Page 121 of Tethered Souls

Krypto woofs, and Leno stops scratching him to wag his finger in front of his nose. “Bad dog. Bad timing. What have I said about you sounding like you’re agreeing to sex stuff?”

My lips curl upwards on the side away from him.

“It’s a good thing you’re cute,” he says as he ruffles his dog’s head in both his hands. “Otherwise, I’d have traded you a long time ago.”

Krypto woofs again, having no idea what Leno is saying despite his spectacular timing sometimes. He isn’t a magical creature himself, just a dog Leno shares a few senses with.

I pull off Interstate Ninety-Five at Sampson, a small town that’s mostly made up of eateries, then head east towards the woods. I park on the side of a random dirt track, and we get out. Krypto lifts his nose to the air, but he doesn’t growl. At the moment, we are alone. The rest of our brothers are scattered around the woods, waiting to ambush Antonio and his gang.

Kicking off his shoes, Leno leaves them in the car, then walks off the side of the road. Krypto trots beside him, his head scanning left and right, doing as he’s been trained.

“Yellow light,” Leno says, telling his dog he’s free to roam as long as he stays nearby. Krypto takes off like a rocket, his tongue lolling out as he zooms around the woods.

Turning so I’m half focused on my brother and half on my surroundings, I draw my sword. One of these days, I’m going to convince Khalid I’m ready to play with his urumi – a whip sword I have been obsessed with trying since I saw him use it a few years ago.

But to be fair, I’m still shit with a regular whip. Giving me one with blades on the end probably isn’t the best call.

Magic hums from Leno as he digs his toes into the dirt and closes his eyes. The plants around him shift, feeding off him like the rays of the sun. Tamping his power down, he focuses it, and the plants near us settle again.

He’s searching the woods, traveling along the roots of the trees, through the mycorrhizal network that they use to talk to each other, to feed young saplings that can’t quite get enough sunlight. It’s a community beneath the earth, right below our feet that most people never know about. But Leno joins it like a long-lost relative finally coming home.

“The WALL is here. Two teams of four, plus a van.” He shakes his head, his eyes still closed. “I can’t see how many are inside it.”

Probably four, but assumptions can lead to death. Unlike the werewolves and vampires, we don’t need our hearts to be ripped out or our heads to be cut off to die. Wounds that will kill Earth humans if left untreated will kill us too.

“The wolves?” I ask.

“None yet.”

Not surprising, but they’ll come. With both us and the WALL here tonight, they won’t be able to resist, especially if Antonio is hopped up on the idea of making hybrids. We just killed his youngest son. Khalid also killed Cid’s wife, eldest daughter, and only son in order to get him to talk. He burned the first two alive with his magic, having dropped the soul dolls he created of them into a ball of fire. And as he did it, he opened up a channel between his victims and their dolls, allowing us to hear them and them to hear us.

Antonio was fucking Elana, Cid’s wife, at the time she burst into flames, and Rudy informed us he’d been fucking Abril, Cid’s daughter, for some time too. Whether he was joking about that or not, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. What we’ve done is a declaration of war.

Antonio will come tonight.

And we’ll kill him before he can take everything from us, before he brings in the wrath of the seven archangels. Or just one of the winged bastards. Any one of them is capable of wiping out an entire city on their own. They’re used to dealing with the gods. We are nothing but ants to them.

“Either of the WALL teams close to us?” I ask, thinking we can increase the chance of drawing the wolves to us if we’re all in a ‘nice little bow,’ grouped together for them to slaughter.

“One’s less than a mile –” His eyes snap open, and he yells, “They’re here. Krypto, red light!”

His dog comes streaking through the trees as Leno relays the werewolves’ location to our brothers, using the trees and plants around them to communicate in signals we flushed out beforehand.

There’re a dozen wolves, and they’re slaughtering their way through one of the WALL teams. Talon and Rudy are closest to them, but the others are on the south side.

“What the fuck?” he suddenly mutters.

“What?” I keep my eyes peeled on our surroundings, my grip on my sword strong but not knuckle-white.

“Khalid is streaking towards the van. Shadow form.”

“He say why beforehand?”

“No.”

“Where’s Maddox?”

“With him.”