Siting up hurt, my head smarting from where I’d smacked it on the ground when I’d landed.
“Ugh,” I muttered and sat up fully. Crickets around me chirped, and in the distance, a songbird called out in the shadows. When the film faded from my vision, I gasped.
The earth had shifted for me, a long ridge of dirt three feet high and several wide, mounded and crumbling at the edges. It looked like it’d been thrust out from the ground. My chest hurt, my ribs aching like my heart had tried to explode out from under it.
Holy fuck. Never in a million years had I imagined myself capable of that. Not without powers, at any rate. With a grunt, I pushed myself up to stand, wobbling. I looked around. At least I had a way to walk back to where Wolfe was.
He was going to be pissed. Or maybe amazed. I hoped more of the latter. Still, there were so many questions-
“Darcy!!” Cash’s voice rang out through the woods, frantic, followed by a loud thrashing noise.
“I’m right here,” I yelled back, just as he burst out from between two sappy pines. He stared at me and then cursed, pulling me into him, wrapping his arms around me. “I’m fine,” I mumbled into his shoulder. He hadn’t been gone long, were the guys okay? They were making their way to the Llewellyn mansion last I’d seen them with my weird quasi-powers…
“I’ve been looking for you for three goddamn hours,” he said, voice heated and angry when he pulled away to stare me over. “You’re covered in dirt, shit, you’re bleeding-” His fingers brushed the ground up the meat of my arm, and I winced away.
“Three hours?” My head swam. I’d just landed. I glanced behind me. Hadn’t I?
“We gotta get back,” he said, catching his breath. “Get up on my back. I’ll run us-” His gaze landed on the ridge of dirt, up past his knees. “The hell is that?”
“I’ll explain later,” I said. He shook his head.
“You better. Wolfe’s losing his shit. We got them, Frank, Luca, Daria, the three of them-” something in the way his voice cut off made me think something was wrong even tucked inside good news. He should’ve been elated.
“What?” I asked as I shifted behind him, ready to get up on his back, even if the thought of jumping up made my legs hurt even worse. He was faster and could carry my weight easily enough.
“Levi lost half his damn arm. Your father saw right through his magic, discovered us as soon as we broke inside,” Cash said grimly, and my body flashed white-hot before my stomach clenched, and I thought I was gonna be sick.
“His arm?” Oh… god.
Cash bent his knees and grabbed me by the waist.
“Up,” he said, “C’mon.” I tried not to puke as I scrambled up his body, my knees bumping against his ribs as I clung to him. “Hang tight,” he muttered, and I buried my face in his neck as he took off, the jostling gate of his run, and the news he’d brought me, shaking me to my center.
Ten
“Sweet blistering CHRIST,” Levi’s voice boomed through the woods as I clung to Cash’s back, and he, sweaty and out of breath, ran right into the clearing lit up by the headlights from the limo.
A man I didn’t recognize, but by his sharp black suit and discarded black gloves, had probably been our driver, was bent over the demon.
“Bite,” the driver said, offering Levi a thick stick. Blood, black as the night sky above, had pooled on the ground. Levi cursed the driver out, his back pressed against the side of the limo, and yeah, he was missing half his arm, from just above the elbow down, a leather belt wrapped tight around the stump. I felt queasy looking at it and glanced away.
“Darcy,” Daria cried out and ran to me as soon as my feet touched the ground. She bumped into me, shoving me back into Cash as he caught me by the shoulder. Her face was soaked with tears, and she sobbed once before burying herself into my chest.
“I’m here,” I said, trying not to look past her at where the driver was tending to Levi.
“He can’t bleed out,” Eli said to me as he walked up to us, a frown on his face. “But we can’t stop the bleeding.”
“I don’t have a fuckin’ heart to beat it out of me, you fuckin’ furry,” Levi spat, his voice high and strained. “Everloving mother-fucking tits!”
“Bite,” the driver ordered again before taking a deep breath. “I’m going to seal it. That tourniquet isn’t doing-”
“Shit for me, you flat-faced bastard,” Levi growled and bit down on the stick. Daria shuddered, and I held her tight. The driver pushed his hair behind his ear, and that’s when I saw what Levi meant.
