Dark Cotillion (First in the Brenna Strachan Series)

by Hadena James

  Chapter Ten

  It was too late. The brush of his soul filled me with power. Power that had to exit my body or consume me. I tore away from Fenrir and screamed, wordlessly at the ceiling, mimicking Gabriel as the first of his power had poured from him.

  Someone yelled, “Oh fuck,” but it was barely a whisper. The power made sound as it moved. It exited me in a giant pulse. The shockwave it created was visible to everyone in the room. It slammed against them, traveled through the walls. I felt it hit Gabriel, Ba’al, and Jonathan. It wasn’t enough. It exited the apartment and found others, slammed into others. The pulse of energy surged outward, upward, and filled the entire building until I thought it would collapse with the pressure.

  The single energy pulse was followed by stillness. Absolute calm, nothing moved, even breathing seemed to be stopped. I could feel the entire building. It was awake, alive, and buzzing with whatever had just happened. I didn’t know what the energy had contained. I had just known that it had to escape or tear me apart.

  Carefully, I looked at Anubis. Fur covered his face. The remnants of the burn completely gone. My leg was healed as well.

  “Holy fuck,” Gabriel staggered into the room. “Wow, what was that?”

  “That was dangerous,” Anubis said as he stood up. “Luckily, it was just healing energy that pulsed out of her.”

  Gabriel held out a hand to Fenrir, helped him to his feet. As he did, he jerked. He stared at their joined hands.

  “What the…” Fenrir looked at him. “You can feel me?”

  “I can feel you,” Gabriel looked at their hands. “I can feel everything in the room.”

  “What?” Anubis walked over to him.

  “I can feel everything in this room. There is a slight breeze from the fan. The light overhead is warm. The air is cool. Fenrir is warm, very warm, to the touch. His fingers are long and fleshy. I can feel them.”

  “That’s impossible,” Anubis looked at me. “Impossible.”

  “Miraculous,” Gabriel corrected.

  There was a pool of blood on the sheet next to my leg. I looked at Anubis.

  “Bloodletting,” I said the word quietly, timidly.

  “Yes, I was bloodletting to get the blood flowing through the fake artery.”

  “I felt your soul.” I thought about it a minute. “I think I fed off of it.”

  “What do you mean ‘fed off of it?’”

  “I think when your soul brushed mine, it infused me with more power, enough power that I had to expel it from my body.”

  “Impossible, that is a Vampire trait. Only we can feed off the soul to make us more powerful and then, only in Vamp form.”

  “Well, how do you explain it?” Fenrir asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Anubis was looking at me. Jonathan had come into the room.

  “Come out here,” he said to me. I got up and walked into my living room.

  “Look out over the city and tell me what you see.”

  “I see ghosts.” I told him. “Not many, about a dozen or so. Some seem to be moving upwards, others seem lost.”

  “You can’t see ghosts, you’re a Demon,” Anubis told me.

  “I see them.”

  “How many do you see?” Jonathan asked Anubis.

  “Fourteen.”

  “An exchange of power?” Gabriel asked.

  “We can’t exchange power,” Anubis responded.

  “We can’t, maybe she can,” Gabriel said. “Maybe she can feed off our powers. Maybe it wasn’t your soul that made her stronger, but your own power. Perhaps she somehow absorbed some of it and it channeled it into healing power when it got to be too much. If she is seeing souls, she has Vampire powers at the moment.”

  “Witches can see ghosts.” I told him.

  “Yes they can, but not like Vampires. Witches can only see souls when the deceased is searching for them.”

  Someone was pounding on my door. Gabriel looked at me. He shook his head to indicate we were not to say a word.

  It was a neighbor from my floor. A Human. He was walking. He normally required a cane.

  “What was that?” He asked.

  “Healing energy,” Gabriel frowned. “Sorry, we have a Maturing Demon. It appears that she sent a surge of healing energy through the floor.”

  “It was amazing,” he responded. “Thank you, Brenna.”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Weiss.” I yelled. I felt rooted to the spot. “I’ll try to keep it from happening again.”

  “Bah,” he pushed his way into the room. “Child, I lived through Nazi camps and The Merge. I live in a Post-Merge building. You aren’t the first to Mature in it.”

  “I know, but I should be more careful.”

