Chapter 63
Chapter Sixty-Three
Hailey
My whole body ached in a way I couldn’t describe. Pain pulsed through every cell, like each one had been pulled free from my body and scraped raw. I couldn’t open my eyes, so I was just floating in the darkness of oblivion. Maybe this was what death felt like. Maybe I was feeling my body die.
No. I could feel my bonds in my chest, even though they were faint.
They pulsed with agony, right along with my cells.
I needed to find them. I needed to get to them and tell them I was okay-ish, but I felt like I was in quicksand, and it was dragging me down.
Some part of my soul knew that if I gave myself up to the quicksand, I would just die. There’d be no more.
Sighing, I concentrated on my eyelids and swam to the light. I needed to wake up. My head pulsed as I pulled one eyelid open, and then the other. I blinked, even though lifting my eyelids felt like a monumental effort.
The room I was in was dark, and I was on the floor. Had the orcs made a move on Eric? Was I in some dingy backroom on clan land? I tried to remember what happened.
Ilyas. A school bus? Nothing.
I tried to sit up, but that was impossible.
Instead, I worked on turning my head. There were boxes along the walls, but they were old and covered in dust. There was no natural light, and the scent of damp and mold, as well as something sharper that I couldn’t place, was almost overwhelming.
I was in a basement, that much I could deduce.
I still couldn’t make my body move. The more I tried, the more I felt melded to the floor, and I was beginning to realize my body wasn’t failing.
I was restrained with magic. Panic flooded me, and it echoed down my bonds.
I calmed myself the best I could. I didn’t want the guys to panic too.
I needed them to find me. I’d always saved myself, but now, I needed my guys to save me.
There were footsteps in the room above me, and I stopped breathing. What could hold me like this? It couldn’t be orcs. They didn’t have magic, unless they were paying a mage or warlock, which was possible.
The last thing I wanted was to be helpless in a room full of the orc king’s men.
I struggled against the magical bindings, the pain in my cells beginning to ebb.
Maybe if I could shift a little, I could get my necklace into a position where I could smash the stone, and Syke would come.
He’d promised that there was nowhere on the mortal plane where he wouldn’t be able to find me if I broke the beacon. I needed to smash it.
I could hear voices—male voices—but they weren’t the gravelly sounds of orcs. They sounded more like humans. Panic surged in my gut, and I swallowed my vomit.
A door opened somewhere behind me, and I heard heavy footsteps as they traveled down the stairs. I closed my eyes again, pretending to be unconscious. The person grumbled to himself, kicking me in the ribs half-heartedly, but I kept my body limp.
He was still muttering as he walked over to a shelf on the other side, and I cracked my eyes open again.
He turned on a little lamp, casting the room in eerie shadows.
A man with a patchy beard and a bulging stomach stood in front of what looked like a hoarder’s tool bench.
He had a row of coffee cans and an ice cream tub filled with nails.
I had a flashback to my childhood, and like most of my memories of back then, it wasn’t a good one, because I knew what you’d get if you added shrapnel to a coffee can.
He was making a bomb. It was a crude one, but still a bomb. My father had done the same thing for days before the riots, packing coffee cans and jars and anything he could with nails and gunpowder he got from God knew where.
He’d even made me do it for a day or two so he could get high without pissing off the higher-ups at the preservers of humanity movement.
I still had nightmares that someone could have died from an IED I packed, but I’d been a child, and there was nothing I could have done.
I didn’t know how to tamper with a bomb in a way so it wouldn’t go off but also not blow myself up in the process.
My eyes wandered back to the shelves. What I’d originally thought were canning jars were actually more pipe bombs.
Fuck. They were going to start another riot. I felt it in my soul.
The door at the top of the stairs opened again, casting the room in a little more light, and I swallowed a gasp.
The entire basement was jammed full of munitions and pipe bombs.
They’d stockpiled enough munitions down here to kill hundreds, maybe more.
The boxes were dusty, so I knew they’d been planning this for a long time.
“Ben, she’s here. Hurry up.”
The guy with the gut grunted about an uppity cunt, and then he moved back toward the stairs.
He climbed them slowly, puffing toward the top.
The light winked out as he left, and I knew I had to move.
I strained against the magic holding my arms and didn’t do much but wiggle my body around.
That was enough though. I felt my moonstone as it rolled across my chest to my shoulder, and I could see it now. I just needed to smash it.
I caught it between my chin and collarbone, slamming down until I knew I’d have bruises, but it didn’t break.
Fuck!
The door opened again, and more footsteps traveled down the stairs. They were lighter, almost nonexistent. The overhead light turned on, just a bare bulb on a pendant. As the person got closer, I held my breath, pretending to be unconscious again.
“That won’t work with me,” a soft, familiar voice said. Why was it familiar? “I know you’re awake, Hailey Swoon.”
My eyes opened, and at first, I couldn’t see who it was, their head haloed by the overhead bulb, but as my eyes focused, they went wide with recognition. The angel from the Creature Crisis Center.
“Allison,” I whispered. “What the fuck?”
Was she here to rescue me?
She let out a soft laugh. “No. Definitely not.” As she lifted her long, flowing white dress to squat down beside me, I noticed it was dirty on the hem. “No one is coming to rescue you, Hailey, because they are all dead, or will be soon enough.”
I sucked in a deep breath. “How can you say that? They are your coworkers. Your friends.”
She screwed up her nose, and bitterness chased away the beautiful mask until only ugliness remained.
“And they tossed me aside for a human at the first opportunity. I did what was right, and they suspended me without even hearing my side. They didn’t care about me. They aren’t my friends,” she spat.
I blinked up at the woman I’d never met but saw for three seconds in my apartment once. “I don’t even know you. Why are you doing this?”
She huffed an angry noise, like a hissing kitten.
“Because I’m tired. I’m tired of doing what’s right and being punished for it.
I’m tired of this city and everything it represents.
I’m sick of the decay that goes unchecked and the abominations as different species cross until they are no longer how they were created.
” She stood back to her full height, and I saw her soft golden wings flare behind her.
“I am tired of humans forgetting their place. You are barely above the food we eat, and yet here you are, fornicating with demons and animals like you deserve it.”
It didn’t make any sense. If she had such a poor opinion of humans, then why was she working with the preservers of humanity movement?
She shook her head at me like I was a disappointment.
“They are a tool whose goals happen to align with my own, like a shepherd and her rabid dog. I’ve always believed in their ideals, even when I didn’t like their methods.
I started attending their meetings years ago, and I’ve been guiding them on this path a long time.
” She sighed heavily, like they were wayward children and not psychopathic bigots.
“The anti-creature movements seem to understand that when an experiment doesn’t work, you need to raze it all to the ground and start again.
That’s what this city is, what this country is—an experiment that has gone terribly wrong.
We aren’t all the same, and despite what those preachers in the square say, we aren’t all born equal.
Humans are born to be food. I was born to rule over your kind for eternity.
It’s time for this experiment to end and to start again. ”
I kept my mind blank. She could read me the way Syke could.
It was hard not to think of the thing I was about to do before I did it.
I had brief seconds, so I hummed “Macarena” in my head, leaned to the side, and took my moonstone pendant into my mouth.
I crunched down as hard as I could and kept biting until I felt little bits of the moonstone shatter…
or maybe that was my tooth. It cut my cheek and gums, and my mouth filled with blood.
I spat it all at Allison’s feet and grinned up at her, my teeth bloody and feral. “You better start praying for forgiveness, because your little experiment is about to end.”