Read Cursed (The Brookehaven Vampires #4) Online
Authors: Joann I. Martin Sowles
“You’re not lying to me, are you?” I questioned quietly.
A small laugh escaped him, causing a coughing fit. I felt my eyes grow as wide as possible while I watched him, totally forgetting about Zane.
When Oliver’s coughing fit was over, he opened the hand he had coughed into, a few speckles of blood dotted his palm. “See,” he said, holding out his palm for me to see. “Healing as we speak.” He smiled again, but before I could relax, his eyes shifted to Zane’s stirring body. “Laney,” Oliver’s voice warned
, it suddenly held more strength, and a lot of concern.
I tore my eyes from Oliver and slowly looked to where Zane’s body lay. I scrambled back, pressing myself against the wall next to Oliver and away from the angel. He was moving.
“You’ve got to push the knife in deeper,” Oliver said, all kinds of seriousness and urgency in his tone.
“What?” He made to repeat himself, and I stopped him. “Oh, I heard you.” I just couldn’t believe he had said it
!
With a deep, steadying breath, I hesitantly crawled toward Zane’s stirring and moaning body. I rose up on my knees and reached for the knife’s handle. Zane’s hand shot up and grabbed mine, his grip surprisingly strong. I screamed and tried to pull away.
“The knife, Laney!” Oliver shouted.
With my free hand, I tried pushing the knife deeper into Zane’s chest
—farther into his heart. But I couldn’t, I didn’t have the strength. I searched around me as Zane’s head rolled, his eyes opening and beginning to focus on me.
Oliver was crawling toward me, his hand still on his healing wound, blood dripping from it…onto some books that had been knocked to the floor duri
ng our struggle with the angel.
With one hand still in Zane’s grip, I lunged for the closest book. I grabbed it by its open pages and pulled it to me. With the book in my hand, and Zane’s eyes focusing on me, his face contorting in the anger and hatred he felt for me, I slammed the book down on the handle of the knife. The knife moved, slipping deeper into Zane’s heart with a nauseating sound. Zane shrieked and his grip released from my wrist.
Oliver wrapped his free arm around my waist and pulled me to him and back to the wall.
When Zane finally fell silent, and his body had again stilled, Oliver
looked at me and grinned. “Your stomach’s gotten stronger.”
“Not funny,” I said.
He chuckled and returned to resting his head back against the wall.
I kept my eyes on the
motionless demon on the floor in front of us—that’s what he was, a demon.
*****
The sun had gone down by the time the team of Brookehaven Vampires arrived. They brought bagged blood and a large cage. The cage was attached to a trailer and being pulled behind one of the coven-issued SUVs.
Two vampires carried Zane out of the demolished front doorway. That is, after they put some sort of collar on him and a pair of handcuffs. Then they carried him out by his ankles and shoulders and tossed him into the cage.
Once the door to the cage was secure, one of the vampires reached between the bars and pulled the knife free of Zane’s chest. Zane immediately gasped for breath. A moment later, he was on his feet, crouched, his lavender-gray eyes crazed and searching for me.
We stood on the front porch while Oliver drained a bag of blood one of the vampires had given him.
Then Oliver gingerly removed his sweatshirt and lifted his tee so that same vampire could cover the slowly healing knife wound with a bandage.
Before the guy placed the bandage, I
saw that the knife had gone through part of Oliver’s coven tattoo. At first I wondered if the wound would distort the large dragon tattoo, but as the Brookehaven Vamp working on Oliver wiped away the blood, I saw that it was going to heal just fine; it had already started to do so. This made me wonder if there was some sort of magical aspect to the tattoo, just like the contract. I mean, what happens if you decide you don’t want to be a Brookehaven Vampire anymore? How the hell would they remove that tattoo? Or did they just leave it. If it was supposed to be some identifying mark, you would think they wouldn’t want just anyone having one… As you can imagine, my brain was on overdrive. I took a deep breath and focused on something else once Oliver gently lowered his shirt over his new boo-boo.
My hand was still bothering me. It looked rather nasty
and kind of raw and jagged. It wasn’t bleeding, but it was burning. I rubbed it on my jeans hoping that would help relieve some of the discomfort. It didn’t. I considered asking the guy who had doctored Oliver to take a look at it, but he had already packed up his supplies and was headed back to one of the SUVs. I’d deal with it later.
After the vamps covered Zane’s cage
with a tarp, we watched their team of eight load into the two coven-issued SUVs.
That was
when I asked something that had been weighing on me. “How do angels complete their connections, or assignments, or whatever it is?”
Oliver’s focus fell on me. His eyes held mine. “The same way we do,” he said, a knowing tone in his voice.
His meaning quickly sank in. Very quietly, I said, “Oliver, are you saying he was—”
“Yeah,” he said, solemnly. He turned his attention away from me. One of the drivers gave a quick wave through his open window as they started off. Oliver watched them drive away with Zane securely caged. “He was going to rape you.”
My whole body shuddered at his words. I felt sick. What the hell kind of creature is sent to save you, only to turn so evil? So evil that it would do something so unspeakable?
Without taking his eyes off of the vehicles leaving the property, Oliver pulled me close against his side. He winced when I accidently touched his wound. I quickly apologized, but he shrugged it off. He gave me a few more details of what a typical angel assignment entailed. I was not impressed. Honestly, I was downright disgusted with the angel race.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked as the coven-issued SUVs’ taillights faded in the distance.
“He’ll be evaluated. He’s turned, Laney. There’s no good left inside of him. He will most likely be put down.” He said the last sentence very matter-of-factly. “You might feel something when it happens.” He looked down at me. “I will request that we be notified beforehand…so
we’re prepared.”
