“Who are we taking out?” she asked, looking over us all with a toothy smile.
“Imps. Grim suspects they’ve been trafficking children into the Underworld and harvesting them,” Payne told her what I already knew. Imps were nasty little critters with wings that preyed on kids as well as teens. They went after demon children too. They didn’t discriminate.
She nodded. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
???
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Maureen asked as she took a step toward the cave entrance.
“Are we ever wrong?” Payne asked her. He wasn’t joking or smiling, just stating the facts.
Maureen gave him a smirk as a thin sword materialized in each hand. She twirled her wrists around. “I would knock…but there’s no door.” And with that, Maureen faded.
“Well, let’s not let her kill them all before we get inside,” Barron said with a crooked grin before fading himself.
Payne, Mr. Straight and Narrow next to me, couldn’t fade like us, but he had a portal chip. I watched as his jaw ticked before we both sprinted inside. It didn’t take long for some of the imps to greet us. Payne kept two weapons at all times. A rifle and a huge ass sword lay across his back, and most people would think it was odd he carried them around but not when you knew his parents. His dad was into guns, and his mom was into swords and daggers, it was only natural that he took a liking to both.
My own weapon—a machete—materialized, and I hacked away at the first one that jumped at me, teeth bared. I took outanother one as Payne grabbed his rifle and blew the head off the one that was jumping toward him.Bang! Bang!Two more.
It didn’t take us long to find Barron and Maureen, literally waist deep in imps, and a hundred or more flying all around us. Not that it was necessarily a problem, just tedious. The real problem was the number of children in the cave.
“Shit,” Payne muttered what we all thought.
“How did they get so many?” Maureen hissed as she brought her blades out and twisted her entire body in a circle, slicing into every imp around her.
Something snapped within me when I saw all the children, most of them human, especially the ones cut to pieces lying on the ground. Their ghosts wailed and screamed, some even transitioned into poltergeists with their hatred and fear of what had been done to them intact.
“How did we not know of this sooner?” I practically growled, gripping my blade tighter. I was already on edge with the way my Reaper senses had been acting up, now I was beginning to understand that maybe it wasn’t just me.
A muscle in Payne’s neck jumped. “Feel that?” he asked.
I arched a brow, then proceeded to hone in on what Payne wanted me to feel as I sliced into some imps and he shot them down from the sky.
And I did feel it. Not only feel it, I heard what was lacking inside their chests. Their hearts were brutally carved out. Their souls screaming for their injustices. It wasn’t what they said, which was nothing, it was everything they poured out into their very essences.
There wasn’t anything ordinary in the deaths of these children. “Their hearts are missing.” Barron must have heard us.
He was right though; their chests were opened. “There’re remnants of something powerful in the cave. Some sort of spell or ritual… Or it could be athing,” Maureen added.
“Kill themall.”I noticed the way Barron’s voice altered, the way his body twitched, and his muscles flexed in and out. Payne tossed me a look the same time I did him because he knew that my brother was seconds away from raging out.
“My thoughts exactly,” Maureen nodded. “They can’t speak, so it’s not like they can tell us what they were doing with the children.”
“Maureen,” I hollered in a severe tone that made her turn and glance back at us. I motioned to Barron and her eyes were quick to find him and that was all it took. Maureen could manage Barron better than all of us. Sometimes she could talk him out of his rage before he fell completely into it.
“Barron,” she called to him, all the while still taking out imps. There weren’t many left. Most were in the sky and Payne was shooting them down. I morphed my weapon into a thick black chain and sent it into the air, slicing into them. They squawked, and the entire cave was painted in their green blood.
In the distance, the children whimpered, some huddled together in a cage while others were chained up. They were safe now that we were here, and I could focus on Barron who we needed to get under control.
“Don’t fucking rage,” she told him. “We have to get these kids out of here.”
While Payne shot down the last of them, I hurried toward Barron and Maureen. Barron didn’t have any thoughts, he didn’t even have a consciousness when he raged, which meant the children were in danger if we didn’t get him under control.
“Barron!” I yelled, and he snapped his head around to me. His eyes were already blackened. “Whoa, don’t give me that look. I’m your brother.”
“I don’t think talking is gonna work this time,” Maureen told me. “Seeing all these dead children has darkened all of our moods, especially Barron’s.”
I knew she was right.
