The Stone Warriors: Damian (32 page)

He spun on his heel and headed up the stairs, calling orders as he went. She heard just a snippet of conversation from the top of the stairs, after he left the basement. It wasn’t much. Just a few words, but with what she already knew, it was enough. He planned to auction off the Talisman to the highest bidder sometime very soon. And before
that,
he was going to do something spectacular enough to ensure the artifact fetched a high price.

They were officially out of time. They needed to stop him
now
.
She
needed to stop him. But how?

Her captor came around to stand in front of her, letting her see his face for the first time. To say he was pierced was an understatement. How the hell did this guy ever get through airport security? Both eyebrows, his nose, his lip, his ears . . . all had multiple piercings each. It made her wonder where else he was sporting metal, but as quickly as she had the thought, she shoved it away. She really didn’t want to know.

He grinned, and she saw he’d filed his teeth to sharp points. And her fate was in this guy’s hands. A guy who’d been ordered to “make it messy.” Damn.

NICK DIDN’T BOTHER trying to be discreet as he roared down the Interstate. It was impossible with the Ferrari anyway. It was too noticeable, too much like an invitation to pull him over. Not for the first time, he wished he’d taken the time to switch out cars before leaving Kansas. But he’d been so excited when he’d heard Damian had been freed, that all he could think about was getting here. He could deal with the cops, if it came to that. Vampires weren’t the only creatures who could magic their way out of a ticket. But he didn’t want to waste the time it would take.

His phone rang and he glanced at the caller ID. Lilia. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said. He always called her that, not because she was beautiful—or not
only
because she was beautiful because she sure as hell was—but because it made her cheeks pink up in a blush every time. He knew she was blushing now, even though he couldn’t see her.

“Nick,” she said in that breathy way she had when he’d caught her off-guard. She cleared her throat, then shifted into pure business mode. “Something weird is happening with the signal from Casey’s phone,” she said briskly.

“What?” Damian demanded from the passenger seat.

“Damian? It’s good you’re there. But you guys should have let me know you’d met up.”

“Lilia,” Nick chided. She had a tendency to get spun-up about details and forget the big picture. “What about the phone signal?”

“Right, sorry. Casey’s phone stopped for a while, but it’s moving again, and that doesn’t make sense. I’ve tried calling her, but there’s no answer, and that’s not good, not normal. Casey
always
stays in touch. She’s the only one of you guys who follows protocol on that. She might not be able to talk, but she’d at least answer the damn phone, even if it was only to let me hear what was happening on her end.”

“Where is she now?”

“The
phone
was stationary for a long time, but it’s now traveling down I-355.”

Nick thought for a moment. “Okay, give me the address of her last stop, but keep tracking the phone.”

“I’m sending the address to your nav system.”

Nick glanced at the map and turned the wheel sharply, crossing three lanes of traffic to get to the off-ramp. It wasn’t a great neighborhood, but he could see why Sotiris would have chosen it. An area like this, with its crime rate? No one would ask questions, because they wouldn’t want to know. Knowledge wasn’t always power in places like this. His engine screamed, waking neighbors and their dogs, as he braked to turn onto the street where Casey had stopped, or at least where her phone signal had paused before racing away.

“Shit, is that fire?” Damian was leaning forward to stare at a small house that did indeed seem to be on fire. “Is this the house? Is Cassandra in there?” he asked.

Nick shot a glance at his nav system. It was the right house. Fuck. Damian would be uncontrollable if something happened to Casey. “The signal’s moving, Damian,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “She’s not there anymore.”

“Then who the fuck is that?”

Nick looked up to see two men race out of the burning residence, but instead of calling for help or acting like people who’d made a narrow escape, they were standing on the dead lawn and laughing their asses off.

“She’s in there,” Damian growled.

“You don’t know—”

“I do, damn it. Stop the fucking car.”

The two laughing idiots had turned to stare as the Ferrari drew closer, but when Nick roared to a tire-scorching stop in front of the burning house, they made a dash for their own car. Damian was on them in an instant, slamming one into the vehicle they’d been trying to reach, and grabbing the other by the neck, holding him several inches off the ground.

