Page 55 of Inflamed By an Incubus

Not that Rane showed any inclination to do that.

According to Tiny, Rane spent most of his days skulking around the house, casting fearful glances at the windows. Windows that Fenix suspected the male used together with the binoculars in an attempt to spot the witch and see if he was safe from her wrath.

The most worrying report was one Des had delivered when Fenix had returned to the mansion to borrow the binoculars. The older incubus had taken him aside and told him that he had overheard Rane muttering to Mort about how he couldn’t face the female because he couldn’t use his charms to make her leave.

Immunity to an incubus’s charms was a sign that she was his fated mate.

If Rane’s mutterings were true, then the male was in a world of trouble. Not only were the old stories about how a witch lost her powers when she took demon seed into her body a lie, something the female had proven by rattling the mansion with a thunderstorm that had lasted five days and had only been present over the house and grounds, but Rane had gone and angered his fated female to the point where she more than likely wanted him dead.

It was one mess that Fenix wasn’t getting involved in.

He had his own problems with his fated female to iron out.

Fenix adjusted the dial again, bringing the humans across the valley into focus. He scanned them for Evelyn, and when he couldn’t spot her among the mortals that were poring over the bodies and equipment spread around the dusty black bowl of the valley, he looked for Archer instead. No sign of him either.

He spotted the ropes that pooled on the ground near the side of the mountain and tracked them upwards to a cave. More movement there. He tried to zoom in and ended up making everything go out of focus, huffed and brought the binoculars away from his eyes to figure out what he had done wrong. He fiddled with a few things, shrugged and lifted them back to his eyes.

Frowned.

Evelyn. She was standing at the edge of the ledge of the cave now, talking to two males he didn’t recognise. He wished he could hear what she was saying, because she looked worried. The two males nodded and she walked away from them, heading towards the back of the cave and disappearing from view.

Fenix watched the men as they worked with a team on the ground to set up what looked a lot like a zipline, and then hooked up a large black case to the wire and attached a rope to it. One of the men kept hold of the rope, controlling the ascent of the case.

He had seen cases like that before, back at the portal where Evelyn’s team had entered Hell. Her group weren’t the only ones who had been there. There had been other ones, some of them waiting for a captive to open it so they could leave, while others had been arriving and checking over the contents of some seriously large black plastic cases.

The kind people in movies shipped weapons and other seriously destructive and dangerous things in.

Fenix studied the humans as they stacked up the cases and packed away the equipment, his mind on the ones he had seen arriving. Those cases had been bigger than the ones the soldiers were placing lighting and other innocent things in. He tried to shake off the bad feeling he’d had upon seeing groups of men struggling to lift just one of the cases, and how cautious and on edge everyone had been, but it had been plaguing him every second of every day.

Steadily growing stronger.

He spotted Evelyn again and stared at her, the need to go to her almost overpowering him. He needed to get her away from Archangel, because he had the sinking feeling shit was about to go down and he didn’t want her caught in the crossfire.

Fenix kept track of her, following her as she went about her business, keeping the binoculars trained on her even as Archer joined her and the whole team moved off.

He lowered the binoculars, stared at the cave, and teleported.

Covered his mouth and nose the moment he landed and the vile scent of rotten meat hit him.

He kept it covered as he checked out the cave, his gaze scanning everything for a sign of what Archangel had been up to this close to the Devil’s domain. Fenix had never met the fallen angel, but he had a reputation for not liking people encroaching on his territory. He glanced at the mutilated bodies, at the long gashes in their clothes and the flesh and bone beneath. It fitted the modus operandi of a fallen angel, although Fenix doubted the Devil himself had done this.

A short way into the cave, he found something.

Stopped dead as he read the note someone had scrawled in huge letters across several pieces of paper on the ground.

He recognised two names.

King Thorne.

And Grey.

Fenix looked back over his shoulder at the mouth of the cave, making sure he was still alone, and then eased into a crouch and stared at the note. Grey. The same Grey he knew? But what would the tiger shifter have been doing here in Hell?

Unless…

Talon, Grey’s twin brother, had recently been held in Archangel headquarters in London. He had managed to escape and apparently must have lost his mind because he had wanted back in. King Thorne had helped him with that, causing a diversion while two elves, one of which was the mate of Kyter, the owner of Underworld, helped Talon break out people he had been held with in the facility. Talon now worked as a bartender for Kyter.

Fenix owed the tiger. One of the people he had gone back in to save had been Agatha, and she had nothing but good things to say about the male and the others who had been taken from the fae town with her.

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