“Why am I here, Catalina?”
Catalina straightened and took a deep breath, all evidence of her previous mocking playfulness gone from her gaze. “You’re here because you lacked the compassion to do what is necessary.”
Oh god. She’s a fanatic.
“I wouldn’t roll over and die, so I lack compassion? How do you figure?”
“It’s not simply rolling over and dying, Deziree,” she replied, shaking her head. “It’s so much more than that.” Anger flared in her eyes and she moved with inhuman speed. Suddenly her face was within inches of Dez’s. “Did you really think I was just going to sit back and watch you make the wrong choice? Did you really think we would just sit idly by and watch you damn all of humanity? As if you have a right to be here? As if your life were somehow more important than theirs?”
“It has nothing to do with the humans!”
Dez was already sick of having this argument. She knew deep down the choice she was making wasn’t about damning humanity. Catalina wasn’t even giving her the chance to show that she could make a difference for the good.
“It has everything to do with the humans!” Catalina boomed. “This is their world, not yours. You don’t even belong here, Deziree.”
“I am not one of them,” Dez spat out the words, and for the first time, she really believed them herself.
“Oh, you’re right about that.”
“The demons,” Dez corrected, realizing how incomplete her statement had been. “I am not one of the demons.”
“Yes, child, you are.” The previous calm returned to Catalina’s voice as she stood over Dez, looking down at her. If she had been an outsider watching the conversation, she would have sworn Catalina actually gave a shit what happened to her. The sudden tenderness in her voice was the polar opposite of how the woman really felt about her. “Of all people, I should know. I carried you in my womb long enough to know the truth of what you are. I could feel you, the whole time. Living evidence of the night I let that thing touch me.”
What? Dez looked on Catalina trying to understand. She had been told her entire life that her existence was a product of her mother being violently raped by a full-blooded demon. A prince of Hell. Why would anyone let him touch them?
“Excuse me?” Dez asked in confusion. “The night you let him touch you?”
“Yes,” Catalina replied, a coldness in her eyes proving Dez’s previous thoughts. This woman may have given birth to her, but she was no mother. “I was not raped as Cassandra chose to tell it. No, you were planned. Your birth was prophesied in the mists. You needed to be born so you could die. And that’s where you almost fucked it up.” Oooh, she’s got a potty mouth when she gets mad. Maybe I am her daughter after all. “I didn’t force myself to endure that disgusting act just so you could screw up the one job you have.”
“What purpose would me dying serve? I can fight them. Don’t you see that?” Dez was pleading now.
Catalina was right and she knew it. Vegas had no clue where she was. She knew deep down he was searching, he wouldn’t just leave her to her fate, but there was no way he was going to find her in time. The least she could do was finally find the answers as to why exactly she was shackled in a cave about to die at the hands of her own birth mother.
“You are a means to an end. A failsafe. Nothing more,” Catalina replied. “See? The Daughters of Eris had it all wrong. They thought your purpose was to further their cause. In actuality, it was to finally bring about an end to their madness. Those imbeciles believe their Goddess is going to finally show herself to save the day, after thousands of years of being nothing short of an absentee landlord. Therefore, we have to take matters into our own hands.”
“Newsflash, you psycho bitch,” Dez interrupted. “The Daughters of Eris are gone. You know that, right? Or are you just that delusional?”
“They’re most certainly not dead,” Catalina scoffed. “They’ve always been there, waiting in the shadows. They keep themselves scattered on the wind. They allowed time and their people to forget about them. If the covens knew their intentions, they all would have been burned alive centuries ago.”
Catalina’s choice of words stung as an image of Cassandra’s burning body flashed through Dez’s mind. As cold as she tried to be about what had happened that fateful night, part of her still ached for the loss of the only mother she had ever known. She hated herself a little for that fact.
“That’s right,” Catalina said, an eyebrow cocked, a smile playing at the corner of her mouth. “You took care of one of them in that very manner, didn’t you? Don’t beat yourself up over it, kid. Cassandra had it coming one way or another. You think I’m crazy? She was the poster child for therapeutic need. A war monger at best. All she ever wanted was to be adored by the covens. She figured if she could do her worst, forcing the Goddess to come out of hiding, regardless of her methods, the covens would still worship her and see her as the means by which they were graced with the presence of their beloved mother. She was arrogance embodied. She was willing to allow the rest of the world to crumble at her feet if it meant she’d be left standing on top of the pile.”
Catalina returned to her task at the table, and for the first time, Dez noticed a soft glow emanating from something just beyond where she could see. Catalina worked in silence for a few moments, before she stopped and spoke without facing Dez.
“I was right to walk away when I did. The disgust I felt with myself as you slithered from my body was something I could never even begin to describe. I should have drowned you right there and been done with it. But no. Cassandra had her own plans for you. She would build you up to be her champion in the eyes of the covens, then sit back and watch as they demanded you be destroyed when they made the connection, when they realized what you were capable of. Cassandra was to be the one to guide you to make the right choice, to sacrifice yourself for the greater good, and she would be heralded for her own sacrifice of the daughter she raised, all to save her people.”
