Stained Bonds: The Salsang Chronicles Part IV Read online

  My attention was averted, however, as she began waking the others from a stupor that had me questioning what had been the weapon to take us down.

  Groans and grunts filled the air around the SUV where we’d been dumped as Sylvester’s men tried to haul us inside. At the reminder, I couldn’t help the sliver of pride that wormed its way through me, even though I was more worried than ever about what we would have to handle before we could just... be.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Cade groaned, as he pushed to his feet next to me. When he did, I grabbed his arm and hauled him upright as he almost fell to the floor once more.

  What could I say to him? I had no clue what was going on other than the fact that Sylvester wanted Marcella for something, but that wasn’t exactly enlightening.

  With no answer, I just shrugged and turned back to the newly-abandoned vehicle, moving toward the rear and opening the trunk. There were cuffs and other restraints chained to the edge of the SUV, and I knew that if they had been able to take Marcella, then we would all be screwed.

  “What are those?” Marcella asked, as she came around to check on me.

  Cade, at my left, grumbled, “Those are nulling cuffs. Enchanted with the same magic as the nulling spell that was poured over you, except this is usually temporary and only lasts as long as the cuffs, or other restraints, are on.” The symbols that were carved into each cuff and restraint seemed to glow slightly as though they knew they were being talked about, which was just weird.

  “Well, at least we know they wanted to capture and not kill. That’s something, right?” Raven’s voice piped up from behind us.

  “Check the restraint count. We weren’t all going to fit.” I cut my gaze to him and watched as it sank in that there was no way for them to haul all seven of us around, plus the men they had brought to capture us. They had expected at least a few of us to die.

  My mate looked both furious and sick at the realization. I couldn’t resist pulling her to me and wrapping my arms around her as I inhaled her scent, letting her sweet and spicy fragrance fill me and soothe the worry that was churning in my gut. She sighed and relaxed against me as the stress of her mates possibly being injured faded, and she was left with the knowledge that she could defend herself and us if needed—not that I would ever let it come to that again.

  “They don’t know we’re bound,” I stated next, my voice lowering so Sylvester couldn’t hear me. “They can’t. You die, we all die. And vice versa. If they’d known that…”

  “They’d have been more careful.” Barclay nodded, but his mouth was downturned as he looked over the carnage Marcella had wrought while we’d all been unconscious.

  I knew it would be hurting him as much as it pained me to realize our mate had done this alone. What use were we as guardians, as her males, if we couldn’t care for her?

  Closing my eyes against the thought, I pulled in air that was scented with my female, and murmured against her hair, “We should put your father in the car with the cuffs. It’s safer than in the ground.”

  “Can’t we just leave him?” she grumbled, sounding every bit as young as she was in that moment.

  “If we do then he might not be there when we come back to collect him,” I said gently, as I ran my hand through her garnet-colored hair.

  “Okay,” she capitulated with a huff.

  “I’ve got it, save your energy,” Gid said, when Marcella began to draw on her power.

  For the druid, this kind of thing would be as natural as breathing, and while my mate was powerful, I knew it would take some effort on her part. If we were still going to wake up a Sire, then we all needed to conserve as much energy as possible.

  We had no idea what lay ahead of us, and I, for one, wasn’t ready to let this little interlude stop us from the reason we returned to this wretchedly humid area of the country.

  When her father reemerged from the ground, he was spitting mad, I could see it in his eyes and the way he was sputtering his outrage, even though most of his throat had been ripped out. I turned and raised an eyebrow at Marcella, who just shrugged. “What? He’s an asshole.”

  “Try anything and I’ll bury you deeper than anyone will ever find you, and I’ll leave you there to rot,” Gideon threatened, venom dripping from every syllable while the ground swallowed up the bodies that had been left behind by their comrades.

  I stared at the blood-stained grass and realized how fucking useful that particular ability was. Not that I wanted to grow accustomed to burying corpses, but around Marcella, the body count was definitely on the rise.

  “Do you understand what your attack means?” I asked quietly enough that I knew Sylvester wouldn’t hear me, while Marcella and I watched Cade and Barclay pick our enemy up and bring him to the back of the car.

  They locked the nulling cuffs around his wrists and chained him by the neck as well for good measure. He might try and pull the cuffs off, anyone would, even though they knew it would never work, but there’s no way he would try and pull against the metal ring that encircled his neck when it would just dig into his wound and leave him bleeding all over again.

  Marcella simply looked up at me with questioning eyes, and I knew that despite her education and all the vast knowledge she had forced herself to acquire, this detail had slipped through the cracks.

  Westbrook had a lot to answer for. Damn them.

  “We need to talk about that later, away from prying ears,” I said, hoping that everyone would leave it at that. I could tell by the worried glances the others were exchanging now they’d caught sight of her father’s wounds that they all knew exactly what this meant, and were just as concerned about it as I was.

  Once Sylvester was nice and snug in the back of the SUV, we closed him in and locked it for good measure. “Continuing on the way we were going?” I asked, trying to be as vague as possible so that my mate’s father had no idea what we were up to.

  “I don’t see why not,” Marcella replied.

