It didn’t take me long to find Honey. She was in a club in one of the shadier parts of Budapest, looking for her next snack. Surrounded by a bunch of duds with drinks, Honey was purring over all of them. I didn’t want to stay in her head because I was afraid she’d detect me and get skittish, so I immediately jumped to the guy she was currently talking to.
His name was Daven, and he was nervous, not because he was talking to a Vampire but because his family didn’t know where he was. They thought he was at a friend’s house, playing cards, not out at a club. Certainly not talking to the beautiful female in front of him. His anxiety didn’t get him moving out the door, not even when I shouted into his mind that he should go.
But I couldn’t press too hard. If too many of the fellows Honey was chatting with left all at once, she might be suspicious. I needed to wait until Eliza and her people got into position before I made it too obv
The scrutinizing look on Brandon’s face was more than a little bothersome. “Where? Where is there a hunt going on tonight?”I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Not at him but at the fact that I probably wasn’t even supposed to know. “In the forbidden land, the place we shall not speak of.”Brandon was with me now. He shook his head and asked, “The Czech Republic?”“Close. Hungary. So... I’m sorry, but I need to be ready in case they need me.” They would definitely need me, especially if Mila was under the impression that Eliza was able to get the necessary information to track Honey without knowing her source. I didn’t like being so rude to Brandon, but he didn’t have all of the information I did, so he had no way of knowing just how important it was that I was ready when Eliza called.He wasn’t walking away, though. “Why in the world would you be helping the tea
I immersed myself in the hunt, hoping that thinking about catching Honey would mean I wouldn’t have to think about what Brandon had just said to me. Eliza was already out of the vehicle and moving toward the club where Honey was still chatting up those dudes by the time I was situated on the couch and back in the game. I hadn’t heard her explanation for how she knew they were there, but I was sure it was on my IAC, so I could go back and look later if I wanted to.The Hunter with Eliza was a really tall guy named Sergio who spoke in a thick accent, but I didn’t have any trouble understanding him. If I dug into her mind a little bit, I’d probably discover she was kind of in to him, at least it seemed that way. She talked to him like she thought he was hot and stood a little too close to him. Or maybe Eliza just acts like that around all guys. It made me like her even less, if that was possible, but Sergio seemed cool, the kind of guy who might come in h
Eliza and Sergio were moving in. She shouted to the frightened man, “Hey, Daven! Better get home before I call your family!”Startled, he turned around, having no idea who the strange woman with the purple hair was, but he’d had enough. Without a word to Honey, he took off running back the way he came, and I let go a sigh of relief that at least I’d helped save one unfortunate soul.Honey wasn’t amused at seeing Eliza, especially after she’d scared off the Vampire’s dinner. “Oh, great. It’s you again.” She put her hands on her hips and stared at the slight Guardian. “I’ve been wanting to repay you for the way you treated my friends.”Eliza stopped a few feet away from her, folding her arms. Sergio was behind her. I assumed her team was aware that these Vampires weren’t like normal ones, that they would be hard to kill, and they’d opted to go with Guardians in the lead, rath
I heard Honey telling Eliza she should look around her. Eliza held the Vampire down with her boot on the woman’s chest and looked up. I could feel panic welling up inside of the Guardian. She didn’t know what they were or where they came from. But when she returned her attention to Honey, she was undeterred. She’d come there to end the Vampire, and that’s what she intended to do. No matter what.“What are they?” she asked me as she focused on Honey’s neck. She was still intending to behead the Vampire, even though the creatures were still heading her direction.“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I don’t think you should stick around and find out.” I had no idea what kind of damage these creatures could do if they were able to reach Eliza before she got out of there. Mila agreed. I heard her shouting at her team to fall back.“You’re probably rig
I needed to reach out to my sister. As much as I wanted to respect her time away, this seemed like an emergency to me, and I didn’t think she’d be happy if she came back in a few days and found out about these creatures; she’d wonder why no one had told her.I didn’t want to use the phone, though. I realized that my IAC was just as traceable as the phone, but it seemed like, if I called her, Aaron could just grab her phone and dismiss the call and not even tell her it had rung. No, I was going to have to use my brain to get in touch with her. So I decided to try my IAC first.Moving into the bedroom, I took a seat on the bed with the lights off and got ready to explain myself to my sister. A quick check in with Christian, in the periphery of his thinking, not a full-fledged “here I am” infiltration, let me know that he was wandering around in the forest now and not having any luck, so he should be okay. I figured Eliza was back at he
