Page 48 of Broken Souls
“Khalid’s worried about his girl,” I start dialing Mother’s number.
He groans. “She probably can’t reach the top shelf or something. He fucking dotes on her. You know Leno caught him picking some flowers last night? Dude wasnothappy. And I’m not happy Khalid’s still breathing.”
I raise my phone to my ear, listening to it ring as my brother keeps talking.
“You remember when I tried to pick a rose for Mother’s Day when I wasseven, and the damn thing strangled me, its thorns all digging into my neck? He left me there for hours until Mom came home! Then every time I stepped out of the house for the next week, the damn plants attacked me! But oh no, Khalid pickshalfa bush, and all he gets is a stern, ‘Don’t do that,’ and the flowers taken away. He deserved losing a hand at least.”
“You knew the flowers are for protecting the property,” I say. Leno has cultivated each plant since it was a seed or bulb, adding his magic to its roots, letting it grow with his essence inside of it. He can connect to them from afar, but he needs to concentrate, needs to be able to touch the soil, which is why he always carries a bag of home dirt with him.
As the phone continues to ring, I send him a messageto check in with our second line of security. I don’t tell him the wards might be compromised, don’t want to go down that rabbit hole of explanations if I don’t need to.
“It wasoneflower,” Enoch continues. “And Khalid -”
My lips tighten. “Mother’s not answering.”
“Maybe she can't? They were making potions -”
“Scry.”
He huffs, but for all his thoughts that everything is fine, he doesn’t hesitate to obey. Releasing the wheel with one hand, he traces a sigil in the air, leaving a line of dark-teal behind. An eye appears with a swirling pupil. He releases the wheel with his other hand, and with both, he creates a scry over the rearview mirror. The eye presses into the glass for half a second, then is gone. I lean forward as an image of our house appears.
“Shit,” Enoch swears, then steps on the gas. His magic wraps around us in a bubble. He turns down a side street, then another, the other car with our brothers following close behind. As soon as there are no witnesses, he activates the bubble of magic, and the car becomes invisible.
A second later, we lift in the air, cutting straight above the city, the view in the mirror urging us faster.
Corpses of werewolves lie under crawling plants whose stalks and limbs sprout through flesh, rooting them to the ground. But there are more enemies on the roof and porch of the house, slashing their claws through the wood, trying to terrorize those inside rather than truly trying to get in. A foolish endeavor. Mother is afraid of nothing but the death of a child, and we are not there.
“Scry the –” I start to say, but then stop as Khalid arrives in our yard. He shifts into his human form and instantly throws a wave of heat at the werewolves on the roof, boiling them alive, their fur melting, their skin beneath bubbling and slipping free. He drops to his knees, spitting up blood, and I curse. He’s at his breaking point already. How much fucking magic has he been using these past few days?
My lips tightening, wanting us to already be there, I twist in my seat and pull the back of the one beside me down, giving me access to the trunk. “Scry the kitchen,” I say over my shoulder as I pull out an M4 and a loaded mag pouch. I strap the belt around my waist as the mirror in front of me shimmers.
Our kitchen comes into view. My jaw clenches when I see no one there, which means Mother didn’t manage to dump Khalid’s girl in the basement and get back to a strong defensible position. The grain of the counter shifts, drawing my eye as it moves restlessly. But the monster inside it is unable to rip free from its binds. A chill comes over me as I seem to catch its gaze. Although there’s no face beneath the grain, I can almost hear it screaming for me to let it loose. I know it’s panicking over Mother.Ourmother – the bond it shares with Sau that of a child. A monster sister. A third defense that hasn’t been used.
Holding its “gaze,” I load the M4, pushing the magazine straight up until it clicks, then giving it a little tug to check it’s locked. I pull the charging handle back and release it, my pulse calming at the familiar sound of the sliding metal. My world reduces to the gun in my hands and the wolves I’m going to kill with it.
“Shit,” Enoch curses, his tone nervous, his body on edge. He doesn’t wait for me to give him a new order. The mirror flickers between various rooms, the scry connecting to any reflective surface he can grab hold of with his magic. We’re unable to see into the basement due to the ward keeping all magic from passing through, but we land on a view of the hall that leads to it.
He sucks in a breath.
A serpentine monster is lying dead on the floor, its head a charcoal so black, I just know that the smallest gust of wind will have it falling apart.Drifting ash. Lost evidence to the battle that took place.
“What the fuck does Antonio have that can do that?” my brother asks as a tightness coils in my stomach. There’s only one person I know with flames that hot, but she’s up north in Tennessee.
My grip tightens on my phone as it buzzes. Ignoring the new message, I open the tracking app on Micha’s car. It says she’s nearly five hundred miles away from here. I glance up at the text notification to see if it’s from the men I have following her. But it’s from Rudy, telling me Leno’s one with the plants in our yard, but that our brothers are already inside the house. I start to type in Stefaan Black’s number, but Enoch’s sudden shout of, “Mom!” has my fingers stilling and my head snapping up.
“Fuck!” he rasps, and I lean forward to get a better look.
She’s sitting up on her bed, her white sheets soaked red, her head hanging down as we look at her through the small mirror on her dresser. All of her clothes have been ripped away, leaving her naked and vulnerable. Her arms have been spread out to either side and nailed to the bed frame with dozens of nails in her wrists and hands.
“She’s breathing,” I say, my voice calm. Enoch glances at me, and I hear the words he doesn’t say.Do you care at all?
But now we’re above our property. There’s no time for questions. No time for judgement as he starts to put the car down by our front porch. My eyes scan the house, looking for any sign of werewolves or our brothers.
Spotting one, I shove open the car door. We’re still ten feet or so in the air, but I don’t hesitate as I leap out. My gun comes up, the safety is switched off, and as I start to fall, I fire at the werewolf that has just barreled out of a hole in the wall of our house. He’s running for the woods, but my hail of bullets hits him in the back. He stumbles. I hit the ground and roll, switching on the safety until I’m back on my feet. My thumb pushes the lever down. I’m ready to fire again, and I do so as the fucker starts crawling away.
The car thumps on the ground as it lands behind me.
“How the hel did you react like that?” Enoch asks as he hops out.
