Page 34 of Bound to the Griffin (Hillcrest Hollow Shifters #3)

Jackson

I crossed the threshold with my gun drawn, stance tight and steady. The kitchen came first, and I cleared it the way I’d been taught years ago: corners, shadows, doorways. They were all empty, quiet, eerily so. The house always creaked and groaned, but those noises seemed absent.

Thorne moved behind me, silent and steady, like he’d been trained to sweep a house, just as I had been. He was unarmed, but he didn’t need a weapon anyway. Fire lived in his hands, and while I respected that, I’d rather not have Gwen’s B it was where she wanted to nest for the rest of her life.

There was no sign of life, though, so we went back down to check the room Evan had been sleeping in one last time.

I’d noticed damage in the rooms here too, though not as extreme as on the top floor.

Evan’s room, though, it had definitely seen the brunt of it.

The walls were ripped to shreds, all of Gwen’s brand-new plasterwork and drywalling undone.

The bedding had been tossed, and claw marks scored the wall and doorframe, some of them bloody.

“Stay back,” Thorne warned, his voice cutting low.

His eyes followed the shifting dark along the edges of the room.

“Don’t step into the shadows.” I yanked my foot back, where a shadow shifted and nearly curled over my toes.

That wasn’t natural; that shadow had moved when it shouldn’t.

That was not an enemy I could fight. We had to find the source.

I recalled all too well the shadows that had crawled through the window that night when Gwen had that dream.

My roar had made them back off, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be so simple now, they felt more powerful this time.

We retreated, each step heavier than the last, down the stairs and back to the kitchen, where the basement waited.

The kitchen door groaned open to reveal the stairs.

I flicked the light switch on, but there was nothing, not so much as a flicker.

Dead. That didn’t matter to me—my griffin eyes cut through the dark easily enough—but what made my skin prickle was Thorne walking behind me as though he could see just as well, like the black itself parted for him.

As a warlock, he had powers, sure, but most of him was still essentially human, or it should be.

The air grew colder the farther down the stairs we went.

Damp. Heavy. The scraping sound I’d first heard was louder now—frantic—and then we saw him: Evan.

He was crouched against the far wall, the same one where Ted had hidden the money yesterday.

His fingers were bloody, shredded at the tips, clawing mindlessly at the stone and mortar.

A hammer lay nearby, thrown aside with the rest of the toolbox, ignored in his madness.

His eyes caught the faint glow of the warlock’s magic, wild and glassy, not seeing us, not seeing anything. His hair was messy, and his clothing disheveled and dirty, muddy and stained with still-melting snow. He’d been outside not that long ago, to do what? To go where?

“He’s enthralled,” Thorne said grimly. “We’re too late.

” That sounded ominous, final, and when I looked at the man, I had to agree.

Something about the way Evan moved was wrong.

Not just frantic. Wrong. His body jerked in sharp angles as he tore at the stone, like a puppet pulled by invisible strings.

Then, all at once, his head snapped up. Those glassy eyes locked on us.

My gut clenched a splitsecond before he came at us, teeth bared, hands clawing.

“Don’t kill him!” I barked, though every instinct in me wanted to end this fast and permanently.

The bastard had caused enough trouble—most especially for what he’d done to Gwen, and now to her B&B—but not like this.

I couldn’t let it end like this, with blood on my hands, even as the beast in me very much thought that was a perfectly right way to deal with her previous lover.

Fire roared past my shoulder, singeing the air with a crack that made my ears ring.

I cursed, throwing myself sideways. “Dammit, Thorne! You’ll burn the place down!

” Thorne swore back—harsh and sharp—but his hands blazed again, heat filling the basement.

It crackled and sang, controlled by the warlock, but only barely.

I didn’t have time to deal with a runaway spellcaster.

Evan slammed into me with a strength I hadn’t thought he had, wild and mindless.

We went down hard. My gun skittered away across the concrete.

I grappled with him, pinning one arm, then the other, his bloody fingers slipping in my grip as he thrashed like a man possessed.

“Hold him down!” Thorne’s shout rang like a whip crack.

“I might be able to reverse this!” So I did.

I used every ounce of strength, every bit of griffin muscle and instinct, to pin Evan to the floor while he bucked and snarled beneath me.

My knees dug into his shoulders, one hand cranking his arm up at an ugly angle to keep it still.

He was raving, incoherent, his teeth snapping like an animal.

I feared I’d break his limbs if he kept this up, one arm already dangerously close to wrenching all wrong in the socket.

Behind me, Thorne’s voice rose into a storm.

He barked words that scraped at the air—guttural and sharp—the kind of language that tasted like iron and lightning.

The basement filled with the stink of herbs crushed under his hands, smoke curling from vials and powders he dragged out of that satchel.

