Dark Illumination Read online

  “I’ve been thinking about that as well,” Eli jumped in. “I was wondering who would have access to the Strachan book. I came up with a very short list. Siblings, uncles, cousins, mates, children, and the one that shot to the top was our sister. If she took it before she left for Europe and gave it to someone…”

  “We never check the book. It is gross and depressing. It could be gone for years without us knowing about it.” I agreed.

  “Plus, our sister could have ‘checked in on it’ whenever she pleased, since she is a bloodline bearer. She could have stolen it a year ago and we probably wouldn’t have noticed. The question would be who it belonged to.”

  “Ugh,” I sighed. “I do not want to call mom. Let’s see if we can get this sorted. If we can’t and we can’t think of anything else to do, we’ll call her. But it must be our last resort.”

  “Agreed,” Levi looked at me. “Success/failure rate?”

  “Oh, 50/50 sounds pretty good, possibly optimistic, but deep down, I’m all about silver linings and unicorns.” I smiled at him.

  “I know what to get you next time I have to buy you a gift.” Levi smiled back.

  “It is hard to sleep on silver linings.” I told him.

  “Yes, but unicorns are much easier to deal with.”

  “Unicorns don’t exist.”

  “Sure they do, but they don’t exist in the book. It really needs to be revised.”

  “Our ‘survival manual’ for Maturing Elders is really more of a crash course in shit you may or may not need to know.” I told him.

  “Yep, someone should do something about it.” He opened the door. “How do you get him to Vamp out?”

  “That would be the easy part.”

  I closed the gap between Anubis and I in two steps. He had a moment where his eyes went wide. I grabbed his hand, unwilling to back down from my proposed plan. I shoved his hand up my shirt and felt it contact my bloodline mark.

  The air suddenly filled with magic. Eli coughed, gagged, coughed again. I understood the feeling.

  Anubis threw his head back. His teeth elongated, protruding from his muzzle. His eyes went pitch black. His hands transformed, making his fingers into long, razor sharp claws.

  “Holy shit,” Eli said as he caught his breath.

  “Fun stuff,” I told him, trying to sound cheery and failing miserably.

  “That is either a very neat trick or a very twisted one.” Levi said.

  “Twisted is the right answer. I can do it to all of them. They only need to touch my Strachan Mark to transform.”

  “It is easier and less painful when you do it her way,” Fenrir had a glassy look over his eyes. No doubt he was remembering his own experience with it.

  “He is a bit intimidating,” Eli grimaced. “Almost as bad as you when I first arrived.”

  “You should have seen me when my eye balls exploded.” I gave a quick glance at everyone in the room. “Well then, hi ho, hi ho, it’s soul hunting we go.”

  “Are you high?” Levi asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I have never heard you like this,” he commented.

  “Maybe a little power drunk at the moment.”

  “You sound chipper and happy, it suits you well, but we are all of the mindset that you don’t really have a sense of humor, so it is as unnerving as seeing you without eye balls.”

  “I have a great sense of humor, it is just very warped.”

  On that note, we left the small motel for town proper.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There are moments when you know what you are doing is a really bad idea. Then there are moments when you think what you are doing is a good idea, only to realize afterwards, that it was a really bad idea. Then there are moments like these.

  We stepped out of the motel into the parking lot. It was getting dark. The sun was setting fast.

  We sprint-walked into town proper. Everything was starting to close for the night. Traffic slowed to a crawl as they drove past us, as they had for the last several days.

  I took little notice of these things. I was concentrating very hard on finding any wisp of magic. My head must have looked like it belonged on a bobble-head doll.

  We stopped, waiting for traffic to let us cross at a main intersection. One car, probably staring at us, rammed the rear end of another car. This pushed that car into the car in front of it. Across the intersection from the accident, another car skidded to a halt in the middle of a turn. Causing a second accident.

