Keeper Chronicles: Awakening (34 page)

Colette crept up the narrowing circle of steps, her breath careful and even. Focused. Stalking her prey had become second nature over the last decade of Hunting, moving and thinking as a demon did. This time, as the watch room came into view, her vision doubled, and for a moment she was again on all fours sinking her teeth into the flesh of the elderly Keeper, sucking the marrow from his bones. Her blood would always carry that reminder. Always call up that feeling of sheer ecstasy at the taste of human flesh.

The pregnant girl had been handcuffed to some metal piping along the outer wall, probably a radiator, her face and arms blackened with bruises. Her eyes were gouged out.

“Don’t hurt me!” Erica shrieked, turning her head around frantically as if her missing eyes still saw. “Please let me go. I’m pregnant. I won’t tell anyone, I promise. Please, just let me go,” the last word ended in a sob, blood tears rolling down her face where real tears would never again flow.

The first-order was nowhere in sight.

Kicking out behind her, she caught the demon by surprise, flinging it backward and down a handful of steps. Colette turned and followed it, ready to bury her hatchet in the thing’s skull and be done with it.

“No, no, no, Hunter,” he laughed, blood staining his teeth, as he waved what looked like a joystick. “Think about this before you take another step. All I have to do is push this button here and your little friends make fireworks like it’s the Fourth of July.”

She pulled back her arm, ready to throw the hatchet. “Nicholas would have the vest you put on Mia disarmed by now.”

“You don’t think I’m that stupid now, do you?” The demon laughed, getting to his feet. “This detonator doesn’t connect to the vest—that was never armed. The little witch was in no real danger. No, this detonator connects to the explosives around the house and buried in the yard. Enough to take out a few city blocks. Tell me, you didn’t leave that precious girl behind or your husband did you? It’d be a shame if they were hurt.”

“I’m a Hunter.” She kept her face calm. He had to be bluffing. His head start wouldn’t have been enough to allow him to prepare such an elaborate trap. Not when they’d been chasing him for weeks. The detonator was simply another distraction. Adam should have been a magician.

He stepped toward her as thunder boomed. Inside the tower, the ring was deafening as the walls captured and magnified the sound. Blinding white pain filled her head, and she covered her ears with both hands.

Adam grabbed her arm and jerked her forward, unbalancing her. The harsh metal steps dug into her shoulders and side and legs as she tumbled down the stairwell, and she nearly decapitated herself with her own hatchets. She pulled herself to her feet, holding a gash in her stomach closed with one hand.

She couldn’t afford to feel pain. She had to stop him from killing the woman and her child. Erica shrieked again, not begging like before but an expression of intense agony. He’d begun cutting out the child.

She dropped her hatchets, unable to hold onto them and climb back up the spiral stairwell. This demon she’d just have to kill with her bare hands. She pulled herself up the stairs, each step on her probably broken leg a nightmare. To a Hunter, pain was nothing. An annoyance buzzing at the back of her head. She’d withstood far worse over the years. Trained for worse.

“Time to die,” she said as she topped the last step.

Hands covered in Erica’s blood, he yanked out something small and held it up so she could see it. A misshapen fetus, no larger than a kidney bean, rested between his thumb and index finger. A nexus of putrid green light rose up from the floor, swirling around his feet and gaining momentum as it rose up to envelop him and his sacrifice. “One move and I’ll squeeze my fingers. Pop. No more seal.”

He thought he’d won. He thought her too slow to be able to stop him.

He thought wrong.

Flicking back her wrist, a spring-loaded blade jumped into her hand. In one smooth motion, she threw it at him.

The blade slammed into his wrist, nearly severing it as the tiny fetus dropped from his fingers. Colette dove for the sacrifice. If it reached the green light, that’d be it. The gateway would be open, and nothing but an even bigger sacrifice would close it.

She closed her fist around the fetus just in time. She hit the floor hard, pain lancing up her side, and her vision darkened momentarily. When she opened her eyes again, Adam lunged for her.

“Give it to me, bitch! It’s mine!” He grabbed her hand and smashed it against the wall.

Rebekah kicked him in the stomach, sending him reeling as the last of the green light faded. She had to get the fetus away. Using his distraction, she got to her feet and ran for the room’s small window, propelling herself through it headfirst.

