Page 123 of Jagged Souls

“She’s pregnant with a hybrid.”

“Abort it,” Dayne demands, and I want to tell Khalid the same. She should be carryingourchild. Not one of theirs.

But if Antonio finds out we still have some alexandrite, he’ll take more than just her eyes. He might even kill her and Rudy, deciding to cut his losses and bank on the three breeding women he already has to juice him up enough to rescue Siome. Micha’s only alive because she isn’t too much of an inconvenience. I can’t risk changing that. Can’t risk revealing our hand just to give her momentary relief.

“No,” I say, turning to Dayne, forcing down my own desires. “They won’t want to risk causing a miscarriage. She will be tortured less while pregnant.”

His jaw tightens, but he nods, and I turn back to Khalid. “Call Vlad. I want an updated list of locations.”

Aleric owns half the police force in this city, and his men have been interrogating the members of the Death Hunt they rounded up. The capos and the higher fish have been transferred to more secure facilities, but he has connections in most of those places too.

When phasing, a vamp jumps to a known coordinate – with a bit of magic to push them out of any solid objects – assuming it goes well. With teleporting, a witch has to make the portals first, etching them into the ground or other flat surface, then connecting them together. Once the gateways are established, they can step onto the portal area and draw a black circle within it. This is the ‘key’ that lets them open the door, and it allows them to only take or send the items they want to go through.

However, the creator isn’t the only one who can hop between them. Any witch who can read their workings can do so, which is why they need to be secured through other magic. An average witch would put the spell around the portal. For someone like Eduardo though – smart and paranoid, they’ll weave it into the portal itself. Meaning a brute force attack will most likely trigger an explosion that destroys it or an alarm that alerts him to tampering.

I’m hoping the witches Ryker is sending me today are good enough to bypass Eduardo’s security. If not, we’ll kill them and get some more. There isn’t a causality number too high when it comes to rescuing my wife.

Rudy will hate me for killing innocents to save him, but he can hate me when he’s back home.

Dayne does not say anything as he follows me to the front porch. Khalid goes inside the house through the side door to make the call, then to rouse Stormie and Enoch.

She’ll need to come with us as I’m still unable to control my powers. It’s common among those who pulse to struggle for months or even years. It’s the equivalent of being tossed a bomb and having to stop it from exploding. The eruption of power is too intense, too blinding and deafening to even hope to know what to do. It took Rudy two and a half years to stop pulsing. Every time it happened, Mother sucked him into the Plane of Monsters. To save the rest of her kids, she had to terrify him. The pain she’s endured holding this family together…

I understand now why she doesn’t believe in true love. If I have to choose between Micha or Rudy…

Perhaps I should ask Mother how she decides.

And how she lives with herself afterwards so if it comes to that, I don’t hesitate in the moment and end up losing them both.

“If this fails,” Dayne says, finally breaking the heavy silence, “what’s plan B?”

“We kill your sperm donor. And every other teleporter on Earth.” We’ll still have the issue of finding the ship, but if we can kill or run off Eduardo after he’s teleported Antonio to land, then we’ll have a much better chance of rescuing my family.

Of course, tracking him down will be the difficult part. A coward like him won’t venture off alone.

“Eduardo,” Dayne says, an almost hiss full of trauma and fury. “I get to kill him.”

“Micha –”

“Will want this for me.”

I glance at him, the words of refusal on my tongue.

I bite them back though. Micha might be my wife, but no one knows her better than Dayne. I might not trust my family when it comes to her, but I trust him.

Because she does.

“He’s yours,” I say.

Thirty-Four

HIM

After picking up the teleporters, we bring them to the house, then march them into the garage. They have black hoods over their heads and steel gloves over their hands, which are tied behind their backs with witches snares, thin golden chains spelled to be unbreakable. Dayne touches the two of them on their arms, dropping them to their knees with his magic. He pulls the hoods off them, and they blink rapidly at the influx of light into their retinas.

The older of the two is a woman. Light skin with high cheekbones and runic tattoos weaving across her chest and face, wrapping around her neck and over her arms. Her bubblegum-pink hair is shaved on one side and long on the other, a complementary color to her lime-green eyes.

The other one is a young male, probably around Rudy’s age. Even lighter skin with platinum-white hair ruffled about his face. His pale-yellow eyes makes him look washed out.