Chapter 6: The Rescue Plan Takes Shape
The warm, cluttered chaos of the Green Moon chapter house felt like a tomb after Godfrey’s report. The golden retriever puppy sat calmly on a velvet cushion, his intelligent brown eyes moving from face to face as Eric Dubois, one hand resting on Reggie’s scarred head, translated the flood of scent-memories and impressions.
“He followed the scent-trail to a municipal building marked for demolition,” Eric said, his voice a low, steady rhythm. “Basement access. Heavy magic—old wards, new tech. A Greyhold.”
Lydia, seated in a high-backed chair, didn’t move, but her grey eyes turned to chips of flint. “A sanctioned holding facility. But he says they weren’t following protocol.”
“They had a subject. A female. Wired into machines. Scared. In pain. Smelled… like Vivian, but wrong. Rancid hunger and fear.” Eric paused, listening to the silent communication from his dog. “Jan’s scent was strong there. Anger. Protective fury. She used a disruption spell on the machines. The Boom Boom girl blew the restraints.”
Fatima stood by the fireplace, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. “They freed her.”
“They did. The female… she was weak. Grateful. Clung to Jan. Then the other scents arrived. Clean suits. Gun oil. Citrus cologne. Amir.” Eric’s eyes flicked to Fatima. She didn’t react, her face a pale mask.
“Amir and his team moved in. Tried to secure the subject. Jan argued. Said she was a victim, not a prisoner. The subject… she changed.” Eric’s nostrils flared slightly, as if he could smell it himself. “The fear-scent vanished. Replaced by something cold and predatory. She kissed Jan.”
Aunt Noor, leaning against the doorframe, muttered something in Arabic.
“It wasn’t a kiss of thanks,” Eric continued. “It was an attack. A psychic drain. Jan’s magic flared—defensive, trying to push back pleasure, to shield herself—but it was a direct feed. She went down hard. The others tried to react. The Fair Bargain man tried to intervene. The female touched his chest and he… he just folded. Came in his pants right there, slumped over. The farm girl screamed, vines tried to grow from the concrete, but the female just laughed and sucked the life out of them too. The soldier, Dale, he fought. He grabbed her. Threw her off Stacy. He was shouting a name. Vivian.”
Fatima closed her eyes.
“The female didn’t like that. She got angry. Her form… shifted. Shadows. Claws. She slashed at him. That’s when the other one, Amir, raised his weapon. A rifle, but it hummed. Not a normal gun. He fired at Vivian. A blast of golden light. It didn’t kill her. It… knocked her out. Then he turned the rifle on Dale.”
“What?” The word tore from Fatima’s throat.
“Dale was trying to get to Vivian. Amir shot him point-blank in the chest. He went down. Didn’t get up. Then a wide blast for everyone else. Neural-inhibitor. Everyone dropped. The last thing Godfrey saw before he slipped out a vent was the female, Yara, standing over them all, licking her lips while Amir’s people hauled them away. Or that's what Godfrey remembers. He's smart, but he's still a dog, and he still doesn't understand everything that's happening around him.”
The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the crackle of the fire.
“Yara,” Fatima whispered. “My cousin. My father’s brother’s daughter. She disappeared when she was sixteen. We thought she ran away. She was always… intense.”
“She’s a half-succubus,” Lydia stated, her voice devoid of any surprise. “Rumor has it the local Bedivere has been perfecting a method to control them. The rifle isn’t a weapon. It’s a tuning fork. It doesn’t suppress their power; it focuses it, directs the hunger. Makes them compliant weapons.” She stood, her movements sharp. “He’s not just studying other Orders’ magic. He’s farming their emotional and life energy to fuel his experiments. And he’s using family as the catalyst.”
Noor pushed off the doorframe. “So we go get them. Now.”
“The Greyhold will be on high alert,” Lydia said.
“Godfrey knows the way back,” Eric said. “Reggie can follow his trail exactly. And animals… we see things people miss. Vents. Conduits. Unsealed doors.”
“They have my brother,” Fatima said, her voice now steel. “They have my friends. They are torturing a member of my family to make her a monster. We are not debating protocol.” She looked at Lydia. “Give me the sanction. Or don’t. I’m going.”
Lydia held her gaze for a long moment, then gave a single, grim nod. “We go in quiet. We get them out. We do not engage Bedivere if he is there. This is extraction, not a duel.”
“Understood,” Fatima said, already moving toward the closet where Lydia kept the chapter’s less-whimsical artifacts.
“I’m coming,” Noor said.
“We both are,” Eric added, patting Reggie’s side. “Right, partner?”
Reggie let out a low woof, his tail giving one firm, decisive wag.
Fatima stopped halfway to the artifact closet, her hand frozen on the door handle. Her mind, trained for scholarly precision, scrabbled against the raw panic. A direct assault with four people and two dogs, even with a Crimson Heart and her powerhouse aunt, was a terrible plan against a fortified Greyhold. They needed misdirection. They needed chaos of a different, very specific kind.
“We need help,” she said, turning back to the room. She pulled her phone from her pocket, the screen glaring in the dim light. “A particular kind of help.”
She scrolled to a contact, hit call, and put it on speaker. It rang four times before a sleep-thickened voice answered. “Fatima? Do you know what time it is?”
“Mara. Are you drunk or did you finally give in to one of Mike and Casey’s strip poker games?”