Prepared?
I began shaking. The surge of adrenaline was passing, and shock was fighting to set in.
Oliver wrapped his arms around me, holding me to him. I turned in his arms and rested my head against his chest. I took several deep breaths to calm myself.
“We can’t stay here tonight,” Oliver said. “Oscar’s still close, and we have no front door. We’ve got to go.” He took my hand and led me back inside to collect our things.
“Where?” I asked. “Back?” I wasn’t ready to leave, let alone go back home. Especially after the mess of the day. Sure, the angel was no longer a threat, but everything else still was.
“No, not quite yet,” he said. “I know of a place.”
Rescue
We were on the road in record time. My phone rang as we hit the freeway. I looked down at the screen and was happy to see that it was Carter.
“Hey,” I said, happy to hear from him. A relief, really, after what we’d just been through.
“Hey?” he shouted.
I held the phone away from my ear. I looked to Oliver who appeared just as surprised as I felt.
“I thought you were dead!” Carter continued to yell. “And all I get is ‘
Hey
’!”
“What?” I questioned, suddenly confused. “Why did you think I was dead?”
“Because this giant jackass over here led me to believe that sadistic angel killed you both! But he was talking about the damage done to the goddamn house!” I could hear Felix apologizing in the background. “I don’t care about the damn house, you fool!” Carter shouted at Felix.
Oliver and I exchanged a look. I stifled a laugh when Oliver
grinned crookedly.
“Carter, you have got to calm down,” I told him. “I’m okay.”
“Are you?” he asked, his tone lowering.
“Yeah,” I said. “He stabbed both of us, but we’ll be fine.”
“He freaking stabbed you?” he shouted.
Okay, I probably shouldn’t have shared that information just yet. “Carter!” I shouted back. “I’m fine! Oliver is fine. We’re both fine. Okay?”
“Sorry,” he said, his tone quieting. “That stupid bastard angel attacked me the other night too.”
It was my turn to be concerned. He told me he was fine, more pissed about it than anything.
“Everything else okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’re heading to Sacramento. Oliver said we can stay there for a few days.”
My hand was itching. The burning was fading, but it itched like crazy. I held my phone to my ear with my uninjured shoulder, and I scratched at my hand while Carter updated me on the news back home. Thankfully, he had nothing major to share.
As we were saying goodbye, he said, “Oh, and tell your
mate
that he owes me a box of condoms.” The call ended.
I felt my face totally burning with embarrassment. “You hear that?” I asked, not looking at Oliver.
“Yep,” he replied.
Relieved, I went back to scratching at the small but super annoying scrape Zane had so nicely given me.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” Oliver asked, reaching over to take my hand. He examined it as best he could in the dark and while driving.
“I think Zane scratched me in the cemetery. He said something about it being just the beginning of what he was going to do to me.” I shuddered at the thought of what he might have meant.
“I’ll take a better look when we get to the hotel,” he told me. “But try to stop scratching it.”
I tried to ignore the irritation as we talked more about Zane, and about what happens to angels when they lose their way.
“He has crossed over, Laney. There is nothing good left inside of him,” Oliver continued to explain. He told me that when this happens, when angels go mad, the demonic part of them takes over. He also explained that all angels lose their minds when they fail to complete the assignment of saving their charge. Oliver also told me that some of them have no desire to stay with their charge once they fulfill their task. Some leave and go home, while others choose to stay and have a life here in our world, with or without the one that they were chosen to save.
I wondered why Zane had been chosen to be my angel. How does the “angel society” go about choosing who gets whom?
My thoughts were interrupted by Oliver’s phone ringing, and I listened while he took the call. Concern quickly took over his tone. I felt fear creeping up my spine.
He ended the call. “Oscar’s got Lacey,” Oliver said, his voice full of nothing but complete distress. His eyes flashed to mine as he took the nearest off-ramp. Crossing over the overpass, he turned us back toward the direction we had just come from.
I was afraid for her, for Oliver’s high school girlfriend, but I also didn’t know what good we could do for her. I voiced this.
“Laney,” Oliver said in all seriousness, “I have to try to do something. I
can’t just hope the others can handle this. No one knows Oscar like I do. He’s sneaky and he’s fast.” By “others” Oliver meant other Brookehaven Vampires.
“He knows you will come,” I told him. I also knew a little about the madman that was Oliver’s brother. “You need to remember that he knows you just as well as you know him.”
Oliver muttered a curse word under his breath, not something he typically did. “You were right,” he admitted. “I can’t let this go on any longer. Lacey has seen Oscar. I have got to set things right before she goes crazy wondering why she’s seeing us.”
I shook my head and sighed.
Now he takes my advice?
Oliver sped down the interstate, weaving between cars until finally taking an exit. I was a tensed ball by the time we pulled into a section of neighborhood close to where Oliver had grown up.
He slowed the car to a stop and parked across the street from the house. He turned off the headlights, but not the engine. He made a call to one of the vampires who was on duty in the area. There was already a team in place around Lacey’s home. They had been alerted to Oscar being in the area and had tailed him to the house.
I scanned the area.
Street lamps and porch lights lit the neighborhood with a soft glow. There were lights on in Lacey’s house. A large, curtained picture window faced the street.
Returning my attention to him, I leaned closer to Oliver so I could listen to the call.
“He is holding the female inside her home. There are two minors and an adult male. The male has been silent since we arrived. I believe he is unconscious, but I won’t know for sure until I examine him,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
They spoke a moment longer, then Oliver told the vampire that he would call him back. Oliver ended the call, and then he revved the engine before turning off his car.
“What are you doing?” I questioned.