Jonas stepped forward. “Would they find her in a lair of vampires?”
Gavin put up his hand. “I got it. Ice!”
“Ice? What do you mean ice?” Damien asked.
“We need to bury her body in snow or a frozen body of water. It’ll bring her body temperature down and limit the beacon’s range and strength.”
“Are you sure?” Damien asked.
“Pretty sure. It’s the best option we have so far, unless you want Dhellia to stand in the middle of a lair of vampires and hope they don’t eat her.”
Damien’s eyes changed red and his fingernails grew. He flew towards Gavin and slammed him against the wall. He growled inches from his face.
My brother’s temper drained me more than I already was. “Damien, please, he’s my friend.”
Damien held his position as a dominant demon. “If anything happens to her, you die.”
Damien released Gavin, moved his jacket to the side and wrapped me in my blankets before he cradled me in his arms. He pressed his lips against my forehead. That familiar loving gesture he always did when he was taking care of me.
He was still in demon form, ready to take on anyone or anything that came toward him to get at me. Although my brother and I were half demons, we did know the meaning of and knew how to love. “Grab my arm,” he growled to my roommates.
We disappeared through a portal my brother had conjured. The mouth of the portal was blue with sparks of electricity filtering through the hole. Only a stationed portal to hell opened red with fire. As the four of us went through the portal, I realized that we were all on the run from demons that were desperately hungry to please my father.
Chapter Fourteen
We stepped out of the portal, onto a mountaintop, and into a pile of snow. The clouds heavily shaded the area and the chill in the air was refreshing against my sweltering skin.
“Bring her over here,” Gavin motioned to my brother.
The iced-over pond sat in the middle of land covered in white fluffy snow. I was in my pajamas still—a Hello Kitty button-down flannel blouse and matching flannel pants. I loved fashion but when it came to sleepwear, I was still a kid at heart.
I wrapped my arms around my brother’s neck while he cradled me against his body. The world around me was spinning, sweat dripped from my face into my red hair. The nerve endings below my skin pricked me the way they did when a limb has fallen asleep.
Damien got on his knees in front of the iced-over pond and kept me against his chest. “You want me to put her on top of the pond?” Damien asked. “It’s iced over.”
“We have to submerge her in cold water,” Gavin said. “Her body heat will melt the ice.”
“Damien,” I whispered. “I can hear them. They’re getting closer to us. Wolf and Zombie’s claws are in rhythm with their panting.”
“Gavin, we need to hurry. If we don’t get that key turned off, they’ll lock in on our position.”
Gavin kneeled down on one side of my brother while Jonas knelt down on the other. Damien rested me on top of the ice. I gritted my teeth but I was ready for my body temperature to go from boiling hot to lukewarm, if not normal.
A sizzling noise came from underneath me. Steam rose and the solid ice that held my body began to feel slimy and then slushy before it decided to completely give way from underneath me. My body was melting the ice. My skin was scorching hot and a slight burning smell singed my nostrils, which told me that I was in trouble. My insides, my organs, were starting to slow cook. I was a crockpot for my own insides.
My back and butt were the first parts of my body that met the frigid water of the iced-over pond. The contrast of my burning body and the icy water sent stabbing pains through my body. I screamed at the top of my lungs. I wanted to faint, but I knew I had to hold on.
Damien’s hands were under my armpits while he let my entire body slip into the frigid water. After the surging pain, it was oddly refreshing against my skin and muscles, but that beacon inside my palm continued to glow under the water like the algae bloom of the ocean.
The ice around me began to melt and recede further away from me. The water bubbled, slowly at first, but then it began to boil and caused fish around me to surface—dead fish. Like the wick of a lighted stick of dynamite, the ice in the entire pond split and melted within seconds.
Damien shifted my body. “The water is boiling! Gavin, this isn’t working,” he yelled.
“Shit. Her body is too hot.” Gavin jumped up to his feet and paced in the snow. He rubbed his temples and appeared to be mentally mapping out our next move.
Damien glanced back at Gavin while he kept me, from the neck down, submerged in the pond. “We don’t have time for you to think, you idiot. They’re closing in on us.”
My eyelids began to flutter. I heard Jonas panic.
“Damien, she’s losing consciousness.”
Gavin stepped forward. “We have to get her somewhere colder.” Gavin grabbed the blanket off the ground.
The magnified sounds of the demon hunters were swimming around me. Hellhound claws were scratching at the next-dimension gravel. I heard labored breathing from one beast to another. I panicked, my eyes flew open and I reached my left hand out of the water and grabbed the back of my brother’s head. “I can hear them. Get me out of here. Hurry, Damien! Hurry, please!”
Damien yanked me out of the water, tucked me in his arms, ran forward, and tackled both Gavin and Jonas. As we disappeared through Damien’s portal, I saw another portal open with two very angry trotters, stepping foot into the snow.
***
Jonas flew out of the portal to the right and into three feet of white powdery snow and Gavin flew out to the left. Damien landed on his feet—his grip around me kept me in his arms.
