Standing there was a Mort. A Mort that had been trying to take over my body—and had been making good progress until an Ankou had come along. This elemental grim reaper had his long fingernails so deep into what would’ve been the skull of the Mort that they were cutting through the Morts ghostly eyelids.
The two forms blurred, vibrating unnaturally fast as the Ankou fought to bring a final end to the spirit’s life. I didn’t get to see the result, because a sudden kick cracked into my ribs.
Callista.
As I lay sprawled across the ground, a second blow struck my cheek, and the side of my face numbed on impact. Something wet trickled past my temple. Pain crippled me momentarily, but before Callista could kick again, a sudden energy burst from me, sending her flying over several graves and crashing into a large headstone. She rose to her feet and shook it off, shock siphoning the color from her face.
Marcus’ head flew past me, exploding into a small cloud of ashes. He wasn’t disabling me anymore.
He wasn’t doing anything anymore.
The cemetery filled with cries of agony, anguish, and defeat. The movement of those in battle was a blur, but the images streamed clearly in my mind. An electric field domed around me, and I lay there, unmoving.
No one approached.
The world bled away and sound evaporated. Each cry of pain and effort became a dying gasp, as though muffled beneath a pillow. I tilted my head to the side. Charles and Adrian battled three Cruor. The earth elementals seemed to materialize from nowhere. Thalia fought the Liettes, and the children watched, everyone at war around them as if they weren’t even there.
Pain came to my body in sharp stabs, and the electric dome around me quivered and then disappeared. A Cruor to my right started to pull her way across the soil. Blood dampened her pale blonde hair. Half of her left leg was missing. She crawled over to me, a mindless minion to the very end, and I staked her though her back, into her heart. The dome flickered on again, but just as quickly, it was gone, and I couldn’t recreate it. My powers were on autopilot, and I still had no idea how to control them.
As Callista stalked toward me again, my vision funneled onto her. The power I emitted slowed her, but my energy was fading. I hefted myself up on a nearby gravestone, pain shuddering through my left ankle. My swollen eye threw off my depth perception.
I limped toward a heap of sooty clothes I’d seen Marcus wearing earlier. The scent of burnt Cruor flesh hit my nose, and I gagged as I sifted through the items with trembling hands. The matches had to be in one of his pockets.
Ice spread in my stomach. Something was wrong.
Thalia approached. Blood soaked her face and streaked her hair. Ashes clung to her clothing and dusted her cheeks and chest. Her eyes sparkled in a way that sent chills up my spine. Behind her, beside Henry’s remains, lay Valeria’s dead body. Her neck was severed three-quarters through.
A scream roared in my mind. Rage engulfed me, filling me with an unfamiliar darkness. I couldn’t allow the pain to surface, couldn’t accept what I’d seen.
Fumbling through another one of Marcus’ pockets, I found the box of matches.
Callista closed in, but my intentions remained fastened on Thalia. I struck a match, tossed it toward her, and held the fire suspended in the air between us. Thalia’s lips curled into a smile as she continued her approach. I encouraged the fire’s growth, the oxygen around us feeding the flame like gasoline to create a fiery sheet.
A strange sensation gripped me, as though I was an echo of myself, trapped in a tunnel of mirrors, reflecting my image back and forth for eternity. On my command, the sheet of fire swept forward, leaving piles of ash in its wake.
My strength gathered, and I tossed my hands upward. The flames extinguished into a mist.
When I turned to scour for more Cruor, Thalia and Callista were headed toward the mausoleum.
Shit. I’d missed.
Thalia tossed back a cursory glance, a shadow of alarm on her face.
Our location had shifted throughout the course of the fight, and a cemetery wall had come into view. The pressure of battle suppressed my ability to orient myself.
Get away. That was the only thing that mattered. No one from the Maltorim would risk exposure by following us to the city. Not now. Not like this.
I spotted Charles and bolted toward him. “We need to go.”
Hurt etched his features—not a wincing pain, but the weighted expression of loss.
