"Aery, I need a shot!" I screamed, holding back the energy pulsing at my fingertips until he was out of the way. The instant he maneuvered the fighting to give me a clear path to the bad guy, I unleashed the fiery red energy and watched it streak through the air until it hit the grotesque monster who'd been holding his own in a fight with Aaron Drake.
My power drained from me as it hit our foe in the chest, slicing and melting through. I lifted my arm a few inches and the light streaking from my hand rose like a laser. When it reached the hideous creature's throat, I moved my hand right and left until he was decapitated, and then watched in horrified fascination as the body seemed to evaporate before my eyes.
My gaze shifted to my friend as I checked to be sure he was okay. I was used to Aaron totally dominating, no matter the species he was fighting, and the fact he'd maneuvered to give me a clear shot to kill the guy told me Aaron wasn't sure he could've won.
As far as I know, I'm the only person who can get away with a cute nickname for the sexy, tough-as-nails, bad-ass owner of Drake Security, but I never do it around other people. I wouldn't have said it today while battling an unknown monster, but it slipped out. No problem though, the bad guy seemed to evaporate and turn to smoke once the life force left his body. I usually want to cry after a kill, even when it's a really bad guy, but I discovered not having to look at a body made it easier. Either way, I couldn't give into the guilt and soul searching until the op was over.
"What was that?" I asked Aaron.
"No idea," he said, barely out of breath. "I used to see things kind of like him a few thousand years ago, but not since we entered the Common Era. I got decent look at him; I'll send a sketch to a few friends and see if they have any ideas. I was about to shift into dragon form and see if my fire would work, but your laser did the trick."
I took a breath and pulled energy in from the forest around us. I'd used up almost all my reserves with that one shot. If something else came along, I'd be useless. I leaned against a tree and tried to relax in the crisp, autumn air.
Aaron, of course, noticed. "I can top you up. You know I have plenty."
I shook my head. "I'm not up for pain right now. Just give me five minutes with a few trees." I could almost always find an ancient tree willing to give me energy. It might take a little time, but not as long as gathering it from the air around me. A waterfall would be faster, or even a creek or stream, but I didn't hear running water.
"I won't push more in than you can take, not during a mission." Aaron said. "You used it to save me, the least I can do is top you back up."
"Okay," I relented, "but into my hands. I'll route it to the right chakras."
He didn't argue, thank goodness, and held his hands out for me to grasp.
He released energy through his palms into mine, and I dropped enough of my shields to let it in. The forest around us stilled and my heart seemed to need less energy to pump my blood.
I routed the energy he gifted me to my first two chakras first, since I primarily pull from those for my weapon, and then filled the rest. He truly does have plenty, but I never want to get used to depending on him.
During the few minutes Aaron's energy filled me I was at one with everything around me — totally at peace with the world, the universe, and perhaps even God. All energy is magic, but Aaron's is a special kind of magic.
If we were compatible sexually I'd be madly in love with him, but since we aren't, he's one of my best friends. I love him, just not romantically.
When I was as full as I could get without feeling pain, I gently let go of his hands. When we do this as an exercise and he's expanding the volume I can hold, he forces it in long past when I would choose to let go.
This hurts about as much as I imagine a lightning strike would, and there's a lot of screaming and crying involved on my part. I hate acting like a girly-girl, but he assures me he screamed and begged when his reserves were being stretched, too. Of course, that'd been thousands of years ago, so who could say how much he remembered of the pain?
Today, though, I felt warm and full and loved. "Thanks," I told him.
Words couldn't adequately thank him, so the single word would have to do.
Besides, we were still on our mission and needed to focus, so I asked, "Do we circle back around and try the mystery cave, or try my idea?" I already knew venturing into the unknown cave wasn't an option, but hoped he'd consider my Plan B. Aaron hadn't liked it when I proposed it a few hours ago, but we were running out of options.
He lifted his chin in agreement while showing no emotion. Aaron Drake could totally rock bad-ass. "Let's pull Nathan in to help," he answered. "I'm not comfortable using you as human bait with just me as your backup."
I nodded and leaned against a tree, closed my eyes, and made Aaron's energy my own while he texted Nathan our coordinates. Nathan wasn't too far away, but was acting as lookout and would need to put someone in his spot and before joining us.
We knew women were being kidnapped and taken to these woods just outside the boundaries of Prentice Cooper State Forest. Aaron is a weredragon and has an exceptionally good sense of smell. He found what appeared to be a staging area, but the women's scent ended there. A few male non-human scents led to the mouth of a cave, and I'd found narrow wheel marks between the two spots. Aaron couldn't identify the species of the men by smell, and wasn't sure about them now that he'd seen one of them, either.
