Chapter 366 – Flee
Ella
Cora and I pound down the stairs, gasping for breath by the time we reach the bottom. She starts down the dark hall, holding Henry’s phone out in front of her, its flashlight blaring through the darkness, but I cry out a little and grab her hand.
She turns to me, frantic, desperate to get away, but I beg her to wait just a moment. “The carrier,” I say, reaching for it, “for the baby.”
Understanding, she hands me Rafe’s carrier and I quickly bend down to strap him into it, wanting to ensure that he’s ready to get in the car as soon as we get there. As I work, Cora glances around the passage.
“A lot of spiderwebs down here,” she murmurs, “I don’t think anyone’s been down here for a long time to do maintenance. I hope the car…” her words fade out as I stand up straight but I grimace at her, intuiting her thoughts and hoping that she’s wrong.
That when we get to the car, it starts without a hitch. I nod to her that I’m ready and together my sister and I start to hurry down the hall, going as fast as we can without breaking into a run. The tunnel is long – longer than I thought it would be – and I’m starting to panic a little when we finally reach a door. Cora yanks it open.
The door leads to a very, very small space, with only a nondescript blue sedan tucked away in it. Cora dashes to the driver’s seat as I open the back seat to the car, lifting Rafe’s little carrier inside and buckling him in. Rafe is crying a little and I do my best to shush him, to tell him that it’s okay, but I don’t think it helps that my own voice and hands are shaking. If my baby does intuit my moods, as Sinclair thinks he does, then there’s not a big chance that he’s going to stop crying anytime soon.
As I buckle Rafe in Cora finds the car’s keys tucked into the visor and quickly turns them in the ignition. We both breathe out in relief when the car stars and she flashes a smile over her shoulder at me. I pull myself out of the back seat after Rafe is buckled and
close the door behind me. Then, seeing a switch on the wall in front of the car, I quickly move to it and press it once. A mechanism starts to grind somewhere in the room but I don’t bother to look for it, instead pulling the passenger door open and quickly slipping into my seat.
“Ready?” I ask Cora as I buckle my seatbelt.
“I have no idea, Ella,” she murmurs, but she puts the car in drive and, when the wall before us folds upwards enough to reveal a steep driveway, she guns the engine so that we quickly climb the rise and find ourselves, to my surprise, deep in the woods.
When we get on flat ground, Cora pauses, looking around. “Where…” she murmurs, “where the hell is the road…”
“There is none,” I say, glancing back at Rafe. “Just drive Cora – ”
“There are trees everywhere!” she protests, waving a hand at all of them.
“There’s got to be a way through,” I say, shaking my head at her. “He – they wouldn’t have put this car here if there wasn’t a way to escape. Just go!”
Sighing with anxiety and frustration, Cora does as I say, starting to wind the car through the trees. And, to my surprise, I start to see a road. There’s nothing marking it nothing mystical or magical about it but…it’s almost as if someone really did clear a path here so that a car just this size could squeeze through…
“Okay,” Cora says, laughing a little hysterically. “I think I get it now…”
“Look!” I shout, pointing forward to where, after a few minutes of driving, I start to see…asphalt? Something black stretching out before us. “Cora, is that a road?”
“I think so,” she says, hope blooming in her voice. But just as the little road is starting to become clear before us, something slams into the car, making us scream in shock and surprise as we fishtail sideways and the back corner of the car slams into a tree.
I look around, frantic, and – there –
I gasp and go pale when I see, through the back window of the car, a priest in a dark robe standing, glaring at us, with two men at his side. The priest holds one hand tensed fiercely in a claw at his side, his fingers wreathed in shadow.
Cora looks back as well when she sees the direction of my gaze and she gasps too. “Shit! Ella! Shit!” And then, in complete panic, she slams her foot down on the gas in an attempt to get away.
But the wheels just spin beneath the car, finding no traction. And, as I watch, the two men and the priest start to move forward towards us.
Sinclair
“Go!” I scream at my brother as I move forward myself towards the priests, who are already beginning to hurl spells at me, at Roger, at my men Get out of here!”
Roger just roars and moves forward next to me, advancing on the priests at my side. His answer is a clear and absolute no.
We take on a set of three priests together, transforming into our wolves and working in a pattern of attack and defense drilled into us since we were children – one of us advancing while the other holds the back, so our enemies who outnumber us – cannot slip by and attack our men. Still, even as we concentrate, even as we take on the brunt of the punishing spells that these priests hurl at us –
I can hear my men’s screams behind me. I know that they’re going down.
Roger and I work fast, both desperate to get back to the men, to help them. I take one priest by the throat and end him quickly, his blood dripping from my fangs as I turn to the other two. Their faces are afraid when they see how quickly their comrade goes down, but they are by no means unprepared. One stands behind the other, taking much the position that Roger and I are using, hurling spells at me while his comrade defends.
The spells alternately cut, burn, and freeze my flesh – but in the end, I work too fast for them, rearing up to my full heigh to pound the substantial weight of my body into the first man’s shoulders, knocking him down and trapping the second man beneath him as well.
Roger comes in for the kill then, ending both with a snarl and tear at each of their throats. They leave this world gasping for air, their dying breaths bubbling the blood at the holes in their neck. As one, Roger and I turn back to the men, hurling ourselves back into the fray.
Only two more priests here – our men have taken down one more with their weapons, and with our aid we quickly take down the other two. As I survey the priests dead and dying forms I note, passively, that none of them is the priest we met before. The priest who was, comparatively, much more powerful than these men.
Sudden quiet reigns in the room beyond the shrieks and moans of our injured men as Roger and I transform back into our human bodies, looking all around us for the next threat –
But none comes.
Not yet.
“Roger,” I say, reaching for him, grabbing his arm.
“I know,” he says, shaking his head.
We turn to the men to issue the command, to retreat, but Conor is already at the door to the basement – or, at least, the space where it used to be. He looks up at us and shakes his head. “It’s gone, sir,” he says, true fear in his eyes. “The door is just…gone.”
“Fuck,” I curse, running an anxious hand through my hair. “Dominic,” Roger says, making me turn to him. Then he shakes his head at me, slow. “It’s a trap.”
“What?” I say, not understanding.
“They’ve covered the retreat,” he says, gesturing towards the back door. ”
They’ve sent enough men to stop us, but not to kill us,” he shakes his head at me. “It’s a trap, Dominic. They don’t want us to move forward. They don’t want us to move back.” “They want us to stay here…” I murmur, trying to piece it together. ” Why…”
But then, my eyes snap to Roger’s just as his move to mine. “The girls,” he says, shaking his head slowly, his voice low, desperate.
“They’re keeping us here so they can get the girls…”
And then I tilt my head back and roar.
