Guardians (Chosen Trilogy Book 2) (5 page)

“W
hoa!”

Felicia cried out as a branch whipped past her stomach and retracted even before she passed. Mortar exploded from the house wall. If it had connected
, the limb could have gutted her. Eliza reached the far corner, peering out. Ken watched her as best he could, gauging her reaction. It could mean life or death.

“Hurry!”

She bounded out of sight, faster than anyone in their group. The other vamps followed and then Ken rounded the corner. Ahead lay a blasted, open space, what might once have been a playground or a park. A rusted swing set still sat at its center, creaking as the slightest of winds passed by. They ran for the open ground, and Ken chanced a quick glance back as he fled.

The house was covered, crawling with tree limbs
, foliage and waving branches. The structure was almost unidentifiable, just a mass of slithering vegetation. A second passed before he saw several limbs shooting across the ground, chasing after them like living hoses unreeling at high speed.

They weren’t moving fast enough! He hopped and skipped like he was treading on hot lava as the vines tore between them, catching up to Eliza in seconds. All of them were brushed, touched, scraped, but the limbs only entwine
d around Lilith. The young girl screamed, and Ken knew they had only seconds to save her. Once she was pulled back within that waving mass she was lost forever.

He tackled her hard around the waist, lending his own weight to keep her grounded. They landed in a tangle and several of the vines detached to flick angrily at him.
That gave him a chance to hack a few apart with the sword and, as he hoped, Felicia stopped to join the fray. A fast glance toward the vamps showed them slowing but looking reluctant to turn back.
Damn them to the deepest hole in the ground.

Felicia tugged hard at a branch, the growl in her throat betraying what was about to happen. In another second of pure shock and awe Ken was witness once more to the amazing transformation this woman could make. Fur rippled over her body, claws split from between her fingers and toes. An elongated snout
, high brows and fangs altered her face beyond recognition. The change gave her superhuman strength. Ken fell back as a powerful leg swatted at him. The wolf straddled Lilith, breathing hot air into her face. The message was clear.

Don’t move!

With jaws gnashing and ripping, Felicia ripped the thick limbs to shreds. Such was their sudden agony that they retreated reflexively, zooming back toward the house and filling the air with their protracted agonies. Felicia sat back and howled, a sound of gratification and victory, and pure with the thrill of freedom. Wild, untamed, this wolf-woman would never accept slavery. Ken helped Lilith to her feet, his heart suddenly taken by another.

“Th
. . . thanks,” she whispered. “I . . . I don’t know why they picked on me.”

“Never mind that.” Ken waved the way ahead. “Let’s go.”

Felicia loped beside them for a minute then gradually began to change back into human form. Ken quickly moved to help her tie some of the rips in her clothes together to keep her modesty. Felicia swatted him away.

“Stop that. I’m used to it. I can do it quicker alone.”

The vamps were waiting. Ken watched their faces carefully, wondering if any of them would come up with the inevitable put-down—
good dog.
If they did he was ready to step up to her defense.

What had they done to help?

But Eliza briefly inclined her head before nodding over the blasted expanse of the playground. “Shall we continue?”

Lilith brushed herself off. “Another half
day and we should reach the secret way. The fifth hell.” She shook her head. “Well, they only get worse from here on down.”

“I can hardly wait.” Ken shrugged.

“The scent left by Dementia does not extend this far,” Felicia told them. “When we were by the grand staircase I sensed it strongly. She definitely descended below the fifth hell, but beyond that we should try to regain her spore.”

Ken noticed Lilith’s eyes light up. It seemed that she was about to say something, maybe give them a clue as to where Dementia might go, but then the dark clouds descended over her eyes and she clammed up. Ken said nothing. In time, he knew, she would learn to trust them.

He just hoped they lived long enough to see the day.

I
walked back through the lobby of our hotel, unable to speak. The journey back had been made in a terrible, heavy silence. All except for Natalie Trevochet, who wept uncontrollably. I still couldn’t get out of my head the fact that I had once left her to die, to be strangled by a rope, as I leaped to save Belinda. Of course, I had assumed someone else would save her—and they had—but that was far from the point. Johnny and I had come to an uneasy truce. Now, we had not only lost Johnny, but the demon Asmodeus and the artefact. Another of the Chosen had fallen, one of the major players, and we were lagging far behind in this apocalyptic race.

