Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 40759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Ryan’s face scrunched up in pain as he shook his head. “I don’t remember. It was so long ago, and… I can’t recall seeing her or anyone else. I don’t remember there being anything but the debris of the building itself.”
The club, from what Ryan and Leith had reported back, had been mostly burned. They had finished the job and then razed it to the ground.
Marcus rounded on Leith. “Did you, or did you not, find the white ashes that would tell you a blood witch had died? I know there was no body, no bones, but were there ashes?”
There was a silence then as we waited.
“I don’t know,” Leith rasped, shaking his head, and I saw it then, on his face, the pain etched there, that he was the weak link. “I was so angry…because of you.”
Marcus nodded, reached for him, and because it was him and only him, Leith let the hand slip around the back of his neck, allowed the bigger man to draw him close. None of us, myself included, ever pushed Marcus away. It just wasn’t possible.
“It was crazy,” Ryan told Marcus. “I went with Leith, and I don’t remember anything except wanting to kill whatever we found. I was furious…wrathful…and that’s all I was.”
“You assumed,” I said, the first words I’d spoken since I walked in with my mate, Raphael Caliva, two hours before. “You assumed it was Moira who attacked you.”
“Yes,” Ryan husked, his eyes red and raw as he stared at me.
“But you didn’t know for certain; you’d never seen her before.”
Ryan nodded quickly.
“So the woman, creature, that tried to kill you could have simply been a demon sent in her place while the real Moira looked on.”
They were all staring at me now, and I felt my mate’s hand slide between my shoulder blades for comfort.
“You knew Moira was there, in town, because Raph tracked her that far from here, from the city, but he’s the only one of us who knows what she actually looks like.”
“Jesus, that’s right,” Malic gasped, shaken.
“None of us had any way of knowing who, or what, we were fighting,” Marcus summed up with a sigh, as Joe, his hearth, stepped in beside him. Instantly Marcus clutched the smaller man close, just holding him helping to ease his tension. “I assumed Moira would be the one coming at me. It made sense that it would be her, but I never got an answer. Whoever that was never said yes, it’s me. She didn’t do anything but try and gut me.”
Joe trembled, and Marcus gave him a reassuring squeeze, as if to remind his hearth that he was alive and well, that Joe hadn’t lost him.
“When Ryan cut off her head,” Marcus continued, “I assumed the same thing you all did—that she was dead and gone.”
“Yeah,” Malic said, “but you didn’t actually know if it was her or not. You couldn’t say for sure.”
“No. Ryan cut the head off a creature I thought was Moira. I saw him with my own eyes, and she had spoken to me not moments before.”
“But you didn’t really know who you were looking at,” Malic stressed.
“No. You’re right. All we had to go on was what we saw during the fight. To me, to all of you, it looked like the witch was dead, and Shane, Joe’s old friend, the warder, had his memory washed, so he couldn’t corroborate anything either.”
Leith nodded in agreement. “And then, of course, there was a fire.”
We had fought a demon and his minions over a hell dimension, and after Malic was hurt and Leith had to help get him home through a portal, there was only me, Marcus, and Ryan left. We’d done our best, but there were so many creatures, wave after wave of them, and when we were overrun, Marcus, with his great strength, had lifted all three of us high off the floor, near the ceiling, in a move that only he could manage. Ryan’s power, like Leith’s, was in the portal, which took him and me home to safety. Marcus had fallen through the dimensional door, and we’d thought, at the time, that he was lost forever. It took almost a year, but he was finally restored.
“When I killed who I thought was Moira, whether it was her or not, a warder void should have opened and sucked the body through the wormhole and scattered the remains throughout all the planes of hell so the demon, or witch, couldn’t regenerate.”
The void always appeared; it was how we killed demons without raising questions. If there were bodies lying around, it would be hard to keep the warding under wraps.
“Thinking back, I don’t remember if it appeared or not,” Ryan confessed. “I was so focused on other things, on fighting, on finally having killed our enemy, and then on trying to stay alive when the demons surged through the door, that now—”