by AJ Myers
I ran until it felt like my lungs were ready to burst and there was a searing stitch in my side and my hands were raw and bleeding from all of the times I had fallen over logs or tree roots. It was only then that I stopped, collapsing against the trunk of a giant old oak tree. I pulled my legs up to my chest and let my head fall forward to rest on my knees.
I counted my breaths as they slowed for something to focus on and cleared my mind of everything. No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t get Nathan’s face to go away. Even after everything else was neatly stowed away into little mental cubbies I couldn’t seem to get rid of him.
The memory of how right it had felt to be held in his arms hadn’t left me. With Nathan I would have found that thing I was looking for. I would have experienced passion and love and all the things I had envied Kim for the last couple of years. I would have been the other half of someone.
Knowing that didn’t help with the ache in my heart; it only made it worse. It was like catching a glimpse of the perfect future and wanting it so much you can almost touch it, only to have someone come and laughingly snatch it away. Let me tell you, there is nothing more heartbreaking than having to watch as a dream like that shatters into a million pieces.
I lifted my head after what seemed like hours to find that the forest had really started to get dark around me. I was cold and sore, but I couldn’t tell if that was from the chilly wind rattling the dry leaves overhead or from the coldness I felt inside and the falls I had taken during my escape.
Even my chilled skin didn’t prod me into movement. I could always crawl under a blanket and get warm later. I could see the very edge of the beginnings of a crescent moon through the tops of the trees and found that if I leaned back just a little, it came into full view.
I lay back on the cushion of fallen leaves behind me and stared up at it. It was so beautiful and seemed so fragile against the vast, velvety-purple background of the twilit sky. As fragile as I suddenly felt myself. And yet, so many of the mysteries in my life were finally explained. Even if I was furious that Grams had kept the truth from me, finally having everything make sense made it a little easier to bear.
“I’m a witch,” I whispered to the moon, trying to make myself believe it. “I’m a ghost-seeing, psychically voyeuristic, witch.”
I felt it when Nathan arrived. It wasn’t that I heard him. I didn’t see him coming. I felt it. I closed my eyes, letting myself feel him. There was something different there, something I hadn’t felt before. It was strong and wonderful and terrifying and heartbreaking, and I realized in a flash that what I was feeling was dangerous.
By allowing myself to feel him that way, I was opening myself up for the kind of heartache that even I wasn’t strong enough to survive in one piece. But there was also no stopping it. It was almost like he had become part of me.
And I didn’t know if that was me or the mark he’d cursed me with.
Vampire Mind Meld
I opened my eyes slowly. I wanted to see him, see his expression, and at the same time I was afraid to. I needn’t have worried. I couldn’t read his eyes at all. His thick, dark lashes were lowered, keeping me from seeing more than a glimmer of his eyes in the fading light.
“You’re bleeding,” he whispered, moving closer and kneeling next to me. “Are you all right, Ember?”
My burnt leg felt like it was on fire again from all the twigs that had brushed against it, my head was hurting, my hands were scraped and raw, and my heart was broken. So, yeah, I was just frigging peachy.
“I fell.”
That about covered it, all right. My hands were bleeding and bruised because of the falls I had taken while running away from the problems I knew I would have to face and deal with in the long run. My heart was bleeding because I had been stupid enough to fall for him, despite him branding me like a choice steer. So, yeah, ‘I fell’ summed it all up perfectly.
He reached for my hands where they rested on my stomach, and I drew them away before he could touch them. Even in the deepening shadows I could see the flash of anger in his eyes.
“You think I would hurt you?” His jaw was taut and there was a biting edge to his voice.
I think you already have, I thought, looking up at him. I saw him flinch and immediately wished I could take it back. Knowing I couldn’t, I shrugged and said, “Vampire plus bleeding wounds can’t add up to anything good, you know?”
So fast I never saw him move, he reached out and wrapped his hands around my wrists in a gentle but firm hold. He pulled them away from my chest and skillfully transferred both wrists to one hand. I held my breath as he carefully pried open my fists with the other hand and examined the scrapes and cuts on my palms.
“You’ll be fine. The wounds aren’t deep. I’m more worried about your leg. You need to let Shea look at it when we get back to the house.”
“I don’t want to go back,” I told him, using his grip on my wrists to pull my aching body to a sitting position. “I want to go home, Nathan.”
“You should listen to what Shea has to say,” he said, softly. “There are things she can do, things she can teach you, to help you protect yourself.”
Then he could go. That was what he hadn’t said, what had been left hanging at the end of that speech. If Grams could teach me to protect myself, he could leave. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t need to wait. The sooner he was out of my life, the better.
I jerked my hands away from him, a feat that would have been impossible if he had resisted me even a little. He didn’t. The second my hands were free, I staggered to my feet rather ungracefully. I walked a few paces from him and stopped. My head bowed and my heart screamed for me to shut up, but I forged ahead without any thought to the consequences of what I was about to do.
“I want you to leave me alone, Nathan,” I told him, clenching my teeth to hold back a flood of tears that were inevitable but which I wasn’t about to let him see. “I don’t need your help and having you around is just…too hard.”