I entered our rented conference room. One whole side was laid out with an American buffet breakfast, many bowls lined up along a white-sheeted table. I headed for the water cooler, not trusting my stomach to keep the food down. Not surprisingly there were bottles of Budweiser and miniatures of Jim Bean and Southern Comfort lined up near the corner and I stopped as if recognizing an old friend, mesmerized.

Lucy tugged my arm. “No. Not now. They need you more than ever.”

I grimaced, not moving. I latched on immediately to the word she hadn’t spoken. She hadn’t said
I
need you. She’d said
they
need you. I felt sadness swamp me and thought irritably that Ceriden and Ethan must be close by. Damn it all. If the whole world didn’t need the Chosen right now I’d take my daughter and get well away. Take her to some place where all this madness was a distant memory, a nightmare. But I was trapped.

Wasn’t I?

The gleam of the bottles seemed so much brighter, that much more enticing. Before I knew it I had pulled away from Lucy and was another step closer. Time stood still. I saw heaven and hell waiting on either side of my next decision and thought about poor old Johnny, the second of the Chosen to have fallen since we met on Miami Beach and, I was sure, not the last.

My hand closed around a bottle of Bud. I heard an intake of breath at my shoulder
then a hand clamped down over my wrist.

“Are you crazy, you w
hacked-out fruit and nut?” a distinctive voice said. “What you’re doing is wrong in about a dozen different ways. It’s not easy to face death, Logan. I do it every hour of the day. But you can never run away from it. Not like this.”

I let go of the bottle, a little reluctantly. “The urge never goes away.”

“It helps you forget, not survive. It drags you in deeper, never giving you a lifeline. It changes your personality, not your position in life.”

I turned to Belinda
. “We might not see tomorrow.”

She shrugged. “Neither might the rest of the world. These things we do now, the actions we take, will shape the future of mankind for centuries to come. Think on that the next time Anheuser Busch looks like a tasty alternative.
You really wanna be remembered as the ‘alcoholic dropout’?”

I watched as she creaked away, joining a table where sat Cheyne and Giles, Cleaver and Lysette
. She sat with her back to me, showing me the options. My eyes sought Lucy’s and weren’t shocked to see her in the company of Ethan. The vampire kid looked as somber as the rest of us, and stared sadly toward the still weeping Natalie Trevochet. Tanya Jordan had stepped up to comfort her, the Hawaiian’s easy-going, calm manner no doubt casting a small but welcome balm over the situation.

I drifted over to Belinda’s table as Ceriden also approached. Cheyne had a cellphone held against her ear.

“Thank you,” I heard, and then looked expectantly as she folded closed the phone.

“All right.” She looked around at us. “
Do you remember the Text of Seven? The archaic document that Emily Crowe stole from the Louvre. It’s how she conjured the seven hierarchy demons to our earth, our realm, but it’s the source of much more than that. It holds information, valuable resources that we need to stop this. I just spoke to the Library of Aegis,” she nodded at the phone, “and they’re e-mailing and faxing a copy across.”

“Let’s hope we can make some sense of it.” Giles rose as they heard the nearby fax-machine ring.

I placed my hands on Belinda’s shoulders and whispered, “Thank you.”

“No worries. We’re all
running in the same race, Logan.”

I looked across the room toward Lucy. Her face was not as forgiving.

Emily Crowe, ex-lead singer of the all-girl rock group Supernatural, and once one of Gorgoroth’s Destroyers, albeit a double-agent for the Devil, had tricked, conned and beaten everyone to the punch. It was she that had engineered the return of the hierarchy even as the ridiculous humans struggled and died trying to defeat the World-Ender and, in doing so, paved the way for a grand future of hell on Earth. The affair was not without its hitches and glitches, but what glorious battle plan ever was?

She sat now, cross-legged in the desert, a flickering camp fire in front of her. Across the other side her new acolyte, Melissa Thorne, sat rigid in the same pose. Above them, the clear vault of the skies seemed to stretch forever, from one side of Death Valley to the other. Old rocks and hills
, and flat stretches of salt lay all around, attesting to the ancient nature of this place.

It held many secrets.