Nick crossed to the one lying on the ground next to the car and lined up the laser sight on his Glock 23 so that it painted a red dot on the asshole’s forehead. The guy could see the light over the barrel, and knew what it meant.

“Where is she?” Nick demanded. “And where’s the Talisman?”

The man grinned, displaying an impressive set of sharp teeth. Impressive in the sense that the guy was out of his fucking mind and yet still functioning.

“The Talisman’s gone,” he said, blood adding a gruesome touch to his grin. “And so’s the bitch.”

Damian spun at the man’s words, his fingers still digging into the other asshole’s throat, still choking the breath from him. With an almost absent gesture, Damian tightened his grip and twisted, breaking the man’s neck. He tossed aside the limp body and, ignoring Nick’s laser sight, grabbed the pierced idiot instead. But the guy only laughed.

“What’re you going to do, big man? You can save the bitch or save the Talisman. But you can’t do both. What’s it going to be?”

A stricken look crossed Damian’s face when he turned to stare at the burning house. Nick wanted to believe that Casey was still alive in there, but, even if she was, he couldn’t set aside the thousands of people who might die if they didn’t recover the Talisman. “You take the house,” he said abruptly. “I’ll go after the Talisman.”

Damian nodded, then broke the pierced guy’s neck as absently as he had the other’s, before running into the burning building without even a heartbeat of hesitation. But that was Damian. He didn’t know fear. He knew loyalty and love, and he’d give his life for the people he cared about. Which now included Casey.

Nick moved almost as fast as his brother, racing back to the still-running car to slide behind the wheel and tear away from the curb. He punched the number for Lilia.

“Did you find her?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Nick said grimly. “Damian’s on it. I need the phone signal.”

“It should be on your nav system. I shared that with you earlier.”

Nick glanced at the map displayed on the in-dash screen, and there it was. Casey’s phone was still traveling due south on the I-355. Where the fuck was Sotiris going?

“Shit,” Lili swore, all the more shocking because she did it so rarely. “The signal . . . it’s gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?” he demanded, knowing he sounded far harsher than he usually was with Lilia. He stared at the screen, which no longer showed any signal from the phone.

“I mean gone as in dead, kaput. No signal,” she said, confirming what he was seeing.

“How the hell does that happen? Is the battery dead?”

“No,” she said thoughtfully, and he could hear the soft tap of her computer keys. “They’ve either removed the battery, or crushed the whole thing so thoroughly that it’s simply gone dead.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they know we’re tracking the phone, Nick,” she said impatiently.

“Right. Okay, mark the spot it went dead. I’ll get someone out there to search the ground, see if we can find it. In the meantime, I’m going back to Damian. If anything’s happened to Casey, he’ll—”

“If anything’s happened to her, I will make it my personal ambition to destroy their virtual life,” Lilia snarled. “I will wreak such havoc on their credit history, on any financial or social interaction they have, that they’ll be reduced to living off the grid, in their car. If they’re lucky.”

Nick agreed with the sentiment. But he had ways of destroying an enemy that were far less virtual. And if they’d hurt Casey . . . well, she was
his,
and he would never again be forced to stand by while his people suffered. After a lifetime of rejecting everything his empire-building father stood for, he’d finally embraced what was very possibly the most important lesson his father had forced upon him: when attacked, you hit back ten times as hard and a thousand times more painfully. And Nick had had millennia to devise ways of inflicting pain.

IT WAS THE SMOKE that brought Casey back to consciousness. She coughed hard, choking, her eyes burning as she struggled to remember where she was. Something crashed near her head, sending embers flying, some of them landing on her bare skin, but when she tried to brush them away, she realized she was tied, hand and foot. The knowledge jolted her awake. She looked around, automatically taking stock of her situation. It wasn’t good. She was in a basement with piles of junk all around,
flammable
junk, and dotted amongst the junk . . . dancing patches of smoky flame, growing bigger by the second.

Her mind froze for a moment, her thoughts nothing but white noise and fear. She was going to die. Tied to a chair, exhausted, too hurt to move, much less free herself, with the fire now burning hot enough that she could feel it on her bare skin. Her lungs were straining for air, short panting breaths that were making it difficult to think, and for some reason, her brain conjured up . . . Damian. Her own personal warrior god, who’d survived a thousand or more years trapped in a prison of stone, who’d held onto hope while buried for centuries in the utter darkness of a cave. If he could do that, then damn it, she could do this. She might die anyway, but at least she’d go down fighting.

