“Which means if the Fae destroy Vamp establishments,
or any fronts that also cater to humans, they will go after the Finnegan’s Wake
bar, The Fair Lady, Dugan’s Bed and Breakfast, the list is endless.” Bradley’s
eyes were wide behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “This could get insane.”
“Correct,” Sasha said. “Which is why we have to find
out what the Erinyes connection is and try to prove to the Vamps that this
wasn’t the Fae. Problem is, at this juncture, the Fae are poised for
retaliation.”
“We could do a séance and call one of them up,”
Bradley hedged, and then looked around the group.
“Dude, are you nuts?” Winters was out of his chair and
had bolted across the room. “Call up a demon? Be serious!”
“It can be done,” Bradley said with more resolve.
“Then you send it back.”
“And do what?’ Winters dragged his fingers through his
hair. “Ask it why it’s pissed off?”
“Precisely,” Bradley replied. “It’s a last-ditch
effort, and we’re definitely running out of time.”
“Okay, let’s keep that as an ace in the hole, Brads,”
Sasha said in a skeptical tone. “Because from what I heard about demons, when
you bring one up and get it to do something, you seriously owe it—and generally
it wants a human sacrifice.”
“Right. ,” Clarissa said slowly. “But wasn’t that
part of the deal that got very messy with the Vamps?”
The room became still as all eyes focused on Clarissa.
“Baron Geoff Montague made a deal with Queen
Cerridwen’s court member Kiagehul,” Sasha said slowly. “That Vampire rat
bastard Montague cut a deal with a turncoat Unseelie, Kiagehul. who
used Lady Jung Suk—a Were Leopard—to do their dirty work.”
“Lady Jung Suk had vengeance in her heart against her
nephew, Shogun, and was willing to become disembodied to temporarily possess
poor Amy,” Clarissa said, walking toward Sasha. “Wasn’t the deal supposed to be
that Amy’s soul would be lost, thrust out of her body and given to the demons,
and Lady Jung Suk would take over the poor young woman’s body?”
“Yes,” Hunter said in a faraway tone. “But during the
battle in the bayou, the girl never died. We cast the demon spirit out of her.
and from what we learned tonight, many of the Were traits were left in Amy.
much to my brother’s good fortune.”
“So the demons got played twice,” Sasha said, grabbing
Clarissa by both arms. “First by whatever spell and promise had to be made to
them by whatever Lady Jung Suk and Kiagehul cooked up. and then by
whatever part the Vampires played in trying to use that demon essence of Lady
Jung Suk to make the wolves go to war.”
“And not only didn’t it work, but they got nonhuman
deaths—or sacrifices, for lack of a better term.” Bradley looked around the
room. “Nobody who died owned a soul.”
“Elder Vlad suicided his own man,” Fisher said
quickly. “Damn, this is gonna make me start smoking.”
“Yes. Right in open UCE court,” Hunter said. “Baron
Montague’s story was found wanting, Elder Vlad was furious, and he butchered
his own man right on the spot.”
“Just like Queen Cerridwen literally iced that crazy
bastard Kiagehul.” Sasha shook her head. “And we trapped and offed Lady Jung
Suk in the bayou.”
“But they all had outstanding affairs with the
demons,” Bradley said. “The ‘they’ being the Unseelie Fae, via Kiagehul, and
the Vampires—unwittingly so, via the late Baron Geoff Montague.”
“Yeah, but what about that other crazy bastard,
Russell Conway?” Woods glanced around the team and pushed off the desk he’d
been leaning against. “Seriously. Like didn’t he come to town dragging a demon,
too?”
“He did, but that was a personal deal forged years
ago. He was to give that demon his human soul when he died, and he did. Case
closed,” Bradley said, folding his arms.
“And it took a squad of Marines, a garrison of Fae,
and a bunch of wolf enforcers to put Conway out of his misery, too..
Sheesh.” Sasha glanced around the team again. “Where’s Doc?”