  I stepped off the sidewalk to check on the accident victims closest to me. Eli came with me, as did Fenrir. I had my head in the window of another car when a sixth car sideswiped me. It hurt, but nearly as much as it did when they hit Eli.

  I was inspecting the wounds on my side and hindquarters when I heard a woman begin to scream. I ran over. Eli’s body lay on the ground. His head in her car.

  For several seconds, I stood there stunned.

  “Get his head, Bren!” Someone shouted at me. On autopilot, I wrenched open the ruined car door, grabbed Eli’s head and stared at it.

  “This sucks,” the head said to me. I tossed it to Fenrir out of sheer creepiness. I had never thought it might be able to talk. But the car had cut it off at a weird angle, leaving the vocal cords intact. No idea where the air to push through them came from. I didn’t really want to know.

  “Brenna, get over here!” Levi was shouting this time. Maybe he had shouted the first time.

  With reluctance, I walked over to him. Anubis, still vamped out, was carrying Eli’s body. He set him down on the ground. Levi stuck the head where it belonged and told me to help him.

  That was the easy part. I didn’t have to touch Eli to heal him. I just had to stand near him to do it. Levi laid his hands on Eli’s chest and I felt the first push of his magic. I pushed my own.

  The pain was excruciating. My neck felt like it was being ripped off my body. I checked once to make sure it wasn’t. Levi wasn’t saying anything, but I could feel his magic mingle with my own as they entered my brother’s body.

  It took us nearly 30 minutes to get Eli reassembled. By the time we had finished, we had gathered a crowd of about 100 people. They gasped as Eli opened his eyes, rolled his head from side to side and then stood up.

  He looked at me, then at Levi, then back to me. His eyes were a little too wide. His mouth didn’t seem to want to move at all. I touched him gently on the shoulder.

  This seemed to break whatever shock he was experiencing. He closed his mouth and smiled at me. Then his eyes got really wide, he lifted his hand and pointed at something behind me.

  The crowd got to look before me. Mass screaming and chaos broke out. People were running in different directions, including into each other.

  I finally got turned enough to see the Troll. He was standing about 800 yards from us. In the gloom, it was hard to make out features, but you could see it was drooling. Something I always consider bad when dealing with hungry predators.

  In that moment, I realized that not only had this been a very bad idea, it had been terribly stupid. I should have realized that being proactive and taking the offensive would lead to problems for the townspeople. Our Witch didn’t want to be caught. He had proved it by cursing me.

  He had also proved himself very cunning, since we had searched several times for him and the troll and come up empty handed. For a fleeting second, I wondered if he had been the jerk that had cut off my brother’s head. It seemed to fit into place. He would know it would weaken us.

  All these things were running through my brain. I’m sure they were crossing the minds of the others as well. The troll had just appeared there. He hadn’t been there when we were healing Eli or the people around us, particularly the ones facing that direction would have noticed.

  No matter how interesting it might be to watch two Demons reattach a head, a troll was hard to miss. This troll seemed really hard to miss. It drooled. It was bigger than a house. It smelled. I could smell it from whe
re I stood.

  I didn’t wet myself this time. I didn’t scream or run away. I just stood and gawked. There was no magic nimbus around him this time. He was moving much faster than he had the first time I had seen him. And he was moving directly toward us.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fenrir dropped to all fours and began shifting. The gooey mess was the least of my concerns at the moment. We had three Demons who were not at their best. Our Vampire was still vamped out, which might or might not have been a good thing. Ba’al was doing something I had never seen before; his claws were getting longer, his teeth pointier. We had talked about him turning to stone before, but never about him making himself more lethal looking.

  “What do we do?” I yelled to anyone within shouting distance.

  “We take the offensive. You trace the magic.” Anubis answered.

  “There is no magic, he is moving faster too.”

  “That would explain why he seemed so slow last time. Think he ate his keeper?” Anubis countered.

  “Uh, no clue. We’ll have to kill him and cut him open to find out and I really have this issue with dead things.”

