by Alyson Noel
“Looks like I win,” Dace says, gazing upon an outraged Suriel. “So what do you say we end this charade, so we can all go inside and celebrate the New Year in peace.”
The crowd is enraged. Furious at Suriel for wasting their time, it’s not long before a hail of beer bottles soar toward his head, along with a fresh slew of insults, deeming him a fake, bogus, fraud, disassembling as quickly as they came.
But Suriel won’t go down easily. Having lost none of his fire, despite losing his audience, he reaches for the dagger and advances on Dace as I leap onto the stage, wielding my athame.
“Daire, I got this,” Dace says, his voice barely a whisper, though loud enough for me to hear. Still, I can’t help but look skeptical. He’s swarming with seven varieties of the world’s most venomous snakes, who despite their friendly appearance, can turn on him just as easily. “Trust me,” he says, through tightly clenched teeth. “I know what I’m doing.”
Taking him at his word, I lower my athame. Remaining on high alert as Suriel charges toward Dace.
Enraged at his snakes for turning against him, enraged at losing his crowd, he’s immune to his daughter’s desperate call, begging him to halt.
“Daddy—stop! I can do this!” she cries, her voice too close for my comfort. While Suriel may be able to ignore her, I can’t.
I whirl toward the empty space where the crowd once stood and find Phyre with Cade right beside her.
“The righteous will ascend—the Last Days are here!” Suriel looms before Dace, dagger at the ready.
Dace breaks free of his binding with a surprising lack of effort, and in a steady voice says, “It might be your last day—but it’s not mine.” With a curt nod of his head, all seven snakes fling themselves off Dace and land hard at Suriel’s neck.
Phyre screams.
Cade looks on with burning red eyes.
Suriel drops to his knees, face turned skyward, convinced he’ll prevail. Until all seven snakes sink their fangs into his flesh at the exact same moment, as though they’d struck a previous agreement. Leaving Suriel gasping and railing against the utter betrayal they’ve wrought upon him.
With a bloodcurdling shriek, he crumples into an agonized heap as the snakes continue to attack. Seven sets of fangs repeatedly biting into his skin, depositing lethal doses of poison into his body until they tire of the game and slither away. While Dace looks on with wide silver eyes. His entire body trembling, shaking, as though he’s caught in the grip of something extraordinarily powerful and completely unknowable.
Phyre leaps onto the stage. Wailing with grief, she flings her blood-spattered form to cover her father’s.
Blood-spattered?
Whose blood?
Despite her deep state of grieving, she appears physically fine.
And that’s when I see the blood-soaked dagger she grips in her fingers.
That’s when Cade’s voice awakens me with his screams.
“What the hell have you done to me, Seeker? I will kill you for this!” He lumbers toward the stage, his entire left side drenched in red.
“Change!” I shout, racing toward him. Horrified to see his eyes wild and blazing, but otherwise looking very much the same. “Change—now!” I scream, as though I could actually command such a thing. Unable to comprehend the scene unfolding before me, when Cade shakes his head, falls to his knees. For some reason he can’t make the shift.
“Whatever you’ve done, take it back!” His voice is fading, along with his life force. But the truth is, I haven’t done anything. If I ever needed to see his demon self, it’s right now.
I whirl toward Dace, afraid of what I might find—only to see him still caught in that strange, hypnotic, silver-eyed state.
Strangely still. Strangely unharmed. Looking as though he’s on the verge of transforming into something I can’t even begin to imagine.
I turn my focus to Phyre and race toward her. Determined to wrestle the dagger away, unwilling to take the chance that she’ll use it again.
She lets it go easily.
Too easily.
Freeing up her hand to reach into her father’s suit pocket, and retrieve the detonator he’d stashed there.
A single glimpse of that small, electronic device is enough to make all of the pieces fall into place.
The explosives Dace told me he saw in her father’s shed are now stashed inside the Rabbit Hole.
