“What?” I asked as Lochlynn strode toward the cage. My brain had short circuited, so I couldn’t think clearly enough to figure out what he meant. It sounded ridiculous to think that he could mean that…that he would break that cage open just because I asked him to. I didn’t even know what to think about that kind of insanity.
Lochlynn put his hands on the bars and leaned against them. All the humans had shied away from the demon, except for those that had truly given up. They watched Lochlynn with a lazy kind of curiosity that made me think they didn’t care. They really didn’t care if he game in and drained them dry. Just another stop to the heart.
“If you want me to do it, then I will,” Lochlynn said, turning around. “You think this is easy for me to look at, but it’s not. None of these peopled deserve to be treated this way, and I know that. They just having something that we want, and demons are capable of taking it.”
I stared at all the faces in that cage. My heart screamed at me to let him do it. Bust down that door and let them all free. Some wouldn’t make it far, like the woman who had been talking to me. She hadn’t moved away from Lochlynn but watched the whole conversation with an odd light to her eyes. Like it amused her to think that we could want to help. To save her.
My head screamed at me. We were in the middle of a demon party. There were so many in the house that we couldn’t get away with this. Even if we saved a few of those people, the demons would know that we had done it. Lochlynn’s father would probably kill me, then. I had become too dangerous to spend time with his son.
As selfish as it made me feel, I had to wonder if I could do that to Derrick. He didn’t have much of a chance, but I was pretty much it. Seanan and Seamus relied on me to get this done, to find our friend. I wanted to do that, even though it hurt my heart to think of leaving these people.
“What do you want me to do?” Lochlynn asked, looking back at me. “Soon, someone will realize that we aren’t at the party, and they’ll come looking for us. Probably Llewellyn or Danielle.”
I didn’t want either of them anywhere near me. Llewellyn disgusted me on a fundamental level, and Danielle seemed out of her fucking mind. Best to avoid both of them.
I looked at the people in the cage again, all of them staring at the two of us. We had become the most fascinating thing in the room.
From behind me, the vampire started to laugh. It sounded as mad as he looked. Unhinged. “You think that you can do anything for them?” he asked.
I turned to look at him. He had finally taken his eyes off the feeder cage. The vampire rolled to his hands and knees in a way that somehow reminded me of a spider. His face twisted up, and a sneer stretched across his mouth. “Open the door. I dare you. It’ll be fun to watch as all those humans scatter, and the demon descend on them like a cat dropped into a mouse cage. Nigel will be furious that his supply was taken away, and he’ll come after you. I won’t get to see that, but maybe I’ll hear you screaming from all the way upstairs.” The vampire tilted his head back without moving his body, making it stretch more than I thought it should.
My stomach twisted.
I dug fingers through my hair, trying not to pull it. I didn’t know what to do. It all boiled down to a single question that I didn’t have the right answer to. How selfish do you want to be?
Either I could potentially save every person un that cage, or I could hold on, hold out, and maybe find Derrick. Maybe fine his corpse. Was he worth dozens of lives to anyone but me, and even if someone said yes, did that matter? Should it have affected my decision here.
My mind ached. It just ached, from too many disappointments and hit along the way. I’d lost so much already, I had caught the eye of an insane demon, stood in the middle of a basement of torture with that demon’s son, staring at the lowest kind of depravity that I had ever encountered. I felt insane, because I liked Lochlynn, a lot. I wanted to see him shirtless more than I felt comfortable admitting. Even after meeting his insane family, even after his father attacked me, I still wanted him, and that made me insane.
Everything felt like it made me insane. I’d abandoned my sister, my friends, for this. This quest that had been doomed from the start, because Derrick made his choice. I wanted to save him from himself, but he had made his choice. He wanted to be the hero and rescue his sister and he hadn’t cared about the rest of us.
It pissed me off, and it made me insane, and I didn’t know how the hell to do any of this. I had been worried about a test last week. I’d been going through the motions of dealing with Linda and trying to fix what I sensed had broken with my sister. She had been so polite to me for so long, and then this happened. It felt like I screwed everything up, every chance that I got, and I hated everything.
And I still didn’t know what to do here.
“How many of them do you think will get away?” I asked. “How many of those people do you think would actually escape.”
Lochlynn turned to look at the cage, cocking his head. “It’s not so much a matter of getting away, as staying somewhere safe,” he explained. “Any one of them could get away, but Nigel would send his werewolves after them. That’s one reason to have werewolves. They’d have to disappear entirely. Most people are incapable of that.”