I theorized they might be putting the women into some sort of cart to get them into the cave, but Aaron didn't want to go in without knowing what we were walking into. I understood the logic, even if it frustrated me.
Still, Aaron was thousands of years old and hadn't made it this far by being stupid, so I generally listened to his advice. Not always, but usually.
My Plan B had been to send me into the staging area as a bumbling, helpless female making a lot of noise, and hope someone showed up so Aaron could question them and find out what was going on.
However, if we happened upon more of whatever we'd been fighting earlier, I wasn't sure how we'd question it. Aaron and Nathan in human form and working together could probably subdue one of the creatures, but if more appeared they'd likely be forced to shift into their animal forms.
Not a problem for Nathan, who shifted into a lion, but Aaron's gigantic dragon form was hard to hide, as he tended to knock trees down and create a huge disturbance even when he didn't take flight. He might've gotten away with it a hundred years ago, but with practically every American owning a camera phone today, he wouldn't risk it unless the situation were worse than dire.
The creature I'd killed had looked like an amalgamation of goat, ape, and the Incredible Hulk — minus the green. It'd been tan and brown, with long curved horns and vertical slitted eyes with flaming red irises where they should've been black. Creepy was an understatement, and he'd scared the bejeebers out of me even before I knew he was almost too much for Aaron to take on in human form.
As a human who can't magically heal like the shapeshifters, I only use my metaphysical laser to kill from a distance. Attempting to wound a powerful supernatural creature would likely only get me killed, once they saw I was a serious danger. I could cut limbs off with my laser, or deliver a kill shot, but couldn't do much else. However, we'd need to capture the next one so it could be questioned, which meant I could only act if I thought there was no other choice.
I was full of energy now though, and if I portioned it out I could probably kill two with what Aaron had given me.
Nathan, as always, startled me when he appeared in front of me. He walked as quiet in human form as when he was a lion, and he was just as ill-behaved, arrogant, and stubborn as any grumpy house-cat, so we didn't exactly get along. I trusted him with my life on a mission, I just didn't like being around him. Too bad he was gorgeous and — if the rumors were true — we'd be perfectly compatible in bed.
Ignoring the fact he'd startled me, I told the men, "I need to hand off my gun and mags to one of you. The goat monsters will probably be able to smell them and I'll lose my whole helpless female vibe."
Nathan held his hand out, choosing to remain nonverbal as usual when around me. I held my tongue as I pulled my nine millimeter from the holster and handed it off, then the two extra magazines. He put my weapon in a zippered pocket on the side of his thigh, and slid my magazines into slots on the inside of his military style tech-vest.
No matter how much of an ass he might be, he's still built like my ideal man and I always have to work to keep from lusting after his more-than-perfect human body. He could smell emotions and physical reactions, and I endeavored to give him nothing. It was more likely he didn't care what I thought or felt, but just in case he did, I wanted to keep as much feedback from him as I could.
We were about a half mile from the staging area Aaron had found, and I started walking to it, knowing Aaron would map out a plan with Nathan and they'd both be in position long before me. As a human, no way can I move as fast as either of them.
Walking away from them, through the woods, towards danger without my gun was terrifying, but I breathed through my fear and tried to keep my physiological reactions to a minimum. Both for my own pride, to keep Aaron and Nathan from smelling my fear, but also because it wouldn't do for the goat-people to know I was terrified before I saw them. A lost human can be expected to smell a little scared, but not out-of-her-mind terrified.
I was pretty sure the creature I'd killed had the snout of a goat, which would likely mean he couldn't speak as a human, but I heard guttural speech when I was around sixty yards from the cave. I purposefully walked loud, and as I rounded a boulder and headed towards a gully, I saw movement.
They stopped talking, and only one of them was waiting for me as I neared. He looked almost like a man, though a grotesque one, but I could see hints of the goatman's features in his mostly human face.
I deliberately let a little shock show in my expression before I reined it in to be polite. "I seem to have gotten lost. Can you tell me how to get back to the main parking lot in Prentice Cooper? I thought I was following a trail, but I guess at some point I must've gone off the blazed pathways and…" I tried to look as vulnerable and incompetent as I could manage. "I feel like an idiot, but I wouldn't know which direction to go even if I could figure out where north is."
I wasn't all the way back to the staging area, but I knew both Aaron and Nathan had excellent hearing. However, if they'd heard the creatures talking then I'd have expected them to have apprehended them before I arrived, so I wasn't sure what was up. I couldn't come up with a reason to scream, but I needed to do something loud so they'd know where I was.
Sound doesn't always carry as you'd expect when making your way into and out of gullies as you climb and descend mountains.