“Looooong story,” Winters said. “Crow came to town,
needed to talk to Doc. They went for a walk on the base. Bear Shadow escorted
Crow Shadow’s new wife back to the Uncompahgre, because Crow said it wasn’t
about not doing their job. But to be sure Jen was gonna be all right, Bear had
to get her tucked in with the she-Shadows, or you know, they might not accept
her. which could be messy, if tempers flared.”
“Okay,” Sasha said in a clipped tone, dropping the
subject at that. She didn’t want to even think about her brother’s pregnant
wife possibly being pack-rejected during a potential time of war. Part of her
understood, but part of her was annoyed beyond words. If Crow Shadow had just
listened to her and stayed in Vegas with Bear Shadow, far away from the pack,
until things blew over.
“They are warriors and pack enforcers, Sasha,” Hunter
said in a quiet tone. “They could no more stay out of the battle than you or I
could.”
She knew that, but it only mildly helped stem her
annoyance. More than anything, it just added one more group of people to worry
about, more lives that could be lost, and more potential tragedy that could
wreak havoc on everyone’s emotions.
“We’ve definitely narrowed things down, then,” Bradley
said, breaking the tense silence. “The serpent-like demon that overtook Conway
isn’t in the same category as the Erinyes.”
Grateful for the return of focus, Sasha paced to the
lab table and sat down hard on a tall metal stool. “Okay, so, if we put two and
two together, and I’m no demonologist or anything, but it looks like the
Erinyes are now playing both groups that conjured them up against each other.
That’s just my layman’s take. You’ve got the vamps that owe them and the
Unseelie that owe them. and both the Vamps and the Unseelie were
trying to make the wolves go to war.”
“Exactly,” Bradley quipped, and opened a big, black
textbook on the lab table beside Sasha. “So, they are making the Vampires and
the Unseelie suffer the fate of the spell they’d been conjured to perform—since
the Vampires and Unseelie essentially used the demons to perform said tasks,
but the demons were not paid for their services.”
“Ergo why the Erinyes are involved,” Sasha said in an
exhausted tone as she closed her eyes and waved her hand in the air as though
conducting an orchestra.
“Yes, precisely,” Bradley said, reading over the tops
of his glasses.
“But wait,” Winters said, frowning. “I thought the
Vamps and the Unseelie dude were the ones who didn’t pay up. so
these righteous vengeance demons wouldn’t be trying to avenge Baron Montague or
Kiagehul.”
“Out of the mouths of babes come words of wisdom,”
Clarissa murmured.
Bradley glanced at Clarissa and nodded. “The dead that
was righteous, I guess, as demons probably would see it, and who was escorted
to Hell under protest was Lady Jung Suk. She gave up her body—for an evil
cause, true, but she did. She was supposed to get a new body out of the deal,
and she didn’t. And basically went down—and since she’d probably given away her
soul years ago for whatever. ”
“If I know Shogun’s aunt, she’d negotiate with the
Devil and find a contractual loophole in eternal damnation.” Hunter returned
his attention to Sasha. “Which is why it will be imperative to keep Amy and her
family safe until this is over.”
“Maaaan.. ” Sasha jumped off her stool.
There were just too many loose ends to tie up and something was bound to fall
through the cracks.
“Look, I know how you feel, Pop, but I didn’t mean for
it to happen like this.” Crow Shadow walked away from Doc Holland and sat on
the desk that was on the opposite side of the room.
“No, Son,” Doc said in a quiet, stern voice. “You
don’t
know how I feel.”
The two men stared at each other until Crow Shadow
looked away.
“I have lived the trauma of being a human with a wolf
trapped inside me, never knowing why. My own father walked away from my mother
and left her to go insane—”
“And that’s why I couldn’t leave Jennifer!”
“I’m on your side,” Doc said, losing patience. “You
don’t have to raise your voice to make me understand. If I had known your
mother was pregnant with you, I would have never left her side. And knowing
your mother, she would have killed me if I’d tried.”
“I know you all didn’t get along, but damn, Pop.
you didn’t have to go there about my mother. She is still my moms.”
Doc nodded, but his expression held no apology. “It
wouldn’t have been personal. It was about the survival of the fittest. Your
mother didn’t want to be put out of the pack or have her reputation tarnished
for falling for a half-breed like me. But as much as she hated that the child she
carried was a quarter human, she couldn’t make the decision to terminate you.”
