Sacrificed (The Ignited Series) (7 page)

Nathan relayed information to Micah, directing them to the location of the nightclub while Alec maneuvered into a parking space behind the building, where we had a clearer view of the van. A moment later, Micah’s voice came over the speaker phone, announcing a plan for him and Richie to go inside the club to spy on the Skotadi from there. Again, Nathan and Alec shared a look, but neither objected.

“Just don’t let them see you,” Nathan warned before he disconnected the call.

After a few long seconds of silence, Alec said, “This doesn’t look like a haven for hybrids.”

“It’s a college town,” Nathan added. “Plenty of unsuspecting, drunk humans.”

“But what do they want humans for?” Alec mused.

Another wave of heavy silence followed. I didn’t have an answer, and if anyone else did, I suspected they didn’t want to voice it. We quietly watched the rear of the club and the van, but after twenty minutes of no activity, I started to wonder if maybe they had just come here for a night out. Did the Skotadi take vacations? Have time off?

When the phone rang again, I got my answer.

“Something’s about to happen,” Micah said urgently. “Looks like two of them are tailing a girl to the restrooms. They’re in the back, might be coming out a rear entrance.”

Interesting enough, the van was parked next to a red door that could be that rear entrance. They had done this before, I thought, and from this exact nightclub. They knew where to park, how to get out without being seen. My stomach soured at the thought of multiple unsuspecting college students being hauled away in the back of that van to an unknown fate. 

The back door didn’t open, but the side entrance door did, and two Skotadi rounded the corner of the building, walking toward the van. It was unlikely that they would see us, but we cowered down in our seats as we watched them.

“Let them take her,” Nathan told Micah. “We’ll follow and intercept on the road before they reach the warehouse. Less witnesses that way.”

“Coming out,” Micah responded before dropping the call.

The two Skotadi had reached the van and one of them swung the back doors open. A second later, the back door to the club burst open and the other two Skotadi emerged with a young woman, her long, brown hair tossed over her face as she struggled against them, her cries for help muffled by a well-placed hand over her mouth and drowned out by the loud music pouring through the open door. Within seconds, the four Skotadi had her tossed into the back of the van like she had never existed. Two of them jumped in behind her, while the other two climbed into the front.

I had been holding my breath the entire time, and only started breathing again when the van was on the move. They turned right, out of the parking lot. Alec waited a few seconds, then followed. As we passed the front of the club, I saw Micah and Richie clambering into their car.

Alec maintained a safe distance, but considering the size of the small town, the van was never out of our sight. Micah and the others were close behind us. Once we were clear of the town limits and speeding along the dark and winding country road, I leaned forward to grip the back of Nathan’s seat eagerly.

We had a good twenty minutes before we reached the warehouse, but I was anxious to stop that van.

Who knew what was being done to that girl right now?

“How are we going to stop them?” I asked the guys.

Nathan glanced at Alec with a hooked eyebrow. Though his eyes remained fixed on the road,
Alec grinned. No words had been passed between the two, yet they both seemed to know exactly how we were going to stop them.

Nathan looked over his shoulder. He flinched at our sudden nearness, but didn’t back away. His eyes swept from me to Callie, and back to me. “You might want to put on your seatbelts.”

He smiled reassuringly at the look of horror likely etched all over my face as I slid back into my seat, but it didn’t really help the nervous flutters in my stomach.

“Kris?” I looked up from my shaky fingers as they fumbled over the seatbelt latch. Nathan was watching me. “We’ll be fine. It’s under control.”

“Yeah,” Alec chimed in from the driver’s seat. “Totally under control.”

With that, his foot pressed down on the gas, rocketing the Tahoe forward and closing the distance between us and the van quickly. My nails dug into the door handle as he swerved into the oncoming lane, coming up alongside the van. From my seat, I had a good view as the front end of the Tahoe angled smoothly closer to the back rear tire of the van.

At the moment of impact, my eyes squeezed shut in preparation of a horrific wreck.

Tires squealed, but they weren’t ours. As the Tahoe came to a quick, but controlled, near-stop and I realized we hadn’t crashed, I opened my eyes.

Ahead of us, the van was spinning off the side of the road. It hit a ditch and flipped over, rolling once before coming to a rest against a tree.  

Alec turned the wheel sharply, bouncing the Tahoe off the side of the road, putting us only a few yards from the wrecked van. Nathan jumped out before we came to a complete stop, and ran toward it with his gun drawn.

Gabby pulled their car up beside us, and then she and Richie ran off after Nathan. While Gabby cautiously opened the passenger side door, Richie moved to the driver’s side and Nathan disappeared behind the rear of the van.

Callie and I climbed out of the Tahoe, for lack of anything else better to do. We’d already been told to let the other, more experienced ones take care of securing the Skotadi. Alec paused long enough to make sure we were following orders, before he hurried to join the others. Micah walked up beside me a moment later, also banned from joining in by Gabby and Richie.

He was practically bouncing on his toes from the excitement. I felt it too—the adrenaline rush—but I wasn’t grinning like a moron like he was. I was about to tell him so, when I was interrupted by a shout, followed closely by three rapid gun shots.

From behind the van. Where Nathan was.

Where Alec was now sprinting.

Where I was now sprinting.

Micah lunged for me but I was too fast for him. Nothing, no one, was going to stop me. Even Gabby knew better than to intercept me. I ran past her as she pulled an injured Skotadi through the passenger side door. And then she was right behind me, rounding the back of the van. 

Its doors were wide open. One Skotadi lay moaning on the ground, with a single bullet wound to the chest. Another stood with his face pressed against the inside of one of the doors as Alec and Richie restrained his arms behind his back with a plastic tie.

