Chapter Twenty
“Fee, fie, foe, fum.” I never finish the rhyme because my prey tries to flee at the sound of my voice. I enjoy catching them.
One by one by one, they all fall down.
I rip apart a human male and it’s like tearing the wings off a butterfly. Only the human is more fun because I can hear the sounds it makes while it dies.
“What the hell was that thing?” A hoarse cry. Full of terror. I hum in pleasure and electronics burst like overworked eardrums.
“I don’t know. But it came out of the dark. We need more lights.”
“More lights, more lights,” I mock, crawling along the ground, inch by inch, vertebrae twisting and jaw unhinging. My belly craves food.
Human flesh.
Human pain.
Human suffering.
It all tastes the same.
The one I have my eye on smells ripe and ready. A fruit juicy and bloody red on the inside. Veins like pulp and bones like sugar.
The Sidhe struggle to rein the Specter in. So far away, the creature is hard to control. But its masters only have one goal in mind, and they make that very clear.
“Find the wolf,” I grumble, bitter at the thought of a lost meal. Lights flood the hall and I take refuge in the shadow of the human I’d been about to eat. Maybe I will be allowed to feed once the job is done.
Find the wolf.
The thought rings through my brain. Louder and louder as the Sidhe repeat their orders. I will find the wolf. I will hunt the wolf, and I will drag it kicking and screaming back to our masters trapped beneath the Sithin. For now, I will watch. Wait. Enjoy the sight of the Weres I arrived with ripping through the first line of defense the humans have erected. When the wolves tire, when they miss one of their enemies, only then will I reveal myself long enough to kill. I must control myself. Taking the wolf will require most of my strength.
Blood sprays across a nearby wall, a rainbow of red mist. This time it is not the Mad Sidhe that pull the Specter’s mind from feasting on the carcasses the Were’s create. The voice that forces it to behave is both familiar and strange.
Find Gabriel, the human female snaps, her grip on the Specter’s mind strengthening with each moment that passes. The Mad Sidhe can’t hear her, but they can hear the Specter’s all too eager agreement.
“Find Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel,” I cackle. I am delighted with the company in my mind. It gets lonely in there, in the dark. It’s nice having someone to talk to. Most of the humans I possess simply fade away. Too weak. All of them, too weak. “Find Gabriel,” I coo, and the human female buried deep within my thoughts is pleased.
* * * *
The humans are on the run now.
They scatter like leaves in the wind. No direction, no tether, only fear to guide them.
The wolves have taken out most of their numbers and I have done the rest. I swallow the lights as soon as they think to turn them on. The electricity from their machines is tasty too. Like candy on the tip of my tongue. In the world below, the world of the dead, I used to gorge myself on flames. Lightning didn’t taste as sweet, but packed twice the punch. The voltage the humans seemed so proud of was nothing but a light snack in comparison.
Without it to power their little trinkets they cannot communicate with one another. They cannot tell the others that danger comes. Then it’s too late and danger is there. Tearing through flesh and howling of their triumph.
The wolves have always been fun to watch.
So messy and loud.
Like furry children.
The human whose shadow I ride is scrambling through their fortress. Running down stairs rather than risk being caught in the moving coffins they call elevators. I would have left him, stolen his shadow and taken his soul along with it, but the woman tells me to stay. That maybe he will bring us to the one we both seek.
Gabriel.
And he does. Oh joy, oh breathless rapture, he does. It’s all I can do not to whip down the hallway to reach him first. To touch him. To swallow him whole. The woman holds me back again. Together we watch the man walk past rows and rows of cells. Each one holding a Were. It is towards the back, in the last cell, that we see who we’ve come for. Gabriel looks up at the man and there is a smile on his face.
“Trouble in paradise?” he asks and the Specter chuckles. The lights flicker ominously and Gabriel’s eyes dart to them before falling to rest on what he can see of Agent Elijah Walker’s shadow. He frowns, but the Agent is too busy talking to notice.
“I don’t know how you did it, how you brought them here, but call them off.”
Gabriel hesitates, wondering if he should warn Agent Walker of the danger he’s in. Then he remembers what the man did to his wolves. He remembers that he is one member short now, and he settles back. Almost gleeful at the prospect of what the Specter will do to Walker once it tires of playing follow the leader.
“Sorry,” he says with a shrug and a devil may care grin. He is not sorry at all, and they all know it. “There’s really nothing I can do.”
The human is enraged, scared; I can feel it vibrating through his shadow and into my skin. My stomach growls, twisting like a wild, angry thing. The man steps forward, grips the bars with both hands and the threat in his voice is born of a deep, and all consuming hatred.
“Call. Them. Off,” he hisses, and the Specter convulses. So hungry. “Do it now, or I’ll play a little song for your Pack that will have them dropping like flies.”
Gabriel growls, face momentarily contorting into something monstrous and dark. Just as quickly, he is under control again and he sends Agent Walker a sly look from the corner of his eye.
“Something tells me that if you could have, you would have done it already. I don’t think you have the clearance to play with your little toy when your masters aren’t watching.” His eyes grow dark and his smile is a quick baring of oh-so-sharp teeth. “Don’t make threats you can’t follow through on. It just pisses people off.”
“You shit-eating son of a bitch.”
Rage, rage, rage. The human is angry and I am fascinated. Slowly, I begin to separate myself from the man’s shadow. The other Weres in the cells around us press themselves close to watch the scene unfold. Yipping in excitement as I continue to grow behind the human. Stretching higher and higher. I am the tower of Babel and the human nothing more than rubble. Still talking, but unable to hear. To understand.
“The next time the scientists cut you apart, I’m going to be there. Standing over you. I’m going to piss on your insides. Watch you drown in it.”
