CHAPTER 7
The sound of Isadora’s hoarse voice and the thought they had done something to her to make her forget him ignited a fury so deep inside Rook that he was flying over the chateau’s roof before he had considered what he was doing.
He snarled and dived at the first person he saw.
The female crossing the courtyard didn’t have a chance to react.
Her head toppled onto the snow-dusted cobbles before she could even gasp and he landed beyond her, furled his wings against his back and roared out his rage.
An older male burst out of the door ahead of him, took one look at the dead female, and fled, heading back into the building.
Rook grinned and beat his wings, shot towards the male and caught him before he made it more than two steps inside. He gripped the grey-haired portly witch by the nape of his neck, digging his claws in deep, twisted and slammed him face-first into the wall. The male choked out a grunt and Rook pressed him harder against the wall, until bone shattered beneath the pressure of his grip and he went limp in Rook’s hand.
He cast the dead witch aside and focused on the building, seeking the others. The female and the older male had been dressed in the same style, crisp black trousers and a white shirt. Servants?
Were the two remaining witches in the chateau servants too?
He recalled what Apollyon had said to him. A group of witches had her. He doubted that the dark angel had meant one powerful witch and his servants. At least one of the remaining people would be as powerful as the one he had slain outside to make the barrier fall.
He mentally prepared himself for that as he stalked through the elegant sage-green kitchen and into a pale cream hallway. His heavy footfalls echoed along it as he tracked his next target, following a branch to his left. He reached a bright foyer and scanned the building again as he stilled and listened, seeking his prey.
A heartbeat, faint and distant, but closing in, sounded above him.
He looked up the dark oak staircase to the next floor. The lights were lower there, barely illuminating the wood-panelled walls. He canted his head to his left. The heartbeat was closer now.
Rook moved to the bottom of the staircase.
“I am telling you, I heard a noise.” The female voice sounded harried.
“Now you’re just making up excuses to get away from me.” A male growled, his accent not matching hers.
He was British.
The dark-haired female appeared in view on the landing above Rook, her hands trembling as she wrestled with the buttons on her white shirt, hastily fastening them. “I will get into trouble if they know what we were doing.”
Rook’s nostrils flared.
She smelled of sex.
So did the mousy-haired male who was striding towards her, hunger still colouring his eyes as he kept them fixed on her.
The female stopped dead as her eyes landed on Rook.
The male grinned, swept up behind her and wrapped his arms around her. “I knew you’d change your mind.”
His grin faded when she didn’t respond.
“Ellie?” He leaned to his right, trying to see her face.
Rook waited.
Watched all the colour drain from her skin as she stared at him, her dark eyes gradually growing as round as the full moon outside.
The British male frowned and slowly shifted his gaze, tracking hers.
A slow grin curled Rook’s lips as the male blanched.
“What the…” The male rallied, shoved the female aside and broke to his left, back the way he had come.
How noble of him to leave the female to fend for herself.
Rook casually ascended the stairs, his crimson wings brushing his ankles with each step, his eyes locked on the female as he tracked the male with his senses to make sure he didn’t get away.
She sank to her knees, sobbing hysterically, the sound grating in Rook’s ears.
He stooped, closed his hand around her throat, lifted her off the floor by it and held her before him. She flailed her legs and clawed at his arm, a weak attempt to break free of his grip. He tightened his hold on her and her fight left her. She stilled, tears streaming down her cheeks as she stared into his eyes, resignation filling hers, leaving them as hollow as Isadora’s had been.
“Did you hurt Isadora?” he said and she tried to shake her head. “Do you have anything to do with what happened to her?”
Another attempted shake.
He sighed. “A nice angel would let you go and would only mete out justice to those who had hurt her, right?”
She nodded, a tiny seed of hope bringing life back into her eyes.
Rook set her down on her feet and released her neck to cup her cheek, his thumb brushing the other side of her jaw.
“Sucks for you that I’m not a nice angel.” He shoved his hand up and forwards.
Bone crunched.
She dropped to the crimson carpet, landing on her back with her wide startled eyes locked on the ceiling, her mouth opened on the gasp that would never leave her lips.
No one in this chateau was innocent.