“How does the Mother Goddess’s appearance fit into all this shit?”
“The mists have shown us you were born to die,” Catalina continued, returning to her task. “The Daughters would raise the demons a second time, giving their Goddess a chance to show herself. If she showed, you would be sacrificed simply to wipe out the last of your kind from this plane. If she didn’t show herself, you would be sacrificed to bring an end to the demon horde. Either way, Cassandra would come out on top, if not for managing to be the only witch known to essentially summon the Goddess, then for sacrificing her beloved champion to save them all.”
Dez listened to every word and still had a hard time reconciling the Cassandra she’d grown up loving with the monster she was learning about. She found it difficult to wrap her head around how someone could be so gentle and caring and have such a totally opposite agenda.
“I didn’t even know her,” Dez whispered to herself.
“Cassandra wasn’t all bad,” Catalina replied, even though the thought wasn’t directed at her. “When I fled that night, I left you to die. I couldn’t bring myself to outright kill you, despite what I knew you were. She saved you. She could have groomed you to be the soldier she needed without showing you love. She could have forged that weapon with cold steel. She chose to make you family. Who knows? Maybe that was just more of her egocentric motives. You as not only her sword, but her devoted daughter as well.”
“The weapon,” Dez said, the word triggering the memory of their first conversation. “You said there was a weapon. Why not let me use the weapon to kill the demons instead of killing me?”
“We could,” Catalina answered, “but that would require far more time and suffering than I am willing to allow to pass. Every day, the demons kill countless numbers for no reason other than to cause mayhem. Now it has come down to a choice I must make, and, really, it’s not a hard one.”
She turned around and approached Dez. In Catalina’s hands, she finally saw the source of the glowing
. A small glass jar filled with a blue light. As Dez stared at the jar, getting lost in the sight. The light flowed and ebbed in the jar as though it were made of liquid, but at the same time floated in a way which proved it was anything but.
“As I showed you earlier, I have the power to control you,” she explained while watching the jar’s contents dance. “You are the weapon, Deziree, and the mists have shown us the weapon can be used two ways. Either way, we use you as a tool to destroy the demons. I’m not willing to stand by and watch more humans fall while I send you out to kill off the remaining demons, so, we are going with the other option. The linking spell. Once linked, I can send all the demons back to where they came from in the blink of an eye.”
She looked up from the bottle and made eye contact with Dez. “That includes you. The other option leaves you roaming the earth long after the rest of the demons have been dispatched. After careful consideration, my sisters and I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of you being allowed to live.” She held the bottle up and smiled. “And this is the key.”
Dez shifted uncomfortably. Being so close to the very thing which was meant to kill her made her uneasy.
“Don’t worry,” Catalina said, stepping back. “It’s not time yet. This jar contains the power extracted from stolen stars and we need one more to complete the spell. The cosmos contain a level of power witches have only scratched the surface of understanding. We draw power from lunar events, and certain planetary alignments, but no one ever thought to draw down the stars themselves.” She admired contents of the glass jar, looking on it as you would a loved one.
“I am assuming you were trained in the arts. Can you feel the power contained behind this glass?”
Dez just glared at her in response. The power was undeniable. As much as she wished Catalina was wrong, her whole body was tingling in the presence of the jar.
Catalina set the jar on the table and turned back to Dez. “Sit tight. I’ll be back. My sisters and I have one final task, then we will be ready to proceed." With that, Catalina turned and walked through a small gap Dez hadn’t noticed before.
The moment she was out of sight, Dez searched her surroundings for a way out of the manacles. Her arms were far enough apart that she couldn’t touch her hands together to use one hand to work the other out of the rough metal cuffs. She tried slamming the hinge of the cuff against the stone wall behind her, but it did nothing other than make a lot of unnecessary noise. She pulled on her left cuff as hard as she could, thinking maybe if she dislocated her thumb, she could squeeze it through. The metal dug into her skin. She closed her eyes and pushed through the pain, pulling her hand as hard as she could. Her hand and wrist burned as the metal bit in, cutting the skin. She stopped pulling, looked to her hand, and her heart sank when she saw that aside from making herself bleed, she hadn’t made any progress. As tears started to quietly flow down her cheeks again, Dez dropped her head, and she felt a part of her start to give in to the weight of hopelessness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Michael
They had been searching the canyon for almost two hours. The idea of Lucas acting as a compass had worked out fairly well. It wasn’t an exact science, but it was at least leading them in the right direction.
“Okay,” Michael said to Kade, “here is good.”
They both came to a stop and held their breath, listening for their signal. A few beats went by, then they heard what they were waiting for. Had they not been vampires, their method of searching for Dez never would have worked. The sound of the small rock smashing against the canyon wall probably wouldn’t have even registered to a human's ears. They both took off in a dead sprint in the direction of the sound. They repeated the process many times until they finally had it narrowed down to a small section of the canyon. It started out as a lot of back and forth, them going too far and having to double back, but they had been making forward progress for a while now. Michael still couldn’t sense the witches’ power at all. Lucas could help them get to the general area where they needed to be, but they had to be careful how much attention they called to themselves, lest the vampires tip the witches off to what they were up to.
