Howler's Night (2 page)

When it was over, blood poured from my nose and mouth.

Who is Asher?

I looked at him, and he knew I would say nothing. His eyes turned dark, displeased, and I knew what was coming. I wanted it, wanted this to be over. And as the shifters slashed at me with their claws, I cried and remembered him. My dark lover. The beat of my heart. He would understand and accept my sacrifice. I would never give him up.

Never.

I could barely breathe when the beating stopped.

My eyes were swollen; I couldn’t see. There wasn’t a part of me that didn’t hurt. I was an exposed nerve, a throbbing wound.

“What did you think when you saw Wrath?”

“Beauty.”

I was broken.

When they took me back to my room, I prayed for death. The green-eyed woman looked at me. They’d moved her cell. She was right across from me now.

Half her face had been melted off recently. Too bad, she’d once been so pretty.

I laughed when I glanced down at myself. I was Frankenstein’s bride. I was scars and grooves. I wrapped my arms around myself and laughed and cried, cried and laughed.

“Under. Your. Bed.” Her voice was scratchy, but it snapped me out of the insanity.

I wanted to ask her what she was talking about, but she crawled away and hid in shadow.

I debated whether I had the strength to move. But I guess I did, because I slid forward. The blood seeping from my scrapes helped, but by the time I made it to the bed, my arms were trembling, my hands shaking.

I laid with my face pressed against the floor, staring beneath the bed, and saw a small leather-bound book. It might have taken five minutes or five hours—I couldn’t tell—but eventually I worked the book over to me.

When I flipped it open, it was empty. Nothing but blank pages.

Except for the last one.

No one ever escapes. Not you. Not me. No one. I’ve spelled the book so that when it’s time it will arrive at the side of the one who needs it most. This is your goodbye.

~Hannah

I guess there was nothing else to say.

Asher

It had been eleven months, three weeks, six days, and twenty hours since I’d seen Pandora last. Except when I closed my eyes. Then I saw her every night, and it was always the same: she was reaching out to me with a look of terror in her eyes, and I was stuck. Unable to move and screaming at her until my throat was so raw it bled, but the nightmare always ended the same.

The monsters took her from me. I am a death priest, a being of such awesome power that with one breath I can bring life or death. And what was happening was all so foreign I didn’t know how to handle it.

All I remembered was my arm hanging by just a string of tendon. And then a choir of roars from the carnival as the Nephilim raced from their trailers with wide eyes, coming at me because it must have been me. I was the interloper, the death priest whose sole mission in life was to bring the demons down.

I’d been tagged by Bubba, and then Cash, each of them with eyes glowing and licking their lips, the taste of their desire to end me so tangible in the air that I knew I would have no choice but to fight to the death.

To hell with preserving their pathetic lives. The only reason I’d let them live was Pandora; she was the only thing that meant anything to me.

But she wasn’t there, and the madness, the old hate, came surging back, and I would have killed them all. Would have leveled the lot of them, but Luc had grabbed me, and there’d been a look in his eyes.

One I could scarcely describe.

The look had been full of wrath, of fury, but buried deep inside was the anguish of what we’d lost.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to classify what he and Pandora had, and while a part of me hated it, for a second I’d been thankful to see it, to see the spark of his humanity, because it reminded me of Pandora’s.

That look had brought me down off the ledge. That look had also quelled his people.

Luc had vowed vengeance, and at first I’d believed him. Stupid, I know. But I’d just known we’d find her and bring her back, and that anyone involved in taking her from us would pay.

But with each day that passed, the madness flirted with me, growing stronger and stronger, until I was pacing back and forth in our trailer looking for some clue, for something I might have missed nearly a year ago. I knew the odds of finding anything at this point weren’t good, but I was desperate.

The room was dark and the night long, but I didn’t need light. I was a master of the darkness. It was how I created my Gray Man; he was a manipulation of the dark matter in the universe.

He worked beside me, a silent, semi-sentient shadow who desired only to do my bidding.

