Promises to Keep dos-9

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  The adventure continued at the next store, which had been closed for an hour. Jay broke in through a back door, hoping there wasn’t an automatic alarm and that—if any of them lived through this—SingleEarth could deal with any legal repercussions relating to the blinking security cameras.

  Brina followed with a quiver of excitement. She helped grab additional fuel, food, and the last odds and ends the first store hadn’t had in stock. They didn’t dare stay long, in case police were coming.

  Satisfied that they had done the best they could with limited time, an apparently unlimited budget, and a desire not to go to jail, they squeezed into the over-full car and sped away to the rendezvous point. Lynx curled up on Brina’s lap, oblivious to the passengers’ rapid conversation, as Brina asked question after question about how humans traveled and survived in such conditions.

  Jay spent most of the three-hour ride in Xeke’s private jet opening packages and compulsively packing and repacking backpacks. No matter what other equipment they brought, he felt naked without his Marinitch blade. His magic might still feel the same to him, but whatever the Shantel elemental had done to him, it had made his own knife violently reject him. No amount of butane fuel, freeze-dried food, warm clothes, or high-tech gadgets would make him feel good about the lack of his blade.

  As they transferred from the jet to a rented Jeep, Jay continued working on the problem of how to lug all their gear with them. Jay could carry a heavy backpack over a long distance, but Brina probably couldn’t. Xeke lifted his for the first time and immediately said, “I can take more,” while Rikai attempted to lift hers and then shook her head. She wasn’t as crippled as before, but her strength was even more limited than a human’s.

  Jay was still fiddling with the packs as they reached the edge of the proverbial deep dark forest. They had been able to drive as far as a campground, with trails leading into one of the largest national forests. After those paths ended, they would have to blaze their own trail through the evergreen trees.

  “At least it’s not a stormy night,” Jay remarked as he stepped down from the Jeep, earning a glare from Rikai, a quirked brow from Xeke, and a chuckle from Brina. Lynx leapt out of Brina’s lap, his senses on full alert.

  In fact, it was an overcast and chill dawn. The ground held a few inches of snow, crusted with ice in many places. They had brought snowshoes, but Jay hoped they wouldn’t be needed, since he was the only one with any experience using them.

  Check it out? Jay asked Lynx as he arranged their supplies on a modified sled known as a pulk. The cat ran off to scout, and Jay kept packing. Given that they had no firm idea of how long they would need to travel, he had brought as much food and fuel as they could possibly transport. He hoped the snow would stay thick enough for the sled to slide smoothly.

  “Do you need help?” Xeke asked, startling Jay from his contemplation of weight and balance.

  “How’s this?” he asked, offering Xeke the repacked backpack, which was now significantly heavier than a human would be able to carry for any length of time.

  The vampire tested the pack, and then nodded.

  Want rabbit for dinner? Lynx asked as he returned. That or chipmunk. Also smells of deer and coyote.

  Let me know if you scent anything else, Jay said. Especially anything big enough to eat us.

  He had almost finished setting up the pulk, when he was startled by another thought, just as clear as Lynx’s but from an entirely different mind.

  See the way the branches sparkle where they’re encased in ice, Brina thought to him.

  To both of them, Jay realized only when Lynx replied, Slippery to walk on. And sometimes it drops on your head when you sleep.

  Brina looked around, as if almost aware of Lynx’s reply but unable to place the sound.

  “It is lovely,” Jay agreed.

  “I could do a beautiful portrait of the lynx,” Brina remarked. Did she realize she hadn’t started the conversation out loud?

  She talks like you do, Lynx replied to Jay’s contemplation. Half in voice-yips, half in mind. And she expects people to hear both, just like you do.

  Was that the result of having been telepathic for years, as a vampire? Or just another one of Brina’s quirks?

  “We should get going,” Rikai said, staring at the mouth of the path with frustration. After the second time Jay had repacked her bag, she had taken half the items out to accommodate her ritual paraphernalia.

