Furious Fire: Grimm's Circle, Book 8 (14 page)

But there were dark, ugly spots that wouldn’t come free, even when I poked at them, like prodding at a slowly healing wound just to see if it still hurts. And it did—like fire.

Leave it alone
.

I hissed out a breath as those words echoed in my mind.

Jerking my head up, I found Will’s silver gaze holding mine in the mirror. They narrowed and once more, those words shot through my mind.
Leave it alone—you’re not ready for those memories
.

In a blink, the pressure in my mind was gone and his gaze focused on the road.

I sucked in a desperate breath and turned my head to stare blindly out the window.

Ready for…

A chill raced through me.

It was odd, wasn’t it? I remember so clearly the way I’d died. Each time some memory broke free, that was always the first. Those last, final moments.

But the memories from the
first
life, I could remember nothing past the night when I all but dared Thom to make love to me.

Just what was it that I wasn’t ready to remember?

Unwittingly, my gaze drifted back the man sitting in front of me. What didn’t I remember…and what did it have to do with him?

I don’t know, but those hidden memories left me aching, ready to cry, longing to fling myself at him and hold him, desperate to hold on and never let go.

But that was out of the question, because one thing was painfully clear.

He looked at me with desire—I’d seen it too often not to recognize it in a man’s eyes.

He looked at me with suspicion—that was just fine because I looked at just about everybody the very same way.

But most of all, he looked at me with the eyes of a stranger. He had absolutely no idea who I was, and that cut me straight through to my heart.

It hurt more than I could possibly say.

“Well. When you said we needed a sizeable location to serve as a base of operation, I had no idea this was what you had in mind.”

Finn took in the sprawling, crumbling structure of stone perched on a cliff facing out over churning, steel gray water.

And even before they appeared, he heard voices.

“Sounds like somebody beat us here.”

“Greta and Rip were in Germany. I suspected there were problems and started calling in the closest teams the moment you contacted me,” Will said, turning to look as Kalypso climbed from the car.

Her gaze slid past him as if he wasn’t even there. Finn had the irrational urge to close the distance between them until he stood so close to her that she had no choice
but
to look at him.

Distance, son. You need distance
.

Something scraped across his senses and he looked up, craning his head just as a petite woman appeared around the corner of the building. Even if Will hadn’t told him who was there, he would have recognized the odd feel of her power skittering down his spine. As she drew closer, he could make out the tight braid Greta used to constrain her curls, the milk-pale skin, eyes a soft summery blue.

She looked young, sweet…innocent.

She’d been one of the Grimm who had trained him. Centuries ago, when she’d still been human, she’d lived in Germany…with her step-brother, Hans. There had been no house with sugared windows and no witch with an oven for stray children. But Finn had no doubt that there had been monsters in her life. None of the Grimm seemed to be without them—not in their mortal lives, not in the new one where they walked as the Grimm.

Keenly aware of somebody’s eyes on him, he focused on Greta and smiled. “Been a very long time, ma’am. You look as lovely as always.”

“Finn.” Her lips curved upward as she came to a stop in front of him. “You went and grew some manners.”

“I always had them. Just rarely use them.” He dipped his head, pressed a kiss to her cheek. She surprised him by catching him around the neck and hugging him.

“How about you use them then, lad, and step away from my woman?”

The voice was low, and not unfamiliar. Slanting a look over his shoulder, he watched as Rip slid out of the shadows like he belonged to them. In one hand, he carried a long staff. It appeared, at first glance, to be a walking staff. Finn knew better.

As he remained where he was, Rip spun it, the move almost absent.

Finn raked his nails down his cheek, felt the stubble scrape there. “Sweetheart, your man there is a bit possessive.”

“You’ve no idea.” Greta looked mildly amused. She patted Finn on the shoulder. “It would be nice if we could visit Scotland without a war going on.”

“Wouldn’t it?”

“When were the two of you in Scotland?” Rip asked.

“In the forties.” Greta moved to his side and linked hands before looking at Will. “Who is coming?”

