Keeper Chronicles: Awakening (20 page)

He growled at Rebekah but let her go and ran for the road without hesitating. Not knowing what to do with herself, she followed him. Her side ached. She touched her dress where the demon had scratched her, and her fingers came back wet. A wave of dizziness washed over her, knocking her from her feet, and the ground rose to meet her painfully as the strength that had buoyed her before fled.

Gabe knelt at her side and pulled her hand back. “You’re hurt. What did this to you?”

“I don’t know,” she answered as the stars spun over her head. She closed her eyes to keep her stomach from repeating its earlier acrobatics, “but it had big claws.” She took a deep breath, which was a bad idea. “And teeth. I think I killed it.”

“Keeper, do your duty!” Panic sharpened Nicholas’ voice. “She’s turning.”

Rebekah pushed him away and sat up, trying to hide a wince. “Go. I’ll be fine.”

“Beks...”

She shoved him harder this time, and he stared at her a long moment before rushing off toward the other two. Lying back in the leaves and grass beside the road, she watched their backs and wondered if she’d ever be able to go back to the way things were before.

Chapter Twenty

His night just kept getting worse. Gabe left Beks lying on the side of the road because he had no real choice. The only emotion he felt stronger than his anger that she was there in the first place was the intense relief that she’d not been hurt too badly. She might not know it, but a few scratches from a demon were nothing her Keeper heritage couldn’t heal within an hour or so. Faster if she’d actually been Awakened and trained.

Which she would have to be now. He’d hoped, after the fiasco the day before, to keep the full truth from her. Now that the Hunters knew, there’d be no hiding. No safety. The Council would insist she be forged into the weapon she’d already shown herself to be.

Just thinking about it made him want to kill something. But he’d have to worry about that later.

“She’s taken too much into herself,” Mia explained, holding the vial of holy water infused with the blood of the witches tight in her fist. “The memories here—taking in so many lives like this—is too much for her to fight. The demon’s psychic stain on this area is overwhelming her. Colette has to drink this, now.”

“Help me pull her away,” Nicholas added.

Gabe heard the terrible memory like it was just happening as he reached into the blue light for the French woman’s arms: the snap of bones crunching as the demon devoured the family in the van, the rain pattering on the metal roof, and worst of all, the screams of the dying. Those sounds would haunt him the rest of his life.

The Colette-demon fought with the blind rage and stubborn determination of someone stuck in an infinite loop. Any deviation from the original memory caused her to panic and lash out. The Hunter’s arms and legs and feet were shredded, blood trickling from a hundred different lacerations, but she acted as though she felt none of it as she clawed for him.

Letting her fingernails dig into his arm—he’d had worse, after all—Gabe wrapped his arms under her shoulders and jumped backwards with all his strength. She kicked and flailed with the strength of four people, slipping through his grasp once and then again. Blue, demonic energy stirred around them, particles soaking into Gabe’s skin.

Nicholas grabbed her feet and the three of them toppled. Gabe wrestled her torso to the ground until he lay back on the asphalt road, his arms locking her shoulders and his legs clamped around her waist.

“Do it,” he shouted through gritted teeth. Behind the witch and the professor, a pair of headlights shattered the darkness. They had maybe thirty seconds at most before it would run over the lot of them. “Hurry!”

The French woman was stronger than she looked, struggling and writhing in his grasp. The headlights, only pinpricks a moment ago, had now become larger. Closer. Twenty seconds more and they’d be road kill.

Arms shot out past him, grabbing Colette’s head. Beks.

“Hold her mouth open,” Mia ordered, uncapping the vial. Together, the three of them were too strong for the demon. Mia forced the liquid into the Hunter’s mouth, and Gabe held her mouth and nose closed as he rolled the both of them off the side of the road and down the small embankment, hoping the others would follow.

The headlights, now big as miniature suns, neared where Rebekah and Mia still knelt on the road. Letting go of Colette, he jumped to his feet and ran up the embankment, but it was already too late. The car was too close.

“Beks!” he screamed.

