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I knelt down beside him, reached around to the front and sunk my blade up through his ribs, piercing his heart.
I slid my blade, now covered in slippery, wet, warmth out of his flesh and shoved him face first into the carpet.
The threat in this room now eliminated, I left the boys where they were on the floor while I checked the rest of the house to make sure there were no more hunters. I found two of them dead in the basement. The person whom I assumed took them out was a female who lay broken and dead at their feet. One of the few who still had her eyes.
The rest of the house was empty, but that didn't put me at ease. There could be more hunters out in the woods surrounding the house, waiting for their friends to join them or ready to come back and lend an ever so helpful hand if need be.
I wasn't taking any chances.
I slipped my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and made a call to my father. He'd come and help me clean up the mess and he'd know what to do with the boys.
After ending my call I slid my phone back into my pocket and, with a heavy heart, headed back toward the nursery.
The hunters had evolved over time and, somewhere along the line, they'd gotten their hands on a witch who had no problems betraying their own kind. The hunters now came equipped with their very own magical tattoos that made it impossible to use magic against them. It was the only reason massacres like this were successful. If the people in this house had been able to use their magic to defend themselves, they wouldn’t have been slaughtered in such a way. No, it would have been the other way around.
I closed the eyes on the pregnant mother, there was something about the blankness there, the lack of life, that I found disturbing, which was odd, considering I had seen it so many times before. Maybe it was because she was pregnant that it bothered me so much, since my wife had looked that round in the belly not that long ago and it made looking at this dead woman all the harder now, because it wasn't just her light that had been snuffed out. Her round belly had been stabbed multiple times.
Very gently, I closed her eyes and placed her hands over her bloody belly.
I easily scooped up both boys in my arms, the one was a lot younger than he had looked when he'd bravely launched himself at the hunter. All rage and balls and brawn, he'd eventually be just fine if he didn't let his rage at the injustice of it all swallow him whole. The other boy was slightly older and would unfortunately wear the marks of this night forever carved into his face.
I carried them down to the blessedly body free living room and laid them out on the couch.
For the first time in my life, as I looked down at them, I wished I had been born a healer and not a warrior, because it hurt my heart to see them lying there injured and know there wasn't much I could do for them outside of trying to stop the bleeding and hoping like hell they didn't bleed out and die on me.
It was one of the longest nights of my life so far and a part of my heart broke a little when one of my father’s associates drove off with the boys, promising them safety.
My father and I had been left behind to take care of the bodies.
Eventually, the bald, fat, pompous little prick named Adrian left and the Brothers of the Maidens remained. I couldn't believe what I'd seen going down.
They were here for my Ariel and they were staying with her. This was a miracle, something I could never have planned or hoped for, much like everything that involved my beautiful daughter.
My mouth moved in an unfamiliar, foreign gesture as my lips parted and I smiled at nothing in particular.
Things around here were looking up. I didn't even care that douchebag Marcus was going for sainthood and had done something I would have done if the opportunity had been presented to me. I was all for righting the injustices of our world, or at least I used to be back before my whole entire world had been ripped out from underneath my feet.
The smile slipped from my face and a familiar emptiness sunk in.
I pushed my chair away from the desk in front of me and stood up. The only thing that could possibly fill me with anything outside of misery was downstairs with strangers and people who knew nothing about those strangers outside of the fact they were there for their girl. They were bound to be upset by these strangers and my daughter likely needed me.
Never as much as I needed her.
I headed downstairs toward the only ray of sunshine I had left in my life. Without her, my world was pitch-black and a place no one should ever be forced to live in.
Chapter Eleven
"Do you both have your driver’s licenses?" I asked into the awkward silence.
I crossed my legs at the knee and shifted my weight, my butt already going numb from the hard surface of the countertop I'd hefted myself up on. The room was tense and I was trying to act as normal as I could in hopes my guys might loosen up just a little bit.
No such luck so far.
"We have the papers you ask about," Trenton assured me. "We have fake papers for everything. Our uncle knew someone who took care of all of those things for me."
My mouth flopped open. Well, that wasn't exactly what I meant at all.
"Can you drive?" I questioned curiously.
