by Lissa Kasey
Seiran slapped the wound. “Gross, Sammie. You licked me.”
“Okay, well next time you’re bleeding out I’ll just kick some dirt in it, yeah?”
“Bastard,” he said without heat.
“Jerk.” I used the bottom of my shirt to wipe his face free of blood spatter and tears. “You need some sleep. Maybe the big guy will be back in a few days.”
“It’s probably better that we have some space,” Seiran said.
“If you say so, Ronnie,” I allowed. The pain would fade in time. But Gabe had gone willingly to ground. Would it absolve him of everything he’d done in the past few months? Was there a need to, when we knew he hadn’t been himself? It was likely something Seiran would be debating until Gabe resurfaced, but that was okay, he overanalyzed everything anyway. I was less conflicted. If Gabe came out calm and normal, the past could be left in the past. If he came out stupid and raging, we’d have to find a way to make his grave permanent. But I’d cross that bridge when we got there.
Seiran let me help him up and leaned on my shoulder. I’d always thought of us as about the same size, but in reality Seiran was smaller. Slightly shorter, a lot thinner, and much more delicate. Sometimes he was so strong that we all forgot just how breakable he was.
The shot that rang out ripped him from my arms and splattered me with his blood.
Chapter 24
I stood there for a stunned few seconds, trying to figure out just what happened. Blood poured from a huge wound in Seiran’s skull. He hit the ground as though we’d launched into a slow-mo mode of a movie, my arms stretched out toward him. His eyes were open, staring blankly upward. I had only the barest moment to think that Seiran was dead before the ground began to tremble and the release of power rolled upward. Instinctively, I reached for it, trying to put a cap on the energy, quell it before it destroyed us all, but it was just too much and I hadn’t had enough practice using power that wasn’t really mine. I could only equate it to standing in the middle of a lava field, trying to hold back the flow, while the melted rock ate away at my very being.
I pressed my hands to Seiran willing the earth back into him like it was a bottle with a leak, trying to keep it filled. The power rushed through me. Needles of pain prickling over every inch of my skin. The ivy and tiny plants climbed through my flesh like they had Seiran’s only moments before. The earth didn’t recognize me. It rejected me, jumping from me back to Seiran and crawling across his skin, headed toward the head wound. Was there any way he could survive that? Would Father Earth be strong enough?
Red pooled across my vision as the other inside me crept out to play. It offered me strength even as the raging power of the earth battered at us. I tried reaching for my link to Max. Maybe he’d know what to do. Maybe he could save Seiran, or at least redirect the earth energy. But there was too much power. His energy seemed to drown in the intensity of the flow of earth, making our link almost invisible.
I briefly thought of Jamie who’d been upstairs, maybe the power would fall to him. Or even one of the twins, and wouldn’t we all be screwed then? If I didn’t have enough control to reign in the earth, how the hell could a baby?
I only had a second to glance back, to see Tresler standing in the door of the arboretum with a gun in his grasp, aimed at me. Another shot rang out. I waited for the hit, the pain, maybe death, though bullets alone were unlikely to kill me. Instead Luca collapsed on top of me, his blood spattering me in a bright wash of crimson.
A hawk flew at Tresler as I caught Luca and eased him down beside Seiran, the power of the earth Pillar burning my skin. Luca gasped for breath, the shot having taken him in the lower back. I reached for him, hearing the squawk of the hawk as it raked its huge talons over Tresler’s face. The vampire waved his arms and tried to shake the bird off.
“Kill him,” Luca gasped. “Devour him like you did Galloway. It’s our only chance.”
I registered his words, felt the world slow to a maddening moment of chaos. Seiran dead, yet healing, the earth struggling not to tear us apart as I barely held the reigns like a mere mortal trying to hold back the tide of the ocean. Luca bleeding out at my feet and Con risking everything to buy us time.
I jolted forward, leaping the distance no human ever could have, to slam a fist into Tresler’s gut, adding to it a blast of fiery air as I felt Con’s powers awaken something familiar inside me. Tresler flew back into the wall of glass, the length of it splintering around him. His skin blistered with the heat from the blow. I’d hoped he would have dropped the gun, but no such luck. He lifted it even as he sank to his knees, aiming it in my direction.
