21
The vans were pretty much right on top of us when we spun to a stop. Eve rose into the air above us with a screech. She could have hidden herself from the other humans, but the fact that she didn’t told me a great deal about what was going to happen. She planned to kill us all. No witnesses, no need to hide.
I ran around the side of the car and ducked as Eve slammed into the hood, her claws swinging straight for me. Rolling, I dodged the razor-sharp talons, feeling them slice through my leather coat, the rip of the material far too close to the sound of flesh being pulled at for my liking. A hand yanked me back toward the mineshaft as the Harpy launched a second attack.
“Bitch, I’m going to pull you apart, one tendon at a time,” she screamed.
There was no doubt in my mind she could do just that, and I wasn’t sticking around to watch her try. If I could free her while I got India out from under the Coven’s “loving” care, then I would, otherwise I’d have no choice but to kill her. One did not control a Harpy; not even the spell the Coven had on her would last forever.
O’Shea dragged me over to the mineshaft and we ducked down behind it.
A wave of India’s fear hit me hard, buckling my knees. If this kept up, I was going to have to block her completely and I didn’t want to do that. Right now, I had the feeling she was only hanging on because she could sense me.
The Harpy rose up in front of us and her body started to buck; puffs of feathers erupted out of her as arrows protruded from her body. Not that it would kill her, she needed a blow from a spelled weapon or another supernatural creature to actually kill her. But the men in the black vans didn’t know that.
It was my turn to pull O’Shea down as Eve streaked over the top of us and into the group of—I did a quick count—ten men.
Blood sprayed up in a fountain as an agent’s head was ripped off with a single pull from the Harpy’s powerful beak. A second followed suit, and then the real bloodbath began. O’Shea and I stood, open mouthed in horror, as the Harpy spelled the men, freezing them where they stood, then eviscerated each of them, letting them slump to the ground to die slow and painful deaths. Her voice sung a lullaby that echoed across the badlands, and the pack of wolves in the distance picked up the harmony. Creepy, beautiful, deadly, and horrifying. There was a sense of loss in her song, the words unrecognizable, but the tune made me think of someone mourning.
O’Shea stumbled forward and I caught his arm. “Oh, no you don’t.” But it was as if he didn’t hear me. Again, he took a step, to go around me, and I put my body directly in his path. “O’Shea, stop!” He didn’t listen. I slapped him hard across the face, but there was no response.
“Liam,” I said, and he turned to face me, his eyes full of confusion. Taking a deep breath, I slid my hands up over his face. “You can’t go to her.”
“She’s hurting,” he whispered. “I don’t want her to hurt anymore.”
I glanced over at the Harpy; we didn’t have much time before she would finish the gore fest and turn her attention back to us. I wasn’t so sure calling her by name would be enough to stop her, no matter what her sister said.
I pulled his face down to mine and kissed him, and felt his arms wrap around me after a brief pause. I tried not to think about how good it felt to be held against a warm, hard male body, how much I missed just the simplicity of human contact, how much I didn’t really want to let go of him. His tongue explored the inside of my mouth, taking its time tasting me, and I returned the favour, finally pulling back to stare up into those midnight dark eyes. They were clear of her song; the hypnotic effect of her singing gone.
“Did you just save my life by kissing me?” He didn’t let go, but held me tighter still against him.
I wanted to believe it was some last remnant of the spell from the Coven, but the way my lower body tightened and my pulse sped up, I knew it was much simpler than that.
I wanted him.
“You know what they say, a kiss a day keeps the Harpy away.” I tried for humour, but my eyes slid to the bloodbath going on. If I’d thought we could have made a difference, I would’ve tried to stop her.
“I guess I’d better keep you close then,” he said, his eyes dipping to my lips.
I pushed him back before his arms tightened anymore.
“We don’t have time for this.” I fought the feelings he aroused, as well as the guilt washing over me. Here we were, kissing while men were being eaten by a Harpy; not what I’d call good manners on our part.
He nodded, his face shutting down, all business again. Which was good. Really, it was. As I tried to convince myself of that fact, O’Shea led me around the side of the van closest to us while Eve dug into the fresh meat on the ground.
“These vans are equipped for anything, even scaling buildings.”
There was a click when he slid the door open that, to me, sounded like a shotgun blast, and I spun to face Eve. But her head was still down, the edges of her neck covered in blood and intestines as she pulled the men apart.
I clamped my teeth together, unsure of whether it was to keep the vomit from spewing up and out of me or to keep my teeth from chattering. Either way, I had to hold it together. O’Shea grabbed the rappelling gear, one harness and a massive coil of rope. I peeked into the van. It was chock full of weapons, my kind of weapons. Blades of all lengths, whips, leather armour and even a couple of shields. What the hell? No, there wasn’t time to question this, though I had a sneaking suspicion this was no coincidence. This was my first real look at the Arcane Arts division of the FBI. At least they came prepared, though their training was sorely lacking.
