To Hell and Back by L.B. Gilbert

Chapter Thirty-Three

Rhys stopped short of the deck with effort, angling his wings and beating them hard so he wouldn’t crash into the redwood structure.

Below him, he saw Valeria fall. By human measurements, it was three stories.

Her fragile human bones would break on the stone and concrete path he’d laid by hand in a circle around the house.

But he didn’t roar his rage until he saw the sigil circle spark to life directly beneath her.

A witch on the ground, his body broken, had somehow managed to toss a leather satchel he’d had fastened to his neck with a leather thong.

The curse had been prepared well in advance. Spreading open on impact, the spell unfurled, grains of dust scattered over an invisible shield over the ground making it look as if they were suspended in defiance of gravity.

It shouldn’t have activated. Such an unnatural and pernicious thing needed a massive jolt of energy, a sacrifice on a major scale…but then the witch succumbed to his injuries. The man’s death gave the curse the fuel it needed to rip a hole in reality, opening a door that should have stayed closed.

He could see nothing of the landscape on the other side of the portal before it snapped closed over his beloved. But that didn’t matter because he would never forget that scent. Recognition was immediate, visceral.

His rage shook the mountains down to their bones.

Naveen landed directly on top of the dead witch. His bulk smashed the man’s bones, his heavy legs stomping to snap and crush while he managed to hold Lanaa safely.

The female babe clutched at him with her tiny claws, nestling in the protected spot between his wings instinctively.

Sparing a second to thank the stars that Sanaa had not neglected her youngling’s training, Rhys flew back up to maim the remaining witches on the deck.

Only one still stood. The second had fallen, a knife-sized splinter of porcelain from a priceless Ming vase embedded in his brain.

The remaining female took one look at him and jumped, letting herself fall through the hole in the deck. Tracking her by scent, he shifted, running through his office and down the stairs.

The witch was already at the front door when the wooden frame sprouted arms. They grabbed her and hurled her back into the room. She tried to get up, but the floor liquified around her.

Desperate to escape, the intruder tried to teleport out, blinking in and out of existence like a body visible under a strobe light. Except the light was steady. It was as if the woman herself was flickering, phasing in and out of existence.

Rhys grabbed her, his move lightning fast. It had to be to capture a witch trying to teleport away with every fiber of her being. That was why a teleporter should never invade the domain of a brownie.

A dead witch walking… Or at least trying to.

“In their home, a brownie’s power is absolute,” he told the invader. “No matter how hard a teleporter tries, they cannot bend the laws of physics while still inside, because those rules were already answering to someone else.”

“Mercy!” the witch cried as his claws bit into the flesh of her shoulder.

He took a slow deep breath, smelling blood. Pinpricks of red bloomed in her eye, a million tiny hemorrhages coalescing into larger and larger ones as the witch continued to beat herself against the invisible walls surrounding her.

“Did you have any for Valeria?” he asked softly, ripping the cross off the woman’s neck.

Face contorted, the witch continued to try to teleport out of his arms, but she was held fast by Aggie’s power.

“I was doing the world a favor. Do you know where that thing was spawned?”

Rhys shook her roughly, making the woman’s toes leave the floor. “I have a very good idea, and I don’t care. I also don’t care about the justifications you made to yourself for chasing her in the first place. I know them for the lies that they are. You were in this for the bounty. Well, I hope it was worth your life.”

Her lips split to reveal bloody teeth. “My coven will reap the rewards.”

Sneering, he shook his head. “No, they won’t. Because I’m going to find every single one.”

“You would kill the innocent?” A thick trickle of red slid from her ear down her neck.

“There are no innocents in your coven,” a new voice said.

Rhys turned to find Ravenna had joined them.

“She’s a lying bitch. Lies with every breath,” the witch spat, twisting her neck to meet his eyes with a gleeful smirk. “You should have said they were dragons, Ravenna.”

