Shade for love, p.31
Shade for Love, page 31
That numbness, that possession crawled up both her arms faster and faster. Into her blood, through her skin. Up to her shoulders. Into her neck, despite the tight squeeze of her neck muscles.
Magnolia sighed, her voice echoing in the chamber and inside of Cara’s head, rippling through her skin, spreading that numbness. “I wish it could have been otherwise…but we’ve waited too long and you’re too important. I’m sorry, child. Perhaps someday, it will be different. We will help you need us as much as we need you.”
“No. No. Please!” Cara begged, maybe screamed. Until it was just in her head as the numbness climbed her neck, removed her ability to cry out, to scream.
All those women, all those hands that had once supported and buoyed her, removed her pain, dragged her down into the water. Stole her thoughts, stole her very being. She thrashed, tried to stand, tried to run…until they stole that ability, too. Until, as her body eased back in the pool, she no longer knew she wanted to fight. Because she, the individual known as Cara, was pulled under, drowned, and swallowed by the collective.
William faced Irene and her two dark fey goons who stood between he and the Shades reaching Cara. One of the dark fey goons had been replaced, the other one banished by Zaki somewhere else. Probably didn’t make this one friendlier. William blew out a breath and squeezed his hands at his sides. Shit. Jeep-eating trees aside, apparently getting this far had been too easy. He sighed internally. Easy once in a while sure would be nice.
The boys had done fine back at the Center—better than he had. But were they ready for a rematch so soon? Guess they’d have to be.
Irene eyed he, Jax, and the rest of the Shades the way someone might eye day-old roadkill. “You cockroaches aren’t ruining my victory over Beckwell.” She gestured toward the trees. “With the nymphs’ help, I’ve won. Trees, of all things, have destroyed your pathetic little town. Why keep fighting? Beg for my mercy. Maybe I’ll take pity on you.”
“Shouldn’t she be dead?” Albert said, turning to Henry and using a stage-whisper.
“Nah, you know how it is. The bad ones keep stinking up the place until someone takes out that trash,” Henry said, not even pretending to lower his voice, his gaze hard as it landed on Irene. He’d always held a particular grudge after she’d launched the attack that landed Albert in traction…and almost in the ground.
“Here I thought it was just me noticing that smell,” Jax added, coming up beside them, fitting in like he’d never quite done as Hermes.
“Oh, but I’ve so missed your moronic banter,” Irene said dryly. “Did you raid a mortuary, William? You’re leading a team of walking corpses.”
That of course only made the men puff out their chests more…chests that, admittedly, had once been a bit more muscular. And especially in Liko’s case, not surpassed by the girth of his belly.
“Don’t listen to her,” Jax said, although his gaze remained on Irene. “She gets meaner when she’s threatened.”
“Well, Irene, I for one am glad to see you,” Liko said with a dark smile. “If I’ve had one regret all these years, it’s not seeing your head on a spike.”
Zaki started to add something, but William didn’t catch it, because Albert stepped sideways until he stood on William’s foot. Jax had stepped in front of Albert, blocking William, and George had maneuvered himself to flank William’s other side.
William’s neck squeezed.
Frick’s sake… It was like they already had something planned.
Liko taunted Irene again, likely about to get his ass blasted by something sizzly for the second time that day.
“Eguisheim,” Albert whispered.
Liko grew more outrageous—and louder—in his insults hurled at Irene.
William struggled to make sense of it. Eguisheim…tiny French village near the German border where they’d circled around enemy German and Guardian troops to catch them in a trap from behind…because they’d used an animated double of William to make it look like he was one place, while he was actually another, coming up from behind. He blinked. Hell. It was brilliant and would let him get inside the house and to Cara faster.
He glanced over, caught Jax’s gaze.
Jax gave him a small nod. As though to say, they had this. William needed to get after Cara.
William took a deep breath. It meant leaving the Shades, his friends, out here to their fates. It meant not being able to protect them from Irene.
