Refugee (The Captive #3)(72)

“What the hell?” Max, seeming to have just noticed Lauren’s appearance was coming back at them. Lauren’s eyes darted to him; amusement filled them as recognition sprang forth.

“Both of you,” she whispered excitedly.

“Who the hell are you?” William demanded.

Aria’s surprise was wearing off. She tried to pull her arm free of Lauren’s grasp but the girl clung like a burr. Lauren was trying to haul her toward the bar, pulling sharply on her arm. “Let go of me!” Aria snapped, as anger completely replaced any shock she felt.

“Get your hands off of her!” William was beside her, Max had circled behind Lauren, blocking her pathway to the tavern. Daniel seemed confused as if it hadn’t quite penetrated his artist induced haze that something wasn’t right.

Lauren was brought up short as she bumped into Max, her fingers twisted painfully on Aria’s arm as she pinched her skin. Panic flashed briefly across Lauren’s pretty face as Max’s hands fell onto her shoulders. Seeming to realize she was cornered, she began to yell. “Guards! Guards!”

Terror filled Aria, reacting on instinct alone she fisted her hand and drove it straight into Lauren’s nose. It was something she’d itched to do since she’d been a prisoner, but she felt no satisfaction as blood spurted forth and the girl groaned in pain. She finally released Aria as her hands flew to her brutalized nose and she staggered back.

“Run!” Aria shouted as Lauren began to wail loudly for the guards.

She bolted down the road, shedding the cumbersome cloak as she ran. Shouts echoed behind them but she didn’t dare look back as they rounded a curve in the road. Her eyes darted over the tops of the houses, the roofs were pitched, steep, and slippery from the rain. She thought she might be able to navigate a few of them, but none of them in succession, and there was a good possibility she would fall from the slippery tops. If she didn’t kill herself, she would at the very least break something.

It was a mess, it was all a mess. The muddy road hindered their progress. It tired them out quickly and made it difficult to get any real speed up. There was still too far to go, they would never reach the safety of the woods if they didn’t do something. She’d promised Braith she wouldn’t do anything stupid, but she’d never expected that they would be discovered.

She broke away from the others, racing toward the porch of a small house that would be easy to scale. “Aria!” Daniel barked.

“Keep going!” she yelled at him.

She ignored him as she leapt onto the banister and seized hold of the porch roof. Her fingers scrambled for purchase on the slippery shingles but she was able to get enough of a hold to lift herself onto the roof. Without the added burden of her cloak she was able to pull her bow and arrows swiftly from her back. The guards were closer than she had realized and there were more of them than she had expected. Her heart sank.

Lifting the bow, she had no time to take aim as she began to rapidly fire arrows at the rushing group. Some of the arrows hit their marks, others missed completely, and still more were dodged. Some of the guards fell back from their injuries, but most kept on coming.

Aria grabbed her bow and quiver and tossed them onto her back as she leapt to her feet and ran. She didn’t attempt to jump onto the next porch roof, she would never make it. Instead, she leapt from the roof. Her legs scissored in the air before her feet connected with solid ground again. She leapt back up and took off down the road. She rounded a corner to find that William and Daniel had taken up shooters stances on either side of the road. Max was further down, his bow lifted as he prepared for the guards.

She heard the twang of her brother’s strings seconds before Max started to fire. “Run Aria!” he yelled at her. She bolted past him, racing another fifty feet down the road before taking up position behind a water barrel that was over flowing with fresh rain. She grabbed her bow and arrow, steadying herself as she set up to take aim at the creatures hunting them. If they could keep this up, if their arrows held up, they may be able to escape this town intact.

Daniel and William appeared from behind a row of houses. Aria ignored the blood dripping from William’s head, she couldn’t think about that now. Not if she planned to survive. She was about to release her first arrow when an arm wrapped around her waist and she was lifted against a hard, broad chest. For a disconcerting moment she thought it was Braith that had seized her, the dimensions were about the same size, but there was something cold, unfamiliar, and wrong about the man holding her now. A hand snaked around her throat and clasped over her mouth.

She began to struggle in earnest, kicking and screaming against the hand muffling her. A cold certainty crept through her as lips pressed against her cheek. “Well well well look at what I have here.”

Her body turned into a block of ice at Caleb’s words. She hadn’t spent much time with him, as Braith had gone out of his way to keep her away from his brother, but she would recognize his voice and the cruelty that laced his words anywhere. This was so much worse than she had originally thought.

Every horrible nightmare she’d ever had seemed to be screaming into reality as his arm constricted cruelly around her waist. “We’re going to have so much fun you and I.”

A scream burned in her throat, it pushed relentlessly against the hand that was currently twisting ever tighter on her face. “So much fun. I’ll get to see just what it was that my brother saw in you.”