Refuge (3 page)

Or was it? What was it Nikolas had said about
the hellhounds?
They
are yours now. Once a fell beast imprints on a new master they are
incredibly loyal. They will only answer to you.
Was that
true? Had they really imprinted on me?

I backed away from the men who were too
focused on the approaching beasts to watch me. When I had put a
dozen or so feet between us, I turned and ran to the left,
gathering my power as I went. If Nikolas was right, the hellhounds
would not harm me because I was their master now. If he was wrong .
. . I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to think about that.

I stopped running and whirled around just as
the hounds changed direction and headed straight for me. The
warriors looked my way, and I saw horror on their faces as they
realized what I’d done. They spun to intercept the hounds. I’d seen
how fast Mohiri warriors moved, and I knew they would engage the
hounds first. I had to do something before it was too late.

“STOP!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs,
and the power building inside me made my voice resonate across the
lawn in a way it had never done before. Men and beasts skidded to a
stop and stood just feet from each other, watching me with startled
expressions. My hand went to my throat. Had that sound really come
from me?

I lowered my voice. “Don’t move.” When one of
the twins opened his mouth to speak I cut him off. “I know these
boys, and I think I can handle this.” I had no idea if that was
true, but it sounded pretty good, and I was encouraged by the fact
that the hounds had actually stopped.

Before anyone could object, I pointed at my
feet and said in my most commanding voice, “Come.” The hounds
tilted their heads to one side and looked at me like they weren’t
sure what to do. I spoke louder. “Come.”

I didn’t really expect it to work. I could
barely get our beagle, Daisy, to come on command, even though I had
saved her life and allowed her to sleep on my bed whenever she
wanted to. I wasn’t prepared when the two hellhounds sauntered over
and halted right in front of me.
Holy crap!
I sucked in a sharp breath when
I found myself face-to-face with two pairs of red eyes and two of
the scariest looking mouths I had ever seen. Their hot breath
fanned my face as they panted, and I resisted the urge to wave my
hand in front of my nose at the awful smell that was like a
combination of raw meat and bad foot odor.
God, I really hope these guys didn’t just
eat someone.

“Sit,” I commanded, and they sat back on
their haunches. Their faces were still at eye level with me, but
they didn’t look nearly as threatening with their tongues hanging
out. “Good boys,” I praised while trying not to cough from their
noxious breath. If you overlooked their size and their red eyes and
their bone-crushing jaws, they were just big dogs really.

“Now, how did you two end up here?”

Their tails began to thump against the
ground, and I smiled in relief. I reached out and rubbed the top of
one hound’s head, giving him a good scratch behind the ears. He
shifted until he was pressed up against my side, and his weight
almost tipped me over. A whimper made me look at the neglected
hound on my other side, and I patted my hip. I found myself crushed
between two heavy hellhounds clamoring for my attention. It
occurred to me that I might be the only person to ever show them
kindness. Hellhounds were bred for one purpose and that was to maim
and kill. They were weapons, and weapons did not need
affection.

I scratched their heads and grimaced when my
face was bathed by two very long, wet tongues. “Ugh! This is not
very hellish behavior.” I tried to shove their mouths away, but
they pushed back harder until I almost toppled backward. “Stop,
stop,” I wheezed, and when that didn’t work, I choked out, “Down.”
The two of them immediately lay down and ceased their play. They
were well trained at least.

I wiped my wet cheeks with my coat sleeve,
grimacing at the wet tendrils of hair that hung around my face. My
hand stilled in the act of pushing my hair out of my eyes when I
realized how quiet it was. I looked up to find the four men
watching me with expressions of shock and disbelief. I let out a
sigh that only the hounds could hear. Just what I needed – another
reason for people to stare at me.

The men recovered from their surprise, and
the twins took a step toward me. The hellhounds leapt to their feet
in front of me and bared their teeth, letting out low threatening
growls. Niall and Seamus stopped in their tracks.

“Stop that,” I ordered, putting my hands on
the back of the hounds’ necks. The growling ceased, but I felt the
tension in their bodies as they maintained their protective stance,
ready to pounce at the slightest provocation.
What do I do now?