The man had no face. Well, he had a face, but it was devoid of features, a flat plane of creamy flesh, unmarked by eyes or lips or-
How were we hearing him? I felt like shuddering too and looked away.
“Some weird shit is going down,” Cash said under his breath, as Frank joined us, looking rough around the edges. His face had bruises, the corner of his mouth bloodied. My heart clenched, a fist of rage wrapping around it at the thought of my family beating him, my father hurting him.
“Hey, Darcy,” he said, a shy smile on his face. Daria unwound herself from me and went to him, curling into his side. He made space for her, his arm around her in a heartbeat. Luca was a shadow, just behind him.
I scanned the clearing as Landon moved to block out most of the sight of Levi and his mysterious case of a missing arm, crouching down to talk to his friend in a low voice.
“We’re all here, don’t worry,” Charlie said, as he barreled me into a bear-hug. I was still reeling from all the information my poor overloaded brain has processed in the last few minutes of my life.
“Wolfe’s not talking to you, by the way,” Charlie said into my hair, “what the fuck did you do?”
“I dunno,” I said because it sounded stupid to say I saw a flame in the distance with my crazy x-ray Superman vision and had taken off before riding one hell of an earth wave several miles away. That sounded nuts, even for us. I swallowed my fears down. I needed to just be… upfront. Lies and secrets were always causing problems, something I should’ve learned by then.
Luca ambled up to us as if our ‘friend’ wasn’t really getting his hacked-off arm sealed up only ten feet away. He looked remarkably unbothered by everything that had gone on over the last few days, at least until he slid his hand around Daria’s waist, holding onto her in a way that screamed ‘if I lose sight of you, I am going to level an entire city and dance in its ashes afterwards, but I am totally normal and not at all emotionally unstable thank you very much.’
Daria turned into him, resting her head on his shoulder for a brief moment.
“I think,” Luca paused for a moment, interrupting us and clearly not caring that I was about to spill my guts and my whole chest on my secrets, “that the key to releasing your powers back to you is to harvest them from your father, but to do that-”
“Harvest sounds-” Charlie sounded irritated and ill at Luca’s word choices.
“It’s about what you think it is,” Luca chirped, even as Daria made a noise of disgust. “What?”
“That is gross, and also in contravention of at least ten different magical laws that I know of,” Daria pointed out. I tried to think of what laws she was talking about, but not for the first time; my lack of paying attention to anything magical at all in my family’s house was holding me back. I made a clearing sound in the back of my throat.
“Catch me up?” I asked. Luca looked directly at me, and I tried not to blink. His gaze was uh, unsettling, as always, and I wondered how Daria felt under his unvarnished scrutiny. She didn’t seem to mind much at all, cozied up to him tight.
“There are two parts to this,” Luca said, “your father stole your powers. We knew that as soon as we saw him because he did feats of strength that a witch his age should never have been able to accomplish-”
“Let alone one that’s dead but alive,” Daria piped up. Luca squeezed her shoulder affectionately, and she smiled.
“That too. It was ja
gged, his magic like he’d forced it into himself, and that’s when we knew that he’d taken from you because he felt like you.”
“How the hell does he feel like Darcy?” Cash demanded, speaking up for the first time in a few minutes, a worried and angry expression on his face.
“Magic has a…” Luca searched for the word.
“It has a taste,” Eli had come up behind me in the dark, nudging me from behind with his arm on the small of my back. “You know that, Cash.”
I cocked my head. I knew that they had senses unlike my own, much more powerful and intense, but we’d never really discussed it. I guess in a lot of ways, we pretended I wasn’t really a witch at all until it became an issue, or we needed my magic for something. Without it, I felt hollowed out like a decorative watermelon at a fancy brunch buffet. While I wasn’t scared of my magic like I used to be, I wasn’t embracing it either, and that needed to come to a quick and dirty stop. No matter how this all shook out, my magic would be with me for life once I ripped it back from my father’s body, and I needed to be more responsible with it.
