Page 6 of Hellfire to Come (Infernal Regions for the Unprepared #5)

Chapter Six

brOOKLYN

Something was wrong.

Not the low, constant hum of anxiety I’d learned to live with since Alice was taken.

No. This was different.

Sharper.

Colder.

It came out of nowhere, sharp enough to steal the air from my lungs.

Something reached inside me, clamping down on the place where my instincts lived, bruising it from the inside out.

Pressure built behind my ribs, twisting along that invisible cord tethering me to her—the bond I hadn’t asked for, hadn’t wanted at first, but couldn’t live without now.

It was the only thing assuring me my friend was still breathing.

I stared out the window as we drove, trying to focus on the blur of motion, absently listening to Dominic mutter vocal responses to the wolf for our benefit.

They communicated on some animalistic level none of us was privy to.

Buildings passed. Places I might’ve cared about once.

None of it mattered. None of it had color.

Not while she was still somewhere under the Syndicate’s thumb. Not while she was hurting.

“She’s not okay,” I breathed, more to the glass than the people around me. “Something’s happening to her.”

Dominic’s eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror, meeting mine. He didn’t ask who. Of course, he didn’t. He knew. They all knew.

Echo shifted beside me in the back seat, her boot tapping anxiously against the floorboard. “That means she’s alive,” she said quietly. “You’d know if she wasn’t.” I could see it in her eyes that she spoke from experience, probably when I killed her brother.

I ignored the tightening in my chest.

“That’s not the point.” My voice came out sharper than intended. I forced a breath through clenched teeth. “I can feel her… like she’s wrapped in chains that keep tightening. She’s not screaming for help. I don’t get that feeling. That’s what scares me.”

Dominic’s hands flexed on the steering wheel, the leather creaking beneath his grip.

“She’s gone quiet,” I whispered, rubbing at the center of my chest desperate, to return whatever link had formed between us. “And when Alice goes quiet like that… it means she’s close to the edge.”

Not the kind of edge you fall off. The kind you jump from, full of fire and fury.

The kind of edge you don’t come back from unchanged.

“She will do something dumb, she won’t wait.” My eyes locked on Dominic’s in the rearview mirror. He understood better than anyone how reckless our friend was when she thought she was protecting us. “She’ll get herself killed.”

I’d seen it before. Those moments when the world pushed her too far, when everything cracked and she stopped trusting people to save her while the rest of us were in danger. Alice didn’t break like others. She shattered inward, then reformed herself into something harder. Colder. Sharper.

And she never warned you before she exploded in a flurry of random magic.

“She’s waiting for something,” I added, voice low. “Planning.”

“Good,” Echo muttered. “Let her plan. Let her burn them from the inside while we strike them from the outside. I’m sure we are nearly there.”

I didn’t answer. Because I didn’t want that.

I wanted her alive. Whole. Safe. Still Alice.

Not the version of her the Council was no doubt trying to make. Not the ghost they’d hoped to carve out of my best friend. The same ghost they carved out of me for decades.

I leaned back and closed my eyes briefly, trying to reach her again. Not with magic. Not with any power I could name. Just with… us. With the thread we’d tied between each other somewhere between disaster and laughter, blood and kindness.

The bond shimmered faintly, tension rippling through it with every subtle shift.

I didn’t hear her voice. Not exactly. But I felt her: bruised but upright. Hurt, but furious. A wildfire behind cracked glass.

She wasn’t asking for help.

She was waiting.

And that was worse.

“She’s going to do something,” I said aloud, my eyelids snapping open. “Soon.”

“She’s always doing something,” Dominic muttered.

“This time feels different.” My throat ached. The wolf whimpered from between Chester’s knees where he was fidgeting. “This time I think she’s preparing to become something the rest of us won’t recognize in hopes of helping us.”

A heavy silence settled in the car. Even Chester had gone quiet in the front seat, for once not running his mouth. That alone made my skin crawl. He kept digging the nail from his forefinger into the skin of his thumb, his eyes vacantly staring at the window. His profile was carved out of stone.

“She’s not just surviving,” I whispered, a lump growing in my throat. “She’s preparing for war.”

I swallowed thickly, forcing the panic down.

No tears. No spiraling.

Not now. Not yet.

Because Alice didn’t need my grief. She needed my rage. She needed me focused. Ready to kill for her if it came to that. And I was. Dear gods, I was.

She’d always been my roots, pulling me back to the earth when I wanted to drift off and follow the breeze. Always patient, always understanding, even when I was a walking nightmare of trauma and venom. She stayed. She saw me. Not the chaos. Not the blood.

Me.

And now she was in their hands.

And I was supposed to stay calm.

The guilt and fear tried to swallow me whole again, drown me in the misery of my thoughts but I fought it with everything in me. If I succumb to it, the Council will win.

Let them keep her long enough to make their last mistake. Let them think they’d broken something precious.

I would burn their empire down brick by brick just to put her back together.

“Brooklyn,” Dominic said, softly, “We’re close.”

I nodded once.

“Then we go in, fast. Quiet. Anyone in our way…” I paused, tasting the venom on my own tongue. “…dies screaming.”

Echo smiled. “Now that’s the Brooklyn I know.”

I turned toward the windshield, the road stretching into darkness.

The Council thought they knew who they’d taken.

They thought I would break.

They didn’t realize they’d just unleashed the weapon they created.

And when I finally got to Alice…

I wasn’t just bringing her home.

I was leaving Hell behind me.

The road narrowed into gravel, then dirt.

Trees closed in on either side of us, their branches, gnarled and skeletal, scraping at the sky.

Dominic turned off the lights and slowed down.

