The Damned (The Unearthly Book 5)

  “I enjoy your tender heart. It must survive much to live here. This will not be the last terrible thing you behold. And I will admit a part of me craves your terror, because it is yours.” He leaned his head back and sighed. “Everything about you excites me.”

  Chapter 18

  Gabrielle

  This time, when I crossed over to earth, I felt water. As my body was forced upwards, the soil had gotten softer and softer. I’d cracked through the hard shell of the earth and was shoved into … this.

  Water.

  After I released enough air to tell which way was up, I kicked my way to the surface. I gasped in a lungful of air, my hair plastered to my neck. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of sulfur.

  Partially submerged columns surrounded me, and intricately carved, vaulted ceilings rose high overhead.

  Irony of ironies, I’d found myself in the middle of a church, one that had been lost to time by the looks of it. The entire floor was underwater. I toed the ground, and tiny bits of ceramic brushed against my bare feet.

  Whoops. In addition to all the really bad laws I’d broken in the past few days, apparently I got to add desecrating a sacred space to the list.

  Only, I wasn’t burning up like I’d assumed an unholy thing would. The disrepair of the place probably had a lot to do with it.

  A growl had my gaze darting up. Gargoyles lined the bannisters and the exposed bars bracing the columns of this place, and their beady, red eyes tracked me.

  Hold up. Beady red eyes?

  Not gargoyles. Demons.

  I spun in a circle; they’d fully surrounded me. And they eyed me like I was their next tasty meal.

  Aww, hell.

  A splash broke the silence. “Aaaaeeeei!” a familiar voice squealed. “Bloody fucking hell, Leanne. You couldn’t have at least warned me we were landing in a moat?”

  Not twenty feet away from me, Leanne, Oliver, and Andre appeared in the same pool of water I stood in.

  My heart spasmed. Today Andre looked worse than he had yesterday, his skin tighter and paler than it usually was. Our broken connection was taking a toll on him.

  He caught sight of me, and I could read the relief plain on his face. I wondered what he saw on mine.

  “You need to shut up. Now,” Leanne hissed, looking blindly around her. Neither she nor Oliver would be able to see much.

  I began edging towards them, my dress plastered to my skin. My eyes darted up to the demons whose attention now moved between all of us with interest. Andre followed my gaze up to the rafters, and his entire body tensed.

  The devil had been concerned about my safety here on earth. Perhaps he’d ordered these demons to watch me. Perhaps not. Either way, my friends were still fair game to them.

  “When’s Gabrielle getting here, Leanne?” Oliver asked, completely oblivious. “Because I can tell you right now, I can only take about ten minutes of this before I’m tapping out—eww, Leanne did you fart?” He scrunched his nose. “It smells rank in here.”

  Low growls echoed throughout the church.

  Perhaps it was a bit optimistic to assume the demons were here to protect me.

  Water splashed and shifted, and then strong arms wrapped around my waist. Even over the scent of sulfur, I could smell Andre’s pheromones. He brushed a kiss along my temple and dragged me back to my friends.

  One of the demons screeched, and it sounded an awful lot like a battle cry.

  “Oliver,” he said, placing my hand against the fairy’s arm, “we need to leave, now.”

  All around us demons jumped from their perches, their leathery wings snapping as they stretched open. Dozens of them descended on us, the beat of their wings blowing gusts of air against my face.

  “But Gabrielle—”

  “Is right next to you,” Andre said. “Now, Oliver!”

  The last thing I saw was the bared teeth of several of them as their claws reached for us, so close that I smelled their acrid breath.

  The basilica dissolved away. In its place were stone monuments and sand. My hands and knees hit the dry soil, and I stared up at giant columns and a wall of incised hieroglyphs.

  That was all the time I had to appreciate the scenery. Someone yanked me back, and my surroundings were brutally ripped from me. If traversing ley lines with Oliver felt effortless, this felt savage, like I was torn through the fabric of space.

