A Sensual Summoning, page 22
Stepping down the incline into the stream that ran parallel to Faye’s cottage, he walked through the water to dispel his scent. The water lapped at his calves, the energy that made up his pants subduing the sound of it moving around him.
His emblems were no longer pinching him, they were full on stabbing him with warning. His grip tightened on the dull silver handle of one, the cracks that were beginning to show on the once smooth metal concerning but his hands were tied. He needed the strength now, as two more acolytes caught sight of him as they sloshed through the water.
Where the fuck were they all coming from?
Silence fell over the forest when the last squeal was cut off by Rafael’s blade. Their bodies were contaminating the stream, something he knew Faye would be distraught to learn. With some assistance though, he was sure she could cleanse it.
The thought distracted him with its charm, a graze of feathers across his eyes that blinded him to the presence that propelled a hollow log of a long dead tree into him. The force of the wood winded him, slamming him into the embankment. It rolled off him when the magic that controlled it dispersed, splashing into the stream where the reflection of blond hair caught Rafael’s eyes.
Marek.
Their eyes met in the water, alarm bells blaring in Rafael’s mind. Surprise passed over the Necromancer’s face, a deviance from his usually ethereal impassivity before dissolving into a smirk. Throwing a log that large was child’s play to him and when he walked out of view, Rafael couldn’t see a thing when he looked up.
But where his hallucination weeks earlier and this one differed, was the smell. A sickly-sweet odor wafted from the direction Marek was standing. The smell alone injected his heart with adrenaline, pumping wildly in his chest at the memories attached to it. It was the last thing he remembered before waking up in that paper prison.
He scrambled to his feet, his tongue on fire from the flavor of decay that the breeze carried. Taking off at a sprint back through the water to the other side of the stream, Rafael’s vision tunneled in a bid to chase the taste that had disappeared as suddenly as it registered.
Whatever had summoned this many acolytes went beyond power.
This was loyalty.
He ducked fluidly under the diving shambles of another sack of bones and jagged teeth, the blade of his knife morphing under his will into the whip he preferred. The golden tail cracked through the air, fizzling and flickering with the strain he was putting it under. The acolyte had no sooner died than another stepped over its body in pursuit of him.
As tall as the others, this one stood straight as it approached him. Rafael’s jaw ticked in recognition when he caught sight of Marek’s brand embedded in the leathery, grey neck. A high priest. No wonder he was in better shape than the acolytes.
He was likely the one who rallied their disorganized numbers and brought them here.
“Daemon.” His voice was like rusted chains forced to move, scratching across Raef’s eardrums while he flicked his whip back to his side. “Our lord was right… devotion has given us a gift.”
He opened his arms out, cracked lips spreading into a smile made up of black gums and sharpened teeth. He had evidently deteriorated more than Rafael initially thought as his bloodshot, cloudy eyes ran over him like a long-awaited prize.
When he lunged, surprising the incubus with his speed, Rafael barely avoided a deeper wound when the priest’s claws grazed his shoulder. He growled at the sting, spinning to slash the whip between them, daring the priest to get closer to his true death.
This one wasn’t stupid.
He eyed the power radiating from the whip as suspiciously as he did covetously. The one thing that could sate the unquenchable thirst for immortality through power was also the one thing that would kill the priest on contact.
As such, they circled each other warily. Rafael was good at waiting, excellent at baiting out the impatience and greed of his opponent, but time wasn’t on his side, and Faye was still alone in the cottage. He didn’t have time to waste on this one priest.
That was when a rustle carried through the ley lines, the stumble of a baby deer fleeing a predator echoing somewhere in the territory he marked. Sunshine-flavored familiarity was overshadowed by fear, the chain yanking from how far away she was.
Faye.
That distraction was all it took for the priest to take his chance, faking a lunge right for Rafael to instinctively react with a crack of the whip in that direction, leaving his left side exposed.
But the priest, like Marek, underestimated Daemons in their arrogance. In their pursuit of power harvested from the death of his kind, they failed to remember that the power they wore was a caricature. A skin suit of imitation that paled in comparison to a living, breathing, Daemon.
His hand shot out to grab the priest by the neck, bones creaking and muscle bruising under his grip as he stopped him in his tracks and forced him to his knees. The priest tore at his arm in a blind attempt to escape, recognizing the end even as Rafael plunged his emblem into him brutally.
The weapon disappeared into the priest, burning him into nothingness even as it shattered before Rafael’s eyes. Metal groaned as his emblem warped, caving under the pressure of the fighting and the weeks of limited sustenance.
The drop of his power that it contained disappeared into the shrubs and moss surrounding him, the shards of metal crumbling to dust in his hand as his last remaining emblem stabbed him with urgency.
Panting hard, he dragged a hand through his hair when a frightened yelp emptied his mind to anything but finding Faye. All but one of the acolytes he sensed in the forest were dead, the last one hot on the heels of his disobedient little witch. He took off in a sprint, flying out of the question after the hit his emblems had just taken.
He’d wring her neck for putting herself in danger. That is, if he found her before the acolyte did.
Chapter 44
Something was wrong.
