Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
Another sunset. Every minute past dark added another pound to the weight on Roger’s shoulders. Endless possible failures paraded through his imagination, each worse than the last. Would he be too late? Had Seamus broken Takashi’s sanity? Was Zack still alive?
Roger could very well be leading Cal, Amber, and Thomas to their deaths. Even if they succeeded, Roger would have to watch out for treachery. Amber and Thomas seemed to hold him as an ally, but Cal never would.
Their meeting place was at a park a quarter mile from the edge of Seamus’s property. Roger parked the car he’d borrowed from Nathaniel again farther away than that and used a burst of vampiric speed to bring him to the location well before the arranged time.
He’d outfitted a belt with his own version of a hunter’s kit. He had a UV flashlight, a silver-plated dagger he’d found in a magic shop down the street from the Last Deal, and three stakes that Vincent had carved for him that day. In addition to those supplies, he had a small backpack with a few blood bags in case Takashi was starved.
The Wrights arrived on schedule. However, only Amber hopped out of the truck. Cal and Thomas remained within while she approached. “They’re just taking a second to go over the plan again.”
Glass vibrated with their voices, transmitting far better than walls did. A human might not have made much sense of the muffled sounds, but Roger could pick out words. Cal wanted to stab him in the back before they ever left for the mansion. Thomas was scolding him.
Roger folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the tree. Knew he would be the problem. The rage he’d found last night churned again.
Instead of giving in to it, he focused on the exterior. He said dryly, “Honestly, I was hoping that they’d leave you at home.”
“Because I’m a girl?” Amber demanded, voice full of teenage vitriol.
“Because you’re a child .”
She glared up at him. “I have more field experience than Zack does.”
“Considering the hours he’s put in on my mission, that’s debatable,” Roger replied. “Do you know why your parents deemed him ‘unfit’?”
Amber’s gaze darted to the side. She didn’t squirm, didn’t give in to the tiny burst of fear that expanded inside her. The fear was too vague and transient for Roger to discern what sort it was. She said, “I know. Up until this summer, I thought … I thought Zack was the fuckup. But he values life. He spared someone who needed a chance.”
“What changed over the summer?” Roger asked.
“We’re not friends, okay?” Amber snapped. She gestured between them. “This is not some amazing bonding moment. You’re on my shit list.”
“Because the family dictates me an enemy?”
Amber stepped closer despite having to crane her head farther back to glare up at him. “Because you got my brother kidnapped by psycho, torture-happy, ancient freaks.”
She was her own person, but the pieces of her that mirrored Zack clawed at Roger’s heart. God, I hope he’s alive.
The truck doors opened. Amber whispered, “Hey, you should know?—”
“Cal plans on putting a stake in my heart at the earliest convenience,” Roger finished.
“Yeah … guess that’s pretty obvious.”
Cal and Thomas stepped out of the truck. They were armed for combat in entirely different styles. Cal had gun holsters, multiple weapons in sight against his black clothing. His hunter’s belt had a section of shotgun ammunition. He had an ammo belt that ran across his torso and a shotgun in his hands. A wealth of silver bullets glinted in the dim streetlight.
Thomas had a sword on his hip, a quiver on his back, and a bow over his shoulder. On his belt, he had a wooden stake, two flashlights—likely at least one of them was UV—and his sheathed enchanted blade. Amber was outfitted like her father, with a crossbow instead of a bow and a backpack.
“Let’s get this fucking over with,” Cal said as he stomped off in the direction of Seamus’s mansion. Amber was quick to follow him.
Roger and Thomas brought up the rear. Roger said quietly, “I thought the plan was discretion. Why does he have firearms?”
“He’s convinced we’ll have to blast our way out. Might not be wrong.”
“And he might be planning to kill innocents like he did in Texas,” Roger snarled. He motioned at Cal. “I struggle to reconcile that that is the brother of a man I love. That would have left Vincent to rot. Zack does not condone my every action, but he makes an effort to understand. He calculates with compassion. He escaped the mold you pushed him into, and for that, you disowned him.”
Thomas was quiet for long enough that Roger was certain their conversation was over. Then, in a soft whisper, he said, “He’s always been brave. I didn’t understand how brave until recently.”
The thinnest touch of the desire to do things differently—regret—radiated from Thomas despite the shield of his hunter’s tattoo. Roger allowed the silence between them to grow.
Cal must have sensed how close they were because he stopped creating unnecessary noise and began to slip through the darkness. The group’s footfalls became as soft as predawn whispers between lovers.