“Let’s stop again,” he finally said, searching around at the canyon walls for any betrayal of the witches’ whereabouts. Kade sat down on a rock a few feet away. He took a deep breath of the warm, desert air, trying to catch a scent. Michael did the same, but much to his dismay, he found nothing but the scent of the local wildlife. He sat down, his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head into his hands, trying to figure out what they were going to do next.
“Holy shit!” Kade exclaimed. “Michael, look! There!” Michael picked his head up and looked to where Kade was pointing. “Is that a star?”
“A falling star,” Michael said. “A falling fucking star! That’s them, I know it. Dez and I saw something, two lights, float down into the canyon the last night we were out here, but we didn’t know what they were, and we never found where they went. That can’t be a coincidence. Damn it, we were so close and had no clue.”
The two vampires took off again, running, but always following the trajectory of the descending light. As the star got closer, it sped up and the light grew smaller and smaller still, until it finally disappeared into the canyon wall. They came to a stop directly below where it vanished.
“How are you at climbing?” Kade asked. Michael smiled sizing up the sheer cliff.
“Not a problem.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Dez
Dez picked her head up at the sound of approaching voices. They spoke in hushed whispers, and something told Dez this did not spell good times for her. As the whispers grew closer, she started to question whether or not this too was a hallucination. Maybe the whole conversation I just had with Catalina was a figment of my imagination.
Catalina’s silver hair came into view through the crack in the wall, followed by the other two witches she didn’t know the names of, one of them holding another glass container filled with more of the dancing blue light.
“It’s time, Deziree,” Catalina said in a sing-song voice. “This is your big moment. You get to help us save the world. Granted, no one will know, but you will, and that’s all that matters, right?”
“Seriously, fuck you.”
“You’ll be singing a different tune in a few moments.”
She set the new jar on the table and picked up the one she had left behind. She unfastened the stopper and gently pulled the glass cork out of the top of the jar. The moment it opened, the room filled with a strange soft howling sound, as if hearing the wind from a far distance. She gingerly set the open jar down and picked up the new, smaller jar. Catalina opened it and poured its contents into the bigger jar, the liquid blue lights melding into one. She replaced the stopper on the bigger of the two jars and turned back to Dez.
“Now,” she said, clasping her hands together, “it’s your turn. I would tell you I am sorry, but I’m not. You don’t belong here and I’m going to remedy that.”
The two other witches stepped up to Catalina’s side and began softly chanting. The language was one Dez was not familiar with. It wasn’t the usual Latin incantations, but sounded just as ancient.
“You don’t have to do this.” Dez figured one last ditch effort couldn’t hurt. “He’ll never stop hunting you. You’ll end up in this cave for all eternity as a rotting corpse, a twenty-two caliber bullet between your eyes, and a gaping hole in the back of your head where your brains used to be. You can save yourself from that fate. Don’t go through with this.”
“My life doesn’t matter,” Catalina replied coolly, “and I am far from concerned with the parasite.”
“That parasite,” Dez forced the word out between clenched teeth, “is one of the deadliest men I have ever met, and you’re about to put yourself directly in his warpath. Don’t you see how stupid that is? He’s not going to simply kill you, not right away, but you’ll wish he would. He’ll make you feel every
ounce of pain my death brings him. He’s not afraid to get bloody. He’ll bring you to the edge of madness and dangle you over the cliff. He’ll do things to you that will have you begging for the sweet relief of death, only to allow you to heal, and start the process all over again. There isn’t a word for the kind of pain he’ll bring down on you.”
Catalina picked up the now full bottle of celestial energy and the sisters stepped back, giving her room.
“Who says we plan to survive this?” she asked, stepping in front of Dez. “That’s where Cassandra had it wrong. We were meant to serve. We were never meant to be idols. If we die serving our purpose, then so be it. Our lives are just as insignificant as yours in the grand scheme. We have lived far longer than we naturally should have. We’ve been given gifts far beyond our deserving. This final act will be our swan song, our gift to the world. By ridding it of you and your kind, we ensure their safety and the safety of future generations. If giving our lives means we save millions of others, then it is what is meant to be. That’s the difference between your kind and ours. You’re too selfish to understand what must be done.”
She uncorked the jar and the three witches started chanting in unison. Catalina stepped forward and poured the contents of the entire jar over Dez’s head, never missing a single beat or syllable of the spell. As soon as the blue light made contact with her skin, she felt a crackle in the air around her, as if surrounded by a field of static electricity. The sensation made her nerves hum with energy. The witches’ voices joined as one, the ancient words speeding up, growing more intense with each recitation. Dez could feel the hatred coming from the three women in waves.
This is the end.
Catalina reached into her robe and pulled out the long, jagged-edged silver knife she had watched take Vegas’ life in her hallucination. Every sickening second of that memory flashed through her mind, assaulting her. Hallucination or not, the image of his lifeless body brought tears to her eyes. The traitor tears made her harden.
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