Promises to Keep

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

He reached for Brina’s hand. She hesitated before taking his, concerned that he had told her to touch him only if she needed to interrupt him, but then followed his lead.

  Look.

  It was clumsy, like a child’s first steps, but once she realized what he was trying to do, she worked with him. Her artist’s mind was able to manipulate the patterns of magic in an instinctive way, so she was able to “see” as he did. The trees were his nerves, and the animals, his eyes. He could feel the power like a heartbeat and a pulse, a thought that made Brina nervous, until she recklessly submerged herself in the forest’s awareness.

  They both could have drowned that way, forgetting their purpose in the lazy pulse of the forest’s slow life, but then they touched Rikai and Xeke. Those unwelcome powers were an irritation, like hot ash falling on the skin. Both of them were in pain, exhausted and starving, not for food but for power … and for hope. They had been lost since Jay and Brina had disappeared.

  This way, Jay called.

  Brina echoed him, lending her power to his. This way, she said. Hurry.

  Together, they siphoned some of the forest’s abundant energy into the Triste and vampire, giving them the strength to stand and walk.

  Once Rikai and Xeke drew near, though, their efforts drew the elemental’s attention. Until then the forest had responded to Jay and Brina, but now the elemental itself noticed what they were doing. As Rikai and Xeke hoisted themselves over the stone borders of the plaza and hurried to Jay and Brina, the spiderweb of magic shook itself, flinging Jay and Brina away.

  When they opened their eyes, disoriented, a figure loomed in front of them.

  She did not register to any sense but Jay’s eyes; to his magic, she was an extension of the land itself, in no way a separate being. Once, this body had belonged to a shapeshifter with ink-black skin and hair marked with white. Now, it had been claimed by darkness itself.

  True darkness wasn’t evil. It was the ultimate neutral. People could kill each other under its cover, or make love. Like so many things, the only value the darkness held was that which others gave it, often based on its use—or ancient fears, of course, since so many things had used the darkness for their own nefarious purposes.

  This darkness might once have been the neutral coolness of a deep cave, beyond the interference of fire’s light, but now it had been tainted by pain and loss and anger. It looked at Jay, and in its face he saw the fury of betrayal.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE CREATURE THAT stood before them, possessing the shapeshifter’s form, no longer saw Jay as an ally.

  “Shantel,” Rikai said, stepping between Jay and the hostile immortal, “I know now how you have grown so strong. All that power in the ruins of Midnight, all the flesh sacrificed that day—you used them to bond yourself to everyone at the battle, including the other elementals. Since that day, you have secretly fed on every elemental that gave magic to that fight. That is how you are now strong enough to challenge Leona, while others have faded into obscurity.”

  Jay would have been happy to let the Triste negotiate with the elemental, but Brina stepped forward, madly, and reached for the once-shapeshifter’s hand. As in everything, she saw heartbreaking beauty in this figure.

  She is the night, Brina thought.

  That’s not your Pet anymore, Jay thought back. The elemental was clearly occupying the shapeshifter’s body, but Jay doubted that made it weaker. Maybe you shouldn’t move so—

  Brina touched the elemental’s arm, and the jolt of power passed through her and Jay both, blinding and deafening them for several moments.

  By the time he recovered, the world around him had changed. The shadowy felines that had haunted the corners of his perception before were now solid and visible before him. Cats of all colors and patterns—many not found in nature—stalked around them. They were not entirely real, but neither could they be disregarded.

  It took him three tries to see Lynx, who looked pale and colorless against the visions. Lynx backed away from the other cats, bristling.

  The elemental stood above them like a vengeful angel.

  “We didn’t come here to hurt you or any of your … people,” Jay said as he pushed himself slowly back to his feet. “We came here to try to ask you not to hurt my people. They never harmed you or any of your—”

  “They did not help us, either,” the elemental replied, its voice heavy like thunder. Jay feared that its words alone might have the power to destroy him. Listening to it speak made his bones ache.

