that were tight on him. My eyes wandered over him, unable to stop myself. Each abdominal muscle was outlined by the material, tucked inside his pants that showed how trim his waist was. Then he bent and grabbed my hand. He lifted me over his shoulder, and my hand fell out, feeling how his skin shifted over his muscles there, each rippling as he moved me back inside the bedroom and then placed me onto the bed.
Need throbbed inside of me, for him and for vengeance. I couldn’t battle both of them, so I let him see the hunger in me when he dropped some clothes onto my lap.
He stopped, frozen, and I felt his desire explode inside of him. Then he retreated, battling his primal side back down. His voice came out strangled. “We can’t. Let’s go. We have to get your aunt now, before it’s too late.”
“What will happen?” I scrambled into my clothes, trying not to dwell on my disappointment. How could I even think about my desire in that moment? Aumae could already be dead or worse.
“They could go back to the underworld. She can’t go there. The mere entrance will be enough torture for her. They’re still here, but not for long. They’re waiting for their comrades to return with us, once they don’t, they’ll go without them.” Then he grabbed my arm and whisked us down to the car.
When we got in and Kellan started the car, I looked around with an odd feeling in my gut. “We’re…driving there?”
He bit back a smile, but gunned the engine, spitting dirt behind us. “We have to. They won’t be attuned to human transportation. They’re waiting for anything supernatural to come at them. We can get close and they won’t know we’re there.”
That made sense, but… “What about us? Don’t we give off vibes? Won’t they feel us, just being there?”
“Grab those bags. I put them in the backseat. Inside are cloaking medallions. Give them to me.”
I twisted and saw the paper bags he had brought into the kitchen. When I reached inside, I pulled out a small bag with gold coins inside. They looked the size of a quarter, but weighed what a small child might. As I dropped the bag in Kellan’s hand, I could hear whispers of an incantation, in a language that I didn’t know, but they quieted in his hands.
He brought them to his mouth and began whispering the same incantation, then as something was building in the air, his other hand grabbed mine. His fingers entwined with mine and he brought it to his mouth, kissing it as he kissed the coins in the same moment. I felt the explosion around us, the air spread out in a whoosh, but there was no difference in us. Kellan looked the same, so did I, but he’d just done something.
“What happened?”
He put the coins back and then put the paper bag behind us. “Our presence, to humans and other beings are now cloaked. No one should be able to find us until the spell ends. We can’t cloak ourselves. It has to come from the outside world for it to work.”
None of that made sense to me, but I sat back. Kellan knew what he was doing, which seemed too easy. However, I’d keep my mouth shut for now, until we got Aumae back and dealt with my father, not to mention Vespar, too.
The drive took hours, but the adrenaline was still boiling inside of me. Kellan pulled the car over on the side of a street, which seemed to be in the middle of a dense forest.
“Where are we?”
“We have to walk in. They’re in a cave, and I can already sense two of them patrolling the woods. We will have to be discreet until we can get inside and find Aumae.”
“Then what?”
“We grab her and kill everybody else.”
Shivers went down my back, hearing the promise in his words. There had been no other consideration. Kellan was going to destroy them all, even if I didn’t join in. As we got outside, I smelled a whiff of the demons and my stomach turned over, but then something came alive in me. I’d wanted their blood before, but had gotten sick in the next moment. That was not going to happen this time. I wasn’t going to be running to vomit anymore.
Kellan started forward, and I saw the same black cloak come over him that had happened in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure what it was, but something shimmied over me, too. I watched, speechless, as something glided over my skin, translucent to my eyes. It felt like armor, but weighed like nothing, like air.
Whatever it was, I felt protected. I felt like I could walk in and raise hell, knowing they couldn’t touch me.
The closer we got, the sickness from before built inside of me. It fueled me, and when we looked up to see a demon floating in the air above us, looking around with no idea we were there, I had to grit my teeth. I wanted to kill it, too much, and Kellan took my hand in his. He led me past it and past the second one that looked like it was perched on a tree limb, with his white saucer eyes shining a beacon wherever it looked. The light blinded us for a moment, but it moved past without missing a beat.
