CHAPTER THIRTEEN
With everyone safely underground, Gabe was finally free to let loose. He hadn’t been able to tell the others, but he’d shielded the entire property from view the moment after the dark ward had come down. It was a good thing, too, with Ezra roaring away at the top of his massive lungs.
Bolivar’s blast destroyed the screen porch. Gabe ducked into the house to avoid the debris raining down from above but went outside again to face the other mage. Bolivar quickly realized he was trapped inside Gabe’s ward around the house, and he turned on Gabe with a snarl.
“There’s no place to go, Bolivar. Give up, and I’ll let you live. Fight, and I’ll destroy you,” Gabe promised.
He really wanted the fight because this piece of scum didn’t deserve to live. Now that Gabe could see him in person, he could see the layers of evil filth that covered Bolivar’s soul. There was no coming back for this warped and depraved being. Only death would cleanse the evil from his immortal soul—if he still had one. Gave wasn’t so sure.
Bolivar didn’t bother to speak before he launched a blistering attack. It felt like Bolivar was sending everything he had against Gabe, all at once. Gabe staggered under the force of the dark firestorm but didn’t fall. He went to one knee, for effect as much as anything. He had to hold up long enough for the shifters to get the women he’d sensed out of that basement. Only then could he unleash his full fury on the mage.
Gabe kept careful watch, as best he could, while luring Bolivar to expend all his magic in the futile attempt to beat Gabe down. He watched the doorway that led to the basement. They were out in the yard, but Bolivar’s last blast had shorn the back of the house off so that the path to that all-important basement stairway was visible through the wreckage.
It felt like it was taking a long time, but it was probably only a few minutes before Ezra—now in human form and naked as the day he’d been born—came out of the stairwell, carrying a woman in his arms. Theodora. Gabe barely recognized her from her photograph.
Then, Collin and, finally, Margo emerged from the basement, shepherding four other women, who all seemed able to walk, but just barely. Bolivar must have caught the direction of Gabe’s gaze, because he screamed in rage and redoubled his attack, trying to get around Gabe and blast the small group of refugees.
That, Gabe could not allow. He rose to his full height, standing tall and strong against the evil man’s rage. Gabe made a broad gesture with his hands he had only ever used once before in his life. Gabe’s power was such that he had to be very careful of his motions while he was spell-casting. Too grand a gesture, and he could flatten a small city. But nobody outside his immediate family knew the full extent of the burden—and gift—he carried within himself.
A few others were about to see some of it. There wasn’t much he could do about that, but perhaps the time for secrets was finally at an end.
He watched with a grim expression as the full force of his power was brought to bear on Bolivar. One minute, the mage was screaming at him. The next, he was nothing but atoms, floating briefly in the wind of his passing.
He wasn’t even dust. He was finer than dust, and in that next moment…he’d blown away. Gone forever.
If Bolivar had retained any small portion of his soul, it was free now. Free to start over and repent of its former ways. Gabe hoped the soul that had been Bolivar—if it still existed and hadn’t been bargained away to an even more dreadful evil—would take this chance to start fresh and pure.
For Gabe’s magic was such that it stripped away all evil in its path. Even as it destroyed Bolivar’s current physical manifestation, it gave the soul another chance. That was the blessing—and the curse—of his mother’s influence. Gabe might not have been able to follow the path of the holy man, but he had been raised by a priestess and trained in the particular gifts he had been given by both his parents.
Bolivar was gone now, and everyone in the backyard had witnessed Gabe’s power. He turned to look at the small clump of humans and shifters and lowered his hands. Margo was the first to recover. She came to him and walked straight into his arms.
There were no words, just her arms around him. Her support unspoken but real. Gabe was grateful. He hadn’t managed to scare away the best thing that had ever happened to him. At least, not yet.
“Is there anything in that house worth saving?” he asked her as she held him close for a long moment.
She drew back with a puzzled look on her face.
“No. I don’t think so. Why?” she asked.
“If nobody has any objections,” Gabe raised his voice a little to be heard by the rest of the group, “I’m going to blow the house. I don’t think we want to leave any evidence for the human authorities—or for any of Bolivar’s friends to comb through. What do you think?” Gabe addressed his question to Ezra and Collin.
Ezra’s face was grim as he continued to hold the bear shifter female in his arms. She was in the worst shape of all the former captives. “Blast it to hell, where it belongs,” was his comment before he strode away, moving to a safe distance behind Gabe.