The girl who rubbed a bald spot onto her head, crawled forward. She put her hands against the bars, staring right at me. “I promise, you won’t ever see me again. If you open up this door, then I’ll disappear. I’ll disappear so good that you won’t believe that we ever knew each other.”
The redneck leaned against the bars as well. “Shut up. You aren’t helping us. Listen to me.” He looked into my eyes. “There are a lot of things that I can understand, but what you’re doing? It ain’t one of them. Working with one of them, over your own kind?”
I looked at Lochlynn, my teeth clenched. I hated the assumption that all demons had something evil in them. I hated that part of me used to believe that bullshit as surely as this man did.
“You are supposed to be loyal to your own people. You have a chance now to save some of us, and even if only one makes it to the end of the finish line, it don’t matter. That’s your job. Your obligation, understand.”
“You’re ruining it!” one of the men hissed and shoved the redneck. This man looked pretty fresh. He had a shaved head, without even any stubble on it. “Stop talking to her like she’s a traitor that needs to be reasoned with.” He turned to look at me, taking a deep breath. “You decide whatever you think is best, but please…please think of what all of us are missing right this second. The families and friends that we left behind, they deserve to know that we’re alive.”
“That doesn’t work,” I said. “You have to disappear. You wouldn’t ever get to see them again.”
“I can live with that,” the redneck said, and he sounded like he meant it to.
“Ignore all of them,” the used-up woman called out. “They all want their lives back, forgetting that they sold those away. You can think of it as saving us all you want, you can hope that your life will be better for doing it, but none of that is true. We are paying our debt, and you don’t have to worry about that. Stay free, girl. You owe us nothing, and we knew the deals that we had made. We knew these hellish days would be coming for us, and that they would hurt more than even you can imagine.”
“How many?” I asked Lochlynn.
“I’d say maybe five would stay free,” Lochlynn said. “Most will get recaptured before they even get off the grounds. Some will have a few more weeks. It all depends on the werewolves and how fast they move.”
Five lives or one. My options narrowed down to that.
I didn’t care about the other stuff. The things that these people had done, or how guilty that woman might’ve felt. Everyone did horrible things, at some point in their live. Even if they didn’t realize it, or didn’t care about it, that horrible thing had still been done. I could forgive them for this sin, just like I had with Derrick.
Five or one?
I scanned the cage, looking at each of the people in turn. they had started to argue amongst themselves, but I didn’t pay much attention to the words they spouted at each other. I couldn’t take anything they said here seriously. Desperation made people do weird things, and so did a nihilistic attitude on the rest of your life. I watched them all, frowning as they talked with each other.
Then I looked at Lochlynn, standing by the keypad, ready to push the buttons the second I gave him the word. He looked so tired. I couldn’t blame him, considering how awful his whole life had been. His father constantly tormenting him, shoving souls down his throat. Ripping him in half just because he could.
“They’ll be mad at us,” I said.
“Yes,” Lochlynn agreed, nodding once.
“They will probably punish us.”
“Most definitely.”
“We can’t get out of our fault in this.”
“No.”
“Let them out.”
Lochlynn didn’t hesitate to press the buttons, his fingers moving smoothly. A second later, the door swung open. Lochlynn grabbed it before it could close again, three seconds after opening. He pulled back on the door, and the metal started to screech. “The code at the top floor is one-one-five-nine. Go.”
Something in the door broke as people started to pour out of their prison. The first out was the redneck man. He shoved someone out of his way and ran up the stairs like he had thunder underneath his feet. Each pounding footfall just made me think that the end would be coming faster.
The muscles in Lochlynn’s arms bulged as he pulled at the door. It had started trying to close again, and it looked like Lochlynn just wanted to make sure it never did that for the rest of its existence. One of the hinges snapped with a metallic ping, and I heard mechanical things trying to recover from the break and unable to. Lochlynn stepped back, panting.
The humans didn’t pay him any mind. They kept running out of their cage, and up the stairs. I lifted my head, watching as they disappeared, and wondered if I would end up in the cage they had just left. It felt like the kind of thing that Lochlynn’s father would do, just for the hell of it.
Four people stayed behind. One of them, the used-up woman, cocked her eyebrow at us. “Going to try and save me next? You can save a lot of time if you just kill me. That’s what I would prefer.”
“I’m not going to do that,” I said.
