Chapter 24
Jena groggily came to, an angry buzzing in her ears and tiny stinging slaps pattering over her cheeks. She waved a hand, and her brow furrowed as something crinkled—
“Ow!” She flinched back, her eyes flying open at a sharp bite of pain on her lip. “What the hell?!”
“Kissed-her-awake-he-kissed-her-awake!” A flurry of wings beat the air around her with a rapid buzz of gleeful little voices.
Pixies? God, her head…she moaned. That wasn’t a frickin’ kiss, one of the little shits had taken a chunk out of her.
She put a hand to her lip, the damned bite already swollen and itching.
She winced as a weird silver sheet crinkled around her with the motion.
Why the hell was she wrapped up like a potato, on the ground, and shoved up against a bunch of stones?
Oh, Jesus. Was this another weird food dream? Where…?
“Jena-Jena-Jena!” The harem squealed, two dozen plus pixies filtering about in a softly glowing cloud before settling on the stones around her.
No. She sneezed, waving away the dust. She was way too uncomfortable and annoyed for this not to be real.
Jena struggled to sit, clutching her head.
Everything spun, and her stomach lurched, the power from the node thumping through the ground in time with the agony between her temples.
Fuck. What did she remember? The ward. She’d sealed the perimeter of the node, and then Chase had been carrying her.
Chase. Shit. She glanced around the shadowed space, then through a veil of bracken. Beyond, it was pouring, the low wall of the garden barely visible. Okay, she’d somehow gotten to the ruins, but where was everyone? Her vision fuzzed in and out as she started forward—
A pixie wearing a mouse skull as a cap zipped in front of her, a smear of her blood on his chin and his hands on his hips as he hovered, shaking his head.
Her fingers rose to the welt on her lip, and she just stopped herself from scratching it.
Ugh, it was double the size it should be. Little bastard.
He was saying something, his words too quick to follow, and the deluge coming down didn’t help. Lightning flickered and a roll of thunder came from directly overhead. She stared at the pixie blankly, and he threw up his hands and pointed through the dripping vines at the garden. “Thumps!”
Jena blinked at him. “What?”
Another pixie zipped over, shouldering him out of the way in a cloud of dust to land on Jena’s shoulder. “Bad-thumps-looking-for-you!” she pipped into her ear.
God, she was not in any condition to translate pixie. “Thumps?”
Mr. Mouse Skull scowled, pointed at her again, and mimed stomping around. “Thump-thump-thump!”
Oh. Big people. Shit, no. Bad big people. “Malcom’s looking for me?” The harem nodded as a collective, and Jena scooted back into the shadows. Great. She rested her throbbing head against the chill stones, her mouth gummy. “Is that what happened to Chase and the others? Does Malcom have them?”
More nods.
Double shit. That wasn’t good. Jena closed her hand around the pendant beneath her shirt and peeked out at the clouds blackening the flickering sky.
With the storm raging, it was hard to tell, but it had to be close to sunset.
Unfortunately, close only counted in horseshoes and hand-grenades and anything less than the full moon wouldn’t activate her stupid were-b-gone charm.
Damn it. Why hadn’t she done that last night?
She needed to stop procrastinating like, tomorrow.
“How many are out there?” she asked the harem.
The pixies exchanged glances. One held up four fingers, and another nine. A third just shrugged. Okay. Guess math wasn’t their strong suit, but either way, it was more than Jena could handle, especially right now. She pinched her eyes shut. Crap. She felt like absolute crap and couldn’t afford to.
Okay…think, Jena. You’re here for the node. The moon hadn’t risen yet, she still had time, and Chase should be relatively safe until it did. She needed to get down to the basement.
“What’s the easiest way to get to the well from here?” she asked the harem.
One of the pixies perked up, jumping off a stone to zip over. “Easy-easy-easy!” She flew past Jena’s shoulder and disappeared into the bracken. Behind it was a pixie-sized hole, and a faint glow came from beyond.
Yeah, that wasn’t gonna help her get down there, but what the heck was glowing?
Jena put an eye to the hole, and her stomach sank.
Shit. The pixie’s hole did lead to the basement, and at its center, the well cast a soft blue light around the ruined space, just bright enough to highlight the three massive weres skulking in the shadows.
Two of them were the same Westsiders that’d stalked her across town the other day, and none of them looked happy.
Jena fell back to sit. There was no way she wanted to tangle with them.