Raef had been yanking on the chain for the last twenty minutes, erratically moving across the limit that had Faye struggling for breath every time that piercing pain doubled her over.
Something was definitely wrong.
“That’s it.” She gasped, gripping her lower stomach with one hand and the kitchen counter with the other. There was promising to stay in the cottage in good faith, but this was scaring her.
Logically, Faye knew she shouldn’t fear for him. She’d seen him take out acolytes before, but suddenly it wasn’t merely about his capabilities. An irrational fear brought on by images assaulting her mind of him disoriented or injured or unconscious as he was dragged across that border wouldn’t leave her alone.
She couldn’t sit twiddling her thumbs doing nothing.
Her lips were still swollen from his kisses, her body only having calmed down when worry had overtaken her mind.
Stepping out into the quickly descending darkness, she considered bringing a torch. She never could find it whenever she needed it, so instead of wasting time, she trusted that the small pulses underfoot would keep her from tripping as they always did.
It was a dull night, the low hanging clouds blocking out the purple light of sunset and the rising moon that barely glowed on the other side of that thick blanket of cotton. She stopped abruptly at the edge of the tree line, near the newly mended fence of Rowan’s paddock that Raef had surprisingly fixed for her.
The hammer he’d used was still there, and grabbing it on a whim, the wooden handle was comforting in both her hands as she stepped into the forest. She might not be adept at offensive magic, but she had two legs that could run and two arms that could swing a weapon blindly if need be.
That was what she reassured herself with as darkness fell, a disorienting low light from the rapidly setting sun more of a hindrance than a help.
A shriek carried eerily across the woods, quiet from how distant it was. She hoped it stayed that far away; her lips pressed tight together to stop herself from making a sound inadvertently.
Pressing forward, regret for leaving was almost instantaneous when a pungent smell filtered up her nostrils. Metallic and fresh, Faye knew the smell of blood anywhere. The pulses that usually guided her were silent, leaving her blind as she stepped in something sticky that froze her in place.
There, in front of her feet, wasn’t a monster, nor was it an incubus. It was someone she didn’t recognize, their throat torn out in a grizzly display and fear cemented in their foggy gaze for eternity.
A human.
Shock had Faye dropping her only weapon to check for a pulse. Feeling for his wrist, she discovered he was missing an arm from the elbow down, causing her to fall back on her ass with a yelp. She couldn’t look away, eyes fixed on this corpse who had likely been alive hours before.
He wasn’t dressed for the woods. He was wearing a tailored suit and what was probably once a crisp white shirt. The pin on his breast caught her eye, even as blood coated it. A half-filled vial with a serpent coiling around the stem.
She knew that crest well, intimately aware that even concealed, a drop of venom hung from the serpent’s tongue, on the precipice of falling into the vial.
The Covenant.
They found her.
And now one of them was dead on her doorstep. Faye didn’t need to be a pessimist to know where the blame would fall. But none of that mattered when the graze of Occam’s razor reminded her with its chilling edge that the simplest answer was usually the correct one.
It couldn’t have been a coincidence that they arrived so soon after Freya’s call.
Nausea crept up her throat at the thought of betrayal. That the call had been staged to pinpoint her position.
Not Freya, she wanted to yell but made do with a shuddering exhale, forced to face possibilities that made too much sense.
They must’ve known she would be too hesitant to answer a call from her parents and even more so from her eldest sister, Farah. But Freya was different. She had an intense personality that made it difficult for them to ever truly be close, but in a den of vipers, she was the only one to use her venom to stand up for her younger sister. Until they grew up and Freya moved away for work.
No.
She didn’t want to believe it, scrambling to her feet to put as much distance between the body and her as quickly as possible. She had to find Raef, that was what mattered right now as another stab of agony forced her to steady herself against the closest tree once more.
That was when she heard the crunching. Within a sloped ditch of the uneven, root-riddled ground before her, was another body. Only this one had an acolyte hunched over it, its protruding spine bent as it chomped through ligament and cartilage. A pair of suit legs, matching the Covenant warlock a few feet away, were all she could see.
Immediately, the choking fear she’d experienced the first time she saw them returned. Only this time, Raef was nowhere to be found. She willed her heart to quiet, barely breathing as it lifted a bald, emaciated head, overly long fingers digging distractedly into the cavity it had created in its victim.
She needed to escape before it noticed.
A single prod underfoot from a brave little ley line swam beneath the earth in a hurried prompt to leave. It helped her place one foot back, then another, her half-steps hardly carrying her away from the precipice of that ditch before a breeze ripped through the trees, carrying her scent downwind.
The moon barely caught the limpid reflection of its eyes before she turned and ran. She heard it pounding the ground after her, cackling screeches lassoing her eardrums with terror. It was going to catch her, the witch ducking with a yelp as the swipe of a hand whistled overhead.
It’s too fast, she wanted to sob, willing everything in her for something to slow it down. Her palm ached as it grazed the bark of a tree in a bid to lose it with a sudden turn in the direction of the grove she’d scouted out for her ritual.
