Chapter Twenty-three

Helena glanced down at her hand where Darryl held her so securely, and tried not to pull away. He’d only done what she’d told him to do, after all. Instead, she raised her free hand at her side palm-up, and tried to concentrate. Normally when she wanted to teleport, she simply did so. She would reach out to the place she wanted to be, picturing it in front of her like a dangling carrot. Then there would be a flash, and she’d be there. But right now she was doing something new.

She began to whisper a few words. They were ancient and Latin-based, and the truth was that she had no idea how she knew them in the first place. But she knew they were the right words and they acted like a booster shot to the transportation spell, bolstering its power.

However, she stopped after only a few words and opened her eyes. She turned to face the rest of the room, meeting Lucky’s gaze.

His brow was furrowed with worry and more than a little confusion. “Why’d you stop, lass?” he asked, glancing nervously at the door.

“I can’t leave you,” she told him. “If I can help you, I have to.” She glanced at the cousins. “We’re wardens. This is what we do, right?” Then she looked back at the leprechaun. “What’s on the other side of the door, Lucky?”

No one was supposed to be able to even find Lucky’s bar if he didn’t want them to, much less infiltrate it. But Lucky was barely keeping this new threat on the outside of the tavern, and Helena was pretty sure that small advantage wasn’t going to last him much longer. Already, most of the patrons and employees had filed out through the back door of the establishment. Only a handful remained, those taller or stronger, and they all brandished magical weapons.

“No, Helena, yae need tae leave now!” he told her frankly.

Helena tried to let go of Darryl’s hand to fully face her friend. She was determined in this. But Darryl held fast, and when she whipped back around to face the warlock, his expression was stern. And his eyes had gone red. “He’s right!” the zombie insisted. “You can’t fight this. Not right now. None of us can.”

Helena blinked. Darryl knew what was out there?

Of course he bloody did. He knew everything.

But then she bared her teeth and yanked with all her might, freeing herself from his grip. If it was that bad, then Lucky was sure to die. There was no way in hell she could leave him to that fate.

“Damn it, lass, I said go NOW!”

Helena had barely turned to face Lucky again when his voice echoed powerfully. The true fae power in him showed as a wave of magic washed over her, blasting forth with such strength, she felt it like a punch to the chest. She was knocked backward into one of the boys, who wrapped his arms around her and held tight. She was stunned and actually grateful for the stabilization, because her world suddenly turned on its head.

Leprechaun magic encircled the lot of them, shoving them through the portal that Helena had begun, but that Lucky now finished. There was neither grace nor gentleness in this magic. It was desperate and it was fast, throwing them through a hole in space and time that whisked them away at break-neck pace. When the four of them came hurtling out the other end, not one of them landed on their feet.

Helena hit the floor and rolled, her savior having let her go in order to prevent himself from taking a face full of table. The lot of them knocked into furniture and skidded across polished hardwood, finally coming to rest in four partially immobile piles of shocked soreness.

“Ouch,” murmured Liam from where he slowly pulled himself to his knees a few feet from Helena. He’d been the one to grab hold of her before the portal had stolen them away.

Not far from them, on the other side of a long wood table, Will was also getting to his feet. He looked around as he rose to his full impressive height. “So now we know leprechauns can teleport into our safe house,” he muttered off-handedly.

Their safe house? Helena thought. She looked around as she sat up and Liam offered her a hand. She took it, slowly coming to her feet. “This is your place?” she asked, taking everything in. It was some kind of library from the looks of it, and according to the titles she could make out on some of the spines, the books were very old and very well cared for. They were also some of the world’s most treasured and forbidden texts on the supernatural realms and their legends and lore.

“It’s is,” said Liam.

“Welcome to our safe house,” said Will with a sweep of his arm. Helena followed his gaze, absorbing as much of her surroundings as possible. “We’re in an abandoned missile silo in Pennsylvania. Renovated, obviously.”

“Mi casa es su casa,” added Liam as he pulled his gun from its place at his back, set it on the table, and then rubbed his side. “I need a drink. You want one?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and headed toward the arched exit to the room.

At the exit was a short set of three or four stairs leading to a lower level that sported punching bags and work out equipment. One room exercised the mind, the other the body.

Darryl had apparently been tossed down the stairs as they’d come out of the portal. Liam passed the warlock at the bottom of the steps as Darryl pulled himself up and dusted off his black coat.

“You want a beer?” Liam asked. Darryl seemed very slightly taken aback by the offer, but he recovered in record time and nodded. Helena wasn’t sure whether Liam even noticed the nod; she could only see him from behind and his stride didn’t slow. He rounded a corner and disappeared.

Helena tried desperately to process it all. All of it. But that made her legs feel sorta wobbly, and her knees began to buckle. So she leaned forward, pulled out one of the chairs at the library table, and sat down hard. She flushed hot, and slipped off her jacket, allowing the cooler air to touch her arms.

Will was immediately at her side. “Hey…” he said, his tone laced with concern. “You okay?”

Helena made a derisive sound, but her heart wasn’t in it. Truth was, she was dizzy. A pain in her gut made her glance down. Blood was spreading across her white tee-shirt. “Shit,” she muttered. She’d forgotten about the werewolf wound.

Will looked down when she did, and suddenly he was swearing under his breath and taking a knee beside her. “You’re bleeding,” he said as he grabbed the sides of her chair in his strong hands. He then spun her around to face him.

She sat somewhat stunned, looking up at him as he gingerly grasped the hem of her shirt and gave her a questioning look. “May I?”

God, those eyes, she thought absently. She nodded.

He lifted the shirt to expose the bandages she’d placed across her stomach earlier. The gauze was drenched. Something about Lucky’s magic spell must have ripped the claw marks right open again. Either that, or it had happened when she’d hit the ground.

