“I can’t believe you keep this all to yourself.” I walked around it, circling it, unable to take my eyes off the magnitude of the entire solar system hanging from his ceiling. A green multi-legged bug, the size of a spider, shot a florescent blue web at my face. It landed on my nose. “What the hell was that?” I wiped it off quickly.
“Snarky.” Gavin laughed at my reaction. “He lives on the moon.”
“You have bugs that crawl around your room and hang out on your models?”
He smirked. “They aren’t models, Dhell, and he doesn’t live in my room, he lives on the moon. There are all kinds of life form in our solar system, many of which, our great minds on Earth haven’t discovered yet.”
“You’re joking, right? That little critter doesn’t live on the actual moon.” My eyebrows came together.
Gavin stared at the solar system. “No, I’m not joking.”
“I don’t get it.”
He pushed himself up to sit with his back against the wall. “I’ve created a replica of the solar system and released it in my room. It’s like a copy-and-paste function on your computer at work. I did a copy of our space and pasted it here. What’s out there is also in here.”
Now my face went from confused to ‘are you crazy?’ “Isn’t there a human law against duplicating a solar system?” I asked, shocked.
My eyes and attention followed something shooting across the replica. “Gavin, there’s a meteor rock heading toward Venus.” I reached up to push it off course.
“Don’t!” he yelled.
I jumped back, my eyes wide, my heart startled. “What?”
“Are you insane? Didn’t you hear anything I just told you? This is a carbon copy. You push that meteor off course and it could collide with something else and cause a ripple effect that could end life as we know it.”
“Damn! And you have all of this in your bedroom? You’re kind of a power-hungry guy, aren’t ya.”
“I’m fascinated, not power hungry.” A crooked frown marred his mama-boy looks.
Gavin shrugged. “What’d you want, Dhellia?”
“I wanted to talk with you for a second.” I motioned toward his chair pushed under his desk. “May I?”
“More talk about pitting yourself against your father?”
“Nah, I’ll save that for later when we haven’t argued in a while.” I smiled casually. I pulled the metal chair up next to the bed, crossed my right leg over my left leg and interlocked my fingers in my lap. “Can you tell me what you know about my mother?”
Gavin stared at me for a few seconds before he clapped his hands, causing the lights to come on, and the solar system to disappear.
“Your room is a wizard’s haven.”
“That wasn’t magic, Dhell. That was a nifty Christmas gift from Jonas called The Clapper.”
Sometimes his humor was so dry that I didn’t know how to respond. Moving onto the reason I was there was the best thing for me to do. “What do you know about her?”
“Why would I know anything?”
“In the living room, you said something about my mother’s soul, and I was wondering if you knew anything about her.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you know about her and we can go from there,” he said.
“She died when I was five years old. I was in the living room of our apartment and Damien had his arms around me. He shielded me from Mother’s last moments. While she sucked in the last few breaths she would ever take, she was saying a bunch of gibberish. Back then I didn’t know what it was, but I’m old enough now to recognize it as a spell.”
Gavin stared into my eyes and then as if he were uncomfortable, he glanced at some books piled on his desk. I could tell he was holding something back. “What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, I want to know, Gavin. What do you know that I don’t?”
“Dhellia, it’s not my place to tell you about your mother. Plus, everything I know is hearsay from distant relatives.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt at that moment when he denied me what he knew about my own mother. I was angry at the situation, but I respected the fact that he didn’t want to gossip.
“I can tell you this, though,” he said. “Your mother was a powerful witch—more powerful than any other witch in our coven.”
For the first time, I was at a loss for words. I stood up, pushed the chair back under his desk and headed for the door.
“Dhellia,” Gavin stopped me. “Damien knows.”
Figures he would, I thought. I left Gavin’s room without turning around to say another word.
Chapter Ten
I wasn’t sure what I was doing on top of the U.S. Bank building in Los Angeles. The last time I was here, I was waiting for my father’s hellhounds to find me and drag me back to the underworld. That was just under two weeks ago, although it seemed like a lifetime ago. So much had happened in two weeks.
In fact, the cloaking spell that Gavin placed around me did shield me from my father and his minions. A part of me wondered if Father even cared about me, or the fact that I had disappeared. I missed the adrenaline chase of dodging around the world, meeting new people and taking in new sights. Now I lived an unexciting mundane human life.
I stood on the ledge of the concrete building and closed my eyes, wondering if anyone would miss me if I disappeared. Who was I, anyway? I was the daughter of Lucifer and Adana, but the concern of nobody.
I could jump off this building to my death, and then what would happen? They’d stuff my petite body inside a body bag and shelve me somewhere until someone realized I was gone.
Where would my soul go? Would I live with my father in Hell or would I stay on Earth and haunt humans? I was certain that the third level would not allow me access there, so in reality, I didn’t know what would happen to me.
My brother’s leather jacket whipped in the wind behind me. His clean musk scent—the scent I knew as well as I knew my own—made me smile. I had missed his scowl and serious demeanor. I hadn’t seen him since the incident at my job in the law library a week ago.