Whether she lived on not, that fetus wasn’t going to die where it could break one of the seals. She refused to let it. As she fell the ten yards to the ground, she hoped Nicholas and Jenna were safe.

Maybe one day he’d forgive her for dying.

Chapter Thirty-One

Gabe didn’t know why he was still alive.

When the chill of death trickled down his spine, he thought at first it had been him. A moment later when he continued breathing despite the heat, he knew it’d been someone else. Like Beks or his parents or Moore.

The gun safe sweltered, baking him from the outside in as he waited for the worst of the flames to die down. Every inch of him dripped with sweat and his mouth tasted like he’d swallowed a mouthful of cotton. He had to get out of there and find Rebekah before Dylan did—if the demon hadn’t already killed her.

Thankfully for him, the explosion that destroyed the house was a quick-burning one, the gas adding additional heat and force to the primary blast, but much of the thick, treated lumber of the log cabin didn’t fully ignite. He forced the safe door open, using all his strength as he pushed through the wreckage. The soft sounds of sirens whispered down to him, muted; the blast must have damaged his hearing.

Squeezing out of the door, he shoved past some burning furniture as the soft mist of rain drifted down on him. The heat was even worse outside the safe, and as the smoke choked him as surely as a hand around his throat. He covered his nose and mouth using his shirt. Something above him snapped, shifting the wreckage.

Gabe jumped back as a beam crashed down where he stood. Had it hit him, it would have crushed him beneath it. He took a deep breath and looked around. Beks needed him; he had to find a way up. The stairs had been decimated by the blast and falling debris, blocking that exit. If he wanted out of the house, he would have to find something to climb.

Most of the upper floor and roof had been blown outward from the blast save for a section around him that must have held on and collapsed inward after the initial wave. Eyes stinging from the smoke, he forced himself to grab the wooden beam that had nearly killed him a moment ago and start climbing. Tendrils of flame covered the log, lapping greedily at his hands and clothing where he was forced to crawl.

Each inch gained came with a price as the flesh began to melt from around his fingers and his pants caught fire. The pain ignited his anger, stirring his demonic blood to a greater frenzy of strength and healing. Rebekah. Dylan had her. He felt as certain of that as he was of his own culpability in her abduction.

He’d seen the signs of her pregnancy, the vomiting and tiredness and mood swings, but had chosen to ignore them. There was a chance, although small, that the child growing inside her hadn’t been fathered by the demon but by Gabe. The timing was about perfect. It’d been almost two months since they spent the night together after her father’s memorial.

If he thought about that much longer, he’d go insane.

About half way up the beam, a spray of water soaked him, dousing the flames eating away at his hand and legs. He gripped the steaming wood while whoever held the fire hose did their best to unseat him. His Keeper strength could only do so much to keep him on top. Fingers slipping, Gabe started to fall to the side when a pair of hands closed around his arms and pulled him up.

Once free of the wreckage of the house, two men carried him over to where an ambulance waited and placed him on a stretcher.

Someone shone a light in his eyes. “Sir? Sir, are you awake? Can you hear me?”

He nodded that he understood and tried to sit up, but a half dozen hands forced him back down.

“Gabe? It’s Nicholas. You’re going to be okay, but you need to let us take you to the hospital. Those burns are serious.”

Blinking, he looked up to see the Hunter leaning over him. “Rebekah?” Gabe coughed the word more than said it, and tried again. “Where’s Rebekah?”

He looked relieved. “She wasn’t in the house with you?”

Gabe shook his head as snow began to drift down from the stormy sky. His body didn’t know whether it was burning or freezing. “No.”

“Well, the firemen haven’t found anyone else. I’m sure she’s fine. She must have left or gone for help. There was an attack at the office, too. She might have been called in for backup.”

“I felt someone die; do you know who it was?” A paramedic began cutting away at Gabe’s pants, and he kicked the man off.

“No. There was an explosion—someone came in wearing a bomb vest. I think they took a few people to the hospital—no one died that I know of.”

Gabe pushed himself up. “Beks. I’ve got to find her.”

The paramedic grabbed Gabe’s legs as Nicholas put his hand on Gabe’s shoulder. “No. You’ve got to heal. You need rest and medical attention.”

