Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,87

he heard it. “Sterling let me go with him because I asked. And for some reason, he seemed to want to placate me, I guess. But damn…” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I got a very fast and bloody introduction to wardens that night. It jarred me to my core. The job that went so sideways was in the Pacific Northwest.”

“That’s Sirius clan territory.” He’d joined the Monsters MC a year later, and the Monsters followed different rules about a lot of things, including territory. But he knew that though each clan’s members changed on a regular basis, the area they governed remained more or less unchanged. It had been this way for a long time.

“Yes,” she said softly. “But that night, nearly the entire clan was slaughtered.”

Ares blinked. “Wait….” His mind pushed through years of warden jobs and tragedies, messes and clean-ups and incidences and… eventually he could see a fire. Fire. So much fire lighting up the night as one funeral pyre after another were lit up in honor of the dead. The mass of dead were swaddled in linens and laid to rest on piles of wood, then set ablaze. As smoke joined the heavens and tears joined the earth, warden souls were being seen away.

He hadn’t been a warden. And he’d been nowhere near the west coast. But through Annaleia’s eyes, he saw what she saw. She was in his home and her memory of the event was painfully perfect, allowing him to see it too.

And he knew what she was referring to. That night, the bloodshed had gone down in warden history. They’d learned lessons that night about preparation, weapons, wards and shields. About what humans could and could not do. And most of all… they’d learned about the Apex. It was a baptism by fire.

Never send a human to do a monster’s job.

Chapter Twenty-eight – Santorini, Greece

“You’re talking about the Seacliff Slaughter. Twenty-four wardens, three survivors. Twenty-one bodies set on fire that night.”

Annaleia blinked up at him in a kind of wonder. “How did you know that?”

“I’ve heard of the killings,” he told her. “What warden hasn’t? I wasn’t a warden at the time, so I wasn’t there at the funeral. But you were. And right now, I can see what you saw.” He gestured to the room around them, and the house beyond. “My place, remember?”

She frowned a little, but nodded. “Well, I’m not really talking about the slaughter, though that’s where we went first because Sterling was actually having a hard time finding the person he’d meant to help. She was a warden, so of course she’d placed shields all over herself. And he didn’t find her amongst the dead by the sea. It was assumed that the three who survived only did so because by the time most of the clan was dead, they had decided to exercise the better part of valor and live to fight another day.”

But that wasn’t true, was it little one? he wondered.

She shrugged. “But of course, that posed a problem if they weren’t at the battle site any longer because of all those wards and shields. Eventually Sterling decided to cast a spell to look for the Apex instead.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because in his vision, the Apex was killing the woman’s family.”

Christ. He’d had to ask.

“Sterling found him, but by the time he did, the monster was on the other side of town. Sterling was running on low when he called up a portal to get us there as quickly as possible. I asked him if there was anything else I could possibly do. I’ll never forget what he said then. He looked at me with ghosts in his eyes and said, ‘Annaleia, I’m so sorry you have to see this and do this. But as selfish as it makes me, I’m grateful you asked to come with me. I’m going to tell you right now – we are not going to be able to save everyone. But with you here, maybe we can at least save two of them.’ And with those words, it hit me. It hit me what I could do, the gravity of it, how valuable it was, and how horrible – how fucking nightmarishly horrible – it was that I was now going to have to fucking choose who to use it on!” She sobbed suddenly, putting her face in her hand.

And just like that, she was falling apart.

Ares was stunned. He had absolutely no idea what to do.