by Tracy Wolff
Finally, Jaxon staggers to his feet. He’s wan and a little gray-looking and in almost as bad a shape as he was that day in the tunnels with Lia. And still he tries to help, too, putting every ounce of strength and power he has left into pulling the chains straight out of the wall.
The wall creaks, and cracks start appearing deep inside it, but the chains continue to hold.
Jaxon starts to try again, but he’s swaying on his feet, and I’m terrified that using any more power will injure him permanently.
And so I turn to the Unkillable Beast—this gargoyle who doesn’t deserve what my friends and I tried to do to him—and my heart breaks just a little bit more to see his head low, his shoulders hunched, like he knew all along that this was going to happen.
I’m sorry, I tell him again. I’m sorry I can’t take you with us right now. But I promise, we’ll come back for you. We’ll find a way to set you free, and we’ll come back.
He studies me for long seconds, those bloodred eyes growing more human and less animalistic by the second. And then he asks, very simply, Why?
Why will we come back? To free you—
No. Why did you come to begin with?
Oh. I look down, embarrassed by what I’ve done. Embarrassed by the hubris that thought it would be okay to take something from this creature who has already suffered so much and embarrassed by all the other mistakes I made that led us here, to this moment.
We needed a treasure you protect. A heartstone, I tell him. I’m sorry. We thought we could just take it from you. It was wrong of us. We’re so sorry.
Heartstone? He cocks his head to the side, like he’s trying to figure out what I’m talking about.
Yes, heartstone, I repeat.
Slowly, so slowly that I think I must be imagining it at first, the gargoyle’s chest starts to glow a dark, deep red. He looks down at the color and so do we, more than a little shocked by what we’re seeing.
You need heartstone? he asks, and then he pats his chest.
Oh my God. The heartstone isn’t a jewel he’s protecting. It’s his stone heart. And after everything we’ve done to him, he’s still willing to give it to us for no other reason I can guess than that we stopped trying to kill him.
I fall to my knees again on a painful sob. Who did this to him? Who could be so cruel?
The gargoyle taps his chest again. Need heart stone?
No, I answer. No, I don’t. But thank you.
We’ve crossed too many lines to get here, sacrificed far too many things. Lost Xavier. I’m not going to compound that by killing this innocent creature, too.
I ruined everything because I didn’t fight harder for what I believed in, for what I believed was true. I knew that it was wrong to take away Hudson’s vampire nature. I knew it was wrong for us to sit in judgment of him. And I knew it was wrong to risk all our lives because I wasn’t strong enough to convince anyone that they were wrong, too.
So many wrongs that have led us here that I don’t know how to make right. I don’t know how I’ll ever make my way home again.
“Grace.” Jaxon leans against the wall to steady himself. “I know you’re upset, but you need to take it.”
“I’m not taking it,” I tell him, bowing my head in a silent thank-you to my kin. “I’m not killing this gargoyle, Jaxon.”
“When you calm down, you’re going to regret this.”
“There are many things I regret, but this decision will never be one of them,” I reply without turning to look at him. Instead, I lower my head and rest it against the side of the gargoyle’s foot as I shift back to my human form. Thank you, my friend. For everything, I tell him. I promise I’ll be back.
When I pull away, it’s to find that Jaxon has picked up Xavier’s body and is fireman-carrying him out of the cave. Macy is helping Flint hobble back over the rough ground and Eden is walking behind them, her right shoulder slanted down in a way that looks incredibly painful.
I hurry to catch up—we still need to find a way back home—but I pause at the mouth of the cave to wave at the gargoyle one more time. And I smile when he waves back.
Time is ticking away as we wind past the hot springs and back to the clearing, where the temperature has dropped several degrees and the aurora borealis dances across the sky in shades of green. The Trial is supposed to start in a little more than three hours, and neither Jaxon nor I am in any shape for it. Not to mention I have no idea how we’re going to get home. The dragons are both claiming that they can fly, but Flint’s bone is sticking through his leg, and I saw what Eden’s wing looks like.
No way is she going to be able to support a dragon’s weight on that wing, let alone the rest of us.
Macy doesn’t stop walking until she’s only a couple of feet from the water, and we all trail along behind her, lost and confused and more than a little scared. She settles Flint on the sand, then drops to her knees and starts rustling in her backpack. She doesn’t stop until she’s pulled out a handful of crystals and a spell book.
In the meantime, Jaxon lays Xavier’s body on the ground several feet from Flint before collapsing on the sand, and Eden drops down between them. She’s trying to keep her face neutral, but I can see the pain in her eyes as she looks at Xavier, and I know that only half her agony is physical.
My own anguish is pressing in on me, making it nearly impossible for me to breathe as I face my friends—really face them—for the first time since Xavier died.
I feel so guilty, I can barely look them in the eyes, but they deserve that from me and a lot more. So I meet each of their gazes in turn as I tell them, “I’m sorry. I never should have dragged any of you into my problems.”