“I’m sorry,” I barely managed to whisper, so quiet I wasn’t sure I’d really said anything at all. My heart longed to console him, but there was no time.
I grabbed the hands of the children and ran. Charles hastened after, helping Adrian limp away, their injuries slowing them to a human pace. We reached the cemetery’s wall with a new team of Cruor not far behind.
“Go, Sophia,” Charles implored.
Blood flowed from a wound on his shoulder, beaded on his chest hair, and dripped down his stomach. More blood drenched his pants. So much blood—it couldn’t all be his. Please don’t let all this blood be his.
“I’m not going without you,” I said. No way was he going to underestimate how stubborn I was right now.
“I can’t—” He leaned against the wall and slid to the ground, pressing his hand over the gash on his shoulder. “Go!”
I dropped to my knees beside him. He and Adrian were slipping. I scanned the ground. Something sharp, something sharp. Anything. A broken bottle someone must have tossed over the cemetery wall in passing caught my eye, and I used it to cut my forearms. As much as I wanted to save Adrian, I wasn’t about to let him bite me and turn me into a Cruor. Having him feed this way would be safer for both of us.
Positioning myself between them, I held the wounds to their mouths. “Drink.”
Blood trickled onto their lips, but they made no movement.
“Drink, damn it!”
Thin red rivers trickled down my arms and dripped from my elbows.
The Cruor behind us were closing in, trapping us against the stone wall.
The children placed their hands on my shoulders and began chanting. “Lumen Solis Invicti. Lumen Solis Invicti. Lumen Solis . . . ”
I looked over my shoulder. As they chanted, a light grew in front of them. No, not in front of them. The light emitted from their bodies. The Cruor started to retreat. Charles, Adrian, and I remained wrapped in shadows as the front of the children’s bodies grew brighter with each spoken word.
I knew those words. Not in my mind, not from this life—but in my spirit, I knew them.
“Lumen Solis Invicti,” they continued.
Light of the unconquered sun.
Their efforts were not enough. They needed me, needed whatever power I stored within me to put their magic into full effect. I knew this in the same way I knew to breathe. It was just a part of me.
I closed my eyes, focusing all my energy into their small bodies, and joined their chant. The light became blinding. I turned away, shielding my face with the crook of my arm, but Charles, Adrian, and I were wrapped in the children’s shadow, untouched by their implacable light. A few moments later, the air went cold. Darkness reclaimed the cemetery.
Only the tombstones had survived. The newly silent air—now empty of the cries of battle—filled with shuddering breaths and the winces and moans of Charles and Adrian.
The children turned to me, their skin bright red. I shrieked at their unexpected appearance and swayed back against Charles.
“It’s okay, Sophia,” they said, reaching toward me.
Their skin lightened more by the moment, returning to their previous pallor. I reached out to touch them, but my hand twitched. What were they?
As their hands touched mine, palm-to-palm, they effused a relaxing stream of electricity that entered through my fingertips. They knelt in front of Charles and Adrian.
“What was that?” Charles asked.
“We’ll explain later,” the girl said, her voice oddly mature. “We mu
st relocate immediately.”
The girl touched Adrian’s and Charles’ wounds, her fingertips glowing red. The touch cauterized the skin, stopping the flow of blood. The boy placed his palm to each man’s forehead, and a soft hum carried on the night’s chill wind. Both Charles and Adrian’s countenances improved.
“Now, Sophia,” the boy said.
I couldn’t read his thoughts, but there was a knowing. The men still needed my blood. This time they had the strength to feed. They drank just enough to gain the strength to get away, then we scaled the cemetery walls to our escape.
As I heaved myself over, I saw Ophelia standing at a nearby grave, watching. A small smile touched her lips, then she disappeared into the shadows.