“He’s right,” Collin allowed, a bit more calmly, as he escorted the four other women to join Ezra and his charge. “I don’t think there’s anything we can learn from this disgusting place. Whatever information it holds is probably tainted anyway. These ladies, if they’re willing to help us, can probably give us more information than the house itself.” Collin looked at the women, who were nodding agreeably. Even in their weakened condition, they seemed fully aware that they had just been rescued by the good guys.
“All right, then,” Gabe said aloud. “I’m lowering the ward I had placed around everything after I blew Bolivar’s dark ward. As soon as I do that, everyone around here will be able to see what’s going on again. I’m going to make this look like a gas explosion and flatten the entire thing from the basement on up.”
“You can really do that?” Collin asked, looking impressed.
“Yeah,” Gabe nodded, feeling odd talking about his power when he’d tried to hide it most of his life. “I can. Stand clear. The explosion will go straight upwards with a debris radius of about fifteen feet from the foundation. Prevailing wind—though there’s not much of it tonight—is from the back here, so I can spread the debris out a little more up front.”
Collin whistled between his teeth. “This I gotta see.”
“It’ll happen fast, so don’t blink,” Gabe warned, starting to enjoy himself.
He’d never really had an audience before when he did this kind of thing. Nobody had seen him at his full potential, except his family, and they were similarly endowed, so they weren’t really all that impressed. Of course, each Llewellyn had their own special gifts. This was one of the more common among the family. Blowing shit up was something the boys in the family usually did for fun—until their elders put the kibosh on their antics.
Margo stood steadfastly at Gabe’s side as he counted down. “Wards coming down in three…two…one…”
Gabe raised his right hand and flicked his finger, and then, the house blew to kingdom come, just as he’d planned. Damn. He hadn’t done that in a while, but it was good to know he hadn’t lost his touch.
“Holy shit,” Ezra breathed, watching the debris float down to Earth with a look of satisfaction on his face.
“I’m glad he’s on our side,” was Collin’s wry comment. Gabe just grinned and put his arm around Margo’s shoulders. Turning to the rest of the group, he smiled.
“Shall we get the heck out of here now? The fire department is probably on the way,” Gabe added.
“There’s a van in the garage,” Ezra said unexpectedly.
“Great. I can shield it from view if you can hotwire it,” Gabe said, already heading toward the small structure half-hidden under the trees at the back of the property. “Just let me check the area—though all of Bolivar’s spells would have collapsed as he left.”
“Left?” Margo asked, a trace of confusion on her face. “He’s dead, right?”
“Yes, he’s most definitely departed from this realm. What’s left of his soul was cleansed, and his mortal coil was reduced to atoms.” Gabe felt both happy and sad about what he’d done.
He’d rid the world of a terrible agent of evil, but it had taken violence to do so. Gabe didn’t revel in the other man’s death, but he knew it had been justified. The look of relief on the former captives’ faces as they heard the truth that their tormentor was no more was good. Perhaps now, the women would have a chance at full recoveries, knowing Bolivar could never come after them again. It was a good first step. Closure to a horrific episode in their lives that had, no doubt, changed them forever.
Gabe found the van, and as he’d suspected, any spells Bolivar had cast on it or the garage had dissipated along with the mage. Margo hopped into the driver’s seat and hotwired the vehicle. Goddess, what a woman!
Gabe flicked his finger and made the van more or less invisible to the neighbors who had run out of their houses shortly after the explosion. Then, he saw a flash of orange out of the corner of his eye.
“Stop the car,” he ordered quickly. Margo complied without question, and Gabe opened the passenger side door.
The calico cat jumped into the vehicle, a furry streak of orange, brown and white. It went straight to the back where the women were sitting and climbed into a redheaded woman’s lap. She cuddled the cat like an old friend and started to cry happy tears.
“I knew that cat was someone’s familiar,” Gabe muttered. “Let’s go,” he said to Margo, and she took off again. “Now, just one last thing,” he said to himself as he turned in his seat to keep what was left of the house in sight.
Gabe flicked his finger at the wreckage of the house and lit the fire that would burn for hours. Nothing could be left of that house of horrors for the civilian authorities to puzzle over. Margo kept going, and they were long gone before the first fire engine showed up.
Soon after Margo took the wheel, Ezra directed them to the outskirts of town where there were a few clusters of high-priced homes. The gated property he navigated to was a mansion. An empty mansion set on a large plot of private wooded land.
“What is this place?” Margo asked, ducking her head to look up at the tall pines around the perimeter of the property, even as she drove up the winding driveway.