I whirl on Dace, desperate to awaken him from his strange, hypnotic state. “The club!” I shout. “The club’s going to blow! You have to warn everyone to evacuate!”
Dace shakes his head, looks at me with wide glittering eyes making a slow return to their usual icy-blue. Seeing the detonator in Phyre’s hand, his blood-soaked brother falling against the stage, gasping for breath, he turns on his heel and races for the Rabbit Hole. While I lunge toward Phyre and tackle her to the ground. Effectively pinning her down, only to realize too late that the button is blinking.
She’s already pressed it.
Already started her own New Year’s Eve countdown.
“You should’ve listened to me while you had the chance,” she says. Her neck visibly bruised from Cade’s hand. The absurd message on her T-shirt illuminated by the haphazard row of candles that continue to flicker around us.
Her words punctuated from the countdown coming from inside the club.
Ten!
You can hear the swell of excitement from here.
Nine!
Phyre looks at me, her eyes a mess of mascara and tears, making her look like the villain of some tragic cartoon. “The last days are here.” She shrugs as though she’s not the least bit responsible for what she’s just done. Putting hundreds—possibly thousands of lives in ultimate danger, as behind us, the crowd counts down from eight to seven. “Better make your peace now. There’s no more avoiding it. No time for forgiveness.”
Six!
I punch her hard in the jaw. Slamming her cheek deep into the ground, more out of frustration than anything else. A move I instantly regret the second I see the way she grins in response.
Five!
I push off her, longing to rush inside, help Dace clear the place, but I can’t afford to leave her with Cade. Can’t afford to let her finish him off. Now that Dace is back to being himself, I can’t be sure he’ll survive it.
Four!
The next thing I know, the alleyway is teeming with bodies. Once-happy revelers now frantic in their need to evacuate the party. Oblivious to Suriel’s prone body. Cade’s perilous state. They storm the stage, causing me to lose sight of them in the chaos. But when a space is suddenly cleared, I find Cade gasping for breath as Phyre looms over him, grabs hold of his shirt, pulls his face to hers, and centers her mouth over his.
The countdown in the club may have halted—but in my head it continues.
Three!
I leap onto her back, and pull her off him, jamming my athame hard to her throat.
Two!
“Do it!” she screams, her neck arced in offering. “Put me out of my misery! Please—I never asked for any of this!”
My hand hesitates, not sure I can go through with it, when something off to the side catches my eye. The same luminous animal I saw before, just moments after we arrived.
With silky white fur and a piercing blue gaze, I instantly recognize it as Paloma’s Wolf.
It’s a sign.
But what kind of sign? What does it mean? What is it she wants me to do?
Cade is gasping, wheezing, inching away, as Phyre lies prone in my arms, waiting for me to deliver her.
I grab hold of her T-shirt and yank her back to the ground.
Forgive me. I direct the words to Wolf, to Phyre, to the universe.
One!
I slip the knife farther down, pressing the tip against the place where it says KISS on her T-shirt. Watching Phyre’s eyes widen as a soft smile crosses her lips.
“She’s here,” she whispers.
“Who?” I ask. “
Your mother? Is she here to meet you?”
Phyre shakes her head, parts her lips to speak. Looking at me when she says, “You can’t do it, can you?”
Her eyes meet mine, and we both know the truth. She’s not a demon. She’s just a sad, troubled girl who never stood a chance in the world.
She heaves herself out of my grasp and staggers toward the club. And I’m just about to go after her, when Dace appears before me, grabs hold of my arm, and shouts, “Run!”
I point toward Cade, lying in a half-dead, bloody heap beside us. And we pick him up between us, and drag him toward safety.
Having just cleared the edge of the alleyway, when the Rabbit Hole explodes.
forty-three
Dace
When the first blast hits, I push Daire to the ground, and throw my body over hers, in an effort to protect her from the barrage of shooting flames and flying debris. The series of explosions seeming to go on forever, coming one after another, punctuated by only the briefest of lulls.
