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They always looked to me. Which was fitting. I was the eldest. I'd been in charge since we all accidentally found ourselves on the human plane. I tended to know and remember more about our ways, our history.
I had no answers for him, though.
Hell was full of screaming, of course, but when Daemon and Bael had been pulled through one of the Hellmouths, we hadn't heard it.
"That's it," Lenore said, jumping backward, clinging to Ly as his wing moved out, wrapping around her protectively as the rest of us took another couple of steps back as bursts of flames danced out of the hole, hotter and redder than flames on Earth.
"Fuck," Drex growled, half hunching forward, pressing his hands to his ears as the screaming intensified. It was such a sound that it felt like it slipped under your skin, vibrated your bones.
There was a loud popping noise, then a body on the ground before the open hole it had burst out of snapped closed.
But the screaming?
The screaming didn't stop.
Because the screaming was coming from the form in front of all of us, curled deep into a ball, covering her naked body.
Naked, yes, but so covered in blood that you could hardly make out that fact right away.
"Oh," Lenore yelped, trying to rush forward, but getting dragged backward by Lycus. "Someone has to help her," she insisted.
"We don't even know what she is," Drex objected.
"She looks human," Lenore said, but then shook her head at herself.
Of course she did.
We all did.
"I don't care who she is, can someone shut her up?" Drex growled, taking another couple steps back.
The woman's body convulsed hard, making the bloody hair slip off her shoulder.
And that was when I saw it.
A tattoo.
A familiar tattoo.
"Fuck," I snapped, rushing forward, dropping down on my knees, trying to reach out to her, but not seeing a single inch of her that didn't seem to be covered in a laceration of some sort.
"What's going on?" Lenore asked to my side as I felt Drex, Minos, and Aram move in around me. "Do they know her?" she added.
"That's Red," Lycus told her.
I'd been around for a long time.
I thought I was incapable of most human emotions, that my emotional range was set the same as it had been in hell. Rage and frustration were my dominant feelings most of the time.
But as my hand landed on what I thought was a safe space on Red's shoulder, and she let out a shriek as she wrenched away, I felt something unfamiliar, something I'd read about in books, but had never experienced myself.
It was something that made my stomach churn, that made my heart shoot upward. It was something that made a tingling, helpless sensation grip my system.
Fear.
This was what the humans talked of when they spoke of fear.
"What happened to her?" Drex asked, trying to brush the hair out of her face, cringing when he found her familiar features were unrecognizable. She was a swollen bruise.
"I don't know," I said, pulling off my coat, trying to cover her with it. "But we have to get her out of here."
"We have to get her a doctor," Aram insisted as he carefully bent down, scooped her, and pulled her to his chest.
"She'll heal," I reminded him. Because that was what we did. We healed. And usually pretty quickly.
I was trying to convince myself that she was so damaged from her trip, that coming through the Earth's core like that had roughed her up. Even as my logical side tried to remind me that Bael and Daemon had come from hell relatively unscathed, that all of us had once.
"We're going to have to gag her," Drex said as we made our way back out of the depths of the canyon, getting closer toward the area the humans were allowed to frequent. And despite it being the middle of winter and humans having no real natural defense against the cold, the idiots still went out and camped and shit no matter the weather.
Drex was right.
We had to gag Red.
Because despite being out, despite likely starting to heal, the screams were as ear-splitting as ever no matter how far we walked.
"Here," Bael said, ripping off a piece of his shirt, shoving it in her mouth.
"Lenore, give her your cloak," I demanded, getting a raised brow from Ly.
"We need to cover her completely or the humans are going to call the police. We all know that Red can't end up in a human hospital."
"It's fine," Lenore insisted, pulling off the antiquated garment I'd told her at least a dozen times made her stand out in human society—and not in a good way. She insisted it was something that reminded her of her upbringing, that she didn't care if it made her stand out.
Eventually, we made our way back to the SUV we'd rented to take this trip, none of us wanting to be on our bikes in the freezing cold if we could help it.