  The Braaid appeared around me, and a cluster of men and women in uniform stood outside the circle watching. A knee dug into my back and magic flooded my senses.

  Under attack.

  My power built in response, but before I had a chance to release it, a spell slammed into me and the world went dark.

  When I woke, my hands were bound with spelled cuffs. My head leaned against a window and my body rocked gently.

  In a car. On the road.

  “It’s just as Lila told us.” The voice sounded far away. “She comes back every night. She can walk both realms.”

  I blinked as the last of the spell dissolved. My blurry surroundings came into focus. I sat in the back of a patrol car. I recognized the feminine voice that spoke. Maggie Comfry, my former boss.

  I’d been ambushed. The Politia must’ve foreseen this. Even with Leanne strategizing our next moves, she hadn’t been able to catch everything. No seer’s abilities were foolproof.

  I yanked on my cuffs, the jangling sound catching the officers’ attention.

  “Shit, she’s already awake,” Maggie said.

  The familiar smell of shapeshifter coming from the driver’s seat triggered my memory from last night. Byron Jennings grabbing my hair and slitting my throat. He’d found me again.

  My anger rose like a whip, and with it, my power. He and the rest the Politia thought they could control me, hurt me, tame me.

  I’d never felt wrath like this, and I no longer had the willpower to curb it.

  It was a testament to how powerful I’d gotten that even with the containment spell wound into the cuffs, I retained enough power to out-muscle the enchantment. I pushed my energy out, disintegrating the spell. The full force my power flooded me, thickening the air in the car. Another push of magic and the cuffs snapped open, falling away from my wrists.

  “What was that?” Maggie said, sensing a shift in the air. I saw the moment she realized the cuffs no longer contained me, her spine stiffening, her shoulders tensing. Slowly, she swiveled in her seat until our eyes met.

  I smiled, and power pulsed out of me.

  The windows and doors blew out. The sound of shattering glass and crunching metal echoed in the night. Wind whipped through my hair. I laughed as a howling gust of lost souls joined it.

  Byron slammed on the brakes and the wheels locked. We spun.

  My skin lit up at the chaos, and right in the middle of it, I leaned over the driver’s seat and whispered into his ear, “You’re going to regret what you did last night.”

  “Knock her out!” he yelled. “Knock her—”

  The butt of a baton slammed into my temple, and the world went dark once more.

  I woke briefly.

  “Should we just kill her?” Maggie’s voice.

  “You want her coming back for you?” Byron’s.

  I blinked open my eyes only to see a black baton coming down on me once more. Pain slammed into my temple, and I lost consciousness again.

  Eventually, the blackness bled away. A shiver wracked my body. I was too hot and too cold at the same time. My head pounded. It shouldn’t pound.

  I reached up to touch it and felt a lump.

  Where I’d repeatedly been hit.

  I rubbed my temples, trying to massage the pain away. Another shiver raced through me.

  “Feels terrible, doesn’t it?”

  My body tightened at the voice.

  I looked up. Iron bars separated me from Caleb. He sat outside my cell, his legs folded and his hands steepled against his lips. He watched me with tired, tormented eyes.

  “This feels familiar,?
?? I said. Only this time I was the prisoner. “Are we in Castle Rushen?”

  Caleb nodded.

  Unlike the cuffs, the enchantments of this cell pounded away at my skin and sucked me dry of energy. Perhaps if I had been awake when they brought me here, I would’ve retained enough power to break free of the cell. But as I’d slept, the neutralization spell had drained me.

  I rubbed my temple again.

  “Yesterday, they meant to kill you,” Caleb said. “Maggie was then supposed to get a read off of your body.”

  As a psychometric, Maggie had the ability to pull information off of whatever she touched, living or dead, animate or inanimate.

  “Andre scared them off, then your body disappeared—or so they say.”

  I lolled my head back against the cement wall, letting him talk. This weak, I couldn’t do much more than listen.