“Go on then, Mac. Go get our girl,” George whispered, already turning to his side to hide the wispy threads of visible magic he wove between his fingers. Probably the start of either a smoke or light exploding orb. He gave William a wink.
“Zaki is the signal. Liko is distracting her so Zaki can transport himself behind her, become invisible, and then see if he can work a hallucinatory hex on her when he touches her. Her wards have always been pretty intense, so it might only buy us a few seconds, but that should be enough for you to get inside. Zaki vanishes, that’s your cue,” Albert murmured.
William gave the smallest nod to his second in command. “You had this all planned out, didn’t you?”
“Someone had to do something while you were laying around, being mostly dead,” Jenklow said.
With a snort, William gave the other man a nod. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, the same words he’d always told them before a battle coming easily to his lips.
“Nothing you wouldn’t do,” Albert whispered with a smirk and their old refrain.
Moments later, Zaki vanished, then quickly reappeared, right behind Irene and her dark fey goons. Zaki grabbed her exposed hand.
Irene turned in slow motion and fury.
George hurled the magical equivalent of a smoke bomb laced with fireworks at the trio.
William didn’t wait to see the fall out, had to trust his men still knew what they were doing, as he dove into the cover of the smoke. It stung his eyes, but from the way the goons waved their hands around and clutched their throats, Chaimek had added something special to the mix that was especially hard on the dark fey, likely some kind of iron powder. Part of him wanted to stay with his team and fight Irene too… but they were making the sacrifice to cover for him so he could go in and get Cara. They were all depending on him. He had to reach Cara. Before it was too late.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Escape
William slipped inside the ruined farmhouse without being noticed, blinking against the dim light. Deep shadows revealed themselves as dusty shapes of a sofa and chairs, all faded beyond any recognizable color. An animal had nested in one of the cushions. Dust coated everything. Or almost everything. On the arm of one of the chairs lay a ball of bright pink yarn and the beginnings of what might have been mittens, the knitting needles stuffed into the ball where they’d been paused, and not a hint of dust on them. It was almost as though the residents had returned and picked up life, seemingly oblivious to the destruction of their home.
Scrapes and disturbances in the dust-coated floor showed further evidence of recent life, and William followed them into the next room. They must have brought Cara through here. Had she walked…or had they carried her unconscious body?
He shook off the thought, and crept down the hall toward the next room, following the path left in the dust. What mattered was finding Cara and getting her the hell out of here. Then they could get back out front and help the Shades deal with Irene and her goons.
The floorboards creaked beneath his footsteps, and the stale mustiness of the house tickled his nose. Something scuttled off into a hole in the wall. The first door to the left wouldn’t open more than a few inches, jammed shut with detritus from the collapsed second floor. He ignored the ruined stairs and continued toward the kitchen, near the rear of the house. Henry and Albert had suspected any kind of nymph pool would be below ground. He needed to find access to the cellar.
Thin light filtered in through dirty kitchen windows, the room only slightly less neglected than the rest of the house. Most of the cupboard doors hung at odd angles, a few doors missing. The counters, though, had been cleaned of dust and a bright pink bloom—a rose? No, something frillier…a peony. A bright, dark-pink peony sat in a clear glass cup in the center of the counter, at odds with the rest of the house, out of season, out of place, unexpected beauty within so much ugliness. It was like meeting Cara after all these years, after anticipating only the next case, the next fight for so long, to have color and life bloom in his life. Love blossom in his heart for an incredible woman.
Something smashed into the side of the house, rattling the dishes, and making the building shift and groan.
The noise jarred William back to the mission, tensed his neck. The entrance to the cellar was probably here in the kitchen. There. A small door, tucked into the corner of the room. Pulling it open, a narrow set of rickety stairs led down into the darkness, a faint glimmer of light below.