“If I wasn’t seeing it with me own two eyes,
I wouldn’t believe it,” said one of the twins without taking his
eyes off the hellhounds.

His brother shook his head. “I’m seeing it
and I still don’t believe it.”

I felt a low rumble in the hellhounds’ chests
when the men spoke, and I wondered how in hell I was going to stop
the beasts from hurting someone. The hounds seemed docile enough
with me, but apparently that did not extend to anyone else,
especially armed men.

“Um, can you guys lower your weapons?”

None of the men moved to do as I asked, and
they all stared at me like I had lost my mind. I understood their
hesitation, considering what they were looking at, but I could not
see any other way to end this peacefully.

“They are protecting me, and you all look
pretty dangerous right now,” I explained, still petting the hounds’
heads. “They don’t know you are friendly, so could you please just
put the swords away?”

The blond warrior was the first one to
comply, sliding his sword into the sheath on his back. The others
followed, and as soon as the last weapon was out of sight, I felt
the hellhounds’ hackles go down.

“Much better. Now, I don’t suppose any of you
know how my hellhounds ended up here.”

One of the twins gaped at me. “
Your
hellhounds?”

I patted one of the huge heads. “Do they
look
like
they belong to someone else?”

Callum chuckled, and the blond warrior gave
me an appraising look. Seamus and Niall stared at the other two men
as if expecting one of them to say something. When neither spoke,
one of the twins said, “They got here yesterday. That’s all I know.
I don’t normally handle any of the beasts.”

“You have other animals here?”

He made a noise. “I wouldn’t call them
animals, but yes, I think there’s usually a few in the
menagerie.”

The image of young trolls trapped in a cage
flashed through my mind, and outrage filled me. “You have a
menagerie here? You put creatures on display?”

“That’s just what we call it. It’s where we
keep some of the creatures we capture that are causing problems for
the humans, until we can figure out what to do with them.”

“I want to see it.” He looked like he was
going to object, so I said, “If my hounds are living there, I want
to see it. Besides, how else do you plan to get them there?”

His eyes flicked warily to the hellhounds,
and he sighed. “Follow me.”

I trailed him, keeping a safe distance as he
led me to a cluster of stone buildings at the back of the property.
The hellhounds walked beside me, but I saw how they constantly
surveyed our surroundings, looking for anything they perceived to
be a threat.

Claire hadn’t taken me near these buildings
during my tour, and I’d figured they held weapons or more training
rooms. The largest one was a long rectangle two stories high with
windows on the second story only, and a domed roof that looked like
thick glass but was most likely a much stronger material. There was
one entrance, and my guide pulled open the heavy reinforced steel
door, allowing me and the hounds to go ahead of him.

Whatever I was expecting, it was not the
bright, airy, two-story room separated into eight caged enclosures
of varying sizes. Between the cages were solid walls, presumably to
keep the inhabitants from bothering each other, and metal bars
lined the front of each cage. I could not see inside the cages when
we first entered the building, but shuffling noises at the far end
of the room told me that at least one of them was occupied.

“Can I look around . . . which one are you
again?”

He grinned. “Seamus. Go ahead, but you’d best
be putting up your beasts first because they make the other critter
nervous. And me, too.”

“Where do they go?” I hated the thought of
caging any animal, but common sense told me the hellhounds could
not be allowed to run free. At least not yet.

“There.” Seamus pointed to the first
enclosure that was at least twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep.
There was a slot at the front near the floor where food and water
could be pushed inside, and at the back I saw an opening that led
to a dark cave-like structure.

I waved at the open door to the cage. “All
right, in you go, boys.” The hounds hesitated for a moment, and I
thought they were going to refuse to enter the cage. I couldn’t
blame them. I wouldn’t want to be caged either. But they went in
without any further urging, and I closed the gate behind them.
“I’ll come visit you every day. Maybe they’ll let me take you for
walks if you behave yourselves.”

Seamus made a face that suggested no one
would ever trust the hellhounds enough to let them walk around
freely no matter how well they behaved. We’d have to see about
that. These hounds were my responsibility, and I would not keep
them locked away like zoo animals.