The deeper we went, the quieter it became.

No birdsong, no wind, no life. Just the rumble of tires over stones and the soft, ominous whimper of the wolf.

There were predators lurking near; nothing dared breathe.

Then, like a wound splitting open in the earth, the forest gave way.

We pulled to a stop at the edge of a clearing, half-shrouded in mist and shadow. And there it stood.

A mansion.

The mansion stood like a bastardized echo of my old life; A distorted version of the place I’d once called home.

The cages beneath it still counted, I supposed.

It hadn’t rotted. It hadn’t collapsed.

It waited, just like they did.

It was massive, three stories of cracked stone and ivy-choked windows.

Most of the roof had collapsed inward, and sections of the facade looked scorched, like someone had tried to burn the place out of existence and failed.

The gates had long since rusted off their hinges.

Nature had tried to reclaim it, but the mansion refused to rot.

It sat like a corpse that hadn’t learned it was dead.

“Looks abandoned,” Echo muttered, leaning between the front seats squinting through the fog.

“It’s not,” I replied without hesitation. I could feel the monsters in wait behind those walls.

She didn’t argue.

Dominic cut the engine and eased the car behind a line of trees, parking under the cover of overgrowth. We got out slowly, every movement deliberate, ears straining. The silence wasn’t natural. It was held. Like the land itself was holding its breath.

“No wards on the perimeter,” Chester noted, running a hand along the air near the trees. “Not the usual kind, anyway.”

“They don’t need them,” I said. “They want us to think there’s nothing there. They are hoping no one would be stupid enough to look twice.”

I stepped forward, gaze locked on the windows.

“I don’t like this,” Dominic muttered, his animal prowling restlessly behind his green gaze. “We are too exposed. They didn’t pick this place for nothing. It’s strategic.”

“Which means it’s a trap,” Echo finished for him, inching closer to Chester, the two demons testing the area for witch magic and wards.

“Of course, it’s a trap.” I crouched and swept a line through the dirt with my fingers, eyes narrowing. There were fresh tire marks leading around the parameter instead of straight to the front steps. Barely visible, but there. “They’ve been using the back road.”

Chester tilted his head. “Think she’s in there?” Red circles of demon magic spiraled around each of his arms.

“I know she is.” The words came out ice cold. “She’s in there; I can bet my life on it. And they know we’re coming.” Rolling my shoulders didn’t help remove the crawling feeling under my skin.

“We could wait till dark,” Dominic suggested, squinting at the darkening sky which still had shades of light gray and blue in it. “Send the wolf around the perimeter. Check for Guardians. Get the layout. I’ll shift and go with him.”

I nodded. “Do it.”

The wolf bolted off into the brush without hesitation, paws silent on the damp earth the second a black panther stretched his powerful body in the spot where Dominic stood not a second ago. I watched them go, jaw tight.

Echo stepped up beside me, scanning the structure. “We need at least two entry points. One silent. One violent. Some of us can keep them busy while someone takes Alice out.”

“I’ll take violent,” Chester chimed in from behind her, cracking his knuckles.

“Of course, you will,” I muttered, a smile tugging at my lips despite the rage and fear twisting in my chest. Chester was too calm, too cheerful to be real. There was rage churning behind those sparkling-with-amusement eyes of his ticking like a bomb.

I took a long, slow breath, trying to ignore the way my pulse thudded in my ears. My eyes drifted back to the mansion.

Somewhere behind one of those blackened windows, Alice was waiting.

Maybe she didn’t even know we were here yet.

If she couldn’t feel the connection like I did, maybe she thought she had to do this alone.

She didn’t.

I turned to the others, voice low and sure. “We go in tonight. Silent as we can. Split at the south wing. Echo and Chester cause a distraction. Dominic and I go through the cellar. No one lives unless they have to. Except Frederic.”

Chester raised an eyebrow. “And if we have no other option but to kill him?”

“You’ll have plenty of options,” I said, voice flat as a blade.

Killing Frederic would be a mercy.

None of them deserved that.

We waited in the trees, every second stretching like a blade across my nerves. Dominic and the wolf returned just before the night spread over us like a blanket, furs matted with dew and eyes alert. The wolf gave a low huff and flicked his ears toward the west wing.

“There’s a breach,” Dominic translated the moment he returned to his human form. “Collapsed wall behind the overgrowth. Leads to a lower level.”

Perfect. A little too perfect but so be it.

“They’ll expect magic,” I said. “They’ll expect brute force. They’ll expect me to blast the doors screaming. But they won’t expect us to slide in through their broken history. No one would guess I’ll go to the cages willingly.”

“Just like old times,” Dominic muttered, dozens of unsaid things swirling behind his eyes.

“No,” I said, focus still fixed on the mansion. “Not like any other time.” Slowly I turned to look at him. “This time… we finish it. Once and for all.”

“What about the witch?” Chester sounded uncomfortable just mentioning the traitor. “Should we bring him back with us or...?”

Kill him—that’s what he meant but didn’t dare say. Chester was a wise male always picking his words so he doesn’t step on any toes.

“Don’t kill him.” Dominic answered so fast the words were almost blurred. I cocked an eyebrow at that. “I want to know why, if he was the one who betrayed us.”

I stared at him.

“You can kill him after I have a talk with him.” My mate offered an olive branch. “If he did it.”

“With pleasure,” I said truthfully. “And I can’t see how it was not him.”

Chester shivered, a full-body shake rippling through him. “Brrrr. I’d hate to be on the receiving end of that.”

“I’d keep my mouth shut then.” Echo shoved him as she moved past. “Let’s go kill some Atua before she decides to kill you first.”