Chapter 8
Beth
I landed lightly beside Jordan in a tunnel lit by a single light bulb. The tunnel disappeared into the darkness in either direction, and I looked at Jordan for guidance.
She looked in one direction and then the other, her mouth pressed together in concentration.
“If we knew what we were dealing with, I’d suggest we split up. But we’d better stay together for this one.”
“Which way do we go?”
A shuffling sound echoed down the tunnel, but I couldn’t tell what direction it had come from. Jordan cocked her head and nodded to her right.
“This way. Stay close.”
We ran down the tunnel, our demon sight allowing us to see in the dark stretches between the lights, and our enhanced hearing picking up the faint sounds of footsteps in the distance. Whoever was up ahead, they were walking at a steady pace, so they had no idea they were being followed. Or they didn’t care.
We slowed when we came to another tunnel. Jordan put a finger to her lips then pointed to the left to let me know we were close.
I nodded, my heart racing as adrenaline surged through me. A voice in my head told me we should have called Chris and waited for him, but the thought of Mei down here, frightened and helpless, spurred me on. Gripping my knife tighter, I followed Jordan down the new tunnel.
It wasn’t long before we sighted our prey. Anger and relief made my blood roar in my ears when I saw the man with Mei draped over his shoulder, her long black hair swaying as he walked. From here, I couldn’t tell if she was hurt, but her lack of movement said she was probably unconscious.
My foot kicked a loose piece of concrete, and I swore silently as the man spun to face us. He was young, no older than twenty, with dark hair pulled back in a short ponytail and a small goatee.
His eyes widened at the sight of us. I waited for him to open his mouth and show us a pair of fangs. If he was a young vampire, we could take him easily. If he was older, we might have trouble. But there were two of us, and we were highly trained.
We stared at each other for a few heartbeats, none of us moving. He sized us up, and then he turned and ran.
He didn’t get far. Carrying the girl slowed him down, and Jordan tackled him before he made it ten yards. I reached them as they went down, and I was able to catch Mei before her head slammed into the concrete floor of the tunnel.
Her captor, moving too quickly to be human, rolled and threw Jordan off him. He came to his feet and took a step toward Mei and me, his hand covering a spreading black spot on his stomach.
I reached for the knife beside me, and his eyes flitted to the weapon. In the dim light, I saw the gleam of silver around his pupils. Incubus.
He must have decided Mei wasn’t worth the risk because he ran off down the tunnel.
“Stay with her,” Jordan ordered as she gave chase.
I gently laid Mei on the floor. Her eyelids twitched, and she moved her mouth, but no sounds came out. I lifted one of her eyelids and found dilated pupils. She looked like she’d been drugged. Or worse.
Standing guard over the girl, I took out my phone and called Chris. The signal was bad down here, and I heard him say my name several times before I was able to tell him where I was. He ordered me not to move and said he was on the way.
From deeper in the tunnel, I heard a yell. I sent up a silent prayer that Jordan was okay. She was tough and a skilled warrior, and Incubi hunted alone. At least he’d have no friends waiting down here for him.
The air moved a second before Chris arrived in front of me. If I hadn’t been expecting him, I would have screamed at his sudden appearance.
“You okay?” he asked, not even winded. His gaze moved over me as if he needed to see for himself that I was unhurt.
“Yes. Mei is unconscious, though. I think it’s an Incubus trance.”
He crouched beside the girl, checking her eyes and breathing. “You’re right. She’s in a trance.”
A shudder went through me when I thought of what would have happened to Mei if we hadn’t found her. “Do you think all those girls were taken by an Incubus?”
“It’s possible but unlikely. Incubi only have to feed once a week, less when they get older. One Incubus wouldn’t need that many females at once.”
He frowned as if he’d thought of something. I opened my mouth to ask him about it when running feet announced Jordan’s return. She entered the circle of light, and I jumped to my feet when I saw black stains on her top.
“Did you get him?” I asked her.
Anger flashed in her eyes. “He got away, but it’ll take him a few days to recover from that gut wound.”
Chris stood. The set of his jaw told me he was unhappy before he spoke.
“You should not have come down here without backup. You had no idea what you were walking into, and you’re lucky it was a single Incubi.”
