by Kit Jennings
“Chase?”
The Texan’s drawl came through a heavy blanket of static. “Yeah?”
“Can you check out Jackson Square for me?” Another burst of static suspiciously resembled a litany of creative cursing. “I heard that.”
“Color me crazy,” he answered, “but isn’t that smack in the middle of civilization?”
“Not at night. Just go with me on this.”
“If you say so.” He didn’t sound enthusiastic. “Call you when I get there.”
Callie set the radio aside. “Now we wait.”
“There was a Great Fire there back in the mid-late eighteenth century.” Liam warmed to the idea. “Do you really think it will work?”
“I honestly have no idea,” she said cheerfully.
A humid breeze from the open window brushed a curl of her wild hair against the side of his face. It tickled. Without thinking, he tucked the errant strand behind her ear.
Her smile faded as she took a step away. “Liam—”
A gentleman of his era would never have considered what he did next.
Well, no, it would have been considered—in exquisite and loving detail, in a never ending loop. But he never would have done it.
She braced a hand on his chest to stop him, his heart beating against her palm. He felt the strength in her, and the fear. “This isn’t a good idea,” she warned.
He smiled, forehead an inch away from hers. “You don’t consider yourself human, do you?”
“I was born, and grew up, and had life and love and a world of possibility before me,” she said softly, not looking at him. “And then I became something else, and ‘normal’ ended in unmitigated disaster.”
“Strange,” he said, smoothing more hair from her face with both hands, thumbs pausing at the corners of her mouth as he tilted her face up. He had to know. “You feel like a real girl to me.”
She tasted like spiced wine, mulled to a turn on a chilly autumn night. She held herself back from him at first, spine straight and hand still keeping him at a distance.
There was a breathless moment when he thought she might soften. But then she tried to pull away. In response he sank his long fingers into her mass of hodgepodge curls and kissed her, deeper and deeper, until her hand on his chest clenched in his shirt and she half-melted against him.
His arms wrapped unrelenting around her. Paper and cold coffee erupted in a flurry as they landed on the library table. The radio skittered over the edge and hit the floor with a dull, accusatory thud
Liam’s heart hammered painfully against his ribs. A gentleman would never have mindlessly lifted Callie’s Jane Russell figure onto the library table. Would never have pressed her into letting him kiss her with the fervor of a starving man.
Would never have smoothed a hand up her warm, muscular thigh until her knee hooked over his hip and the hem of her bright dress cascaded back. He cradled his weight against her. Lost, completely and delightfully lost.
He never stopped kissing her, because stopping would bring her to her senses.
The hem of his shirt had ridden up, baring his lower back. The tentative touch of her fingers nearly electrified him out of his skin. He pulled away from her luscious mouth as her hand crawled an exploratory path up his spine by inches, then hesitated. “Don’t,” he breathed.
Her eyes fluttered open in surprise. “What?”
“Don’t stop doing that.” His tone was part moan, part growl.
Their breath mingled as she gave a low laugh. “This is a really bad idea.” But she drew experimental fingers up the curving line of his spine. She leaned forward and pressed her lips against the hollow of his throat. A small but telling concession.
The last string he had on control snapped. He would have acted very ungentlemanly indeed, his hand curling around the strap of her outrageous dress to pull it down, if Chase’s unwelcome, static-ridden voice hadn’t emitted from the tumbled radio like an unpinned grenade in their midst.
“Callie? You there, girl?”
Callie scrambled from beneath Liam’s solid weight. “Chase,” she gasped, snatching up the radio and opening the channel in one movement.
“How’d you know?”
“What are you talking about? Where are you?”
“Jackson Square. There’s already a summoning area set up.”
“What?”
“I found a ring of obsidian. The staging area’s ready to go. The power building around here is unbelievable. Maeve wasn’t kidding when she said this was a trap.”
“Alive or dead?” she demanded. Liam’s heart felt as though it were about to take flight.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The obsidian—alive or dead? Has it been drained?”
“No, it’s definitely alive.” Static filled the speaker with a high, momentary whine before his voice came through again. “Donny? What are you—”
The line went dead.
Callie and Liam stared at one another, questions flooding the small space between them until an unbridgeable abyss yawned. The radio fell from Callie’s nerveless fingers.
“Chase.”
4
Callie and Liam entered Jackson Square by the southern entrance. Callie adjusted the strap of the baldric over her shoulder and buried her hands in her jacket pockets. She stood, outwardly composed, eyes on the triple spires of St. Louis Cathedral as she toyed with Liam’s ring in her pocket.
The cathedral resembled a ghost ship in the thick, humid mist brought on by the Louisiana rain. Trees rustled a sticky drizzle in a warning wind, so the rain must have just stopped. No wonder Chase had been so annoyed. His van enjoyed wet weather about as much a cat when caught in it.
She tried not to think about Chase and Donny as she waited for Liam to relock the gate behind them. She was even less successful in forgetting Liam’s body cradled against hers, his kiss making the blood pound in her veins. He didn’t kiss like Legba—it had been so, so much better. The breath was still tight in her chest, heat pooled her gut, held in curling, lazy abeyance. There had been so much unexpected heat in him, driven to get out, to bleed itself into her like the sun after a tremendous storm. She wanted to bask in him.