The woman knew she was dying. In her eyes was a spark that spoke more of fanaticism than desperation over her fate.

A true believer.

Rhys clenched his jaw at the proof these women knew each other. Every muscle in his frame was rigid with the effort not to backhand Valeria’s mother against the wall. But he would deal with her later.

“The minute you breached our borders, you declared war on us,” he told his captive. “And we give our enemies no quarter.”

“Ravenna lies about our coven. I have a child—”

“You attacked a child,” he pointed out, his lip curling.

The woman’s stench made him want to toss her away. Instead, he forced his hand to open and let her drop at his feet.

She had done too much damage to herself to escape now.

“And I don’t need to take Ravenna’s word on who is guilty and who is not,” he continued, his voice flat and obsidian hard. “I know evil when I smell it. The death you mete out in your rituals sticks to your very skin. It can’t be washed off. When my clan hunts down yours, that evil will be purged from this world in fire. That is my promise to the mate you took from me.”

The witch tried to regain her feet, but her brain was no longer capable of sending those commands to her legs. “So, you’re…going to kill me?”

“In case you missed it, you killed yourself,” he said, staring down at her in disgust and a cold that was so icy and unfamiliar he could barely speak. “But I choose not to save you. Because Valeria was good. And she was mine.”

Turning her face against the floor, the witch coughed, spitting blood on the marble-tiled floor.

“You can’t let…me die. Without me…you’ll never…know where she ended up,” she rasped, her breath weaker now.

The death rattle had begun.

Rhys turned his back on her. “I already know where you sent her.”

Ravenna whipped around. “Where is she? Where is my daughter?”

He narrowed his eyes, his patience burned to dust. “Drop the pretense, Ravenna. We both know she’s not your child.”

Ravenna paled. “Of course she is.”

“No.” Rhys shook his head. “No mother would condemn her blood kin this way.”

He was dead certain of that. The small cut on Ravenna’s temple was the last nail in the coffin.

It was entirely conceivable that Valeria’s mother might look nothing like her. His mate could have inherited her great-grandmother’s eyes and her uncle’s chin, or her father’s ears. Genetic throwbacks were a biological reality.

But it wasn’t possible that her mother wouldn’t smell anything like her.

If Ravenna were Valeria’s biological mother, half her DNA would have been the same. Her blood would have smelled like his mate, enough for him to tell. Familial scent patterns were strong enough when separated by a single generation. It was only after two or three that the pattern became muddled.

Rhys had held a bleeding Valeria in the alleyway—a lifetime ago. Ravenna was bleeding now. And there was no similarity in their body’s intrinsic perfume. None.

The woman pretending to be Valeria’s mother paled impossibly further. “That’s not true. Stop saying that.”

Glancing down, he noted that the cross witch was dead. Her eyes were glassing over even as he spoke.

“I’ll stop when you do—no more lies.”

Ravenna’s lips pressed together, disappearing in her too-white face. “Rhys, where is my daughter?”

“Sheol,” he whispered. “Better known as hell—the closest one anyway.”

“A hell dimension.” Ravenna closed her eyes, swaying slightly as if she were going to be sick or faint. “No. That’s impossible.”

Dismissing her, he began to walk away. Rhys needed to see Veda.

The man wasn’t just their healer. He was also the clan historian. And Rhys needed to remember certain details, the knowledge he’d blotted out of his mind in self-preservation.

“You’re wrong,” Ravenna called after him, the words breaking against him like shards of glass. “You can’t know for sure. Doors to other dimensions can’t be opened with a snap of your fingers. There was no way you could have identified the location from that brief glimpse. “

Less wrong words had never been spoken. “I assure you that I can.”

“How?” she cried, wiping the tears from her eyes that tracked him up the stairs. “How can you possibly know that was Sheol?”

He turned back at the landing. Whatever she saw in his face made her flinch and back away despite the space between them.

“Because my clan used to call it home.”