My leg buckled, and my kneecap burst into a mess of soot, my calf disintegrating. I felt nothing, but the gags around me were enough.
“Mother,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Get out. Leave me to burn on my own.”
“Don’t do this.”
“I. Wish. For help,” I said, too weak to say more, inches from death and not wanting to spend my last moments arguing with my damn mother.
Everything trembled. Not like an earthquake, but like goosebumps rising in the world. I looked up to the sky first, and saw them. The Chains, becoming more and more visible. Great, metal links, souls that had enough hope left to answer my call.
They twisted in the air, huge snakes of things, and everything I knew twisted with them. Nothing was real, except for those links, drawing the Spirit Elemental out of my body with their will.
When the ghost of my mother hovered in the air, suspended in The Chains she’d created, it was seconds before she disappeared into a very ordinary looking glass vase in a line of others just like it. Cym’s creations. One held water, one held a single flame, one the sprout of a plant, one empty of all but air; and my mother’s, filled with a throbbing energy that bowed the glass now and again, but would never break it.
Agana left her lover’s side with a squeeze of the hand, and approached the vases on the ground. She looked to the links above us, and didn’t need to say anything. Sentient, graceful things, they slithered down with the sound of clanking prison doors, and wrapped smoothly around the five vessels, settling with a sigh. Agana didn’t wince as she opened a vein in her arm and dripped her blood into each vase.
“Bound by Blood. Bound by The Chains of your own Sins,” she said.
“There is only one place they belong,” Lux said. “They have to go to The Gone where the Seven of us can watch over them and never let their sins become stronger than the demons who own them.”
“Note the irony,” Una said, her body swaying with exhaustion. “Created The Chains to keep The Gone away. Now they’re wrapped in The Chains and going to The Gone for good.”
And there it was. The reason Lux would be stripped away from me.
Chapter 33
Lux and I, Aamon and Agana, stood side by side in the Royal Demon castle. We’d come to deliver the Elementals to their place of rest. Only one of us would be returning to The Chains. The possibilities of Wrath and Blood, the hopefulness of Lust and Wishes…. These things weren’t meant to stay together. They were too raw to remain whole.
A room had been created for the Elementals to inhabit right across from the room where the Chains lived, if living is what you’d call it. The Elementals weren’t dead, only contained. I suspected The Chains wouldn’t be broken until our mothers were obliterated entirely, but I would find a way to give those souls rest. Anything could be done if you wished for it hard enough.
After all, it was with the last ounce of strength in my heart that I Wished to survive the burnt thing I’d become on my birthday, and there I was in The Gone again, with my super pale skin and silver hair, good as new.
My fingernails were black. I don’t understand why it happened that they couldn’t be changed, but the Poisons all painted their nails black, too. That felt good. My eyes—they scared my coven, even Vera. They’d turned silver, shining silver, with only the slightest pinpoint of black in the middle. They didn’t look like eyes, they looked like gems from the moon or something. Inhuman. But I still saw everything the same way. Nothing looked different. Lux said it was because I saw the world as something extraordinary to begin with.
Lux took Link from my hand, and shifted it, in that non-magic, reality-altering way he did with his butcher knife. He did the same with his own link, turning them both into padlocks. I was the one to lock the door on our mothers, the immortal beings that destroyed so many girls of our bloodlines, who betrayed each other and took care of each other, and made the world turn as it did, under the watch of the very Demon Sins they’d fallen victim to. It was sick, but I think the Elementals needed the rest. I thought they’d be safe there.
She was my mother. I still wanted her safe, no matter how many wrongs she’d committed. There were a lot of rights, too. She was immortal, but she was human. They all were. We all were.
Leaning against the door, Agana trained her red eyes on me. They were softer than when we’d met, but they’d never be sane. “She didn’t deserve to share your blood,” she said. “I’ll miss you.”
“You know, I’ll miss you, too.” We didn’t hug. We both understood that the power of blood could do many things, but the Blood Witch wasn’t able to make responsible choices with it. “Agana. Love Aamon. Don’t isolate yourself from him. Things can change in The Gone, too.”
“I know,” she said, her voice echoing in the halls, certainly reaching the brothers who stood a few feet away. “I’ll do it because you and Lux can’t.”
Lux and I held hands on one of the many staircases in his secret, ruined palace. We shared that place. It was ours. A gorgeous, empty thing with stars that didn’t belong.
“Celeste.” He watched our fingers.
“There’s nothing to say, Lux,” I whispered, tears choking me. This was a time when I would have felt panic overcome me a week ago, at the thought of abandonment, but not anymore. Lux saw it.
“I know you think you can return to The Gone, Celeste.”
“I have to think that.”
“You can’t come back.”
My eyes pleaded with his. “This place doesn’t scare me anymore, the demons don’t scare me, my own demons don’t scare me. I can use magic here, I broke the rule, just like Agana did.”
“Sweet girl. You are nothing like Agana. It’s for that very reason, for that perfect softness that you mustn’t return. Celeste, you’re not hopeless.”
My teeth hurt with gritting them. “I. Won’t. Let The Gone make me hopeless. This is where you came from and you’ve given me such hope—”
He put a finger to my lips. “You would free them, Celeste. One day, you would free them.”