He crept down the stairs, hands brushing rough wood on either side of the narrow stairway. The scent of earth and damp mustiness grew stronger the lower he got. He stepped down into a wood-framed cellar that held back the earth. Ahead, like someone had blasted a whole through the support beams, lay a natural cavern. There was a crude table, an unmade cot with rumpled bedding near the crude opening. He continued forward, into that cavern with damp, faintly glittering walls. The air warmed against his face, and he followed the faint glow of light ahead. A lantern maybe. Something about the place raised the hair on the back of his neck, tightened the muscles in his shoulders. Maybe it wasn’t the place. He thought he was here to rescue Cara.
What if she didn’t want to be rescued?
Maybe she hadn’t been carried down that hall. Maybe she’d walked, and she was where she wanted to be. Afterall, he’d seen her only from a distance fighting for the Shades and against Irene. He was so used to deceptions, for the motives that made people turn sometimes in desperation to the Guardians. Could Cara have done the same? If not to the Guardians, she could have turned to the nymphs, her own people, driven by the Shades’ betrayal.
Or perhaps to escape his betrayals, the secrets he’d kept.
He didn’t want to believe it. The idea that he could have lost her before he’d ever been able to tell her how he felt… Hell, that was a knife blade to the gut. For so long it had been his duty to stand between the Guardians and everyone else. He’d managed to leave the Shades outside, to trust them to handle this battle without him. He couldn’t let the Guardians control Cara, but gods help him if he had to fight to free her.
Any such battle could cost Cara her life. This mission might take more from him than he could give. If he had to hurt Cara, it would destroy a part of his soul.
He swallowed hard and eased a breath into his tight chest as he crept toward that light, toward the pale reflection that shone off a glassy, dark surface. Kerosene lamps hung sporadically in the stone cavern, the light thin and yellow, barely reflected in that mirror-still water of the pool that dominated almost a third of the space, easily the length and width of two vehicles.
Something, though, disturbed the mirror-like surface of the water.
Three bodies floated on the surface.
His heart hiccoughed, and he rushed forward, his footsteps echoing in the cavern.
Three women floated starfish-like on the surface of that water, hands joined. All of them dressed in identical, pale, almost Grecian-type robes, their skin dark, features lovely, dark hair floating like halos above their heads.
All three of them stared blindly upward, eyes open, but sightless.
None of the women stirred as he approached. His hands clenched. All three women were exceptionally similar in appearance. Obviously, Cara had finally found those relatives of hers, or they’d found her.
Her body floated lower in the water than the others, her face partially submerged. Oh hell. No bubbles rose from the water above her face.
He rushed to the side of the pool, crouched on the edge, dropped his legs into the water and prepared to jump in.
“Don’t,” a quiet female voice whispered, freezing him in place. “She’ll wake.”
One of the women, the one farthest from him on the other side of Cara, had turned her head in the water to face him. Her gaze remained slightly foggy, but she definitely focused on him.
He’d barely looked at her when the third woman twisted and thrust herself out of the water, grabbing his ankles and yanking him into the icy water. The shock of the cold stole his breath just before his head submerged and she dragged him beneath the surface. The woman clung to his shoulders, using her entire weight to hold his face beneath the surface.
William twisted, groping blindly for the slippery edge of the pool. His lungs burned and under the water was dark and murky. He couldn’t make out anything. But even the woman soaking wet was a third of his size and strength. He twisted her off him, bursting through the surface and sucking in a breath of cold air.
She made an infuriated snarl before leaping for him again, surprisingly agile in the chest-deep water. Chanting in some language, they grappled, and she tried to grab and force him beneath the surface again.
He grabbed for her arms, struggled to hold her off in the splashing water. Finally got a grip on her shoulders, tried to force her away without hurting her…only for her to go limp as overcooked spaghetti. He blinked.
Behind stood the third woman, the one who’d tried to warn him. Her hand rested on his attackers’ bare shoulder, as though she’d somehow rendered the other woman unconscious.
Cara still floated nearby, unresponsive despite all the activity.
William swallowed, hard. It must be the pool and the water somehow. He was damned lucky he’d made it above the surface.