I tried not to think about anything disturbing so I could chill out a little bit, but nothing that came to mind was exactly settling. Not the dream I’d planted, not the reality it had come from, and certainly not the fleeting thought that Brandon had broken up with me. I definitely couldn’t dwell on that at the moment.Breathing deeply seemed to be helping. I checked my heart rate again and saw that it was falling. Normally, my resting heartbeat is slow, like 50 bpm, so it had been working a lot harder than usual. I was glad I hadn’t tried to take Eliza’s exact footage and stick it in Cadence’s mind without building it from my own memory because who knows what that might’ve done to me.I was hoping to hear from my sister soon. If it had worked, she should wake up with her heart thundering, too, though not as quickly as mine had been. Hopefully, she’d reach out soon. I could see her contacting someone else, like Aurora or Elliot
My alarm scared the living crap out of me when it went off a few hours later. I fumbled for it, knocking my phone off of my nightstand, out of reach of my grappling fingers. I continued to reach for it as the obnoxious noise blared through my room until I realized that I could turn it off with my mind—which I did. The silence was almost as deafening as the melody from my alarm.I had been dreaming, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it had been about. I tried to go back over it, to conjure the images in my mind, but they were slow coming. I just remembered the unsettling feeling of being underground, of being alive, but in a narrow opening, lying on my back, with dirt and tree roots millimeters from my face. I couldn’t remember how it was I’d gotten there or anything else that happened before I found myself in the cold earth, but I did remember how uncomfortable it had been to think of the weight of all that ground dangling above me.The thoug
First, I needed to check in on Christian. I was hoping to just scrape the periphery of his mind again so he wouldn’t know I was there. He’d said he’d let me know when he was ready to chat, but it had been too long, and I was worried.I should’ve been worried-er. It took me a while to get to him, and when I did, there was no periphery to scrape. I had to dig down pretty deeply through layers of blackness to find him, which was more than a little alarming. It wasn’t nearly as bad as when I’d had to dig Aaron out of Holland’s web, but it wasn’t good. As soon as I stepped foot into his conscious mind, it became apparent that Christian had gotten himself into a bunch of trouble.“Christian? Where are you?” I asked, finally pulling back enough layers of darkness that I could make contact with him.“Oh, hey, Cass. Nice to hear from you. I’m in a hole. In the ground.”
Cadence was glowing, holding both of her babies, one in each arm. I smiled at her and then focused on Josephina. She wasn’t crying now, but her little face was wrinkled as if she might burst into tears at any moment. Aaron had his hand on her back, beaming with pride as he looked at his little family. Jamie and another Healer, Ona, were cleaning up a tray table, but I caught his eye, and he winked at me. I hoped he could tell how grateful I was. If it wasn’t for him and his life saving blue magical healing powers, not to mention his medical skills, Cadence never would’ve come back to life.“Where’s my new favorite lil girl?” Elliott asked beside me.“Hey! I’m your lil girl. You’re going to have to think of something else to call her.” I threw an elbow at him.“Oh, I’m just teasing,” Elliott assured me. “Still, she is definitely lil. And she is my girl.”“I&rsqu
I’ll never forget the day my sister died. Even now, eight months later, sitting outside of Jamie’s operating room with Brandon’s hand in mine, every time I think about what happened that day, I get tears in my eyes. So many things could’ve gone differently, if only one of us would’ve made a different choice. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what I could’ve done differently myself that day, and even though everyone tells me there’s no point in dwelling on it, what’s done is done, it still haunts me sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, when I can so vividly see Cadence hanging there in the air before she plummeted to the ground, the whoosh of power that left my hand just missing its mark.The new Hunter Leader is a guy named Daniel Bower. He came in from California a few months ago. He’s awesome. I’ve known him for a while. He’s the one who helped capture Professor Stewart after th
I continued to beg and plead with her to come back to us. At fifteen minutes, Scarlet’s whispers were loud enough for me to detect what she was saying to Cale. “How long will he give it?”“I don’t know.” Cale seemed agitated and upset, certainly more connected to my sister than Scarlet. “Not yet.”“Please... Cadey, please.” I felt as far and as deep as I could, thinking about how I’d had to go so very far into her brain to plant that dream. The clock continued to tick. Cadence still wasn’t breathing, and Jamie began to sound desperate. At twenty-five minutes, when Jamie said “thirty,” his voice broke. He knew that the chances of her coming back to us now, after this long, were minute at best. He couldn’t give up, though. We couldn’t give up.Aaron blew two breaths of air into my sister’s lungs, and Jamie started counting again.Something was diff
