32. Declan

32

DECLAN

T he first thing I felt was pain.

The second, a strange, uncomfortable stiffness in my arms. Like they were made of some kind of thick metal, and not flesh and bones.

I blinked, or at least I tried to. My eyelids were impossibly heavy and though I'd just woken up, my body was already begging me to fall back into the painless depths of sleep.

Only, it was a ruse, because my sleep had been anything but painless. Nightmares, more real than any dream I'd ever experienced, had plagued every corner of my sleep.

I whimpered at the brief flashes of them licking at the peripherals of my memory.

Flashes of gore painted my eyelids, and my head pounded with the echo of horror-stricken screams—some of them mine, but not all of them.

I forced my eyes open, desperately fighting my body's demand for rest. My skin ached, the touch of fabric from my shirt pure agony where it lay against my torso, every nerve rubbed raw .

There were thick tubes shoved into my arms, liquid apparently streaming both in and out of my veins.

What the fuck. Where was I? What happened?

The lighting was abrasive, that awful bright white that should be illegal to use in any room that wasn't a hospital. It did nothing to help the pounding drum in my skull.

"Declan?" A soft voice whispered to my right, but I couldn't quite move my neck around to see. "Are you awake? Are you okay?"

I blinked back the stark light, trying to get a feel for my surroundings. I was in a small room, the walls and ceiling a white as obnoxiously loud as the light bouncing off their surfaces. From my position, I couldn't see a door—or much of anything.

I twisted, just slightly, wincing as pain shot up my spine. I followed the winding tubes from my arms. They led through a small hole in what looked like a glass wall, though I'd bet all the money in my bank account that it was shatterproof—impenetrable.

Familiar whirring blotted out the dull buzzing in my ears and the echoes of screams I was doing my best to ignore. I clocked a few machines just outside of my cage. I focused on them, trying like hell to ground myself in the present—anything to get away from the possibility of more sleep.

"Wh-" it was the only thing I could manage—a sound that would have to function as a question for now.

My head felt like it weighed two thousand pounds, my body like it had been buried under an avalanche.

Were we back in the lab?

No.

Max had burned it down.

A different lab, then?

The sterile coldness of this place had The Guild written all over it. Sterile-white was practically their branding package .

What happened?

My memories were sand, slipping through my fingers as I tried to collect them, coming to me in disjointed patches.

I reached for Max, chancing closing my eyes for a few moments in an attempt to feel her, to speak through our link. Only I couldn't. All I saw when my eyes closed was death, all I felt a breath-stealing panic.

"Jarrod knocked Max out," the voice whispered again, the sound more familiar this time. I held onto it, used the gentle warmth as a rope to pull me out of my spiral. Rowan. "Us too, though he hit you with the same number of tranqs as Max, so it'll probably take you a while to feel like yourself. I've only been awake and cognizant for an hour or two," a pause, "I think. You—" he sighed, "you were screaming. What was he doing to you? You were yelling, and then it was just silent, I thought—" his voice caught, "I thought you were gone for a moment there."

"Is—" the word was more grunt than anything, my throat raw. I didn't want to think about why—if I had been screaming, I didn't want to linger on the reasons, didn't want to revisit those dreams.

"She's not here," he said, picking up on the question I couldn't voice. "Think they left her." He grunted. Left her? The cabin. The town. My stomach threatened to empty itself at the memory of the massacre I'd been too late to stop. All of those innocent people, gone. And for no reason other than their proximity to Max, and Jarrod's insatiable greed. "I think he's keeping us for collateral, to ensure that she comes around to his plan. Force her into some kind of negotiation."

"That," a new voice—sharp, loud, and abrasive this time, "and we're running a little experiment. If it goes well, I may not even need her at all."

Jarrod appeared on the other side of my cage, his beady eyes assessing every inch of my body, his mouth twisted in a greedy little grin that grated like nails on a chalkboard.

"What're you doing to her?" There was a series of loud, dull thumps that rumbled my wall, and I knew Rowan was likely ramming against it in an effort to get to me or attack Jarrod. Maybe both. "Leave her alone. O-or take me—use me instead."

"You're all but useless to me, unfortunately." Jared glanced in the direction of Ro's voice, his nose scrunched in disgust. "You see, I had a thought." He lifted a small vial, dark with blood, but there was an almost iridescent shadow to it when he held it up to the light. He turned to me, fully stepping into his supervillain era, no longer bothered with trying to pretend he was anything else. "You see, Xavier noted that when you found him, with Evelyn and the others, you were particularly strong. He told me that you were able to easily pull and use Ms. Bentley's powers, and with impressive ease." His smile brightened.

My stomach lurched at the barely-constrained excitement in his voice.

"And I perhaps am uniquely positioned to understand just how impressive that is," he continued. "I know firsthand how difficult these powers can be to master." He tilted his head. "I can't be sure that draining you will give me access to her powers too, at least not to the extent that you are tuned into them, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. If I can move things along without the girl's direct compliance, well," he grunted out a half-hearted chuckle, "that would certainly make things smoother for me—for us all, really—wouldn't it?"

