Primal Heat 05 - Darkness Reborn

smell of fresh earth and trees was the ever-strengthening scent of death, rot and sulfur. Anyone smell that? He reached out with his mind to his team, able to connect with them all because they were close.
    He got a negative from everyone, and he swore under his breath. If no one else could smell it, then it was up to him to track it. It was daytime. Nothing should be out in these woods except nature...unless he was the evil he was scenting.
    Oh, man, because that was a good thought.
    He took Sarah's arm, bringing her more tightly against him as they reached the edge of the pit. He hadn't known what to expect during the day, whether the seething cauldron of hell would still be there, but he hadn't expected this.
    Quinn let out a low whistle as he walked up beside Kane. "I've never seen anything like that before."
    Stretching out below them was a seemingly endless stretch of green grass that seemed to descend into the very depths of the earth itself. It looked almost as if something were sucking the field straight down into the center of the earth.
    "Last night it was hell," Kane said, recalling that Sarah had said her brother and the other males in the town had claimed that the pit was only grass and flowers. Apparently, that's how it really appeared during the day.
    "I bet it still is," Quinn replied. "I'm not buying the grassy fields for one second." He gestured to the team, and as a unit, everyone called out their weapons. Everyone except Drew, who called out two swords, a battle axe, a spear and a dagger.
    Kane shot a surprised look at the youth. "Five?"
    Drew shrugged, giving Kane a cocky grin that showed exactly how little he understood about what he was dealing with in the aftermath of the evil that had tainted him a few months ago. "I still have the ability to call Ezekiel's twenty-one weapons," he said.
    Kane looked at Quinn, who nodded. Ezekiel was the bastard of pure evil who had given birth to the entire Calydon race two thousand years ago, and he'd tried to take them down a few months ago. Drew had been caught in the cross fire and he'd absorbed a lot of the ancient evil that had bled through Ezekiel, as well as the warrior's affinity for twenty-one different weapons. It wasn't a good sign that Drew was still carrying so much of Ezekiel in him, not when he was so young and didn't have the defenses against taint and temptation that the rest of them had.
    I had to bring him, Quinn said. Vaughn went off with Ian.
    Let's hope he uses them for us and not against us, Kane said.
    He's my responsibility. I'll manage him. Lead on.
    Kane gripped his weapon and looked back at his team. Ryland was right next to Sarah. Gideon and Elijah were covering the rear, armed and ready. Zach and Gabe were covering Kane's right flank, with Quinn and Drew on the left. Lily was back at Nonny's house doing information management, researching each detail they found and then replying to Gideon with anything she could find on it. Grace and Ana had stayed behind to provide protection for Lily.
    Although Ana and Grace's Illusionist talents made them formidable in battle by being able to create offensive illusions that were so deadly that they could kill people simply because people believed they were real, neither of their soul mates was all that fond of putting them on the front lines. Given that Jacob and the others could teleport directly into houses past the spotlights used to guard them, in this particular situation, even Nonny's house wasn't safe, so they'd all seen the wisdom of keeping them back to protect Lily.
    But Quinn, Gideon and especially Elijah were on edge about leaving their women behind when they were so close to the action. Kane knew they had to be back before nightfall, or the trio would be too distracted to work. Kane checked his watch. Less than an hour until sunset, and the monsters came to life. In and out in sixty minutes.
    "Can you teleport us down there?" Ryland asked. "It'll save time."
    Kane studied the grassy hills below, the ones that had been a roiling tomb of rot the previous night. He could see a spot at the very bottom, where the valley seemed to disappear into the earth that seemed clear. "Yeah, I can..." he said, not moving to do it yet.
    "Kane." Sarah came up beside him.
    "Hey, sweetheart." He tucked his hand on the back of her neck, searching with all his senses to try to get a lay of the land below them. When he teleported, he had to know where he was going, or he could wind up lodged in a tree