  I looked around our small group, and the guys seemed to be on board with the suggestion too. “Okay, who can run the fastest? I’m not bringing Sylvester all the way there, but I’m not comfortable leaving him here either.”

  “That would be me.” Marcella grinned up at me. “I’m the fastest.” And she’d proven that ten days or so ago when she’d stolen my cellphone and had called upon the Cavalry for their dubious aid.

  Though Rhys had saved Gideon, he’d brought a whole heaping pile of shit to our door.

  I’d have to thank the bastard for that at a later date…

  “Other than you, sweetness,” Cade said with a chuckle.

  “Me,” Gideon chimed in. “I’m the fastest.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the only one who knows where we are going,” my mate interjected. “If we take both SUVs, it won’t matter. We can all go together. You take Darius and Barc, and I’ll drive the others in daddy’s ride. Sylvester will be okay while we take care of Arthur.”

  Before anyone could respond, she was sitting in the driver’s seat of the SUV that contained her father, and we were left to shake our heads. Cade, who’d headed off to join her with Keiran, was smirking like they were going to have a quickie in front of daddy dearest before they followed us. I’d like to see him try, somehow I doubted our innocent mate was ready for anything like that, even if she did consider her father nothing more than a sperm donor.

  The rest of us piled into our own SUV, and we set off. My Vampire was unhappy with the situation, to say the least. Having Marcella in another vehicle made it restless, and I had to fight the urge to ask Gideon to pull over so I could go and climb in the backseat. It was only a matter of time before she’d get sick of me being so clingy, and I wasn’t ready for that yet, so I tightened my hold over my Vampire, shoving the feelings it created back down where they were easier to control.

  “Do you think she knows what she’s done?” Gideon asked quietly, as we set off.

  “Not a clue—I checked.” Raven grimaced as he
spoke, as though he needed to physically confirm his own words.

  “What I want to know is how Sylvester McCray has so many damned nulling restraints. There can’t be a fae alive who’d would do so much work for one person, let alone a fae silversmith,” Barclay mused.

  It made sense that he was more familiar with these particular items since I knew Eastbrook used them to control their students, especially shifters, regularly.

  Fae silversmiths were rare, and they were the only ones who could weave spell work into metal, so it was almost enchanted. If anyone was going to have one on hand to do his dirty work, it would be Sylvester McCray. He probably had a whole team of supernatural beings outside of Vampires to do his bidding under threat of a true death.

  “He’s probably got one chained in his basement or something,” Raven commented, echoing my own thoughts.

  For a moment I wondered if the mind walker had been in my head, but as we drew closer to the site where Arthur was buried, nausea rolled through me, and I had to fight just to keep my stomach from expelling its contents. The feeling only increased in severity as we closed the distance between us and the Sire. When the feeling persisted, I knew all other thoughts would have to wait until later. All I could do was focus on breathing or I was going to be sick.

  2

  Keiran

  With Sylvester struggling in the back of the SUV and a terrain that made the 4 x 4 part of the vehicle a necessity, it wasn’t exactly a comfortable ride over to the steep hills that were the backdrop of the Academy.

  The cliffs were nearby and they were steep and sharp, the ocean cutting into them and battering the walls with the fury of the tide. Even up here, thousands of meters away from the sea, I could hear the never-ending roll and it soothed me as we moved ever nearer toward Arthur’s resting place.

  “Aren’t you feeling sick anymore?” Cade asked Marcella, his eyes on her and not the view. While she was a damn sight prettier than even the majestic backdrop, I was on edge, and looking at my mate, for once, wasn’t going to take my unease away.

  Not when said mate might have just declared war on an entire House without knowing it.

  Marcella shook her head, then cut her eyes to the rearview mirror and stared back at her father, who was writhing around in the trunk like a walrus in chains. The guy definitely wasn’t interested in stealth.

  I got that she didn’t want to discuss anything in front of the dick, but as we’d driven closer to the rocky outcrop earlier, each yard that had brought us closer to Arthur’s resting place had made Marcella cry out in pain.

  She’d considered it a warning from Arthur, and the second we’d backed up, retreated, the pain had diminished until she’d been incapacitated and exhausted but no longer suffering.

  The fact she could drive toward Arthur again was indicative of the fact that he’d known Sylvester was coming, that we were under threat of siege, and he’d been warning us.

  But why?

  Who was Sylvester to Arthur?

  Shit, there were so many questions.

  Why had Marcella’s dad tried to kidnap Marcella?

  And why attempt to kill us? A Sixth would perish without her brotherhood. If we died, she died, and vice versa. That was the nature of the bond.

  Like Darius had said, that could only mean that he didn’t know she was a Sixth, and that we were her brotherhood. That mattered, because I had to wonder who was feeding him the intel, and whoever they were, they needed to get better at their jobs. Although that might be something to grateful for rather than worthy of bitching about.

  As we drove another two miles toward the craggy hill, I had to admit I felt nothing around the vicinity. Gideon, all those months ago on our first run around Westbrook’s grounds, said he’d felt a ‘presence’ here. He hadn’t explained what, and to be honest, we were used to him saying weird things like that. It was Gid. He was a druid, of the Earth, and they came out with random shit all the time. You swiftly grew accustomed to it, and then you tended to ignore it.