  “That’s why they captured you tonight. To understand you better.”

  So they could better understand how to defeat me.

  “Why are you here telling me this?” I asked.

  “You could’ve killed me, but you didn’t,” he said. “And last night, when you faced us off, you spared the officers then as well.”

  I just stared at him.

  “I keep expecting death, not mercy from you,” he said.

  I didn’t really care what he made of me. I wasn’t doing this to prove anything to him.

  He fell quiet, and for a long time we sat there together, me in agony, him in deep reflection.

  “Remember our first date?” he finally said, shattering the silence.

  My jaw clenched. I nodded.

  “You asked me why I was interested in you, and I told you that you were mysterious. I hadn’t known … I hadn’t known the half of it.

  “And then Samhain came around.” He swallowed. “That night I began to realize that you were really as doomed as you warned me you were.” He blinked several times. “You were marked by the devil, but I believed I could save you. I truly thought that’s what I was doing when I pulled the trigger four nights ago.”

  So this was Caleb’s apology, part two, and I had to sit here and listen to it.

  Lucky me.

  “I still want to save you.”

  “There’s no coming back from what you did,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how you defend yourself. You tried to murder me. We will never be friends again.”

  He held my gaze. “I know, Gabrielle. I’ve figured that out.”

  “Then why are you here?” God, I felt like shit. I was sure the enchantments of this cell were turning my organs to mush.

  “Seers have been looking into the future,” he said. “It’s not good. But some have said …” His eyes captured mine, “some have said that there’s at least one future where you save us.”

  Bullets pinged in the distance, interrupting story time.

  Caleb stood, his attention going to the end of the hall.

  The gunfire stopped abruptly.

  Both of us waited with baited breath.

  A chorus of shots broke the silence, and after the ringing in my ears died down, I heard a dozen different screams.

  Caleb cursed. “I have to go.” He backed up and pointed to me. “We’ll finish this later.”

  “Wait—”

  “Later, I promise.”

  Caleb turned on his heel and took off.

  “Thanks for letting me out of here,” I muttered. Not that I should expect anything else. I’d done exactly the same thing only a couple days ago.

  I pushed myself to my feet and wrapped my hands around the iron bars of my cell. I listened to the sounds of people dying. Whatever was out there was bound to find me eventually. I had no doubt this had to do with me. So I wasn’t surprised when I heard the slow footfalls headed towards my prison.

  I was surprised when I saw my sassy friend saunter up to the bars that separated us. He stared into my cell, a little moue of disappointment on his lips. “Fate’s really sucker-punched you in the tits this time, Jailbait.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Hello to you too.”

  Oliver held up a key, jingling it. “Lookie what I got. Just say it, I’m the best.”

  I exhaled, a smile curving my lips. “You are without a doubt the best.”

  In under a minute he had the cell opened, and I stepped out. As soon as I crossed the threshold, my power roared back to me. I sighed as my headache vanished and my injuries healed themselves.

  I rolled my shoulders back.

  Oliver gave me a gentle push. “C’mon, Corpse Bride, there’s so much to do and so little time.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, following him.

  He laughed, and it sounded so nefarious. “You’re not the only one who can wreak havoc on the Politia. Your honey bee is de-stroying Castle Rushen and everyone inside. We need to move it. Dude has a track record of ruining castles.”

  His words were punctuated by a tremor that passed under us. The lights flickered out.

  “Well shit. Can you see, Corpse Bride?”

  “You really need to stop calling me that,” I muttered, grabbing his hand and leading him out of the prison block, the walls shuddering around us.

  Déjà vu hit me as we made our way down the back halls of the Politia’s headquarters. I’d done this only nights ago, and only nights ago it had been Bedlam here as well. When we hit the crossroads, I looked down the halls. To the right was my exit out of here. Straight ahead took me to the training rooms, and to the left … that would eventually lead back to the main entrance of the castle.

  I desperately wanted to go left.