I pulled down two large blades—one curved, one straight—and settled them on my back in a cross pull holster that sat there as if it were made for me.
I fingered a tag on the leather straps and my breath froze. “This has my name on it.”
“What?” O’Shea asked, his eyes scanning the tag. “That . . . doesn’t make any sense.”
They knew about me. Shit! But why would they have put stuff in my size into their van and then chased us across the badlands? As O’Shea said, it didn’t make sense.
India’s fear hit me in a wave that collided with my own, spiralling upwards through my body until it was all I could do to keep from screaming. A large pair of hands grabbed my arms and shook me, forcing me to look up into O’Shea’s eyes.
“Pull it together, Adamson. I can’t do this without you.”
More than anything else, that admission snapped me out of it. Later. I would deal with the implications of this later.
Geared up, we crept around the edge of the van. Eve had finished feeding and preened her feathers.
“How are we going to get past her?”’
Now that I had the weapons, I could probably take her on; she was young and inexperienced, scared. Alone. Shaking my head at my own stupidity, I motioned for O’Shea to stay behind the van.
“Let me deal with this,” I said, my resolve firming. “You get the harness on. Seeing as there is only one, you will have to pack me down.” I told myself Eve was just another child, just another child. That mantra spun through my head, but it didn’t lessen the fear making my skin clammy.
The Harpy lifted her head, her beak clacking at me. “You are too stupid to even believe. Do you think I won’t kill you because I’ve feasted well?”
Lifting my hands to show her I had no weapons, I shook my head. “No, I expect you won’t kill me because your sister asked me to free you, Eve.”
She let out a screech, her eyes widening until they were completely dilated, and she stumbled backwards, her wings flapping. “She wouldn’t have told you my name.” But her voice had lost its edge and she sounded like the child her sister claimed she was. Her emotions swirled toward me, and I let myself feel them. Fear, uncertainty, loss, and pain.
Wiping my hands on my jeans, I tried not to shake as I stepped toward her. Her left foot glittered as she stepped away from me, a blood red ruby catching the light as she walked.
“You’ll have to hold still if you want me to remove that,” I said, pointing at her foot.
Her feathers trembled, rippling as if there were a breeze blowing, but there was no wind. Just the raw emotions that shook her frame.
Eve said nothing, and I took a steadying breath and pulled one of the swords out. She hissed and raised her wings, her terror filling me. She was afraid of me. Her emotions were raw, an open book, and I knew if I kept tapped into them, I might have the warning I needed if she was going to attack me. Maybe.
Moving slowly, I spoke to help calm her. “I have a pet werewolf you know. His name is Alex. He was from a pack that tried to kill him, and somehow he ended up on my porch one night, bleeding and hurt.”
I was a few feet closer, and she lowered her wings. “Why didn’t you kill him?”
“I don’t like killing.”“ He was scared and needed help. I know how it feels to be in that kind of a bind.”
She cocked her head and her eyelids fluttered. “What do you know of fear? You are a Tracker. You are a killer.”
My chest constricted. Was that how all the other supernaturals thought of me? As a killer?
“I was accused of killing my baby sister, a lot of years ago.” I crouched by her foot and put the blade to the edge of the stone, working around it to loosen it up. “She was the first I tried to find, but she was already dead by the time I realized I could track people. No one believed me, not even my parents. I had nowhere to turn to for help.” I lifted my eyes to hers. She was crying. “Am I hurting you?” There was no blood from her foot, no cuts from my blade; I was being as careful as I could.
“I miss my sisters. They kept me safe,” she said, her head dropping to her thickly feathered chest.
I worked at the stone and with one final pop, it flipped out of her foot, leaving a depression but no wound.
Tucking the stone into my pocket, I stood and backed away. There was no glitter of a spell breaking, no clash of thunder or backlash of power being released. The most powerful of spells were often also the simplest, and this was one of those. “There. You’re free of the Coven now.”
She twitched and her wings shook. “I have nowhere to go. We are the last of the Harpies in this range; the others would kill me because I am young and alone.”
Deadly, they are as deadly as anything out there. But I still opened my damn mouth. “You can stay with me. For a while.”
Her eyes flicked up, hope flared between us like a sucker punch to my gut. I’d killed her two sisters and now she was looking at me as if I was her saviour. Shit.
I motioned to O’Shea, who made his way to the mineshaft and starting hooking up the gear.
“We have to go. If no one shows up, wait for us here. If people show up, hide yourself,”
She bobbed her head and settled down on the ground. It was too surreal, even for me, to see the sprawled out half-eaten bodies next to the young Harpy I’d just given leave to stay with me.
“What the hell are you thinking?” O’Shea snapped my own thoughts back at me.
