Page 37 of Beyond the Veil (Endangered Fae #4)
Chapter Fourteen
Beings of multi-race heritage: While most magically sensitive races are unable to produce children together, certain races have proven to be genetically compatible.
There are documented cases of children from sidhe and Fomorian pairings as well as cases of children born from several human/fae pairings such as pookas and several other water fae .
D iego led his human contingent around the prison to the correct side of the monster cellblock door.
He had waited as long as he could. But the moon shone through the ceiling slits and waiting any longer might put Finn and Theo in jeopardy if they were trying to stall an untenable situation alone. His heart ached. Asif hadn’t come.
Door open. Get everyone out. I’ll go back for him after.
“Nusair, if you’d like to get your, ah, friend ready?
We’ll need to carry the phoenix, but let’s get this door open first.” Diego grasped the hands offered to him and waited until every human magic user had a place in the circle—men, women, foreigners, local citizens.
He gave Ethan’s hand an encouraging squeeze and nodded to Tarek.
“There is a lock mechanism inside this door. We must think about it opening. All of us together. Concentrate hard. Think about any lock you have ever seen and how the mechanism turns to open. Think of turning it. Of opening it.”
That moment of panic bubbled up again when nothing happened.
Again, Saeed made himself the central focus as he began to chant.
Everyone but Diego joined in, since everyone else understood the language, but that didn’t distress him.
Diego was their lightning rod, the conduit for their combined magic.
He moved Ethan’s hand to his shoulder and set his palm against the door.
A slow trickle caressed his nerves, like a tiny stream of cool water.
Panting, a bead of sweat edging down his temple, Diego reached into the stream and fought to channel it.
Saeed’s chanting grew louder and the trickle increased to a rivulet, to a faucet with the taps opened wide, to a small spring chuckling down the side of a mountain.
The jolt of magic he had waited for didn’t come.
All the people involved must have acted as transformers, but the stream grew wider and wider until he wasn’t sure his stunted channels could hold it.
Forehead against the door, Diego fought the ever-increasing pain, blinking spots from his eyes. Turn, damn you, turn. Disengage. Open…open…
Down the line, someone sobbed. Beside him, Ethan moaned in obvious distress.
Diego was about to tell everyone to stop when metal clicked on metal inside the door.
He pulled at the stream, forcing it into the lock, white-hot agony searing through him.
The door clicked again and a hard thunk echoed inside the metal shell as the bolt shot back.
With Diego leaning his weight against it, the door swung open and he would’ve fallen flat on the floor if hands on either side hadn’t supported him.
“Damn…oh, damn…give me a minute.” He panted, Ethan patting his back. “All right…okay…careful everyone. The hallway’s dark but there’s a ladder on the other end with the second door at the top. We’re almost there.”
Still hand in hand, the circle shuffled down the pitch-black hallway. There were some soft cries of fear but no one panicked, the large group most likely keeping the fear at bay.
“Nusair? Still back there?” Diego called out. “You have her?”
“I’m here, yes, and with the ghoul and griffin. I have the phoenix, too,” Nusair’s voice came from far back, less cocksure and sardonic than usual.
“Are you all right to keep going?” Tarek asked beside him.
“Yes. We have to keep going. One more door. This is going to get a little clumsy though. You and Ethan are going to have to keep hold of me on the ladder to keep the circle complete.”
“We’ve got you, Diego. Just yell if you need a break,” Ethan said close to his ear.
Up the ladder, six rungs, seven, then the metal portal was close enough to put his palms flat on the underside. One more door.
One small window, one door, a ventilation shaft not big enough for a fat rat to squeeze into. Theo stood hipshot, eyeing the command center critically. Finn had scouted the roof of this shorter section of the prison while he’d taken the ground level. No easy entrance revealed itself.
“We do it the hard way.” Theo glanced up at Finn, currently a raven sitting on his uninjured shoulder. “Door, you think?”
“I could get in and open the door for you.”
“You’d be alone and exposed. They’d shoot you.”
“They’ve already shot you.”
“I’m fine. I think we can force the door. Gives us a field of fire.”
“That’s one of those Kevin terms, I’d wager, since there are no fields here and I don’t think starting a fire would be wise. But I can get the door down.”