  “Who do you think destroyed Midnight centuries ago?” Jay argued. Where were Xeke and Rikai? Nearby, he hoped.…

  “What good did that little revolution do, when the worst creatures all survived? When, after your kin declared victory, my child continued to live in suffering?”

  You’re reasoning with it the wrong way, Brina thought.

  “Spirit of the Shantel,” Brina said, her voice gentle and respectful, “you wear the form of one who used to belong to me.”

  The elemental snarled, recoiling. “The sakkri of the Shantel belongs to no one!”

  Brina tilted her head, as if confused. “I know of no sakkri. I know only of a creature named Pet. Has she not introduced herself to you as such?”

  Was the elemental getting bigger? Or was Jay shrinking?

  “Brina,” he whispered, trying to warn.

  “You tried to name her and tried to own her,” the elemental said, “but the shell you possessed was meaningless.”

  “The same shell you possess now?” Brina asked, tilting her head as if confused. “Is the sakkri even in there with you? Did you protect her at all, or did you just claim her for your own use? After all, you could not have been too fond of her, considering you were the one who gave her away. Is all this anger just a mask for your own regrets?”

  Brina’s distraction had given Jay a chance to recall their original plan: get inside Shantel land, and therefore inside the elemental’s defenses, so Leona could fight back. If the Shantel elemental is here, where’s Leona?

  “You think this is all of me?” the elemental replied to his thought. “This shell you see is a fragment of my power, nothing more than I need to speak with you. The battle continues, beyond the ken of mere mortals.”

  “Shantel!” Xeke called, striding forward. “This is a foolish battle.”

  The elemental turned to him, and the felines moved closer, snarling, until the rumble of the earth threw Jay and Brina to the ground. Only as he fell did Jay realize that Xeke’s form was shimmering, as overwhelming to behold as the possessed sakkri herself.

  One of Xeke’s progenitors has a bond to an earth elemental called Leshan, Rikai had said. I was able to partially block Xeke’s connection to Leona and tighten his bond to Leshan.

  By bringing Xeke into this place, they had allowed more than just a vampire to breach the Shantel’s defenses.

  “Leshan,” Shantel demanded. “Why have you ridden your bond into my territory?”

  “Shantel,” Xeke replied, his voice deeper now, his form changing to the golden and green of summer trees. “This bond’s body is fading. I can preserve him for a time, but not the way Leona could. He will die. In that way, you have killed many of my bonds. Did you expect me not to respond?”

  “I have meddled with no one not tainted by the fire,” Shantel replied. The cats near her raised their hackles.

  “We have had a truce with Leona for millennia,” Xeke—or Leshan now—said. “You know this!”

  “Truce?” The day became darker as the forest canopy inexplicably thickened, covering the Shantel courtyard. “That truce ended when my sakkri was destroyed by those bound to Leona—and you, Leshan, among others. Jeshickah’s trainers fed many of you, didn’t they? Fed you in the flesh and blood of my people!”

  Out of the forests came serpents with bodies of sand and jaguars whose heavy footfalls left behind smoldering ash. From the canopy came birds made of vibrating light, brilliant against the darkening night sky, their wings making
a crystalline ringing sound as they struck the air. Looking at them made Jay’s eyes water and his body ache. When he finally forced himself to turn away, he saw that Rikai too had changed in the last few minutes. Jay wasn’t certain what power had ridden her into this place, but it made every hair on the back of his neck rise. Earth, air, fire, and water were neutral elemental powers. The one Rikai had brought was mad and dark and hungry.

  Her oil-slick eyes had become vortexes. In a voice like nothing he had ever heard, she said to him, “You want to run now.”

  Jay grabbed Brina’s hand and called to Lynx, and they nearly flew over the wall. Behind them, he felt heat and concussion as the immortal powers collided. He could hear the hiss of snow vaporizing and—

  Brina screamed as they stumbled into a solid mass of branches.

  Can’t go that way, he thought to her.