When they reached the iron-wrought fence surrounding the property, Thomas held out a hand and took out his enchanted blade. He murmured a spell, and the blade’s runes shifted in color to a dull orange. Carefully, he neared the fence, and the runes grew slightly brighter. “Basic intruder spell. Nothing lethal. Amber.”
Amber pulled her backpack off and took out two iron hooks with a cord of silver between them. She knelt beside the fence and murmured a soft incantation as she put the hooks onto the fence. They were spaced two feet apart.
Once she’d nodded and backed away, Thomas used his blade and incantation to check that the spell was gone between the hooks. He nodded for Cal to go first.
“If I get cursed, I’m burning shit,” Cal muttered. He grasped the iron fence. When nothing happened, he climbed over it.
Amber’s spell and equipment had nullified a spot of Anton’s magical defenses. The idea was simplistic and brilliant. Roger wouldn’t have believed it could be done. Had Zack thought of such a scenario? Did he know the spell? Would they have been successful in defeating Seamus if Roger had stopped to listen to any of Zack’s ideas? I will beg him to go through every possible plan. Every thought. I never want to give either of them up.
Roger jumped over the fence, and then Thomas climbed over it, and finally Amber. The process took only seconds.
While light streamed out from various windows, Seamus’s mansion loomed across the lawn. Roger had witnessed the construction of this mansion, visited it time and time again when Seamus wanted to check on the progress. Built in the 1920s, it imitated the structure of a French palace, yet it lacked any of the polished charm. Its edges felt cold and severe rather than graceful.
A pair of guards making their rounds pricked Roger’s hearing before he saw them. He motioned for his group to fall in behind a tree. Tapping into his shadow abilities, he gathered darkness around them and deepened the shadow on top of them, obscuring them. The patrol passed on without hesitating.
Roger made a signal to wait and stretched out his senses to check the area. No one else was close. He gestured for the Wrights to move.
Thomas led the way to a window. He repeated his quick ritual to test for a magical barrier, but nothing came up. Quickly, he used his knife to slide open the window lock. After sheathing his blade, he hauled himself through the window first. Then Cal helped Amber in.
That left Cal and Roger outside, waiting for the other to go first. The next patrol wouldn’t be forever. One of them would have to surrender and put their back to the other. Am I the scorpion or the frog? Feel like the frog .
With a huff, Thomas leaned out and offered his hand to Cal. Cal grimaced, handed his shotgun over to his father, and climbed through the window. Roger followed him.
As they moved down the hallway, Roger continued pushing the extent of his senses. The mansion was still, almost too still. Other than the Wrights’ pulses, the occasional beating heart sounded far away. No distant conversations, no heavy breathing. Seamus must have taken most of the household with him to meet with Josefina.
But there was something … else that Roger was feeling. It reminded him of Halloween—of when he’d felt the siren cast a spell on the mortals. There had been a snap in his mind, and suddenly, he had simply known more. This time, it was like running his fingers across a floorboard and finding the grooves left behind from use. Nothing discernable, nothing active.
Magic had been in this place.
How did he know that? Some aftereffect of his coma?
The path to the basement door was clear. Roger slipped on a pair of leather gloves and reached for the silver door handle. Standing so close to the door, a wave of ingrained fear rumbled through him. Not much of it was new fear. So much had happened around and beyond the door that it was stained with the remnants of terror.
The damn thing was locked.
Amber took out her lockpick kit while Cal, Roger, and Thomas kept an eye on their surroundings. Her movements with the lock were smooth, near silent.
“I don’t like the feel of this,” Cal whispered. “Too fucking easy.”
Must be a cold day in Hell. I agree with him . Roger continued focusing on his senses rather than responding.
A moment later, Amber unlocked the door.
Roger took point as they headed down the basement stairs. If some surprise was waiting for them, he wanted the Wrights to have a chance to run or prepare. He wouldn’t be able to buy them much time, especially considering the speed that supernaturals could move as opposed to humans, but they were trained for that sort of limited opening.
Cal followed, then Amber, and Thomas brought up the rear. The weight that came with Cal’s presence was almost enough for Roger to ignore the increasing sense of compounding dread bearing down on his soul. No. I have to stop hiding from the pain . He refocused on what was happening around him and the sensations his extra senses were telling him.
The basement was made of concrete and heavy stone so that the sound of the individual rooms was entirely blocked out from one another. Anyone in the hall might have heard echoing screams slipping through doors—and Roger was startled that there were none.