I hadn’t realized he’d come that prepared, but I was grateful that he had.

Perhaps that meant he had the answers we needed to clear the B&B, once and for all, of this evil menace.

Evan writhed beneath me, a scream tearing from his throat as the warlock’s words battered at whatever had him. His back arched, bowing up—so strong I thought I’d lose my grip—but I held him down, snarling low in my own throat, like the griffin in me wanted to match him.

Then, abruptly, there was silence. A stunned, sharp silence, left in the wake of a battle I wasn’t quite sure I understood.

I just knew that sweat soaked my skin and my muscles ached from the effort of restraining a man, a human man.

A feat that should have cost no effort at all, given that my shifter strength far outweighed his—under normal conditions, but these had been far from normal.

Evan sagged beneath me, limp and unconscious.

My breath came hard, burning my chest. Thorne slumped against the wall, sweat dripping down his temple.

His eyes were glassy, blood smeared under his nose, his parka askew and filthy.

That could’ve been from Evan’s blows, but it could have just as easily been from the magic tearing at him.

He looked half-dead, and not just from exhaustion.

I didn’t think that was a good sign. This had been a battle, but the war wasn’t won.

If he was our best weapon, how could we ever face that evil? What was it? Where had it come from?

The basement itself was too quiet, the air heavy. It was the kind of quiet that made every hair along my arms stand on end, like something else was still here, waiting, watching for us to slip.

Then my radio crackled, the sudden burst of static making me flinch.

Drew’s voice came through. “Jackson. Kai and I just hit the outskirts. We’ll be there in a minute.

” I glanced at Thorne, then down at the unconscious man sprawled beneath me.

My pulse still thundered in my ears. It felt like hours had passed down here in the dark, but only minutes had gone by.

I raised my head to meet Thorne’s eyes. “Okay, Drew. We’ll meet you outside,” I said into the radio.

Then I dipped down to cuff Evan, just to be sure, hooking him to one of the new pipes so he hopefully couldn’t go anywhere.

“Can we leave him here for now? Do you know what we’re dealing with?

” I asked Thorne, watching closely as he struggled to climb back to his feet.

Something flashed in his dark eyes, and a shiver shot down my spine when it seemed as if shadows danced across his features.

“I know,” he said, his voice husky and hoarse from shouting.

“And Jackson, it isn’t good. Not good at all.

” He raised his hand and pointed up and out, toward the woods beyond Gwen’s backyard.

“The ridge,” he said, “starts here and curves around all the way to the back of Rosy’s property, doesn’t it?

” He did not need to explain further. Though Thorne hadn’t been a resident of Hillcrest Hollow last summer—when Rosy had inherited the farm and its duties from her father, Zachery—I did not doubt that the warlock had done his research before coming here.

He’d already hired contractors to build his fancy home.

They broke ground shortly after Rosy’s arrival and built the cabin-mansion in record time.

What he was speaking of was the evil that had been imprisoned on the back of Rosy’s land for millennia.

A prison that Chardum the Destroyer and Rosy’s father, Zachary, had been charged with guarding.

Until evil found a way, and twenty years ago, cursed both of them.

Last summer, in a huge fight, that evil either escaped or died, vanished.

Rosy thought it was gone, but not everyone believed that. Thorne certainly didn’t.

“No,” I said to him. “You’ve got to be wrong.

Wouldn’t we have seen something more serious if it was…

that?” I didn’t even have a name for the evil from the prison—none of us did—just that it was vile and powerful.

I glanced at the passed-out Evan and, while certainly awful, it didn’t quite rise to the level of “mass destruction…”

Thorne’s expression was very grim, though, his head shaking.

“We need to talk to Chardum,” he said. Then he added, “But you wouldn’t be at full strength either, after being locked up a couple of centuries.

Let alone as long as this thing has been trapped.

” With that ominous warning, he pulled his askew parka straight and, shivering all the way, climbed the stairs out of the basement.

It took me a moment to gather my thoughts, hoping, praying that he was wrong.

What he said made a very painful kind of sense, though.

I followed him out of the basement with heavy feet, feeling like I was stepping out from beneath a thick, muffling fog by the time I reached the kitchen.

That’s when it hit me, the sharp, fierce burst of panic.

It was like a punch to the gut and made me stagger a step, clutching at my chest.

Thorne was by the back door, and his head jerked up, his gaze snapping to me as I stumbled into a cabinet with a crash.

Our eyes met, and I didn’t have to vocalize what I’d just sensed.

He spun for the door, threw it open, and raced outside with a curse.

I was hot on his heels, unsteady from the panic thrumming wildly in my chest. Outside, the backyard confirmed what I already knew: Gwen was gone.