Way Down We Go
“Time to greet the day, lovebirds!”
The low hanging sun flooded the room through the opened doorway, and I blinked groggily, still too exhausted to lift my head. Val chuckled, his body shading the early morning light as he stepped into the room. As pissed off as I was with him, I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to get out of bed. Maybe in a few hours. Or a few days. I nestled back into the warmth engulfing me and shut my eyes again.
“Uh, Doll Face...”
I groaned, blindly fishing around for the pillow that should have been next to me. The moment I got a hold of it, Val would be eating a cushion full of feathers…if only I could find it. My hand continued patting around the mattress, coming up short. I stretched my fingers out a little bit further, only to feel the edge of the…bedside. Wait, that couldn’t be right.
“Ahem.”
I peeled my eyes back open, looking up at the opened doorway. Val stood there smiling like the Cheshire Cat, while Reese—
If looks could kill…
I followed both of the guys’ gazes, realizing I was on the whole other side of the bed. I lifted my head to find a naked, muscular torso resting beneath me. Blaine just sighed and stretched indolently, his eyes still closed as I noticed his rune-covered arm draped around my shoulders. Feeling the rush of heat reach my cheeks, I tried to toss off the appendage so I could sit upright. The moment I attempted to, Blaine’s hold only pulled me closer, forcing my head back onto his toned stomach. He murmured something inaudible under his breath that I was pretty sure wasn’t English.
The door slammed so hard, the old hinges rattled. Blaine finally opened his eyes at the thunderous disturbance, and I turned to see that Reese was gone.
“Would you mind?” Blaine waved lazily at his brother, shooing him outside. “Some of us need our beauty sleep.”
“You’re pretty enough, Sleeping Beauty,” Val said, lobbing Blaine’s discarded shirt at him. “We’ve got places to go, people to torture. All the fun stuff.”
“What places?”
“It’s not exactly safe here, so you two are going to be relocated. Probably to The Hideaway, at least for now. Raelynd’s sent a ride to pick us up. It’ll be out front in fifteen.”
Relocated? I hadn’t allowed myself to think too much about the repercussions of last night, but hearing him say it out loud… It felt like a mallet had been thrown down into my chest. I had to leave. Just when I had been able to settle down and find some semblance of a home, I was going to have to leave it all behind again. Jenna, Hannah, Sam, school. Everything I’d rebuilt, gone.
I finally managed to heave Blaine’s arm off me, and I hauled myself out of bed, realizing I didn’t have any clothes. My dirty pajamas were probably still on the ground in Reese’s room, and I didn’t even have shoes.
Val must have noticed me uncomfortably fidgeting with the hem of my shirt as I kept pulling down on the fabric, desperate to make it cover more than the measly top inch of my thighs. He motioned to the little red luggage case parked beside the mini fridge.
The little Epi Leather carry-on case was unmistakable. It was part of the Louis Vuitton luggage collection my mom had bought me before our last family vacation. I cautiously approached it, pulling the bag up onto the couch so I could unzip it. Inside were a handful of my clothes, my picture frames, a couple pairs of shoes, and even my curling iron. If Val had gotten all this stuff...he would’ve had to have been in my aunt’s house!
Before I could make the accusation, the Dark Mage snorted. “Relax, Doll Face. Your precious little magician was the one kind enough to pack your belongings. I never even got an invitation inside. Though, I did speak with your aunt. Told her you were going away with friends on a trip for Winter Break, and suggested that she perhaps go away for a bit as well. You know, until things settle down. Wouldn’t want any demons or Reapers swinging by again looking for you while she’s home.”
I appreciated the thought, but there was only one person on my mind.
Reese…
Without bothering to grab some fresh clothes, I pushed Val aside and ran out the door. I could feel eyes burning on me from down the hall as I pounded my fists on Reese’s door. Val stood leaning against the worn brick wall outside Blaine’s room, his head cocked in amusement as my fist suddenly struck…
Crap! I’d been so consumed in my need to give Val my most vicious glare that I hadn’t realized the door opened, making me pound my fist into Reese’s chest.
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry!”
He just scowled, also stealing a glance at the leather-clad asshole down the way. Reese merely nodded over his shoulder and pulled the door open enough to indicate my invitation. I immediately noticed the packed duffle bag resting on the corner chair. He was leaving, but where?
“That’s not at all what it looked like back there, I swear. I don’t know what happened. I’m so, so, so sorry, about everything!” The words were clumsy at best, but they were the only things I could think to say as Reese locked the door behind me. “I never should have bitten Blaine. I should’ve listened to you from the very beginning! I should’ve just run away the moment Blaine tracked me down here! I should’ve listened!”
Reese was shaking his head, and it felt like a vise grip had seized my heart, slowly applying pressure to it until the muscle would explode in my chest.
“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered.
“Don’t say that—”
“Kat, listen to me.”
“No!” I reached behind me for the doorknob. A stupid, childish part of me was convinced that if I ran away from him, if I could get out before he could speak, I’d be able to stop him from doing what I knew was inevitable.
But his palms came to rest on both sides of the door right behind my head. “Listen.”
Not him too…
I couldn’t lose him, too. Everybody else had already abandoned me.
“Dr. Madsen’s found a cure.”
My pounding heart seemed to skip a beat, maybe even two or three. “What?”