She worked for whoever had Isadora, which meant she had been involved, had known what sort of person her employer was and had done nothing about it. She had been fucking one of the males responsible for hurting Isadora. She was as much to blame as the rest of them.
He stepped over her body and stalked down the corridor, tracking the final witch.
The male’s heartbeat hammered frantically, thundering in Rook’s ears, driving him on. He grinned as he hunted him, following that rapid beat, and passed his hand over the length of his blade, shortening it this time, anticipating the coming fight. It would be close quarters, room to swing it limited despite the size of the apartments he could see on either side of the hallway.
While he preferred the length and power of his broadsword, he was just as comfortable fighting with a smaller blade.
The witch was going to find out just how comfortable he was with it.
His grin stretched wider as he closed in and detected someone in a room to his right, beyond a smaller dark wooden staircase that led both downwards and upwards.
Rook glanced down the steps as he passed it. Why hadn’t the male escaped that way?
Perhaps in his blind rush to flee, he had missed the staircase in the low-lit hallway and had panicked, hiding in a room instead.
Perhaps he was lying in wait, ready to attack when Rook stepped into the room.
No matter.
He closed in on the door, the only one in the corridor that was shut. If the witch had wanted to hide from him, he should have left it open, making it appear like the others. This witch wanted to fight. He smirked at that. This witch was an idiot.
He was strong, but Rook was stronger. His build alone would have given him the advantage over the slighter male, but the powers he commanded combined with a thousand years of battle experience all but assured he would be the victor.
Rook lifted his right foot and slammed it into the door, sending it crashing into the wall. The sound of the collision echoed along the corridor as he peered into the darkness. Unusual darkness. He couldn’t penetrate it, no matter how hard his eyes tried to pick out some details in the room.
Was the witch cloaking himself with the shadows?
The male’s heartbeat still pounded in his ears. He had taken Rook’s sight from him, but he should have doused all his senses. It was easy to pinpoint the male directly in front of him, at the far end of the room.
Rook prowled forwards, his fingers flexing around the black hilt of his sword.
Dazzling colourful light erupted around him and he flinched, reared back and snarled as he flashed fangs.
If the idiot meant to blind him…
Pain tore up his legs.
Rook roared as a thousand white-hot needles pierced his flesh in a rising wave.
He squinted against the bright light and looked down.
“Fuck!” He slashed at the thick thorny vines wrapping around his legs, hacking at their bases where they blended into the wooden floor before they could reach his thighs.
He growled as he reached down and ripped at them, tearing the long thorns from his flesh. Blood tracked down his legs from each puncture wound, leaking from him as he wrestled with the rest. They tangled around him, snagging him again whenever he managed to free himself.
Adrenaline surged in response, his heart racing as panic tried to grip him. It wasn’t going to happen.
He roared and let the change come over him, watched as the skin on his legs turned black as his body began to grow, limbs thickening with muscle as the floor dropped away.
“Shit,” the witch muttered and the colourful lights brightened, the vines growing faster in response.
Rook grunted as another thick onyx vine wrapped around his left leg, sinking thorns deep into his black skin. He glared at it and hacked at the root, managing to stop its growth. His crimson gaze scanned the vines that littered the floor around him, wilting now he had cut them. More sprouted from the wooden boards.
He frowned, his eyes snagging on something.
A pattern beneath the dead branches.
On a feral roar, he slashed his sword through the markings, carving a long groove in them.
The light stuttered.
“Oh, bollocks.” The witch’s pulse jacked up in his ears, the scent of his fear flooding the room.
Rook cut at the floor again, interrupting the spell that formed a circle beneath him. It began to fade, the vines that had been sprouting withering before his eyes. He staggered forwards, each step agony as the lacerations and punctures on his legs stretched and pulled, spilling crimson over his black skin.
The mousy-haired male appeared before him as the spell shattered.
He had his back pressed against the pale blue wall between a four-poster bed with rumpled navy covers and an antique wooden wardrobe.
“Wh-what do you want?” The attempt to sound confident and calm failed, and the male looked ready to soil himself as Rook closed in.