We were safe.
The entrance of the cave wasn’t far. I felt the mouth of the cave like it was the opening to a vortex. Whatever was inside was evil, through and through. It sucked anything good, anything pure, and swallowed it whole. Two more demons floated above it, but Kellan took my hand again and we stepped around tree roots, over and under. We followed a narrow path that led around a body of water. I glanced down once, wondering what the water would be like with so much darkness near it, but it shined blue and bright. It even looked white in some parts from the sand that was so close to the surface. I felt it beckoning to me. It wanted me to go inside, take a swim, but Kellan yanked me away.
“It’s enchanted. The water doesn’t look right. It’ll draw you down and drown you, killing anything that steps foot in it. Don’t even look at the water,” he warned me in my head, shaking his.
As soon as we stepped inside, Aumae’s pain was overwhelming. I felt her everywhere, in every corner, behind every rock. It almost stopped me in my tracks, it was so strong. The torture must’ve been tremendous, and I held my breath the rest of the way. Kellan seemed to know where to go, when to pause as a demon went past us, and when to sidestep traps they had laid.
The cave turned downward, and we followed. The sounds of water grew in volume the lower we went, and soon the narrow pathway we were on grew slippery. Water dripped from the walls and ceiling onto our feet. Some splashed up from below, and the rushing sounds of it grew loud, too loud to hear anything else.
I turned one corner, but Kellan yanked me back. A floating demon was right in front of me, would’ve touched me in the next instant. He passed by and it wasn’t until my heart slowed a little bit before I let myself breathe again. It had been close, too close, but rounding another corner, I saw that we were there.
Aumae was tied to the floor in front of us. Her wrists were crisscrossed over each other, bound by rope to two stakes. Her legs had been spread out, also staked to the ground. As we got closer, I saw the rope was soaked in a red liquid. Aumae’s eyes were closed and tears had streaked down her cheeks, leaving trails through the dust and dirt on her skin. The white robe she wore before was stained in red. There were clumps of the same red liquid on her robe and marks that looked like she’d been scratched.
I bent to untie one, but Kellan shoved me aside again. “Don’t touch them. They’re soaked in virgin’s blood.”
“Virgin’s blood? Are you serious?”
“The virgin was raped and killed, Shay. It’s an old metaphor for purity, but it still has power over messengers. Whatever was pure and innocent that’s been violated by the hands of evil will harm a messenger. Aumae is bound just by the blood, not the rope.”
I shuddered and moved away, wondering what would’ve happened to me if I’d touched them. It didn’t matter, thankfully, as Kellan had them untied in seconds. I waited, expecting Aumae to spring up, released and free, but she remained on the ground, groaning and writhing in pain still. I exchanged worried looks with Kellan, but he knelt quickly and thrust her robe away. Still, she stayed on the floor.
“What’s keeping her there?”
“They soaked her in the blood. It’s a
ll over her skin and they might’ve made her drink it. We’ll have to move her. No, I’ll move her.” Kellan pushed me away when I stepped forward. “I don’t want any of the blood to touch you. Its hold won’t be as powerful since you’re a hybrid, but it’ll still affect you. I need you strong.”
He lifted her and then we turned, ready to leave, but stopped. Four demons were there, in front of us, just staring at us.
Kellan didn’t pause. He threw Aumae at them. As two caught her, he sent two bolts of his energy at the other two, flinging them backward. Then he leapt forward, took Aumae back, and whipped her around. Her feet clipped one in the head. With a hand holding my aunt’s head, Kellan started to turn her around so her feet would hit the last one. As he rounded, the demon wasn’t there, and he turned to look at me, a question in his eyes.
I grinned and lowered my hands. I’d sent two shots of my power at him and felt the demon die. The anger in me was boiling again, and I felt more demons approaching us, alerted from the death of their comrades. As they came in, we were still cloaked. They didn’t know where I was at first, but all of them zoomed in on Kellan. Aumae wasn’t cloaked and he held her, making him the obvious target.
