“Besides,” Hunter casually announces, “Compared to everything else we’re dealing with, some extreme weather is a walk in the park. We’ve built houses from the ground up; if it gets bad enough to signal a real apocalypse and the world floods, we can manage to slap together a boat easily enough. If anything, you should be giving Slade a hard time, not us. He’s the one that was pushing for a clean slate.”
Slade chuckles, fixing the twisted strap of the small, waterproof athletic bag on his back. “Well would you look at that, he actually does have a sense of humor. Who wou-”
My startled yelp cuts him off as my foot is suddenly sucked down in the mud up to my knee. We’ve wading through countless puddles on our trek so far without any more issues than soaking wet socks, but honestly, I should have anticipated it and I’m mentally kicking myself in the ass. With as dry as it usually is here, coupled with their claims of occasional landslides, there are probably plenty of unstable air pockets underground. This entire place is likely a minefield of potential mini-sinkholes.
Bo’s tall enough to reach me without getting too close and risking adding more weight to send me deeper or sink beside me, so he takes point on hauling me out. Gripping beneath my arms, fingers splayed over my ribcage, he plucks me out with ease. My shoe is a lost cause, though, sucked down into the murky depths, and my sock right alongside it.
Sighing, he says, “I’m going to officially request you stop joking about this stuff out loud from now on.”
Setting me on my feet, Bo keeps a hand on my upper arm to steady me as I take advantage of the rain to wash some of the mud off of my skin. “What do you mean?”
His fingers tighten. “I know you were joking about the apocalypse thing, but between the hellacious storm and now the muddy equivalent to quicksand, it’s starting to hit a little too close to home. You’re getting stronger by the day, and we don’t really understand how your abilities work. I don’t know about you, but if a plague of locusts appears next, I’m out of here. That’s where I officially draw the line with this place, and we can take our chances outrunning that nutjob.”
Reid beats me to it. “That’s actually a pretty apt comparison.” He takes my free hand, encouraging us to get walking again. “Sure, you can incinerate things with a touch, but you’re not exactly chucking fireballs or shooting lasers out of your hands. These abilities are a mind fuck in so many variations of the words.”
Care to weigh in?
“Am I allowed to get two words out without you biting my head off this time?
Tongue in cheek, I take a deep breath through my nose that isn’t calming in the slightest.I’m sorry. It’s been a pretty rough couple of weeks and it hurt to find out that we could have been saved a hell of a lot of grief if you’d just spoken up.
“Like I said; until Damian removed the block, it was all I could do to keep the two of us alive. Making sure that your body didn’t suffer the same fate as mine did was my priority, and with the way you were already struggling with siphoning, I couldn’t show you. I wasn’t even sure if Acheron was stillalive,let alone that he was the reason I woke up in your body.”
Reid strokes his thumb over the back of mine. “You were worried about being able to do what those three were hoping and made a few quips about a rain dance, but were also resentful about it; hence the first thunderstorm. And the last time you got pissed off, you burned down a mansion and murdered over a dozen people. Now that Ash and Xander dropped these recent bombshells, and since we aren’t prepared to go on the offensive yet, we get the storm from hell. A subtle ‘fuck you’ to everyone to tide your petty little heart over while you’re getting all of your ducks in a row.”
You could have told me. Given me literally any sort of heads up so we wouldn’t be completely blindsided when you knew that we were all struggling, and you had the ability to give us at least some of the answers.
“I could have,”she easily agrees,“But you forget that I know how your mind works better than anyone. All I did was ensure you had the support necessary so that my... affliction wouldn’t overload you until you’d had a chance to acclimate and were able to handle the influx of power without going mad. Then you’d be more inclined to trust what I had to say because you couldn’t claim that I was lying or manipulating you all this time, because you came here of your own volition.Youchose to come to this place; I never influenced you one way or another. It wasn’t even until they were talking about this desolate place that I started to think it was the same mountain and that Acheron might have a hand in it. And the only way to outwit that power-hungry, narcissistic bastard is by reimagining the game. That couldn’t have happened if I colored your opinion and limited your perspective of things. He knows how I think too well and will assume that you’ll act similarly because of me whispering in your ear.”