She looked around with fresh determination, memory clearing her thoughts like a splash of ice-cold water. She remembered Sotiris’s pierced and tattooed henchman bragging about his piercings, telling her about some of the ones she couldn’t see, about how much it hurt when he was strung up by the steel loop in his dick, or the pins in his back, and how much he loved the pain.

“But you know what’s even better?” he asked, flashing a short, very sharp-looking knife in front of her eyes. “Cutting someone else,” he told her, the gleam of insanity so obvious in his eyes that she wondered how Sotiris had managed to contain him. He placed the flat of the blade just under her eye and scraped downward, not hurting her, not drawing blood. Not yet. But the point of the knife was so close to her eye that she could see it reflecting the orange and red. . . . Wait. Orange and red? She didn’t dare turn her head, but she slid her gaze sideways and saw the first licks of flame among the boxes.

Her pierced friend followed her gaze, then straightened with a curse. “God damn it, you fucking pyro. I told you to wait.”

A second man appeared on Casey’s other side, a classic Zippo lighter in one hand, and a wild look in his eyes that made the pierced asshole seem sane. Where did Sotiris find these guys? He giggled. “It’ll burn slow.”

“No, it won’t, you fucking moron. Damn it.” He spun away, staring around him at the tinder-dry boxes, the old wooden furniture. “Shit. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“What about her?” the pyro thug asked, trailing the still-warm Zippo over her cheek.

“What about her, fuckwad? You wanna stay and fuck her while she burns, have at it. But I’m leaving.”

Pyro’s breathing increased, as if he was excited by the possibility. Casey swallowed hard. She didn’t know what would be worse—dying in a fire, or having this creep rape her. Wait, yes, she did. The smoke would get her before the fire ever did, so she voted for fire over rape. Definitely.

“I’d love to stay,” Pyro hissed in her ear, “but the master has such wonderful things planned. So much destruction.” He licked her cheek, and then, laughing, flicked the Zippo open and tossed the open flame onto something she couldn’t see, before shoving her chair over and slamming her head onto the hard floor one more time.

She’d lost consciousness then. She remembered that much. The blow to her head had been one too many. But, as grateful as she was to be alone and awake, her future looked pretty damn bleak. She couldn’t make out much from her position on the floor, but she could see that the wooden stairs and bannister leading out of the basement were dotted with flame, almost like a deliberate pattern. Pyro’s work, no doubt. But what worried her was the knowledge that he had to have used an accelerant for the pattern. And if there was more of that scattered around, the whole basement could explode into flames at any minute.

It would have been easy to simply lie there and go to sleep at that point. To accept the inevitable and let the smoke do the rest. But fuck that. She wasn’t going to die for her enemies’ convenience. She took stock of her situation.

She was still lying on her side and tied to a damn chair. Her lungs were burning, but at least the air was a little better down on the floor. She tested the ropes holding her and knew she’d never break them. Everything else in this basement was junk, but the ropes were new. On the other hand, the chair was part of the junk. It wobbled loosely when she moved and the seat under her ass, when she’d been upright, had been falling apart.

Twisting her head around, she focused on a stack of more solid-looking, wooden boxes and started scooting backward in that direction, thinking she could smash the chair—and herself, but, hey, no one said it was a perfect plan—against the boxes until something broke. Preferably the chair, not her bones. But once she started moving, she realized two things: one, it was damn difficult to move tied up the way she was, plus it hurt, and two, when she’d hit the floor that last time, the impact had actually cracked the wood under her left arm, weakening its connection to the chair. She pulled hard and it broke away completely.

Score!
she thought to herself. Moving was easier now that she had greater flexibility in at least one arm, and she managed to drag herself over to the outer wall, with its row of three, high-up windows. Only one of those was uncovered, and that was only because someone had ripped away the tattered black cloth that had been nailed over it. She’d have to reach the window, break it, and then climb to the outside, and all with a chair tied to her ass.