To Hell and Back by L.B. Gilbert

Chapter Five

Rhys inhaled deeply, stalking up the stairs of the condemned building as the lightest trace of jasmine and amber teased his nose. The moist fetidness in the air was making it difficult to pick out the girl’s scent. The signature was unfamiliar, but he recognized it instinctively.

His quarry had been here mere hours ago.

The idea made him angry, not because he had missed her—again—but that she had been here at all. This was a place for the forgotten, a derelict building where humans squatted because they had nowhere else to go.

And the woman is one.

He could taste the fire in his mouth as his nose wrinkled at a particularly unpleasant scent. The flames wanted out, eager for him to burn something down in cathartic release. But Rhys tamped the impulse down. He couldn’t afford to lose control, not when he was so close.

His people had scoured the city, asking shop owners for whatever security footage they had from the day she’d been spotted. Between the banks and traffic cameras Jerik was able to hack, Rhys now had dozens of photos and video snippets of his mystery woman.

He had studied the pictures from every angle, trying to find one where she didn’t resemble the lost mate burned into his memory, but soon conceded defeat. Every feature, every line of her body, was the same. Rhys could find no flaw, at least not on camera. Which made him all the more determined to find her in real life. Surely the illusion would fall apart once he had the flesh-and-blood woman in front of him.

Her scent was different, he reminded himself.

Poring over the images had brought something else to his attention. He wasn’t the only one looking for her.

A camera outside a gas station had caught the woman. Ten minutes later, two men had paused in the same spot, their manner and bearing that of hunters. The same pair were spotted a second time, following soon after the woman passed a bank ATM camera several miles from the gas station.

After he realized they weren’t the only ones searching, his people went back over the footage, identifying at least four other individuals, three men and one woman, in pursuit of the same quarry. Each of the strangers made an effort to present a benign appearance, dressing to blend in with the mostly human populace of the area. But Rhys could recognize the hard edge and experience of the hunt in their gaze and movements.

Rhys could not allow them to find her, but he knew he might not have a chance to get there first. However, having his adversary’s faces gave him another way to find the witch. He ordered his men to track the hunters, following them in case they stumbled on the girl before him. Meanwhile, he joined the search, taking the location of their most recent sighting as a starting point.

That had brought him here. The building was new by his standards, but cheaply constructed with rows of tiny rooms laid out in straight lines. From the uninspired layout, he assumed it was meant to be offices, but the lack of open spaces made it claustrophobic, even in his two-legged form.

The stair under him creaked ominously under his weight. Rhys shot it a disapproving glance.

The structure was a recent foreclosure, but he couldn’t tell from the condition. Given the stained and moldy drywall, he’d have expected the building to have been abandoned for multiple decades instead of just one. The shoddy construction had accelerated the rate of disrepair.

He went from room to room, eliminating possibilities. Many of those cramped spaces were occupied, but one look at his large, muscled form, and even the more reckless vagrants held their ground or hid instead of attacking him.

Her room was on the second floor. Rhys walked inside and staggered, the concentration of her scent in one place a veritable bombardment to his olfactory sense.

Except for discarded fast-food wrappers, the room was empty. She had left nothing he could use to pass her scent to the others, but it didn’t matter. Her perfume was burned into his brain now. And Rhys had never lost a target.

* * *

Valeria limped up the road,aware the knife wound on her stomach had opened.

It’s a scratch,she assured herself. Yes, it was long, but it was shallow. If she could get a hold of tape or super glue, she could fix it.

The trio of witches had ambushed her early this morning, right after she’d exited a convenience store with a day-old donut and a coffee she had microwaved after finding it ice cold.

Thinking on her feet, she had thrown the hot coffee in the face of the largest witch, elbowing the second one before tripping him. But the third had grabbed her from behind, knocking her head against the outer wall of the store before she could twist away and elbow the assailant in the throat.

She hadn’t even been aware that the woman had slashed her until she was several blocks away. Valeria had found an out-of-the-way bench in a small park where she had rested most of the day, but sundown had forced her up to find someplace warmer.

Despite being chilled to the bone, Valeria slowed her steps. Moving too fast kept stretching the cut and would only accelerate the bleeding.

She walked east, away from the cold winds coming off the Pacific. Maybe she’d find a fast-food place, an old one that didn’t have those keypads on their bathrooms. It would be warm, and she could patch herself up.

But Valeria hadn’t found a safe haven. The constant prickles up her spine pushed her on until she stumbled with exhaustion, her vision darkening with every step.

Blinking, she stopped and rested against a dumpster as the world spun around her. At the mouth of the alley, a trio of blurred forms appeared, and her shoulders slumped in defeat. Even if she had the energy to run, the blood trail would lead them right to her.

Still can’t give up. She had been fighting and running so long she didn’t know how to stop, even when she had nothing left.

