An explosion of crackling vibrant power blazed through the room, heating my wrists right before the cuffs shattered. They disintegrated in a thousand blazing sparks, and then, I was free.
I sagged forward, my arms screaming in agony again at the sudden jolt, but at least I could move again. Shaking my hands, I tried to dispel that lingering zapping feeling.
Another wave of dizziness swept through me, but I tried to hold on, tried to fight it when my vision grew dark, but my head was so fuzzy.
Too much.
Too much.
Too much.
Gritting my teeth, I made one last attempt to stay conscious, desperately trying to escape the power of the ax and the lingering magic from the cuffs. But I was no match for the strength of the underworld.
“Tala?” Kaillen lunged for me.
I fell forward just as my vision went dark.
∞ ∞ ∞
I woke to the feel of warm blankets cocooning me and the sound of a crackling fire. My eyes peeled open. Moonlight blazed through a window, bathing the room I slept in with silvery light.
I fixed on that glowing orb hanging in the sky. The waxing gibbous moon shone brightly, just a day away from the full moon in the lunar cycle. A tug registered in my chest, snagging all of my attention to that beautiful ball of pearly light.
I should go to it. Out in the field. Open my arms. Bask in its light. I should follow the moon and—
“Tala, are you awake?” The soft question came from my side.
I snapped my attention away from the moon. My gaze landed on the hunter who sat on the other side of the bed, his back against the headboard, his long body spread out across the mattress. He was fully dressed and sat on top of the covers, as though he hadn’t slept at all even though it was nighttime. That wild look was still in his eyes, those irises all flames and molten gold.
“Kaillen?” I asked, confusion strumming through me.
He pushed off the bed, and in a blur was kneeling on the floor at my side, only a foot away from me. A wild look covered his face, his expression so fierce that I wondered again how rational he was at the moment.
He brought a hand to my forehead, as if assessing me for fever.
I pushed up more, realizing my body was no longer sore, and the plethora of cuts I’d had before were gone. “Did you heal me?”
He gave a sharp nod. “I gave you a potion after you passed out, not my . . .” His jaw locked.
Not his blood. Right.
I ran a hand through my hair and grimaced. I could only imagine what I looked like considering the snarl my fingers just encountered. “Was I sleeping?” I tried to make sense of everything, but a fuzzy feeling still coated my mind.
“You passed out after I broke the cuffs. You’ve been unconscious for nine hours. I didn’t know how to wake you.”
I frowned. My mouth felt like cotton and once again I was in a room I didn’t recognize—it was a bedroom though. “Where are we?”
“My home in Montana. It wasn’t safe to bring you back to Ontario, to those—” Roaring fire leaped to life in his irises. “Someone betrayed me and handed you over to those sorcerers, and from the scent on your clothes, I’m guessing it was my dear brother.”
My lips parted when some of the dizziness cleared. “It was Cameron. He came to your cabin this morning. Or yesterday morning. Or whenever it was.” I hung my head, still trying to make sense of everything. “He surprised me, then took me. I didn’t have time to fight back before he put those cuffs on my wrists.” My fingers curled. “If only I’d fought back immediately when he’d grabbed me, I could have annihilated that donkey’s ass. But it all happened so fast, and I never thought he was capable of something like that even though he’s a real fucker. He willingly handed me over to those sorcerers knowing they would probably kill me.”
The flames in the hunter’s eyes shifted from blazing red to deep-black. My breath hitched. I’d never seen them that color before. His demon shone fully through those irises as if rising from the depths of hell.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said in such a low guttural tone, that I knew he was close to losing control, the rage or fear or whatever had been making him look so crazed when I’d been abducted was returning full throttle. “I’m going to kill him once and for all.”
The mind-altering fury that strummed from the hunter was palpable. It flowed off him in hot, vicious waves that hit me again and again. And a scent accompanied it, a metallic scent of iron.
But I brushed that realization off, because I knew without a doubt that Kaillen had meant it. He would truly kill his own flesh and blood. He hated Cameron that much.
I shook my head, trying to dispel some of the whirling vortex of malice and death that swirled around the hunter. “Is there some water around here? I’m so thirsty.”
My very uninteresting, mundane question seemed to snap whatever grasp the underworld had on the hunter. He blinked, and those black flames calmed back to the fiery red I was used to. They were still a bit crazed-looking, albeit not as much.
“Yeah, I’ll get you a glass.” In a blurred movement, he was up and gone. Not even a second passed before he reappeared at my side, a glass of water in hand. The water sloshed over the rim at his abrupt stop, but half of it stayed put, and at least his demon had receded enough that I was once again looking at the Kaillen I knew. “Here.” He thrust the glass toward me.
With a shaky hand, I greedily gulped all of it, draining the entire glass in one go. “Thank you.” I set it on the bedside table when I finished, and some of the dizziness swimming through me faded.
I tried to process my current time and place. I was in Montana, and it was obviously nighttime, but it felt as if I was jet-lagged, or had done too many realm crossings between earth and the fae lands. Everything felt discombobulated, disjointed, and it all rolled into one big swirling mess.
“Say, where did you go earlier this morning, or yesterday morning, when you left the cabin in Ontario after we . . . fought?”
His shoulders stiffened. “For a run. I needed to . . . clear my head.”
“Right.” I didn’t press further. I could only imagine the guilt that was eating him. I figured he was blaming himself for my abduction since he hadn’t been there. But it was my fault he’d left. My rejection. That letter from Carlos. All of it.
My head began to pound just thinking about that unfinished conversation.
I cleared my throat, shifting my attention back to the matter at hand, because one thing stood out clearly. I’d been with Kaillen’s pack when I’d been abducted. I was supposed to have been safe there, but Cameron betrayed the hunter and me, and Maybe-Jakub had nearly caught me because of it.
An image of that man in the sedan came back to me. Medium build. Short brown hair. Wide mouth. Detached, clinical expression. I shuddered. Had that truly been Jakub?
“We need to contact the SF,” I finally said. “They need to know about the second abduction attempt made on me and those dead sorcerers that are probably still lying in the street.”
“I’ve already spoken with them. They’re in Philadelphia as we speak. Don’t worry about the bodies. They’ll take care of them.”
“Philadelphia?”
“That’s the city they took you to—where I tracked you to. The SF is there searching for clues about where Jakub went and who he is.”
“But what about you finding him? Did you catch his scent while you were dueling Tall Sorcerer?”