{twenty-nine}
THE CAR OPHELIA HAD WAITING for us was old, the gray seats upholstered with perforated leather, each tiny hole an inch apart. The heating vents blew around a mothball odor that reminded me of Mother’s coat and vacuum closet back in Keota. My clothes, wet with blood and dusted in ash, squished against the seat, and my stomach sent acrid bile into the back of my mouth.
At first, I half-expected Cruor to chase us down the road, but the further we distanced ourselves from the cemetery, and the faster the night sky lightened, the safer I felt. But we still needed to get Adrian indoors before sunrise.
I wished for the nausea and shaking to subside. A headache settled in. I was neither able to block nor focus on the elemental noise. All that remained was the pulsing hum of whispered thoughts.
A fog lifted from my mind as we pulled away. Not a fog caused by magic or Cruor influence, but the fog of what had happened. Reality crashed into my chest, arresting my lungs and heart with the realization of what I’d done.
As Adrian drove, the children, sitting on either side of me, tended to my wounds with their magic, but because I was mortal, the scars would remain—the thin pink rivers on my arms as well as the burn scars on my shoulders, chest, stomach, and shins that Ophelia had healed. Charles and Adrian had already fully regenerated. No visible evidence of the war marked their bodies.
With my immediate wounds cared for, the children turned and stared out the windows. I leaned between the front seats to check on Charles, who was sleeping in the passenger seat. His chest rose and fell in slow breaths. I touched his cheek with the back of my hand. His skin was feverish and damp.
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked Adrian.
“Quite.” He reached to turn on the car radio, hand trembling. “A big shift, is all.”
I rubbed my temples to alleviate the pressure. In the rear-view mirror, I saw the creases in Adrian’s forehead deepen. Where did we go from here—where would we be safe?
“They could’ve killed me,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.
Adrian heaved a sigh. “I cannot thank you enough.”
“Thank me?”
“We’d all be dead if it weren’t for you.”
I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps they wouldn’t have escaped without me, but I wouldn’t have escaped without them, either. Or Ophelia for that matter.
We passed barren fields as Adrian placed a call to Rhett, his voice a backdrop to my thoughts. “Fifteen minutes . . . immediate departure . . . ”
As we turned the car onto the private runway, Charles woke. Rhett had the plane running. We rushed over, his gaze scrutinizing us more harshly the closer we came.
“No, no, no. Not getting in my plane like that, dirty as field rats and smelling of rot.” He shook his head. “No way. Ain’t gonna happen.”
I glared at him. “We paid you.”
“Fine,” he said, huffing through his nose. “Fine! I don’t get paid enough, tell you that. Grab the towels in the back. Don’t touch nothing, don’t get nothing dirty, or you pay for that, too.”
“Go on,” I said to the children, shooing them to follow Rhett onto the plane. I turned to Charles and Adrian. “What are we going to do with them?”
A muscle twitched in Charles’ jaw. “I couldn’t care less.”
I frowned. “Are you okay?”
“My parents are dead. What do you think?”
I stared at him with searching gravity. The pain of losing his parents was one we shared, but I wasn’t ready to deal with those emotions right now, and there was nothing I could say to make him feel better.
Once we boarded, Charles told Rhett to take us to a location in the Japanese mountains. The Liettes’ home, I guessed. Rhett’s only reply was a flippant quip that we should do nothing and let him take care of everything, since that’s what we were doing anyway.
Adrian lay on a small bunk in the back cabin. I should’ve been exhausted, but my mind stirred with too many unanswered questions. I grabbed the ragged brown towels from the compartment near the bathroom and tossed them over all the seats. Charles and I sat opposite the children, a small dish on the table between us, empty except for some dusty peanut residue.
“Sorry,” I said to the children, “I haven’t even caught your names.”
The boy introduced himself as Aspen and the girl as his sister, Autumn. “Valeria took us in several years ago—” the boy began.
“Bullshit,” Charles said.
The boy blinked. “Did Valeria not tell you of us?”
“My mother,” Charles said, turning to me, “would never take in one of the Chibold.”
So they were fire elementals? I covered his hand with my own. “Please, let them talk.”