“Take my bond, Mueller. Save your friends,” Tresler offered. “I can control the earth if you just give me your bond.”
Who was he kidding? Give another crazy control over me? Not a chance. Did he forget I was no longer that kid everyone got to abuse? I was no one’s slave. I was a fucking vampire!
My movement became magic. I wasn’t sure how it happened, just that one moment I was twenty feet away, the next I was in front of him, ripping the gun from his grasp and crushing his hand with little effort.
He gasped as though he hadn’t seen me move either. The red in my vision gave me an edge of comfort as I glanced down at my hands, talons extending from my fingertips. Sharp enough, I thought. All those years of hunting beside Matthew, learning to survive by killing things bigger and badder than me. Now I was at the top of the food chain.
My other and I were finally aligned in one thing. Death of the Tri-Mega. Destruction of Tresler. These things appealed to us both. For him, the release of rules and restrictions, and for me, an end to the constant attacks on my friends and life by idiots who thought their power could dominate everything. Madness, isn’t that what Seiran had said? Power drove people mad, and that’s what he feared. But we could keep each other sane. Or at least have a lot of fun bickering until insanity took us both. If we survived. First, I had to destroy the monster who thought I was still a victim.
With a flick of my wrist I took off Tresler’s head, nails slicing through him like razorblades. The first key to killing a vampire was decapitation. Ensuring he stayed dead was about destroying the body. I think it was more about disintegrating the magic that held the vampire together. Not so much physically, but metaphysically. Though that was more philosophy shit I wanted nothing to do with.
I could have done as Luca said, fed on the power. It pulsed in waves of broken energy. Stolen magic, not all that unlike Galloway. Through it I could see an endless web of ties cast into the distance in the thousands, other vampires. Galloway had not had such ties. Perhaps he had created or bonded so few vampires that he was truly alone in his power. Tresler had built up his web like a barrier around him. Hundreds, if not thousands, of threads woven together like a tapestry of slicing strands to keep anyone who got close away. He also wasn’t dying, despite his head coming off. Instead it snarled and gaped at me while the body twitched convulsively, each movement bringing it closer to the head. The power seemed to stretch between the severed parts like it could somehow metaphysically bind it all back together.
Fuck.
That chaotic web of power wasn’t something I wanted any part of. The strands of it darkened and dripped as though covered in blood. Was he pulling energy from the vampires he was bonded to? If I fed on him like I had Galloway would that make those vampires mine? Fuck, no. I didn’t want that kind of responsibility. I hated people on a good day, tied to thousands? Yeah, I was pretty sure I’d go mad and kill them all.
I screamed and kicked the head into the opposite corner. It landed with a sick thud. Tresler’s power stretched like taffy over the distance, his web of vampire ties trying to pull him back together. Damn it!
I called the earth, willing it to take the vampire, return it to the soil as nutrients, devour the power and spread it back across the universe. Seiran had described it a time or two. A well of particles that made up all the energy of the earth. Sometimes it glowed with the power, so
metimes it was quiet. I shoved at whatever my power was, begging the earth to feed on Tresler if that was what it needed to take him back permanently.
The link of energy from the earth felt like worms crawling through the dirt and rising up. Only it wasn’t worms, it was branches, vines, roots, and trees. They wrapped around Tresler’s body and began to rend it to pieces. The head was pierced a second later, spearing it between the eyes and sprouting new growths that broke up the head, despite Tresler’s stunned expression, into a thousand tiny grains of compost. The body decomposed that quickly, feeding the earth and releasing the last hold on Tresler’s stolen power. All those tiny webs spanning into the distance shattered, as the power of the earth ripped them apart, flinging small daggers of energy outward. I felt them hit me like shrapnel from a bomb, cutting into my soul in places that really fucking hurt.
