Chapter 153
The angry monsters were coming at them, and Jo, Zane, Scott, and Cassidy were outnumbered at least ten to one. The chances of them being able to shoot all of the monsters dead before any of the LIGHTS members died were slim to none.
Thankfully, Cassidy didn’t have to shoot the monsters in order for her to get them out of their way. As Jo, Scott, and Zane worked on shooting them, Cassidy used her powers to create a bubble around the monsters, one they couldn’t break through. Jo held her fire, afraid she might do something to mess Cassidy’s plan up. The men followed suit. The monsters were contained, but it wasn't clear how long they would stay that way, and they were still blocking the group from reaching the door, the only means of escape.
For now.
Cassidy directed Jo, Scott, and Zane to move behind her. “Get out of the way!” she shouted. “I’m going to move them!” As soon her teammates were behind her, Cassidy lifted the monsters and shifted them around so that they were no longer blocking their exit. It all seemed too simple, but as Jo and Zane made a run for the door with Scott right behind, Cassidy was able to keep the monsters inside of the bubble from bursting out and coming after them.
Jo was hopeful that she’d find only a couple of Vampires inside of the tunnels once they exited through the doorway to hell, but as soon as they came through, she knew that wasn’t the case. Christian had not kept his word. Whether he hadn’t been able to get a portal to open to get her mom through or he was just being an asshole, Jo couldn’t say, but she could see on her IAC that Christian and her mom were still here.
“What the hell?” Cassidy asked as she clearly saw the little blips on her IAC as well. “Why are they still here? Christian didn’t take Cadence out of here?”
“Apparently not,” Jo said, running away from the door to hell. Regardless of where the others were at the moment, it seemed like the smart thing to do, to get away from there, just in case those monsters came through again.
As soon as she had a second, she used her IAC to contact her mother. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you guys go through the portal?” Jo asked.
“Christian’s injured,” Cadence said, her voice calm. “He’s bleeding out. Where’s Scott?”
“Shit,” Jo muttered aloud. Then, to her mom, she said, “He’s with me. Do you know what tunnel you’re in?”
“No,” Cadence responded. A few seconds later, she said, “Sixteen.”
“We need to find tunnel sixteen,” she told Scott specifically but the others heard as well. “Christian needs you.” Jo was looking at the numbers of the tunnels as they ran by. None of them were in order.
“Christian?” Scott repeated. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. My mom just said he’s hurt and needs help. That’s why they couldn’t get out. He didn’t get a chance to open the portal.”
“Well, it seems like a pretty good time to right a universal wrong if you ask me,” Cassidy said, not moving nearly as quickly as the rest of them.
“We need him to get us out,” Jo reminded her aunt. She really didn’t want Christian to die on her watch either. As much as she hated the man, he had lived a really long time, and it would suck for him to be dead because she mishandled a mission. Not that it would be the first time he’d died, but her understanding was that the first time it happened, he’d only been dead for a day.
“We don’t need him to get us out,” Cassidy argued. “We can just go when the portal opens on its own.”
“No, I don’t think we can,” Jo said. “I think that’s probably where the rule of one left behind comes into play.” She was still frantically running from tunnel to tunnel looking at the numbers, as was Zane. “If one of us opens the portal, I think it doesn’t matter if someone is in here or not. But if the portal opens by itself, that’s when we have to leave someone inside of the portal.”
“What makes you think that?” It was clear by Cassidy’s tone that she didn’t agree with that assessment.
For a moment, Jo thought she had found sixteen, but it was twenty-six. She growled. “I don’t know. But we’re not going to just let him die if we can save him.”
“Sixteen!” Zane shouted from a couple of tunnels ahead of her. “Here it is!”
They all picked up the pace then, even though Cassidy did it reluctantly, and as Jo sprinted down the tunnel, she saw her mom sitting on the floor next to Christian while Ryker stood sentinel with his gun drawn. Scott wasn’t as good at throwing his light ahead of him as his father was, so he sprinted over instead and quickly laid his hands on Christian. Jo stood back, but she could see that Christian’s wound was in his gut. “What happened?” she asked.
“One of those creatures got him in the stomach with its claw,” Ryker explained. “Too many of them hit us at once, and we just couldn’t fight them all off.”
“I’m fine,” Christian said, his teeth clenched, sweat pouring off of him. “Leave me alone, not-Jamie.”
Scott glared at him. “You’re not fine. Let me put your intestines back in your body so we can get out of here, okay?”
Jo was sure that they’d gotten there in time for Scott to save him if the stubborn Guardian would let him.
“Come on, Christian. Stop being an asshole and let him work,” Cadence said, her hand on Christian’s shoulder.
He narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t say more. Scott’s blue healing light enveloped Christian, and within a few moments, he was breathing normally again.
“He’ll be all right now,” Scott said, pulling his bloody hands back from Christian’s ripped shirt. “Give him a minute to catch his breath, and then, we can go.”
“We should have a few minutes before the mass of monsters come back,” Jo said, but her eyes were constantly looking in one direction and then the other. Just because most of the monsters tended to come and go at once, that didn’t mean there weren’t any in here now. She knew that there were some that split from the group because they’d been attacked so many times when the portal hadn’t just opened.
“All right. Get the hell out of my way,” Christian said, pulling himself up off of the floor with one hand on the black wall behind him. They all moved away and gave him room, and Christian began to walk unsteadily toward the end of the tunnel. “Come on,” he growled. “Let’s go home.”
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