“I had it constructed,” Dae-hyun said. “Just for this purpose.”
“Did you blow up your house?” I asked.
He grinned. “I had to do something to slow down those men who can track you.”
“A bit excessive,” I said.
Then the seriousness of the explosion hit me. The fairies would probably recover. The Demons and Sever too, of course. Unless they were standing right next to the bomb. Even a fairy can't recover from getting blasted to pieces. But the extinguishers, for all their psychic gifts, were human. They were wearing magic-proof vests as I was—Gentry Tech had distributed them to both councils to outfit the Extinguishers and Wild Hunt—and the vests might save them from the initial blast. Their torsos at least. But they wouldn't be saved from crumbling debris.
Fuck. How many were dead? How badly injured were my husbands? Star? His guards? Thank the Gods, Alexis and Alex had stayed behind with the tech crew. They would be safe and they would send help. And Alex knew about Dae-hyun's other property. So they'd be sending help here too.
Dae-hyun took another loud slurp of coffee.
I focused on him. “They'll survive it. And then they'll be coming for me.”
He grinned.
Oh, fuck.
“What have you done?” I demanded.
“I have a little surprise for your friends. Just wait and see. It's going to be . . . well, they'll get my point.”
“You can't kill them.”
“That is incorrect.” Dae-hyun sat forward. “They, and probably you, are immortal, but they are not invulnerable. If they were, they'd be here already. Also, I'd know. But that's notwhat I saw in them.” He grinned and added, “I saw weakness. Do you know what their weakness is?”
“Yeah, yeah. You know about the blood. Well done. They still survived, asshole. There's an antidote.”
“Oh, I'm not talking about the blood of Angels and Demons.” He paused and reconsidered. “At least, not in that way.”
“Then what?”
“There is something you can do that will kill anything, even an immortal. Something only the mythical hydra would survive. Can you guess now?”
“You're going to behead them?” I lifted my brows. “You'd have to catch them first.”
“Yes, I thought of that.”
A sudden cry came. Not just one. Shouts echoed around me. Shouts of pain.
“They're here,” Dae-hyun said in a sing-song tone.
“What the fuck did you do, Carol Anne?!” I jerked against the chains binding me as the sound died down.
“Carol Anne?”
“What did you do?!”
“Seren?!” Sever called.
“Sever! Are you all right?”
“Give me a minute and I'll be right there, love.”
“Oh, it's going to take longer than that,” Dae-hyun drawled as he tapped some keys on his laptop.
Water dispersed into the air and the electrical buzzing stopped. Suddenly, I could see that we were in a cavern, not the house I'd seen on the laptop. The cavern entrance was the mouth of a tunnel located directly opposite me. There was a ledge before the entrance, but after a few feet, it ended in a sharp drop. Our cage was perched upon a pedestal of rock in the center of the cavern, hundreds of feet away from the tunnel. And the pedestal was nearly the same size as the cage. It was a trap.
