Destined (War of the Covens 2)

“Anyone watching?” Caia asked, approaching the padlock and boards.

After a moment, Phoebe gave her the go-ahead, and she pressed her hand against the padlock, her magik seeping out of her skin to engulf it. In a second, it quietly popped and dissolved into water. With her lykan strength, the boards snapped away from the door with ease. Phoebe followed and pulled the doors shut silently behind her.

Both of them could see through the shadows of the darkened room, past the little round tables and the bar up ahead, past the stage off center to the left.

“Behind there,” Caia whispered, pointing to the right side of the bar where they could see a dark opening. “There’s a hallway that leads to the storeroom door. In there is the door to the basement. Mr. Daemon is in the storeroom covering the basement trapdoor.”

Offering a resolute nod, Phoebe removed her clothing quickly, neatly folding it as she went.

“Wait,” Caia whispered urgently.

“What now?”

“I’m going to put a shield up to cloak the sounds of your change.”

Phoebe’s eyes widened. “Good idea,” she whispered back.

It felt like forever, waiting for her change to be complete, the knowledge that the daemon hadn’t heard them not lessening her anxiety.

She didn’t like daemons.

Caia found it prudent to keep the shield around Phoebe as they moved through the club, afraid her claws would click against the concrete floor and ruin the element of surprise.

Together they stood outside the storeroom door, and Caia could feel the thing on the other side, standing vigilant upon the trapdoor in the floor that opened to the basement.

Phoebe turned to look up at her, her huge wolf eyes telling her she was ready. Caia nodded and pulled in her energy before pushing it back out and blasting the door off its hinges. Phoebe took off before the door was even gone and lunged at the daemon before it even knew what was happening. She knocked it off its feet and managed to cling on to its dirt-red skin, even as its ungraceful fall sent crates of bottles smashing down around them.

Caia shot in after her and blasted out a tube of water as the daemon punched at Phoebe’s sides, desperate to unclamp her jaws from his neck. As the hunter held him distracted, Caia forced the tube down his throat and held it there until he fell unconscious. Phoebe wasn’t taking any chances; she chewed and masticated until his head rolled away from his body.

She backed up off him, making a hacking sound from her throat that reminded Caia of her own daemon takedown and how she’d retched after decapitating him. Once Phoebe was clear of his body, Caia thought of the daemon who’d wounded her that night in the mall lot, and more usefully, she dragged up the memory of Sebastian dying in her arms. Just like that, the white heat built inside her.

Taking hold of its reins, she focused it on the daemon’s body and watched as it obliterated it into ash, leaving just a dusty trace. Phoebe elicited a strange noise, and Caia turned to find the wolf watching her. Even in her lykan form, her expression seemed to say, “You’re kind of scary, you know that?”

Yeah, she did know that.

“Stay back.” Caia pointed toward the hallway, and the lykan grudgingly padded away. She stared at the trapdoor, thoughts of the marble one in Gaia’s altar determinedly pushing their way to the forefront of her mind. How could Marita justify what she was doing? Marita hated Midnights and everything they were about … and yet wasn’t what Pierre had done exactly the same as her own crime?

At the impatient sounds Phoebe made from the hallway, Caia shook off the thoughts. The trapdoor lifted easily, and a set of very unstable-looking stairs descended into darkness. The smell flooded her nostrils and she gagged, pressing her shirt to her nose. Phoebe whined from the doorway. That smell was enough to make every small move after filled with trepidation. There was no mistaking the stench of death—mixed with an obvious array of chemicals.

Taking off the backpack Marion had given her, Caia found the flashlight and dipped its light into the basement, leaning over to get a better look at what she was walking into. It seemed safe enough.

Safe perhaps physically, but emotionally …?

Swinging the light from lab post to lab post, her shirt still covering her nose and mouth, Caia willed away the emotional reaction her body was so ready to give into. There were five morgue slabs in the room, each with a decaying lykan sliced open in varying manners upon it. The vile stench emanated from their exposed innards. Metal chains were still wrapped around their limbs from when they’d been alive and chained down. She didn’t even want to think of a lykan being awake and aware during such experiments, such torture.