“Everybody I could reach who isn’t on something essential—sixty-one was the last count. I’m leaving Jack and Perci in charge back in North America. There’s a two-man team in South America and the same in Africa and Asia.”

Greta’s eyes widened at the number. Rip let out a low whistle.

Finn thought of the clawing, cloying evil that lingered everywhere. Sixty didn’t seem enough to him.

Will reached up, absently touching the medallion at his neck. “I’m hoping to get Sina here, but she must be out of commission—there’s no answer and Luc is ignoring me.”

“Out of commission?” Finn frowned.

“Hurt,” Greta said sourly. “And if Will can’t reach Sina, then she’s hurt bad.” Her eyes shifted to the woman still standing by the car.

Finn braced for the questions.

But they didn’t come.

Greta just stood there, eyeing her appraisingly. Rip looked like he had a thousand questions, but he took one look at his partner—both for life and in the endless war against the demons that plagued their world—and his face blanked.

If he’d been hoping either of them would help him talk Will into taking her out of here, it looked like he was out of luck.

Stasis was sometimes a calm, restful thing.

Other times, it was like a glimpse into true hell.

Right now, Sina was having one long, vivid glimpse and she couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Some part of her knew she wasn’t alone.

Luc was there.

He’d been there when she fell, and if he hadn’t been, she’d be dead.

A particularly enterprising group of orin had set up in Seattle and they had their own muscle, in the form of a bocan—the Irish’s own version of a boogeyman. Strong, mindless, bloodthirsty. She’d almost had him dealt with too.

She’d have to remind Luc of that…when she emerged.

In the back of her mind, she tried to think about all of those things instead of letting the images of the dream continue to taunt her, haunt her. It was unlike anything she’d ever imagined.

She’d had glimpses into the netherplains before. Most of them had, although only Will commanded the ability to open a gate between their world and the demonic world at will.

That was why their job was such a dicey one. If a demon was close enough to a living, breathing human when they slaughtered its host, it could jump into another body, but it had to be close. A hundred yards or so, and the hunt started all over again.

It was a brutal, ugly job, but a manageable one, because while demons could tear open a rip and escape into the human world, once they killed the human host, as long as they kept it away from others, it was sucked back here, into this desolate hell.

Dreaming…

She rubbed her arms and tried to whisper it out loud.
I’m only dreaming
.

But the words were snatched from her lips before she could speak them, nothing more than an echo in her memory.

Yes, the endless gray world was desolate, and cold. Driven by wind, the earth was scarred with endless chasms and it stank with death and charred flesh and it was bereft of anything remotely human. Demons roamed here in their true forms, from the odd, dog-like appearance of the vankyr—if dogs were hairless and scaled and four feet at the shoulder, their teeth like jagged, yellow blades, to the bloated, staggering forms of the bocan—a mindless thing that had only the mind to find food—and kill.

The demons driven by the need to feed on the sexual energy, and pain, were the closest to human, pale forms, their bodies hairless, eyes like black pits in their faces. Their limbs were long and slender and if they went too long without a feed—namely, without sex—those long, slender bodies withered away until they resembled little more than walking corpses.

Sina nibbled her lip as she stood on a cliff staring down at what lay below her. She could see the demons, although she’d never seen anything quite like this. Not that she’d spent much time in Hell’s waiting room. That’s all the netherplains were, really. Maybe the demons
liked
to congregate together, sit around and talk. Chat.

Maybe the orin frequently conversed with the vaporous forms of the glamori.

But somehow, Sina didn’t think so, and she had a sinking feeling in her gut that this was more than a dream.

I need to wake.

It was an impossible need. She could still feel the bocan’s claws slicing through her shoulder bone, her sternum, nearly ripping her in two. If it hadn’t been for Luc, ripping her away, and Krell lunging his powerful body at the bocan to distract it, then Sina’s eighteen centuries would have come to a bloody end.

She’d taken a bad injury and her body had slid into stasis, the healing sleep of their kind. She wasn’t sure what would happen when she awoke, because she could sense the weird, shifting changes taking place within.

And this dream…

A dream that wasn’t a dream, and that filled her with a cold, terrible fear.