  Earthquakes?

  He could sense them months before they struck.

  Things like avalanches or mudslides too.

  He never knew when they were going to hit, just that they would, and that wasn’t exactly useful. A lot of shit could happen at any given time, and a warning a few months before wasn’t helpful so we usually told him to shut up.

  As for Marcella, she grew stiffer and more uncomfortable the closer we drew to the hill. She wasn’t in pain though—I’d have sensed that through the bond. She was just uneasy, and I figured that was the Sixth side of her nature drawing on whatever Gid seemed to have felt when he was around here.

  Finally, she braked to a halt, and shooting us both a look, stated, “Time to play.”

  I snorted, but Cade chuckled as he hopped out of the SUV. “I like this side of you,” he teased, nudging her gently and making me roll my eyes. “You’re badass.”

  Trust Cade to prefer her homicidal than sweet and cuddly.

  She stuck her tongue out. “Takes one to know one.”

  I had to grin at that and watched as she locked the SUV with the alarm. When Gideon joined her, he nodded, then pulled his particular brand of voodoo. A copse of bushes and trees appeared out of nowhere, blending into the scenery as though it had always been here. It shielded the car and kept Sylvester hidden while we worked on awakening Arthur.

  “What are we going to do with him?” Barclay asked me softly while Gideon worked.

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

  “If we let him return to his House, he’ll declare war on the Maximus line.”

  “You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know,” I groused. “Keep your mouth shut, Barc. We don’t want to freak her out more than we already have.”

  I knew Marcella hadn’t overheard, only because the powers Gideon was tugging on were fascinating her as she could probably get a sense of what he was doing through the bond. Knowing her, she was learning so she could pull a similar move at a later date.

  With the SUV covered and Sylvester out of the way for the moment, Darius inquired, “You feel his presence here?”

  Both Gid and Chella nodded, then she sucked in a sharp breath and murmured, “Connect with me. You need to feel this.”

  It was like she tossed a baseball into the ether, one that all of us reached for. Not with our hands, but with those parts of our makeup that were intrinsic to us. My walker responded, as did Cade’s and Raven’s, and Barclay’s wolf and Gid’s earthly connection, then Darius’s pursang leaped into the fray, and all of us tumbled around together in a mass of chaos until Marcella separated us into strands and wove us into an orb, like I remembered my grandmother, once upon a time, wrapping thread around and around to make a ball of wool for knitting.

  When we were tight, securely held in place by whatever the hell Marcella was doing, we were tapped into each other. Seven unique powers, seven unique draws on the Earth, and four different connections to the Sires.

  Beneath our feet, the ground began to tremble, and my unease grew. This sense of darkness was what Gideon had experienced all that time ago when we’d first come to Westbrook?

  Holy fuck!

  I shot Marcella a look and saw her frowning. “You’re not doing this?” I questioned, raising my voice as the wind suddenly whipped up, and the ocean, so far away, suddenly sounded as loud as if we were on the seashore itself.

  She shook her head as her hair began to be tossed around in the breeze, and rain started to flood around us. “No! Just joining us together. Not the other stuff.”

  Gideon called out, “Is this how we Awaken him?”

  His voice was a shout, and even though our senses were inhumanly good, hearing him above the raging elements was damn hard.

  “I think so!” Cade called back.

  “I thought we’d have to find his tomb?” Darius yelled.

  “Me too,” Marcella confirmed, then she shook her head. “But I swear I’m not doing any of this. Are you,
Gid?” she screamed.

  “No!”

  The ground beneath us began to quake, and my talk of tremors before was nothing compared to this. The vibrations tore through the Earth like a bomb, and it made my entire nervous system buzz in response. It reminded me of using a power tool for an excessive amount of time, and it dulled your nerve endings.

  There was the sudden crack of lightning, a boom of thunder, and we were all pushed back and tossed onto the ground.

  With it, there was a sharp, guttural burst that reminded me of gunfire. I jolted upright, determined on scanning the scene for enemies, but all I saw was the way the ground had formed around us. Where I lay, there was a trench, and each of us was in a trench of our own. What had once been flat land was now marred by seven cut outs that gave the area toward the hill behind us seven steppes.

  Cade and the others fought to sit up also, not appreciating being taken down by the weather, and when they saw how the landscape had changed, we all shared uneasy and surprised glances.

  What the fuck was happening here?

  Out of nowhere, the weather had stirred, and just as swiftly, it calmed.

  When I called on the bond, that tight-knit ball that Marcella had crafted for each of us, there was a thread of lightning that shot through the sky.

  “Do you feel that?” I asked Chella.

  “I’m the link, Keir,” she chided me with a wry glance. “Of course, I feel it.”

  I scrubbed my chin sheepishly. “Sorry. If we all do that, maybe it will happen again?”

  “Why would we want to do that? We’ve already wrecked this area,” Barc groused, peering around several large puddles that looked like miniature swimming pools.

  “Because Arthur isn’t here, is he?” I retorted. “Whatever we did, it wasn’t enough to wake him.”