Doc looked away toward the window. “I guess just like my poor mother couldn’t,
no matter how my father treated her. So, there you have it.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, man. There you
have it?”
“Yes,” Doc said calmly. “There you have it. My father
walked, your mother hid, and they were both full-blooded Shadow Wolves. Now
you’ve come back to the pack dragging a full-blooded human wife thinking that
everyone at home is gonna be singing ‘Kumbaya’ and will treat your baby—
my
grandchild
—like a full-blooded Shadow Wolf.”
Doc used the silence to make his point and gave Crow
Shadow his back to consider as he slowly walked to the window to stare at the
moon. “I’m getting too old for this bullshit. I wish it would be right for you,
Son. Wish I could make heartache and prejudice just disappear, just like I
wished I could save your sister, Sasha, from all she had to endure. But I’m
just a man. An imperfect being. I’ll always love you. So will your sister and,
I suspect, her husband and team.. But the Shadows are creatures of
staunch tradition. I don’t even know if Silver Hawk will be able to get them to
welcome you and Jennifer with open arms.”
Getting to the Chens was priority one. Sasha and
Hunter raced through the dense shadow land mist but began to slow down as the
cavern became darker and darker and the indisputable smell of sulfur stung
their noses.
“I don’t understand,” Sasha whispered, taking her
sidearm out of the holster.
“Something’s definitely not right,” Hunter said in a
low tone, his gaze scanning the barren terrain.
Suddenly a ragged splinter of pitch-black darkness
ripped open before them and a howling wind blew them backward. They hit the
ground with a thud, stomachs and chests exposed to the onslaught of gargoyles
pouring out of the disturbed border. Covering their faces and curling up into
tight balls to protect vital organs, Sasha and Hunter hunkered down as leathery
wings and scaly legs bumped and pushed past them in what seemed like an aerial
stampede.
Although reflex made her want to fire on the beasts,
gut hunch told her that they were focused on getting out of the demon doors,
through the shadow lands, and out into the night. Their flight pattern seemed
disoriented. As they battered and bumped her and Hunter’s bodies, the one
question that continued to assault her mind was, why didn’t they attack?
Gargoyles were the pit bulls of the old-world Vamps. She and Hunter were fresh
meat. And what the hell were these things doing coming through protected shadow
lands?
The answer came quicker than she’d expected. Just as
the last of the flying stampede exited through the shadows, three huge demons
leaped out of the tear between worlds.
Mesmerized, Sasha lifted her head, but Hunter pressed
her face down quickly and turned his away.
“Don’t look at them,” he warned through his teeth.
“This is not our fight.”
He could feel their eerie presence pass over her;
their cold, massive bodies sent a shudder through her as she squeezed her eyes
tightly shut. But curiosity made her peep at their retreating forms.
Massive talons had replaced what should have been
human feet. Their legs were covered in scales, and muscular spaded tails
bullwhipped the air behind them. Serpents hissed and struck out from the thorny
crowns they wore, and their muscular blue-gray arms terminated in vicious
claws. Their backs were a sinewy network of corded tissue that worked in unison
to move huge bat wings to lift them in flight.
The moment they were gone, the sulfur cleared and the
black rip that hung in the air sealed.
“Twenty bucks say the Vampires called the gargoyles,”
Sasha said, slowly lifting her head and placing her gun back in its holster.
“I’ll raise you ten that anything called up by the Vampires
is no longer welcome to use the demon tunnels,” Hunter said, dusting himself
off and pulling Sasha to her feet.
She needed to be at three places at once, but Hunter
wasn’t hearing anything about splitting up and each doing a part of the mission
solo. They had to get Amy’s parents back to the Sidhe, and also get word to the
Sidhe to try to get Sir Rodney’s forces to stand down. But there was also the
not too likely chance of getting word to Elder Vlad without a fight—and even if
they did, him standing down just on a my-word-is-my-bond code of honor scenario
was insane. Still, they had to try.