The second creature stepped out, and he looked almost exactly like the one I'd killed, though his horns seemed thicker and heavier. This was my excuse to scream, and I did. Long and loud. These guys not only looked terrifying, but I'd seen how well the other fought, so the fear in my screams wasn't an act.
I heard Nathan running towards us this time, but only because he intended for us to hear. The shock value of watching an eight hundred pound lion running towards you is enough to make anyone freeze, and I stepped out of the way as Nathan pounced on the more goat-like of the creatures. The other one ran, and I saw Aaron take him to the ground just before they rounded a corner.
Nathan had a paw on the goatman's chest, and his scary lion teeth pressed into the goatman's throat enough for a small trickle of blood.
"He wants to know where the women are," I told the goatman. "I'd advise you to start talking. He's tasted blood and he can't always pull himself back."
This was a lie. Nathan had perfect control, but I wanted to be sure the goatman was sufficiently terrorized.
"He should just go ahead and kill me, then," the goatman said from the ground, his voice strained.
"Oh, no. He likes to play with his food before he kills it. Sometimes creatures are more than half eaten before they finally die. He knows which parts of the body he can eat without getting into an artery, and he bites around the spots that would let you bleed out. When they're gone, he opens the stomach and eats the liver while his victim watches. I've never managed to stick around for much of it, the screams are horrid."
He'd actually only done this around me once, but I wasn't lying about having to leave because of the screams.
The goat creature actually laughed as he said, "He won't eat me. I taste awful and will make him sick." His English was good, but he had a chopped, guttural accent, and I had the feeling it was his second language.
Aaron showed up with the other creature tossed over his shoulder, and as he flung him to the ground I saw silver laced zip-ties around the creature's wrists and ankles. I smelled burning flesh, but it was worse than usual.
Good to know these creatures had an allergy to silver, but I took shallow breaths to keep from gagging. Burning goat flesh smells even worse than burning human flesh.
Aaron wore a backpack, which I assumed contained Nathan's clothes, which meant my guns should be in it, but now wasn't the time to ask for them. Instead, I asked, "Can I have the roll of silver twine, please?"
The twine wasn't all silver or it wouldn't have worked to tie creatures up. There were silver threads woven into the outer casing, and it was quite painful to most shapeshifters. Silver didn't bother Aaron, but would burn Nathan, which meant either Aaron or I would need to restrain the second guy.
He tossed me the roll, and I deftly caught it and stepped to the goatman restrained under Nathan's paw. I made short work of binding his goat ankles together — he was completely furry and wasn't wearing clothes, so I tied the twine tight enough to burrow into his fur and touch skin. I heard the sizzle and smelled the burn, and finished the knot as quickly as possible while holding my breath.
Now he was thrashing under Nathan, but the huge paw on his chest kept him from moving too much.
No stranger to the human version of CBT, I reached into the fur at the goatman's crotch, found his genitals, and wound the rope around his nuts first, then his cock. I would've paid someone ten thousand dollars for a pair of gloves in that moment, but didn't let the goatman know how skeeved I was — he needed to think this was just a normal day for me.
Nathan had his mouth off the man's neck now, but still held him down with his massive paw, and I saw the claws dig in when the man moved around too much.
"Please, Azazel below, please save me from this torment!"
Most people beg God or Jesus when tortured, but this was the first I'd ever heard someone beg one of the lesser known demons of hell.
"Doesn't look like your demon's listening," I told him. "Where are the women?"
"Lucifer, Belial, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus!" he called. "Someone! I need help!"
I looked at Aaron as gears starting turning in my head. Azazel was somehow related to goats and was a demon, and the other beings he called were also demons or devils. Asmodeus is supposedly tied to lust somehow, but I wasn't clear on how or why, or how powerful he may or may not be.
"They're half-demons," Aaron said, his face a mask so I had no idea whether this was a bad thing, or a terrible thing.
I must've looked confused, because he further explained, "He's calling demons because he's related, though probably pretty distantly. However, he's right about the lion not eating them — they'll taste horrid."
"How do they survive here? Do they have a more human looking form?"
Aaron shook his head. "Just as some beings of faery can come into our realm and have sexual relations with women, so can the lowest of the demons. Most of the inhabitants of the hell realm can't get into our world through a normal gateway, but a few without much power can. You're looking at their offspring." He looked in the direction of the cave, though we were too far away to see it, and added, "My guess is they can pass through gateways with ease, which means they probably live in the hell realm and only come here when on an assignment."
Nathan gave a pissed-off cat grumble, and Aaron looked at him a few seconds before shifting his gaze back at me. "I'll try to get information from them, but the odds are we'll need to hand this off to someone else.
This isn't my forte."
I looked at the goatman and noted a change in his entire demeanor. He was hurting, but he was getting off on it now. I looked to his groin and saw his erect penis poking up through his fur.