Okay, inventory, Jena. What have you got to work with?
Her karma was spent, if she ate sin chances were good Malcom would know exactly where she was since it belonged to him, and the node…
she sighed, her stomach churning at the power coming from it.
That dankness she’d sensed down at the gate had only grown.
Sin striated through it, the magic erratic, pulsing and spiraling off into wild mercurial tangents and completely ignoring her call.
Wild. The node was going wild, and she had bupkis. Jena gritted her teeth. No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t wild, it was just…agitated. She could fix this. She just needed to bind herself to the well before she spoke the vow at the stones, and it would settle down. Right? Yeah, right. Easy.
Or it would’ve been, yesterday. Damn it. How the hell was she going to bleed into the stupid well now? She picked at her crusty, swollen lip. Ugh, she was screwed and itchy on top of it. God, pixie bites were the freaking worst. Miserable little carnivores—
A really bad idea pinged into her brain as her gaze lit on Mr. Mouse Skull and the rest of the harem. “Hey…do you want to play a game?”
His face contorted, suspicious. “A-game?”
“Yeah…” she licked the bite on her lip before she’d thought better of it. Ugh, it was sour. “It-it would be like a—a favor.”
“A-favor?-What-kind-of-favor?-What-do-we-get?” he asked, suddenly way too eager. The rest of them crowded in on her, their voices buzzing in kind.
God, this was gonna bite her in the ass, but she was already missing one chunk of her… “Whatever you want, as long as it’s in my power to grant, and won’t stain my karma.”
Mr. Mouse Skull looked intrigued. “For?”
Jena took a deep breath, pretty sure this was either gonna be genius or one of the dumbest things she’d ever suggested. God, please let me be able to do this by proxy… “I need you to bite me and spit my blood into the well. Whoever gets a whole mouthful in there, earns a favor.”
His severe little eyebrows rose. “We-bite-you-and-we-get-whatever-we-want?”
“Only if a whole mouthful of my blood goes in the water down there. And then, yes, you get to pick a favor.”
“Game-game-it’s-a-game!” Another pixie clapped.
They congregated, their rapid little voices increasing in speed until it became a shrill hum, then it dropped off and Mr. Mouse Skull nodded. “Coconuts.” He held up all his fingers. “This-many-each.”
Well, that was random. What the hell would pixies want with coconuts? Whatever. She didn’t care. “Um…okay. Deal.”
The harem was on Jena before all the words were out of her mouth, their sharp, stabbing teeth at her neck and wrists, pain blooming a hundred times worse than wasp stings—
And then they were through the hole like bees returning to their hive.
“What the fuck?!” A were yelled from the basement, the sounds of a scramble ensuing.
Jena bit back a sob, the horrible bites already swelling as she put her eye to the hole.
The harem zipped around the three burly weres, taking turns hawking bright red mouthfuls of gore into the azure water.
It pulsed, a purple glow slowly rising from the depths along with the distinct scent of bergamot.
“Hope you’re happy, Mom,” Jena muttered, scratching.
A tinkling laugh and a wash of power crested through Jena, clearing her head and settling her stomach. The harem returned through the hole in a rush and she stumbled back onto her rear, her palms splaying on the ground as she caught herself.
Her mind’s eye opened at the contact, the constraints around the node laid bare. Instinctively, she re-channeled its energy, strengthening the existing wards—
It wasn’t going to be enough. The backup of power was reaching a critical mass, and she couldn’t reroute it without having full access to the node’s power and the leylines that fed it.
Jena looked out at the driving rain, conviction settling in her belly as lightning flickered through the clouds and the sky rumbled ominously.
She needed to finish the rite, and she had to get to the center of the garden to do it.
Chase sat chained to an iron loop set into one of the seven standing stones in the garden, his face tipped up to the rain, and his eyes closed, biding his time.
At either side of him was a bare monolith, and then past those, Felix was to his right and Liam to his left, both strung up against the next stones in the circle by their ankles.
Felix shivered beneath the deluge, coughing at odd intervals, and his lips blue.
Liam didn’t move. They’d taken off the silver chains, but the damage had been done.
He dangled, his hands brushing the tip of the inverted pentagram that’d been drawn across the circle of stones, his face an unhealthy gray and his breathing shallow.
The fire beneath the caldron at the center of the circle crackled azure, leaping in defiance of the storm, and beyond it, Malcom—
His stomach clenched. He didn’t want to think about what Malcom was doing.