Grabbing her friend around the waist, Rebekah jumped. He couldn’t believe his own eyes as she rose above the height of the car which passed beneath them as if nothing strange had happened. The blue energy trail of the demon exploded as the car drove into it, expelling the last of the memory, and behind him Colette moaned. Rebekah landed with the feline grace of a cheetah.

As Rebekah looked around, a frightened Mia clutching onto her, the spark in her eyes glowed brighter than it ever had. For the first time, the Keeper heritage shone through her like its own light, unimpeded by magic or potion or ignorance, and it stole his breath. Her dress had been ripped and torn, blood from injuries both healed and unhealed smeared her arms and legs, and her short ebony hair was matted with leaves and debris. It took all his strength not to run up and kiss her right then.

Just as quickly, the light faded, reminding Gabe he had an incapacitated Hunter and four witches who’d thought killing him was a good idea to deal with. Turning away from her, he returned to Colette first.

“How is she?” he asked Nicholas who held her head in his lap.

“I don’t know. I need to get her somewhere quiet where she can heal. Most of these wounds look superficial, but there’ll be no telling the damage to her psyche until she wakes up. I hope whatever she learned was worth it.”

“I agree.” He glanced over his shoulder at Beks and Mia who were whispering heatedly. “Mia, I need you.”

“Coming, boss,” she chirped.

As Nicholas picked up his wife and began to carry her back down the road, Gabe went to where he’d tied up the witches and wondered just what he was going to do with them. Mia and Rebekah jogged up behind him as the witches started to scream and tried to back away like he was going to eat them or something equally terrible.

“What’s wrong with them?” he asked.

Mia took the nearest of her sisters and looked into her eyes for a long moment. “Poison,” she finally answered. “A kind that causes hallucinations. I can’t tell what exactly until I get them back to the house.”

“Why don’t you walk ahead with them? They don’t seem afraid of you.”

Mia looked at Rebekah who nodded. “Okay.” The witch gave her sisters a gentle push back in the direction they’d come. “Let’s go and see what trouble you’ve gotten yourselves into, shall we.”

As Mia herded the other witches in much the same manner a shepherd would guide a flock of sheep into a pen, Gabe looked over at the woman he’d loved since they were little kids. “How’s your side?” he asked.

“Still hurts.”

“Here, let me have another look.” She turned toward him so he could examine the wound. Touching her as little as possible, he tore open the ripped dress, widening the area so he could see the wound itself. The bleeding had stopped, but the open scratches would need a little more time to knit properly. “You’ll live,” he pronounced. “Come on, we should stay close.”

They walked in silence for the first few steps, and she limped heavily. Now that everyone was safe, relatively speaking, his anger at her washed back over him in a surge. He managed to bite his tongue for a few minutes, but finally he could hold it in no longer. “What were you thinking, Beks?” he hissed. “I told you to forget what happened.”

She bristled. “I was thinking that everyone I’ve known my entire life’s been keeping secrets from me, huge secrets, and I wanted to know what was really going on.”

“Well, now you’ve got your wish.”

“No, I don’t. I still don’t know what’s going on here.” She grabbed his arm and stopped him, her dark eyes intense. “Was that
thing
I saw what killed my father? The one I killed back in the woods—that was a demon, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t answer, and when he tried to walk past her, she stopped him again.

“If you ever loved me, you’ll tell me what happened.”

“Don’t you get it?” he yelled, turning to face her. “It’s the people who love you who’ve tried to stop you from leaning about this. I won’t break the promise I made to your father. If you want to learn the truth, you’ll have to ask someone else.”

“What do you mean, promise? What did you promise him? When?”

He rubbed his eyes. Gabe was exhausted, physically and emotionally. She wouldn’t stop, he knew. Wouldn’t stop asking until he gave in. “Your parents didn’t want this life for you; it’s brutal and dark and short. When your father saw how close we were getting in high school, he knew that my being around you would drag you down into this, too, so he made me promise to do everything I could to make sure you never found out.”

“That’s why you left?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “Because of a promise you made my father?”

“No. I left because I love you and because he was right.”

Persistent as ever, she didn’t let it drop there. “What happened afterwards?” she asked.