He hadn’t said anything but based on the connection in which I knew my brother, he was standing ten feet behind me, staring at me and quite possibly contemplating what I was doing on the roof, mere feet from one of Hell’s portals.
“When are you going to grow up?” I heard him say.
“For your information, I’m growing up at my own pace.” I swung around to face him.
His eyes grew wide; his mouth agape. “What?” he asked shocked.
“You asked me when I was going to grow up and I’m telling you, I will do it at my own pace.”
“I didn’t say anything, Dhellia.” He thrust his hands in his jacket pockets.
“What do you mean you didn’t say anything?”
“Well, I mean, I thought those exact words to myself, but the words never left my mouth.”
I glanced at the ground, my mouth opened in shock, various thoughts manifested inside my mind. “I can read minds! Damien.” I looked up at him, “I read your mind.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Are you and Gavin playing around with spells?”
“No! Gavin is able to read minds and he said that’s one of Mother’s powers, and that I should have that power, too. I bet that you have it, too. Read my mind.”
“Dhellia, I’m not here to read your mind.”
“Why are you here?” I slowly turned away from him and gazed out at the vast sky.
Damien walked over to my side and peered off the edge of the building. “It sure would hurt if either of us fell from this building,” he casually mentioned.
“Planning on pushing me?”
He ignored me. “I went to the house to look for you, but your roommates said you’d been gone for two days.”
I shrugged. “I’m sowing my wild oats.”
“You don’t even know what that means.”
“I have an idea.”
I felt my brother’
s eyes on me. His mood was sour, his body rigid and his eyes narrowed. We were at odds in some ways. I felt that he hated being my keeper, but even worse, hated being on Father’s bad side.
“Father’s outraged,” he finally said.
“So, what else is new?”
“True, but he’s on a mission, Dhellia.”
“The same mission he’s been on for the past year? Lock me away in Hell and throw away the key?”
“He has tracker demons looking for you.”
I released a slight snort. “Of course he does, because for some reason, he doesn’t want to let me go. And you know what, Damien?” I turned and faced him, met him eye for eye, stance for stance. “He doesn’t even love me.”
My brother scratched is head—the sure sign that he just became uncomfortable with our conversation.
“He loves you in his own way.”
“Pfft. That’s all you got?” I turned my body to gaze back out at the sky. My left foot rested on the ledge, my arms crossed over my chest. “That always worked on me, didn’t it?”
Damien’s eyes moved from me back out toward the city. We were both pretending to gaze at its beauty when in reality, all I wanted to do was cry. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to scream out to the world, drop to my knees and sob relentlessly into the palms of my hands. I wouldn’t, though. My life had been centered around men that view weakness as an opening to attack. I would never let either of them see me cry.
“This is not a game, Dhellia. Father keeps saying that he needs you there—something about his plan not being fulfilled, if you are out of his grasp.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve no idea and no one is talking. I have a meeting with one of father’s rivals to see if I can negotiate some information about your future.”
My head moved to look at him. He placed his hands inside his pockets. “Who?” I asked.
He shook his head. “The less you know the better.” He turned to face me again. “But I need you to stay near Gavin and Jonas and away from the stationary portals to Hell, like the one up here.”
Now was the time for me to ask him what I needed to know. This was my moment to use my negotiating power. “I’ll promise you that, if you tell me what happened to Mother.”
He hesitated. His jaw tightened, his eyes narrowed and his hands were tight fists at his side. Then he relaxed and answered me with a casual response. “She died.”
“How?”
“What does it matter, Dhell?”
“It matters to me. I was there with you the night she died. I deserve to know what happened.”
“You honestly don’t remember any of it?” he asked.
“I remember Mother’s last words. She chanted something and then she took her last breath. That’s all I remember.”
He searched my eyes. The silence between us was dead space. Finally, when he spoke, his words were cold as ice. “Then you remember enough.” He ran his hand down the side of my face and walked toward the portal.
I could feel my blood boil. Why wouldn’t anyone tell me what happened to my mother or explain to me how she died. With an unfamiliar pull at the core of my body, I roared, “Damien, stop!”
The building and windows of the top floors shook and then shattered. I turned to look at him just as he turned toward me, his eyebrows furrowed. “What the hell? Are you okay?”
“No! Damien, help me.” I felt my body tighten. When I glanced down at my hands, my nails had grown into sharp daggers, my mouth felt odd. Razor-sharp teeth stuck my tongue and a pinhole amount of blood gave me the slight taste of the coppery flavor. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong.” He wrapped his arms around me and carried me to the edge where he turned and sat down, keeping me locked in his embrace. “You’re maturing.”
I trembled, my body desperate to ignite the rage inside me—a need pulling at the gut of my stomach and extending through every muscle and ligament in my body. My brother’s hands brushed my hair off my forehead and he rocked me while I shook in his arms.