I’m not the one who loses control. It is the woman, the one who has been rising in my mind ever since I took her body. At the man’s words violence pulses from the woman like a beacon and she is taking control. Shoving me away so that she can rip into the man’s shadow as I’d considered just a few moments earlier. Darkness on darkness. It clings to us with greedy fingers. Even if I had wanted to release the human, I cannot. On the inside, in his human shell, he is just like me.
Damned.
Unforgivable.
Like calls to like, and the woman and I rip the man’s shadow from the mooring of his body. The violence of the action dragging everything that is Elijah Walker out along with it. The woman is horrified, and her concentration slips as she shies away from what she’s done. She doesn’t know what to do with a man’s soul in her hands, with his shadow dripping like ink through her fingertips.
She doesn’t know.
But I do.
My jaws unhinge, and I consume the essence of Elijah Walker in the span of a single heartbeat. His soul screams on the way down, but that’s all right.
He is still tasty.
* * * *
“Found you,” I say, pleased that the Sidhe are pleased. At the sound of my voice, the Were, the wolf, the Gabriel cocks his head to one side. Horror suffuses his face.
“Phaedra?” His voice cracks around the name as if it made from broken glass. He looks like he is bleeding on the inside from the utterance of it.
“Found YOU!” I crow instead. I don’t know how to answer the question in this pain. It makes me think of my dead wife from long before. I don’t like the feeling, so I ignore it. He clears his throat.
“Yes. You found me.” He holds up his hands and I see that there are chains encircling his wrists. There is even a collar. A collar. Weres are not dogs. The sight confounds me. “Now you just have to get me loose.”
“More work,” I growl. Fingers growing like claws as my frustration builds. “It’s always more, more, more.” I slash at the bars and they melt beneath my violence like sand. How can they restrain anything at all?
“I FOUND YOU! I found the wolf.” I scream at him, at the Sidhe, from beside the door’s remains. I hate this world. Hate being trapped in skin. Hate breathing air. Hate having a beating heart. Death is simpler. If everything was dead, the world would be a better place. My fingers dig into the human woman’s scalp and I began ripping at her hair, so frustrated I could eat her down with that I had eaten….
What had been his name again?
I was so hungry.
My wail is echoing, sad, and the lights finally stop fighting me and die.
The darkness makes me feel a little better.
But only a little.
I snarl at the amber eyes still watching me, and the Were’s expression is both stern and understanding.
“I know you’re tired,” he tells me, and rage begins to boil in the darkest recesses of my thoughts. “I know you’re hungry. You must have worked very hard.”
My mouth twists bitterly, but I nod anyway.
“Yes,” I say. It doesn’t matter what I’m agreeing to. All of it’s true.
“You just have to do this one thing,” he continues, his voice hypnotic. I step into the cell. “One little thing, and your done and we can go home. Back to the Sithin.”
Home.
A curious notion. Home.
I don’t ever remember having a home, but the word is a familiar one. A strangely comforting one. I make my way to the Were’s side and I am reaching, grabbing a hold of the shackles that bind his wrists. But before I can tear them away, his fingers are entangling in my own. He is pulling me forward, off balance so that I collapse into his lap. The power in me sprouts, builds, roars, but before I can lash out at him his mouth is pressing against my own.
Huh.
He pulls back only long enough to say, “This is going to hurt.” Then he is ripping me apart and all of the world goes dark.
* * * *
Gabriel loved science.
It had a certain grace that magic lacked.
A certain finesse.
What made it so romantic in his mind was that there was so much untapped potential. So much of it still unexplored. When he first came to the human world he’d devoured everything he could find concerning the subject. The results had been fascinating.
Science didn’t explain what he and the other Hounds could do, but it gave him a better understanding of his gifts. The others thought he was ignoring his magic, but that was the complete opposite. He was just giving it a name.
He knew, even as he allowed the atoms holding him together to split apart, that what he was trying might not work. But if he didn’t try something, then the Specter would wipe Phaedra away, assuming that it hadn’t done so already.
Letting himself fade was easy. Some said that it was like exploding, like dying, like being reborn again. He’d heard all of the comparisons, but for Gabriel there was only one way to describe it.
For him, using his gift was like breathing.
One second he is solid.
He is real.
The next he is nothing,
But,
The world is a collection of thought, a kaleidoscope of flashing color where before there was only darkness. Even as a wolf he cannot see with such clarity. Cannot see a person’s breath escaping on the air like a moth or their skin like thousands of tiny particles, each with its own special brand of energy and life.
These particles are what he grabs a hold of. What he slips in between and pulls apart. They struggle at first, screaming and reluctant to be separated from one another. But they give up the fight soon enough. Her skin is the first to fall away, an old dress being discarded. He moves through everything else quickly. Internal organs, veins, ligaments, bones, blood cells. Inch by inch he breaks her down and sends her floating into the ether.
He grabs for her soul last.
The Specter is wrapped tight around her, black tar swallowing a dying bird. He can hear the tiny sounds of panic she makes, or fear, as the Specter continues to grow stronger. It makes it easier to pull them away from one another. The Specter is buried so deep within her that he has to shred her just to erase the last trace of the creature.
Then he leads her, broken and sobbing, after him into the light.
When they are safe, he works on pulling the piece of her back together.
He starts from her soul and works his way up. Brick by brick, holding her together with his will alone when she would have fallen apart. His mind stretching for miles in every direction just to bring the parts of her that had wandered too far away back home where they belonged. To him it takes forever to rebuild her, but in actuality, the process only lasts a minute or two. He doesn’t have to work nearly as long or as hard to make himself solid once again. If using his power was like breathing, stepping back into reality was like holding
His.
Breath.
“He is where Angels fear to tread.”
—Phaedra Conners
Kissed by Moonlight
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