  Jay glanced down at the clunky watchlike GPS thing he never would have touched if he had been spending his own money or wandering familiar forests. Xeke had given the device coordinates based on Brina’s best guess as she’d looked at a series of maps, and it currently claimed that their destination was about thirty-five miles to the northeast. With fair weather, good trails, and experienced hikers, that distance could easily be traveled in a couple days, but Jay doubted they would have any of those luxuries.

  They didn’t even have a straight path to their destination. Instead, they headed first to the base of the original Midnight, from which Brina believed it was only a short journey to Shantel territory—assuming that her estimate of Midnight’s location was correct, that they could find Midnight without getting trapped in its magical gravity well, and that the magic in the Shantel land didn’t throw them back out.

  Rikai believed that the Shantel power would draw them in, because Jay and Brina were now bonded to it, but even she admitted that was just a theory.

  Yes, if all went well, they should be able to confront a homicidal immortal very soon.

  CHAPTER 22

  JAY BECAME INCREASINGLY grateful for Brina’s odd conversational style as they began their hike. The more out of breath Brina became, the more she communicated in mental images instead of speaking aloud, and the clearer it became why she was an artist. A simple s’mores granola bar triggered a deep, meditative analysis of the various tastes and textures.

  Her mental energy gave him hope. Her joy at the way the sun sparkled on the snow made the impressions he received from Rikai and Xeke easier to bear.

  The comfort Xeke had experienced as a result of Rikai’s work was now fading, and was being replaced by hunger and restlessness. Her rewiring made it possible for him to keep control, but he couldn’t ignore the spicy heat of the witch’s blood, or the coppery tang of Brina’s human blood, or even the syrupy sweet lure of Rikai’s blood—though the last would be poison to him.

  Rikai was still shielding her mind, but Jay suspected she was keeping pace with the rest of them out of sheer stubbornness. The only thought she let slip through to him was that she considered Brina’s presence a boon because she could be used as a human sacrifice. She expected him to be reasonable if it came to that.

  Jay chose not to comment.

  Unlike the woods behind Xeke’s and Kendra’s homes, this forest was vast, teeming with the life one would expect in untouched wilderness. As the group moved farther away from human civilization, Lynx pointed out territorial markers left behind by cougars, bobcats, and other lynxes. He caught a snowshoe rabbit, and lorded it over the rest of them that he had hot, fresh meat while they settled in for a night of dried, packaged foods.

  The tent was snug with the four of them, even though Rikai sat cross-legged in a trance instead of sleeping, and Jay had decided that it would take less energy to keep people warm with his power than it would to lug bulky subzero sleeping bags.

  That logic had seemed sound, right up until the moment when he had Xeke spooned against his back, Brina snuggled against his chest, and Lynx keeping his feet warm. He had been worried that Brina’s ladylike manners might make her balk at the sleeping arrangements, but she accepted them as part of the ongoing quest.

  Jay was the one who had some qualms, mostly about the vampire nuzzling at his neck and not-so-idly recalling their first conversation.

  Was it was safer to give a little blood and risk being weaker in the morning, or to leave the vampire hungry? This is only the first night. What about tom
orrow?

  “Fire is bound in blood, but earth is bound in flesh,” Rikai said, making Jay jump. “I can’t entirely block the blood-hunger, because that comes from Leona’s seeking power, but all he needs to be able to sustain himself is to be able to touch you, as he is now.” That was … unsettling. Rikai added, “He should not be able to draw enough power from you to be a danger, but I will keep watch just in case.”

  And you care so much about my well-being. Rikai kept Jay with them for the same reason she tolerated Brina: she thought he would be useful. Knowing that wasn’t the same as actually trusting her.

  A restless night led into an even longer day in which their off-trail hike became increasingly challenging. Jay’s irritation only grew as his foot skidded on an ice-slicked rock and he fell into a winter-stripped thornbush.

  As he extracted himself, he felt a burst of triumph from Brina. Throwing herself down to look more closely at the bush, she exclaimed, “Look!”