  “If you are going to send pulses like that, I don’t think you need to be careful. I feel at least sixty years younger. I don’t know how long the effects will last, but it’s nice. I think I’ll go for a walk in the park.”

  “Glad I could help, Mr. Weiss.” I blushed.

  “You’re a good kid, Brenna.” He smiled and walked back out. Gabriel shut the door behind him.

  “It affected the Humans.” Anubis frowned. “I think we need a full memory recall to figure out what happened.”

  “Oh man,” I frowned and plopped down on the couch. “Great, a Djinn wandering around in my mind, digging out my memories. Just what I need.”

  “No worries, we’ll call Vishnu,” Gabriel told me.

  “And Lucifer,” Anubis added. “Lucifer needs to be told and should be present.”

  “Great, my papa and Vishnu poking around my mind.” I sat down on the couch. “Nothing like being mind raped after an experience like that.”

  I lit a cigarette and sullenly waited. I knew the men were right, I needed to have the memory probed, needed for it to be explained to all of us. Vishnu would be able to see exactly what had happened. However, like every time I had been prodded by a Djinn, I wished it were going to happen to someone else.

  Lucifer arrived first. He was bordering on being out of control. I could feel him from the street below me.

  “Dad’s here and he is losing it. We need to stop calling him.” I told everyone about forty seconds before my father forced his way into my apartment. Since it wasn’t my spell, I didn’t feel it break, but something told me the protection spell was a little bit useless.

  “What the devil!” He bellowed. “She is supposed to be in bed, resting, not up running around doing magic!”

  His voice shook the glasses in my kitchen. It was strong enough to make even the solid sliding glass doors of my balcony rumble in their molds. His eyes were completely dark, a red glow leaking from him. He turned on the others and he would have begun shouting more.

  “It’s my fault,” I stopped him. “Well, sort of all of our faults, but mostly mine. My 90 year old neighbor thinks it’s the coolest thing on the planet though.”

  “What?” He shook his head at me, closing his eyes. Some of the anger drained away.

  “Mr. Weiss is out wandering in the park in the dead of night without his cane. He thinks it’s extremely nifty. He told me he feels sixty years younger; a feat considering his age.” I knew that confusing my father was a dangerous game. It could enrage him or calm him down. In this case, it seemed to be calming him down. It was as if his mind was trying to grasp what I was saying, but was stuck on the words.

  I felt it when the anger snapped. It went away completely. He looked at me for the first time since bursting into my apartment. Since I was still not particularly dressed, he could see that the hole had healed itself.

  “How did you…” Lucifer sat down.

  “That is why we are letting Vishnu mind rape me. We aren’t sure how it happened. I did manage to heal everyone on this floor though with a gigantic burst of energy. And I’m seeing souls.”

  “That’s not…”

  “Possib
le.” I shrugged. “I know. Hence the call to Vishnu. We don’t know what happened, Papa, we just know that it did and it was precipitated by the realization that the main artery in my leg was missing. Anubis brought in an IV tube to make a fake one, there was some intense distracting going on, and there was a bloodletting and then…”

  “And then there was a pulse of energy that escaped from Brenna and slammed into every being on the floor,” Anubis came into Lucifer’s line of sight. “One that healed everyone, Luc, including Gabriel.”

  “Gabriel wasn’t that injured,” Lucifer responded.

  “No, Luc,” Gabriel came into the field of vision. “Healed my brain, I think. I could feel the warmth radiating off of you when you came into the room. Your body heat. I helped Fen stand up after the pulse and could feel his hand.”

  Gabriel walked over to the glass door. He hesitated for a second and then put his hand upon the glass. He stood, motionless, breathless for a moment before placing his forehead on the glass.

  “The glass is cool, cooler than the outside air. Cooler than the inside air. It’s hard and unyielding, but cool to the touch.”

  “You can feel sensations?” Lucifer stood up. He hesitated before taking holding of Gabriel.

  “Your skin is hot, almost burning to the touch,” Gabriel told him. “It’s tough, harder than Fen’s skin. There are calluses on your hands and you are touching the area between my wings and the area between my hips and the bottom of the wing joints. I can feel everything, Lucifer. Not just when she touches me, but everything around me.”

