Home > Fated (Relentless #6)(24)

Fated (Relentless #6)(24)
Author: Karen Lynch

Her captor, moving too quickly to be human, rolled and threw Jordan off him. He came to his feet and took a step toward Mei and me, his hand covering a spreading black spot on his stomach.

I reached for the knife beside me, and his eyes flitted to the weapon. In the dim light, I saw the gleam of silver around his pupils. Incubus.

He must have decided Mei wasn’t worth the risk because he ran off down the tunnel.

“Stay with her,” Jordan ordered as she gave chase.

I gently laid Mei on the floor. Her eyelids twitched, and she moved her mouth, but no sounds came out. I lifted one of her eyelids and found dilated pupils. She looked like she’d been drugged. Or worse.

Standing guard over the girl, I took out my phone and called Chris. The signal was bad down here, and I heard him say my name several times before I was able to tell him where I was. He ordered me not to move and said he was on the way.

From deeper in the tunnel, I heard a yell. I sent up a silent prayer that Jordan was okay. She was tough and a skilled warrior, and Incubi hunted alone. At least he’d have no friends waiting down here for him.

The air moved a second before Chris arrived in front of me. If I hadn’t been expecting him, I would have screamed at his sudden appearance.

“You okay?” he asked, not even winded. His gaze moved over me as if he needed to see for himself that I was unhurt.

“Yes. Mei is unconscious, though. I think it’s an Incubus trance.”

He crouched beside the girl, checking her eyes and breathing. “You’re right. She’s in a trance.”

A shudder went through me when I thought of what would have happened to Mei if we hadn’t found her. “Do you think all those girls were taken by an Incubus?”

“It’s possible but unlikely. Incubi only have to feed once a week, less when they get older. One Incubus wouldn’t need that many females at once.”

He frowned as if he’d thought of something. I opened my mouth to ask him about it when running feet announced Jordan’s return. She entered the circle of light, and I jumped to my feet when I saw black stains on her top.

“Did you get him?” I asked her.

Anger flashed in her eyes. “He got away, but it’ll take him a few days to recover from that gut wound.”

Chris stood. The set of his jaw told me he was unhappy before he spoke.

“You should not have come down here without backup. You had no idea what you were walking into, and you’re lucky it was a single Incubi.”

He was right, but his condescending tone irked me. It was clear from Jordan’s raised eyebrows that Chris had never spoken this way to her. I knew it was because of me and the bond.

I had to end this before it got worse and caused problems between Chris and his friends. It would mean leaving Los Angeles, and I hated the thought of leaving the friends I’d made here. But I couldn’t ask them to choose between me and Chris.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“We did what we had to in the moment,” Jordan said unapologetically. “How’s the girl?”

“Entranced. She’ll be fine in an hour or so.” He stood, lifting Mei as if she weighed nothing. “Let’s get her out of here.”

“What happens now?” I asked Chris, walking behind him.

“Now we bring in a team to go over this place. If either of you got a good look at the Incubus, we’ll pass the description along to Adele and see if she can identify him.”

“I saw him,” I said.

Jordan sheathed her blade. “I did, too. I also saw a tattoo on his arm.”

“Tattoo?” Chris asked. I detected an edge in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“On the inside of his wrist. It looked like flames with writing underneath. I couldn’t make out the words.”

Chris sped up. “Come on. We need to get Mei back to her friend.”

Jordan and I exchanged a confused look.

“You going to let us in on the secret?” Jordan pressed him.

“Not here. We’ll talk at the house.”

There was an urgency in his tone I’d never heard before. I couldn’t help but wonder what worried a seasoned warrior like him.

Something told me it was nothing good.

Chris

The team I’d called in when Beth and Jordan had told me about the missing girl was outside by the time we reached the street. I sent them in to search the club and the tunnels for more Incubi.

When Beth had called me to tell me she was in a tunnel beneath the building, fear had twisted my gut in knots. The fact that she was a trained warrior and a skilled fighter should have reassured me, but I was finding it hard to think logically where she was concerned.

Beth went to find Mei’s friend Alicia, and I went with her. If my suspicions were right about what was taking these girls, I wasn’t letting Beth out of my sight until we were back at the command center.

Mei was awake when we returned, and I wasn’t surprised that she had no memory of the attack. As far as she and her friend knew, a human man had tried to take her away. I sent them home with a stern warning to stay away from clubs, and their frightened expressions told me they weren’t going to party again anytime soon. They left in Alicia’s car, and I sent Brock to follow them and make sure they got home safely.

Beth and Jordan had driven here in one of the SUVs, so I followed them back to the house on my bike. I called Nikolas on the way to tell him what Jordan had said about the Incubus’s tattoo. He hung up to make a few calls before we got there.

We parked our bikes outside the garage, and Beth and Jordan gave me expectant looks.

“We’ll talk inside,” I said.

Nikolas and Sara were waiting for us in the living room, wearing grim expressions.

Jordan looked between us and threw up her hands. “Will someone please tell us what the hell is going on?”

I waved for everyone to sit while I remained standing. I was a little too worked up to sit still.

“We assumed a vampire took the missing girls, but the attack at Luna points at something a lot more dangerous.”

Jordan’s eyebrows shot up, and Beth’s eyes widened. I knew they were both wondering what was more dangerous than a vampire.

“I thought this was a random Incubus attack until Jordan described the tattoo on the Incubus’s wrist. That tattoo is the mark of a Lilin.”

Jordan made a sound, but my eyes were on Beth, who sucked in a sharp breath as realization dawned. She’d studied demonology so she knew what a Lilin was, but reading about it in a book and facing it in person were two entirely different things.

Incubi were among the more powerful demons that lived among us. By the time an Incubus reached adulthood, he was already stronger than a new vampire. But unlike vampires, most Incubi did not kill the people they fed off, which was why they were not at the top of our kill list. That and the fact that they were solitary and territorial and usually killed each other off. Old age was something very few Incubi experienced.

An Incubus reached his first fertile cycle at age thirty, and every thirty years after that, he was consumed with the need to reproduce. It was only during this fertile period that he could breed. There were no female Incubi, so he chose a human woman to bear him a son. Gestation took six months, and as the fetus grew, it fed off the mother’s energy, draining her strength. The Incubus would carefully tend to the woman, feeding her his own energy daily to help her make it through the difficult pregnancy. Even then, many women did not survive the birth and the infant mortality rate for Incubi was high.

The Incubus raised his son until the child reached adulthood at twenty. By then, the younger Incubus’s territorial instincts kicked in, and he went off on his own.

The rare Incubus that lived past two hundred years was driven by more than the need to produce offspring. He became obsessed with creating a family, and he bound his children to him before puberty, in a special ceremony. During the ceremony, the child received his sire’s mark on his wrist, a mark that only a very powerful Incubus could bestow. When the son hit adulthood, he did not feel the urge to leave, and he stayed with his sire for the rest of his life.

An Incubus that bound his children to him was called a Lilin, and they were as reclusive and as powerful as a vampire Master. When they entered their fertile cycle, their need to reproduce made them one of the most dangerous demons on earth.

   
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