Witch Road to Take (10 page)

This was the second time that I heard Gavin
say I was a key. I had no idea what he was talking about. Talking
hurt but I forced myself to say, “Laymen’s terms, magic man.”

“All you need to know right now is that
you’re sending out a signal to the underworld.”

“No. My father will find me.” I felt the
panic scramble through my blood. “How long will this thing send a
signal?”

“Twenty-four hours, until your key turns
off. We have to get you out of here. You’re no longer protected by
my cloaking spell.”

Jonas ran in with Gavin’s cell phone up to
his ear. “I’ve tried to call him twice, but he’s not
answering.”

“Give me my phone.” Gavin reached for and
snatched his phone from Jonas’s hands.

Damien’s scent filled the room. He pushed
Gavin out of his way and came to my bedside. He knelt beside me,
rubbed my forehead with his hand. “Three demons were searching for
you in Asia but they’ve just changed course. There’s one in South
America and two in Africa. And Father’s hellhounds are in
Australia. They’ve all detected you. Some will be here within the
hour.” He glanced at Gavin and Jonas. “Where can I take her?”

“They’ll find her wherever she goes,” Gavin
said.

“Is there anything that will slow them
down?” My brother continued to run his hand over my forehead. He
turned back to glare at Gavin. “Let’s go! We’re running out of
time!”

“I’m thinking!”

Jonas stepped forward. “Would they find her
in a lair of vampires?”

Gavin put up his hand. “I got it. Ice!”

“Ice? What do you mean ice?” Damien
asked.

“We need to bury her body in snow or a
frozen body of water. It’ll bring her body temperature down and
limit the beacon’s range and strength.”

“Are you sure?” Damien asked.

“Pretty sure. It’s the best option we have
so far, unless you want Dhellia to stand in the middle of a lair of
vampires and hope they don’t eat her.”

Damien’s eyes changed red and his
fingernails grew. He flew towards Gavin and slammed him against the
wall. He growled inches from his face.

My brother’s temper drained me more than I
already was. “Damien, please, he’s my friend.”

Damien held his position as a dominant
demon. “If anything happens to her, you die.”

Damien released Gavin, moved his jacket to
the side and wrapped me in my blankets before he cradled me in his
arms. He pressed his lips against my forehead. That familiar loving
gesture he always did when he was taking care of me.

He was still in demon form, ready to take on
anyone or anything that came toward him to get at me. Although my
brother and I were half demons, we did know the meaning of and knew
how to love. “Grab my arm,” he growled to my roommates.

We disappeared through a portal my brother
had conjured. The mouth of the portal was blue with sparks of
electricity filtering through the hole. Only a stationed portal to
hell opened red with fire. As the four of us went through the
portal, I realized that we were
all
on the run from demons
that were desperately hungry to please my father.

We stepped out of
the
portal, onto a mountaintop, and into a pile of snow. The clouds
heavily shaded the area and the chill in the air was refreshing
against my sweltering skin.

“Bring her over here,” Gavin motioned to my
brother.

The iced-over pond sat in the middle of land
covered in white fluffy snow. I was in my pajamas still—a Hello
Kitty button-down flannel blouse and matching flannel pants. I
loved fashion but when it came to sleepwear, I was still a kid at
heart.

I wrapped my arms around my brother’s neck
while he cradled me against his body. The world around me was
spinning, sweat dripped from my face into my red hair. The nerve
endings below my skin pricked me the way they did when a limb has
fallen asleep.

Damien got on his knees in front of the
iced-over pond and kept me against his chest. “You want me to put
her on top of the pond?” Damien asked. “It’s iced over.”

“We have to submerge her in cold water,”
Gavin said. “Her body heat will melt the ice.”

“Damien,” I whispered. “I can hear them.
They’re getting closer to us. Wolf and Zombie’s claws are in rhythm
with their panting.”

“Gavin, we need to hurry. If we don’t get
that key turned off, they’ll lock in on our position.”

Gavin kneeled down on one side of my brother
while Jonas knelt down on the other. Damien rested me on top of the
ice. I gritted my teeth but I was ready for my body temperature to
go from boiling hot to lukewarm, if not normal.

