Hadley Werewolves, page 22
Rather hard with Drew so close though. How long had it been since someone kissed her? Over two years, since Kasim was the last one. Her first and last. The urge to touch her lips came over her. She’d missed the sensation. The breathlessness after two people made love. Her heartbeat quickened as she left the dormitory and returned to the main house, the location where the basement to the box waited. Not many ventured there without the permission of the elders—Nevena included. The minute she stepped across Ophelia’s threshold, now Isabella’s home, the house had a hum that thrummed across her skin like a persistent whisper in her ear.
“Is everything all right?” Drew asked behind her.
“I’m fine. Just adjusting to the new environment in the basement.” Yet this time, things “felt” different. Almost as if the siren’s call had a different key. A chorus with a new tune.
She strolled across the foyer, and a few witchlings darted out of her way. The older one minding them nodded to her and scurried off with them.
Drew followed her until they came to the basement doorway. He stopped abruptly. “I thought you weren’t supposed to go down here?”
“Unfortunately, I’ve been summoned.” She turned to him, hoping to make her point clear. “There are two flights of stairs. The distance is beyond what we both can endure. I’m sorry.”
What made her suddenly so polite? She should’ve kept going and forced him to accompany her. Yet this place was a den for evil. Everybody deserved a choice when facing it.
“Will you be safe going down there?” he asked.
“I only go when I must. Which is now.” She took one step, feeling her body easing the closer she got, as if the path was meant to be. She belonged down here. This was what the blood demons wanted the witches to believe.
As she walked downward, she reminded herself with each step what her purpose was. What her mission in life was to be. Only elders with experience and power had the ability to come this far and turn back. Before appointment as an elder, each witch was tested with the task of going to the basement floor and returning. Only those worthy had the inner strength to fight the call and return. Those who did became enforcers or elders. Nevena was one of the rare ones who became both.
“There’s a strange smell,” Drew whispered.
“That’s incense as a part of the cleansing ritual. Every month, we have to remove the tainted air from the jewelry box. The blood demons warp things—it’s rather hard to explain. The same way I manipulate matter with my blood, the demons influence everything around the place where they are trapped.”
“No wonder you have so many protective measures.”
“We don’t have enough. If I had my way as leader of the coven, I’d find a way to destroy the box and the two demons inside.”
“Destroying the box doesn’t kill them, does it?”
“What happens to inmates if you destroy the jail? The inmates are free to do what they want.”
“I don’t understand.”
She stopped mid-step. “You and I are nothing more than electrical signals, water, and blood. A bunch of other chemical reactions and such, but what consists of us—you and me—our consciousness—can be moved elsewhere using our magic. That is why an enchanted werewolf can communicate telepathically when they are bound. A bit of the witch is pushed into the wolf and vice versa. When the blood demon invades a witch, it takes everything. There’s nothing left that is her. That’s why it’s dangerous for my kind. We are open doors.” She looked up at him as he considered this. No one had ever asked her these kinds of questions before. At first she found his inquiries annoying, but he didn’t have snide remarks like Ben. His interest was genuine.
“So that’s why only your kind is susceptible?”
“Yes, and that is why this burden is for us to endure.”
“What role do the wolves play?”
They reached the bottom step and the tugs along her face strengthened. The pull stretched across her arms and legs. Every bit of exposed skin tingled and the yearning grew.
“Humans and werewolves can touch the box without getting infected, which is why we used werewolves to guard this floor and move the box as needed if it corroded the table or whatever held it.”
In the room they entered, three elders waited outside of a rusty iron door. Ophelia’s body, wrapped in white gauze lay on the floor covered with a sprinkle of red roses. In the dim light, Nevena made out Isabella and two other elders holding hands. One of the elders, a woman in her forties, trembled. The younger witches fared better than the older ones at times—depending on the depth of their power.
“Nevena, come. We need to do this quickly,” Isabella said.
“I thought you sent the demon back to the box,” she said slowly.
At her side, she noticed Drew swayed. The demons’ effects on the room carried to all creatures. His motion sickness would pass soon, but she couldn’t keep him here for too long. The box’s servants came down but never returned if left for too long.
“We attempted the transfer not too long ago,” Isabella whispered. “But after the ceremony to remove the demon from the body, something felt wrong. Don’t you sense it?”
Undeniably, Nevena could sense it. The pull of the demons was still here, but the call was off. “I don’t know what it could be.”
She reached for the door to press her palm against it, but Isabella snatched her hand. Her grip tightened. Her eyes were accusing, dark and unfriendly. “The exorcism didn’t go as planned. What did you do?”
“I did a binding spell,” Nevena hissed. “After performing a protective measure with a shield, I approached the demon and touched her forehead to bind her and put her to sleep.”
The other two looked at Isabella with lines of worry in their faces.
“It doesn’t feel like the demon is in the box,” Pearl said. Out of the three witches here, her draw to the box was the weakest, she had yet to tremble. “There should be three demons inside the box. It’s as if there are only two.”