After Aaron finally moved forward, I followed, staying back a little bit. I didn’t want to see her like that. I had never seen a person’s body after they’ve fallen that far, but I could imagine what it was like.Only when I finally did take a few hesitant steps around the trees, Brandon’s hands on my shoulders, she didn’t look like I expected her to at all.Cadence was lying flat on the ground with her hands folded over her abdomen, sort of like Snow White. Her feet were out straight, and her hair was blown out around her. She looked absolutely beautiful. And still. So very, very still.Jamie was doing chest compressions, and when it was time to breathe, Aaron did that for my sister. Some sort of automatic pilot must’ve turned on for him because his movements were very robotic. Jamie would say thirty, and Aaron would breathe into my sister’s open mouth twice before Jamie started counting again.Tears were rolling
“No!” My scream echoed across the mountainside as I watched in horror as my sister fell. I cannot guide what I cannot see, and I didn’t have a chance to get a grip on her before she plummeted. My hands shot out in her direction, but the surge of power I’d sent to grab her went over her head. I saw a streak of blue do the same and knew Jamie had missed as well.Fumbling through Cadence’s stream of consciousness, I tried again, hoping I’d be able to figure out how to get my powers around her before she hit the ground, but she was moving too fast, and without my eyes on her, I wouldn’t be able to get a grip.Part of me wanted to at least jump into her head, to be with her, to let her know she was okay, but then, the thought of what she was about to endure, when she hit the tops of the trees and then cascaded down through them to the earth, I couldn’t bear the thought, and I knew she wouldn’t want me to see it.I
“Brandon!” I shouted, floating over to where he had disappeared. He didn’t answer, and I realized he must’ve fallen all the way in. “Dang it.” I looked around the battlefield. I knew he was safe down there, but I hated that he was in that miserable place. Cadence was firing at Daunator now while Christian moved in, to place the grenade, I assumed, so I thought perhaps she’d be safe for a few minutes. I decided to help Brandon.“Are you all right?” I asked, using my telepathy.“Thank goodness,” he thought, probably not even to me. “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just really dark in here.”“I know. Hold on, and I’ll get you out.”“If I hold on, won’t it be harder for you to get me out?”“All right smarty pants.” I needed to focus all of my energy if I was going to do this
“You okay?” Brandon shouted to me as he moved a little closer to where I was standing. The holes in the ground were not shaking now as much as they had been before, but they were still an obstacle we had to consider. I didn’t want him to get too close because of my tornadoes, but I was glad he was nearby.“Great,” I called back, sending another pile of creatures over the side of the mountain.Aaron was fighting his way through the crowd of black creatures, working his way to Cadence. The path was getting clearer, as far as the minions were concerned, but once he got within about a hundred yards of Cadence’s location, one of the Vampires that had been engaged with our forces closer to the top of the mountain broke off, clearly on his way to intercept the Guardian Leader.Whether he liked it or not, Aaron wasn’t alone now. I wasn’t sure where she’d come from, but Eliza was running parallel to him, fighting off
Moving the black creatures off of the ledge worked well, and I was just starting my second round when I realized my sister had taken off running toward Daunator. Christian had reached him already, a grenade in his hand. I prayed he didn’t get sucked down into another hole. The fact that Cadence was so far away from Aaron was worrisome, but he was busy with the creatures. While Cadence was slowed a few times by the minions sinking their teeth into her arm or grabbing at her heels, for the most part, they seemed to be letting her through, which seemed like a bad sign to me. Did Daunator want her to fight him?A blast of light illuminated the mountain, and then a wave of smoke obscured my view of Christian and Daunator. He’d thrown a grenade, the old kind, the ones he knew wouldn’t work. When the smoke cleared, Daunator’s laughter echoed through the air, and Christian went flying twenty feet in the air.Paul’s voice came over the IAC as I tos
Christian’s eyes widened. “Get out of here? We can’t. We have to get Daunator.”“We will. But for now, we need to go back and regroup. The most important thing is that you’re safe now,” Cadence explained to him.Christian was starting to freak out again. “No, Cadence, you don’t understand. We can’t just leave from here! We can’t just let him go!” His eyes were wild, and he reached forward and grabbed my sister’s shoulders. That lasted about half a second before Aaron grabbed him and pulled him off.“Listen, Christian, I agree. It’s important we come back and end this, but you need medical attention. And a good visit with Hannah.”And a shower, I thought to myself. But I was staying out of this one for the moment. I felt a stirring in the ground and a shift in energy somewhere further up the mountain. The argument was about to be moot.“No,