His footsteps crunched along the gravel path until he stood beside her, close but not hovering, simply giving her the space she needed to focus.
“Chase was right. This place is thrumming with power.”
“It’s always like this,” Liam told her. “Something to do with the proximity of the cathedral.”
“Good. We’re going to need it.” She moved forward.
The path had once been well maintained. One storm too many, a war and the constant tread of shuffling feet had seen to the Square’s trim geometry.
The four paths of the Square were bisected by one large circular path and a smaller one at its center. At the larger ring, she paused, stooped to run her fingers through cool, damp grass. After a moment, she extracted a large hunk of rock, hefting it thoughtfully.
Unlike the dead obsidian she’d found in Chicago, which had been charcoal gray and porous with drained life, this palm-sized specimen was glossy black with orange striations like veins. With a humorless smile, she replaced the hunk of obsidian and wiped her glove on the side of her jacket. The rock’s living energy tried to seep its way to her bare skin, nipping like insects.
Callie and Liam continued to the smaller ring, where a crumbling stone block bravely upheld the remains of a bronze statue gone green with age and crawling moss.
She could just make out the rearing horse; more prominent was the headless horseman waving its hat, like a friendlier version of Sleepy Hollow’s well-known demon. There, nestled in Spanish moss, lay the thirteenth piece of obsidian. Callie watched it warily. It was about the same shape and size of a human heart. She imagined it pulsing with life.
“No Chase, no Donal,” Liam observed.
“No.”
“So why isn’t the obsidian drained?”
Callie
didn’t look away from the keystone as she removed her left glove. “Because one of them betrayed us and the other is a hostage. I’m supposed to do the summoning to come after them. Trap.” She unwound the bandage from her left hand.
“How?”
“How else? Maeve. We gave her a way in.”
“So maybe it wasn’t either of them.”
Callie shook her head. “She couldn’t have done it without someone coming to her to make a Crossroads bargain. And you said it yourself. This is the most powerful Crossroads in the city.” Bandaging and gauze fluttered to the ground. All that was left of the cut on her hand was a thin, pink line. She pulled the knife from her boot and traced the cut open again with the blade’s point. She closed her fist over it until the blood welled between her clenched fingers. “If this doesn’t work,” she told Liam, sounding a little breathless, “go to Sulie. She knew about Eva. She knows about me. She’ll know what to do.”
“Callie—”
She shook her head again. “There’s too much at stake. I’m sorry.” Her voice was as clenched as her fist. She told herself the tears pricking her eyes like acid were due to the pain in her hand. For a bright, shining moment it had almost worked, being with him.
Before he could respond, she dripped blood on the obsidian, malevolent black in the soft shadows of moss. Her hand shook. “There’s your heart’s blood,” she whispered.
“Now open up, you bastard.”
Sensation not unlike what she experienced in Sulie’s humfor, the ground moving beneath her like the deck of a ship, shifting around her. She replaced her glove and knife with forced calm. Then she drew her sword, its familiar weight grounding her in reality as nothing else could. There was something reassuringly direct about the length of a steel blade in her hand, an anchor to what was real and true. She grabbed Liam by the coat with her bleeding hand and pulled him to her for a rough kiss as the Square spun crazily about them.
Then she turned away. The world snapped into place, and her hand was empty.
As though she’d held nothing at all.
Callie swiveled to face a dream, one that threatened to morph into nightmare. Black silhouettes blurred against an indigo sky, the ground beneath her feet hardly discernible other than the indisputable fact she was standing on it. She was still in Jackson Square, though not in the one she had just left. This was something else, something Other.
Something between.
She took a few careful steps, breath harsh in her throat, heart beating hard against her chest. There was no texture here. No sound, though trees and grass clearly rustled in a silent wind. Her sword was a heavy weight in her right fist. A cloaked figure beneath a wild oak bled in and out of shadow, until Callie wasn’t certain it was there at all. Her head spun if she tried to focus on it, her stomach turning. Her nerve endings pulsed and throbbed against her skin.
Ahead of her, a few thread-thin veins of glittering red gold teased her eyes. She walked toward it, one foot at a time. She kept having to pull her mind away from Liam, waiting for her beyond the boundaries of this place. The luxuriant feel of his mouth on hers, his strength pressed against her, equal but giving. She was tall, but he was taller.
She liked that.
Fire flared with a sound that destroyed the silence. She shielded her eyes painfully against the sudden light. She should have been able to feel its heat from here, but she only felt colder.
The fire stretched higher, gathering in intensity, then exploded in four directions, following what would have been the gravel paths of the Square. Callie staggered back as it rushed past her.
The red gold veins began to slither and twist, to grow and move. Callie realized this was the demon she had come here to face, evolving from churning, gathering shadow. It reared against the moonless, starless sky. She had just time enough to marvel at its size, and to realize the fiery crossroads meant the life was now draining from the obsidian in the other Jackson Square. There was only one way out now, and that was forward.