He emptied the vial into his mouth, cringing slightly at the taste. He licked his lip then shrugged. "Remarkable isn't it, the depths one must sink to when trying to save our kind. I'm practically a vampire now." His forehead lined as he studied the empty vial, blood still staining the glass. "Not quite to my preferences, but assuming I survive the sample, I'll be ready for transfusions in a few hours. Those are less…revolting to suffer through."

The banging from Rowan's side of the wall grew more erratic, more desperate—but I knew it was futile. The Guild designed these cells to hold the strongest, most dangerous supernatural creatures they could catch. We stood no chance of getting out with attempts at using brute force. Especially not as weakened as we were.

Hell, I could barely even lift my head more than a few inches without wincing.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes again, this time ignoring the flashes of violence that seemed to be permanently etched into my brain's memory.

The bond. I needed to fight past whatever they'd done to me.

What had they done to me? Was it a drude?

My chest hollowed at that possibility. If it had been—if I'd been this affected from one brief encounter with one of those creatures, how had Atlas survived months locked with one? How had Sarah?

The bond still hummed inside of me, its normal glow and strength dampened, but it was still there. That meant Max was okay. Or at least alive. Maybe that was the best I could hope for right now. I wasn't sure any of us would ever be okay again.

If I could get some of my strength back, I could reach her, warn her—keep her from coming here.

"On the chance that I'm wrong," Jarrod continued, oblivious to my attempts, "I wanted to have options, collateral here that might influence Ms. Bentley to see things my way. She's young, troubled. But I'm sure that with the right amount of…suggestion, even she can be convinced to see reason." Jarrod's gaze drifted over to where I assumed Rowan was glaring daggers at him, his expression bored and a little annoyed. "But if you continue that racket, I might be convinced I only need one of yo ur lives to trade in exchange for her cooperation. Tell me," his expression curled into a dark smile, "who do you think she cares more for? A brother who doesn't even share her blood? Or a mate?" His eyes glistened, bloated with cruelty. "Of course she has four others, so perhaps it's the illusion of family she'd prefer to save—the only remnant of childhood she has left. She does strike me as the sentimental type."

"Where are we?" I barked out, sitting up, despite the wave of nausea and pain the miniscule movement sent through me. I needed to keep his focus off of Rowan. There was no way in hell I was letting his bloodthirsty thoughts anywhere near reality.

Max had lost too much.

I refused, after everything, to deliver her a dead brother.

He studied me, surprise raising his brows. "You don't feel it, then? I was told you might."

I swallowed, my mouth drier than sandpaper. "Feel what?"

His eyes narrowed, confusion and anger battling out across his features. "The stone."

The stone.

It was here?

I glanced around the room again, or whatever small slice of it I could see from my cage, but nothing about this dungeon stood out. It looked like a miniature version of Headquarters' lab, though unfamiliar enough that I knew I'd never been here.

"Perhaps that creature took too much from you." Jarrod shrugged, then walked out of my sight line. "Oh well, not necessary that you sense it, but I must say I'm disappointed all the same. The scientist in me is truly so curious to test the limitations of this bond of yours. Perhaps we should have started there. If things were less," his eyes narrowed in thought, "urgent, we would have."

Metal clanked against metal, the sound echoing harsh and abrasive in the sterile room .

I shivered at the possibility of which tools he was gathering. Somehow not seeing them made it all the worse.

We're almost there. Hang on.

The words were a whisper at first—a gentle breeze given form. And then, I'd half-convinced myself they'd been nothing more than my imagination, my subconscious desperately clinging to some possibility of survival, creating hope where there was none.

But then I heard them again, louder this time.

"Don't worry though, I'll put you under again. I'm not a monster." A soft chuckle, like he'd made a joke. "I don't believe in pain for pain's sake, despite what you might think of me."

"Tell that to the town you cremated," I spat out, bile coating my tongue. How many people had died at this man's hands? Or, if not his hands, at his orders?

"A tragedy, to be sure. But one that was meant to prevent a much larger one, in the end," he mused, still fussing with tools I couldn't see.

"Your job is to protect people," Rowan said, his voice dark and on the edge of breaking. "To save them."

"I'm trying," Jarrod barked. He dropped whatever he was doing and walked back over to us, his posture rigid, expression unhinged. "To save us all. Don't you get that? These deaths, however tragic, are nothing compared to what will come, if we don't destroy hell." His eyes locked on mine. "You used to believe in our work, Ms. Connolly, our mission. I've read your files. You were a fierce hunter, rising through the ranks. Who knows?" he shook his head, eyes wide, incredulous, "another decade or two and you could have been appointed a seat on the council. Instead," disgust ate away at his expression, "you've thrown it all away. And for what? A girl? A vampire who's convinced you he's not evil? Teammates come back from the dead as a werewolf and whatever the hell the younger Andrews boy is now. Tell me, Ms. Connolly—how many lives have they taken since you've turned your back on us?" His lip curled as his gaze cut to Rowan, then back to me. "You're no different than me. You act all holier than thou, but look at the trail of violence you've left in your wake since abandoning your post. Since abandoning the mission passed down to you from your ancestors. You had potential, but you were too weak to see it through."

