Alpha Dom and His Human Surrogate

Ella

Cora and I pound down the stairs, gasping for breath by the time we reach the bottom. She starts down the dark hall, holding Henry’s phone out in front of her, its flashlight blaring through the darkness, but I cry out a little and grab her hand.

She turns to me, frantic, desperate to get away, but I beg her to wait just a moment. “The carrier,” I say, reaching for it, “for the baby.”

Understanding, she hands me Rafe’s carrier and I quickly bend down to strap him into it, wanting to ensure that he’s ready to get in the car as soon as we get there. As I work, Cora glances around the passage.

“A lot of spiderwebs down here,” she murmurs, “I don’t think anyone’s been down here for a long time to do maintenance. I hope the car…” her words fade out as I stand up straight but I grimace at her, intuiting her thoughts and hoping that she’s wrong.

That when we get to the car, it starts without a hitch. I nod to her that I’m ready and together my sister and I start to hurry down the hall, going as fast as we can without breaking into a run. The tunnel is long – longer than I thought it would be – and I’m starting to panic a little when we finally reach a door. Cora yanks it open.

The door leads to a very, very small space, with only a nondescript blue sedan tucked away in it. Cora dashes to the driver’s seat as I open the back seat to the car, lifting Rafe’s little carrier inside and buckling him in. Rafe is crying a little and I do my best to shush him, to tell him that it’s okay, but I don’t think it helps that my own voice and hands are shaking. If my baby does intuit my moods, as Sinclair thinks he does, then there’s not a big chance that he’s going to stop crying anytime soon.

As I buckle Rafe in Cora finds the car’s keys tucked into the visor and quickly turns them in the ignition. We both breathe out in relief when the car stars and she flashes a smile over her shoulder at me. I pull myself out of the back seat after Rafe is buckled and

close the door behind me. Then, seeing a switch on the wall in front of the car, I quickly move to it and press it once. A mechanism starts to grind somewhere in the room but I don’t bother to look for it, instead pulling the passenger door open and quickly slipping into my seat.

“Ready?” I ask Cora as I buckle my seatbelt.

“I have no idea, Ella,” she murmurs, but she puts the car in drive and, when the wall before us folds upwards enough to reveal a steep driveway, she guns the engine so that we quickly climb the rise and find ourselves, to my surprise, deep in the woods.

ground, Cora pauses, looking around. “Where…” she murmurs, “where the

say, glancing back at Rafe. “Just drive

protests, waving a

to be a way through,” I say, shaking my head at her. “He – they wouldn’t have put this car here if there wasn’t a way to escape. Just

There’s nothing marking it nothing mystical or magical about it but…it’s almost as if someone really did clear a path here so that a car just

a little hysterically. “I

I shout, pointing forward to where, after a few minutes of driving, I start to see…asphalt? Something

before us, something slams into the car, making us scream

around, frantic, and

car, a priest in a dark robe standing, glaring at us, with two men at his side. The priest

gasps too. “Shit! Ella! Shit!” And then, in complete panic, she slams her foot down

just spin beneath the car, finding no traction. And, as I watch, the two

Sinclair

the priests, who are already beginning to hurl spells at me, at

forward next to me, advancing on the priests at my

a pattern of attack and defense drilled into us since we were children – one of us advancing while the other holds the back, so our enemies who outnumber us – cannot slip by and attack our men. Still,

hear my men’s screams behind me. I know that they’re

as I turn to the other two. Their faces are afraid when they see

spells alternately cut, burn, and freeze my flesh – but in the end, I work too fast for them, rearing up to my full heigh to pound the substantial weight of my body into the first man’s shoulders, knocking him down

gasping for air, their dying breaths bubbling the blood at the holes in their neck. As one, Roger and