I remembered vaguely back to when Matthew had died in the fire. The barn burned, but he’d begun to move despite my taking his head. So I’d dragged him into the fire, thinking to myself that it all just needed to burn, and the entire place had blown. Not just with heat and flame, but an eruption of magic. How I’d survived, I still wasn’t sure. I had simply woken up a few hours later outside in the cold, next to the smoldering heap that was the barn. I’d thought it was all the power that Matthew’s null ability had been restraining that had caused the explosion, only now I think it was the opposite. It was a release of his power, the destruction of his soul, or whatever it was that made us vampires. Tresler’s death seemed to be on the verge of causing the same thing on a much larger scale.
The ground shook so hard I thought it might split open any second. There was just too much. Too much power, too much wild magic, too many emotions. I looked back at Luca. Con was back in human form, curled around Luca and Seiran as though he could somehow protect them. I could see a bubble of air swirling around them. But if the ground fell apart beneath them it wouldn’t matter, they’d all die.
I could hear Max very quietly in my head telling me to redirect the power. The extra energy Tresler’s destruction released into the earth was too much, like a bomb directed underground that just needed to explode. Our tie burned. The power igniting the bond, traveling through me to him like wildfire. Max’s skin burned and began to flake into little pieces of dirt from being open to me and then a wall came down and he was gone. His last bit of help controlling the power vanished.
An explosion smashed through the arboretum, throwing me into the wall of the house and shattering the glass into a rain of daggers. I felt them pierce my skin. A thousand cuts leeching energy from my flesh. I collapsed, crushed into the ground and motionless by the weight of the energy pouring out around us. I could see Con and Luca, both looking at me, sadness on their faces, like they knew we were all dead. And Seiran, whose open eyes should have been dark, glowed like the babies.
We were still linked, he and I. I could feel it, even if he was dead. Was he? His body had been lost last year. Death, we’d all thought, though Gabe had claimed to still feel their link. Since the earth hadn’t come apart we wondered, while the Dominion had speculated if he’d really been accepted as Pillar. We’d all wondered if maybe Gabe had just gone mad with grief until Seiran appeared at the back door of the house a few days later. Alive. Whole. Something different. No longer human.
My heart leapt at the thought that maybe, just maybe… But that was stupid, wasn’t it? People didn’t just survive a gunshot to the head. Not normal people at least. Was there anything normal about Ronnie?
Shit. No wonder his blood tasted divine. Fucking Rou. Letting us all think he was vulnerable when he was practically a god. Not that I’d ever tell him that. Wouldn’t want it to go to his head.
Something separated from his physical body. It wavered in the light, transparent, but somewhat human-shaped, moving toward me. I couldn’t make out any features, just a wash of colors, green, brown, orange, and blue. Like the swirling of a storm over an island in the sea.
Seiran? I thought instead of vocalizing as I couldn’t even move to breathe. My cheek was pressed into the dirt, my blood leaking into the ground, pooling around me. At least Con and Luca had been protected from the glass by whatever shield Con had created out of wind. Get back in your fucking body and stop this! I screamed at him through our mental bond having no idea if he could actually hear me.
Plants surrounded us. Shooting out of the ground in a rain of dirt around stalks and roots a hundred sizes larger than their normal versions. The ceiling of the arboretum began to splinter and crash down around me. I prayed Con and Luca were safe, but feared this was only the epicenter of what was likely to be the end of the world.
The hand in front of my face began to dissolve, even as I fisted it into the earth like it could help, crumbling to little grains of sand, as it slowly disintegrated under the weight of the earth’s power. I didn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel anything really. Nothing but fear for Con and Luca. Maybe the babies who hadn’t yet had a chance to live. I was so mad for a moment as something dark covered my vision, and I tried to blink. My vision didn’t clear. I sucked in a breath, feeling the glass in my lungs, the power crushing my bones, body dissolving to mix with the earth and feed the growing plants. I let go of the struggle, releasing it all and sinking into something dark and luminous all at the same time.
A fire flickered, flame bursting to life, warmth spreading through my soul. Was this Hell? I deserved Hell, right? I’d killed lots of vampires. Hurt people. Stolen enough to enjoy my sorry life. The short time with Seiran wasn’t enough to absolve me of those ills. It seemed momentarily justified that I’d burn when I died. I always hated being cold anyway. Though it made me more than a little pissed off that I had such a short time with Con and Luca. Just a few days to be happy. But life wasn’t fair. Isn’t that what they always said in church? Maybe if I’d thought to repent?