Dread touched the back of Nevena’s neck and played with the fine hairs there. There had to be some mistake on the elder’s part. “You followed the ceremony correctly?”
“We’ve done this since before you were born,” Pearl snapped. “Ten steps. One witch binds the other with rope to keep her from touching the box. The other two lift the box and places it into the room where the other one approaches the box with the body. The three perform the summoning spell, and we pull the demon from the body to the box. Simple. As we have always done.” The fear on her face told Nevena something had gone wrong. But what had happened couldn’t be their fault. Nevena had seen the ceremony once. The movements couldn’t be messed up.
Unless something failed on her end. She turned away from them and stepped away from the door. Had she made a mistake?
“I need to go back upstairs. I feel weird,” Drew said.
Nevena nodded and directed him toward the stairs. They’d spent too much time down here already. Once a werewolf walked into the room with the box, coming back out was near impossible.
As she helped him reach the bottom step she recounted the events before she bound the demon. The glyphs and the tracing of her finger in her blood. The moment before she touched Ophelia’s forehead.
What remained foggy was what happened after she blacked out. So what happened when she fell into the depth of her head to close all links? Usually she was awake the whole time. Blackouts were unheard of.
The whispers from the box quieted at that moment.
The utter silence sent a shockwave through her bones. She slowly turned to glance at the door which was there to protect them. The others continued to argue among themselves over possible problems. None of them moved or acted as if things had changed.
This close, the pull should be non-stop. Yet as she stared at the door, a new whisper slithered through her mind, one that made her question if she was awake or dreaming.
“Wouldn’t you love to know what happened, Tsvete?”
Chapter 10
A persistent voice entered the haze of Nevena’s disbelief. A large hand gripped her shoulder and twisted her away from the door.
“I don’t like this.” Drew’s face went from blurred to clear. “We’re leaving.”
The grip on her shoulder moved to her wrist. With a firm tug, he forced her up the stairs. Every movement felt sluggish, as if she walked through honey.
“Don’t go so soon,” the new presence cackled. “Come touch the box, Tsvete, so we all can play.”
Shit. Shit. Double shit. She touched her forehead as if she could make the voice in her head disappear.
“The farther away you go, the more you’ll feel me sucking away at your soul.” The blackness around the voice resembled a whirlpool. It sucked aat her wakefulness, but as she managed to go up one flight, the feeling backed off.
Drew continued to tug at her, pulling her forward until she stumbled. He was there with strong arms, gathering her up until she noticed the flights of stairs going by faster than her eyes could see. He bounded up five stairs at a time. By the time they reached the top, she breathed a sigh of relief. Everything had to be a dream. A bad dream where she needed rest.
Lying in his arms again was a comfort she didn’t want, but she couldn’t resist taking in his rich scent and letting it flow through her. It would be so easy to allow herself to enjoy this, but she couldn’t.
“You can put me down now,” she mumbled.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“As best as I can be.”
“Tell him you’ve got a blood demon in your head, Tsvete,” the strange voice said.
Her chest grew heavy with realization.
The binding spell had failed.
She ignored the voice and sucked in a breath she wanted to hold. Ignore it. Ignore it.
“What happens after they put the demon in the box again?” he asked.
“The whole place will be safe.” She tried to offer her most confident face and failed. Most women didn’t frown as deeply.
“You don’t look happy about it. Are you in pain?”
Was it that obvious? She touched her forehead and found wrinkles. Her back wasn’t straight—she wanted to curve in on herself and find a dark place to hide from the overwhelming feeling of violation. This wasn’t fair. She finally confronted and imprisoned the blood demon that killed her parents and now she had that son-of-a-bitch in her head.
So how the hell had the demon gotten here in the first place if it was in a box in Bucharest? She needed answers and the only ones available would be in the archives.
“Follow me,” she said.
The coven had archives for all transfers and business deals with other covens. Demon boxes rarely traveled, but when the task was necessary, powerful elders were required to maintain them and transport them. The enforcers rarely did such a task. She searched through a file cabinet with older records. There were at least ten folders to check—most of them scribed in horrible handwriting she could barely read.
“What are you looking for?” he asked as she scanned a document in a folder.
Could she tell him? What could he do about it, if anything? The need to talk to someone was overwhelming. To have someone to help bear her burden. She settled for a need-to-know basis.
“I’m concerned they’re having trouble with the blood demon, so as captain of the enforcers here, I need to check to make sure the box wasn’t mishandled. There has been a past history of the demons escaping this compound so I need to determine if there’s an overall problem I need to handle.”
“You’re really the captain?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“You don’t look like a cop.”
She hadn’t thought about, but perhaps she was a cop. “You’re a cop in Hadley, right?”
He nodded. “I can help if you want.”
Her vision blurred. Damn it. She tossed him a folder from the stack she held.
Drew hunted through the stack she gave him while she searched the computer. There had to be records of some kind, a history to the demon box she had to uncover.
“You won’t find what you’re looking for in those files,” a woman’s voice said from behind her.