A lifetime ago, I would have killed to be without powers, and now I was hungry to get them back and embrace them. It felt a bit like finally throwing out that thing you’ve been holding onto in your junk drawer for ten years and never used, only to really need it the very next week.
Except y’know, ten times worse.
“That’s weird,” Daria said, eyeing Eli up. “A taste? We feel it like… it’s almost like a perfume; you can smell it on someone, but not, it glows around them.”
“I guess you could put it that way too,” Eli replied. He rested his chin on the top of my head, curving his arms around my body and tugging me back into him. I melted into the warmth of his hug, feeling it deep in my bones. I needed my pack badly, to just be with them, skin to skin, and forget the pain and fear that had been haunting us since… forever since the beginning.
Something popped into place in my mind, like a bone snapping back into a joint. I wanted the fight to be over. Tears prickled in the corners of my eyes, and my nose tingled like I was about to cry.
“I have to kill him to get it back, and if that’s the case, I’ll do it,” I said quietly, putting everything together before anyone else said anything. It didn’t even need to be told; I knew what I had to do. I’d taken him down once before, and I’d do it again. And again. Until it was done. He wasn’t really my father anymore, and after everything he’d put me through, he’d never had been, to begin with. If I was just a pawn to him, a thing to be passed on to another family to bring him more power and prestige, then he was nothing to me. I had all the family I could ever want in the guys, in Wolfe, in Daria…
Luca caught me looking at him at that moment, and he smiled, but the expression was grim, a thin ashy line of lips. He knew what I was thinking, he must’ve, because his eyes were sad, like he felt sorry for me.
“I’m fine,” I said, and Eli squeezed me gently.
“We know you are.”
“So, murder, anyone?” I tried to make it light, but my voice barely floated above the ground.
“It probably won’t be enough to just kill him,” Luca said, clearing his throat. “I think, I really do think, that part of the reason he’s still alive is that his ancestral home kept him that way. It’s binding him to this plane and not letting him move on, which is great for him, but awful for us.”
“So the house acts like a heartstone?” Ace asked from across the clearing.
“Fucking fuck!” Levi’s shout rang through the woods, and he collapsed forward with a thump, groaning. The no-faced man, the driver who spoke without lips, helped him back up again. The end of Levi’s stump was glowing softly, the light dying until it disappeared, leaving whole, unblemished flesh in its wake.
The pain that had lined Levi’s face since I’d first seen him back was finally lifted, and he sighed, lifting his remaining hand to his face and pushing the sweat-soaked hair off of it. Landon stood, unruffled and unbothered by the whole event, beside his friend. I felt sick over the entire thing. Levi may have been an asshole, but… I averted my eyes from where his arm used to be. Levi gave a snort and got to his feet.
“Don’t mind me, just laying here with my arm off and all,” he said. “So what’s the plan? I’m fuckin’ starved. Gotta eat something after that.”
“We think we need to burn it down, the house,” Luca said, glancing at me.”Sorry.”
“What? Why are you, sorry?” I asked, and he shrugged, hanging tight to Daria. Frank wandered up and put an arm around Luca’s shoulders, which made my internal eyebrows shoot sky-high. Daria just gave me a look that said, ‘don’t judge me, you’re the one that’s fucking five werewolves, I’m only fucking one, and another witch, so piss off.’ A smile spread across my lips despite the serious situation.
“Because it’s your family’s home,” Luca said, bringing me back to the conversation.
“They’re not my family,” I said, leaning back into Eli’s firm, warm bulk. He hugged me extra tight, and Ace nodded.
“Fuckin’ right,” Ace muttered. “So, we burn it down?”
“And take your father with it,” Wolfe spoke after being quiet for so long and still like a statue. He sighed. “Buildings, like an ancestral home of a witch, has its own power, a heartbeat, that feeds off of and feeds in return, the power of a witch. Every building has it; it’s fast in the beginning and slows over time. It’s why new buildings creak and crack so much; they’re not settling; it’s the heartbeat of the thing, sounding out through the house. As they age, just like us, they slow down until it might only be the slightest vibration, not even a sound at all. Each nook and cranny soaks up the energy of the mundanes living in it, and when a witch resides there…” His gaze travelled over each of us, pausing on me for a half-beat longer before he looked away.
