Chapter Sixteen #5
She screamed in pain as they jumped from her safe space to Lucian’s.
Standing there, he put his body in front of both women.
“You do not have my permission to be here,” Lucian said, as that darkness slithered into the space.
There was sick laughter.
“Hello, Oracle. Fancy meeting you here. You’ve been hiding from me. We’re about to meet. I’m about to win.”
Lucian couldn’t go deeper to find out who it was. With Ridge, he’d be able to. In his mind, he could trap him here, and he could pull him apart to find his identity.
“Set them free,” Oracle said. “You know you cannot keep them for yourself.”
He laughed.
“They are already gone. I devoured them, and with a few more, I’ll be stronger than you.”
Well, until then, Avalon knew what she needed to do.
She cracked open Raven’s home and called for Trey, right before she shoved this darkness from Lucian’s mind, and pulled all three of them out of the static.
The darkness screamed as they slipped away.
When they came back, there were their gasps as they ‘woke’ up.
On the floor, Raven was out cold, and Booth didn’t look any better.
“What the fuck was that?” Josh asked, breaking the circle to get to Genesis.
She went into his arms and held onto him.
“That was what is hunting here,” Avalon said, as Nate helped her up. “I had to pull from Raven’s energy and break us free.”
Lucian didn’t like that.
Normally, in the static, he was strong.
Had Avalon not pulled them out, they would have died there.
“Are you guys okay?” Booth asked, grabbing Raven’s wrist to wake him up.
Lucian nodded.
“I’m good.”
With a moan from the floor, slowly, Raven woke up, and he had the mother of all headaches.
“Oh, that didn’t feel good,” he said, rubbing his head.
Oh, Avalon knew. She’d purposely weakened him, so he’d not feel the spell on his house being broken.
By the time he did figure it out, hopefully, the dead would have done their job.
Now, she had to hope they did it.
When Lucian’s phone rang, he grabbed it from outside the circle. On the screen, he saw his wife’s face.
“Hey,” he said, lying flat on his back as he stared up at the ceiling.
The room was spinning.
A fast ride out was like being on an out-of-control roller coaster. The vertigo would stop in a minute or two, but until then, he was going to feel the aftereffects.
“Hey,” she said. “Why are you lying on the floor?” she asked, seeing him on their video call.
He laughed.
“Static. Vertigo.”
Oh, well, that was a problem. She needed to speak to him, and sooner rather than later.
“So, is this a bad time?”
He blinked away the haze.
“Never, Baby, I’m here. What do you need?” he asked, not telling her what happened in the static.
It would only freak her out.
His wife dropped the bomb.
“Hey, we have another victim. I also have a problem. Can you meet me at home? We need to talk for a few minutes. Privately.”
Oh, boy.
That didn’t sound good.
A wife didn’t ask to speak privately unless there was a big issue on the horizon.
Shit.
He had no choice.
“I’ll be there. Give me twenty to clear my head and get home. Are you safe?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Yeah, I’m good. But Lucian?”
He heard the worry.
“What?”
“He bought more pentacles. Eight more, to be exact. He’s starting to kill again. We have to find out what is going on because there’s seven more victims about to be sacrificed to this darkness.”
Oh, and that was bad.
Lucian knew what the darkness had said in the static. It was getting stronger, and if it managed to take more souls, he, Genesis, and Avalon wouldn’t be able to hold it off.
This was bad.
“Okay, my love. We’ll be okay. I’ll see you at home. Please be careful getting there. This thing is likely watching all of us.”
Yeah, she was aware.
“I love you,” she said.
His heart skipped.
“I love you too, Bish.”
When he hung up, he sighed.
“This is bad,” Booth stated. “He’s taken another?”
Lucian nodded.
“Yeah, we have our next victim. I have to meet my wife. Can you guys hold down the fort without me?”
Booth didn’t like the idea that there would be more. They’d believed Wynter to be the last one, but now…
This could escalate fast.
When his phone chimed, he pulled it from his pocket. On his phone, he saw a message from Julian.
‘We are going to start interviewing some suspects. Can you do research on Thomas Vanderbilt? And see if he’s in the area? We need to find him. It might take some scrying. We’re almost out of time.’
He showed Raven, who was shaking his head.
“We will start digging. A scrying spell will tell us where he is, and we can see if he’s popped up in the media anywhere.”
Lucian was honest.
“His family has homes all over. He’s rich-rich. We haven’t seen him in a while, but that could be intentional. I doubt that if he was doing this, he’d be up in our faces. This darkness knows all about what we can do. He’d avoid us.”
That sounded about right.
Well, this person could only hide for so long.
It looked like witchcraft was going to give them some help on this one.
They hoped.
If not…
Someone else was dying, and that wasn’t going to be good.
Because it might be one of them.