  “It’s a troll, Bren, not a cute dog or cat or Bengal Tiger.” Eli chided me.

  “Nice to know getting your head cut off doesn’t affect your sense of humor. I don’t like any dead thing. It creeps me out.”

  Fenrir turned his muzzle skyward and gave a deep howl. It was answered by several others. I had no clue what he was doing, but if it helped, I was all for it.

  “Eli, Levi and Ba’al, see if you can get around to his backside. Bren, Fenrir and I will attack from the front. We really need to kill him quick and efficiently. If we fail, he may eat a person or two and gain some extra strength.”

  “How is that possible?” I frowned at the plan.

  “I’ll explain later,” Anubis grabbed my arm. Fenrir ran beside us.

  I still wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to do. “Attack it” just didn’t explain how an unarmed Demon was supposed to do. Then I remembered that I wasn’t just a Demon and began trying to think of a spell.

  As I raced toward the troll, I realized that my spells were not going to work. Some witches are very good at casting weapon spells, some were good at making it rain fish, some were good at putting on curses and some were good at breaking curses; I fell into the latter two categories. I could come up with a doozy of a curse or break one, but that would require ingredients, not just words. I had tried several times to cast weapon spells, but they all blew up in my face, literally. I could cast a curse, but since I had no ingredients and wasn’t sure what sort of curse to put on a troll anyway, my magic was pretty much useless.

  This brought me back to the Demon side. I didn’t have the retractable finger claws that my father, Levi and Eli had. I was lucky enough to get clawed toes though. I also have very pointy incisors. And while my horns are tiny, they exist.

  I had to stop to tear off my shoes. This meant that everyone else stopped and stared at me. Eli and Levi did the same, once they realized what I was doing. Anubis rolled his eyes as the second shoe went flying over my shoulder. We were off again. The gap getting much smaller.

  The men seemed to have a plan. I didn’t. As we neared the troll, I did the only thing I could think of. I jumped on him. My toes dug into his thigh, my fingers grasped at the wrinkly skin around his mid-section.

  The Troll probably would have swatted me off his leg, if he hadn’t been more concerned with the Vampire, the Werewolf or the Gargoyle. He didn’t seem to think much of the Demons.

  I climbed as high as his waist, turned my head sideways and bit down. My teeth went into the skin easily, stopping when they hit his hip socket. I tore out the skin and spit it on the ground.

  Suddenly, the troll had a different priority. He grabbed me with one hand. I sank my clawed feet deeper into his flesh and sank my teeth back in. I didn’t hit bone this time. I had missed the hip socket that I had decided to expose. He grabbed onto me and yanked.

  I held fast, feeling the pain in my mouth and feet. My hands couldn’t hold on against the Troll’s powerful grasp, so I let them dangle and fly at will.

  “Brenna!” Anubis yelled my name from below.

  The troll stopped jerking for a moment. I used it to readjust my bite. I felt the canines hit bone. The troll let go and repositioned his own grip, grabbing onto my hair.

  For a moment, I considered fighting against him. A better thought popped into my head though. The troll jerked back and I went with it. The flesh tore out in an even larger patch, muscle and tendon came with it. The troll’s own force making my bite stronger. I could see bone now. Not a lot, but enough.

  Fenrir was now scurrying up behind me. His wolf claws digging into the troll’s flesh as easily as mine had. He climbed awkwardly, but then normal wolves do not climb. I watched as he bit into the hand that held my hair.

  Bones cracked under the force of Fenrir’s bit. The troll howled wordlessly and let go of me. It was my turn to look awkward.

  I crab walked sideways until I could reach into the hole I had made. I grabbed the bone; it felt slimy but firm under my hand; and jerked as hard as I could.

  The force of the socket slipping caused my claws to come out of the troll. I held on, letting my body weight do what it could to finish dislocating the hip. I felt it pop again, the troll’s leg buckled.

  As we fell, I watched Elders flinging themselves out of the way of the falling troll. The troll was bellowing in pain now. I hit the concrete road and rolled out of his grasp.