  They turned, but they both knew the truth; the forest was trying to hold them here.

  “Shantel has bonded itself to you,” a voice on the wind said. One of the other elementals had diverted its attention enough to speak to them. “When it keeps you close, it is stronger. You must get out so we can contain it. Get far away—back to your home, if you can. From neutral ground, you can summon Shantel. You are not strong enough to bind it to your will, but if you call to us as well, we will assist you.”

  How?

  There was a long hesitation, and a mournful cry.

  “Betrayal to tell you this,” the voice said, “but there is no other choice.”

  What followed was not words but an expression of power. Within the power was a name—one that mortal vocal cords could never utter aloud, for it was the true name of one of the immortals. With this name, the immortal could be commanded if one’s will was strong enough. And then came knowledge of the ritual they needed to perform.

  “Why would you help us?” Jay gasped as he ran, wary of making yet more deals with immortal beings. No, that wasn’t the right question. “Why do you need us to help you fight? We’re just mortal.”

  “Shantel has crippled us all through its sly feeding all these years, and now it would destroy us in its mad quest for impossible vengeance,” the elemental replied. “We are too weak to overpower it unless it is summoned and bound.”

  “But—”

  “I do not know what this will do to you,” the power warned. “Such binding is unpredictable. The ritual could drain the power from every creature in your circle, or grant them immortal life … or grant them immortal hunger. There is no way of knowing until it is done. But it must be done. Now go!”

  The wind shoved hard at their backs, blowing shards of stone and earth at them and nearly knocking Jay off his feet.

  This way! Lynx yowled at them. No, no, not there. Close your eyes, humans, Lynx howled. Ignore these illusions. Follow me. Trust me.

  Jay closed his eyes without hesitation. Brina, too, shut hers and threw her senses into the lynx.

  Blindly, they ran. Cold and exhausted, they forced their bodies to move, and keep moving.

  At times they fell, and their bodies slept deeply. Lynx commanded Jay’s power to keep them from freezing.

  When at last they stumbled out of the woods, they could do nothing more than climb into the car. Too exhausted to drive, Jay dialed his phone with trembling hands and begged someone from the closest SingleEarth to pick them up and arrange for the fastest transport possible back to Haven #2.

  Then they slept, but could not rest, because their dreams were still twined with the elementals’ thoughts, and they both dreamed of the ongoing battle.

  They wept as they saw what was happening to the world around them. An off-season hurricane. Abrupt, unexpected blizzards, dropping snow and sleet and hail and freezing rain. In another area, wildfire. A volcano came to life, rumbling out of its centuries of sleep. As the earth shook, buildings tumbled.

  These poor creatures, Brina thought. So helpless, so frightened.

  Jay needed to hold her. She let him, and they continued to sleep.

  CHAPTER 26

  “WE’RE AT NUMBER Two,” an exhausted human voice said, rousing Brina, who was still wrapped in Jay’s arms. She hadn’t wanted to let go of him as they had stumbled, semiconscious, from a car to a plane to another car, with people asking desperate questions but finally just accepting Jay’s often-repeated statement that they had to get back to Haven #2.

  What Brina had seen in her nocturnal visions swept over her and dragged a sob from her throat. Thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of humans must have died in the last twenty-four hours. Those who believed called to their gods for explanations and help.

  The humans were not alone.

  Some of Leona’s bonds had succumbed to the siphoning away of their power, or to human ailments such as pneumonia, or to physical frailties such as heart attack and stroke. Some of the other elementals that had come to fight Shantel were trying to support Leona’s damaged bonds, but they could do only so much.

  Jay stirred with a moan, and then pushed himself up, groping for the car door handle so groggily that they both nearly fell when it opened.

  “We need a blade,” Brina said. She remembered everything the powers in the forest had told them, and she did not intend to hesitate.

  She saw Jay seeking out specific faces in the crowd, but neither delayed their task. They both snapped commands to nurses and secretaries. Shouting over the protests, they had the ill in the gymnasium moved, until the group could form a rough circle around the outside of the room.