One after another, I shot my energy at them. One after another, I felt them die from my blast. Kellan fought as well, but he wasn’t the power force that he’d been at the house. Aumae was limp in his arms, barely conscious, but it wasn’t long before we were making our way back up the cave. More and more demons flew down to us, but we shot all of them down. As we got to the mouth of the cave and stepped out, an army of demons waited for us, floating in the air above the water.
I looked down. I couldn’t help it. The water had been serene and beautiful before. It was angry now, splashing over on itself, boiling upward. Each wave had darker waters than the last until the entire pool was a mass of churning black waves. It fed off the demons. As one dipped down, the water spewed upward to touch it. The higher demons kept more calm water below them, but it was still a rolling mass of evil, in liquid form.
“Shay.”
I turned to him.
“I’m going to put Aumae on the ground. I need my hands free to fight them. Do not touch her. Guard over her. They will try to take her with them, but they can’t have her. The minute they do, they’ll go to the underworld. We can’t follow them there.”
I nodded. “I will protect her.”
“Don’t touch her. I mean it. You’ll just hurt yourself, and none of us will make it out of here.”
He caught my gaze, and I saw the countdown in his eyes. I felt it within me. Three. Two. One. He laid Aumae down and leapt into the array of demons in the same moment. Two of them rushed for her, but I blasted them back. They seemed surprised, and I remembered that I was still cloaked. One by one, a demon tentatively floated toward her, but I sent each back, killing most of them with one blast. A few were more courageous, going almost too fast for me to shoot them. It never worked. I always caught them, sometimes just by a foot, but my power sent each of them reeling.
I stood back and saw how they started to rush around me, around Aumae. They realized I stood beside her, shooting them. They were trying to figure out where I was, trying to touch me. None of them came close, but it was a matter of time. I couldn’t move Aumae, a fact they hadn’t realized yet. If too many of them overtook me, I wasn’t sure if I could fight them all.
As a wave of ten started to get closer to me, I tried to shoot into them. As one was taken down, another one replaced it. The wall of demons kept coming, closer and closer to me, until I feared they could feel my breath.
Then Kellan shouted, “Down!”
A tree was thrown into the group. I ducked just in time, and it sailed over my head, knocking the whole row of demons over me. I spun on my heel and took aim, shooting the tree instead of the demons. It burst into flames, white flames, and engulfed all of the demons still attached to it. They exploded, sending white sparks into the air. As those floated down onto more demons, killing them, I hoped none would touch Kellan. Then I turned again and saw another wave of demons coming at me.
This time I reached for the nearest tree and lifted it. I sent it myself at them and lit it on fire as soon as it touched the demons. This routine kept happening before the demons fell back once again. They couldn’t find me to fight me so they turned their focus on Kellan.
The circle doubled in size around him. Kellan drew them above the water and then he yelled to me in his head, “On three, light the water.”
“NO! It will hurt you, too. You need to get out of there.”
“I will. I promise, but count to three and don’t hold back. It has to be the exact same time.”
I closed my eyes, hating what I heard, but lifted my arms anyway.
“One…Two…Three!”
I gritted my teeth and sent everything I had at the water. My energy sparked it, and it quickly grew into a rolling flame, like an exploding volcano. It burst into the air, wanting to extinguish itself somehow, but it caught the demons. All of them were sucked down into the fire, and one by one, I felt them each extinguish. They died, and as the air seemed to get lighter with the passing of one by one, I found myself praying. Words I didn’t know spilled from my lips, and I tasted tears beside them.
I hoped against hope that Kellan had gotten out. He must’ve gotten out. It had been his plan. As the last demon burst into flames, I opened my eyes and saw another bright explosion in the air. It sucked the remaining evil from the air, the woods, the cave, and even the water. It engulfed onto itself and then vanished.
“Kellan!” I screamed. I couldn’t see him anywhere. “Kellan!”
He poked his head out from behind a tree, a few feet behind me. Chuckling, he glided down to me. The black armor that had grown over him disappeared, as did mine. Somehow I knew both of them appeared because of him, but it was another question I’d wait till later to ask. At that moment, as soon as his feet touched the ground in front of me, I threw myself at him. He caught me and it felt so right, his body to mine. I savored the feel of it, the realness of him again.