Jonas jumped up and tried to regain his balance. He immediately glanced up at the sky to make sure the clouds concealed the sun. Again, he managed to escape the daylight and keep himself intact. “What was that thing? Did you see that, Gavin?” he brushed the snow off his clothes.
I could tell that my face was beet-red from my continually escalating temperature. My head hung back, with my eyes closed, but I could hear everything around me.
“It was a trotter. They are one of my father’s fiercest well-kept secrets,” Damien remarked.
“A trotter? What in the hell is a trotter? Satan comes up with a nice pleasant word for an ugly tentacle, meat eating demon beast. What was it, twelve feet tall?” Jonas asked.
“They’re usually fifteen feet tall and they eat humans for a snack,” Damien snickered.
“Great! Exactly… meat eating. I’m ready to go home. Let’s find a way out of here.” Jonas motioned to Gavin for them to leave.
Gavin ran his hands over his forearms to warm himself up, as they spoke, “What are you worried about? They probably don’t eat dead meat. They want human meat and according to their playground pals here, I’d only be a snack. What do you think they eat as a meal?” Gavin tried to pace in the snow, but he kept falling over.
I moaned, still curled up in my brother’s arms. “They eat three elephants a day.”
Gavin gasped. “Elephants! Elephants!” He threw his hands up in the air, “Did you hear her just say that those beasts can eat three elephants a day?”
Damien kicked snow in Gavin’s face. “The more you talk about it, the closer they’re going to get.”
“Is anyone else turning into a popsicle? Where are we?” Jonas asked.
“Antarctica. You said we needed a colder area and I figured this would be the place,” Damien said as he walked through the snow.
“Like we don’t have enough problems with global warming,” Gavin said under his breath so that only Jonas could hear.
Dhellia sighed. “Children of Satan here, we can hear you!” I shifted my gaze to my brother. “I don’t hear the trotters or any other demons on our heels.”
“I think we just bought ourselves some time.” Damien kissed my forehead.
; “Hey, guys, I think that’s a body of frozen water over there.” Jonas motioned to an area that was glass-like ice near fluffy snow.
“Damien,” Gavin said. “It’s so cold here, we don’t need water. Lay her down in the snow.”
Damien nodded. He knelt down and placed me gently in the snow. I sank deeper into it, but with the frigid air around us and the painfully cold snow engulfing me, my body temperature no longer threatened to melt everything around me.
Damien grinned. “You’re going to be okay.” He turned his attention to the guys. “How long should we leave her buried here?”
“No longer than ten minutes.”
“Are you sure…ten minutes?” Damien asked.
“We’ll have to judge her reactions. After we pull her out, her body temperature should return to normal. If it drops below, she’ll go into shock.”
“Hypothermia,” Jonas said.
“Once we pull her out of the snow, we’ll need to get her somewhere where we can keep her body temperature stable. The key in her palm is going to try to raise her body heat again. But if we can keep her body temperature between 98.6 and 108, the underground brute squad won’t find us.”
“Got it,” Damien whispered.
Gavin surveyed the area. “I’ll tell you what. You monitor her and give me five minutes. I’m going to make an igloo for us to have shelter. I don’t know about Jonas and you, but I’m a human being and after five minutes, I will freeze to death out here.”
Damien nodded.
The key in the palm of my hand was bright red below the snow, but within a minute, it began to dim and after three minutes, the light was gone. Initially, the frigid virgin snow was refreshing against my body, but after five minutes, I could feel my organs shutting down.
Gavin used his mind to lift me from the snow and lay me down on my blanket that we had brought from home. Damien quickly wrapped me up and moved me from lying on top of the snow to the igloo that Gavin had made.
My teeth were chattering, my body twitching. I heard the voices of my brother and my roommates, but I could barely understand what they were saying. Then Damien’s frantic words made me realize that I wasn’t doing so well.
“We’re losing her! Do something!” Damien roared, his eyes red and his nails long.
“Move!” I saw Gavin leaning over me. I wondered why he was moving back and forth, but just before everything faded, I realized that the movement was from my body…my body convulsing.
Chapter Fifteen
The moment I heard my brother and Gavin arguing, I knew that the world was right again. My body was still cold from the inside out, but the convulsing and tremors had stopped.
I continued to lie still, focused on my brother’s voice while I easily floated back into reality. I hadn’t opened my eyes, so I wondered where Jonas was in this argument.
Damien’s voice was deep and cynical. “I don’t care how much magic you know or what line of wizards or witches you think you came from, you are not my relative.”
“We aren’t an ordinary coven, Damien. Do you think all your powers come from your father?”
“Witchcraft is about spells, and I’ve never learned a spell in my life,” Damien argued.
“That’s what I’m trying to explain, we’re not a coven of spell witches. We’re descendants of the gods.”
“Okay, Hercules. Do you honestly believe that garbage? If you know so much, tell me which god are we descendants of? Humor me,” Damien urged with sarcasm.
“Well, if you’re serious about knowing.” Gavin waited for Damien to give him a sincere response.
“Flood me with your wisdom,” Damien chuckled.
