The Forbidden Read online

  He landed in a crouch, his boots splashing in the sewer’s filth, but he maintained his balance, managing not to fall into the foul water. A pile of rocks and mud were just beneath the hole, where the Fomorii had obviously left the remains of their digging.

  The tunnel was not quite high enough, forcing him to hunch over to keep from banging his head.

  Once he was certain there were no Fomorii in the vicinity, he mind-spoke to Silver. “It is safe. Be careful as you climb. I will catch you if you fall.”

  He felt Silver’s surprise at his speaking in her mind, and then her assent. Within moments, the blue glow grew brighter as she climbed down toward the sewer, and he could see her lithe form as she found footholds and handholds in the dirt and stone.

  When she reached the bottom of the hole, she swung down with her normal grace, landed with a thunk of her boots on the metal, then proceeded to lose her balance and almost fall into the sewer water.

  Hawk’s head banged against the top of the tunnel, but he managed to hook one arm around her waist and pull her to him. He felt her warmth against his body, the roughness of her breathing. She tilted her face up. “Nice catch,” she said, and he smiled.

  One after another, Jake and other members of the PSF team climbed down into the tunnel. A couple slipped and landed in the sewage, but quickly got to their feet as if nothing had happened. Professionals they were, Hawk had to admit to himself.

  Jake’s quick assessment was the same as Hawk’s. He pointed in one direction. “The sewage drain has deep scratches heading that way.”

  Silver nodded and reached up to tuck errant locks of her hair back under her cap. Her silver snake bracelet glowed in her magical blue light, the serpent almost seeming to crawl up her wrist with her every movement.

  They walked through the sewage drain, hunched over, as they searched for some kind of clue to the whereabouts of the demons. Their boots sloshed in the muck and the stench clung to their clothing. Even with the stink, Hawk could still smell traces of Fomorii. They passed manholes but ignored them as there was no indication the demons had used them as exits.

  It wasn’t long before they found an opening torn through the metal drain and a hole dug up into what appeared to be a room. A pile of rocks and mud were beneath the hole, much like the one where they had begun.

  Hawk insisted on climbing up alone, and found himself in what appeared to be a ceremonial chamber. He smelled remnants of Fomorii stench, but it was not fresh. Using mind-speak, he shared with Silver what he saw, and then eased back down into the sewage drain.

  “That has to be where the Balorites hold their Clan meetings,” Silver said when he reached her and he saw her shiver. “No doubt that’s where they’ve been holding most of their blood rituals.”

  “Too bad we don’t have time to scope it out,” Jake grumbled. “I’d like to nail those bastards.”

  “You might just get the chance, if they’re in league with the Fomorii,” Silver said.

  Hawk turned to follow the sewage drain and nearly slid down it when it sharply turned downward. Bracing their hands at the top of the drain, they amazingly enough managed to make it down the steep incline without landing in a pile at the bottom.

  They hadn’t gone much farther when they reached another hole with a bigger pile of rocks and dirt beneath it. The Fomorii stench was much stronger and Hawk gritted his teeth. His senses told him the demons were close. Very close.

  This time muted sunlight peeked through the hole. Hawk worked his way up the rough tunnel, his hands and feet braced on the walls in what footholds and handholds he could find, his dagger between his teeth.

  When he reached the opening, he raised himself up and out onto a patch of dirt beside an enormous building. Silver was right behind him, and he grabbed her hand to help pull her up onto the ground.

  “Their lair,” Hawk said. “Magic may be shrouding the Fomorii, but this close I can sense the demons.”

  She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked up at the building. “It’s a hotel. We’d better stay out of sight.”

  Jake and the rest of the PSF team made it out of the hole. The lot of them smelled so bad from the sewer that Hawk wasn’t sure they would be able to search the building without being instantly detected.

  “We must get inside,” he said.

  Silver frowned. “We can’t just walk in there like this.” She looked up and up and up. It must be one of the older hotels as it didn’t tower as high as the more modern ones.

