” Xavier says gently.
All I can do is nod, and then I flit in and out of consciousness as Xavier takes me to his car.
Sirens echo in the distance, and I force my eyes open, making sure Antonio is with us.
Looking like a drugged-up 1950s housewife, he sits in the backseat with a pleasant smile on his face, watching the warehouse burn as if it’s his favorite movie.