I walked away into the dark, dense, forest without looking back. I had made my decision and now there was nothing left to do but follow through. My fingers found the cross around my neck again, and I gulped back a sob as they wrapped around it, the only thing besides a lot of painful memories I would have to remember him by. I walked without seeing anything or really even noticing which way I was going. I just knew I had to get away, far away, before I went running back to beg him not to leave me.
I had been walking for about twenty minutes when I finally snapped out of it and realized I was wandering around lost. I might have known those woods when I was a kid, but that had been years before. As I stopped and looked around me, I had to face up to the fact that I had no idea where I was or how to get back to Grams’ house. And, to make matters worse, I was lost in the dark. Seriously, I couldn’t see a damn thing.
I immediately froze in place, my overactive imagination conjuring up images of hungry bears and wolves. Unfortunately, those horrifying little daydreams didn’t help much. Thanks to them, I was not only lost and miserable; I was lost, miserable, and terrified.
Turn right.
I turned around, expecting to see Nathan standing right behind me, but I was still alone. I frowned. I had heard him. I knew I had.
Just turn right, Ember. You’re not that far from Shea’s house.
There it was again. Maybe I had finally fallen off the ledge of sanity I had been tiptoeing along. Great. Impending insanity was the perfect end to my less than perfect week.
You’re not crazy. I’m talking to you using telepathy. When I marked you it formed a connection between the two of us that makes it possible for us to communicate, even over great distances. And keeping my distance right now seems like a good idea. It’s obvious you don’t want me anywhere near you, so this was the only way I could think of to guide you home. Now, turn right and you’ll come out at your grandmother’s garden.
I heaved a deep sigh and did what the voice in my head told
me to do. If that wasn’t the definition of crazy, I didn’t know what was. After about fifteen minutes of following the directions the voice was giving me, I walked out into Grams’ garden and saw that every light in the house was blazing bright, a beacon to call me home.
Only, I wasn’t home. I was stuck in the middle of a really bad dream that I couldn’t get out of.
I heard Nathan walk toward me because he wanted me to hear him. When he was a couple of feet from me, he stopped, and I closed my eyes against the desire to turn and look at him. He didn’t move any closer, and I realized he was waiting to see what I would do.
“If you don’t mind, I need a ride to the airport.” I was both surprised and pleased to hear how steady and calm my voice was when my mind and heart and body were in such a terrible state. “I know I told you to go away, but it’s only fair that you get me out of here before you disappear.”
“Please don’t do this, Ember. Stay. If you don’t want to let Shea help you, then let me help you.”
He sounded so sad that I nearly changed my mind about leaving. It was close, but then I realized it was all probably just a ploy. He was using the fact that I liked him to get me to do what they wanted.
“That’s okay, I think I’d be safer taking my chances with Jack. Better than getting my heart stomped on by you.” My voice was colder than the autumn wind that was howling around me, whipping my hair into tangles and chilling me to the bone. “Now, are you going to take me to the airport or not?”
“Take the car,” he said, sounding totally defeated. I knew the feeling. I jumped a little when he slipped a credit card into my hand, his smooth fingers lingering against my skin, and then had to beat back another wave of tears.
“For your ticket,” he said quietly when I looked up at him. “Just leave the car in the departure lot and I’ll pick it up tomorrow. I’ll stay here and distract Shea so she doesn’t follow you.”
I didn’t waste any time. I was already backing out when Grams came running down the steps and hurried toward me. Nathan stopped her before she could get to me, and I saw her throw him a filthy look before I turned my concentration back to getting the hell out of there.
I was on the highway when it all hit me at once and the tears blinded me. I pulled over onto the shoulder and laid my head against the steering wheel. It wasn’t only tears but painful sobs that tore from my chest and filled the car with sounds that resembled those of a wounded animal. I hadn’t cried like that in years, and the intensity of my feelings of sadness and despair frightened me more than everything else that had happened put together.
When my tears finally ran their course, I leaned my head back and stared at the winding road before me with a desolate feeling. I tried not to see the glaring truth, but there was no help for it. I was in over my head. I might have said I didn’t need help, but I was wrong. I didn’t even know where to start.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to explain my three day, fear-filled vacation to my parents. I didn’t know what a bandraoi was or if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I didn’t know what to do the next time I saw Jack—or the next time he tracked me down in my dreams or visions or whatever. I didn’t know anything about demons or how to fight them, or if such a thing was even possible. There was just so much I…didn’t know.
I sat there, though, staring out the windshield at nothing, until a semi blew past me doing at least eighty and rocked the little car violently, effectively snapping me out of my trance. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I started the car and made a U-turn, retracing my path back to the only source of help I had.
∞§∞§∞§∞
I would like to say everything looked better in the morning, but I would be telling a lie big enough to land me a first class ticket to Hell. If anything, I felt worse than I had ever believed I could feel.
Grams hadn’t said a single word when I arrived back at the house. She simply led me to my old room at the top of the stairs and found me something to wear to bed. Then, with a long, sad look, she left me to figure things out for myself. But figuring things out hadn’t been going so well for me, so I didn’t bother trying.