He was right, but his condescending tone irked me. It was clear from Jordan’s raised eyebrows that Chris had never spoken this way to her. I knew it was because of me and the bond.
I had to end this before it got worse and caused problems between Chris and his friends. It would mean leaving Los Angeles, and I hated the thought of leaving the friends I’d made here. But I couldn’t ask them to choose between me and Chris.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“We did what we had to in the moment,” Jordan said unapologetically. “How’s the girl?”
“Entranced. She’ll be fine in an hour or so.” He stood, lifting Mei as if she weighed nothing. “Let’s get her out of here.”
“What happens now?” I asked Chris, walking behind him.
“Now we bring in a team to go over this place. If either of you got a good look at the Incubus, we’ll pass the description along to Adele and see if she can identify him.”
“I saw him,” I said.
Jordan sheathed her blade. “I did, too. I also saw a tattoo on his arm.”
“Tattoo?” Chris asked. I detected an edge in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“On the inside of his wrist. It looked like flames with writing underneath. I couldn’t make out the words.”
Chris sped up. “Come on. We need to get Mei back to her friend.”
Jordan and I exchanged a confused look.
“You going to let us in on the secret?” Jordan pressed him.
“Not here. We’ll talk at the house.”
There was an urgency in his tone I’d never heard before. I couldn’t help but wonder what worried a seasoned warrior like him.
Something told me it was nothing good.
Chris
The team I’d called in when Beth and Jordan had told me about the missing girl was outside by the time we reached the street. I sent them in to search the club and the tunnels for more Incubi.
When Beth had called me to tell me she was in a tunnel beneath the building, fear had twisted my gut in knots. The fact that she was a trained warrior and a skilled fighter should have reassured me, but I was finding it hard to think logically where she was concerned.
Beth went to find Mei’s friend Alicia, and I went with her. If my suspicions were right about what was taking these girls, I wasn’t letting Beth out of my sight until we were back at the command center.
Mei was awake when we returned, and I wasn’t surprised that she had no memory of the attack. As far as she and her friend knew, a human man had tried to take her away. I sent them home with a stern warning to stay away from clubs, and their frightened expressions told me they weren’t going to party again anytime soon. They left in Alicia’s car, and I sent Brock to follow them and make sure they got home safely.
Beth and Jordan had driven here in one of the SUVs, so I followed them back to the house on my bike. I called Nikolas on the way to tell him what Jordan had said about the Incubus’s tattoo. He hung up to make a few calls before we got there.
We parked our bikes outside the garage, and Beth and Jordan gave me expectant looks.
“We’ll talk inside,” I said.
Nikolas and Sara were waiting for us in the living room, wearing grim expressions.
Jordan looked between us and threw up her hands. “Will someone please tell us what the hell is going on?”
I waved for everyone to sit while I remained standing. I was a little too worked up to sit still.
“We assumed a vampire took the missing girls, but the attack at Luna points at something a lot more dangerous.”
Jordan’s eyebrows shot up, and Beth’s eyes widened. I knew they were both wondering what was more dangerous than a vampire.
“I thought this was a random Incubus attack until Jordan described the tattoo on the Incubus’s wrist. That tattoo is the mark of a Lilin.”
Jordan made a sound, but my eyes were on Beth, who sucked in a sharp breath as realization dawned. She’d studied demonology so she knew what a Lilin was, but reading about it in a book and facing it in person were two entirely different things.
Incubi were among the more powerful demons that lived among us. By the time an Incubus reached adulthood, he was already stronger than a new vampire. But unlike vampires, most Incubi did not kill the people they fed off, which was why they were not at the top of our kill list. That and the fact that they were solitary and territorial and usually killed each other off. Old age was something very few Incubi experienced.
An Incubus reached his first fertile cycle at age thirty, and every thirty years after that, he was consumed with the need to reproduce. It was only during this fertile period that he could breed. There were no female Incubi, so he chose a human woman to bear him a son. Gestation took six months, and as the fetus grew, it fed off the mother’s energy, draining her strength. The Incubus would carefully tend to the woman, feeding her his own energy daily to help her make it through the difficult pregnancy. Even then, many women did not survive the birth and the infant mortality rate for Incubi was high.
