Come Out Swinging (Reach for the Moon Book 2), Sam Hall [leveled readers .TXT] 📗

“Forget Mum. Get out of town, take your guys, and fuck off back to the city, never to return. That place… I’ll not set foot in it again. It’s a fucking cesspool.”

For a minute, all I could see was Selma and Aidan, rigid as marionettes, looking down at each other with manufactured passion. “The Spehr stuff is all bullshit, you and I have always agreed on that, but…” I let out a long sigh. “I have a responsibility. How many people has she coerced? Our uncles? The other cousins? How far is she prepared to go with this? Will she bend the whole bloody town to her will? We’ll set you up, keep you safe, find you a harem of your own.”

I saw her bloodshot eyes grow suspiciously shiny at this.

“Promise?”

I watched the bruised muscles in her face struggle to form a smile, and mine was watery in response.

“Promise.”

“But then you’re gonna go after her.” She studied my face and got her answer clearly enough. “Then if you’re gonna go after her, you need to get Aidan out. I don’t know how long or how deep her claws are, but she’s had them in him for some time,” Bridget said. “He…” She took a long shuddering breath. “He’s my brother, but he doesn’t know that. He just walked in on Marshall…” Her head shook sharply. “He saw what they were doing, tried to stop them, and then…”

“And then they wiped him and turned him into their little puppet.”

I swallowed hard, seeing what she described clear as a bell, and my fingers formed fists.

I walked down the hallway to where Mason was being kept, feeling like steam was billowing out of my ears as I went. Fucking Nance, fucking Lupindorf, fucking Marshall, fucking Engels. Fuck, just fuck. I shoved through the swinging door with more emphasis than needed, people’s heads jerking around at the sound of it, so I stopped and took a deep breath before opening the door into Mason’s room much more sedately. As I entered, the guys all looked up from where they stood or sat around his bed.

“Apparently, they don’t usually allow this many people in to visit,” Declan said. “Nor non family, so we’ll need to be quiet.”

“You pushed your dominance onto them?” He nodded. “Good. How is he?”

“They don’t know what’s wrong,” Zack replied through gritted teeth. “They’re waiting on tests and—”

“It’ll be something to do with us, what’s inside us,” Micah said, eyeing the lot of us with those unearthly grey eyes. “I don’t reckon they’ll find out what using human medicine.” He lifted a hand as he moved closer, hovering it over Mason’s lax one.

“Don’t,” Lorcan said, shaking his head.

I stepped in closer, eyeing the two men, then forcing my eyes down. I’d been studiously ignoring that, the echo of my father in Mason’s form. Micah’s eyes glittered with a dangerous light, his hand dropping lower.

“Isn’t that what got us in trouble the first time? When we touch, we connect,” Lorcan said, scanning the lot of us.

When we touch, we connect. There was a simple truth to that which I hadn’t felt before. We’d all touched in various ways, from romantic to sexual to just comfort. So what had happened back at the forest? I lifted my hand, grabbed Micah’s, and drew it to my lips, feeling the hum when I did, of energy, of him. My eyes slid sideways and found his watching me, some kind of unspoken knowledge hovering there.

But I let Micah’s hands go, and as a collective breath was let out, my other one shot out, taking a hold of Mason’s. We were going to war, and I needed to know exactly what we were walking in with. I’d felt our power rise like an ancient sea monster before. Well, now the lack of that surged up, just as vast and sluggish. It snatched me in its massive jaws and yanked me down into it.

Chapter 20

The darkness swallowed me, rolling me around in its endless depths until I became it and it became me. I felt like I was falling, falling, falling, until finally, something caught me.

Mason.

There he was, emerging from the gloom as it plucked at his skin like a spurned lover, but it was me he focussed on. He frowned, then shook his head.

“What are you doing here? I… No, you need to go back, now.”

“We need to go back,” I agreed. At my words, the shadows shifted. Like predators in the night, I could barely track the movement, but I could feel it. “We need to go, now.”

“We can’t, you can.”

I hated his face, the way it fell into resigned lines. I knew this expression, though it had been years since I’d seen it. It was the same as my father’s when he watched me leave town.

“No, Mason—”

“Yes. I felt it when we joined. We didn’t know what this was. Zack said he was doing research, and you need to ask him about that when you go back. There’s something more to being a nix. The pull for us is just one part, but there’s a power. It’s not complete, we shouldn’t have joined up. Instincts we shouldn’t have kicked in, somehow realising innately what we were asking of ourselves.” He blinked slowly, his eyes dropping down to focus on my hands. “If it had just been you, you would have failed. No harm, no foul. Well, except for Bridget. There’s something in her, so strong, it blocks us. Her…” He shook his head. “Ask Zack, he can investigate. The longer you stay here…”

His eyes darted around, and at that, the darkness became more oppressive. The tendrils that writhed on his skin became claws, raking away everything he was in long slender scratches, leaving only nothingness behind.

“No…” I said, shaking my head wildly. “No, Mason. I’m not…” What? What was I going to do? “I’m not leaving you.”

“I could feel it, the teeth in this place. Power exacts a cost, you know that. The Spehr