  She frowned up at them all when they failed to respond, and then touched a reddish bulb growing at the end of one branch. “Rose hips,” she said, as if that should have been sufficient explanation.

  “Are you craving tea?” Rikai snapped. Rose hips were the fruit left behind after a rose’s blooms fell.

  Brina stood up and announced, with what sounded like genuine disappointment, “It took Rhok nearly a century to breed a rose that blooms so dark it appears black to human eyes, and you look at it like it’s a dead bush.”

  “It isn’t blooming at the moment,” Xeke pointed out.

  “And it hasn’t been eaten,” Jay replied as he examined the bush more closely. Long-stemmed formal roses generally couldn’t survive in darkly canopied forests. This one not only had, but the rose’s fruit hadn’t been touched by any of the numerous animals who should have enjoyed it as a delicious snack.

  “Silver’s line is the one known for black roses,” Xeke said.

  “When Silver’s line took over after Midnight’s fall, they made the symbol their own,” Brina replied. “I know this place. See these stones, here, and here?” It took a great deal of imagination to see anything more than random rocks strewn amidst trees and brush, but Brina recognized something, and through her Jay could see the plaza that had once been in that place.

  “This was a freeblood market,” Brina said, one gloved hand lingering on a stone with faint vestiges of etched letters, its message long lost to lichen and moss. “All the shapeshifter nations traded their best goods here. We should be less than a day from Midnight proper.” With a slight pout, she added, “There used to be a road.”

  “Well, there’s no road now,” Jay replied, more sharply than he’d intended. He glanced down at the stupid GPS, which informed him that they had overshot their destination … suggesting that the coordinates they were using hadn’t been correct in the first place.

  “Let’s try that path,” Xeke suggested, pointing.

  “That’s a deer trail,” Rikai replied.

  Jay turned toward the unremarkable break in the woods. He wouldn’t have noticed it if the vampire hadn’t pointed it out first, and it still didn’t seem a likely prospect. It wasn’t even going in the right direction.

  Lynx gave him a mental poke, saying, You don’t know where you are or where you’re going. How can a direction be wrong?

  Pondering that insight, Jay stepped closer, and realized the path was wider than he had first thought. The closer he moved to it, the more he realized his eyes were playing tricks on him. This wasn’t a deer trail.

  “I think we’ve found your road,” Jay said to Brina. “Xeke, I’m going to need you to tell me if you see forks … or anything dangerous, come to think of it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you saw this and I didn’t.”

  “Where—” Rikai paused, closed her eyes, and tilted her head as if listening. At last she said, “The spells here are old but still powerful. And very discreet, designed not to be noticed even by a witch.”

  Especially a witch who normally carries a hunter’s blade, I’d bet, Jay thought, lamenting the loss of his usual weapon.

  “Once we get to Midnight proper,” Brina said as she led the way up the old road, “there is another path, traveling nearly due east, that should take us into Shantel land. Then it is simply a matter of—”

  Blackness.

  Pain.

  Jay opened his eyes to find himself sprawled in the snow, with Brina kneeling next to him. Xeke looked concerned, but Rikai’s face simply held contempt.

  Flames, like the fires of hell. Flesh scalding—

  “Guard your mind,” Rikai suggested belatedly.

  Jay turned his head, trying to see the mind he could feel so clearly. Brina gripped his hand, crushing his fingers, and he knew she saw it too: a semitransparent shape, almost humanoid, but—

  “Ghosts, nothing more,” Rikai said. “Unless you invite them into your brain, they are harmless.”

  What most people called ghosts were just impressions left behind by strong emotions. Jay had encountered them before, but never this powerfully. The pain this ghost was radiating was beyond Jay’s comprehension. It made his bones ache as he forced himself to stand and keep moving.

  The farther they traveled up the road, the thicker the impressions became.

  When Jay was a boy, his history lessons had included stories of Midnight. As for its fall, that had been described in simple terms: on September 22, 1804, Midnight burned to the ground. No one knew who was responsible, though everyone had celebrated the destruction, which had been so complete that the slave trainers had not been able to gather their power fast enough to re-subjugate the witches and shapeshifters before they could raise arms to defend themselves.