But that strange sensation of magic interrupted his chain of thoughts. It was less of a groove and more of a deep, empty river bed. What has Anton been doing to my loves?
Roger tried each door as he went past. The first four revealed identical, empty rooms. Ten feet by ten feet, they were clearly designed to be cells for captives. Though decades had passed, Roger had thrown others into these places before. Always at Seamus’s bidding, but that didn’t lessen his growing guilt. He could’ve said no. What would Seamus have done? How far could Roger have pushed him before he decided that the bet wasn’t worth winning and killed him?
His spiral into what-ifs ended when he reached a fifth door and found it locked. Roger stepped out of the way and nodded to Amber, who set to work with her tools. Hope flared as soon as he heard the tumblers click open. He gripped the handle and pushed the door open.
Spanning from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, silver wires crisscrossed the room. The low light glinted off the wires. They had been stretched in a pattern that brushed against the man in the center of the room, threatening more damage if he moved.
The man hung from the ceiling by his wrists, toes barely touching the floor, without a stitch of clothing on his pale body. With his head fallen forward, his dark hair hid his face. The silver touching him left angry red lines on his skin. Thin blood trails had danced down his arms, his cheeks, and his chest but were dried.
Roger knew him. He’d seen this man naked countless times.
Dmitri.
Old wounds were torn open and salted. Dmitri had believed Roger couldn’t follow through with killing Anton and enacted a reckless plan that had ended with Roger killing a hunter in front of a crowd. During their last conversation, Dmitri had spoken oddly, displaying symptoms that he was giving in to his worse, self-destructive impulses. He’d wanted his agony to stop.
And Roger had been too willfully ignorant to realize that Dmitri’s depression hadn’t ended in his mortal days but continued into his long nights as a vampire. For three hundred years, Roger had been too caught up in his own shit to see that the man he’d tried to love time and time again was drowning in despair.
Roger had thought he was dead. Had thought that was what Anton meant when he said the gamble was settled.
I never know what’s going on .
This wasn’t the time to brood on his inadequacies as a lover and a friend. He glanced around at where the silver wires connected to the walls, searching for some way to dismantle them.
“Oh my God,” Amber whispered, horror plain in her voice.
“We have to get him down.” Roger stepped into the room. He tugged on a wire, and it pulled taut against Dmitri. The sizzle of skin started immediately, and Dmitri cried out, jostling into other strands. Instantly, Roger let go. In order to break it from the wall, he’d have to use more force, which would increase its tension against Dmitri. “Tell me one of you thought to bring wire cutters.”
Amber slipped her backpack off her shoulders and dug into it.
Thomas had his enchanted blade in one hand and a stake in the other. He examined the room. “Is this Takashi?”
“No,” Roger said.
“Then we need to move. Amber?—”
The rage inside Roger whipped into a violent storm, and he grabbed Thomas roughly and shoved him against the wall. A note of thunder rolled into his voice. “ We are not leaving him .”
Sternness filled Thomas’s eyes, the kind that came from having to make life and death calculations too many times. “We don’t have the resources to rescue inconsequential?—”
“That is Dmitri, he who has been by my side longer than anyone else on this Earth. That is the man who has kept me sane, though I have never been able to do the same for him,” Roger snarled. “If you need a tactical reason, he has been in charge of Seamus’s finances for over a hundred years. He has a wealth of knowledge that I am sure he would love to share with hunters.”
During Roger’s speech, the soft sound of snips of metal began. Amber continued cutting away the silver as she said, “Also, this is too fucked-up to not do something, Dad. And we don’t have time to argue.”
Concern entered Thomas’s expression before Roger mentioned Dmitri’s knowledge. Upon his daughter’s words, Thomas made a gesture. That tiny flick of movement brought Roger’s attention to what was going on beyond them. Cal had the shotgun aimed at them, likely not taking any shot so he wouldn’t wind up shooting his own father, but clearly prepared to blast them both if he had to. He glared intently at Roger before nodding to his father and carrying on down the hall.
“We’ll keep searching,” Thomas said. “Work fast.”
Roger nodded and released Thomas. He stepped back into the room. Amber had dismantled enough of the wires that he could approach Dmitri. Using an abundance of caution, he did so. Gently, he cupped his face. “Dmitri, it’s me.”
Dmitri lifted his head. His dark eyes were layered with rings of exhaustion and dried bloody tears. His voice broke with pain as he asked, “Roger?”
“Yes, sweetheart.” Roger looked for a mechanism to lower him from the ceiling, but it was through more wire. He pointed it out to Amber.