A sigh, long-suffering and familiar, came through the speaker. There was a rustle of sheets, a muffled male grumble—Zack—in the background. “It was charades. And Casey insisted the penalty for losing was removing an article of clothing. Mike is currently down to his socks and a profoundly misplaced sense of confidence. What’s wrong?”
“I need a lawyer. I need a couple of actors. And I need a really annoying couple to go distract some armed, magically-enhanced guards at a black site in about forty-five minutes.”
The line was silent for three full seconds. Then Mara spoke, her voice now clear, crisp, and utterly awake. “Location, initial threat assessment, and desired outcome of the distraction.”
“Texting you the coordinates now. Guards are Golden Wand initiates. Charcoal grey suits, tactical sunglasses, likely carrying non-lethal arc rifles. We need a fifteen-minute window at a secondary service entrance. They need to be confused, irritated, and thoroughly preoccupied.”
More rustling, the sound of a drawer opening. “Understood. I’ll get my coat. And Fatima? Remember, we’ll expect the standard hazard fee for non-initiate auxiliary services. My consulting rate is five hundred an hour. Mike and Casey work for pizza.”
The call disconnected. Lydia raised a severe eyebrow. “The attorney and the civilians? That’s your reinforcement?”
“Mara has an exceptionally strong mind. She’s all but immune to persuasion charms and thinks in loopholes. Mike and Casey specialize in being capture-proof annoyances. And Molly and Ginny can make anyone believe anything for five minutes.” Fatima shoved the phone back in her pocket. “It’s not a tactical team. It’s a human glitter bomb. Now, do you have any smoke candles or obfuscation charms?”
Across the city, in a sterile dormitory within the Greyhold’s upper levels, Amir Abaza felt Becky’s hips sink down onto his erection, taking him to the hilt in one smooth, practiced motion. The dorm room was cheap, institutional, but Becky had lit a vanilla-scented candle that did little to mask the smell of industrial cleaner and ozone.
“Fuck, Becky,” he gasped, his hands gripping her slender waist.
“Shhh, Bors,” she whispered, leaning forward to kiss him, her small breasts pressing against his chest. She began to move, riding him with a slow, deep rhythm that made his thighs tremble. Her inner muscles clenched around his shaft in a deliberate, pulsing ripple. “Just feel. You’re thinking too much.”
He was. His mind was a split screen. One half was consumed by the hot, wet clutch of her cunt, the delicious friction of each upward stroke, the sight of her blonde hair falling around her flushed face. The other half replayed the last six hours on a cold, endless loop.
The look on his sister’s friend Jan’s face when Yara’s power dropped her into a shuddering, draining coma. The wet, hopeless sound Aaron Sweeney made as he came undone from a single touch. The brutal, mechanical way Dale Foster fell when the neural-inhibitor bolt hit his chest. Bedivere’s calm, academic notes about “bond exploitation yields” and “optimal emotional resonance for power extraction.”
This wasn’t civic hygiene. This was butchery. And his cousin Yara, her mouth stained with stolen energy, had smiled like it was a birthday party.
“You’re getting soft,” Becky teased, speeding her pace. Her nails dug into his shoulders. “Come on. Fuck me back. Forget about downstairs.”
He thrust upward, burying himself deeper, trying to lose himself in the physical grind. Her cries got louder, sharper. He flipped them over, pinning her to the thin mattress, driving into her with new urgency. The bed frame slammed against the wall with a rhythmic, hollow bang.
“Yeah, like that!” she yelled, wrapping her legs around his back, her heels digging into his ass. “God, your cock is so perfect. Just perfect.”
He pounded into her, the slapping of skin on skin drowning out his thoughts for a moment. She was so tight, so eager, milking him toward his peak. But the dread pooled in his gut, cold and heavy. He saw Yara’s face over Jan’s. He saw Fatima’s, if she ever looked at him with knowing, betrayed eyes.
With a final, desperate thrust, he came, spilling inside her with a choked grunt. He collapsed atop her, spent, the sweat cooling on his skin almost immediately.
Becky traced circles on his back. “See? All better.”
He wasn’t. As his breathing slowed, the clarity returned, harsh and unwelcome. He rolled off her, staring at the acoustic tile ceiling. “Becky.”
“Hmm?”
“What if… what if Bedivere’s methods are wrong?”
Her hand stilled on his arm. The casual affection evaporated. “What are you talking about? The protocols are based on measurable data. The ends are justified. The Consortium—”
“Is that what we saw today?” Amir interrupted, turning his head to look at her. Her post-coital softness was gone, replaced by a wary alertness. “That wasn’t gathering data on Consortium operatives. That was torturing members of the Verdant Pasture and the Fair Bargain. My sister’s best friend is down there, Beck. My cousin is the one doing the torturing.”
Becky sat up, pulling the sheet over her breasts. Her expression was smooth, unreadable. A good Wand initiate’s face. “Yara is an asset. A powerful one. Her methods are her own. Bedivere is synthesizing a defense for all of us, Amir. Sometimes the material is uncooperative.”
“They’re people. Not material.” He pushed himself up on his elbows. “If… if I couldn’t go along with it anymore. If I had to choose my family over the directive. Would you help me?”
She stared at him. The vanilla candle flickered, casting dancing shadows that made her blue eyes look infinitely deep and suddenly very cold. She leaned in and kissed him, a soft, closed-mouth press of her lips.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, Bors,” she whispered against his mouth. Then she slid out of bed and headed for the shower, leaving him alone with the banging of the pipes and a dread that had crystallized into certainty.