“What I need is you out of my way, Hunter. That demon must have her.”

Nicholas, his scholar’s face gentle, grabbed Gabe by the shoulders. “Colette went after Adam. By now, he’s dead. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Gabe didn’t back down. “Rebekah’s pregnant, maybe with that demon’s spawn. I know he’s taken her.”

“When did Adam rape her? Why didn’t anyone bother to mention that earlier?”

“Because he didn’t,” Gabe answered. “But she dated the demon Dylan for over a month. Right under both of our noses.”

Nicholas stumbled back a few steps. “Two of them. There were two of them all this time. I...I’d had my suspicions at first, but then with the spell at Halloween and passing Dylan’s car with him unconscious inside...I believed Dylan was innocent.”

“He had us all fooled.” Gabe swung his legs off the stretcher and took a tentative few steps. “We need to get to the lighthouse.”

“Why do you think he’s there?” the Hunter asked. “He could be anywhere.”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

****

Humans looked so pathetic when they slept. Rebekah had fallen for his trap—her heart had always been a weak one where the Keeper was concerned, so he made the perfect bait. At least, that’s what her mother’s memories whispered. His dolls, over a dozen of them total, begged him to leave the girl alone. Begged him to have mercy.

The demon wearing Dylan Hurley’s body laughed.

Using the boat he knew would be docked at the Coast Guard docks, he brought her back to the Killamook tower where he’d made his first kill: the Keeper girl, Juliette.

He tied off the boat at the small dock. The lightning had died down somewhat as the first snowflakes began to fall around them. The other demon must have failed or else the seal would have already been broken. Dylan didn’t mind. He wanted to be the one to bring his brethren here, the one who finally broke one of the seals put in place nearly two millennia ago. The chaos demon had been a useful distraction, however, and for that, Dylan was grateful.

Lifting Rebekah, he carried her over his shoulder and into the tiny shack behind the tower. He’d killed his first doll, Juliette, near the door, so that was where his offspring had to be sacrificed. As the dolls moaned and screamed for him to stop, he blissfully ignored them and tied his former lover to the bed, stopping to remove her clothes.

Although living with her had grown tedious, the sight of her bare flesh nevertheless aroused him as he remembered their last, violent fuck on the kitchen table. Hunger gnawed at his thinking as the song in her blood cried out to be devoured, but he pushed it aside. He had more important work to do than satisfy his baser urges. He could eat her once the seal had been broken.

She began to stir, turning her head from side to side. When her eyes locked on his, she screamed.

“There, there,” he calmed, using his siren’s song to sooth her mad thrashings. It wouldn’t do for her to hurt herself before he had a chance to get what he wanted. “No need to fight.”

He caressed her face as her convulsions slowed and then stopped. Only her eyes showed her true feelings. Her true fear.

“What do you want with me?” she asked, voice little stronger than a whisper. Tears leaked from the corner of her eyes even as she began to shiver from the cold.

Dylan wiped them away. “My child, of course. I must say, motherhood suits you. I’ve never seen you...glow like this.”

She tried to pull away from his touch as he caressed the place where his seed had taken root, but her binds gave her nowhere to go. No way to hide from him.

“Why me?” she asked. “You could have picked anyone, could have gone anywhere; why come back here?”

Letting his left hand devolve into his natural form, he raked his claws all over her body in a mock caress, each touch leaving a welt as her skin melted from the acid. What the other demon hadn’t known was that for the sacrifice to fully open one of the seals, the woman had to be properly marked. Then, she had to kill the child of her own free will as an act of love. Killing the seed himself or frightening her into it wouldn’t work.

He needed her willing cooperation.

“Your mother wanted to see you again,” he answered.

Rebekah paled. “My mother?”

Dylan burned a symbol for strength in her thigh. “She was my second kill. After feasting on the Keeper Juliette’s flesh, my hunger drove me to shore. I noticed the man in the tower, but he’d fallen asleep and men were never really in my taste. But your mother—ah, she was delicious.” He closed his eyes in something like pleasure as the feeling of devouring her memories rushed back. “My technique had been crude then—my call clumsy. But in the end she’d been eager to please. Just as you had.”