“I know,” she murmured under her breath and kept cutting. Roger was about to tell her to hurry, but he noticed that she wasn’t dawdling in how she cut the silver. She was taking a few extra seconds between snips because she was ensuring that whatever she cut next wouldn’t whiplash across the room and hurt Dmitri.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” Roger whispered.
Dmitri began to cry. Fresh, bloody tears coated the old ones.
“I love it when I’m right,” Anton said with a joyful sigh.
Roger spun. The shadows in the corner of the room thickened, and Anton walked out of them as if he were walking through a door. He was pale as white marble, his eyes were deep red, and his platinum hair was tied back for a change. He dropped the jacket of his pinstripe black three-piece suit and began to roll the sleeves of his white dress shirt.
“I told Seamus that Josefina’s visit was terribly convenient, but he insisted that we both go meet her. Luckily, I had alarms set on my favorite toy.” Anton grinned wickedly.
Dmitri whimpered, and the overwhelming anxiety pouring from him sparked a chain of lightning into the impending storm of Roger’s rage.
Relying on every ounce of speed he had, Roger grasped one of the silver threads hanging loose in the room and weaved through the remaining strands in his way. Anton started to extend shadowy tendrils to catch him, but he countered by using his own shadow as a blade against them. He wrapped the thread around Anton’s throat.
Anton managed to get his hand between his throat and the wire. The bastard was laughing.
Cutting off his hand would work. Roger pulled as tight as he could, even as Anton attempted to yank the wire free. With effort, Roger managed to wrap the wire around a second time. He shoved Anton against the wall and hissed in his face.
Desire oozed from Anton, a sickeningly thick sensation against Roger’s mental shields. He murmured, “You’ve always been pretty, but now you’re fucking hot.”
“Fucking die,” Roger snapped.
“We have the wrong energy going here.” Anton’s dark red eyes flared a brighter red.
That thick, invisible, mucus-like desire crept over Roger, but he had long known where his own wants lay. He had manipulated other’s emotions with the same power Anton was wielding.
And he had a burning wish for vengeance. He pulled that into a mental wall so thick that Anton’s attempt to control him slithered off.
Anton’s smile turned slyer, and he rolled up against Roger. He purred, “Honestly, this way is hotter. It’s been a while since I’ve wanted a spanking, but you have me yearning for all kinds of nasty punishments.”
“I’m not playing a fucking game,” Roger snarled.
“Oh, but games are wonderful distractions .”
Damn it, I’ve been focusing on the wrong thing. Roger had missed when the snips of wire had stopped. Sounds of scuffle in the hallway told him that combat was going on there as well. The blast of a shotgun roared from farther away.
That fractional slide of his attention gave Anton the opportunity to rear back and headbutt him. The blow stunned Roger for less than a second, but between creatures who could move quickly, it was too long. Anton slammed his free hand against the center of Roger’s chest and knocked him against the opposing wall, snapping wires as he went.
Dmitri wailed like an animal in pain, and his bloody tears now coursed down from his cheeks to his chest.
Roger landed beside Amber. She had drawn her dagger, but it had slipped her grasp and fallen to the floor. Tendrils of shadow held her pinned to the wall despite her attempts to yank herself free. One of them was locked around her neck, and another was over her mouth. As Roger watched, the one on her mouth thickened to block her nose. Her cheeks flushed pink from exertion, and terror filled her eyes.
With a growl, Roger snatched her dagger from the floor and pulled his silver-plated one from his belt. “Let her go.”
“Oh, but she is marvelous,” Anton said smoothly. He made a small hand motion with his right hand, but his left continued to move as if orchestrating strings. “You can feel it, can’t you? That first primal terror. She’s never been overpowered like this before. Her blood would be rich, Roger.”
“If she dies,” Roger said, “no corner on this Earth will be able to hide you from the suffering I will bring you before sending your soul to rot in Hell where it belongs.”
And, unsurprisingly to Roger, Anton’s smile only grew. “I must say, once again, how absolutely fucking hot you are right now.”
“Anton!”
“I would have thought that you cared more about Zack’s well-being than hers. Or his.” As Anton threaded his way to Dmitri through the remaining wires, he plucked them. He put a hand on Dmitri’s chest, and the sound that came out of Dmitri was unnaturally high. “I heard your little threat to the older hunter. I know you still care about our poor, sad Dmitri.”
Anton mimicked a pout. His eyes still sparkled with a joke.
“If you’re going to talk, let her breathe,” Roger demanded.