“What happened to our friends?” Daire shouts to be heard over the noise. “Did you get them out? Are they okay?” She lifts her head, squinting through swirling gusts of black smoke.
“They’re fine,” I say. “Safe.” Careful to keep her body contained, until I’m sure that it’s over. “Before I even got there, Xotichl was already herding everyone out. She must’ve sensed it.” I lift my body from hers, and help her to her feet. “They went out through the front. I told them we’d all meet by my truck.”
“And everyone else?” Daire looks at me with red-rimmed eyes and an ash-smudged chin, her hair falling in limp tangles around her cheeks. But to me she’s never been more beautiful, and I have to resist the urge to pull her into my arms and kiss her. “You didn’t have much time, were you able to get them all out?”
I rub a hand over my chin, a long-time habit I can’t seem to shake. “I don’t know,” I admit, the words thick with the burden of truth. “It’s impossible to say for sure. While I couldn’t care less about the Richters, there were all those people at Leandro’s private party who aren’t guilty of anything other than having their perceptions altered without their consent. But there was so much pandemonium and so little time, it was impossible to get close enough to the vortex to properly warn them.”
Daire meets my words with a sobered gaze. Her chin lifting in earnest when she says, “Still, you did good.” She nods to confirm it, but I’m too absorbed by the possible loss to acknowledge the kudos. “You did the best you could. Without you, it would’ve been worse.”
I shrug. Look away. My mind swimming with the determined look on Phyre’s face as she pushed past me. Racing to get inside the very place all the others were fleeing.
Despite her earlier attempt to kill me, I tried to stop her. Tried to convince her not to do it. But she just looked right through me as though it were already done.
“What happened to Phyre is not your fault,” Daire says, accurately reading the look of loss on my face. “You’re not responsible for her. If anyone bears that burden, it’s me. She begged me to finish her and I was unable to do it. Unable to keep her from rushing into the building, determined to do what I couldn’t.”
“You did the right thing,” I tell her.
“Then why do I feel so conflicted?”
“Because watching a life self-destruct is never supposed to feel good. Unless you’re Cade Richter.”
Or me.
Though I fail to put a voice to it, there’s no denying the surge of power I felt when those snakes flung themselves from my neck to Suriel’s.
No denying the ripple of delight when I watched as they repeatedly sunk their fangs into his flesh.
No denying how those same feelings were connected to the mystical shift occurring within me.
But I keep all of that to myself.
Wrapping an arm around her, we begin the walk back to my truck when we come upon my bloody, injured beast of a brother, who looks at me and says, “You’re supposed to be dead! What the hell did you do?”
I stare at him with changed eyes. A slow grin creeping onto my face when I see the way he cowers away.
He struggles to rise, eager to make an escape, but one swift kick from Daire puts him right back in place. She kneels down beside him, grabs hold of his shirt, and drags him up to her face. And though this is her fight, I still stake a position beside her, in case she should need me.
“I saved your life tonight,” she hisses, practically spitting the words, leaving no doubt just how much she wishes it had been otherwise. “But I only did so to spare Dace. Consider it a one-time pass, Coyote. Next time, you’re dead.”
Her hands shake with rage, and I know she’s tempted to finish him now. But I can’t let that happen. The beast is settling inside me. There’s no guarantee it’ll rise up to save me again.
A flurry of fire engines, police cars, and assorted emergency vehicles begin to arrive in a blur of blaring sirens and flashing lights.
“Daire.” I coax her away from her rage. “Enchantment’s finest are here. Most of who are Richters. It’s time to move on.”
With obvious reluctance, she lets go of Cade. Watching with glaring eyes and grim lips as he scrambles away, disappearing inside the smoldering club.
“You planned that whole thing, didn’t you?” she says, inexplicably transferring her anger from my brother to me. “Suriel, the snakes, all of it—why didn’t you tell me?”