A sizzling noise came from underneath me.
Steam rose and the solid ice that held my body began to feel slimy
and then slushy before it decided to completely give way from
underneath me. My body was melting the ice. My skin was scorching
hot and a slight burning smell singed my nostrils, which told me
that I was in trouble. My insides, my organs, were starting to slow
cook. I was a crockpot for my own insides.

My back and butt were the first parts of my
body that met the frigid water of the iced-over pond. The contrast
of my burning body and the icy water sent stabbing pains through my
body. I screamed at the top of my lungs. I wanted to faint, but I
knew I had to hold on.

Damien’s hands were under my armpits while
he let my entire body slip into the frigid water. After the surging
pain, it was oddly refreshing against my skin and muscles, but that
beacon inside my palm continued to glow under the water like the
algae bloom of the ocean.

The ice around me began to melt and recede
further away from me. The water bubbled, slowly at first, but then
it began to boil and caused fish around me to surface—dead fish.
Like the wick of a lighted stick of dynamite, the ice in the entire
pond split and melted within seconds.

Damien shifted my body. “The water is
boiling! Gavin, this isn’t working,” he yelled.

“Shit. Her body is too hot.” Gavin jumped up
to his feet and paced in the snow. He rubbed his temples and
appeared to be mentally mapping out our next move.

Damien glanced back at Gavin while he kept
me, from the neck down, submerged in the pond. “We don’t have time
for you to think, you idiot. They’re closing in on us.”

My eyelids began to flutter. I heard Jonas
panic.

“Damien, she’s losing consciousness.”

Gavin stepped forward. “We have to get her
somewhere colder.” Gavin grabbed the blanket off the ground.

The magnified sounds of the demon hunters
were swimming around me. Hellhound claws were scratching at the
next-dimension gravel. I heard labored breathing from one beast to
another. I panicked, my eyes flew open and I reached my left hand
out of the water and grabbed the back of my brother’s head. “I can
hear them. Get me out of here. Hurry, Damien! Hurry, please!”

Damien yanked me out of the water, tucked me
in his arms, ran forward, and tackled both Gavin and Jonas. As we
disappeared through Damien’s portal, I saw another portal open with
two very angry trotters, stepping foot into the snow.

***

Jonas flew out of the portal to the right
and into three feet of white powdery snow and Gavin flew out to the
left. Damien landed on his feet—his grip around me kept me in his
arms.

Jonas jumped up and tried to regain his
balance. He immediately glanced up at the sky to make sure the
clouds concealed the sun. Again, he managed to escape the daylight
and keep himself intact. “What was that thing? Did you see that,
Gavin?” he brushed the snow off his clothes.

I could tell that my face was beet-red from
my continually escalating temperature. My head hung back, with my
eyes closed, but I could hear everything around me.

“It was a trotter. They are one of my
father’s fiercest well-kept secrets,” Damien remarked.

“A trotter? What in the hell is a trotter?
Satan comes up with a nice pleasant word for an ugly tentacle, meat
eating demon beast. What was it, twelve feet tall?” Jonas
asked.

“They’re usually fifteen feet tall and they
eat humans for a snack,” Damien snickered.

“Great! Exactly… meat eating. I’m ready to
go home. Let’s find a way out of here.” Jonas motioned to Gavin for
them to leave.

Gavin ran his hands over his forearms to
warm himself up, as they spoke, “What are you worried about? They
probably don’t eat dead meat. They want human meat and according to
their playground pals here, I’d only be a snack. What do you think
they eat as a meal?” Gavin tried to pace in the snow, but he kept
falling over.

I moaned, still curled up in my brother’s
arms. “They eat three elephants a day.”

Gavin gasped. “Elephants! Elephants!” He
threw his hands up in the air, “Did you hear her just say that
those beasts can eat three elephants a day?”

Damien kicked snow in Gavin’s face. “The
more you talk about it, the closer they’re going to get.”

“Is anyone else turning into a popsicle?
Where are we?” Jonas asked.

“Antarctica. You said we needed a colder
area and I figured this would be the place,” Damien said as he
walked through the snow.