  Hawk folded his arms across his chest. “I can gain access from the roof.”

  Silver furrowed her brow. “There has to be an easier way. A window, something.”

  Jake gestured to a second-story balcony at the back of the building. “If we can get there, I can break open the window.”

  “I can take care of the locks,” Silver said. “Just let me get up there.”

  She didn’t wait for the men. She climbed onto a low wall that shielded the hotel’s generators. Thank the Ancestors for the dreary and overcast day. Hopefully no one would notice a bunch of people in black climbing up into a hotel. That would certainly go over well.

  Jake followed, and without her asking him to, he took her by the waist and boosted her higher so that she was sitting on his shoulders. Now the balcony was almost within her grasp.

  Just as she went to push herself to stand on his shoulders, Hawk soared up, grasped her beneath her arms and carried her onto the balcony. The brief sensation of flying was exhilarating. She found herself breathing a little harder when they landed.

  “Help Jake and the others,” she said, pointing down to the cops who appeared to be looking for another means of getting up to the balcony.

  Hawk grimaced, then flapped his wings and leaned over the edge of the balcony, just hanging by the toes of his boots. He reached for Jake, and the cop clasped arms with him. Hawk gave a mighty pump of his wings that almost knocked Silver back against the balcony window. His jaw tensed and his muscles bulged as he drew Jake up high enough that the cop could grab the top railing of the balcony, and swing himself up the rest of the way.

  “Thanks,” Jake said.

  Hawk just grunted and folded away his wings so that they had completely vanished beneath his shirt. “I do not sense any Fomorii in this room.”

  Silver turned her concentration from the overdose of testosterone behind her, to the lock on the balcony door.

  She searched for the lock with her powers and found them at once. There were two locks, a bolt and a pin. Easy enough. She raised one hand, focusing on the pin lock, and heard a light scraping sound, then a chain’s jingle as it fell away. With a twist of her fingers in the air, the bolt scraped clear. Silver tugged the sliding glass door open. They were in.

  But the room wasn’t empty.

  14

  A man and a woman were completely naked on the bed in the center of the hotel room. The woman was on her hands and knees facing Silver as the man took her from behind.

  Silver raised her hands and said, “Oops.”

  The man rolled off the woman and onto his feet. “What the hell?”

  The woman gave a furious scream, snatched the remote control off the nightstand, and threw it at Silver with the accuracy of a World Series pitcher. Silver barely dodged it and flung ropes of fog from her fingers just as the man strode toward her.

  Magical fog whipped around the couple as Silver forced them to become completely motionless.

  The man’s hands dropped to his sides. The woman’s expression went blank and her eyes glassy.

  “Well, shit.” Jake came up to one side of Silver and scratched the back of his neck. “Can you do something to make them forget us?”

  “That’s what I’m doing.” She tightened the fog and with her thoughts she ordered the man and woman to return to their bed and sleep.

  The gray magic it took to force her will on someone else was intoxicating this time instead of exhausting. The mix of raw sexual energy, pheromones, and anger in the
room—the gray magic fed off the combination.

  It worked perhaps a little too well, a little too fast. Drawing a little too deep on Silver, penetrating her just as the man had been penetrating the woman. Rough, hard, primal.

  Power.

  Ah, goddess. It felt so incredibly powerful to force this couple to bend to her orders.

  For a moment, she held them still. Then she moved the man like a puppet. Back. Back. To the bed. On the bed. If she wanted to, she could leave them at it as the whole group trooped through the room.

  Some dark part of her warmed to the thought while another part of her mind yelled for her to back away. Screamed about the edge, the brink, about points of no return.

  A black wolf raced through her mind, its tongue lolling out, and it almost seemed to be laughing.

  Around its neck was the red eye.

  The vision nearly broke Silver’s concentration. She narrowed her eyes on the couple and managed to get the man and woman into bed with their covers up to their chins, and fast asleep.