  Plaster began to fall from the ceiling.

  “Son of a demon,” Oliver cursed.

  Son of a demon indeed. I had to get Oliver out before this place imploded … just as he said it would.

  Andre really did have a bad habit of destroying buildings.

  Chapter 19

  Gabrielle

  As soon as we burst out of the castle, I turned to Oliver. “Stay here.”

  “What? But that’s no fun—”

  I left him mid-sentence, darting around the castle and back to the front. Officers had surrounded the building, their weapons trained on the main entrance.

  That awkward moment when someone’s inside your headquarters and you’re guarding against them coming out. Bet the Politia was forcing down a significant serving of humble pie right now.

  When the officers saw me, they began shouting, and some of them turned their weapons on me. I lifted a hand, and with a flick of my wrist, wrenched their guns from their grips. Another flick of my wrist and the guns crumpled in on themselves.

  Oh, I really liked doing that.

  I felt the now familiar rage searing my veins.

  Kill them all.

  Kill. Them. All.

  No. No. I fisted my hands and pinched my eyes shut.

  Chill, Gabrielle. You are not a psycho. Correction: you are not a violent psycho.

  I slowed to a saunter, then deliberately gave the officers my back as I headed inside, where the screams were coming from.

  It was just as bad as I’d assumed it would be. Somehow, nearly every officer that wasn’t outside was in that main room. Including Caleb.

  The halls that branched to either side of the entrance had been barricaded with tables and chairs, preventing the officers from escaping.

  And in the midst of all of this was Andre, his hair rippling. The air crackled with power. Two gigantic sheathed swords crisscrossed his back. He hadn’t used them—yet. Still, that hadn’t stopped him from wreaking havoc on the place.

  Some officers lay sprawled in front of him, moaning. The smell of blood was ripe in the air, and each of these officers laid in a growing pool of it. The sight and smell excited the predator in me.

  A closer look told me that all their injuries were non-lethal. A bullet to the arm, another with a hole through her calf. All gunshot wounds.

  The remaining officers—including Caleb—clust
ered at the back of the room, facing my soulmate down. I was surprised to find that I cared Caleb was unhurt. Not that he wouldn’t be, and soon.

  Guns pointed at their owners. And right when I walked in, they all cocked themselves.

  “Come any closer and I will shoot them,” Andre threatened.

  “Andre,” I said, stepping farther into the room, “do you not recognize my scent?”

  At the sound of my voice, his shoulders tensed. He turned slowly, the static-y energy of the room ratcheting up.

  “Soulmate,” he breathed.

  The weapons stayed trained on their targets, but he kept his back to the officers as he strode towards me. When he reached me he cradled the back of my neck and tilted my head up. His hair still rippled, and his eyes were largely unseeing. He leaned his head against mine, drawing in my scent.

  “They took you.”

  I touched his cheek. “And you came for me. Thank you.” A week ago I might’ve said this as a way of placating him. Now I meant it sincerely.

  His eyes closed, his body relaxing. “I haven’t breathed since they captured you.”

  He opened his eyes and kissed my lips, then my forehead. “I will eliminate these people, and then we will go home.”

  Blood roared between my ears.

  Yes!

  Andre began to pull away, and I stopped him, gripping his arms. I was missing something. I searched and searched before I remembered.

  Ah.

  “Let them live to see another day,” I said. Even as I spoke, I rallied against my own words. I wanted them all to pay for what they’d put me and Andre through.

  His nostrils flared. “They want you dead. I will not let your enemies live.”

  I clasped his cheeks with my hands, and forced his unfocused gaze on me. “I cannot be killed. They know this.”

  His unseeing eyes finally sharpened on me, and I thought I’d made a breakthrough.

  Over a dozen weapons fired at the same time.

  Mother fucker. He shot them.

  “What’ve you done?” I gasped as more screams lit up the night. I felt those screams soak into my skin, along with their pain. Power burned through my veins.