  I lay there, staring up the sky, realizing that the stars and moon still had not come out. The others seemed to be doing the same thing I was doing; taking a moment. The troll continued to bellow, but the sound never changed, meaning the others were not attacking it.

  I got up, putting my hands behind me. I was scraped and cut and had broken a claw in the fall. It was bleeding pretty badly, but it would stop shortly.

  Eli yelped. I whipped my head around to look at him.

  There was a man standing over him. A tall man, hidden in shadows, only his outline could be seen. He was wearing a pointy hat with a wide-brim. He was also smoking a cigarette. The glow did little to illuminate his face, only showing stubble when it blossomed into more than a dim glow.

  I stood up and swore at him. His magical aura was a cerulean blue with tinges of sickly yellow in it. Our Witch had come to us. The others were moving towards Eli.

  “Stop,” the Witch instructed. I finally looked and realized he was holding a sword over Eli. It was the Strachan Family Sword. I froze.

  “You should lock your doors when you leave, Brenna Strachan.” He teased me. “Never know who might wander in when you are in a small town, so far from home.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What do you want?” I asked the figure.

  “You dead, but since that is unlikely, how about you incapacitated? I have a lot to get done in the next few days and you running around isn’t going to help me much. So, I figure if I do enough to you and your brother here, I can probably be left unmolested to do my work,” he paused and took another drag off his cigarette.

  “No, on second thought, I’ll have to take out your uncle as well. The three of you down for the count should give me enough time to play through my plan.” He chuckled lightly. It didn’t sound maniacal, but it should have.

  He did something complicated with his cigarette hand. The troll disappeared. He turned back to Eli.

  Eli lay helpless on the ground. The Strachan sword would inflict more damage than any normal weapon on an Elder. It had been forged with Elder bits and pieces, including Gargoyle Blood.

  “I’ll trade you, me for them,” I offered.

  “Not a fair trade. See, seriously injuring you, I get the Overlords out of play, but that leaves a very powerful half-breed and an even more powerful Demon. To injure one of the Brothers, that could weaken the entire pack of them. But if I don’t injure Elijah in the process, he can
make you both better. That just wouldn’t work.”

  “You honestly think we are going to sit here and let you cut us to ribbons?” I frowned. I never understood the inner workings of a lunatic. They seemed to like to hear themselves talk. Their plans also only seemed to make sense to themselves.

  “No, but I have help on the way.” He did another complicated gesture and tossed a bit of potion at the ground.

  From the potion sprang two more trolls. I felt my mouth fall open, but couldn’t stop it. Both were healthy and huge.

  He repeated the gesture and a dragon popped into existence. It roared at the Trolls, then roared at us.

  “I figure they will keep you busy while I go to work on this one. Should they do the damage for me, more the better and Brenna, you are going to get to sit this one out.” He flung the potion at me. I felt the same feeling I had felt the day before. I went blind. I swore some more and stumbled.

  Someone caught me. They swore. It was Ba’al. I felt his leathery wings wrap around me.

  “This is going to freak you out,” he warned. I felt his body suddenly harden. It took a second for me to be completely encompassed by stone wings. I couldn’t fight against them.

  Unlike Ba’al’s velvety wings, these were not soundproof. I could hear screaming, yelling, shouting, roaring and snorting. At one point, I felt Ba’al’s stone encasement rock just a bit as something hit it.

  I sighed with resentment and frustration. I needed to be out there. I needed to be helping. I wasn’t sure what I could do being blind again. But I was sure I could do something.

  The stone Gargoyle suddenly got very hot. There was a strange hissing sound that went with it. My guess, the dragon had just blown fire at us.

  Suddenly, all noise stopped. Time seemed to stop with it. I was trapped inside the Gargoyle’s wings with no idea what was going on outside. Even if I hadn’t been trapped, no sound would mean no real clues as to what was or had happened.