Too wiped out to care about demons or vampires or witches anymore, I went to bed and prayed no disembodied voices would decide to have a chat—be they ghost or the telepathic undead. I shouldn’t have bothered, though. Nathan had been gone when I got back and I didn’t expect any further contact from him. I was with Grams. I was safe. He was off the hook, just like he’d wanted.
When I stumbled into the kitchen looking like death warmed over, Grams continued her reign of silence and slid a cup of coffee across the table to me with a tentative smile. I tried to return it, but the expression stretching my features felt more like a grimace than anything that might remotely resemble a smile. I settled for staring out the window at the pale blue, cloudless sky. The sunshine didn’t exactly compliment my mood. A thunderstorm—or a hurricane—would have been a much better indication of what was going on inside me.
“Are you all right, sweetheart?” Grams sounded so upset that I felt a twinge of guilt knowing I was the cause. “If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”
“Talk about what, Grams?” I had a bad feeling I knew what she was getting at and no, I didn’t want to talk about it. “There’s nothing to say. I guess what we actually need to talk about is what I’m supposed to do now.”
“You go home, go back to your normal routine.”
Go back to Moonlight? With Jack lurking around waiting to roast me again? That was her brilliant advice? And as for my normal routine, I thought it was safe to say that had gone straight down the crapper. I was supposedly a witch, the only guy in the world I wanted was a vampire who wanted nothing to do with me, and I was being stalked by a demon. That did not equate to normal in any way, shape, or form.
“What do I do about Jack?” I asked, turning back to the window.
And what do I do about Nathan? I asked myself silently, staring at the cherry tree beyond the glass. As scared as I was of Demon Jack, it was Nathan who was breaking me. All the demons in the world couldn’t have been more destructive to my peace of mind than my own personal vampire.
“I spent last night trying to come up with a plan,” Grams said, leaning back in her chair with a tired sigh. “It’s going to be difficult seeing as you’ve had no training, but I think I may know how to take care of the problem. You’re going to trap him.”
“What?” I gasped, my eyes snapping back to her face. I couldn’t have heard that right. Had she really just told me I was going to trap a demon? Was she crazy? “You mean you are going to banish him, right?”
“No, sweetheart, you are,” she said, getting up and walking over to the counter.
When she turned back around, she was holding an old, leather-bound book. As I watched, she opened it to a spot about midway, then carried it back over to lay it on the table in front of me. I stared down at the illustration on the page and felt a chill sweep through me as I gazed at the image of a monstrous creature.
It looked shriveled and deformed, but there was nothing deformed about the fangs I could see in its open mouth or the six inch claws on its fingers. There was nothing deformed about the giant, leathery-looking wings on its back that looked like something straight out of a horror story, either. It was its eyes that really terrified me, though—soulless and black and evil.
Was that what I had seen in Jack’s eyes on the road that afternoon, the shadow of what lay behind the pretty face? And those wings were looking kind of familiar. I had seen a pair disturbingly similar to them outlined against the spotlight in my waking nightmare right before Jack set me on fire.
I flipped the book closed so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore and shoved it away with shaking hands. I suddenly felt sick. I had kissed that thing! Okay, it was only once—and it definitely hadn’t been willingly—but still! Ugh! I was going to have to gargle with bleach!
“There are several ways to trap a demon,” Grams sa
id as she resumed her seat, sounding like she was telling me how to plant tomatoes or something. “You’re nowhere near ready for banishing rituals, of course, but I believe I can teach you to trap him. We’re going to use a sacred object, one with a direct link to the soul he wants, as a portal to imprison him. Done correctly, we may be able to trap him indefinitely.”
“Done correctly?” I repeated sharply. “I don’t know how to do any of this, Grams! The only thing I know how to do is talk to ghosts, damn it! And that doesn’t make me a witch, by the way, it makes me a freak!”
For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock hanging over the door. I knew I should be ashamed, but I just couldn’t seem to dredge up any remorse. She had stolen something from me, something far more valuable than memories. Time. Time to learn. Time to accept what I was. And now she expected me to say, “Awesome! I’m a witch! Teach me, Obi-wan!”
Unrealistic much?
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Ember, for everything.” I heard the tears in Grams’ voice and when I looked up they were trickling down her cheeks. “I lost the time I needed with you because I gave your mother more credit than I should have. I bound you and messed with your memories, something I had no right to do. Then I sent Nate to you without any thought to the effect it might have on you both because I thought I knew what was best. And now I don’t know how to make you understand any of it. Not what you face. Not who you are. None of it.”
I couldn’t stand to see her so sad. I was angry at her, but I loved her and she was hurting. I got up from the chair and threw myself into her arms. Her tears were contagious, and we sat there that way, crying together, for what seemed like a very long time.
Grams regained her composure first and then just held me, stroking my hair while my tears continued to come. I hadn’t cried that much since I was a kid, and I couldn’t say I was particularly happy about it. Was this some weird side effect of being near a vampire, even temporarily, this insane crying?