He took his finger away, but my mouth stayed closed, frozen shut with the truth. He was right. One day, I would….
“…I would see a goodness in the Elementals that isn’t there,” I murmured. My mother had said the same thing to me.
Leaning to look into my eyes, he said desperately, “A love like this doesn’t just stop. It changes things. We’re willing slaves to it until it turns us away.”
“Lux, I don’t care about the big picture right now, or what might happen. I don’t care about changing anything, I…” I choked, stumbled, went on. “I just… Just tell me that your heart will hurt without me. Every star will have your name on it for me from now on. Tell me that you won’t just—”
“Forget you?” He chuckled. “To think, all I expected to return from The Chains with was the memory of the stars.” He kissed me softly, holding it there until we needed breath. “I didn’t see stars until my eyes met yours.”
“Oh, Lux.” God, my heart hated that moment, and loved it and wanted it to be locked in a room like the Elementals and those hopeless chains and never leave.
A tear hit my hand. I tapped it with my index finger, and held it between both of us to look at. I blinked, and it transformed into a tiny star; silver on one side, ice blue on the other.
“Who says magic can’t happen in The Gone?” I said. I opened his palm and closed the star inside.
It wouldn’t be forever until I saw Lux again, but it would feel that way. I would live through the foolishness that was a seventeen-year-old girl’s life, and I’d lead the witch coven that would reshape the world. We’d been left with a lot of questions that we’d never thought to ask, but only one mattered: What next?
The Chains were under my command, tethered only by the Poisons. We wanted to free the links, but how? And without them, the demons could come and go as they pleased. For as many lies as we’d been told, it was true that we weren’t ready to face that.
* * *
We thought Cymbeline could fill the souls of the hopeless links in The Gone, but she couldn’t. “They hold their emptiness like teetering wine glasses,” she’d said with tears in her eyes. The mass of bottles, crates, cardboard boxes and porcelain vases surrounded by every other type of container she kept had grown since the first time I’d been in her room, such a short time ago. Cym was chasing the emptiness, I could feel it.
Cymbeline sounded like she was hiding from someone when she said to me, “I’m tired of longing for empty things.”
I couldn’t blink back my tears. I held up my palm and Wished I could help her fill the void. It was worse after she created the vessels to hold the Elementals. I don’t think she knew what to do with herself anymore. I wanted her to feel my friendship when she was afraid, to know that mistakes didn’t mean the end of things. A tiny glass bottle, stoppered with a cork, appeared in my hand, a bright silver chain attached. “No chain,” I grumbled, and the chain became a white cord. A swirling of silver dust turned into a miniscule star, suspended in the bottle.
“This is for you. I hope you’ll wear it. You can fill it with the thoughts too awful to be left unbottled. Me, the stars? We’re not afraid of them. You’re not alone, Cym, and we don’t have to hide anymore. We don’t have to shrink. This world is ours now.”
And even if I couldn’t Wish for my own happy ending, I would make a world worth wishing for.
I was different. Everything was. After a lifetime, after centuries of nothing changing, that one demon came and made my life mine.
The Poisons weren’t perfect. We’d made a lot of bad choices, let the dark draw us in. Power did that. Some of us wanted it to. The Elementals wouldn’t be gone forever, but they wouldn’t be free until I’d led my coven somewhere better. Only until our empty places were no longer tempted to darkness. Until our own shades were no longer shadows. Until our sweets didn’t sicken, until the Whispers in our ears weren’t wicked.
I would move the stars to make it so.
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KEEP READING FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER OF RUNNING HOME, Book One of the Shinigami Vampire Series!
Excerpt: Chapter One of Running Home
Book One of the the Shinigami Vampire Series
Death hovers around Ellie Morgan like the friend she never wanted. The snow-swept town of Ossipee, New Hampshire, is the perfect place for Ellie to detach herself from a world where she doesn’t belong. She certainly doesn’t belong at a black tie party at a mansion in the woods, but that’s where she is, and where he is: Nicholas French. The man who mystifies her with a feeling of home she’s been missing, and impossible knowledge of her troubled soul. Nicholas is one of the Shinigami—a heroic order of vampires that “save” their fated victims from other tragic ends. And while he followed an abomination of his kind to New Hampshire, he finds that fate drove him there for another reason. Nicholas knows why Ellie is human repellent…and why physical agony grips them when apart. But as Ellie’s quest for belonging finally nears an end, she’s forced her to choose between two unfeasible sacrifices: love and the destiny she’s longed for, or the sole companion who tethers her to the only world she knows.
“So guess what?” Kat flopped girlishly into the thrift store armchair opposite my own. Twirling a tablespoon of pink ice cream into her mouth and topping it with a sugarplum smile that meant trouble, she didn’t wait for me to guess. I hid my smile as I looked up from the Christmas scheduling I’d brought home to work on. The more I looked at it the more it seemed to say “unpaid overtime.”
“Partypartyparty!” she squeaked in a single breath.