And Nathan…

My shoulders heaved with relief when I saw that he was fine. He was inside the van, toward the front, his back to me as he knelt down in front of the human girl.

A scream pierced the night air, and we all jumped. None of us more so than Nathan, considering he’d been the closest to the source. The girl pulled her knees tight against her chest as she regarded Nathan with wary eyes.

He must have gotten the not so subtle hint that she wanted nothing to do with him. He scooted back, providing her with the space she clearly wanted, and turned to look over his shoulder. When he spotted me, he gave a
‘come here’
nod.

He stood to meet me halfway. My gaze fell on a red scratch on
his upper arm as I approached, and I grabbed his shirt to turn him toward me. The sleeve was shredded and blood oozed through the fabric.

“Did you get shot?” I asked him, my eyes wide with alarm.

He shrugged. “It’s just a flesh wound.” But a flesh wound from a diamond-coated bullet wasn’t something to shrug at. He must have seen the thought register on my face, because he added, “It wasn’t coated.”

“You sure?”

He nodded with a hint of amusement. “Pretty sure.”

I let go of his shirt, only then realizing that I had still been gripping it, and how close Nathan and I were now standing. I didn’t want to step away, but did, knowing that we had an audience.

I looked down at the human girl, huddled in the corner. She had a nasty cut across her nose that was bleeding. Other than that, she appeared unharmed.

Just scared. 

I offered her a smile that I hoped she found reassuring. She studied me cautiously before her eyes narrowed on Nathan.

Clearly, she had a head injury. Sound minded girls didn’t shoot daggers at Nathan. Ever.

“What did you do to her?” I whispered to Nathan, only partially teasing. From the bland look he shot me, he didn’t find it half as amusing as I did.    

He leaned close to me, dropped his voice for my ears only. “Talk to her,” he said. “See who she is, if she has any connection to the Skotadi or Kala. See if she overheard anything.”

I nodded. “What are you going to do?”

He grinned as he retreated to the back of the van. “Forcing a few Skotadi to talk.”

The girl watched Nathan as he jumped out the back. She was still terrified, and it was easy to understand why as she watched all of them—Nathan, Alec, Micah, Richie, Gabby, and even Callie—surrounding the Skotadi with weapons drawn. They, at least, moved the Skotadi out of sight and earshot so we didn’t have to hear or see what they were doing to make them talk. Still, considering what the girl had seen so far, I got the impression she might consider us to be the bad guys.

“Hey,” I said to her, pulling her gaze to me. “We’re the good guys. We’re going to help you.”

She looked reluctant. “I want to go home.”

“Sure. I just want to talk to you first. Is that okay?”

“I want to go home. Now.”

“Can you tell me your name first?” 

“Jennifer.”

“Okay, Jennifer,” I said as if I were soothing a baby to sleep. “We’ll take you home, but first my friends need to talk to these guys that took you. We want to know why they took you. Do you know?”

She shook her head. “I was at the club and was on my way to the bathroom…and it just went dark,” she sobbed. “Next thing I know I’m in here with two of them.”

“Did they say anything to you?”

She started to shake her head, then hesitated as if a thought came to her. “Not to me. I heard them bragging to each other.”

“About what?”

“It didn’t make sense,” she muttered. “Something about getting a lot out of me, or something like that.”

My confusion mirrored hers. I didn’t know what to make of that. Surely the Skotadi weren’t in the human trafficking business. But what else could they have been getting out of her, if not money. Sexual favors? I didn’t even want to think about that, and pushed that thought out of my head as
quickly as it appeared.

“Did you hear anything else?”

“One of them…” She trailed off as she struggled to remember. “One of them said they were ready to move on to the next step. That they were getting bored playing with
humans
.” Her eyes were wide with fear when they lifted to mine. “Why would they say that? Are they not….”

I understood her trepidation. When I’d first learned that Nathan was not entirely human, it had freaked me out a little. And I had been fully prepared for him to admit something unbelievable. This girl was completely blindsided.

I decided she was better off not knowing the answer to the question she couldn’t even finish asking.

“They’re just a bunch of sick men,” I said. “I don’t know what they were talking about, why they said what they said, but I do know they’re not good. That’s why we helped you.”

She seemed to accept my explanation eagerly, like she wanted to believe anything other than what she had started to suspect. After a few more minutes of talking to her, it became frustratingly clear that she knew nothing else.

With a promise to have her driven home soon, I left Jennifer sitting in the back of the van, and went in search of the others. Perhaps they had uncovered something more useful.

I found Callie leaning against a tree, distancing herself from the rest of them. I could hear their voices, all loud and angry and menacing. Mostly, I heard Richie, which was surprising.

“You stay with her?” I asked Callie, nodding toward the back of the van.

“Sure thing. I’ll do anything but go over there.” Callie jutted her chin forward. I followed her gaze and saw exactly where they were, hidden behind some brush.

As I approached, I saw that all but one of the Skotadi were now dead. I knew that they had been injured in the rollover, but I wondered if their injuries had ultimately done them in…or if someone had killed them. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that one of them had definitely been killed by someone’s hands. More precisely, a bullet.

Nathan was knelt on the ground, his face only inches away from the last remaining Skotadi. He didn’t notice my approach, until the Skotadi looked past him and saw me.

“You,” the man rasped.

Nathan stood and swung around in frustration. I hoped it wasn’t because of me. From the set scowl on his face as he glared down at the Skotadi, I suspected he had been frustrated long before I came along.

“You need to join us,” the Skotadi was saying to me.

“Not going to happen,” I returned, earning an evil grin from him.