Aaron might be right, but I wasn't ready to toss in the towel just yet, so I told him, "If you'll bind this one so I can play with him without needing the lion to hold him in place, then maybe you can take the more human of the two and let me have a go at this one?" Nathan wouldn't want us to name him to enemies while he was in lion form, so we didn't.
Aaron realized I had a better chance of getting somewhere with the half-demon who was sexualizing pain, so he nodded.
Three minutes later the grotesque goatman was strung with silver-laced rope between two trees, his erection still peeking out of his long fur, and the smell of burning goat-meat permeating the air.
I pulled my knife from my pocket and grabbed his cock, but instead of fear I heard a guttural moan of pleasure. I needed to see what I was working with, so I did a rough job of shaving around his cock and over his balls before I grabbed his nuts and squeezed.
I'm a masochist and a sexual submissive, but I've seen enough Dommes work over their male submissives to know a thing or two about how to torture a man's genitals. I squeezed until the sounds of pleasure turned to screams of pain, and then held it for a count of fifteen. When I let go, it was only to let him get two breaths before I squeezed again.
Nathan walked up behind me and startled me again, and I turned to see him in human form and fully dressed. He handed my gun over, and I let go of the goatman's nuts long enough to holster my firearm and magazines before I returned my attention to the prisoner. I'm not a sadist or a Dom, but I found I wasn't disgusted by hurting this man. He had something to do with the women who'd been abducted, and I needed to know where they were and how to get them back.
"I've only just begun," I told him as I held his creepy-as-shit gaze. "I can hurt you in ways you can't turn into pleasure." I methodically unwrapped the twine from his cock and then his balls, and didn't slow my progress when I saw it was stuck to his skin and I was pulling flesh away with the twine.
He was going soft, which was what I wanted, so I quickly unwound the rest of the rope, and let it fall to the ground. I grabbed the foreskin, gathered it in my fist, and settled my knife in position to give him the beginnings of a very rough circumcision. I let the knife slide into his skin about a quarter inch and looked into his disturbing eyes, my face an emotionless mask. "Where are the women?"
"Gone," he said, his voice even. I'd scared him into talking, but he wasn't going to give me the pleasure of seeing his fear. "The cave is a gateway for us, but will just be a cave for you. The women are beyond your reach." Ah, so it did no harm to tell me. He was only verifying what we'd already guessed.
Or, maybe it could mean something to us, if I knew the right questions to ask.
I considered what I knew and asked, "You have to take them in some sort of cart, to get them through the gateway?"
He nodded, but Nathan said, "Don't even think about it. It's a gateway to hell, which is another realm, just as Faerie is another realm." He looked to Aaron and then back to me. "It's different, though. Where the Summerlands are mostly neutral and appear to only be concerned with what is fair, the land in Hades is hateful, as are the residents. There is no good there, Kirsten. We aren't going." I'd been into The Summerlands once, for about five minutes, and would be thrilled to never go back. If Hades was evil where Faerie was supposedly just a bunch of Fae having a good time doing things humans considered socially unacceptable, I'd do everything in my power to stay away.
Still, I couldn't just walk away from this, knowing over a dozen women who'd gone missing had likely been taken there. "Then how will we rescue the women?" I asked, not ready to give up.
"We'll hand the problem over to someone better qualified," Aaron told me as he walked to us. He nodded to my prisoner and added, "You've done an impressive job with this one, but since we know we can't mount a rescue today, we need to move before something else comes out of the cave and tries to rescue them."
I saw the wisdom in his statement, and as much as it pained me to not find the cart and charge off on a rescue mission, I knew I'd do the women no favors by getting myself caught right alongside them.
I looked at the prisoners and then to Aaron. "We're done with them, then?"
He shook his head. "We're about a mile from a road outside the park.
Someone will meet us there and take them off our hands, and one of our lookouts is moving our vehicle down there. Nathan and I will carry the prisoners to the rendezvous, and then you and I can return to headquarters while Nathan waits for our contact to arrive and collect them."
So many questions, but I'd learned from experience Aaron would only tell me what he intended me to know, so it would likely be a waste of time to ask who was going to come get the prisoners, and what qualified him to hunt half-demons.
Aaron had contacts all over the world, from the highest levels of the U.S. Defense Department, to royalty living in palaces around the planet.
The politicians in Washington hired Drake Security to do the things they couldn't legally ask our military to do, and Aaron held a top level clearance, which was super impressive for a man with fake birth and school records.
However, I had a feeling this time he'd called in some high level supernatural Aaron would just as soon keep me in the dark about.
I sighed. "This is another of those cases where there are supernaturals I don't know about, and you figure I'm safer if we keep it that way, right?"