Finn hopped off Theo’s shoulder. Once he hit the ground, he began to glow blue. “You may want to take a few steps back.”
Curious and a little alarmed, Theo backed off while Finn’s raven shape melted and expanded, then kept on expanding. He had to fight to keep his jaw from dropping as four thick legs emerged from the shifting mess, a body the size of a dump truck and a trunk.
“One way to do it,” Theo said to the elephant now standing beside him.
“Perhaps it will confuse them enough to keep them from shooting for a few moments, as well.” Elephant-Finn flapped his huge ears as he lined up with the door. “Stand well back. This may take a try or two.”
Theo nodded as he stepped away and drew his gun, the Smith & Wesson comfortably heavy in his hand.
The moment Finn needed cover fire, he would have it.
The guards up on the walls might not have had a chance for radio contact, but with a shot fired, the men inside the bunker most likely knew something was wrong.
Finn shifted his huge flat feet, swinging his tusks side to side.
He huffed an elephant breath, kicking up a miniature sand devil, and charged with his head lowered.
The first blow echoed off the surrounding dunes in eerie repetition, leaving a sizeable dent in the metal door.
Finn backed up and tried again. His hard skull bent the door inward on his second attempt and now voices raised in babbling alarm came from inside the bunker.
“Make sure you step aside after the next one!” Theo shouted over as Finn prepared to charge again.
Finn’s head connected with a thundering crash and a squeal of tortured metal as the door separated from its hinges and flew into the room.
He stumbled to the side as best he could, though shots already rang out.
Theo ignored the bullets zipping past him.
Breathe in, breathe out, find the target’s center mass.
He fired at the one man foolish enough to be standing in sight of the open doorway.
That one flew back with the force of the .
44 connecting with his chest, blood spraying the wall behind him.
Theo didn’t have time to think about what he’d done.
The firing from inside the bunker continued from two distinct trajectories.
He laid down cover fire, forcing the remaining guards to keep their heads down, giving Finn time to shift into a smaller target.
A quick glance to the left confirmed that the elephant had vanished.
The dark shape hidden in the building’s shadow was feline, most likely the panther again.
The distraction cost Theo as a bullet creased his right thigh.
He dropped and rolled out to the side, telling himself he’d have to deal with the pain later.
A quick crawl across the concrete got him to the wall on the side of the door opposite Finn.
The men inside still fired, just wasting ammunition.
“Three count. Stay low,” Theo murmured. When Finn nodded, Theo held up a hand and counted back on his fingers. Three…two…one…
Together, they burst through the doorway, Theo racing along the wall to the right behind a desk, Finn slinking under a counter to the left.
Their targets had taken shelter behind a bank of monitors.
Speed was their greatest ally, before the guards had a chance to figure out they were being outflanked.
Crouched low, Theo stopped at the counter where the monitors hissed and hummed.
It abutted the wall on his side, so no going around it.
Under would tangle him in a disorganized collection of wires.
One of the guards crouched not four feet from him, rifle barrel supported on the countertop between monitor banks, still aimed toward the empty doorway.
If he and Finn had worked together more often, Theo might have thought of a signal to coordinate their attacks.
He realized this too late when Finn struck first, leaping at the target on his side from under the counter.
The man went down with a shriek. His rifle fired, destroying one of the monitors in a shower of glass shards and sparks.
The second man shot at Finn before Theo could hurl himself over the counter to stop him.
Theo slammed into him, snarling in the man’s face as he yanked the rifle from his hands and used it as a club to knock the guard out.
The second guard, Finn’s target, lay still too, blood welling from claw marks on his shoulders.
Theo’s heart slowed on a painful thud when he looked beyond to where Finn sprawled in panther form on the floor.
“Finn?” Theo called as he secured the guards. “Finn!”
A quick crawl while he prayed to any god that might be listening got him to Finn.
A wet line of blood seeped up behind his feline ear, difficult to see against the sleek, black fur, but the scent hit Theo like a jackhammer to the gut.
No bone showed. Finn’s chest still rose and fell evenly.
The bullet appeared to have creased his head and knocked him senseless.