“Fine,” Anton said with a roll of his eyes. He gestured with his right hand, and the tendril blocking Amber’s nose thinned to cover only her mouth, and the one on her throat eased. His left had stopped moving, but sounds of combat were still going on in the hall.
What else was Anton doing? Was he bringing Seamus here? Stalling for his arrival? Torturing someone else? Roger hated not knowing, but asking would lead him nowhere. Everyone else’s lives were games to Anton.
And though the games changed, some of the basics remained the same. Roger had played through other versions of this. If he used that knowledge, he might be able to maneuver out of this. Roger asked lightly, “Did Seamus drag you out of the mansion so you couldn’t play while he was gone?”
Anton narrowed his eyes.
“He considers Zack and Takashi treasures, and he’s warned you not to spoil them,” Roger replied. “Let me walk out of here with them, and you’ll have his full attention again.”
“This attempt at being clever is making you quite dull,” Anton said with a sigh. He stroked Dmitri’s chest. “However, I am prepared to make you a deal.”
Roger’s heart dropped like a stone. Anton always kept his deals, but he’d once seen him offer a man that he wouldn’t harm a hair on his head and then promptly use a spell that made the man lose all his hair. Then the torture had started.
But he had to do something. Sooner or later, Seamus would come home.
“I’m listening,” Roger said.
“I can let you leave with your little band of hunters, and I’ll even give you Dmitri. Or—” Anton’s eyes glittered, and his smile returned. “—I can keep everyone but you, and I’ll tell you where Zack and Takashi are.”
Callum Wright was worth nothing. Thomas would be a loss, but Zack would survive it.
But Amber? No. Roger couldn’t let her suffer. He had sworn no more innocents would come to harm because of him, and she was only in danger because he’d failed to prepare for this. He couldn’t abandon the others, not if he wanted to be able to meet his lovers’ gazes again.
And then there was Dmitri, for whom his heart would always ache.
Without hesitation, he said, “I’ll take the hunters and Dmitri.”
“What an interesting choice!” Anton declared. “I must say, I love this new side of you, Roger. You’re finally something close to fascinating.”
Anton snapped his fingers, and the shadowy tendrils gripping Amber melted away. She started to fall, but Roger caught her. Still fighting for air, her first instinct was to snatch her blade back from him, and he let her have it. The runes glowed with bright white light, and she fought for her balance to face Anton.
Anton’s attention was on Dmitri. He stroked his cheek and murmured, “I’ll see you again, my sweet.”
Roger held on to Amber because if he let her go, he would try to kill Anton again, and they would all lose.
“You have ten minutes until I call the mansion’s security,” Anton said without taking his gaze off Dmitri. He grinned broadly as he backed away into the shadows. “Maybe less.”
Anton vanished the way he’d arrived. Knowing that the trick was going to happen, Roger could use that extra sense to feel the shape of where Anton had been. Could he have followed him? But where is he going?
He had to deal with what was before him. Though he’d stopped her from hitting the floor, Amber was unsteady on her feet. They didn’t have time to waste. With a note of authority in his voice, he said, “On your feet, hunter. We need to get him down.”
Amber had a hand on her throat. But his tone and words gave her focus, and she nodded, pushing down the fear until it was a minor pulse against Roger’s senses.
By the time she had undone the mechanism, Roger was prepared to catch Dmitri. He broke the handcuffs off him. Then he swept him up into his arms and murmured words of comfort to him.
Dmitri clung to him like he hadn’t done for centuries. His cries might have been sobs if he’d had more energy. The emotions that Roger could read from him were incoherent. Can he even hear me?
Thomas came to the door of the room, though he kept his true attention on the hallway. “Got it handled out here for the moment. You two all right?”
“Alive,” Amber croaked.
Stronger than his tattoo could hide for him, fear for one’s child emanated from Thomas. He glanced at Amber, and a righteous fury was clear in the clench of his jaw.
“We have to go,” Roger said.
“We haven’t found Zack.”
The truth stabbed Roger in the heart. He’d known they hadn’t, or Anton wouldn’t have bargained with the information. We’re in the wrong place. We won’t find either of them down here. “If we stay, we’re dead.”
Thomas puffed up.
“Dad, the op is blown.” Amber stashed the wire cutters in her backpack and put it on with professional quickness. She kept her blade in her hand, and it continued to flare with white light.
Amber’s words cut Thomas’s resistance to shreds. Needing a hand free, Roger gently put Dmitri over his shoulder, and the four of them made their way out of the building and escaped into the night.