Page 48 of Fire Bound

She’s here.

Remington, wrapped around his back, has her claws in the dead man’s throat. With one flick of her wrist, she tears through all the vital arteries. Blood pours out of his jugular like a water faucet. His hands try to put pressure on the wound, but Remi only tears it open farther. His eyes widen and he falls to his knees. The weight of his large body hitting the ground causes objects around us to rattle. Remi holds on to him as he falls and doesn’t let go until he finally succumbs to his injury and falls forward on his chest.

Silently, Remington looks at her blood-soaked hand and without a second thought, she wipes the residue on the back of the dead man’s jacket. She finally lifts her head and looks me over for any wounds. When she deems I’m okay, she’s charging at me with a pissed-off look on her face. Her hands slam into my chest as she violently shoves me back. “What in theDisney Prince Charmingwas that shit!” she yells at me. “You kiss me goodbye on aliteralcliff and then gallop away on your white horse towhat? Almost get taken out by André thefuckingGiant.” Her hand waves at the very large dead man at our feet. “Tell me that wasn’t your plan, Jax!”

“If you’d just given me a second, you would have seen I had it perfectly under control,” I reassure her, but her response is to roll her eyes at me in pure Remi fashion. “You’re not supposed to be here, Remington.”

“And you’re not supposed to be here alone,” she argues instantly. “You’redefinitelynot supposed to threaten our new human friend with bodily harm either or leave bruises on their body. That was a dick move, dude.”

“He had information I needed, and he wasn’t inclined to give it to me at first,” I sniff unapologetically.

“Maybe because he’s smarter than you and knew it was a bad idea for you to go alone.” Her eyes jump from me to her hand as she discovers there’s still blood on it. With a grimace, she bends down and uses the hem of the guy’s dated jacket to clean her fingers off. “Jesus, what the hell is this man wearing?”

“I think Kaius gets a kick out of bringing back the people who’ve been dead the longest,” I theorize. “I think it makes him feel strong knowing he’s bringing back someone who’s been dead for over fifty years. He’s always been a little bit of an egomaniac.”

Remington looks between the two dead bodies and their dated clothes, before nodding in understanding. “Are they the only ones here? I can’t tell if there’s more, that ungodly smell is masking everything else.”

I look around the empty space. “Not sure. I haven’t gotten that far.”

“I’m assuming this is one of the buildings they haven’t had a chance to clear out yet?”

“Based on the short amount of time those assholes have been alive,” I gesture at Kaius’s dead goons. “Kaius is getting his ducks in a row before he does just that.”

Her face sets like she’s preparing for battle. “Alright, so let’s keep going and see if we can find anything else.”

“I’llkeep going. You’re going to turn that cute little ass of yours around and go home where your family needs you.”

“My family doesn’tneedme right now,” she argues. “They’re all watching each other’s backs, but no one is here watching yours. I want to find Kaius as much as you do.” She pleads before her face pinches like she’s in pain. The expression goes away as fast as it flashed upon her pretty face. “We can’t ever be together.Fine. One day I’ll come to accept that, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop being there for each other. Since the very first day we met and you jumped in front of a bullet for me, we’ve been protecting each other. I’ll admit I didn’t always see that, but I do now. So just let me help.”

If I had the time, I would lift her up and put her on a goddam bus back to Montana right now, but this mission is time sensitive. As we speak, Kaius could be setting aflame important documents. One particular document I want is one that has all the breeding facilities on it. I’ve only ever been to a couple and those have been cleared out, but there is no way Sterling would have terminated all those viable experiments. He just moved them to a new location, and I want to know where. If and when we kill Sterling, someone will have to go to those facilities and save all those souls.

“Fine,” I relent. “But if I tell you to get out—to run—you have to listen to me.”

She blinks slowly at me before shaking her head. “Nope.” Remi pats my back mockingly as she walks past me. “But that was a nice try. Your tone… very convincing. Bravo, well done,” she praises over her shoulder before making her way down the corridor.

Catching up to her, I ask, “How the hell did you even find me?”

“I put a GPS in your dog bowl, and I had Whisper ping your location.” When I stare at her with wide, confused eyes, she laughs under her breath. “Kidding. Whisper gave me the address of the cemetery, so I went straight there from the airstrip. There I found a groundskeeper who was pacing around by a headstone, mumbling about a demon” —she gives me a pointed look clearly not as impressed by my joke as I was— “I knew I’d just missed you. The poor man pointed me in the direction you headed, and I eventually caught your scent and followed it here. And you know the rest.”

“Come on. The man had rosary beads in his pocket! How many times am I going to get an opportunity like that?”

“I’m assuming you missed this lesson when you were a kid as well, but our kind has only been able to survive this long because we keep our existence a secret from the humans. Can you imagine how they’d react if they found out their monsters and horror movie villains were in fact real? It would be chaos. You know how humans react when they’re afraid. Violence is always their first response.”

“Sterling always had an issue with humans,” I tell her. The sound of our matching footsteps bounces off the concrete walls and metal ceiling. “You should have heard the way he talked about them. I’ve never heard someone talk about something with so much disdain as how he does with humans.” The only thing that rivals it is the manner in which I talk about Sterling.

We come to metal double doors. The glass windows in them have been broken and the shards crunch under our feet as we walk over them.

“Well, this isn’t creepy or anything,” Remington comments dryly at my side as we both pause and look around the vast room we’d entered. Mannequins, some fully intact and standing while some are in pieces in bins lining the walls, fill the dark room. The only light comes from glowing red exit signs posted above the doors. Plastic hangs from the ceiling, blowing slightly from some kind of airflow streaming into the room. “Seems a little on the nose as well. Sterling and Kaius might as well have spray-painted‘villain lair’on the freaking walls because this place is straight out of a scary movie.”

“If you were trying to keep nosy people out, wouldn’t you make it as unappealing as possible?” I question as I pick up a broken mannequin hand. When I poke Remi in the back with it, she swats her hand at it and glowers at me.

“Well, five stars to the criminal masterminds because if I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t come within five hundred yards of this room.” She waves her hand in front of her face, nose wrinkling. “It smells in here too.”

“Like death and chemicals.” It’s so strong, it almost makes my nose burn.

She turns around like she’s about to say something, but her face drops and her head tilts. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

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