“We have to get India. Then I will deal with the rest.” I forced the confidence into my voice and my movements; forced myself to turn my back on Eve, though my every instinct screamed at me to run.
O’Shea slipped on the harness and climbed up on top of the mineshaft, a glow stick dangling from his hip barely touched the murky darkness below him. He passed me a flashlight, which I stuck in my back pocket.
Then he held out his hand. “Come on.”
Tucking away the sword I’d used to pry the gem from Eve’s foot, I did as he asked; put my palm against his, and; he yanked me to his chest.
“Hang on.”
“Like I was going to let go?” I lifted my eyebrows in tandem.
He flushed and I snaked my arms around his neck, shifted more to his side before I wrapped my legs around his hip and right thigh. Even though it wasn’t a tight squeeze, the mineshaft brushed up against us, banging us back and forth down the pipe, our bodies swaying with the movement of the rope.
O’Shea worked the ropes, lowering us slow and steady, his muscles flexing under his dirty white shirt. At some point along the way he’d lost his tie, his hair was a complete mess and again, I could see just before we lost the light from above that there was a glint in his eye.
“You having fun, Agent?” I tightened my grip on his thigh as the pipe bumped into my hip.
“What?”
“This whole time, with all this crap going on around us, you look like you’re enjoying it.” The pulse of his blood beat strong against my hands. I forced myself to not trail my fingertips along his neck and jaw, to feel the stubble that had been pressed against my own face not so long ago. I swallowed hard. This close proximity was not a good thing for me. Never in all the times I’d been tracking down kids had I been so distracted, and it wasn’t like this was the first time O’Shea had been involved—to some degree—with a salvage I was on. He’d almost always been there on the periphery, just on the edge of my life.
He shifted his arms and we slid down, the light around us dimming completely except for the little glow stick below us. “I don’t think enjoying is the right word.”
We slid down into the darkness, no longer able to see each other’s faces. Maybe that was what made me so damn bold. “Yes, it is. You’re enjoying this. Like a kid who’s never been to a party before and gets taken to the biggest frat house in town and lets loose. So what gives?”
Silence, except for the creak of the rope, and when he spoke, he went in a totally different direction.
“What really happened to Berget?” His words would have sent me running in a different direction except for the fact that I was stuck with him in a freaking mineshaft that would probably take us another half an hour to get to the bottom of.
It was my turn to be silent. But then, hell, it wasn’t like he didn’t know anything about the supernatural. I could tell him, I just didn’t want to.
“I was watching her for our parents. Berget loved the park, loved being outside. So I took her to the biggest park in the city late in the afternoon, close to dusk.” My fingers found the collar of his shirt and I fiddled with it; of course he already knew all this, it was in the files on me and the case, no doubt. “Anyway, when we got there, I had this strange sensation of something not being right. I didn’t know what it was, but I told Berget to keep close.”
We slid down a few more feet while I gathered myself. Much as I hated talking about this, I suddenly wanted O’Shea to know completely and irrevocably that it wasn’t me who’d killed Berget. But I wasn’t going to analyze why it was important to me, as my fingers brushed along the back of his neck.
“There are some people who have blood pulsing through them that is . . . ““I tried to find the right word. “Exotic and tantalizing to the supernaturals who drink blood to live.”
He kept shifting us lower, but still managed to sound as if we were just going for a walk in the park. “You mean like vampires?”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see it. “Yes, and daywalkers, and a slew of other creatures too. I found out after she went missing that Berget had that kind of blood. It sings to the supernaturals, almost demands to be taken in a way. I don’t fully understand because it’s not something that’s a part of me, nor is it a common occurrence. What I know is there are very few people with this kind of blood who make it to adulthood. Very few.” And that was the hardest truth about my job as a Tracker. So few of the children were brought home to their families alive.
“So what took her?”
“A pair of vampires.” I thought about Doran, how he’d wanted a taste of my blood, and I shivered. Although I had no doubt my blood was tasty, I never would have made it to where I was now if I’d carried the same blood as Berget. I’d have been stolen and drained years ago.
“So these vampires took your sister and you couldn’t stop them?” His words sliced through me as if it had been only moments since Berget had been killed instead of years.
“I was young and had no training; I didn’t know I was a Tracker. It was after Berget went missing that my abilities awakened.” And that was the crux of it. If she hadn’t been killed, I wouldn’t be able to help these other kids. Yet, I’d give them all up to have her back in my life, to have had a family that was whole and not shattered into pieces. It was also a line Giselle had drilled into me as she’d trained me and Milly. I couldn’t change the past, but I had to use what it had given me in order to keep Berget’s death from being wasted.
Tears traced down my face in the pitch-black darkness, and even though O’Shea kept asking me questions, I couldn’t answer them. Not that it mattered anyway. I couldn’t change the past, and it was India’s life that now lay in the balance.