  Those lessons were made real in the early twilight as the forest spat them onto the carcass of what had once been an empire’s terrible heart.

  Nature should have taken over in the last two centuries, but it hadn’t been allowed. Magic had salted the ground in this clearing, leaving it a dead zone inhabited by nothing more than what might have once been stone—now twisted and melted as if torn from a volcano—and the ghostly impressions of those who had once lived in this place. Sheets of ice, gritty and black from ash, ringed the area, but the ruins themselves glowed hot like coals under the darkening sky.

  Jay could hear the memories wail in fury, and pain, and helplessness, and—more than anything else—confusion. Why? they asked.

  Rikai crept close, even though that meant crawling on the ice, until she could hold her hands above the glistening coals and say in a voice that sounded half hypnotized, “They say every major power in the world was involved in bringing Midnight down. They poured their magic into this spot. I can feel them.…”

  “Jay, I do not wish to camp here for the night,” Brina said, her voice seeming oh-so-distant as Jay struggled not to hear the screams of the dead.

  “Agreed,” Xeke said.

  Lynx hissed, and Jay realized that he couldn’t hear his longtime companion over all the other voices pressing against him. Brina reached down and stroked Lynx between the ears, while looking up at Jay with concern.

  “East, you said?” he asked her. Was he shouting?

  She nodded, and caught his shoulders to physically turn him until his back was to the setting sun. They all wanted to get as far away as possible.

  Almost all.

  “Rikai?”

  “Come here!” Rikai called, her voice breathy. “This is incredible. I think—”

  Jay heard Xeke trying to reason with the Triste, but he didn’t wait for her response. He needed to get away from this place. The others would have to catch up.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE MEMORY OF blood and fire pressed in around Brina as she ran from Midnight and every gruesome recollection the sight had brought to mind. She followed Jay, who led them at a frantic pace well past sunset, until clouds obscured any hint of stars or the nearly full moon and it was too dark to see one foot in front of the other.

&n
bsp; Preparing food and setting up their camp in the inky black was challenging, as was trying to find enough privacy to take care of awkward human bodily functions without becoming totally lost. She was grateful that Lynx stayed near, sweetly compassionate in the way he called to her in the darkness when she strayed the wrong way.

  Though they made camp late, they started early the next morning. Brina struggled to keep up with Jay’s pace, refusing to be the weak member of their party. Exequías and Rikai lumbered behind her, and she kept her eyes firmly on the wide-eyed witch. Eventually, it was Lynx who set teeth into Jay’s calf with a snarl.

  Jay jerked his head up as if from a trance, and looked around at his exhausted companions. “Sorry,” he said. “I keep feeling …” He trailed off, and shivered. “I think it’s the same magic that tried to hide the road from me.”

  “I’m no expert at magic,” Exequías said, “but doesn’t it take power to maintain something like this? What kind of spell is still this strong two hundred years later?”

  “The kind of spells Midnight would buy,” Rikai answered, shouldering past them at a slower but no less inexorable pace. The rest of them fell in line behind her, Jay’s steps tense, as if he were still fighting the instinct to run. “They were first crafted through sacrifice. When Midnight was attacked, the spells were fed with slaughter, and enough magic to leave stone smoldering for centuries.”

  “You mean the spells got stronger after the attack?” Brina asked. She had no magical expertise personally, but she knew some of the witches who had supported Midnight. Black was not a dark enough word to describe some of their rituals.

  “More than that,” Rikai answered. “I think it’s no coincidence that the civilizations who lent their power to this attack have all fallen into decline since. Before that attack, even Midnight feared the Shantel, the Azteka, and the shm’Ahnmik. They were worth fearing. Now they’re so insignificant that many consider them myths. The wreckage their actions left behind has been like an open wound that any parasite could use. I doubt Midnight’s defense spells were the only opportunistic leeches who noticed.” With a glance back and an unsettling smile, she added, “I know that I certainly intend to return, once other matters are—”