“You said the mating bond didn’t work when the Angel of Death attacked you at school, right?”
I nodded. “My omen rune went off, but Blaine had no idea. The connection was somehow interrupted.”
This little tidbit of information brought a sly smile to decorate his lips as he crooked his finger and gestured for me to follow him over to the bed. Pulling out printed copies of the ledger we had borrowed from Blaine, he found the page in question and handed the sheet over to me.
“‘Sanctus Perimo…directly derived from the Latin words meaning ‘holy abolishment,’” I read aloud. “‘Seven holy swords were forged from Angelorum steel and given to Samael, also known in some scripts as the Angel of Death. The fuller of these blades is said to be brandished with angelic sigils that work to deactivate the effects of Black Magic. Any demon or Dark Mage will find their powers useless when in its presence, and when killed at the hand of these swords, any soul will be banished to eternal Purgatory. The angel Samael gifted one of these blades to a special offspring of men, who shared his angelic bloodline…’”
In other words, Reapers.
But… Purgatory? As in eternal suffering? More of Raelynd’s words came to mind, what he had said about Blaine intervening when Russell tried killing me. “The fact he would risk getting his very soul claimed is a true testament to his character.”
All the blood drained from my face as I stumbled back.
“It’s well documented that runes can’t be tampered with,” said Reese, too consumed by the papers in his hands to notice I could be knocked over with a feather. “Even if you were to burn your entire hand and arm to destroy Blaine’s mark and mating bond, the moment your skin healed back to normal, the runes would regain their power.”
“…Yeah. So?”
“What if there was a way to maim the skin so that it couldn’t heal?”
“By somehow swiping a blade from an avenging angel who wants me dead? That sounds like a suicide mission.”
Reese just smiled. “You won’t need to get it from him.”
Nick’s questions from last night hit me like a railroad spike.
“Who killed Russell Hurst?”
“What happened to his blade?”
The breath caught in my lungs. “Blaine.”
***
“During the 18th century, when there was an upsurge in the art of dark magic, there was a blade reportedly used to permanently disable a Mage’s runes. If it cut through the brand, the magic would cease to run through the rune, making it ineffective,” Reese further explained to me.
Just like Val’s runes.
“Why did Reapers kill all of them if they could be neutralized?” I asked. “You know, asides from the fact that they’re assholes?”
“Because severing the power didn’t cure them from the demonic virus. Their offspring would still carry the same dark magic. Reapers wouldn’t risk that kind of energy being passed on to another generation.” He sighed. “Are you absolutely certain the Angel’s blade you saw was exactly marked like Russell’s?”
All the puzzle pieces seemed to fall into place as the gears began working in my mind. “You should’ve seen Blaine’s face when I mentioned that Death’s blade shared the same symbols as the one Russell tried to kill me with. Blaine couldn’t get me away from the school fast enough. And he himself has a sizeable scar on his unmarked arm, suspiciously right where Russell had cut him with that very same blade.”
Reese beamed at me. “If this does work, if we can get our hands on one of these swords, then we can break both the mating bond and the hex placed on you. After that, finding a cure for the virus will be the only hurtle we have left.”
“Yeah, but we don’t even know where to start looking for the blade,” I pointed out. “I haven’t seen it in over eight weeks, and the last time I did, I was half delirious with the virus. I fell unconscious after Blaine used it to kill Russell.” A knot formed in my stomach at the very thought of that night. But then something else ate away at me. “I still managed to use my runes to get the blade away from Russell when he came at me. If it’s supposed to turn off all dark magic, then how did I have use of it?”
“That…I’m not entirely sure of.”
“The sword could still be anywhere by now,” I said, admittedly deflating a bit. “And it’s not at his house. I already checked that place from the basement floor to the roof shingles.
Three solid knocks thudded against the other side of the door. “Wrap it up, Doll Face. We’ve gotta get a move on,” called out Val.
That pit returned to the bottom of my stomach, but Reese just took my hand, trailing his thumb over my runes. Tiny electrical pulses crackled along the surface, and I found myself leaning into him.
“I don’t know when I’ll get to see you again,” I muttered.
“Oh, I wager it’ll be much sooner than you think.”
Before I could say anything, he pulled me in against his chest, seizing my lips. That very same electrical current worked its way across my mouth, into my face, tingling down my back, leaving me delirious and lightheaded in the best possible way.
“I love you,” he whispered.
The door swung open on some kind of phantom wind. Magic no doubt. I turned back to where Reese had just been standing in front of me, but he was suddenly across the room. And that pissed off expression he’d been sporting earlier had evidently returned in full-force. Reese proceeded to glower at me—glower—as he pushed past me like I was some insufferable pest he wanted nothing to do with.
“Get the hell out,” he growled.
I just gawked at him.
Paging Dr. Jekyll!
Where the hell did this come from?
“Ouch.” Val smirked as he strolled into the room, interlocking his arm around mine. “You heard the man, Doll Face. Let’s go.”
He turned us around and guided me out the door. I barely had time to pluck up my dirtied pajamas from last night as I stole a glance back at Reese, who winked at me. The message was clear. I was now the fox in the brothers’ henhouse. Only problem, their henhouse was no henhouse at all. It was a shark tank. And there was blood in the water.