She looked behind her to see Vanessa. Charly’s mother didn’t have the hazy appearance she had before—this time, her eyebrows lowered as she gripped a tome from the archives. The woman must’ve been there ever since they’d arrived.
“How do you know?” Nevena asked.
Vanessa placed the book down on the desk. The title read Featherly’s Guide to Basic Glyphs. Just seeing the book made her snort. Vanessa’s sad attempts to re-learn the craft were in vain. The spell on Charly’s mother was all too familiar to Nevena. Every glyph the older woman stared at would eventually fade from her mind the moment she looked away.
“You’re looking for the transport report for the jewelry box,” Vanessa said. “The records are incomplete for the past ten years.”
“Why would they do such a thing?” Nevena asked.
Vanessa chewed on a thought. “The box is over capacity. Way over. One was all it was meant to hold. No one was meant to know. Only Ophelia, Isabella, and I knew the secret.”
Nevena kept her mouth from forming a hard line. Just another problem to add this clusterfuck of a situation.
“Three years ago, the coven received word of a dire call for help from Paris. They needed someone to retrieve a demon box for safekeeping. Ophelia sent help in the form of a werewolf courier to take the box from Paris to Vegas.”
Of all the stupid things to do. “Please don’t tell me she put the box on a plane?” Nevena asked. “No private transport?”
“Ophelia made all sorts of poor decisions before you arrived.” She paused a moment before beginning again. “The werewolf I met at the airport was haggard, almost as if he’d been drained of strength with the thousands of miles he traveled. He refused to look me in the eye, only casting off his hatred for his final task. It didn’t matter what he thought of me. I had a job to do—no matter how much I wanted to touch that box—to become one with it—I was strong enough to accompany him to the compound without an army of enforcers.”
Nevena took in Vanessa’s beautiful features. Time had passed, and now her youth was gone, but she was still a force to be reckoned with. Before her powers had been taken away, Vanessa was one of the few witches Nevena respected for her spellcasting prowess.
Vanessa continued. “While at the airport, the werewolf told me more of what happened in Paris. A single demon lived in the cigar case he carried. That demon had decimated the coven in Paris before capture. Reinforcements from Portugal arrived, and they drove the demon back into the box, but the damage was done. No one from Europe wanted the box or its contents. Since the fire had destroyed the coven, there was no evidence as to where the cigar box had come from.”
“No identifying marks on the box?”
“Not that I remember. It wasn’t one of the original boxes created by the great witches. Someone else did a shitty job constructing a makeshift prison, only to leave the demon cracks and crannies for its power to leak out. Once we arrived in Las Vegas, I directed the others to switch the demon from the cigar box to the jewelry box which was a more secure location.”
Nevena nodded. So somewhere between Bucharest and Paris, the demon had traveled from one coven to another. In the meantime, the creature blazed a path of destruction, and now it was here. With her.
I’m so fucked.
“Are you looking for what I think you’re looking for?” the wispy voice asked.
She closed her eyes. It couldn’t read her mind, but it could see what she saw. Hear what she heard.
She swallowed down a wave of nausea. She’d be damned if she’d let this bother her.
A knock on the door made them look up. A witchling entered the room.
“I have a message from Isabella,” the girl said. “The binding has failed. Something is wrong with the box.”
“Shit.” The response came from Vanessa instead of Nevena.
“So what do we do now?” Drew asked. “If the box is broken, like in Paris, aren’t we all in danger?”
“We’ve got bigger problems than that,” Charly said as she filed into the room with Trenton. From behind them, Ben marched in with a machine gun pointed at their heads. A black box with multi-colored wires was strapped to his arm. A single bright red light blinked.
The crazy bastard had left a bomb somewhere.
“Ben…” Nevena’s voice was hollow. “What have you done?” The finger with her blade twitched. She suppressed the urge to get up. He didn’t have any explosives on him, but he held the bomb trigger in his right hand. Far too easy access.
“I’m doing what I’d planned since the beginning. Thanks to all of you, I got a free ticket to witchville. All I had to do was play along and offer a helping hand. While all of you hunted down that demon, I placed little red welcome stamps from the top of this compound to the very bottom.”
“There are children here, Ben,” Charly growled.
“There were children in Hadley,” Ben snapped back. “You bitches didn’t give two fucks about them when you sent those murderers to my town!”
Charly pulsed with anger. “The elders made the decision to go to Hadley. You’re blaming many for the stupidity of a few.”
“Well, those few are gonna die, aren’t they?” Ben replied slowly.
Trenton edged his foot forward, his gaze locked on Ben’s hand. “Let’s talk about this, Ben. How about we evacuate the children? Then you and I can sit down to work things through.”
Ben laughed. His sneered filled her with icy dread.
“Fuck you and this godforsaken place,” he said.
If it isn’t one thing, it is something else, Nevena thought. If Ben hadn’t showed up armed with explosives stuffed into his armpits, she could’ve left the property to add as much distance between herself and the box as possible. Something was very wrong—including the current situation—and she couldn’t solve it if the whole complex was blown away.