  When she finished and her gray fog slowly vanished, Silver’s shoulders trembled. What was happening to her? Why would she feel such pleasure in manipulating this pair of humans?

  To Silver’s surprise she felt a pair of strong hands rubbing her neck as if she were a boxer preparing for another round. “Are you all right, a thaisce?” Hawk asked in her thoughts.

  She gave a sharp nod and ducked out of his grasp. Dragging her thoughts from the strange feelings of power, she turned to face him, Jake, and the other four armed PSF team members who had followed them. Jameson, McNulty, Sanders, and Chin were their names, all of whom Silver trusted implicitly. The other two PSF officers had remained below, just as two had remained at the entrance to the tunnel back at Janis’s home.

  “Let’s make it quick.” Silver switched on a dim bedside light. The room they had entered was stuffy and also had that old-hotel smell to it. “We need to find out more about this place.”

  Jake moved up beside Silver. “You said you saw a small ballroom in your vision?”

  Silver nodded. “To one side was a cloth-paneled wall with hinges, like it could fold away.”

  “Sometimes they separate a large ballroom into smaller ones by removable panels.” Jake’s expression was thoughtful. “If that’s the case, then we could enter by a side room and get in that way.”

  “Hold on.” Silver went to the desk in the room and started riffling through the room service menu and sightseeing pamphlets, until she found a brochure for the hotel. She scanned photographs of the hotel’s amenities and within moments found a picture of the Grand Ballroom. “I think you’re right. This looks identical to the one I saw in my scrying cauldron, only this one is double the size.”

  After glancing through the brochure, Silver looked to Jake. “I’ll go first so that you all don’t scare the crap out of someone with your guns. I can do a quick memory spell on anyone we meet.” She almost laughed as she added, “Likely the sewer stench on our clothes will drive them away before they see us.”

  Silver swallowed as they made their way past the bed with the sleeping couple and exited out the hotel room door. One reason she insisted on helping the cops and using her magic to keep the criminals from fighting back was that she was against any form of killing. But the feeling that these demons deserved death was so strong she could taste it.

  And it scared her.

  Weapons drawn—or in Silver’s case, fingers ready—the seven of them crept down the hallway toward the stairwell, their shoes silent on the carpet. It was as red as blood. The way to the stairwell was short, and thankfully they did not run into anyone on the way.

  When they reached the stairwell, Jake entered first, followed by Silver and then Hawk. She knew the men were being protective of her and she tried not to let it piss her off. She could more than take care of herself.

  On the first floor they eased out of the door from the stairwell. It creaked the moment they opened it and they all froze. When there was nothing but silence, they slipped into the illuminated area of the elevator banks.

  Silver’s heart beat faster when she heard noise coming from the lobby. Her stomach clenched as she recognized the hallway she had walked down in her vision—straight past the elevators.

  “I know where to go.” She nodded down the hallway toward the noise. “In my vision the back way to the ballrooms wasn’t far from here.”

  Heart pounding in her throat, Silver moved stealthily along the corridor. As soon as she recognized the door from her vision, she moved through it and into a huge storeroom. Definitely déjà vu time. She felt the presence of Hawk and the PSF team behind her as she glanced around the room filled with banquet tables, chairs, and risers.

  The sense of wrongness she had felt in her vision swept over her in a powerful wave, much stronger this time.

  Yes. Darkness. Definitely, dark sorcery was close.

  Carefully, Silver moved through the storeroom to another door, placed her hand against the cool metal, and held her breath. She felt the presence of Hawk, Jake, and the other officers behind her, but heard not a sound.

  She pushed open the door and slowly exhaled when she saw the small ballroom, identical to the one in her vision. Again this one was empty, and mirrored the one the scrying cauldron had shown her.

  Tension strained every muscle in her body as she crept over the floor to the sectioned wall. As she had Seen, each section was hinged, as if the wall could fold away.