She’s only half interested in the details, the other half is steeped in feeling deceived, and it’s the part I set out to quell first. “It wasn’t nearly as planned or strategic as you think,” I say, urging her toward my truck. Wanting to get as far from the club as we can before the authorities find us, the questions begin, and they find a way to blame us. “I figured Suriel was gearing up for some big reveal, and I knew I wanted to be there. The only reason I didn’t mention it is because I didn’t want you to worry. But, Daire, you need to know that my life was never in jeopardy—getting killed was never a remote possibility.”
She ducks out of my reach. Standing stubbornly in place with an accusing gaze and arms crossed defiantly, she lifts her chin and says, “Are you that righteous?” And though she does her best to commit to her anger, I know she’s fueled more by the fear of almost losing me, after all she went through to find me.
Since she deserves no less than the truth, I meet her gaze and say, “I used to be. I used to be made of the purest white energy. But I think we both know that’s hardly the case anymore.”
She swallows hard, drops her focus to her feet. Seeming to direct the words to the scuffed toe of her shoes when she says, “So why didn’t they bite you? Clearly the venom glands weren’t removed.” She shifts her gaze toward the place where Suriel’s lifeless body lies, now a trampled, pulpy mess thanks to the frantic exodus of the panicked masses.
I place a hand on her arm, steering her away from Suriel’s grisly remains. When I’m sure I have her attention, I say, “Suriel believes in a world of us versus them—where everything exists separately from each other. Whereas I believe in a world of complete and total connection—one where we are all a part of the same, unifying source. Which means I’m as connected to those snakes as I am to you. Thing is, in order for it to work, you have to truly believe it in the deepest part of your soul.”
“So why did Suriel last so long without getting bit?” The determined tilt of her chin tells me she’s not fully convinced.
“Because Suriel’s the hand that feeds them,” I say. “Problem is, he let too much time pass between meals. Those snakes were starving, and they blamed him.”
“Speaking of being connected,” she says, once I have her moving again. “Cade was unable to change.” Her voice quickening along with her pace when she sees our friends waiting next to my truck. “He couldn’t shift past the glowing red eyes, and he didn’t seem to know why. He even tried to blame me, but I’m wondering if maybe you had something to do with it.”
“
I didn’t,” I say. “Or at least if I did, it wasn’t deliberate. Weird thing is, while he couldn’t shift, I started to.” The look that meets mine isn’t one bit surprised, so I take a chance and offer my hand. Pointing out the spot where the small remnant of a talon remains, noting the way her eyes widen as a flurry of soft white feathers drift from my sleeve.
“What is that?” she asks, voice hushed with a combination of awe and uncertainty.
“I don’t know. Something very powerful though.”
“Has it happened before?”
I shake my head in reply.
“Does it worry you?”
I rub my hand over my chin, unsure of the answer. “I’m not sure,” I admit. “It certainly didn’t feel bad. Actually, it felt quite the opposite—amazing and good. It took all of my strength to stop the progression. And the only reason I did, is because I had no idea where it would end. While I’m sure it saved me from suffering the same fate as Cade, I couldn’t risk riding that wave all the way. Daire—” I take her worried face in my hands. “All I can say for sure, is that it felt like I’d swallowed a bolt of lightning. It was the most tremendous surge of power I’ve ever experienced. It’s hard to describe…” My voice fades when I see the way she focuses hard on my eyes.
Afraid that I’ve said something to scare her, I start to turn away, eager to get to our friends, leave the gaffe behind, when she holds me in place. Her soft hands cupped to my cheeks, she says, “Whatever it was, it can’t be all bad. For the first time in a long time, I can see myself reflected in your eyes.”
forty-four
Daire
I rush toward our friends, never so glad to see them. “Thank God, you’re okay!” I hug each of them to me. Focusing on Xotichl when I say, “You sensed it, didn’t you?”
She nods, burrowing deep into the shelter of Auden’s shoulder. “But it took me a while—longer than it should have. I was almost too late. For some, I was too late.”
“You did the best you could, flower.” Auden’s quick to comfort her. “None of us would be here if it wasn’t for you.”
“Don’t forget about Dace,” she says, looking right at him.