I look at Xavier’s broken body and nearly choke on my own grief. “There’s nothing I can do to bring Xavier back. I would change places with him—or with any of you—in a second if I could. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“This isn’t on you,” Jaxon tells me, voice hoarse and eyes bruised with pain and exhaustion. “I pushed for this. I insisted that we come. I didn’t listen to your doubts. This is my fault. If I had just—”
“Stop it, both of you,” Macy snaps, even as she drags her hands across her face to wipe the tears away. “It’s not up to either of you to apologize. We all made the decision to come. We all knew what the risks were—probably more than Grace, as we’ve all grown up with stories of the Unkillable Beast. And we came anyway.”
Her tears keep falling, so she clears her throat several times as she, once again, wipes them away. “We flew all the way up here and attacked that poor creature, because we told ourselves we were preventing a greater atrocity. We told ourselves we were doing the right thing even though everything about it was wrong. And that, too, is on all of us.
“We play with magic our entire lives. We do spells and shift forms and even move the earth”—she looks at Jaxon—“when we want to. But the world we live in—the privileges we enjoy—come with responsibilities and consequences that we learn about in school but never truly think about until we have to.”
She looks at Xavier, and it seems like she’s going to break down completely, but then she squares her shoulders and looks everyone in the eye except me. “We—all of us—are the ones who lost sight of those lessons when we decided to come here and play God with Hudson and the beast and even with our own lives—even after my cousin begged us not to. And that’s on every single one of us; it’s something we’re going to have to live with, a lesson we are all going to agonize over for a long time to come.”
She clears her throat. “But we owe it to Xavier and to that poor gargoyle in there and to all the people back at school—all the paranormals in the world who don’t understand what the Circle has become or what it is doing—to learn from this mistake and to do whatever we must to stop them. It won’t right this wrong, it won’t fix this mistake, but it might keep others from making w
orse ones.”
She points at me. “And that means getting you to that Trial and getting you on the Circle and doing whatever else we need to make things better. So all of you need to stop blaming yourselves. You need to stop wallowing in guilt and sadness and anger and help me get us back to Katmere before it’s too late to stop what the Circle is trying so desperately to set in motion.”
For long seconds, none of us moves. Instead, we stand transfixed by the power and the responsibility of her words. At least until she raises an eyebrow and says, “Or do I have to do this all by myself?”
104
Because We Could
Not Stop for
Death
“We’re in,” Flint says, trying desperately to push himself back to a standing position. It’s painful to watch, at least until Jaxon rests a hand on his shoulder, then leans over and speaks quietly to him. I don’t know what he says, but Flint settles back down and doesn’t try to get up again.
“What do you need?” I ask as I scramble over to where Macy is once again kneeling in the sand.
“Give everybody a crystal and have them face north, south, east, and west respectively,” she answers, pointing in the right directions as she reads over a page in the spell book several times before closing the book with a snap and shoving it in her backpack. “Then lay the fifth crystal on Xavier’s chest.”
I do as she says, my throat tightening a little as I place the crystal in the center of Xavier’s Guns ’N’ Roses T-shirt. I whisper a quick prayer for him, then head back to Macy to see what else I can do to help.
Jaxon must have the same thought, because he asks, “What do you need from us?” as he staggers over to where we’re standing.
I grab on to his hand, send him a stream of energy through the mating bond.
“Stop,” he tells me, pulling away. “You can’t afford that right now.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t afford to have my mate get sick, either. So let me do this right now. We’ll figure out the rest when we get back to school.”
He doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t argue anymore, so I feed him a little more energy. Not enough to weaken me significantly, but enough that he doesn’t look quite so gray and pallid.
“Just stand over there, where Grace put you,” Macy answers as she slides her backpack onto her back.
“Now what?” I ask Macy as she turns to face the ocean.
“Now I’m going to try a spell Gwen told me about when I was preparing for tonight. I’ve never done it before, so all I can say is it’s either going to work and get us back to school, or it’s going to fail and splinter us into a thousand beams of light.” She looks over at me. “So here’s hoping.”
“Umm, yeah,” I answer, eyes wide and stomach flipping all the different ways. “Here’s hoping.”
She hands me one of the crystals and says, “Hold this for me, will you, please? And check to make sure everyone is where they need to be.”
“Of course.” I do as she instructs, glancing at the others before wrapping my fingers around the crystal as she pulls her athame out of her pocket instead of her wand and holds it dagger-side up. “Ready?” she asks as she grabs on to my hand.
“To splinter into a thousand beams of light?” Flint asks. “Sure. Why not?”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” she answers and then tilts her face to the sky. “Here goes everything.”
I hold my breath as Macy lifts her arms to the sky in a circular pose worthy of a ballet dancer. Her athame is in her right hand and she points it straight at the heart of the aurora borealis dancing above us as she moves her other hand in small, circular motions, over and over again.
At first nothing happens, but slowly—so slowly that it takes me a few seconds to realize what’s going on—the crystal in my hand starts to pulsate against my palm. A quick look shows me that the others’ crystals are doing the same thing, glowing brighter and brighter as they begin to vibrate in their hands.