When I could finally talk, my words were clumsy and barely audible. “I matured when I was thirteen.”
He smirked. “Think about it like your moment of puberty. Do you remember when you first grew those things,” he glanced down at my chest and then quickly looked away.
My nails and teeth had returned to normal while my body temperature had cooled off after it spiked a few degrees. He made me laugh around the few tears that had slipped from my blurry eyes. “Growing boobs is slightly different than shattering glass when I’m angry or growing hell-awful nails and spiked teeth.”
Damien chuckled. “You’ve got a point there.”
“What am I?”
“Let me put it this way. You got Ma’s looks but Father’s temper. You’re gonna need to keep that temper in check or you could do some serious damage.” He glanced down into my eyes. “Your body’s changing, Dhell. It’s like puberty for us. Every year, you’ll discover more and more about yourself. It’s like a surprise in a Cracker Jacks’ box.”
I nestled into his arms, basking in the security of his masculine demeanor. His deep voice rumbled in his chest against my ear and while I fought to come down from turning into the creature that I was bound to be, Damien comforted me as he had always done.
“We are part demon whether we like it or not,” he said.
“That is true,” I whispered.
He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “That night, behind the couch, when I held you in my arms and you heard Mother die, someone or something had murdered her.”
I maneuvered off his lap and knelt down in front of him, my hands resting on his thighs. “You knew this all along?”
“Yes. My mind had blocked out the events of that horrible day for years, but the older I got, the more I began to understand.”
“Who killed her?”
“I never saw anyone kill her.”
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“She was fighting an entity. Something I couldn’t see. But she was chanting and I remembered everything she said, word for word. Before Father whisked us away, I wrote her chant down. Later, when I was older, I looked up the spell she cast.”
“And?”
“And she put a spell on Hell, one that cannot be broken unless seven keys are brought together. The spell entitles every spirit to a trial by fire.”
“I know about the trials. I thought the trials had always been a part of Father’s kingdom.”
“Prior to Mother’s spell there was no such thing, but after she cast her spell, spirits were entitled to convince the court that their souls deserved a second chance.”
He stopped for a moment, staring toward the portal that only we could see. I waited for him to continue.
Finally, he looked at me. “There were two things in that spell that has had me baffled for years.”
“What’s that?”
“In part of the spell, Mother said: Lucifer will suffer the loss of trials, near and far. And she followed that up with a repetitive verse: Separabis eos vigilem.”
“Separate them, watcher?”
“How did you know what that meant? It’s in Latin.”
I shook my head. “I’ve no idea. You said it and it replayed in my mind in English.”
Damien placed his warm hand on my arm. “Your powers are coming in fast and strong.”
There was silence between us. We could hear the sirens from the city below and helicopters making their rounds. “A watcher needs to separate what?”
“Exactly. What? Those two things have baffled me for years.”
“And you’re positive that you remembered it word for word?”
“More than positive.”
“Why would someone or something kill Mother? Gavin said she was a strong witch, but who or what had she threatened? And what did she mean about Father suffering the loss of trials near and far?” I stood and paced, repeating her words. Separabis eos vig
ilem”
Damien stood and gripped my hand. “It was time for you to know and maybe with some luck, we can figure out those things together.”
I nodded.
He hugged and kissed my forehead before he started off toward the portal.
“Wait.”
He turned and faced me.
“Will that thing I become only happen if I get mad?”
“For the most part until you learn to control it, and then you’ll be able to invoke it when you want.”
I used this opportunity to remind him of something very important. “My birthday is in four days. Think you can make it?”
“I wouldn’t miss it. And Dhellia, go home. Don’t stand here and search for the one thing you wanted to get away from. You have a life now. Go and explore it.”
He was right. I watched him disappear through the portal, happy that he had finally confided in me. I turned around and propped my leg up on the ledge of the U.S. Bank building.
“Separabis eos vigilem,” I whispered to myself.
Chapter Eleven
I stood in front of Jonas’s closet and eyed his wardrobe. With my index finger erect over my lips, tapping ever so slightly, I was horrified at the collection of plaid button-down shirts, polyester pants and random-colored ties. I sighed in disbelief that he’d own any of this stuff, let alone think he was going to wear something from this closet to perform on stage this evening.
“This is a joke, right?” I blew my flaming-red bangs off my forehead and crossed my arms under my chest.
“This is what I got. We take it or leave it.”
I glanced at his body from head to toe. “Well, we’re definitely not going to leave it. We want your fans to have fun, right?” I giggled at the thought of Jonas nude on stage.
He put his hands on his hips. “I have plenty of women who want this body. Look at this?”
He lifted his sleeve and flexed his bicep. Unintentionally, I laughed so hard I thought I would bust my side open. I even fell on his bed, curled up in fetal position and laughed. “Jonas! You can’t be serious. You didn’t just flex a nonexistent bicep, did you?”
His grin turned into a frown and he pulled down his sleeve, slightly embarrassed.
Witch Road to Take Page 6