“You take the left, I the right,” I ordered him.

He didn’t bow or dip his head, but he glided off, hovering over the floor like a black wave.

I stood in the room, staring at the gaping hole in the wall. Memories clawed at my mind—me holding her, the explosion, and the utter chaos of noise and light. Then dragging my broken body out from under the wreckage only to be set upon by shifters. I’d been disoriented from the blast, unaware that I’d taken a direct hit until I’d tried to punch one of them and my arm refused to obey.

I’d managed to get away from them just long enough to see Pandora in their clutches, see her panicked gaze and hear her anguished cries. My little demon had never looked so scared, and I’d been too useless to help.

By the time the shock had worn off, they were all gone, even the ones I’d put down. Luc had packed up and moved the group twenty-five miles deeper into the swamp. He’d bucked me when I told him I was moving the trailer, telling me it was nothing but scraps, good only to build a fire with. And even though I’d known he was right, I also knew that the devastation of losing this trailer would undo her.

Kemen had been her world; this trailer was a shrine to him, her way of clinging to a love she’d so rarely known in life. So I’d kept the thing, and worked on repairing it during my down time.

I closed my eyes and inhaled the marshy, swampy air, letting the calling clicks of the cicadas ease my strained nerves.

If she were dead, I’d know it. I’ve loved Pandora for centuries, learning her, watching over her. Becoming one with her soul.

I rubbed my heart.

The scent of sulfur filled the room. It was a dark, smoky scent that all demons inherently possessed.

Though Pandora had never smelled of the stench of Hell to me.

Luc’s grizzled voice sounded from behind my shoulder. “You know you’ve missed nothing.”

I worked my jaw, watching as the gray man floated painstakingly over every inch of the room.

Slowly I turned, so that our chests practically bumped. “I should kill you for sounding so defeated.”

I still didn’t like him, but I’d learned to tolerate him.

His nostrils flared as my fists clenched.

We were bombs, our fuses so short it would take nothing for one of us to explode.

Maybe it was the ghost of Pandora so close to the surface, but his tension faded, and then he was taking a giant step back, and then another, until he was out of my space and sitting on a corner of the bed.

Spreading his legs, he flicked his wrist around. “Fuck,” he growled. “Fuck.”

The more crushed he sounded, the more he disgusted me. Snarling, I swatted the emotion away. “We can’t sit here and do nothing. I will find her, with or without you.”

His gaze shifted to mine. “We’ve searched through every network of shifter conclaves out there. No one has a clue what we’re talking about.”

Leaning against the wall, I chuckled. “Yeah, and we can take the word of monsters. Especially ones with a tight familial bond. If you’re not with me, Luc, you’re against me. So which is it?”

“I have a responsibility to my family, Priest.” He scrubbed his jaw and then rubbed his palms down his jeans. “It’s not like she’s the first we’ve lost. She sure as hell won’t be the last.”

“Screw you!” I gripped the edge of the beaten up wooden dresser, because what I really wanted to do was cram my fist down his throat and rip his heart out. “You can’t tell me that one year is all Pandora means to you.”

“Of course not!” He shot to his feet, licking his fangs a few times before he got his heavy breathing under control. “You think I like this?” He pounded one fist into the other. “Think I don’t want to kick my own ass for even saying this? But she’d understand. She’d even tell me to do it. I know her. Look, we’re not safe here. We need to go deeper into hiding. Staying in one place this long is a bad idea, and you damn well know it. Maybe once we regroup we can—”

I laughed. “You make me sick. All of you make me sick. She’d fight. She is fighting. My woman is not dead, and the fact that you would walk away and let her continue to endure this torment…”

The anger inside me was a living, breathing thing full of fire and brimstone and righteous fury. Gathering the shadows to me, I squeezed my hand that now rippled with the sensuous slither of the night and wrapped it around his neck like a snake’s coil.

Gasping, fangs pulling back, Luc glared at me. But he didn’t try to fight it. Maybe deep down he even wanted it. Wanted me to end his miserable, pathetic existence.