My eyes widened. “Oh, hell no. No more Kat parties! You try to dress me like a human cupcake and you know I—”
“Hear me out!” she yelped, leaning over and shoveling a lot of ice cream into my mouth.
“No, I will not,” I mumbled, ice cream making a cold trail down my chin. I’d already lost this argument. She’d gagged me with the atrocity of strawberry artificial flavoring on purpose.
Kat popped in a horror movie, which she hated and I loved; a clear bribe. “Ellie, there’s a new attorney at the firm. They never hire new attorneys.”
This was Ossipee, New Hampshire. “Law firm” was a loose phrase when applied to a town where every business had a bear or moose in its logo. This may bother some people, but I wasn’t one of them. Ossipee was familiar, and fresh, and as close to the earth as I liked without being anywhere near a hippie. I liked being surrounded by wilderness and all things that reminded me of the solitude I loved.
Kat loved people. She had a romanticized view of city life that had not quite panned out in New York, and she brought her small-town-girl-in-the-big-city romance back to the small town. Leave it to Kat, as soon as she returned, she found the one “law firm” with no wildlife on the sign. A few old guys who went to law school twenty years ago were unable to say no to Kat’s can-do attitude and need to be employed somewhere that could almost be mistaken for a city job, even if it was as a receptionist.
We were so different, my odd attachment to Kat alarmed me at times. I didn’t want to think I clung to her because she was the only person left. A lurking sense of death was my only family, a dirty spirit that darkened any light in my life, making it so grim I never wanted it illuminated again. But Kat made it better.
Relief surged through me when she’d come back to town, and we found an old bed and breakfast that had been repurposed into apartments. It echoed us well. Charming like Kat; left over by the world, half-molded and half-destroyed like me.
Her wild enthusiasm jolted me. “Ellie, this is such a big deal! They said they had to have him, even though they hadn’t been looking for new blood, but then they realized they needed it if they wanted to handle the whole state, and he’s gorgeous—”
“So who is this new attorney?” I interrupted as I pulled my afghan closer to my neck. Dawn of the Dead woke up in the background.
“Chris Lynch,” she sputtered, clunking the ice cream bowl on our crappy end table. She was actually pacing the room over this guy, intermittently blocking the movie. “Wait until you meet him, he’s unbelievable!” All her words came out as tiny screech.
“The firm is having an office party now?”
“NO! No. Chris is having a cocktail party at his home, which he had built in honor of his new position,” she bragged, like this was the most impressive thing I would ever hear. “I drove by it the other day on a long car ride. It’s HUGE! And he got it built in less than a month!”
“He invited you and me?” I threw my schedules on the floor in surrender. Clearly this was not a work-conducive environment.
“Well, sure, me and a guest,” she peeped, breaking her pace to touch the tip of my nose. “And of course, there will be plenty of people to meet.”
“Not really winning me over here, Kat.”
“Lots of eligible men, friends of his. Normal guys.”
“Kat!” I interrupted again with more force, not liking the inevitable direction this had taken. She looked at me like a child in time-out. “Kat,” I said more softly. “We’re in New Hampshire, and he just moved here. How many eligible guys can he know around here, for starters?”
“He only moved here from Boston,” she said, like it was down the street. “And we were chatting at my desk and he said—”
“Kat, I have no need to mingle with the rich and self-important, and I definitely don’t need you to introduce me to any more men. Remember Jason?”
“That one was not my fault, Ellie. How was I supposed to know he was a cokehead?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Kat. The constant bloody noses, the five-inch pinky nail, the bag of coke he always carried. The point is, you get me into these things with people you barely know, and I just don’t want to do it again. You trust too easily, Kat.” She sighed
. “I know you want me to be happy, and I swear to God, I am.”
“How can you be happy spending all your time with me? I’m fun to be with, but you’re the one who says only in small doses.” We both laughed at that. “You never go out with the guys who ask you out at the shop. You never get near anybody but me.”
“I’m not suicidal, I’m just not actively looking for a man. I am actively trying to watch zombies, though.”
The thought of getting close to anyone sickened me. I couldn’t expect her to understand that after stripping me over and over again of anyone that mattered, death had become the only thing I’d never lose. Trying to hold on to a person, any person, it didn’t make sense when the crows were circling overhead, when death was right there, eager to slip in. Death chased everyone, but with me, he ran a little faster, grabbed anyone I cared about. Death singled me out. I hadn’t been kicked out of the world, I was never meant to be here to begin with.
And even I didn’t know what that meant.
Kat sat on the arm of my chair and leaned against my shoulder. “To tell you the truth,” she said, hyperactivity dissipating, “I’m actually a little intimidated by him. He’s perfect. Besides, you’ve got to see this house with me or I’ll have nobody to talk under my breath to.”
Here it comes.
“Please?” She had a way of saying the word with such sincerity that it was impossible for me to say no to her most ridiculous requests, of which there were many.
I thunked my head against the back of the chair and closed my eyes, groaning in tune with my zombie movie.
“Yay!” I heard her squeak.
“Call for pizza,” was my only reply.
* * *
*To continue reading and dig in deep to Ellie and Nicholas’s story, check out RUNNING HOME! My Book*
The Wind Between Worlds Page 25