So she went forward.
The book in which Yshotha’s woodcut face glared out at her in Liam’s safe, cozy library didn’t do the demon justice. It wasn’t just big. It was, no pun intended, monstrous.
Leviathan may have been a better word.
Its deep laughter resonated softly in her head. “Another little champion comes to feed her essence to my mistress. One by one they come, and fight with all their hearts and souls. One by one they die, and I grow stronger. And when there are nineteen, I will be free.”
Callie forced the words past the tight pulsing of her heart in her throat. “You do know what happens to villains who reveal their evil plans, don’t you? They fall.”
More laughter, a lightning flash of exploding star eyes. “It is a marvel, just how many humans are willing to see their world and race end, as long as their need for vengeance is fulfilled. In this case, only one human was necessary.”
Callie got that unmistakable feeling in her gut when the puzzle pieces came together to form a nearly complete picture. This time it formed a picture of dismay. She couldn’t do this alone, and yet here she was. She shoved all thought of Liam away—best not to let the demon know she was edging the truth. She would keep Liam safe for the city, at least.
“So who was it?” she asked conversationally. “Chase? Donal?” She hesitated.
“Liam? We both know I’m not getting out of here, so you may as well tell me.”
“We also know that will not stop you fighting me with everything you have. It is what makes a champion’s soul so delicious. Yet their minds stagger me with their stupidity.
You cannot win, and yet you will fight, because you cannot see.”
Callie’s subconscious nattered away at her. Nineteen Keepers’ souls, and Brighid’s Flame was extinguished. “Bleating semantics at me isn’t going to move this along any faster. And you haven’t answered my question.”
A deep, disappointed sigh from the demon. “Very well.”
The fire around her dampened enough give her a decent view of the landscape.
Donal lay in a crumpled heap few feet to her right. Callie turned her head. An equal distance away to the left lay Chase.
Which was playing possum? Neither, she decided. That would be too easy.
“I will make you a Crossroads deal, little champion. I will give you enough time to reach one of your comrades. They will return to your world with no recollection of what has happened, of your existence. They will have no reason for vengeance, no unrequited love. They will be happy and healthy. And you will know the truth before you die.”
“And the one I don’t choose?”
“He will remain here as a witness to your defeat, and return to bear the news to your Loa’s link. In this way, you will have a way of saying farewell. Let all your Keepers come then, and Brighid herself with them. I will prevail.”
“Loa’s link” echoed in Callie’s mind. Her left hand sank into her jacket pocket.
Liam.
She drew her hand from her pocket, the heavy silver weight of Liam’s ring with which she’d been unwittingly fiddling more real in this place than even Yshotha. She closed her fist hard around it, until its metallic chill warmed, and prayed like hell she was right.
“No deal.” She whipped Liam’s ring with the obsidian on its silver chain around her head and released it into the air. At its apex, it stopped with a ping, shining like a lone, brilliant star in the sky.
Yshotha shrieked, shaking the landscape with the rippling echoes. The fire extinguished, leaving smoking outlines and the stench of char.
No Crossroads. No trap.
And the cavalry on its way. It was the least she could do.
Trusting Liam to get Donal and Chase out of there, she ran for the demon.
Liam raised his forearm against the sudden burst of blinding light. Heat and sound resonated from a distance, reminding him of the night Callie had arrived in New Orleans in Chase’s beater van. The connection clicked in his mind—
just as Callie had used his ring to find him that night, tonight he would use it to find her. Shielding his eyes, he pushed himself into the between place on the other side. It was like swimming through quicksand, viscous and unrelenting. But he made it through.
Here it was all dark. The smell of burnt timber and overloaded energy assailed his nose and mouth, collected in the back of his throat. He saw the demon, just like in his dream. It roared and thrashed. He saw Donal and Chase in the middle distance, groggily pushing themselves to their feet. He saw Callie, running.
He ran after her.
Callie’s breath burned her lungs and throat raw. She grasped the leather grip of her sword, worn comfortable from decades of use. Then she reached inside for the light that made her what she was. A Keeper of the Flame, one of Brighid’s nineteen champions.
Correction: eighteen champions.
She searched for the fire in her, deeper and deeper, and found nothing but a muted glow beyond her reach. In that startling moment she knew why Eva had died, her soul lost. She hadn’t ascended, because she couldn’t. And neither, it seemed, could Callie.
A strong arm caught her around the waist, dragging her back. “No!” she screamed, jolted off balance. She hung like a hissing, spitting cat from Liam’s arm.
“What the hell are you thinking?” Liam snarled.
“It’s not about me.” She continued to struggle. “Get Donny and Chase and go!”
“What are you talking about?” His dark eyes blazed, marble planes of his face stiff with barely contained fear finding release in stark anger.
“The raven.” She turned in his one-armed grip until she could see the burning tree.
“It’s not a death omen. It’s a messenger. It’s not about betrayal, it’s about war. Maeve and Yshotha are just means to an end. It’s Lilith killing us.” She spun him about and shoved him in the other direction, to no effect. “Get them and go. Donny will know how to contact the Tuatha.”