I laughed again, shaking my head at them before turning my attention to Tan. He’d handed his prisoners off to Gar and had clothes in his hand.
“You can shift back. I have clothes for you. We need to get back inside. They’re still fighting in there.”
Really? I couldn’t believe it. It felt like we’d taken a long time to get through the tunnel and take these guys out.
As if hearing me, Tan nodded. “Apparently, everyone in that building came down to join in the fight so a bunch of people attacked from behind.”
Shit.
I shifted back quickly, took the clothes from him with athanks, and dressed.
When I looked at my viramore, they were already shifted back and putting on clothes that Hiro handed them. I growled under my breath because another man was way too close to my viramore while they were naked, but Tan gave my shoulder a shove to distract me. It helped, but only a little.
Fortunately, Oak dressed quickly, and even though I wasn’t happy about it, I was relieved when Hiro handed Oakley a sports drink to help them get the blood witch flavor out of their mouth.
I grumbled under my breath about it as quietly as I could, but from the eye roll and wink Oak shot me, they clearly heard me.
Oakley and I both retrieved our dragonscale weapons from our ripped-up clothes, and I could tell Oak was sad that their ankle holster for their knife was broken. Neither of our shoes had survived the shift, which was unfortunate but pretty typical. Oak strapped their shield around their left arm and held the knife in that hand to free up their other for their sword.
I followed their lead, setting myself up the same way.
Oak muttered, “I can’t believe how many blood witches are here.”
“Me either.”
Over my comms, Thayer’s voice yelled, “We need help in here! They have those fucking shield-breaking spells and keep going after the cages. More blood witches came out of a back room, and they have hostages.”
Everyone on my team heard the call, and Oak, Bas, Hiro, and I took off without missing a beat. Tan and Garrick knew they had to stay behind to watch over the prisoners, but neither was happy about it from the look on their faces.
I was the last through the door, which irked me, but it was fine. Bas and Hiro would probably be faster than Oak and me since we didn’t have shoes on.
We made it all the way through the tunnel and out of the closet in record time, but I almost ran into Oak because they stopped so suddenly. I grabbed their hips to balance myself—they didn’t even seem to notice—and stepped to the side, releasing them as I surveyed the basement.
There were bodies everywhere, some frozen, some clearly no longer alive, some under shields, some handcuffed. There were just so many, everywhere.
Ailin, Seb, Thayer, Toby, and other team members were standing in front of the cages that were still full of people. There were shields around the cages now, but they were a mix of colors—green, blue, silver, black, yellow—so it was clear that they weren’t the original shields Seb and Ailin had put up.
To our right, there was a group of people, the servants, all huddled together with Jed, Beshiro, Phaeron, and the rest of the vampires standing in front of them, guarding them. They didn’t have any shields over them, probably because the cultist had managed to separate our witches from the servants, and once they used a shield-breaking spell, the servants were exposed.Fuck.
For the last several months, people had been using magical artifacts to break wards and shields. Jed and Beshiro had been on the case, and I knew they’d found several warehouses full of the damn things, but they obviously hadn’t stopped the culprit yet if these cultists had them.
Where they were coming from was a mystery for another day. There were other worries to think about.
A group of cultists were standing near the stairs with several children—hostages—many of them bleeding. The cultists held children captive with knives to their throats. Some asshole even held a crying toddler.
Every time I thought these people couldn’t get worse…
One of the cultists stepped forward, dragging a teenager with him. Oakley made a strangled noise, and I winced when I looked harder at the teen. It was Isidore. Holy shit, it was Isidore.
The blood witch had clearly cut her arms up already since she had blood smeared over her and dripping from her fingertips. And now, he held a knife to her neck, dragging her with him, using her as a shield, although he also had a red hazy shield over both of them.
The witch said, “Let us leave this place unharmed, and we’ll leave the children outside.”
I didn’t think it went unnoticed by any of us that he didn’t say the kids would be unharmed… they were already harmed, for fuck’s sake.
Ailin called out, “Let the kids go, and we’ll let you live.” He sounded more pissed than I’d ever heard him. But that didn’t surprise me since I’d been hearing stories about the man for decades about how much he loved kids.
The cruel blood witch laughed. “No, I don’t think so.”
