Refuge(145)

I ignored the cold nausea as I pulled the dark magic into me. It seemed to take on a life of its own, fighting to escape as if it knew its impending fate, but I was a lot stronger than I’d been two months ago when I encountered my first Hale witch. My power incinerated the magic. I heard a scream nearby, but all I cared about was Chris.

“Chris? Chris?” I rolled off him and tapped his cheek a few times before his green eyes opened and he gazed at me in confusion. “Hey. You with me?” I asked him.

He groaned and rubbed his brow. “That is some war cry you have, cousin. What the hell happened? I feel like I have a killer hangover.”

“Hale witch.” I glanced over at the witch who was lying on his side, facing away from us. “Come on, we have to get up.”

“Up?” He blinked in confusion. “Why are you so wet?”

I tugged on his arm. “Long story. Come on. Get up.”

“Shit!”

I looked up in time to see Jordan dive away from the attack of a snarling female vampire who had probably been a college freshman a few weeks ago. Jordan rolled in a ball and came to her feet with Chris’s sword in her hand.

“This is more like it,” she said fiercely as she brandished the weapon with ease. The vampire skidded to a stop and stared at the sword warily. Jordan leapt forward in a burst of speed and sliced off one of the female’s arms at the elbow.

“That was for Mark,” she shouted over the vampire’s screams. “And this is for Olivia!” The sword whistled and the vampire’s head separated from its body.

Jordan stood over the corpse, shoulders heaving and silent tears running down her face. Then she spun with the dripping sword in her hand and stalked angrily toward the fallen Hale witch.

“No.” I pushed to my feet and caught her arm. She tried to pull out of my grasp, but I held firm. “Trust me; you don’t want him in your head. I’ll handle this.”

The witch had his arms wrapped protectively around his head. I nudged his back with my boot, and he moaned loudly.

“If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out,” I told him pitilessly. “Get up.”

He rolled onto his back and uncovered his face. I sucked in a sharp breath when I saw that he was only a boy, maybe sixteen, if that. How young did these guys start in this business?

“Please,” he whispered brokenly. “Please finish it. Kill me.”

“What?” I took a step back. “I’m not going to kill you. I just wanted to stop you from hurting people. Did you hurt more of my people out in the woods?”

The boy nodded, and I swore furiously at the thought of the warriors lying out in the woods in pain. “You better hope they’re alive,” I ground out. More screams pierced the air around us. “If we survive this, you are going to show us where they are and then you are going to fix whatever you did to them. You understand me?”

“Please.” He sounded more like a young boy than a powerful witch. “They took my mother and my sisters, and they will kill them if I do not do as they ask.”

“I’m sorry about your family, but I’ll do anything to protect my family, too. You can sacrifice yourself later if you want to, but not until after you help the people you hurt. Now get up.”

He stared at me for another minute before he sat up. His strained expression told me that was as far as he could go on his own.

I was loath to touch him, but I could not leave him here and give him the opportunity to escape. Reaching down, I grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. He wavered unsteadily and I called Jordan over. “I don’t think he has enough juice left in him to try anything, but if he does, you can kick his ass.” I gave the boy a hard stare. “You hurt anyone else and you’ll deal with me.” I had no idea if I could hurt him, but he didn’t know that. He nodded submissively.

Jordan gave the boy a warning glare before she took his arm. I hurried back to Chris, relieved to find him sitting up. “Can you walk? We can’t stay here.”

Shouts reached us before he could answer, and I turned to see Erik and three other members of his team racing toward us. The warriors sped around us and intercepted a group of six vampires advancing on us. My heart thudded when I realized how close we had come to being taken by them. Surrounded by so many vampires, I had a permanent lump of ice in my chest, which rendered my vampire radar useless.

Erik quickly sized up our pathetic group. We had one sword, an injured witch, and our seasoned warrior was down. “Get out of here,” he shouted at us. “We’ve got this.”

I glanced around us frantically. In every direction, I could see fighting, hear screams and shouts. Until now, we’d kept away from the main battle, but it looked like it had found us. There was nowhere to run.