The Incubus raised his son until the child reached adulthood at twenty. By then, the younger Incubus’s territorial instincts kicked in, and he went off on his own.
The rare Incubus that lived past two hundred years was driven by more than the need to produce offspring. He became obsessed with creating a family, and he bound his children to him before puberty, in a special ceremony. During the ceremony, the child received his sire’s mark on his wrist, a mark that only a very powerful Incubus could bestow. When the son hit adulthood, he did not feel the urge to leave, and he stayed with his sire for the rest of his life.
An Incubus that bound his children to him was called a Lilin, and they were as reclusive and as powerful as a vampire Master. When they entered their fertile cycle, their need to reproduce made them one of the most dangerous demons on earth.
“A Lilin?” Beth echoed incredulously. “But I read that they hate cities.”
I nodded. “That’s true. The only reason one would come to a city this big is to breed.”
Sara held up a hand. “Wait. Don’t Incubi have one baby at a time? Why would he take more than one girl?”
“A Lilin is not like a normal Incubus,” I told her. “The older they get, the more offspring they want, and some are said to sire as many as twenty in one cycle.”
“Twenty?” Sara choked out.
Beth put a hand to her mouth, her eyes rounded in horror. “But those girls are so young. Jessica and Tracy are only seventeen. So is Mei.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “A Lilin will only breed with strong, healthy females between the age of sixteen and twenty-one. Incubi can sense if a human is diseased or sick, so they know which ones to take.”
“Now we know why there were only teenagers at the club,” Jordan said. “The rave was a perfect cover for them to check out the girls and choose the ones they wanted.”
Sara looked ill. “Those poor girls. We have to find them before he…”
Nikolas took her hand in his. “The Lilin will wait until the peak of his cycle, when he’s most fertile, to breed. He has to prepare the females first by feeding them his energy. And he won’t breed until he has all the females he needs. As far as we know, only three girls have been taken. The attack at Luna tells us he’s still looking.”
“And now we know what we’re looking for,” I said.
Beth frowned. “But there are thousands of girls that age in Los Angeles. How will we know who he’ll go after next?”
I sat on the arm of a chair. “We don’t. But a Lilin won’t go unnoticed long by other demons in this city, especially by other Incubi and Succubi. Lilin are like royalty among their kind, and their mark is easily identifiable to anyone who knows what to look for.”
Jordan tapped her chin. “He’d need somewhere to keep the girls. Or would he take them back to his lair?”
“He’d have to keep them near him so he can feed them every day,” I said. “And a Lilin never takes females from his own territory, so we know his permanent lair is not close to Los Angeles.”
“Then they’re still in the city,” Beth said.
She wore a determined look that made my stomach clench. I didn’t want her anywhere near this one, and if I had my way, she’d be leaving Los Angeles tonight. Once this Lilin figured out we were onto him, he was going to feel threatened, and a cornered Lilin was unpredictable and deadly.
“Okay then.” Jordan looked from me to Nikolas. “Where do we start?”
“The first thing we do is reach out to our most trusted contacts in the demon community.” I looked at Sara. “Can you work with Kelvan and David to see if you can find where the Lilin is staying? It will be a large, secure property, most likely rented within the last six months. And tell them we have to be discreet so we don’t tip off the Lilin.”
“I’ll call them as soon as we’re done here.”
“Good.”
“What about us?” Jordan asked.
“You work with Raoul. Find out everything there is to know about Luna and whether or not there are similar places we haven’t heard about. If anyone can find a party, it’s you.”
“Sounds good.” She smirked at Beth. “Let’s party.”
“Beth won’t be working with you on this one,” I said, earning startled looks from them.
Beth opened her mouth to protest, but I cut her off.
“New warriors pair with experienced warriors for this job. You will work with me, and Sara will be with Nikolas. Mason will work with Brock. If we need to switch it out for any reason, we will, but this is how it will be for now.”
Beth’s lips pressed into a mutinous line, but it had been ingrained in her to follow the orders of the senior warrior in the field. It would take a few years for her to start breaking free of those restraints – unless Jordan’s rebelliousness had rubbed off on her. I sent up a silent prayer that wasn’t the case. I didn’t think I could concentrate on my job, knowing she was out there with a Lilin loose in the city.
