Page 141 of Broken Souls
His jaw tight, he nods at me to enter after Leno. He’ll go next to protect my back. I nod at him ever so subtly, letting him know that I understand we might have to fight our way out of here. I just don’t know if he’s paranoid because we’re going into a dark hole with no door he can open or because he doesn’t trust his brothers. Does he have a real reason to be on edge? Or is this just because Talon betrayed him and now he doesn’t know who to trust?
Knowing I won’t get any answers out here, I descend into the dark.
The metal stepsclangbeneath my shoes. My pulse stays steady as all my nerves fire. I touch the gun I have strapped to my waist. Varius is right behind me, and I relax a little from the feel of his presence.
Nothing lunges out of the dark to get me. Khalid, Krypto, and Leno are already continuing on, their backs to me, so there’s no immediate threat from them either.
Releasing my gun, I follow them down a hallway that’s only wide enough for one person to walk through at a time. The floor’s uneven, and I have to concentrate on my footing so I don’t stumble. The dullest of bulbs hang above us. Their ambience overlaps and creates multiple shadows per person, making it hard for our eyes to adjust. The back of my neck prickles. Claustrophobia starts to set in.Fuck.
“Is the rock too hard to work with?” I ask, trying to keep my mind occupied so I don’t shove past Leno and Khalid to run to the exit like a little bitch. Or worse, draw my gun and shoot them in the back. Varius’ paranoia is stressing me the fuck out.
“Nah,” Maddox says from behind Varius. “This is the last stand to stop whatever comes out of the portal.”
“I thought the other side was controlled by the Ezwail’ik Family?”
“It is,” Leno says. “But the werewolves onBlo´dyrio´ fall under the Craving on the full moon.”
“Fuck.All of them?” The SCU keeps on top of Craved sups on Earth, but I saw a mad werewolf in North Korea while Dayne and I were on a job there. We had been hired by a Russian politician to kill the diplomat who’d slept with his youngest daughter. While in Pyongyang, we heard whispers of agumiho(what they believed her to be) being experimented on. They were torturing her to see how fast she could heal and which wounds hurt her the most. When we found her, they’d forced her to change into her wolf form and were in the process of skinning her alive for her pelt. She fell into the Craving right after we killed the guy behind the glass, and she ripped her way through the entire compound.
We missed our extraction to go save her, so I was really annoyed when she ended up saving herself, then tried to kill us. Unfortunately, with her under the power of the Craving, we couldn’t let her live once she reached the exit. She would have slaughtered her way through the entire city, perhaps the country, killing without discrimination. If an undercover reporter caught wind of her before the SCU arrived to clean up, then our entire world would’ve been blasted open.
So I killed her. It wasn’t an easy fight, and by that point she was heavily malnourished, dehydrated, and already half dead from all her wounds. If she’d been at full power, I would have struggled even with Dayne’s help. Being under the Craving gives a sup extra strength. They do not heal any faster, but their wounds bleed less and their pain resistance skyrockets. In short, they become pure killing machines.
To survive an entire night when half the population goes bloodthirsty at once? Fucking hel.
“No, most of them chain themselves up with silver before nightfall,” Leno says. “But some of them like to spend the night out hunting in the mountains or other uninhabited places.”
“And let me guess,” I say, stepping over a lump in the floor, as if a tree root had grown under the tile, “the portal on the other side is in the middle of nowhere?”
“Yep. And then you have blood moons.”
“I’ve heard of those,” I say, but then I pause. “What are they again?” My knowledge of Blo´dyrio´ or any of the other Seven Planes other than Halzaja is sorely lacking. And I only know a bit about the plane of the angels and demons because Lou is a summoning progeny and is obsessed with eknor demon culture.
“It’s when the moon turns dark red, triggering all the werewolves and vampires to fall under the Craving,” Varius says, and I turn my head to look at him. I like the fact that he’s answering me too. He normally ignores me in public so no one knows I’m his weakness. A slow smile curls my lips, lighting me up on the inside.
His eyes heating, he grabs the back of my head. My feet root to the floor while he steps up to me. He ducks his head, and his lips cover mine, kissing me until I’m breathless.
I start to reach for him, but he pulls back, then nudges me to keep moving. I stumble forward even though all I want to do is ride his cock right here, right now. Our blood bond has strengthened substantially since last night, and his arousal is amplifying mine.
“The blood moon’s cycle can’t be tracked,” he continues as we walk, and I focus on that rather than leaning against the wall and telling him to get down on his knees in front of me. He has teased me with the idea of having him at my mercy too many times, and mamawantsit.
“It’s random and comes without warning.”
Wait, what are we talking about again?
“Some people say it happens when Artemis comes down for a hunt.”
Oooh. Yeah. Now I remember.“Wait. Artemis as in the Goddess of the Hunt?” I ask, turning my head. “That can’t be true, can it?” The gods haven’t been seen on any of the Seven Planes in...forever, as far as I’m aware. Granted, my knowledge of these things is actually pretty bad. If it doesn’t have anything to do with my family or job, I’ve been too busy to pay attention to it.
He shrugs. “There are hundreds of thousand dead when the blood moon ends, so perhaps.”
My jaw drops. I stumble over a bit of rocky ground, and I turn to catch my balance. Keeping my eyes on my feet, I say, “Fuck.”
“Most of those are probably due to the two billion wolves and vampires going crazy in an instant all at once,” Leno adds. “The wolves don’t have time to chain themselves up, the vampires can phase, and no one’s activated the wards. It’s an absolute massacre in every village, which is why all the large settlements on Blo´dyrio´ only allow vampires and werewolves to enter during the day, year round.”
“Shit. That sucks. It’s their home world.”
Leno shrugs. “They never had huge cities before people migrated over anyway. I don’t think many of them care.”
