Page 27 of A Velvet Kiss After Dark

Kane shook his head as he patted down his weapons: silver-laced bullets, pistols, knives, two axes, and a massive sword strapped to his back.

A group of teenagers walked past them and muttered something about a "larping team" when they saw them. Kane growled at them and set them giggling away.

Their gear was packed with plenty of food, weapons, camping supplies, and more weapons, Kane was ready to leave and get this mission over with, so he could come back victorious and work on wooing his new mate.

"We don't know the environment or terrain or what will be in store for us," Kane said. None of the books he'd read had described climates. Hell could be a fiery volcano of activity or a land of pink bunnies that farted rainbows for all he knew.

In short time, they'd find out. The team was ready. They agreed they'd speak the chant written on the bottom of the scroll together at exactly seven o'clock tonight. Then, a portal would appear, and they'd step through it. It'd remain visible and open to them for exactly three days, for only the ones who speak the spell can see the portal.

The group, packed like a bunch of gladiators, readied in a circle beneath the Gateway Arch.

"As one," Kane said, and they each began to recite the uncommon linguistic, phonetically-encrypted incantation that would send them all to Hell.

Kane wasn't even four words through the incantation, when a bush shook behind hi,. A tender rustle of a fir tree dipped up and down as if a squirrel had pounced on a branch. Kane glanced over his shoulder, the only one to hear it. His astuteness revealed just how paranoid he was. Of course, he was the only member of his team who was a mercenary for a living. Seth and Graham made their livings as bodyguards, though he couldn't say what the cold-hearted vampire Alexis did. And not everyone had spent the bulk of their childhood locked up in a cage like he had. He'd already been to hell, so he didn't expect the real Hell to be much worse.

Kane thought he heard a whispered, feminine curse, but the sound carried so low over their recitation that he could barely grasp it. However, the group continued the incantation to open the portal without him. In the middle of their circle there came a stirring of air like a funnel. Autumn leaves, which had fallen to the ground as the harvest season came began to twist into a miniature tornadic vortex, and strange, otherworldly sounds began to pop from the ether vortex making his skin twitch at the eeriness of it. What appeared to be a large bubble, big enough for a man to step into, began to appear. Opalescent and oblong in shape, it never quite formed a circle. The color reminded him of a contact lens, at some points iridescent reflecting the colors of the rainbows, while at other angles completely transparent.

"Gods, it's working," Graham said, with wonder in his voice.

"Of course it is, you oaf. Did you think it wouldn't?" snapped Alexis, clad in leather and weapons much like her brother.

Kane could have sworn he heard a twinge of fear in Alexis's voice, but his attention was now completely on the bush behind him, which continued to sway via something more than just a squirrel.

We're being watched.

He'd scare those teenagers off with a growl if they so much as glanced his way.

No sooner did he he think that, did the portal fully come into existence. It popped with a static crackling of power and warbled like undulations in a river which had a stone cast into it before solidifying into something real, iridescent, and glossy.

"I'll go first." Seth tossed up the black hood of his cloak, and secured it around his neck before he lifted a black boot and stepped through the opalescent shape.

"And I next," Alexis proclaimed, and his sister deftly followed her brother into Hell.

Graham mumbled something about not wanting to miss the fun, then stepped into the bubble and disappeared instantaneously.

Kane ventured away from the portal, his gut instincts telling him to look. He knew better than to ignore the call. His beast sniffed the air, smelling something suddenly rather familiar, something that sunk him with pure dread and near shock.

It simply wasn't possible . . .

He'd been so careful not to be followed.

How on Earth did…

With an agile yank he lunged and snatched the perpetrator watching them from out of the bushes. His eyes rounded and a thunderous expression crossed his features.

No.

Pretty, familiar eyes blinked up at him from behind a pair of eyeglasses he'd recognize anywhere.

"Um, right, see, I can explain," Tabitha Burke sputtered, blushing profusely.

Terror filled him as he jerked his gaze back to the portal. It was closing!

"What have you done?!" he all but shouted, scaring the living daylights out of her.

***

Kane's grip bit into the flesh of her arm. She'd never seen him so angry before.

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