And I wouldn’t pretend I wasn’t happy with this arrangement for other reasons. Working together would give me time with Beth, to talk and to get to know each other again. She’d done her best to avoid being alone with me since I’d declared my intentions toward her, but she also hadn’t tried to break the bond. She might say she didn’t want me, but until she made it official, I’d do everything in my power to win back her trust.
“What will you and I be working on?” Beth asked in a tight voice.
“Tomorrow, we’ll pay a visit to one of our informants. If anyone knows about a Lilin in Los Angeles, Adele will, and this is not something I want to talk to her about over the phone.”
“You need me with you to talk to her?” Beth asked skeptically.
Sara scoffed. “More likely he needs you to protect him from that she-demon.”
“That, too.” I smiled at Sara, who did not try to hide her dislike of the succubus. I turned back to Beth. “Talking to informants is an important part of our job, and I think this would be good practice for you.”
She looked only slightly appeased by my answer. “Okay.”
Nikolas leaned forward with his arms resting on his knees. “We don’t have to tell any of you how serious this situation is. A Lilin is single-minded when it comes to breeding, and he will let nothing get in his way. If by some chance you encounter him, do not engage him. Chris or I might take him in a fight, but he is stronger than the rest of you combined.”
“Hey!” Sara poked Nikolas in the ribs.
“Except for Sara,” he amended, capturing her hand. “But I don’t want you anywhere near him either.”
“This is not like any demon you’ve met so far,” I told Sara. “He is highly intelligent and ruthless. His offspring are fanatics when it comes to serving him, and they will gladly give up their lives for him. Plus, their bond with him makes them stronger than the average Incubi.”
Jordan grimaced. “I can attest to that.”
“You sound like you know him,” Sara said to me.
I shook my head. “This isn’t the first Lilin Nikolas and I have hunted. They all share certain characteristics that help them survive so long.”
Sara frowned. “They must have some weaknesses.”
Nikolas nodded. “Like all demons, a Lilin can be killed with a silver blade to the heart, beheading, or fire. But they are stronger and faster than most demons, which is why it would take an older warrior to match them in strength and speed. The only time a Lilin is weak is at the peak of their cycle right before they breed and during the pregnancy. They drain their power by feeding it to the females to help them through the pregnancies. But by then, they are safe inside their lair.”
“Great,” Jordan muttered.
Sara got to her feet. “If you guys don’t mind, I’m going to call David and Kelvan. The sooner we get working on this, the better.”
I nodded, and she pulled her phone from her pocket, dialing a number as she walked toward the control room.
“And I’m going to find Raoul and give him the great news about his new partner.” Jordan stood, wearing a Cheshire grin. “You coming, Beth?”
Beth darted a glance at me then back to Jordan. “Might as well.”
She got up, and the two of them followed Sara. I watched Beth until she was out of sight. All I could think of was her in that tunnel and what could have happened if the Incubus hadn’t been alone, or if he’d chosen to fight instead of run.
“I know what’s going through your head,” Nikolas said, pulling my gaze back to him. He smiled sympathetically. “I wish I could tell you it gets easier, but you’d know I was lying. You saw what I went through with Sara.”
I gave him a pained look. “Don’t remind me.”
“All you want to do is take her and get as far from Los Angeles and the Lilin as possible. If Sara wasn’t as powerful as she is, I’d try to take her away, too.”
“I’m sure she’d have something to say about that.”
He chuckled. “She already did. When I told her about the Lilin, she told me in no uncertain terms that she is not leaving.”
I sighed heavily. “As much as I want Beth away from this, I know she’d hate me if I tried to get her to leave. I’m already on thin ice with her.”
“She hasn’t broken the bond, so the ice can’t be that thin.”
“We’re not breaking it,” I said gruffly.
His brows rose in question.
“We have things to work out, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.” I gave him a sheepish smile. “There may be some groveling involved.”
Nikolas burst out laughing.
I scowled. “You’re going to enjoy this, aren’t you?”
He leaned back into the couch, wearing a devilish smile. “Immensely.”