  “Someone called for a Djinn?” Vishnu inspected the broken door before entering.

  “Yeah, I need my mind raped, a memory recalled.” I told him. “I need to know, no, we need to know exactly what happened a few minutes ago. And whatever it was, the knowledge cannot leave the room.”

  “Why is Lucifer squeezing Gabriel to death?” Vishnu asked.

  “Oh, you might need to mind rape Gabriel as well,” I told him.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call it that.”

  “Look, once you’ve…”

  “I know, Brenna, you’ve had it done against your will on a hunt.” Vishnu sat down next to me. “But when I do it, I only see what you want me to see.”

  “Bullshit, you only tell what I want you to tell.” I told him.

  “Fair enough,” Vishnu sighed. “What are we probing for?”

  “A memory,” I repeated. “I just healed everyone on the floor of this building by accident. I felt Anubis’s soul and I am currently seeing souls. Something happened, something unexplainable. I think I healed Gabriel’s mind. My father is currently hugging him because my father is crying on Gabriel, tears of joy that Gabriel can feel a pane of glass.”

  “What?” Vishnu narrowed his eyes at me.

  “It’s true, I can feel everything,” Gabriel told him as my father let go.

  “Wow,” Vishnu smiled at me, “powerful indeed and now you are seeing souls?”

  “Yes, and I shouldn’t be able to do it.” I reminded him.

  “Well, let’s get to work then. Someone should really fix the door.”

  “On it,” my mother’s voice came to me. “You really shouldn’t force magical doors, Lucifer.”

  Lucifer’s energy had masked everyone else’s. My two younger brothers came into the room. Nick was smirking. Daniel looked like Daniel.

  “Good job,” Nick rolled his eyes at our father.

  “Not a good time,” I told him quietly.

  “Okay, let’s begin.” Vishnu touched my hands and held onto them firmly.

  It took a couple of seconds, but I felt him push his way into my head. Felt his presence as it entered my brain. The magic was making me sleepy. It always made me sleepy. I yawned, unable to stop it.

  “What am I looking for?” Vishnu’s voice said in my head. “Tell me an exact moment or sequence of events.”

  “I’ll show you,” my mind responded, pulling up the first moment, Anubis telling me I wasn’t going to like the next ten minutes of my life.

  “It has begun,” Vishnu’s voice sounded light, lithe, and wonderful in my head. Vishnu was always very careful to make me feel happy when he was in there. His voice would soothe and calm me. I had been forcibly mind read once in the past when a Maturing Djinn had invaded my brain. It had been more than unpleasant. I had never been able to shake the feeling. The Madness had affected him and he was currently under Pendragon’s watchful eyes, locked for eternity in Prison.

  I could see the memory replaying. Parts of it, unknown to my conscience, but vivid in my subconscious. He finished and looked at me. His eyes were wide with surprise and something else.

  “No, I will need more input,” he said to everyone as he let go of me. “Anubis, come.”

  Anubis did as he was told. I felt the push, felt Vishnu enter his brain. Suddenly, I was there with him and Vishnu’s spirit, soul, or whatever, knew it. So did Anubis. They struggled to break the connection.

  “No, we need to know. I don’t know how I’m here, but I am.” My thoughts were barely a whisper in the recesses of the Vampire’s memory. It began to play out.

  His memory was very different from mine. Fen and he were still arguing about him needing time, but the kiss, it had terrified me. It had irritated Anubis. I saw Anubis look at the artery, now pulled out of my leg and visible, felt him bite into it. It wasn’t bleeding, it should have been, and the Vampire was controlling the blood flow. It explained why he had done that as opposed to just opening the vessel. As the first drops of my blood entered his mouth, he filled with energy. He felt me fill with energy. He stifled his, forced it down, moving away from me as he did. The pulse was bright green as it exploded from my body. It slammed into him. The fur began to flow, fill out, and cover his face. Warmth spread through him, his own energy surged, responded to the Call. For a moment, he felt the magic that caged him, felt the curse scream against the energy. His own spilled into the room and it was dark orange. It found my body and my body accepted it. It moved into me.

  Vishnu yanked back from all of us. He stared at me in wonder. He smiled, shook his head, and closed his eyes.

  “Holy shit,” he finally said. “She’s right, what happened tonight can never leave this room.”