“She would have enchanted and drowned you.” The third woman who could have been Cara’s sister bobbed in the water that reached her shoulders as she wrapped her arms around his unconscious attacker. Lovingly, she smoothed back the silvered hair at the other woman’s brow and reclined her slowly, effortlessly sleeping and floating once more on the surface of the water, her hands shifting but always maintaining skin contact.
William swallowed, the cold of the water making his teeth chatter as he kept the unconscious woman between him and the active one, eyed the distance to Cara and calculated the likelihood of making it to her first. His fingers tightened against the stone lip of the pool.
Brushed against something like a chain. Picking it up, further tightness spread through him. Cara’s pendant. The Yaga pendant. The one she never took off, and which she said helped protect her. He slipped it into his pocket. It belonged with Cara.
“I’m taking Cara out of here. You understand me?”
The other woman considered him a long time. Blinked, the action slow, out of it. “Yes,” she finally said, as though speaking were exhausting. “It is…right.” Still cradling the other woman, she floated them both back to where they’d been, not far from Cara. “I will…keep her…asleep.”
Cara bobbed in the slight disturbance but didn’t stir. Still no damned air bubbles.
The third woman, the one trying to help him, spoke once more. “Cara…is alive.” She lay back, let herself float on the surface once more beside the other one, a breath sighing from her lips. Moisture glistened on her face, tears, as she turned toward him, gaze once again glassy, but face tightened with regret, with pain. “It wasn’t…supposed to be this way. She should get to choose. Protect her. Help her.” She sighed again closing her eyes, another tear sliding free. “For Rose.”
Rose. Jenklow’s wife? Didn’t matter. William gently eased himself through the water toward Cara.
She didn’t stir. Her face remained below the surface. Submerged and making her skin paler, grayer. Corpse-like.
The water icy cold and compressing his lungs, tightened every cell with painful awareness. He forced himself slowly forward until he could reach Cara’s still form, blurred and magnified by the water. Her hair brushed against his chilled skin as he caught first her arm, then wrapped another arm around her body. Her skin temperature matched the icy water. No air bubbles disturbed the surface. Yet as his fingertips brushed over her wrist, a faint heartbeat thrummed against his touch.
He wheezed out a breath. Thank the gods. A heartbeat. She still had a heartbeat.
From this perspective in the pool, it was easier to see that over to the left the water lapped against stairs. He pulled Cara with him, her body bobbing next to his as he made painstaking progress across the pool, through that thick, icy soup. His toes had gone numb inside his boots. His muscles started to shake, and he could barely feel the tips of his fingertips. The water grew shallower, only up to his waist. Then his thighs. He pulled Cara closer, lifted and cradled her against his chest, and walked with her out of the pool. His shirt sucked against his skin, his sodden boots and the cold making every step harder, clumsy.
Cara lay, limp, icy and motionless in his arms. While her heart may have been beating, she wasn’t breathing.
He lowered her as quickly to the stone floor as he could, glancing over at the pool, the other two women, once more floating silently. How long would it stay that way? He had to get Cara breathing first. He’d deal with them if necessary.
He brought his lips to Cara’s icy ones and pulled gently on her chin until her mouth opened. Chills quaking through him, he blew in first one breath. Then another into her still chest. Come on, Cara. Come on. His heart hammered against his chest. How could she have a pulse and not be breathing? Had the other woman lied when she’d promised Cara was still alive?
Five breaths. Still a slow steady pulse at her throat. Not breathing. It shouldn’t have been possible.
Come on, Cara. Please. Come back to me.
Another five breaths. Her lips so still, so cold against his. Nothing like the warm and vibrant woman he knew. She couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t. His heart squeezed inside his chest. His body grew stiff with cold, yet still he breathed into her, willed her awake, willed her to live. Images of all those he’d lost before her hovered around him. Cousins who’d been like brothers, felled on the battlefield. Her gray skin echoed their corpses. Mother’s body laid out and prepared for her burial, still and limp on the table. Too much like Cara’s motionless form now. So many friends, family, brothers and sisters that he’d held like this, as they wheezed their last. As they left him behind.