Chase seethed. Patience. He had to have patience…
a muscle in his jaw jumped, his knuckles white at the small of his back.
Fuck, he knew that, but sitting here trying to buy time for Jena to do whatever she had to—if she even could do what she had to after sending up that ward at the gate—was trying him in ways he hadn’t thought possible.
He rolled around the image of the manacles they’d fastened around his wrists, walking through the steps to release the chain between them…feeling the tumblers of the lock shift in his mind…he stopped before the last fell into place.
No. Not yet. Jena would come through. He had to believe—
A tremor swept through the tor and across the circle, the fire momentarily gutting. Malcom gave a low growl, his gaze snapping towards the ruins.
Chase didn’t bother to swallow his smile. That’s my girl…
Malcom thumbed the pommel of the blade in his hand, then grunted, sinking back into a crouch, his attention on the corpse he was in the midst of mutilating. Chase swallowed raggedly, forcing himself not to gag at the visceral reek of offal and burning flesh despite the pouring rain.
Trying to convince himself that what was left of it hadn’t been his mother, despite the string of blood-stained pearls still dangling around her ravaged throat. Jesus, if he dwelled on what Malcom had done to her…fuck. That’d been his mom.
Mary Montgomery had been strung her up by her ankles and hung splayed against one of the seven standing stones then disemboweled, her abdominal cavity stuffed with hot coals.
A single loop of intestine had caught against her chin, and the rest lay in a steaming pile beneath her head.
Her eyes, wide and unseeing, had filmed over gray; her face a rictus of macabre surprise.
Malcom had gleefully prodded her to describe in horrific detail what she’d done to Wallace as she alternately screamed and sobbed about their deal.
Jena was right, his mom was evil, but reconciling her confession with the woman who’d raised him…
what he’d seen in that vision of Jena’s…
Karma might be the bigger bitch, but God only knew what else his mother had done to deserve an end like that.
Later. He’d deal with it later.
If there was a later.
Chase closed his eyes again, breathing deep. No. There would be. He had to believe that.
Malcom stepped back to inspect the arcane symbols he’d carved into her chest and thighs, then flipped the knife in his hand, chanting.
A ruddy bubble of power flared from the corpse, encompassing the circle of stones and diverting the driving rain around them. Dark tendrils of mist gathered, swirling above the cauldron, and Felix began to sob softly.
Malcom ignored him, turning toward his next victim.
Lashed upright to the stone at the fifth point of the pentagram, Crystal cringed from him, a gag cutting into the sides of her mouth. He rested an arm above her head and ran the flat of his blade down her cheek, following the dark streaks of makeup streaming from around her eyes.
“You’re so much prettier when you cry,” he murmured, softly kissing her forehead. She cowered back. “Don’t worry, beauty. Your part will play out soon enough.”
Behind him the mist coalesced, and the shadowy form of a tall man stepped from the flames. “She comes.”
Chase flinched at the obscene anticipation dripping from the entity’s lips.
Malcom turned toward it. “She does, and our bargain is now complete. Do with her what you will, the node is mine.”
The entity gave a low chuckle, solidifying as it slowly paced around the circle to stop in front of Chase.
Shit. It was the man from the picture—Jena’s father.
He was very tall, his hair a dark shock of raven and handsome in the way only a sidhe could be.
He wet his lips, and stared down at Chase with the same emerald-green eyes as Jena.
The entity lowered himself to a knee and grasped Chase’s face, sniffing as he turned it this way and that.
Chase jerked free. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
Jena’s father chuckled again. “Well, aren’t you a surprise.” A cruel smile flitted across his face. “Your line ran truer than I’d have thought,” he said over his shoulder, a hit of glee in his voice. “A manifester. How frustrating that must be for you.”
Malcom scowled. “Leave him be, we are quits, and it’s of no matter.”
“So you hope.” Her father stood, looking back toward the ruins. Another cruel smile stole across his lips, and he was gone.
Chase stared at the space he’d been, his pulse pounding in his ears.
A manifester? What the hell did that mean?
A vision of the repaired fireplace flashed across his mind’s eye.
He’d done that…moved the tumblers in the lock keeping him chained…
had willed it to happen. Was that what he’d been doing?
Manifesting his will? He glanced at Malcom and his jaw set, concentrating on exactly how he was going to kill him.