“Thank goodness,” I whispered against his neck and hugged him tighter. I wasn’t sure if I could let him go.
He hugged me back for a moment, squeezing tight before he let me go. As he stepped back, I wanted to leap at him again, but forced myself to stay. Instead, I watched as he knelt beside Aumae and rested his hand to her cheek. After a moment, he looked back at me. “She took in a lot of blood. She’ll need help. We’ll have to take her to someone.”
“Who?” Who even knew about this stuff, much less someone willing to work with a demon and messenger?
“There’s someone I know. Take my other arm. I’m going to take us the fast way to the car.”
“The car? Just take us to where she needs to go. She can’t wait for a drive. We don’t have the time, Kellan,” I cried out.
“I will take her, but you have to drive the car back to the sanctuary. We need it there.”
“Is it safe there still? They found us there before.” As I spoke to him, I touched his other arm, and Kellan whisked us back to the car on the edge of the road. It had never looked so human and normal to me than it did at that time.
Kellan gave me the keys and waited till I got inside, behind the wheel. He bent forward at the open window, still holding Aumae in his arms. “I won’t be long. I hope not. Go to the sanctuary. It’ll be safer now than it was before. Nothing can find it now. The trees have grown in height; they protect it. Trust me. That’s the part of it being a sanctuary. Once it’s been broken into, it’ll never be again.”
“Okay…” I still wasn’t sure, but he leaned in and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Go, Shay. You’ll be safe.”
I drove back, relying on memory. It seemed longer than the hours it had taken to get to the cave. It felt more like an entire day of driving, but when I pulled into the driveway, I wasn’t sure it was the right one. Nothing looked the same. In fact, I felt like I hadn’t even gone to the
same place, but this was where the sanctuary should’ve been. And then the trees shifted in front of me and allowed me entry. I drove the car through. When I’d gone past the first line of trees, they quickly closed behind me, shutting everything out. No one would try to get past. I even saw a few trees lift up their roots and settle back down in a different spot.
Kellan was right. Nothing was the same. The waterfall was gone, but as I got out of the car, I could hear it. I knew it was there, but I could only see forest around me. Guessing where the house would be, I moved forward, looking for the front steps. A wind rushed forward, picking up some leaves and I was shown the path that led to the house. It went down instead of up, and I found the front door and went inside, I saw that it was an entirely new house. It had been built upward before. This new one was built in a circle, around the waterfall inside now. The kitchen and dining room opened to the pool of water, as did the living room to their right.
The roof didn’t look like a roof. It didn’t seem like there was even a closing, but I knew there was. There had to have been, and just then a bird tried to dip down, inside of the house. A thick glass barrier kept it out, zapping it away.
Everywhere I looked, the walls were thicker, sturdier. The windows moved for me, where I looked, they appeared. I finally chose a room on the first floor, underneath where the waterfall fell into the pool. It splashed up, but a glass wall formed over our hallway and connected to the door. The water slid down it, trickling back into the body of water. I sat there and watched it. It felt like I stayed there for another few hours before I jerked in place. I’d fallen asleep without realizing it. With a yawn coming over me, I looked up and saw the sky was dark through the glass roof. A few stars could be seen, but not many. It felt like a darker night than normal, and I figured there was no full moon, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was where Kellan and Aumae were, and when they were coming back.
After showering, then lying in bed for a while, I got back up. I couldn’t sleep, not until I knew where they were. Padding barefoot from the kitchen to the living room, I curled onto a couch and then reached for the remote control. I’d never been one for television, no one in my family had been. Humans were…entertaining enough to me, but before I turned on the machine I was distracted by a buzzing sound. I searched through some bags and then through a few kitchen cupboards until I found a cellphone vibrating in a small drawer. Kellan’s name was scrawled over the screen, and I answered it, “Hello?” That was when I realized I had no idea where mine had gone. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even used it.
“We’re coming back, and we have another guest.”
“How’s Aumae?” I didn’t even care about the other guest. Kellan wouldn’t bring anyone he didn’t trust. “When will you be here?”