I look to Macy, but she is so focused on the sky that she doesn’t so much as glance my way. I think that means she can’t see, so I start to lift my hand up, to show her what the crystal is doing, but a small, nearly imperceptible shake of her head has me freezing in place.
But as the crystals continue to vibrate, to glow brighter and burn hotter, Macy’s circular hand motions get bigger and bigger and bigger, until she seems to be encircling all of us with the gesture, wrapping her magic and her protection around the whole group of us even as she continues to channel energy from the sky.
All of a sudden, Macy gasps at the same time the crystal in my hand starts to burn superhot. I cry out, trying to hold on to it, but the heat gets more and more severe with each second that passes, until I have no choice but to open my fingers. For one second, two, the crystal lays flat against my palm and then it starts to rise, floating higher and higher above our heads until it floats into the athame’s path.
The others’ crystals do the same thing until they line up between the athame and the sky in rainbow order. The second the last crystal slides into place, lightning shoots through the sky and slams straight into the crystals and through them into Macy’s athame.
I cry out at the sudden flash and heat of it, but Macy doesn’t so much as gasp. She just holds the athame steady even as the lightning links up to it and then shoots out, making a giant circle that wraps around us all.
Sand and water rise up around us, a sudden wind whipping them into a tornado until we’re surrounded on all sides by sand and water and wind and lightning—all four of the elements coming together through Macy.
She starts to shake, her entire body lighting up with the strength of the elements whipping through her. Soon her clothes are plastered to her body, her hair stands on end, and her very skin seems to be glowing from within. She reaches out to me then, grabs my hand, and I feel it, all of the energy from the elements—from the natural world around us—flowing from her into me.
It’s powerful, painful, so overwhelming that I nearly break away from her—until I realize that she needs me. That the energy is too much for her to contain on her own and she’s funneling it through me, through my gargoyle, because I can absorb it, the power of the magic sliding through me but not hurting me at all.
So I hold tight to her hand, let her funnel everything that she needs to straight into me. And when a second blast of lightning cracks across the sky, I don’t so much as flinch, even when it links up with the first.
Seconds pass, filled with incredible, unbelievable power, and then there’s another giant flash. This one lights up the entire sky, spreads over the water, over the clearing, over us, until there is no more crater.
Until there is no more rock.
Until there is no more us, only the light and energy and air that we’ve become.
105
Fall from Grace
We hit the ground screaming, every single one of us, as the light molecules we traveled on band together to re-form our bodies. It’s painful and weird and a little bit terrifying, but it takes only a few seconds, and then I’m struggling to absorb the pain and get my breath back.
“What time is it?” I demand as I stagger to my feet and look around at my friends, all of whom are still curled up and moaning on the snow. I reach for my phone, but it’s dead. I throw it and scream, “What time is it, goddammit?”
Rosy streaks of dawn are starting to work their way across the sky, and panic is a living, breathing animal within me. I didn’t come this far just to fail because we’re too late. We can’t be too late.
Please God, we can’t be too late.
“It’s six fifty,” Flint groans as he rolls over, his phone clutched in his hand.
“Six fifty,” I whisper. I’d checked sunrise before we left, and we still have time. “True sunrise is at eight twenty. We have an hour and a half.”
I look
at Jaxon and the others, all of whom continue to lie on the snow despite my announcement. None of whom seems to understand the sudden urgency we’re facing. “We have ninety minutes!” I yell as I look around, trying to figure out exactly where on the Katmere grounds we are.
Macy pushes herself to her feet, and she looks as bad as I feel. Maybe worse. “Okay, okay, okay.” She glances around, too, rubs a hand over her face. “The amphitheater is that way. We just need to get out of these trees.”
“Come on,” I say, pulling at Jaxon, who definitely isn’t looking very good right now. Then again, I’m pretty sure the same can be said about me.
Flint rolls to his feet and helps me get Jaxon on his, but now that it’s not as dark as at the gargoyle’s cave, I can see just how bad his leg is. “You can’t walk any farther on that,” I tell him. “You have to stay here, and we’ll send help.”
“I’ll stay with him,” Eden says. “Him and Xavier.”
But as soon as she says that, I look around for Xavier’s body and realize he’s not here. “We left him,” I whisper in horror. “We left him there on the beach.”
“No,” Macy says. “No, we didn’t.”
“He’s not here,” Eden says, running for the closest trees. “Where is he? Oh my God, where is he?”
“He’s light,” Macy says, and her voice is thick with tears as she looks up at the ever-lightening sky. “We’re still alive, so we could re-form back into our bodies. He wasn’t, so my life-force magic couldn’t work on him. He’s gone.” She starts to cry. “He’s really gone.”
I want to cry with her, want nothing more than to sit my weary, aching body down on this snow and sob like a child as guilt racks me. But I can’t do that. We can’t do that, not yet. Not when we have to be inside the arena in ninety minutes.