Chapter 22 #2
Fuck this. Ophelia might not know what his deal was, but she knew exactly what the vampires would do to them if they got in here. She grabbed Jena and shoved her toward her father. “Suck it up, buttercup,” she hissed. “We’re going.”
“What!” Jena’s eyes widened, and she dug in her heels.
Her father caught her arm and Ophelia’s hand in the process.
“I knew I was going to like you,” he said to her.
This time, his grin made her stomach drop for an entirely different reason than it had before, but it was too late now.
Before Ophelia could react, the three of them had vanished from the basement.
Gideon landed on the Witchery’s roof and raced inside.
A circle of witches chanted within the chalk-drawn circle on the floor, and in the far corner, Matilda bent over an altar, her hands dark with blood.
A large, unconscious man was trussed up nearby, and between the two, a group of unfamiliar warlocks stood around a prone woman, arguing.
There was no sign of Jena, nor of Ophelia.
“Where is she?!” Gideon roared.
An elderly warlock with a shock of white hair raised a hand in supplication, stepping forward. “Peace gargoyle. If you interrupt the circle—”
Fuck their circle. “Where. Is. Ophelia?” Gideon slowly enunciated, the knuckles of his fist whitening as he glowered at them from beneath his brows. Below, a door crashed open, signaling Chase’s arrival.
The old man’s throat bobbed. “We don’t know.”
“But we will within the hour,” Matilda spat over her shoulder, flicking gore from the blade of her knife. “Haruspicy takes a hot minute, and scrying for that sack of shit’s never worked.”
An hour? They didn’t have an— Gideon swallowed his rage, the urge to eviscerate everyone in the room throbbing at his temples. “What sack of shit?”
“Jena’s father,” the white haired man said, glancing toward the stairs.
Claws skittered in the hall below, then paws pounded up the steps. Chase leaped into the room, morphing back into his human form as he landed. He took in the room with one sweeping glance and growled, stalking toward the warlock. “Tell me I didn’t hear that. He has Jena?”
The old man held up his hands again. “That’s our theory. No one saw anything, but we’d split into pairs to secure the building. Clint and I were in the basement when William—Jena’s father—appeared.” The beefy man beside him nodded, and the growl in Chase’s chest deepened.
“He started prattling on the way he does, and then we heard the girls at the top of the steps.” The old man scowled. “William got that damned look on his face like he’d hit the lottery, and the next thing we knew, we were in the parlor with Luna slumped over poor June’s body, and William was gone.”
Chase’s eyes narrowed. “Did he kill her?”
“No.” The old warlock glanced at the man who’d been tied up. “But after seeing what happened to Luna and June, some of us thought it best to regroup before we rushed down there blind. That was what, two, three minutes ago?” He scowled at a man with a nose that would give a raptor pause.
“And time keeps ticking,” the beefy man snapped. “If he’s down there with them, we need to move.”
“Jena’s more equipped to deal with William than any of us,” the man with the nose retorted, holding a bloodied cloth to his head.
By the look on Chase’s face, he didn’t agree.
And neither did Gideon, these warlocks were all cowards.
“Then they could still be down there,” he growled. And if the pixies were to be believed, that’s where the vampires would be coming from. He pushed past the poor excuses for men. “I’ll be back for answers. I suggest you have them ready.”
He hurried downstairs, and Chase fell into step with him, an odd camaraderie of shared purpose forming between them. They got to the main floor, and Gideon looked around the cluttered shop, his temper spiking, and at a loss at how to get to the lower level.
“This way,” Chase said, taking the lead through the merchandise and into a storage room packed with goods. “It’s just over—”
A door on the far side of the room flew open, and a horde of slavering vampire revenants tore up from the basement.
They caught sight of Gideon and Chase and let out unholy shrieks, long strings of saliva spattering from their decomposing maws.
Gods, every last one of them had gone completely feral.
Gideon slammed the door to the shop closed, hoping to stop the fiends from getting any farther.
He shoved a crate against it, resolute that they hadn’t enough logic left in their moldering skulls to move it.
By the time he’d turned, Chase had morphed back into a wolf and rushed the creatures. They scattered, a group charging at Gideon.
He tore through the first’s neck with his talons, the others tripping over its corpse and tangling themselves in a rolling rack of heavy robes.
It went down, trapping them beneath it. Gideon tore a loose board from a crate, staking the floundering creatures with its jagged end.
He panted, his gaze flicking up from the carnage.
It was obvious that even in their frenzied state, the revenants had little incentive to engage with the were, attempting to keep their distance.
They skirted around the big wolf, rolling their stark white eyes and foaming at the mouth.
No doubt their aversion was due to the charm Chase had swallowed earlier, though the room’s cramped confines gave them little recourse.
The wolf had no such qualms. He tore into them, gore spraying over the housed wares as the fiends flailed ineffectually trying to escape his teeth and claws.
Unfortunately, for each one he put down, another two appeared from the basement. Gideon rushed forward, ripping free a vamp that’d jumped on the were’s back, relieving the creature of its head in the process. Gideon snarled; stupid or not, their sheer numbers were becoming a problem.
He needed to stem this at the source before they were overrun.
Gideon dove into the fray, his talons tearing out hearts and slicing through spines.
He waded through the dripping corpses, kicking limbs and headless torsos out of his way, making for the steps.
Behind him, Chase ended the remaining revenants and followed, limping, his fur matted and his jaws soaked with gore.
“Close the door behind me and hold the line here,” Gideon growled.
Chase paused, then huffed his agreement, blood bubbling at his nostrils and his chest heaving.
Gideon kicked a revenant in the chest as it attempted to gain access to the room, sending it sprawling into the ones behind it.
They fell halfway down the flight, the frenetic mass at its base buoying them back up like gruesome crowd surfers, backlit by the overturned spotlight casting manic shadows onto the ceiling.
Gideon launched himself into the morass of bodies, slaughtering all in his path. He snapped a fiend’s spine over his knee and used the creature to bludgeon another, cracking their skulls together. His talons shredded through jugulars, ripping through tracheas, and beheading the foul beasts.
The mob refused to lessen. He swore, his gaze sweeping the room. Where the hell were they coming from?
Movement on the far wall caught his eye.
There, in the shadows, a darker spot. A hole had been blown through the fieldstone foundation, and a tunnel lay beyond.
Fiends darted from it, disappearing into the churning mass of monsters.
Gideon dispatched another creature, ineffectual claws skittering across his skin.
His gaze narrowed, focusing his will on the bedrock beneath him, calling upon it to heed his command.
A low rumble began, the earth shifting beneath his feet.
Frenzied monsters fell to their knees, and his talons swept through their necks like a scythe.
Jagged rocks exploded from the packed earth of the basement’s floor, impaling the creatures, then sped toward the wall, drawn there as if by a lodestone, piling up and fusing together, cutting off the revenants’ ingress.
A grim smile curved Gideon’s lips, and he cracked his knuckles, attacking with renewed vigor. Without reinforcements, it took very little time to put the rest of them down. He wiped a spatter of gore from his eyes, surveying the room.
That Ophelia wasn’t among their number did little to console him. Something incongruent by the steps caught his eye. He knelt, sweeping up of the snakeskin heels he’d picked out for her yesterday. She wouldn’t have left them if given a choice. Certain dread filled his being.
Whatever creature Jena’s father may be, he had them both.
Gideon’s fist tightened around the shoe, and he strode back up the steps, leaving the carnage behind him. It was time to get answers.