Don't Touch My Men - Helen Scott

1

Grim

I had never been as exhausted as I was when we got home that morning. We’d been out all night kicking ass and taking names of asses we had to go back and kick later. Every single muscle in my body hurt like I’d tried to go for a weight lifting record and then run a marathon afterward. It fully sucked.

As soon as we stepped on the footpath to the front door, everything got so much worse.

Death visions began slamming into me one after the other. Mae coming down hard and fast on the mages, even some of Alastair and Ellis—they all swirled together as we walked toward the house. Each mage that we had taken out was coming back and punching me in the psyche.

This wasn’t right.

I shouldn’t be having these visions at all. I’d been present for most of these deaths, which meant that the visions usually skipped me. Apparently, I hadn’t been paying enough attention though, because I was seeing them all over again.

They were twisted and warped though, unlike any other death vision I’d ever had before.

When I stumbled, Ellis grabbed my arm. “You okay, Grim?”

“Something’s wrong,” I mumbled as we walked into the house. Death visions were everywhere. A step in any direction triggered more, it was worse than being in a vampire’s nest.

“Guys! Mae is gone!” Hunter’s panicked voice came from the other room.

Fear surged through my chest, making my heart seize and beat in a strange rhythm. Something was very wrong if Mae was gone and I was having all these weird visions. “Help me to her room,” I said to Ellis as I reached out blindly, my mind too filled with visions to actually see what was around me.

A hand took my own, whether it was Ellis or not I didn’t know, or particularly care, so long as someone helped me get there. Everything got so much worse as we moved though, to the point that I fell to my knees and started to crawl. I didn’t know what was driving me, all I knew was I had to get to that room.

My hand felt along the wall, and I could hear the guys talking, possibly even talking to me, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying over the roar of the visions in my head. It wasn’t that I could make out what the people in the visions were saying either, but I was getting snippets that I knew happened recently, which was brand new for me.

Then a vision of Mae as she fell to the floor in front of me. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as she struggled with something. Bodies crawled over her, ripping and biting, pulling and shredding until she passed out. Or at least I hoped that was what had happened. Then her being dragged away.

I crawled farther, and it was like the vision rewound itself. Mae was standing there arguing with a man…who was on fire? What the hell had happened? Magic of some kind encased her, and when I looked beyond her, I could see the faces at the window, dead eyes staring in as they fought to get to their prize. When the glass of the window shattered, I flinched like I was there, even though this had happened hours earlier.

Another forward motion from me had the glass piecing itself back together and the zombies, for lack of a better word, moving away from the window until it was just Mae and…Wardwell? What the hell was going on?

I watched as she threw a blade that embedded itself in his forehead and then lit him on fire before the two of them had a chat. It was at that point that I felt it—the urge to vomit, the feeling of oil slicking over my skin, and the scent of sulfur stinging my nostrils.

Black magic.

Not just black-ish magic either, this was the kind of black magic that was as dark as pitch and as bottomless as the night sky. No wonder piercing Wardwell’s brain with a dagger and setting him on fire didn’t do anything. He wasn’t being powered by normal bodily functions, wasn’t even a corpse that had been raised, like the ones necros used to be able to produce. This was a different kind of magic, one that wasn’t reliant on anything other than the caster. Without being able to hurt whoever had cast the spell, Mae was trying to fight smoke and mirrors.

I just wished I had any idea who