  She found her hand trembling as she placed it against the wall.

  The darkest of sorcery slammed into her, so intense it nearly drove her to her knees. She gasped for air and tried to calm the sudden queasiness in her belly. With shaking hands, she reached down and drew her daggers from her boots.

  The presence of sorcery was so thick Silver’s stomach roiled. She rose, weapons in hand, then moved silently along the wall until she came to the end where there was a gap between the partition and the wall.

  She peeked through the gap and her breath stuck in her throat.

  The witches—they were behind some kind of purple force field. Some braced their backs against the wall, others sat with their arms around their knees, and one of the witches was pacing.

  Rhiannon! She’s alive!

  Sharp relief rolled through Silver, followed by fear for her friend, along with anger so intense her vision blurred.

  Standing guard at the door were two of the biggest, ugliest creatures Silver had ever seen. Their rotten-fish stench clogged her nose. The demons watched the room and the witches diligently but occasionally the creatures turned to one another to speak in a garbled language.

  Silver glanced back at the two men behind her. “This is it.” She tried to clear her thoughts. “I’m going to have to take out the two guards with my witchcraft, or we’ll never get in.”

  Jake gave a quick nod and Hawk frowned.

  She focused on her gray magic. With a small push of her mind, gray fog streamed from her fingertips through the crack in the wall between rooms. The fog slowly made its way along the floor, creeping toward the two demons.

  The Fomorii didn’t notice the fog as it wrapped around their ankles, and worked its way farther up their bodies. Sweat broke out on Silver’s forehead and a droplet rolled between her breasts. She could feel herself weakening from the spell.

  “Sleep,” she instructed the demons. “Sleep.”

  For a few dreadful moments, nothing happened. If the damned things had been human, they would have fallen unconscious—maybe permanently—from the force she was using. But these were demons. Former sea gods.

  Had she been crazy to think her magic would work against such alien monsters? Demons that had once been gods?

  Shaking from a mix of nerves and strain, Silver poured even more energy into the sleeping spell. Binding, taking freedom, using gray magic to force her will on other beings.

  Distasteful. Exhausting.

  Necessary.

  More. I need more.


  Damn it. What if she killed them?

  Let them die.

  Silver’s lips pulled back in a wolfish snarl. Her power seemed to double, triple, filling her with such energy that her hair practically lifted from her shoulders and crackled with electricity as if joined with another, far darker magic.

  She was using the gray for good, wasn’t she? She could use the extra power, just a little.

  Sleep. Sleep. Sleep, she repeated over and over in her mind. A burst of magic rushed through her fog ropes, straight to the demons.

  In response, the monsters blinked their eyes. They seemed to lose color, even look sick. A black substance trickled out of one’s snout. The other rubbed its throat and seemed to be gasping for air.

  Silver didn’t break off her attack.

  Sleep or die, you monsters from hell. Your call.

  The bleeding demon swayed a bit. Then the gasping demon staggered. Both were obviously in pain. They even looked afraid.

  Silver felt her smile widen.

  For one awful second she thought they were going to fall to the floor in two giant thuds that would alert every other Fomorii in the place. But each simply slid down the door panel and collapsed into deep trances.

  A few of the witches murmured in confusion. The rest remained studiously silent, and someone even shushed the whisperers.

  Silver waited one breath for the usual exhaustion that would make her momentarily weak.

  Nothing. If anything, she felt energized. On fire with power.

  One of the men brushed against her back. Hawk. Without looking, she could tell by the scent of him, the smells of wind and forest above all else. The irrational urge to bite him nearly overpowered her.

  She might have done it, too, but Jake paused to give her arm a squeeze.

  When Silver looked down at his fingers, the wild energy waned enough for her to think—at least a little. She raised her head and met his gaze.

  Jake winked, moved by her and began to pry open the door. It gave a small groaning noise and they all jumped. Silver’s heart pounded faster.