Valeria pushed her soles against the asphalt, forcing her heavy muscles to move. But it felt as if each of her limbs weighed a thousand pounds. Somehow, she made it to the middle of the alley.

Reaching inside, she tried desperately to spark her magic, but it was like trying to pull a tree branch through a lake of mud. It finally lit with a weak anemic flame, one that threatened to go out as she swayed on her feet.

The trio of assailants fanned out in front of her. She could feel their magic welling, bouncing around inside her. Pushing it down, she tried to taste it, but they were coming at her too quickly for her talent to decipher it, so she pushed out, trying to drive them back with raw, unfinished power.

It was a difficult draining move, but Valeria was out of options. She hit out blindly, managing to strike the middle assailant. He fell back, his face spurting blood. Someone screamed, and she fell as arms reached out, grabbing at the air where she had just been. But she’d forgotten about the third man. Between one blink and the next, she lost sight of him. However, he made his presence known with a brutal kick to her back that sent a wave of pain so intense over her that she momentarily blacked out.

Vision blinking in and out, she saw her attackers standing over her. The triumph mingled with rage twisted their innocuous, average-looking faces into monstrous masks.

The man with the cross was the closest. She struck out a second time, but the force of it was much weaker. Cross man staggered back, putting a hand to his face, but her other attacker shook it off. He pulled his leg back as if to kick her, but then he and his partner were gone, replaced by a wall of flame and a roar of sound so loud her ears shut down.

Squeezing her eyes closed, Valeria held her breath until the blistering heat dissipated. Cracking her eyelids open, she saw the night sky, the lights of the city masking all celestial bodies but the moon.

Muscles trembling, she sat up. The alley was empty. Her attackers were gone. In their place were two greasy streaks of soot, both smoking ominously. There was no sign of the third man, the one she’d hit.

The nape of her neck prickled. Someone was watching her. Pulling herself together with slow, painful movements, she turned around to face a mountain of a man with coal-black hair and eyes that burned with the fires of hell.

“Perfect,” she mumbled. “Just freaking perfect.”

This had happened once before when a small coven had chased her in the Appalachian foothills. She had been close to getting captured. Then, a bounty hunter working for someone else had stepped in and taken them out for her, only for him to break his leg in the rough terrain when he misjudged a jump. It had been sheer dumb luck that she’d gotten away, but Valeria still relived the moment in her dreams.

The corner of the man’s lip turned up, and Valeria had to fight the urge to smack the smug smile off the stranger’s brutally handsome face. Touching him at all would be a huge mistake. This wasn’t a dumb shifter tracking her. She knew it instinctively.

“I didn’t catch that,” the newcomer said, his voice a rumble of bass with hints of spicy dark rum.

It sent a shiver down her spine, warning and enticement rolled into one. Nope, this bounty hunter wasn’t going to go down like the one in Appalachia. Her senses screamed at her to get away.

Valeria forced herself to calm down, letting the stranger’s magic lap around her.

It was the only passive aspect of her talent. If she were calm, she could sense the nature of another practitioner’s magic….and this time, she felt the familiar tingle of fire.

That flames she’d seen earlier hadn’t been a mirage fabricated by her exhausted brain. The man was pyrokinetic. She could work with that. But it would cost her.

Mentally, she reached down, grabbing the gleaming strands of energy only she had ever been able to see.

The man’s dark face clouded further. “What are you doing?”

Okay, so maybe she wasn’t the only one who could see the energy. The man was looking at her, following the mental motion as if he could see what she was doing.

“Er…have you ever heard the expression, ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire?” she asked.

The stranger scowled. “What?” he asked, before shaking his head.

“Never mind.”

He held up a large meaty hand. “You must come with me if you want to live.”

Her brow went up, and she almost laughed. Did this guy think he was the Terminator?

“That’s the cheesiest pick-up line I’ve ever heard,” she said, retreating into snark even as she slumped over on the filthy ground.

From her prone position, Valeria looked the stranger up and down. There was a whole lot more up than down. He was at least six and a half feet tall. He might actually be a Terminator.

That thought shook her out of her stupor. Valeria reached down and gathered the fire energy, hurling it back at the man with all her strength.

Halfway through her thrust, Valeria realized her mistake—right when the man walked through the flames completely unscathed.

“Stop,” he ordered, his expression thunderous.

Panicking, Valeria kept going, pushing out the energy she couldn’t afford to lose. She was well beyond her endurance.

Valeria fell to her knees, her vision narrowing to pinpoint.

Distantly, she heard his voice again. “Little one, you must desist. Stop it now or you’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Nice try, cheese-master,” she slurred, her mind unable to think of a better insult.

Valeria kept going until she fell over. She hadn’t just used the magic that her talent reflected. She’d thrown her own at him, draining the well until it was empty.

Valeria landed on her back, but her head didn’t strike the hard pavement. Instead, she felt arms pick her up. Her last recollection was the sound of wings and the bite of a sharply cold wind on her face.