The witch clutched his hands together in front of his chest and swirls of purple and blue light streaked upwards from them. A sword formed in his grasp, silver and very elegant. Utterly impractical. It was whip-thin and had a fancy guard made of gold. Evidently, he had never fought with a weapon before.
“Is that meant to be a sword or a magic wand?” Rook jerked his chin towards it.
The male swallowed hard, his voice rising an octave as he bit out, “It’s a fucking sword.”
Rook smiled slowly. “This is a sword.”
He swept his hand down his own weapon, took pleasure from the way the witch’s skin paled and his eyes grew enormous as the blade transformed, growing to twice its original length and breadth.
Rook weighed it in his hands, still in love with the heaviness of it after all these centuries. It felt good in his grip. Always did. Always would.
He regarded it with a slight frown.
“You asked what I wanted.” He lifted his crimson eyes to lock with the witch’s. “I had wanted to ask you some questions. Like… why did you take Isadora?”
The male’s expression shifted, the fear fading as he mistakenly saw an opportunity to bargain for his worthless life.
“You want her? Take her. It wasn’t my idea. Who wants to be immortal, right?” His lips twitched in a smile that reeked of nerves. “Apart from you. Must be nice being immortal… but not my thing. I really don’t want to be immortal.”
Rook arched an eyebrow at that.
So Isadora was immortal.
“A spell did this to her?” He didn’t wait for the witch to answer him, pieced together the answers in his head to build a picture of what had happened, one he didn’t like. “You all wanted to know this immortality spell, so you captured her… and she didn’t want to tell you… so you hurt her.”
He advanced a step, a growl peeling from his lips as he imagined this male and the one he had beheaded outside laying hands on her, torturing her to make her surrender it.
But his brave witch had resisted them.
“Please, mate,” the male drawled, looked at the sword in his hands and held it up at his side as he shrugged, both of his hands in the air. “It’s all a big misunderstanding.”
He couldn’t see how that was possible.
“So, I did not just see Isadora with bruises all over her?” He advanced another step, relishing how the bastard squirmed as he tried to hold his smile and the acrid scent of fear grew stronger in the air.
“We didn’t do that.” The male eased back against the wall. “I swear. She was doing something when I went to feed her last night… a spell… she was making herself forget and I tried to stop her.”
Forget?
Had she been so desperate to protect the spell these people wanted that she had used another on herself, one that would place it beyond her reach as well as theirs?
His eyes widened as he recalled the way she had looked at him and what she had said.
She didn’t know a Rook.
She had made herself forget him.
That cut deep, cleaving open his heart for some reason.
“So you beat her?” he snarled and glared at the male, his anger at what she had done pouring out in his words as his emotions started to get the better of him, a thousand whispered taunts filling his mind to drive him into the darkness.
“No.” The witch shook his head. “It backfired. The spell. It happens sometimes. Magical backdraught. It hurt her. I swear… it wasn’t me.”
Rook had heard enough.
“I said I had wanted to ask you some questions,” he bit out and hefted his sword. “What I want now is your head.”
He swung hard, burying the blade into the wall with the force of his strike. Blood spilled down the witch’s black t-shirt in a waterfall, reaching his bare feet before Rook had even pulled his blade free and caused the male’s head to fall. It rolled across the floor and under the bed.
Rook turned away, transformed his sword and wiped it on the bedclothes before sheathing it at his waist.
He closed his eyes and concentrated.
Only one heartbeat remained.
Isadora.
Had she really cast a spell to forget him?
His eyebrows dipped low as he thought about that, as a need flared inside him, a hope as foolish as those he had witnessed in the eyes of his enemies tonight.
He hoped that she hadn’t.
He hoped the one he had just killed had been right and she had meant to forget the immortality spell and not him.
Rook laughed at himself, sure he was heading for pain far worse than what he had felt on realising she had forgotten him. His master’s words rang in his head. He had heard the Devil say them centuries ago and they had stuck with him, echoed in his mind whenever he watched the souls in the prison begging for mercy, saw it ignite in their eyes a moment before the life in them died.
Hope was for fools.
If it was for fools, then he was the king of them.
Because Isadora had awoken a thousand hopes in him and all of them were pinned on her.