Wrath

then . . .

“Owen,” I whispered.

“Mom?” Dorian spoke in my mind. “Are you still there? ”

Yes, little man. We’re coming.

“Mom! Don’t leave me again!”

I’m still here, Dorian. Almost there.

“Mom! Please!” Anguish and tears filled his mental voice, and all I wanted to do was reach out and grab him. “No. Please. I don’t want to go!”

He actually shouted aloud now, meaning he pled with someone else. It had to have been Owen. I took off in a blurred sprint for the front of the building.

I’m coming, baby. I’m coming, Dorian!

But before I reached the building, I slammed into an invisible wall. White-hot pain knifed through my brain, bringing me to my knees. Kali. She was here, too. I clasped my hands over my ears and doubled over my knees as I tried to push her out of my head, but my mind began to gray out. Then went blank. As did my vision.

I didn’t think I’d actually passed out this time, but the next thing I knew, Tristan and the others stood next to me. Vanessa sprinted away, toward the far end of the parking lot, but after what I didn’t know. Pressing the heel of my palms to my temples, I squeezed my eyes shut and forced my mind to focus inside the building. But Dorian’s mind signature was gone. Kali and Owen seemed to have disappeared, too . . . as well as one of the others, one of the Daemoni who had been there.

“Shit!” I scream-sobbed. “We were so close!”

“Amadis royalty,” I heard in my head, coming from someone in the building. “I feel it in my blood.”

“I feel it, too. They’re close. But they can’t help us. We’re locked up like fucking lab animals.”

They weren’t only thinking, but spoke to each other. Daemoni being held prisoner. At a building that may or may not have belonged to the DoD. Why? And what did Kali have to do with it?

We can help you, I dared to tell them. Just tell me what’s going on.

An evil laugh cackled in my mind. “You can’t help us, princess! Even if we wanted you to, we can’t ever go with you.”

“Not that we want to,” another added, his voice vaguely familiar from a distant memory, but I couldn’t grasp it.

They growled more words at each other, but they were incoherent in my mind.

“I don’t know what they’re doing in there, but I don’t think locked up Daemoni is a bad thing,” I said as I tried to push myself to my feet, but Tristan’s hands were heavy on my shoulders.

“Are you okay?” he asked with a raised brow. “You slammed into the shield pretty hard.”

“It wasn’t only the shield. Kali was in there, too, but she pushed me out. I’ll be fine.” I lifted my brows until he finally let me up. “We just need to figure out where they went.”

“I tried to catch them,” Vanessa said as she ran up to our group, “but Kali or Owen put up a cloak. They disappeared from sight.”

I swallowed down the sob threatening to explode. We’d been so damn close. So close to holding our son again. So close to killing the bitch sorceress and her traitor son. My eyes cut guiltily over to Char, glad she hadn’t heard my stray thought. She paid no attention to the rest of us, but glared at the black DoD building with hard sapphire eyes, her jaw muscle popping in and out as she seemed to grind some kind of thought between her teeth. I thought about peeking to see what she was thinking, but decided to give her privacy. I didn’t really have to wonder too hard about it—she wanted to kill Kali as much as I did.

We pulled back into the woods and kept surveillance on the building throughout the night, in case they all came back, including Dorian. When it started to look like they might not return at all, we took shifts watching while the remainder of us rested at the safe house. At some point between my first and second shift, an unknown Daemoni warlock had come in and strengthened the shield, blocking the mind signatures inside from me. The stronger shield also meant no one could flash in or out without us knowing. The only people who came and went, however, were Normans dressed in either security coats or civilian clothes. What were they doing in there? And had they already done it to Dorian?

I held onto his word that he was okay. I hoped he would have told me if they had been running some kind of tests on him or something. Surely in the short time we were connected he would have brought that up. But maybe that had been Kali’s plan—to deliver Dorian to the Normans who were so interested in learning more about us. But what would be her motivation? Why would she hang around? Why would she take him out now when we’d found him?

Tristan suggested the Daemoni had taken the building over from the DoD, who may have had nothing to do with any of it. This theory seemed like another good possibility, given the evidence, but still—why would Kali and Owen keep Dorian there? Was it like Lilith and Bree, when Kali had kept them in the Everglades, right under our noses simply because she could? Or was there more to it?

The only way to get answers was to find them all.

Every time Blossom and I were at the safe house together and both of us well rested, we did our search, but Kali had caught on. Whatever had caused her to lift the cloak long enough for us to come as close as we did must have been a mistake she wouldn’t make again. But we also weren’t feeling any kind of nudge to move out of the area. We were essentially stuck in limbo until something broke again.

Without a clue or a prod or anything, we began debating among the team whether to make a charge on the building. If we couldn’t find Dorian, then we could at least find out who the others in the building were and what was going on in there.

“From what Alexis could tell before they put the shield up, they were all Daemoni,” Tristan said. He leaned against the railing of the wooden deck outside, where we’d all gathered for a drink to go with our afternoon debate. I leaned against him, his arms wrapped loosely around my shoulders, a beer in his hands in front of me. “The most obvious and best option is they’re the Summoned brothers and their offspring. The ones Rina told us about.”

“Unless they’re fools who were caught by the Normans in their traps and checkpoints,” Vanessa countered. She hopped up onto the railing, and gracefully swung down to sit on it, giving no regard to the fact that we were twenty feet above ground. “And they’re probably being tortured and prodded like freak aliens.”

“Which means they could have Amadis in there, too,” Sheree said. She sat on a cushioned lounge chair, gnawing on her fingernails.

I shook my head. “I’m positive they were all Daemoni. Besides Dorian, of course. And the Normans who have been coming and going since.”

“They could be keepin’ the Amadis someplace else,” Jax suggested before taking a swig of his beer. He, too, sat on the railing, his legs swinging in front of him.

“And torturing and prodding them,” Blossom added as she moved to stand between Jax’s legs. “We have to find out. We can’t leave them there.”

“Unless they are all Daemoni,” Char said. She sat under the umbrella’s shade over the outdoor table, an elbow on the glass top and her head resting on her hand. “Then I’m with Alexis—let’s leave them there. Better than on the streets, especially if we can’t convert them.”

“They said we couldn’t save them,” I reminded them all.

“Because they’re probably the Summoned brothers,” Tristan said again, bringing us full circle.

I rocked forward on my feet and placed my hands on my hips. “Well, in that case, we need to find Dorian first anyway. Rina said he’s probably the key to finding the brothers. Maybe even saving them.”

Everyone’s eyes darted around as they thought about what our next step should be.

“You two keep trying,” Tristan finally said, “and the rest of us will create a plan. In the very off chance that I’m wrong.”

I jabbed him with my elbow.

“What? I’m rarely wrong. If ever.”