“Like we don’t have enough problems with
global warming,” Gavin said under his breath so that only Jonas
could hear.

Dhellia sighed. “Children of Satan here, we
can hear you!” I shifted my gaze to my brother. “I don’t hear the
trotters or any other demons on our heels.”

“I think we just bought ourselves some
time.” Damien kissed my forehead.

“Hey, guys, I think that’s a body of frozen
water over there.” Jonas motioned to an area that was glass-like
ice near fluffy snow.

“Damien,” Gavin said. “It’s so cold here, we
don’t need water. Lay her down in the snow.”

Damien nodded. He knelt down and placed me
gently in the snow. I sank deeper into it, but with the frigid air
around us and the painfully cold snow engulfing me, my body
temperature no longer threatened to melt everything around me.

Damien grinned. “You’re going to be okay.”
He turned his attention to the guys. “How long should we leave her
buried here?”

“No longer than ten minutes.”

“Are you sure…ten minutes?” Damien
asked.

“We’ll have to judge her reactions. After we
pull her out, her body temperature should return to normal. If it
drops below, she’ll go into shock.”

“Hypothermia,” Jonas said.

“Once we pull her out of the snow, we’ll
need to get her somewhere where we can keep her body temperature
stable. The key in her palm is going to try to raise her body heat
again. But if we can keep her body temperature between 98.6 and
108, the underground brute squad won’t find us.”

“Got it,” Damien whispered.

Gavin surveyed the area. “I’ll tell you
what. You monitor her and give me five minutes. I’m going to make
an igloo for us to have shelter. I don’t know about Jonas and you,
but I’m a human being and after five minutes, I will freeze to
death out here.”

Damien nodded.

The key in the palm of my hand was bright
red below the snow, but within a minute, it began to dim and after
three minutes, the light was gone. Initially, the frigid virgin
snow was refreshing against my body, but after five minutes, I
could feel my organs shutting down.

Gavin used his mind to lift me from the snow
and lay me down on my blanket that we had brought from home. Damien
quickly wrapped me up and moved me from lying on top of the snow to
the igloo that Gavin had made.

My teeth were chattering, my body twitching.
I heard the voices of my brother and my roommates, but I could
barely understand what they were saying. Then Damien’s frantic
words made me realize that I wasn’t doing so well.

“We’re losing her! Do something!” Damien
roared, his eyes red and his nails long.

“Move!” I saw Gavin leaning over me. I
wondered why he was moving back and forth, but just before
everything faded, I realized that the movement was from my body…my
body convulsing.

The moment I heard
my
brother and Gavin arguing, I knew that the world was right again.
My body was still cold from the inside out, but the convulsing and
tremors had stopped.

I continued to lie still, focused on my
brother’s voice while I easily floated back into reality. I hadn’t
opened my eyes, so I wondered where Jonas was in this argument.

Damien’s voice was deep and cynical. “I
don’t care how much magic you know or what line of wizards or
witches you think you came from, you are not my relative.”

“We aren’t an ordinary coven, Damien. Do you
think all your powers come from your father?”

“Witchcraft is about spells, and I’ve never
learned a spell in my life,” Damien argued.

“That’s what I’m trying to explain, we’re
not a coven of spell witches. We’re descendants of the gods.”

“Okay, Hercules. Do you honestly believe
that garbage? If you know so much, tell me which god are we
descendants of? Humor me,” Damien urged with sarcasm.

“Well, if you’re serious about knowing.”
Gavin waited for Damien to give him a sincere response.

“Flood me with your wisdom,” Damien
chuckled.

“Your father has tainted your views. You
look at things in black and white, good and evil. But how do you
explain your gift of foresight?”

Damien was quiet. I couldn’t even hear him
breathing. I wondered what he was doing, but my closed eyes weren’t
ready to open yet.

Then he spoke. “How did you know?”

“Jonas hadn’t even called you and you were
at Dhellia’s bedside. You saw everything before it happened.”

“Not soon enough,” he mumbled.

“You also knew when those trotters were
going to come through that portal back at the pond, which is why
you tackled us.”

Damien shrugged. “My foresight is weak. I
can only see minutes before anything happens.”