Charles was suspicious, and, admittedly, I didn’t like the way they kept staring, unblinking, an inky blackness to their eyes. But if what they said was true, they were family.
As I delved more deeply into Charles’ thoughts, I read he was only remotely thankful the twins had saved me; mostly, he blamed them that I’d been in danger in the first place. The children clearly had the power to rescue his parents but had allowed them to die and nearly gotten us killed in the process. Why hadn’t they acted sooner?
“Tonight’s events had to happen this way,” Aspen said.
The usual blue vibrancy of Charles’ eyes faded to a stony gray, and he clenched his fist over the armrest of his seat. I placed my hand on his arm, hoping to soothe him. We all dealt with grief in our own way. Detachment was the only way I knew. For Charles, grief was handled through anger and a need to place blame.
He slumped in his chair, pressing his lips together.
I asked the children—these Chibold—about their capture, about how they had survived so long. The Maltorim had been waiting for us, but not entirely for the reason we had thought. They didn’t know how to destroy these children, and the Liettes provided no answer. They’d hoped Charles would help them solve the riddle, that somehow bringing the family together would be the key to solving this small mystery.
“Though our kind are nearly extinct due to the lack of host families, some of us have found a way to survive by helping dual-breeds in exchange for their hosting,” Aspen said. “The Maltorim does not take kindly to this, but there is not much they can do. Their only option is to kill our host families, but we protect them. Even once they’ve ended the lives of the host family, we’d still live for centuries more. The Liettes being alive was the only thing that kept us in holding, and the Maltorim was aware of that. We could have left at any time. They thought Charles might be able to reveal more—reveal another way to end our lives.”
“You were trying to help the Liettes, then?” I asked.
“They wanted us to escort Charles once he was ready to approach the Ankou and purge his Cruor side. We were to be introduced to him at that time.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
Aspen settled his gaze on me. “You were involved.”
“Of course I was involved.”
“No, you don’t understand. Not you, the woman Charles wanted to grow old with. You—as in the very reason we were originally sent here.”
What the hell was he talking about? “Who sent you here? Why?”
Autumn smiled warmly. �
�Sophia—this has been hundreds of years in the making. The first attempt had been in the late 1600s, but unexpected events derailed the Universe’s plans. As things changed, they had to take additional measures to prepare. Even Ophelia’s life has been devoted to awaiting your arrival.
“They brought you back time and again, but the path was not an easy one to resume, to line up as had originally been intended.”
She spoke as if the details carried no weight. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps the night’s events rendered everything meaningless.
The Chibold, Charles thought toward me. My parents would not get tangled up with such tricksters. Don’t believe anything they say.
I disregarded his thoughts. Much as I loved him, he was a horrible judge of character. His perceptions of Thalia and her coterie had been way off. Then again, perhaps I was no better. I’d trusted Ivory for years.
“You could have prevented the deaths of your host family,” I said. “I hope you can see why we’re hesitant.”
Charles crossed his arms, his mouth dipping into an even deeper frown. The shadows under his eyes deepened with each passing moment.
“The Liettes were like parents to us,” Autumn said, her voice lullaby-sweet, “but we are here to save something bigger. We needed to meet you, Sophia.”
Charles scoffed. “You could have saved my parents and found her later. Or joined them on their visit to the States.”
“Brother,” Aspen said, his voice darker than his sister’s, “we couldn’t come forward until now—we simply were not able. Sophia had to act first.”
The idea was hard to accept, but I’d gone years without even knowing about my gifts. Perhaps things were the same for them.
“We would not willingly sacrifice our host family,” Aspen pressed. “That would mean risking our own lives. Host families are hard to find these days, and even centuries might not be enough to find one to hide our true identities. Surely you understand that?”
“Why is this happening now?” I asked.
“Because you willed it,” Autumn said in her musical voice. “Your ritual set these events into motion.”
When Darkness Falls - Six Paranormal Novels in One Boxed Set Page 83