Because it wasn’t just demons that walked in the rocky, pitted valley below her.

There were mortals as well.

Or…they had been.

And while there might not be a legion of them down there, there was enough of them to make her skin go cold.

I have to wake up—

Luc bent over the counter, taking five minutes to eat and grab a cup of coffee. He could do without the food, but experience had taught him that his body reacted better if he either ate or rested. He wasn’t going to rest. He had to be at Sina’s side, so he chose food over sleep.

Granted, more often than not, he ate hot dogs and Cheetos and washed it all down with half gallon of chocolate milk. None of that was anything a dietician—or anybody sane—would consider healthy. But he didn’t have to worry about calories or heart attacks or any of those annoying nuisances that would have plagued him had he been human.

He just needed the fuel.

He felt Krell shift next to him, felt the tension in him. “What’s the…”

The words trailed off and he shoved away from the counter, automatically merging his mind with the animal walking, then running at his side.

The ragged breaths, the erratic heartbeat he heard coming from the bedroom meant only one thing. But it was too soon. Sina had taken a near life-threatening injury—the one thing that could have taken her from him—less than a month ago. She needed another month, easily, to heal.

He entered the room, Krell racing ahead of him, instinctively knowing what Luc needed.

Luc, blinded for hundreds of years, had adjusted to the loss of his sight, but when one fought demons and beasties from hell, sometimes having a way to see made that job easier. In those times, Krell served as his eyes, and right now, through the dog’s gaze, he could see the rapid rise and fall of Sina’s chest under the thin gray cotton of the Dopey sleepshirt he’d bought her a few months ago.

Sina and her fondness for those seven, silly dwarves…sitting down next to her, he slid his hand along the bed until he could cup her head.

“Shhh….” He bent down and pressed his mouth to her brow.

Her shields were frail, faulty. Stasis left them vulnerable at best and just then, he could feel her panic, and her desperate need to wake.

“You’re safe,” he whispered, sending those words out, letting them fall across her battered mind, hoping they’d reach her. His heart wrenched inside him.

“You’re safe—” He jerked up as her body went from almost cool to burning. “Krell, I need you.”

The animal, eerily intelligent, leaped onto the bed, padding to sit at Sina’s hip, watching her as if transfixed. Luc studied her through the dog’s eyes, searching for some cause of the heat.

What’s wrong
?

The pendant at his neck pulsed, heated.

He ignored it, as he’d done for the past two days. Will had other angels. He could call them.

“Sina…” The name slipped past his lips before he could stop it.

Her body arched, jerking.

In the next moment, her eyes flew open, a low, keening noise escaping her.

As her gaze flew to his, he covered her cheek.
This isn’t right. It’s too soon…

“Luc.” His name was a ragged sound on her lips and then she sat up, each movement slow, sluggish.

“Lie down,” he said and he would have forced her to do so if he hadn’t suspected she was still hurting.

“I can’t.” She shuddered, something like fear rolling across her face. “Something…something is wrong. We’re needed.”

“Fuck that. You
need
rest, not another fight.”

A harsh sound escaped her. “I don’t think we’ll have a say in this. None of us will. We have to…” she looked around, her expression dazed. Then, slowly, it cleared. Reaching up, she rubbed her chest.

Exasperated, Luc caught her hand. “Stop that now. You just had your chest laid open, if you remember.”

Her gaze slid to his. “I remember.” She tugged the loose V-neck of the sleepshirt aside, revealing a smooth, healed chest. “How long?”

Krell inched closer at Luc’s mental nudge and he stared in amazement. “Sina, it’s only been a month. That…that’s amazing.”

“I think it’s rather horrifying, actually.” Her voice was grim and she swung her legs out of bed. “Food. Clothes. Then we need go.”

He let her rise, figured if she staggered on her way out the door, he’d have an easier time convincing her otherwise.

But with each step, she seemed to get steadier. Rather than finding it reassuring, Luc was unsettled. She needed—or she should need more rest. That she didn’t meant only one thing. She’d undergone some changes in stasis and that only happened when those changes would be needed. Sina was already stronger than a bloody hurricane. Why did she need more power?