“I didn’t see or speak to anyone for three years. Not my parents, not other Keepers. No one. And then I met Juliet and she was beautiful and fun. She changed everything. We fell in love with each other and with life, and for a while I forgot how nasty this life is. I forgot all the friends and relatives whose funerals I attended. I asked her to marry me, and she said yes.”

“What happened to her?”

“We lived at the Killamook light just the two of us. We were happy, for Keepers. Then one day I took the boat to the shore for supplies, and when I came back she’d been torn apart by a particularly nasty demon. She was pregnant.”

She took his hand and squeezed. “I’m so sorry, Gabe. I didn’t know.”

“You weren’t meant to know. Not any of it. That’s the point.” Yanking his hand from hers, he followed after Mia and the other witches. Her sympathy was the last thing he wanted or needed right then. Juliet had only been dead for six months, and still the pain felt as fresh as if she’d died the day before. And their child...

Gabe didn’t recognize the dark plume of smoke for what it was until he was walking up the drive that led to the bed-n-breakfast.

Fire.

Something very large was burning, the house or the tower or both. Either would be a disaster. If the bunker beneath the storage shed caught, all his weapons and ammunition would ignite. The explosion could send their little peninsula crashing into the ocean. And the house—there were probably thirty or forty people there for the party. This was bad.

Taking out his cell phone, he dialed his parents.

His mother answered. “Gabe? What’s wrong?”

“There’s a fire at Meceta Head. Not sure if it’s the house or the tower yet, but we’ll need everyone: fire, ambulances, police. Call all the Keepers.” He hung up the phone before she could say anything, knowing that she would make the necessary calls. No matter how quickly she worked, however, it’d still take at least fifteen minutes or more for the first help to arrive. People could die before that happened.

Gabe shoved his phone back in his pocket and ran up the gravel drive toward the house. The ashy scent of smoke reached him first, followed by screaming. It was the house burning then and not the tower.

“Mia,” he said, tapping her on the shoulder, “get everyone to my bunker and lock yourselves inside. The police and fire are on their way here; the last thing we need is them asking what happened to Colette or why your friends here are in handcuffs. Got it?”

“Yes.”

When he passed into the clearing in front of the house, he stopped. Thick black smoke poured out of the basement windows and up around the edges of the house, ripples of dark clouds rising to the sky like some twisted tidal flow. Intense heat radiated outwards from the fire, palpable even from a distance. A dozen people, maybe a few more, milled around the yard looking lost and confused. At least that many people remained unaccounted for.

Beks ran past him and toward the burning house, screaming Dylan’s name at the top of her lungs.

Gabe hesitated just a moment before running after her. Dodging the handful of people who watched the fire aghast, he tackled her right outside the front porch, just a foot away from the stairs leading into the house.

“Let me go!” she half yelled half cried, struggling against his hold. “I have to find him.”

“Not like that you don’t.” Gabe ripped off the bottom portion of his shirt and dampened from the flask of holy water he kept in his pocket. “You’re of no use to anyone unconscious. The fire department will be here soon. Go in the front and get as many people out as you can, but if you start to feel faint, I want you to leave. Do you understand me?”

She stared past him at the house. “Let. Me. Go.”

“If you’re incapacitated, you can’t help anyone. Remember that.” Although probably not a prudent move, stopping her would take up precious time he needed to put out the blaze in the basement before the entire house burned to the ground, so he let her go.

At least she covered her nose and mouth with the cloth before running into the house.

Ripping off another scrap of shirt for himself, he wet it with the rest of the water and ran around to the back where the cellar doors would grant him access to the basement. Burning hot metal singed his hand as he yanked open the blue doors, a puff of foul smoke making its escape and burning his eyes. Nevertheless, he pushed his way downstairs to find Dylan unconscious on the living room floor, his head bleeding from a wound.

Shit.

As much as Gabe might dislike the man, he couldn’t leave him there. Squatting down, he picked up the man’s limp weight and flung it over his shoulder. Finally all those years carrying demon carcasses around paid off. Gabe climbed the stairs as quickly as he dared, his vision a blurry mess, and laid the man in the grass at a safe distance.