"I believed in The Guild, yes," I fought to keep my words even, to distill the rage boiling in my blood down to something more usable. "I thought I was part of something important, that we were working towards the greater good. Then," I sat up straighter, ignoring the sharp bolts of pain shooting through my spine, "I got more information. And I changed my opinions and actions accordingly. That's not weakness, that's critical thinking."

A shadow fell across his features, but before he could respond, a crash echoed through the room, explosive and thundering.

Jarrod flinched, the little color he had in his face dissipating quickly.

I couldn't see beyond the boundaries of my cell window, but I could feel them all.

They were here.

Jarrod dropped the small blade he'd been gripping, the sharp, tinny clank as it hit the floor almost comedically soft compared to the sound of my team's entrance.

"You've come." His voice was higher than normal, his lips quivering slightly at the corner. He was afraid. "That's good. Though perhaps a bit sooner than I'd planned for." He winced. "Tell me, have you considered my offer?"

There was another loud crash, and then a soft scream that was cut off almost as quickly as it started. Jarrod's fingers trembled at his sides, his eyes shifting from side to side, as he watched whatever was unfolding unfold .

He licked his lips, glanced quickly at me, then raised his hands up in surrender as he took a step back. "Now, Ms. Bentley, you have to understand." He stumbled, his breathing erratic as he tried to create more distance between them. "I'm trying to serve the greater good—to help humanity. We can work tog?—"

He was going to run. Teleport. I read the decision on his face the moment he made it.

Apparently, so did Max, because she came into view in a flash, her hand wrapping around his neck.

To outside observers, it would be a strange sight—this short, lean girl, hardly half the size of this man bulked with muscle, holding his life in the palm of her hands. But I knew the depths of her power, felt it make a home in my own marrow.

Jarrod's eyes widened as he read his death in her eyes.

"Wait." Darius came into sight, eyes shifting briefly to me with a small nod of acknowledgment.

Max only tightened her grip as her other hand shot deep in Jarrod's chest, where I knew his heart would be pumping a panicked rhythm against her knuckles.

"Yes," Darius said, voice soft like he was speaking to a frightened animal, "kill him. But I have an idea before we leave his body."

Picking up the small blade Jarrod had dropped, Darius sliced a deep line into the man's arm, collecting his blood in a small jar.

It was a strange sight, watching the room suddenly still and quiet as Darius stole the council member's blood.

"There," he said, fastening a lid on the container, eyes sparkling with delight. "Kill away, my dear."

I grunted in disbelief. Was he really focused on his own stomach right now?

Max said nothing. She merely withdrew her hand, Jarrod's heart along with it .

He collapsed at her feet, his death surprisingly anticlimactic.

When she took a step towards me, her gaze cutting to her brother, then back again, I realized that she was covered in blood. Her dark clothes were soaked with it, her arms painted red.

Jarrod wasn't the only person they'd encountered then, on their way into this hell hole.

I failed to conjure much pity for those who died at her hands. Not after what they'd done.

Her eyes were black, pupils blown wide, her expression flat, like she was only partially here with us.

She got that way sometimes, when she used too much power—like she gave a little of herself over to it, in exchange for more strength.

"You're okay," she said, her jaw rigid, like she was fighting desperately to contain the storm of fury etched into her bones. She turned to her brother again. "Both of you?"

I nodded, my body still stiff and sore from whatever Jarrod and the drude had done to me while I was asleep.

Her eyes fell to the tubes dangling from my arms, nostrils flaring at the sight, her anger almost palpable in the air. The tips of her fingers sparked when she twitched them, like the hellfire was aching for a chance to scorch this place to the ground.

Wade, Atlas, and Eli came into view, the five of them huddled together so that they could get a good look at me and Ro.

They were all covered in gore, all wearing identical masks of fury that were slowly melting with relief.

It was done. The council was dead.

I took a deep breath, and when I exhaled, it felt like I'd shed an entire boulder's worth of weight from my chest.

Max glanced down at Jarrod, sparing him only a momentary glance. "His death was too quick. I should have made him suffer."

"No amount of torment would have been enough." Darius nudged the corpse with his foot, mouth dipping into a frown. "At least it's done."

"Get them out," she said, her words stiff, filled with gravel. She tensed, head tilting to the side. "It's here. The stone. I'll retrieve it." She took a deep breath, shivering slightly. The dark edges of her irises started slowly bleeding through with familiar threads of brown. She reached her hand forward, the tips of her fingers gliding gently against the wall. "So much death, so much torment within these walls."

"Well, we didn't leave much standing upstairs. Might as well finish the job with style." Darius grinned. "What do you say, Little Protector? Are you in the mood for one final Guild-worthy bonfire?"