Maybe there she’d know what direction to go, if her legs and lungs didn’t give up on her first. She was tiring quickly, far quicker than the acolyte but just as she thought it had her, there was a resounding thump from behind followed by a pained squeal.
Faye didn’t trust herself to look behind, not until the sound of its squeals had grown fainter and when she did, she came to a stop. A root, no thicker than a line of rope, had pierced the acolytes’ foot like a caltrop and pulled it down beneath the ground.
It squirmed and pulled like a captured animal to get free, every attempt revealing more and more roots that surrounded its leg, cementing it into the ground while it screamed.
With her still in its sight, it clawed at the ground, ruthlessly slashing through tree limbs and its own in a bid to get free. As horrific as the scene was, she couldn’t look away. The forest groaned, intent on swallowing the creature whole, the leys thrumming wildly beneath her and leaving her with no confusion that they were the cause.
But the creature was persistent, or her presence was too tempting, because with a nauseating crack, it left its lower leg in the ground to throw itself at her.
The leys stabbed her with urgency, panicked at the development until they breached the earth and the soles of her feet. Her spine straightened with electricity, her arm lifting of its own accord where the brand that had become so familiar to her began flowing with a faint golden light.
A clawed hand, larger than her entire body, opened in front of her. The creature, unable to swerve with its severed leg, was powerless as the claws closed around it. She staggered back a step, her energy sapped as the claws tightened, crushing its victim with the same burning strength that reminded her of a similar golden whip in the hand of the incubus she was looking for.
Seconds had passed, but it felt like a lifetime when her knees finally buckled, and she sank to the ground. In the next breeze, the massive paw that had saved her disappeared like smoke.
Curling her fingers into the dirt, the leys exited her in a trickle, adrenaline finally taking their place as shivers wracked her body.
“I’m alive?”
Lifting a shaky hand to her chest, her heart hammered erratically.
Her knees were muddy, and her palm ached, burning as badly as the day she received it. She hissed when she prodded the swollen, raised lines, the flare of pain confusing her.
It was magic that saved her, no doubt about it, magic that came from the sigil. But the hallmark golden light, the familiar glowing energy that kissed her intimately even as it crushed someone before her eyes…
What was Raef’s magic doing in the sigil?
A rustle from ahead sank her stomach in dread. Night blinded her and, still riding on the adrenaline of nearly dying, Faye scrambled back to her feet. She couldn’t survive another one. She wouldn’t have the energy even if she somehow managed to summon that paw again.
All she could do was run.
But she was slow, her lungs burning, and blinded by fear until something large and hot grabbed her shoulder. Her world spun, a shriek leaving her as she flailed. She didn’t want to die, and her wild thrashing was all she could do to stop it.
Tears blurred her vision. She wanted to sob. To yell and scream that she had fought so hard to merely exist somewhere she wasn’t in the way. To be killed now, it wasn’t fair.
“Faye!”
Raef’s voice pierced her panic, filling her vision until he was all she could see. This one Daemon, clear amidst the terrifying darkness that surrounded her. He was panting, topaz-tinted eyes frantic as he gripped her face until she recognized him.
“I thought I told you to—”
She didn’t let him finish, dragging his mouth down to hers as relief outweighed everything else inside her. He was here. He found her, and for now, nothing else mattered.
Chapter 45
In the back of her mind, Faye knew they should get back to the cottage. She nearly died. She would have had she been unable to use Raef’s sigil.
That logic, however, grew dimmer as he kissed her hard, a silent desperation in the grip of his hands on her body. It was swept away entirely in a current of cosmic tides, disappearing into the dark depths while she alone was kept afloat by his hold on her.
“You… what were you thinking?” he growled into her cheek, her head craned back by his grip under her jaw. There was so much she wanted to say, but muted by his mouth when he kissed her again, she could only groan when his tongue forced its way past her lips.
Raef followed her mouth down to his knees when hers buckled.
He was shaking, or she was. She couldn’t tell. Both of them high on adrenaline and needing an outlet as his hands found her ass to pull her up onto a thick thigh.
“You never fucking listen, do you?” Even as he scolded her, his lips slanted over hers, mapping their shape. “I should take you over my fucking knee for scaring me like that…”
“Do what you want.” Her fingers grazed the deep gashes on his shoulder, earning a hiss even as his cock twitched against her thigh. His lips parted against hers when she rocked her hips tentatively. “You can do whatever you want to me, so long as you fuck me first.”
That was all it took.
“Where’d you learn that kind of talk?” Large hands tracked down the dip of her spine and over the swell of her ass, the curve of her waist and the cushion of her thigh. “It sounds so fucking filthy coming from such a polite mouth.”
“Not that polite,” she sighed, her mind blank as his growls and influence touched where his hands couldn’t. Between her legs where the memory of his fingers inside her still throbbed. Over her breasts that ached with a heaviness that demanded his touch. Down her throat where she could imagine his thick release coating if he came in her mouth.
His rumble of, “Let me see those pretty tits, Faye,” stained her neck with damp desire, his control non-existent when calloused fingers found the neckline of her blouse and ripped it clean down the middle. The material was nothing more than a flimsy barrier between her body and the inferno that sought to consume it.