“We killed everyone else at the council, though. He’s the only one that survived,” I pointed out because it didn’t make sense my father would live and the rest would die. I was sure that everyone’s houses were built around the same time, a hundred years ago or more probably, and if they carried with them their own magic, they would have been just as powerful and just as likely to help the other witches on the council survive.
“Maybe they’re not all dead,” Ace said and then winced when we collectively groaned. “Look, I’m sure a lot of them are-”
“Max reduced them to ashes,” Levi added, and then spat on the ground. “Fuckin’ beauty of a thing that she was, they were lucky they got to know her even in death.” I shivered and wondered if I should tell him that I thought I saw Max in the woods.
He’d had enough loss for one day, though.
“If you guys think for a minute, it’s a good idea to go right to my father’s house and try to take him out,” I started, but Wolfe shook his head.
“I wouldn’t start with him,” he said, “no, he is ready for us, and his guard is up, and he is not afraid. He may have lost valuable things to him-” He eyed up Daria, and Luca held her tighter, Frank growling softly. I needed to talk to her more about what had happened. “But no, let us start with the smaller fish.”
Landon smirked.
“I think we should rest first,” he said, his voice low and rumbling. “The kids should sleep.”
“I’m fine,” Daria protested, but I think I knew what Landon was anxious about. Levi was still pale from the loss of half his arm and would fight until the end of his life if we let him. He needed to rest.
The faceless driver, who I still couldn’t look at because honestly, it was just so fucking weird, walked around the limo to the front, getting into the driver’s seat.
“I have somewhere we can go, take stock, and recuperate before our next attack,” Wolfe said. “Our friend will take us.”
“Some kinda friend,” Finn said, the first words out of him since he’d returned with the rest of the pack. “What’s with his face?”
“I don’t have a hand, and he don’t got
a face, and yet both of us can still get the job done, furboy, leave it,” Levi snapped. Daria cleared her throat.
“C’mon, let’s just… let’s just go. Now. Before old man Llewellyn decides to come hunting after us in his pajamas.” I wrinkled my nose as we loaded ourselves into the car, Wolfe muttering about Levi getting blood on the upholstery. I slipped in second to last, Cash watching me as I glanced over my shoulder and out at the woods. I couldn’t see through it anymore, but I could feel her, out there, wandering.
“What is it?” Cash asked.
“I- let’s talk about it later, okay?” I smiled at him briefly, and he held my gaze steady.
“Later,” he said, “but not never.” He helped me slip into the car, and the door closed behind him.
Eleven
It was a tall, spire-spiked, sprawling mansion, and Luca glared suspiciously at Wolfe when we emerged from the cocoon of the limo.
“Don’t make me lie to you,” was all Wolfe would say when we asked him about where we were. Instead, he walked up a grand marbled staircase, the carved steps slippery with light rain, and into the open maw of doors that creaked as he pulled them toward us.
The entry-way was shadowed until Wolfe went into a side closet and turned on the lights, a brilliant chandelier above throwing off lights all around.
As we stepped inside, the scent hit me, of waxed papers, trimmed wicks, and a curl of tobacco smoke crawling out of the darkness toward us. It felt like a home-coming, and I immediately liked it. It was a huge mansion, but it felt like it was reaching out to hug me.
“Well, this ain’t creepy,” Eli said as Finn made a noise of agreement.
“It isn’t; you guys just would prefer sleeping out in a tent and don’t lie and say you wouldn’t,” Charlie sassed them both. “You and Cash, the three of you would have our Darcy roughing it in the middle of nowhere if you had any say on the matter.”
“Rooms are upstairs,” Wolfe said, “I won’t be mysterious and tell you not to explore because then you’ll do just that. There are a groundskeeper and his daughter who oversees the cleaning, but they live in a cottage at the edge of the property, so you won’t see anybody but us. Three rooms are ready for you to sleep in, up at the top of the stairs, to the right and left.” He looked tired when I glanced at him. “I’ll see you all in the morning.”
Phoenixlost Page 7