Consequence by Shelly Crane Read Free Book Online Page B

“What?”
    He leaned in and kissed my lips firmly, the tips of his fingers rubbing behind my ear. He pushed away from the truck and held his hand out. “Now let’s go get these bastards.”
    It was what I needed. Exactly. I put my hand in his and let him lead me the short walk through the woods to the house. The Watson Compound. I had never seen this part of it when I was here. I could see the well on the cliff a little ways in the back. A shiver ran over me at the thought that we might find people down there today.
    “No time like the present,” Caleb muttered and lifted his hand to let everyone know, from their various scattered positions across the estate, that we were moving in. There was a couple of cars in the driveway, but for the amount of people that supposedly lived there, it didn’t look right. We sneaked across the property line until we reached the main entrance. The massive gate was left cracked open…like they left in a rush. We made our way up the driveway to the house. Some of the family started to search the outlying buildings while we took the main house. Caleb and I took either side of the front door and listened. Not hearing anything, he started to grip the handle to turn it.
    I got the worst feeling. I didn’t know why, but I hissed, “No.”
    He stopped. I went to his side and he put me right behind him as he borrowed my ability and yanked the door from hinges with a wrench of his wrist in the air. We turned our heads, just in time it seemed, as a blast of noise and smoke came from the other side of the door. Caleb looked at what it was. “They rigged the door with a shotgun.” He looked back at me over his shoulder. “How did you know?”
    “I don’t know.” I gulped.
    He squeezed my fingers gently. “It’s okay. They rigged the place since they don’t have any powers to protect themselves.”
    “And how is that supposed to make me feel better?”
    He didn’t answer as he inched past the gun and looked around the room. “If they were here, they would have heard that. We need to move quickly.”
    “The well,” I said. “And the bunker out on the hill.”
    He nodded. He knew I was right. If they had someone here, that’s where they were keeping them. We moved over the hill to the storm shelter looking door and opened it up to find the ladder leading down to the tunnels as Kyle and Lynne went for the well. I gasped at the smell. It smelled the same…exactly the same.
    Caleb held the door open as our family watched and waited for instruction. Peter was next to me and gripped my arm to keep me steady. Caleb walked to me easily. They all knew and remembered what happened to me here. “You don’t have to go down there. You can stay out here and—”
    “No,” I cut him off. “Then they win.” I looked up at Peter and back to Caleb’s eyes, begging him to give me the strength to do this. “Sikes doesn’t get to win, does he? Marcus doesn’t get to win after everything they did?”
He touched my cheek. “Hell no.”
“Let’s go.”
    I let him go first because I knew he needed to, but I was anxious now. I needed to see if anyone was down there and get them out of there if they were. While half the family stood topside and watched for company, walking the estate, the rest of us came down and started to search the tunnels. I opened my mind and listened, but it was quiet.
    It didn’t take long however to know that we’d found what we were looking for. When a ghost white hand crept out from the bars of a cell, so weak the fingers could barely bend, I yelled for the person to back away so I could open the door. With the only weapon I had, I used my mind to yank the door from the hinges to reveal a woman so thin and weak, I didn’t know how she was still alive.
    She was afraid, I could tell, but Caleb immediately knelt and lifted her, handing her to someone closer to the hall and told her it was okay, that we were taking her somewhere safe. Her cries and “Thank you”s could