She gave a bitter smile. “No, I didn’t think so. That’s the only savior for me, though. Death. I wonder what the inside of a demon feels like. Sometimes, I have these dreams that make me think I almost know. I can feel myself moving. I’m young and strong again, not like this withered old body that I have now. When I do die, do you think that I’ll be able to experience things through the demon’s perspective?”
I winced. “For your sake, I really hope not.”
The woman laughed.
One of the others looked like they had already died. They laid on their back, staring up at the ceiling. Their eyes had gone completely white, and they had been used to the point of death. I didn’t think anything in this world would save them.
Of the other two, though…
“What about you?” I asked a woman sitting on the floor. She had her head resting against the cage bars, looking exhausted. She tilted her head over to me. “Broken leg. Couldn’t get away if I wanted to. And no, I don’t need you to carry me to safety. If I can’t walk, then I can’t be one of those five, right?”
When I looked to the last person, he turned passive eyes back to me. He smiled, lowering his head in a deep nod. “I’ve made my peace,” he said. “I consulted with God long before making this deal, and God has promised that I will still go to my heavenly reward. I will not back down now, just because you have opened up the cage. My fate is sealed.”
Lochlynn released the door, but it didn’t swing shut. It couldn’t, since he had broken the hinge. He came over to me, rubbing his hands together. He looked worried as he came to a stop next to me. “We’ve done what we could for them.”
“Now the real fun begins,” that vampire cackled from his cage.
Upstairs, a siren started to echo throughout the house. I could hear the sound of pounding feet and shouting voices. A deep growl went through the house, making my shiver. I wrapped my arms around myself, still staring up at the ceiling. “That didn’t…sound great.”
“No,” Lochlynn agreed. He touched one of my hands, and I gave it over willingly. His fingers laced through mine, and he started to pull me up the stairs. “They’ll send the werewolves down to sniff the area. We need to be gone before that.”
“Won’t they find out that we did this anyway?”
“Yes, but the werewolves won’t have the control that my father would. They would also be kind enough to kill us immediately, rather than drawing it out for possibly years.”
My stomach rolled as I realized what I had done. It had felt like the right decision at the time. Still did, as a matter of fact. That didn’t change the sick feeling in my stomach or make me believe that I would make it out of this in one piece. If alive.
Yesterday would be furious with me.
At the top of the stairs, Lochlynn and I peeked through the door. When we didn’t immediately see anyone, he yanked me through the door and down the hall. We ended up in a bedroom about four seconds later. He locked it behind us, and then the two of us sat on the floor. The bed would’ve required more walking.
Pounding footsteps traveled down the hall, and I tensed up.
“Werewolves,” Lochlynn said, taking one of my hands again. Mine felt small in his, but I didn’t mind that, or the effort I went to make my fingers lace with his. “They’ll head downstairs to secure the scene. They have to stay down there, so let’s hope that Nigel didn’t send any extras. If he did, then they’ll come looking for us, and we’ll be busted all the sooner.”
“Do you think I made the right choice?” I asked.
Lochlynn shrugged his shoulder. “I’m not sure. Some choices aren’t right or wrong. They just are. You could’ve saved someone’s life tonight, and yeah. There will be consequences for that. A lot of them, probably. Some of them will be painful, too, if my father gets involved.”
I didn’t want to think of that. It just made me stomach sour.
“What would you have done?” I asked. “If you had been in my position, given the same options that I had been given, what would you have done?”
“I’d have let those people out,” Lochlynn said. “I know that you want to save Derrick, and I know that you’re trying to do what you think is right for him, but…There is a good chance that we can’t do anything from here on. If Savannah has him, then she won’t let him go. Especially if there are people trying to get him back. That’ll make Derrick all the more a prize to her. Something to be cherished and kept until it dies.”
I rubbed my chest. “I still want to try.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I feel like I’ve let you down,” I said. “And myself. Every time we make some progress with Derrick, someone tells me that we can’t save him. I know they aren’t lying to me. I know that I should stop trying. Derrick didn’t want me to do this. He wanted to accept his fate.”
“Some people aren’t hardwired to fight their own decisions,” Lochlynn said. “Most, actually.”
“But I still wanted to fight for him,” I said. “I would’ve died for him, but he always gave up so easily. I can’t seem to do that, even knowing that it would be better for everyone around. I just…can’t do it.”
Lochlynn rubbed my shoulder. “I’m not upset with you over that. You care about him, and that matters. You’d be surprised how few people actually fight for those that end up here. There have been studies on it, and people have come to the house asking questions.”
“How did that end?”
“You don’t want to know.”