It was a mercy I would not give him.

I relaxed my hand, and the shadow rescinded. “No, you don’t get out of this so easily. You’re going to suffer. You get to dream about her. About the things they’re doing to her. How she’s probably locked away in a room crying out for you, holding on to the hope that you’ll find her. You know as well as I do that if this had been you, she’d have done everything in her power to find you and she would never stop. Never.”

Luc’s jaw clenched, but he refused to look at me. “I know,” he said so softly that if I were human I’d not have heard it. “And that’s why she won’t survive.” His jaw clenched hard enough to make the veins in his neck throb.

I hated him for saying it, for even thinking it. Love wasn’t a weakness. It was strength. One that no demon could ever possibly understand, except for mine. She’d known it to be true; it’s why I would never quit on her. Because she would never have quit on me.

“I’m staying.”

“I figured you’d say as much.” Luc got up, but this time when he did, he moved like an old man, like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. “We’re rolling out now. You can keep this trailer.”

I shook my head, unable to speak. No wonder Pandora was always so sad. If even the ones she loved most were so willing to give up on her, it could come as no surprise that she was willing to believe it of me.

He stood with his back to me, before saying, “If you do find her…”

I wanted to tell him I’d never bring her back here, never let her be with those who’d so quickly discarded her, but Pandora would never allow it. For reasons beyond me, she’d always loved the ones she shouldn’t.

He traced without finishing his thought.

The gray man stood and turned toward me. He’d found nothing.

Luc was right. The trail was dead. But he was wrong to give up, and I wouldn’t stop searching until I’d breathed my last. I knew she could handle herself. She was a born fighter. But my gut told me she’d been taken by the Triad, and there were things that could break even the strongest of us.

“Pandora.” I whispered her name with all the passion within me. “I’m not going away. I’m not giving up. But you have to help me. Help me find you.”

Exhaustion laid claim to me. Once I’d called the gray man back inside me, my power pulsed beneath my skin and I attempted something I’d not attempted before.

Mainly because the amount of power required to do it wouldn’t just leak energy, it would create an explosion that would leave me weak and vulnerable until I could recharge. I’d never had a moment’s peace within the confines of this group, and they’d never left me alone. As if they felt I was somehow in on all this and were just waiting for me to slip up.

But now that the Nephilim were leaving, I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone coming in and doing my weakened body harm.

Lying down on our bed, I closed my eyes and slipped into a trance, shedding my metaphysical body until I floated free of myself. I was nothing but a soul and a conscience, moving above the clouds as I searched for the pulse of her life. But I had to get higher than the clouds; I had to move above the world. Beyond Earth, into space.

I could only locate someone if I knew them so well it would be like searching for my own soul.

Because I had to feel them. Had to know their taste, their scent, the way they thought. Only then could I call to their spirit.

And as I thought these things, I brought my little demon to mind. The taste of her strawberry lips, the honey of her skin, the warmth of her light. Her love of children and the down and out. Pandora was a band of dark glimmering onyx with a golden thread of light at its center that pulsed brighter than the sun.

As my mind filled with thoughts of her, I stopped floating, stopped moving, and called her to me. If I knew her half as well as I thought I did, then I would find her. I just had to wait. I stared at the North American mass, waiting to see her.

I waited and I waited, until finally I knew she would not come to me that night.

But I was determined, and regardless of how this drained me, I would come back the moment I could. I would find Pandora, even if I had to burn the world down to do it.

Pandora

What is time?

Day and night, perhaps?

Light and shadow?

But when those don’t exist for you, time begins to feel like a myth. Because there is no beginning, no middle, no end. There just
is
.

For me, time was never ending, unceasing, and cruel.

I was broken.

A body, a shell, full of nothing. There were no more thoughts. I’d purged myself of them so long ago—hours, days, years. I didn’t know how long I’d been there. It no longer even mattered.

The man in the white lab coat stared at me, his look concerned, mine empty. Because they had stripped me of life, of soul, of everything.