So that story Kaige told us about the jilted lover?
Her gag makes my lip twitch despite still being annoyed at her for intentionally keeping me in the dark. “Acheron is a man that can’t stand being told he can’t have something. Each time I turned him down, he considered it a challenge to change my mind, growing bolder until it became a sick game. I don’t think he’d even know what to do with himself if he won, he’s simply obsessed with the thrill of the chase.”
Tabling our discussion for later, I force myself to focus because this is one of the last places I want to let my guard down by getting lost in my head. Embracing that spirit, I kick off my remaining sock and shoe, choosing to go barefoot for the sake of what remaining comfort I can find in what may very well be my final days.
When I sink into another pitfall, Reid and Bo both curse, managing to save me from going deeper than mid-thigh. Cinjin jogs over while they haul me out, his gaze darting between the ground and me. After a slight hesitation, he steals me away from his brothers, only to release my hand and crouch in front of me a second later, giving me his back. “We should put a little distance between you and the demons in this hellhole that are trying to drag you down to their level. Hop on.”
Eyeing the mud puddles at my feet, it’s impossible not to think of them as portals to Hell now, to envision shadowy hands reaching up through the cracks in the earth and pulling me down into their underground prison. “Well, when you phrase it like that...”
I wrap my arms around his neck and tighten my knees on his sides, sending another nervous glance at the murky puddles and the dark secrets that might be hiding beneath them. “Thanks for the delightfully horrifying picture that you just painted in my head. Now I’m worried I might have turned the puddles into mini-breaches and an army of zombie demons are going to crawl out. Remind me never to go swimming in the ocean with you; for both of our sakes.”
He rises up, sliding his hands under my thighs for extra support. “I’m thinking we’ll skip the scary movies for a while to be safe, too. If some creepy doll begins popping up everywhere at random, now, I’m with Bo and officially out of here. It was fun sleeping with my brothers’ wife while it lasted, but all good things must come to an end, and all that jazz. You can keep the murder-doll in the divorce.”
None of them seem to be having any of the trouble that I did no matter where they step, so we make much quicker time on the last leg of our hike, the warehouse at the far side of a clearing coming into view through the trees. “Sounds reasonable to me. Here’s to hoping we have many more years of making other people uncomfortable ahead of us before that happens, though. And really, I should thank you.”
Turning his head enough to kiss my arm, he hums a sound of contentment at odds with us arranging our hypothetical divorce. “What for?”
As a handful of guards hanging around the warehouse door set their hateful gazes on us stepping into the small clearing in all of our unimpressive, half-drowned glory, an ill-timed laugh slips out. “Because demon zombies and feral wolves don’t seem like such a big deal anymore. Far scarier things to be worried about out there, like possessed dolls.”
Slade oh-so-helpfully chimes in, “Technically,we’repossessed dolls.”
“One, that was hilarious and I’m ashamed of myself for missing the opportunity. Two, I’m stealing that to make my point.” I let their collective confidence soak into my chilled bones and breathe easier than before, the knot in my stomach unraveling a bit. “Which means we have no reason to worry because we’re officially the scariest things in these woods.” Catching Bo’s eye, I wink. “Big enough monsters to keep the rest of them at bay.”
Turning away from his quiet laughter, I rest my chin on Cinjin’s shoulder as he says, “No wonder you were against us showering you with a life of luxury. Awful situations bring out the best in you, sweet girl.”
I bite back the witty retort on the tip of my tongue. By default, I tend to hide behind humor as a way to deal with my problems when I’m around Cinjin, but ultimately, that’s not him. His wolf became the person he needed most when everyone else let him down, rose up to protect the kid that was beaten down by the world and tried his damndest to make him smile even when everything was scary and hard to deal with. While some of that may have rubbed off on the man behind the guardian demon, I need to make sure Cinjin understands that I choose him and always will, that I see him, too.
“No, awful situations inspire me to get creative. It’s you guys that bring out the best in me. And the worst, but that’s actually a good thing. It means that deep down, I know you’ll still love me even at my lowest, so I don’t have to pretend to be okay around you.”