No, I probably didn’t. If his mother had answered the door…I nearly shivered just thinking about that woman trying to intimidate someone. She didn’t have to put much effort into it, since she could’ve easily killed any human that crossed her path. I didn’t even want to think about his father in that position.
Shouts started up in the hall. One person screamed the loudest, saying that they needed to track down the humans and whoever had done this. Their voice echoed off every wall in the hallway and bounced around my skull. I shifted, uncomfortable. “I’m sorry that I got you into this too.”
Lochlynn scooted closer to me. “Don’t be sorry for that, still. I get how out of control things can get.”
“That’s no excuse, really. I know your father is going to be a pain in the ass about this. Will he…What will he do to you?”
“I don’t know. We’ll find out when he discovers that I had anything to do with this latest stunt.”
I pictured all kinds of awful things happening. Like Lochlynn getting another piece of his soul removed, or having it cracked. I pictured his father beating him, like he would have the other day, had I not gotten in his way. He could’ve mowed me down without hesitation, and he had chosen not to.
Instead, he played with me, cracked my soul, and then left me alone. What would happen this time?
Lochlynn scooted closer when someone punched a wall so hard that I felt it shaking. He touched my shoulder, and I looked over at him, eyes wide. “What was that?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
Since he’d had all the answers until that moment, I didn’t know what to do with his explanation. Then my brain registered his proximity, and I stopped thinking altogether. That strong scent of his, the spicy scent that I had come to like the last few days, it overwhelmed me. I breathed deeply, taking the s cent in over and over again. I could feel the warmth of his skin as well, and it sparked something in my brain.
Because obviously, we didn’t have a better time for something like this. Like the last two days that I had spent in his rooms, or something.
My mouth opened, because breathing became harder.
Lochlynn looked over at me. We made eye contact for about two seconds before I turned my gaze away, my heart beating too fast. It felt like someone had shot me full of adrenaline.
Lochlynn put his hand on my knee, and I turned to stare at him. The same thought kept going through my mind. That we couldn’t do anything right then, not with the halls filling with werewolves, all hellbent on ripping our throats out and finding all the humans we tried to save.
That part of my mind shut off fairly quickly when Lochlynn leaned forward. That spicy scent brushed across my face in one fast sweep, and the rest of my thoughts disappeared. I leaned forward, pressing my mouth right against Lochlynn’s. That scent filled every part of my senses.
Lochlynn didn’t hesitate or seem surprised by the sudden kiss. His hands cupped my face instantly, and he pressed his mouth harder against mine. That huge body of his loomed over me, and it made my thoughts stutter to a halt. Everything became about Lochlynn and keeping his mouth on mine.
His teeth touched my lip for a second, dragging it out. It felt like pure energy jolted through my body, and I just thought about pushing him onto the floor, getting on top of him. I didn’t know where things would go from there, but they would all feel wonderful. It would feel like all our problems fell away.
His hands dug into my hips, jerking me forward. I cried out, a breathless little moan escaping me. Lochlynn almost had me in his lap at that point, and my hands dug into his shirt so hard that his jacket almost ripped. I felt the fabric wanting to give way.
One warm finger brushed up my face, and it felt like all my nerves came alone. I jerked again, pushing myself harder against him, eyes closing. Our mouths had stayed locked together the entire time, I just wanted to keep going, to keep kissing him. If we never stopped, then this moment didn’t have to end, either.
Something else hit the wall, and I jerked away from Lochlynn out of surprise. I heard a deep, guttural snarl coming from the hallway, and my thoughts realigned themselves. “What was that?” I asked.
“I think the werewolves found us,” Lochlynn panted. He rubbed his eyes, which had looked brighter than I had ever seen them. He looked brighter than I had never seen, now that I thought about it. More alive. Not like he had to hide himself.
“Lochlynn?” a deep male voice boomed. Landers. My heart twisted around in my chest. “Come out right this second and bring the human with you.”
He closed his eyes. “I could probably buy you some time. You might be able to run.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to do that, and even if I did…I’d have to leave everyone behind, and I don’t want to do that.”
Lochlynn rose to his feet, took my hand, and helped me stand up as well. Once on my feet, I looked around the room. “It was nice while it lasted.”
We stepped out into the hall together, to find Landers waiting there. I’d never seen him so furious before. His eyes practically burned out of his skull, and he stared at his son like he wanted to rip him to shreds. Landers lifted his hand, and magic barreled at me so fast, I didn’t have a chance to blink before the world went dark.