Who was I kidding? I wasn’t sorry for anything I’d done. The past was done and over. No point lingering on it now. Or was that the purpose of Hell? An endless monologue of our sins? Wow, that would be Hell. Like watching the stupidest TV show you’d ever seen on repeat for eternity. Painful until it just drove you mad.
Shouldn’t it burn more? I expected burning, searing pain. Yet, it was just warm. Floating in a pool, maybe, or through the breeze on a warm day. It was a struggle of consciousness. Was I awake? Asleep? Dead?
But my eyes opened and the world below was still growing. Apparently, I’d tossed my body aside again to become a bird. Only my wings weren’t black, they glowed orange, red, and yellow. Like a fire.
I flew above the madness. Seiran had vanished, likely absorbed into the earth as his clothes were left behind. Jamie knelt on the steps, hands to the earth, probably trying to control some of the earth’s power. Con tried to hold the vines back with his wind, but they squeezed at the bubble he’d created around himself and Luca. His bare back and the tree of birds reminded me of the comment Con had made: “We’re all connected through the earth, so that’s why it’s the tree. Birds land in the tree, rest, and nest in a tree. Earth and water make the tree grow. Fire burns it down to make way for new growth. It’s a balance.”
Life was a balance. All the elements were part of that life; earth, water, air, and fire. Without any of them the whole balance shifted, and entire species died. Life was a delicate thing. It was why all witches were elemental since all witches were part of the earth and the chain of life and death.
What were we missing from that teeter-totter? Fire?
I glanced at my blazing wings and thought, maybe we weren’t, though where it had come from was unclear to me. Was Max a fire element? I think I would have sensed it in him. His power came across as non-magic. Something more physical than metaphysical. Luca maybe? Same issue.
Either way something needed to be done to stop this insanity and put the genie back in the bottle. But how did one cut back the earth? I swept down toward the bubble wrapped in squeezing ivy. I squawked at it, sounding like some sort of eag
le, warning it to let go, only fire spewed from my mouth with the sound.
Shit!
The vines lit like they were soaked in gasoline. They burned away quickly, leaving a bewildered Con staring at me from inside his weakening bubble. Luca lay unmoving beside him, barely breathing, but alive. Tiny vines had begun to curl around his limbs like they were planning to drag him under. I glared at those nasty little vines trying to steal him from me and they burst into flames, falling away from him somehow without singeing him.
Okay, so I was fire. I could work with that. I flapped my wings, turned and headed for the largest growth, which had burst forth from where I’d kicked Tresler’s head. Gross. I briefly entertained visions of a live Ent-like tree with Tresler’s mad gaze coming at me. But it was just a tree, gnarled, blackened with corrupt power. I shot fire at it, pretending I was a mini dragon instead of just some orange bird. It took a few passes to get it to ignite, but the flames began to crackle and the branches moved, mimicking the Cthulhu of old, tentacles raging toward the sky. I lit all of them up, too.
Watched Jamie drag a weary Con into the house, which appeared untouched by the rage of magic, earth, and freed vampire power. Jamie reappeared a moment later to scoop up Luca. I kept raining fire down on it until it all burned, crackled and stopped writhing like a thing of nightmares. The fire began to devour what was left of the arboretum, melting metal, bursting the last of the glass, and sizzling through the lower drywall layer. The plant matter fell to the dirt as nutrients, ready to fuel the soil into new growth. I hoped the fire wouldn’t overtake the house. Wouldn’t that just suck. Sam Mueller absolving himself by saving the world, only to burn everything down by accident. Yeah, that was the story of my life.
We needed fucking water. Good thing there was a water witch nearby. I could feel him, close. Not anywhere near the door, but it didn’t matter. He’d used my power to amplify and focus his own before, so the seed still sat in my gut. I pulled on the metaphysical link, demanding water, even if it was a burst in the ground beneath where I flew. I thought cleansing, which is what we needed, not unlike Seiran’s California house, or the river beside the old ranger tower where I’d been forced to carve into my own flesh for evil spells. It all needed to be cleansed to rebalance. Earth, air, fire, and water.