The thought of Lucky back there with whatever she’d abandoned him to pissed her off, and before she realized what she was doing, Helena reached down and ripped the damn bandage off. She winced when she did; the tape stuck to part of the wound, yanking away tiny amounts of skin.

“Whoa,” Will said, quickly grabbing her hand to settle her down. “Hold up.” His eyes were searching, his brow furrowed. But Helena’s heart was racing.

“It’s just a few scratches,” she said, teeth clenched. “I just need some new gauze.”

Will shook his head, glancing down at the four claw marks. “Not anymore,” he told her. “You need stitches.”

Helena’s gaze narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘not anymore’?”

Will swallowed hard and froze as if he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I just mean… they may have been more shallow earlier, but you’ve moved around a lot and they’re deeper now.”

Helena began putting facts together in her head like an algebraic equation. What she came up with when she solved it was something unsettling. How could Will have known what they looked like earlier?

“How long have you been watching me, Will Slate?”

Will looked at her long and hard, and Helena began to feel strange. He was boxing her in, his tall, strong body blocking her exit from the chair. His eyes were honest; she could tell that much after all this time. But they were honestly torn too – which meant he was hiding something at the same time. And she knew it was something to do with her.

Helena moved fast, placing both of her hands on his chest to shove him backward. He managed to catch himself, coming at once to his feet, but she was already out of her chair and moving around the table to put distance between them. “You’re hiding things from me,” she told him, “which means you’re lying to me.”

“Technically, he isn’t,” said Darryl, who had come up beside her on the stairs. Without hesitation, Helena spun and punched him in the jaw with all of her strength. The powerful warlock stumbled back several steps and hit the wall, where he shook his head as if to regain focus, and gingerly touched the side of his face. His lip was busted, and a thin trickle of almost-black blood escaped his left nostril. It moved slowly because his heart pumped just as slow.

“That’s for killing me thirteen times,” she told him. Then she turned back to Will. He’d moved. Now he was at the end of the table, only a few feet from her. She took a step back and pulled her gun, leveling it on him in a serious and steady grip. She’d had a lot of practice.

He at once straightened and raised his hands in placation. “Okay you’re right,” he told her. “We haven’t been completely honest with you.” He hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “But we were telling you the truth about wanting to protect you. That’s why we were watching you, and that’s why the spell was made.”

“The spell you won’t tell me about,” she hissed.

Will sucked in his lips, and then said, “It’s just that some aspects of the spell aren’t so… pleasant.”

Helena felt her throat tighten. She could think of a lot of unpleasant things. “Like what, damn it?”

“Like this,” Liam said. His lips were at her ear, and his arm was around her body before she fully realized what was happening. When he captured her arms, her gun was effectively lowered, and he was smart enough to keep his head to the side so she couldn’t head-butt him in the nose. The needle he stuck in her arm was only the icing on the betrayal cake. She hissed with the sharp but passing pain, and Liam held her tighter, fully emptying the syringe’s contents.

As soon as he was finished, he took the needle out, and then grappled with her for the gun. He won. They were both equally skilled; but he was stronger and she was too discombobulated to use any of her magical abilities on him.

In the end, she wound up facing him, and he just watched her with hard, determined eyes. His hands were down at his sides, her gun in one grip, the now-empty syringe in the other.

Helena touched her arm, glanced down at it, then looked back up. “What did you just do to me?” She was very proud of the fact that her voice didn’t shake. Because she felt very shaken up just then.

“The potion needed to be absorbed, love,” said Darryl, where he still stood beside the wall. “But not necessarily swallowed.”

Helena looked from him to Liam and back to Darryl. She realized in that quick moment that when Liam had passed by Darryl and offered him a beer, he’d actually done something else. Unspoken words had passed between them and a plan had been hatched. When Darryl had nodded, he hadn’t been nodding about the drink. He’d been nodding: It’s okay to inject the potion; you don’t need to drink it.

These guys were good. She was outnumbered. And she was unarmed.

And Will is now behind me. Her eyes widened and she spun, but it was too late. He was a mere inch away, towering over her, and his hands were faster than hers. She recoiled, leaning into one bent knee to fight, but he was no stranger to fighting stances, and in a hair’s breadth of time he had both of her wrists secured. He then yanked her toward him with such force, she fell against him, splaying her hands to catch herself on the broad expanse of his chest. As she did, he released her wrists, shoved his fingers through her hair, held her tight, and kissed her hard.

Helena’s mind exploded. There was no reason, no sense, no right or wrong or yes or no. There was nothing but the feel of his lips against hers, pressing in, opening her up. And then there was warmth, uncoiling inside her, beautiful and terrifying. It steamed through her core, sizzling through her muscle and bone, infiltrating her blood – and Will moved in further, his arm coming around her waist to crush her against him.

It was the perfect kiss, filled with longing and desperation, yet tenderness and deep understanding. She had never been kissed like this. She had never even dreamed of being kissed like this.

Had she?

Something familiar niggled at her mind. It was quickly overshadowed by the behemoth that was Will’s magnetic embrace. But when Helena began to feel the penetrating magic of sleep chase hard on the heels of her budding desire, she knew it was also the most traitorous kiss she’d ever been given.

Whatever magic he’d ignited took over in record time and Helena’s legs gave out. Will lifted her easily into his arms, never breaking his kiss. A flash of very real fear followed hot and hard on that wonderful and deceitful spell, giving her just enough strength to call out with the only thing she had left in her arsenal – her mind.

Ashrim, they’re coming. Please… help me….

Darkness overtook her then. In that warm and deep darkness, the Night Terrors opened their arms to welcome her home.