  “Take hands,” Jay said to those surrounding him—sick and well, human, witch, and shapeshifter alike. “If the person you are next to cannot grip, then hold on to them as tightly as you can. We cannot break the circle. Is that understood?”

  Jeremy looked up with bleary eyes as he took the hands of those beside him. “Jay … what are we doing?”

  “Saving us all,” Jay answered.

  “Possibly dooming us all,” Brina added more honestly.

  There was no choice, and no time to explain the danger. The ritual could drain the power from every creature in your circle, or grant them immortal life … or grant them immortal hunger.

  Jay quashed the protest from his conscience that there was enough time to say a few words of warning. With so much at stake, he couldn’t afford to give people a chance to refuse. He kept silent.

  Brina and Jay walked to the circle’s center carrying their tools.

  Each element required a different form of sacrifice to call it. Water asked for tears. Air was called through breath and voice. Fire answered only to blood. Earth, like the power of the Shantel, was bound in flesh.

  Brina needed only to remember what she had recently seen, and the tears ran down her face. She further recalled her brother’s destruction, and well before that, the blackening bodies of each of her family. The end of safety in her world. She did not know what memories Jay pulled upon, but she did not need to. When their eyes met, the witch’s were glistening.

  She felt the world shift around them, wavering as power responded to their wordless command for attention.

  Invoking air at that moment was more challenging, because Brina’s throat was still tight with tears. She choked on her first attempt to draw breath, and so it was Jay who began with a traditional folk tune. It didn’t matter what the words were, though Jay had chosen a tune of longing and loss. It mattered only that their voices mingled in the air.

  Jay passed Brina his blade, clenching his jaw as Shantel’s power within him fought against Leona’s power embedded in the silver. He held up his arm, and Brina drew a line of blood across the palm of his hand; he took the knife and did the same for her.

  Normally, a sorcerer willing to risk life and soul might have summoned one elemental, in an attempt to dominate it and win incredible power. But no trained sorcerer was foolish enough to invite this many forces into their circle at once. They would tear each other—and the mortal arrogant enough to summon them—to shreds.

  In this c
ase, that was the point. The other elementals were the weapons Jay and Brina needed to wield.

  “Only one guest left to invite,” Jay muttered to Brina, his voice wavering with nerves.

  The name the elemental had spoken to her, Brina uttered now, not with breath but with the power gathered within the circle. She whispered it as a prayer and screamed it as a demand simultaneously, and as she did so, she reached for Jay, drew him close, and kissed him.

  Their bloody hands twined, pressure stopping the blood’s flow, and the kiss cut both of their voices off, leaving only the original mortal power: the touch of flesh to flesh.

  It was the power that passed between mother and infant when she held her child for the first time. It was the power of a gentle touch to the cheek, a reassuring pat on the shoulder, a sympathetic hug—or an angry slap. Every human being knew the power that arose when flesh met flesh.

  Brina could have just held on to Jay, leaned her cheek against his, and used that contact for the leverage she needed to summon the Shantel elemental. They needed only to invoke it, not to provide the kind of sacrifice that would have been necessary to call it the first time. She chose this because she had wanted to kiss him since sometime in the forest.

  Jay, though surprised, responded as she had hoped he would—willingly, with the same memories of shared experiences and an understanding of all the beauty and agony they had both endured recently.

  The power that passed between them was sweet, and gentle, and the opposite of everything the Shantel had fed on for the last two centuries. It was a reminder of what had been, and what could be again. It drew Shantel close, until the circle around them shuddered with the elemental’s appearance, hands clutching hands in the effort to contain the power.

  The power of flesh could be compassion and forgiveness—but not this time. Shantel would find no absolution here. Too many lives had been lost, and neither Jay nor Brina was the turn-the-other-cheek type. The other elementals who had stepped into the circle around them, some claiming bodies too worn down by disease to even open their eyes on their own, were also not the types to let the matter be forgotten.