And it would become her base, their base, the base of newly emerged evil. It was large and powerful enough to contain them. The creatures of hell would come here, and from here they would conquer all. But first—the problem.

A well-established trailer park sat quite close to the national park, so close
that it would have to be eradicated. Crowe had known it as soon as she’d come down here, and had been looking forward to the task ever since. Melissa Thorne was a former resident of that trailer park, and had willingly divulged its details, even before Crowe had worked her wiles on her. As of now, Melissa was simply struggling to remember which day it was or know the precise hour. Soon, she would struggle to remember her name, her past, and then the fact that she’d once been human.

Crowe spread her arms, chanting softly. She rose to her feet and divested herself of every stitch of clothing. Melissa did the same. Neither of them felt the desert’s night chill. Shadows began to stir within the flames and then to writhe among them. Crowe flung her head back and chanted loudly at the stars.

The night spun around her. It was at times like these that she remembered her initiation. How she and twelve others had somehow managed to raise a specter, a spiritual force, for the fun and audaciousness of it all, and then how everything had gone badly wrong. What had started out as a rock-band dare, something to take their wild-child image to the next level and maybe outdo even Fleetwood Mac, had turned into an all-too-real savage nightmare. The spiritual entity they’d raised had been taken over by something terrible, a malevolent force that had hijacked the room. She never knew how it had happened. Maybe it was a chance in a hundred million. Maybe the dire entity had been searching for a conduit to Earth. Either way, it wasted no time in exerting its brutal authority. Two of her friends had immediately murdered two others, then flung themselves atop the bleeding bodies to start an inhumane copulation. The remaining eight had found themselves spreadeagled around the sides of the room, arms and legs held apart by an implacable force, unable to even blink. A demonic visage had materialized in the center of the room, right above the rutting bodies, born out of ferocity and abhorrence, and then blasted toward all of them and shattering apart in their faces. Many had screamed, some had died. But Crowe had suddenly felt different. She’d felt whole. Capable. A woman who, since childhood, had never known family, was now part of some enormous hierarchy. And she liked it. The chance to get a little revenge, a little power and a lot of fun.

She fancied she’d always been a psychopath. But now she had the power to live out her dreams and never get caught.

That night every one of her twelve friends’ bodies were inhabited by a different demon, seven of the greatest from the hierarchy and five more. Every one of them threw her down to the floor and shamed her into enjoying their degradations, every one of them drew blood, every one of them drew a promise.

She would serve them. Always. And she would be rewarded with power and a seat beside a throne. Somewhere. When the
Earth was subjugated.

Now, though, the time was firmly at hand.
So far, her servitude had proven faultless. The hierarchy was pleased with her. Now, the final few tasks neared completion. Her focus snapped back to the present as the shadows elongated above the flames, washing the desert floor with deep reflected crimson. They gathered, writhing up and out and around like eager serpents. They began to coil over at their apex, flowing fluidly toward both women, now wrapping and entwining their naked bodies. Crowe luxuriated in it. The intimate sensation of her flesh being touched all over by unknown bodies, by a terrible animate force, brought every nerve to life. She squirmed against them, rolling her hips suggestively, running her fingertips across her stomach. The shadows drew black energy from her, becoming even more lively, flitting and jetting about, galvanized by power.

As the force grew, Crowe opened her eyes and checked on Melissa. Good, the girl was performing nicely and that meant she lived another day. The trailer park wouldn’t. Crowe gathered all her energy and flung her open arms at the skies. Instantly, the shadows shot up high, zooming like black comets up at the glittering stars, and then arched away like dark missiles, an eclipse of evil armament, with only one destination
in mind.

Crowe listened hard as the sensations fell
away. Melissa collapsed to the ground, heaving and spent, but eyeing Crowe with a certain amount of healthy lust. In another moment Crowe heard screams as the inhabitants of the trailer park were systematically torn to shreds or, even better, succumbed to the shadows and tore each other to shreds. Judging by the sounds, trailers were being toppled and gas bottles blown up. Men and women were murdered. Crowe had fulfilled yet another task.

Death Valley was ready to accept new residents.

Crowe turned her attentions to Melissa, walking over and lifting the girl to her feet. Her lips were full, pouting and blood red.

Crowe bit into them.