Seamus examined the locking mechanism on the
gate after I closed it. “Hmmm, this doesn’t appear to be broken.
How did these two get out?”

“Maybe someone forgot to lock it.”

He shook his head thoughtfully. “The locks
engage automatically on the cages, and they can only be unlocked
from the main control panel or with a coded key. I’ll have to get
security to pull up the surveillance for today.”

I looked around until I spotted a number of
security cameras fixed at regular intervals high up on the walls.
There was one camera for each enclosure and two near the entrance.
It made sense that if you were housing dangerous creatures, you
kept them under close surveillance.

I left Seamus muttering over the lock and
walked toward the other cages, intensely curious about what kinds
of creatures they kept there. The first three cages I passed were
empty, but my pace picked up when I saw what looked like wisps of
smoke drifting out of the fourth one.

“Watch it, lass. Don’t get too close to that
one,” Seamus called just before the interior of the cage came into
view. Heeding his warning, I moved to the other side of the floor
before I turned to see the occupant of the cage. My jaw dropped and
my eyes nearly bugged out of my head.

“What the . . . ? You have a freaking dragon
in here!”

I gawked at the greenish-brown creature
breathing small puffs of smoke as it watched me with large green
eyes eerily similar to those of a crocodile. Leathery wings were
folded against its scaled body, and it crouched in the back of the
cage like a cat about to pounce. It was small for a dragon, roughly
the size of a very large bull, so I figured it must be young.
Dragons are not native to North America so I wondered what in God’s
green earth had brought this one here.

“Not a dragon, a wyvern actually.” An
olive-skinned man with short black hair walked up to stand beside
me. “And a mean one at that. This one burned five people and killed
two in Utah before we managed to catch him.”

I tried to remember what I had read about
wyverns. They are smaller and faster than their dragon cousins but
not as powerful. They breathe smaller flames, and they have two
legs instead of four. Whereas dragons are intelligent, wyverns are
closer to animals, kind of like a crocodile with wings and just as
deadly.

I shivered. “What will they do with him?”

“We have a place down in Argentina where they
actually train them to hunt vampires. We’re holding Alex until they
can send someone to get him. Don’t get too close to him. His flame
has a good three-foot reach, and he won’t think twice before trying
to fry you.”

I couldn’t stop the laugh that burst from me.
“Alex? You named a wyvern
Alex
?”

The man chuckled. “One of the men who caught
him gave him that name. He said the beast was as surly as his older
brother.”

Shaking my head, I smiled and held out my
hand. “Hi, I’m Sara.”

“Sahir.” His dark eyes were warm when he
smiled. “I have heard much about you.”

I made a face. “Yeah, you and everyone else,
apparently. I think warriors gossip more than the girls at my old
high school.”

Sahir’s laugh was deep and rich, and I liked
him immediately. He moved toward the hellhounds’ cage, and I
followed. The hellhounds growled menacingly, but he ignored them.
“I have cared for many creatures, but this is the first pair of
fell beasts I’ve ever had in my care. They are extremely rare. When
I heard how they were captured, I must admit I thought the story
was fabricated – until I saw you walking with them.”

“Damndest thing I ever saw,” said Seamus, who
had finally stopped studying the lock on the hellhounds’ cage. “I
thought for sure someone was going to die when I saw them coming at
us. Sahir, you have any idea how those beasts could’ve gotten
loose?”

Sahir shook his head. “No one’s been here
since they brought them in last night, and the keys are in my
office. Perhaps we should check the security footage.”

Seamus and I followed Sahir to his brightly
lit office at the back of the building where Sahir logged into a
computer. A few clicks later, he brought up the feeds from the
security camera in the building. “All camera feeds are stored in
the central security database, but you can view them from any
computer if you have clearance,” he explained to me as he clicked
on the camera for the hellhounds’ cage. He opened the digital
footage and went back an hour. Then he slowly fast-forwarded until
we saw the door to the cage click open and the hellhounds leave the
cage. Sahir switched to one of the outdoor cameras, and we watched
the hellhounds push open the main door and run from the
building.