Through the Ether (Force of Nature Book 5) - Amber Lynn Natusch Page 0,77

it was. We’d been in such a state of unending chaos that I’d totally lost track. Instead of bothering to find out, I flopped to the ground and whispered to the earth beneath me while the others fanned out to keep watch, the threat of my mother ever-looming. Energy seeped in through my pores, and I took a deep breath as it circulated through my body, regenerating all that had been lost to the chalice. But before I could finish, Knox’s hands wrapped around my biceps and snatched me off the ground.

“What is it?” Foust asked. As he searched the area for the threat he hadn’t seen, his eyes fell upon the front door—and the small, bloody object pinned to it with a blade.

Not an object—a creature.

A bird...

“Noooo.”

I wrenched free of Knox and ran to the door, hoping I wasn’t too late. Hoping I could save the raven who had saved me, reuniting me with my father. My father’s guardian had been plucked clean except for a single feather atop his head, and his wings had been broken. They hung limp at his sides, bloody, with bones sticking out. With gentle fingers, I lifted his head to look in his eyes. There was only a hint of life left in them.

“It’ll be okay, Drake,” I whispered so my voice wouldn’t betray me; so he wouldn’t hear the potential truth belying my words. “I just need to get you down.” I grabbed the blade, and a jolt of fire shot through my body, knocking me into Jagger. “What the fuck…”

The raven who held the soul of my dead uncle inside him looked at Grizz. The man-bear stepped forward a second later, sadness in his warm brown eyes, and stroked his bald head.

Then, in a single movement, he ripped it from his body.

“No!” I screamed, launching at my guardian who’d just killed my father’s. “How could you?”

“It was a mercy kill,” Jagger said, sadness rimming his voice.

“But we didn’t even try to save him!”

Grizz, still holding the bird’s head, looked at me, silently begging me to understand what he could not say, as I had so many times before in our bizarre relationship.

My anger slowly washed away to pity, realizing that he’d done something he hadn’t wanted to in the service of a friend—a comrade of sorts. Someone who understood what it was like to be him.

“He asked you to do it,” I said, the hollow words escaping in a whisper. The man-bear nodded. “He knew there was no saving him…”

He nodded once more.

“We need to get inside,” Knox growled as he punched in the code to the door. Without hesitation, we all crammed into the foyer and waited for the next code to unlock the entrance.

“Why did she pluck him?” I asked, the morbid question too pertinent to withhold. “Just to torture him? To be the soulless bitch she is?”

“It was a message,” Kat replied. I turned to find her blue eyes filled with burning rage.

“But what?”

“To tell us she’s going to pick us off one by one,” Brunton said, “until only one is left.”

I felt all their eyes land on me.

When the door beeped, I ripped it open and stormed through the foyer—right into my father. His wide eyes were full of panic, and for a second, I wondered what had gone wrong while we were outside.

“It’s Drake,” he said, his tone edged with fear. “Something’s wrong—” His words cut short when his gaze fell to Grizz’s bloody hands.

“He’s gone. We found him outside.”

While my father stood there silently, doing what he could to process his loss, I shouted for Merc as loudly as I could, but he didn’t come. And as ice surged through my body, I heard my mother’s cackling laugh bubble up from the back of my mind.

It has begun…

Then screams rent the air.

Chapter Twenty-Five

We bolted down the hall toward the kitchen, where the alarm had sounded. Along the way, others funneled out of other rooms, drawn by the sound. By the time we reached the chaos, we’d amassed a small army.

Knox and I shoved our way through the mob until we reached the bloodstained marble island in the center of the room, upon which lay a disemboweled witch whose name I didn’t know but whose face I recognized. She was one of the golem victims; a freed prisoner of the Ether. She’d survived all that, only to be gutted in a place that should have offered some measure of safety. But like most things that involved