Ezra had given her the gate code, and she’d punched it into the keypad after leaning out the window. The heavy ornamental, but seriously protective, gates swung silently open and then closed behind them as soon as the van was through.
“It used to be owned by Beth’s father,” Ezra said, naming the mermaid mate of the bear shifter, Trevor. “It was a place their entire pod could come and vacation. It’s set up for multiple guests and has a nice big pool house. I cleared out Jonathan’s people and have been keeping the place in readiness for just this kind of thing, should the opportunity arise.” Ezra cradled the unconscious bear shifter woman as if she was made of spun glass. “It’ll be a good place to recover and heal,” he whispered as if to the woman in his arms.
“Collin can get medical and psychological support up here in a couple of hours,” Margo said softly. “Can’t you?” She eyed her boss in the rearview mirror.
“They’re already waiting,” he said in a firm but gentle voice. “Ezra gave me the address and gate code, and I sent them ahead.”
“Good one, boss,” she complimented her forward-thinking employer. There was a reason she liked working for Collin. He was always one step ahead of everyone. She could really respect that. Especially in this kind of situation.
He nodded at her as she rounded the last bend of the long driveway and the house came into view. It was big and lit with welcoming lights. As she pulled up the van in front of the wide double doors that led inside the massive house, they were opened from within by a team of women in medical garb. They took charge of the former captives as soon as Collin opened the sliding door on the side of the van.
The redheaded witch kept hold of her cat, but nobody minded. Ezra, likewise, refused to release his burden and insisted on carrying the unconscious bear shifter woman into the house, two nurses following close behind.
Within an hour, the three strike teams had converged on the mansion with the women they had rescued in tow. The house was filling up, and everybody was being checked out by the medical team Collin had pre-positioned. The entire medical team was female—something Collin had done in order to minimize any possible trauma the women may have experienced. Margo thought that had been a compassionate touch.
She’d been acting as a liaison between her boss and the Redstones while Collin took off to collect Theodora’s family from the airstrip. He’d had her parents flown out specially, so they could see their daughter and help her recover. Until they arrived, though, Ezra seemed to have appointed himself Theodora’s guardian. He claimed he was staying by her side in case she woke scared and shifted. Even a weak bear could do a lot of damage. Ezra was there to help keep her calm—or so he claimed.
Nobody felt like arguing with him, and honestly, since Theodora was the only shifter in the group of freed women, they were keeping her in a separate room, away from the others, just in case. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she would wake frightened and immediately shift. If that happened in front of the humans, things would get really complicated really fast.
The three strike teams had freed about two dozen human women, who were being kept in their own wing of the mansion. The freed mages and Theodora were kept in another part of the house. The four magical women clustered together in one suite, while Theodora was kept in the next room over. Her former cellmates kept checking on her, according to the nurse who had been left with them, which Margo thought was really sweet.
Steve Redstone was already making plans to turn over the human women to federal law enforcement personnel. He would claim he’d stumbled across evidence of human trafficking on one of his job sites and had been collecting evidence before he went to the civil authorities, but then, things had snowballed, and he’d decided to take action. Luckily, Steve had many contacts in law enforcement from his old military days.
Rather than go directly to the local cops, he’d already called a friend of his who was high up in the FBI. The regional director was more than willing to overlook the fact that Steve and his people had acted on their own to perform the rescue. The director knew Steve and quite a few of the members of Steve’s team. He knew their abilities, and he would probably just thank them for doing the job cleanly and without fuss.
In fact, Steve reported to Margo, the man was already on his way to the mansion. Margo passed along that information to Collin, who was waiting at the airstrip. Collin would need to time his arrival with Theodora’s parents to minimize exposure of the magical women to the human officials.
That left the four witches. They had most likely been living normal human lives before being targeted and abducted. Margo went into the suite where they were staying cautiously. The calico cat sniffed at her but didn’t hiss, which was a good sign, and Margo was a bit surprised to find Gabe there, talking quietly with the women.
They were all seated in a conversation area to one side of the main room. There were several bedrooms leading off from the main room, and a bathroom or two, as well. Very luxurious, but the waif-thin women didn’t seem to care about their opulent surroundings. They were all listening intently to Gabe’s quiet words. Margo moved closer, and Gabe looked up and met her gaze with a soft smile, just for her.
Her heart filled with the love she hadn’t yet told him about, but there was work to do first. She’d have time to grab him and tell him they were mates later. She wouldn’t give him a choice. She was going to keep him for the rest of their lives. She just had to convince him.
But, first, work.