“Your father has tainted your views. You look at things in black and white, good and evil. But how do you explain your gift of foresight?”
Damien was quiet. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. I wondered what he was doing, but my closed eyes weren’t ready to open yet.
Then he spoke. “How did you know?”
“Jonas hadn’t even called you and you were at Dhellia’s bedside. You saw everything before it happened.”
“Not soon enough,” he mumbled.
“You also knew when those trotters were going to come through that portal back at the pond, which is why you tackled us.”
Damien shrugged. “My foresight is weak. I can only see minutes before anything happens.”
“That’s the gift of Veles, the Slavic deity, Lord of the underworld. He was the supernatural force of earth, water and the underworld, not to mention associated with and a master of magic and trickery. Of course, through the years, the nature of our powers have either developed or diluted, but we are related. Distantly, Damien.”
“Okay?”
I opened my eyes to see my brother sitting on the ground, his legs pulled up and his arms resting on his knees. He seemed to be contemplating what Gavin was telling him.
Gavin sat a few feet away from my brother, facing him while Jonas was leaning against the igloo with his eyes closed. His fair skin was so white that it looked like someone stroked White-Out all over his face.
I continued to listen to Gavin.
“As I was saying, Veles is the god of trickery and magic. That’s why you don’t need to learn spells to take on the traits of your mother.”
“My mother was just my mother—a good woman who was murdered before her time.”
“Damien,” Gavin glanced over at me. My eyes were closed to mere slits but I could see them. They thought I was still out cold. “I haven’t said much to Dhellia about your mother because she’s not mature enough to handle it.”
“What do you know?”
“Your mother was murdered.”
“I know, I was there,” Damien narrowed his eyes.
“What’s strange is that your mother was murdered for no apparent reason. At first, we thought it was because she was a visionary witch but—”
“A visionary witch? What’s that?”
Gavin’s eyebrows came together, confused. “You didn’t know your mother was a visionary witch?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Your mother had the ability to see the keys.”
My brother shrugged.
Gavin looked at his watch, “In seven hours, Dhellia’s key in the palm of her hand will turn off. The only other time it will send a signal is when she comes within a hundred feet of another key. At that time, your father will get the signal, as he did yesterday. When that happens all keys within that hundred miles are usually hijacked and branded with a tracking device.
“Are you kidding? Is she going to be ill each and every time that thing turns on in her hand?” Damien asked.
“No, from what I understand, when the key turns on for the first time, it makes the person ill and slows them down so they can be brought downstairs. If it ever turns on again, she should be okay.”
“That’s a relief,” Damien said.
“I know. But as I was saying, your mother could see the keys whether they were near each other or not. She was an asset to your father which is why your father”—he used his hands to simulate the, you-know signal—“continued to have relations with your mother.”
“My father loved my mother,” Damien said, knowing damn well that Father didn’t love anyone or anything.
Gavin sighed. “I’m telling you this, but I’m asking you to keep it to yourself for a while until Dhellia is ready to handle all of this.”
Damien nodded. “I will determine when she’s ready.”
“Keys are made by your father having an offspring with a visionary witch. But it’s not guaranteed that the two will produce a key. Every six years, on the sixth day of the sixth month, another visionary witch is born—one baby anywhere in the world with that ability. The gods often kill these visionaries before they take their first breath, hence miscarriages and stillborn babies.
“Our family used magic to protect your mother, but when your mother ventured out on her own, your father t
racked her down and baited her with his manipulations. You two were born.”
“And Dhellia is a key.”
“Yes. I can only imagine that your father thought she might be a key. This would explain why he wanted her downstairs with him on her twenty-first birthday. And why he was strict on bringing her back each time she tried to spread her wings. If she had been in his grips when her key turned on, he would have branded her with a tracking device.”
“Has he captured and inserted a tracking device into any other keys?”
“I’ve no idea. The chatter isn’t clear and is often changed based on rumor.”
“Where are the other keys?”
“Only a visionary witch can tell us. Your father searches high and low for other visionary witches. When your mother was murdered, your father was set back from his ultimate goal.”
“Which is?”
“To rule all three planes—to ultimately be the ruler of Hell, Earth and Heaven, of course. With all seven keys, he’d hold the power.”
My body shook involuntarily. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Damien crawled over to my side.
“Dhellia, are you okay?”
I opened my eyes and peered into the eyes and handsome face of my brother. I whispered, “Whoever killed Mother knew about her ability—I want to find that person and destroy them.” I wasn’t going to pretend as if I didn’t hear their conversation.
Damien nodded, but changed the subject. “You need to regain your strength. If we can make it another seven hours without seeing a trotter, we can go back to our lives.”
I sighed. “What life, Damien?”
Gavin came to my side and gripped my hand. The three of us, closely and distantly related, were gaining knowledge about each other that would change our existence and the world.
I had two missions: Discover and destroy the entity who killed my mother. And second, I would stand before my father as an equal match in strength and ability in order to thwart his plan to take over all planes of existence.
Chapter Sixteen
Witch Road to Take Page 8
