I slip on sneakers, grab the silver knives beside my bed and tuck them into the pockets of the cargo pants I purposely changed into. I consider taking the crossbow too, but I don’t want the long range weapon. I want much more intimate ones. I grab the ceremonial katana from my closet that Becca’s dad gave me as a gift for my birthday last year. He has a wicked collection of blades that he always catches me admiring when I go to their house. I have drilled with it enough times to know how to wield it. I strap it to my back and zip on a hoodie over it.
I go to my mother in the backyard. When I cross the threshold of our back door, she turns away from me and begins walking towards the detached garage in the back of our house. Sound doesn’t travel well between it and the house. If I scream for help, no one will hear me.
“Mom?” I croak out then stumble after her.
I let her lead me into the garage. Once we are there she turns to face me. No sooner than she does her form shifts into the massive gray red eyed wolf. She transforms into it and leaps at me in one fluid motion.
Derek barrels in and collides with the wolf before it reaches me. It swipes an enormously clawed paw at his chest. He jumps back out its swing range, but not fast enough. The claws don’t sink in deep, but five scratches swell with blood on his chest.
“A knife Ash!” He yells at me and I throw one to him.
He catches it and thrusts it into the wolf’s side. It’s not good enough. To take a skinwalker down, it has to be thrust into its heart.
The wolf growls and shifts into an entirely different beast. It towers over Derek by a good foot when it stands on its hind legs. It it a grotesque mix of half man, half wolf that has doubled in size.
Derek plunges the knife into him again, but it goes in at the wrong angle and misses its target.
The wolf-man howls in rage and picks Derek up by the throat. He flings him across the room. Derek hits the opposite cement wall with a thud that leaves me feeling sick as he crumples to the ground. He jerks the knife out of him and starts towards me with it.
I pull the katana from at my back. When the wolf-man comes at me with the knife I jump to the right. It nicks me in the side but I breathe through the burn. I swing the katana in a wide arc. He brings the knife up to meet it and the katana’s steel clangs against its silver. I step back, feint left, then thrust out to the right. He shifts to the left and the katana slides into the center of his chest. The upward angle my arm is at leaves me exposed. I try to jerk the katana out of him because if I leave it he can pull it out and use it against me or Derek. Trying to do so costs me precious seconds and by the time I get it free it is too late. The knife is about to cut into my throat when Derek delivers a roundhouse kick to wolf-man’s head from the side. It snaps to the left, breaking and his hand unclenches the knife.
Derek catches it before it hits the ground.
The skinwalker shifts to the wolf and then back into the wolf-man in rapid succession.
“He needs to shift to heal,” I tell Derek.
“I’m finished playing,” he growls ferociously and we both sink into defensive stances, me brandishing the katana and Derek brandishing the silver knife.
He flings out a hand and both of the weapons are wrenched from our grips by a force I can’t see. They go flying and crashing against the garage’s wall.
He starts towards Derek and we move on him at the same time. The same invisible force that ripped the katana from my hands presses down on my shoulders forcing me to my knees. I try to fight against it but it feels like I am trying to hold up a five hundred pound weight. I crash to the ground.
“Ash!” Derek yells. The same force holds him in place from ever making it to me.
The wolf-man’s gaze locks with mine and he holds it as he reaches a hand out and snaps Derek’s neck.
I scream as his body slumps to the ground and his neck sits at the exact odd angle that my mother’s did. I know it was done on purpose. Meant to torment me before I die too.
He reaches towards me. As he does I see movement in my peripheral. But I’m still locked in place so I have no idea what it is. The wolf-man growls and turns to my right and as he does the silver knife embeds itself in his chest exactly over his heart.
The invisible hold on me is automatically released. I turn to see Mrs. Jensen with murder in her eyes.
I stare at her for a split second before the thudding of the wolf-man’s body sounds against the floor jolting me out of the shock. “His name,” I rush out. “His name is Patrick Jacobs. You’re the one who pierced his heart with silver so you’re the one who has to say it to destroy him.”
As soon as she says it, the wolf-man’s form shifts into that of my grandfather. His chest heaves once and then it goes still.
In the next moment Derek’s body bursts into flames beside me.
What happens next I am only vaguely aware of. Mrs. Jensen is beside me, wrapping an arm around me, and restraining me from flinging myself at Derek in a knee-jerk reaction. I feel moisture on my face. I realize it’s tears. I’m crying. I’m crying and I’m numb and I’m in denial and complete shock and I’m terrified for Derek. For what will happen after the flames have died. I realize that we talked about how phoenix have six rebirths but we never talked about the number he had left.
Oh God, what if this is his last one. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. He didn’t tell me. I didn’t ask. Why didn’t I ask?
I think that I think these things in my head but I must really shriek them out loud because Mrs. Jensen starts telling me that it’s okay. Everything will be fine. Derek will be fine. He’s never died before. This is only his first rebirth. He has five left.
That calms me a little but it is still agony like I have never experienced before kneeling on the cement floor and watching his body go up in flames. It feels like my heart is physically being ripped from my chest. I can barely breathe through the sensation.
Derek’s body burns in a self-contained fire that seems to last for an eternity. As I look on, I know exactly what an eternity in hell would be like for me. Nothing could torment me more than having to watch Derek burn forever.
When the flames die at last, all that remains of him is a dark pile of ashes.
We can’t leave them in the garage. I numbly help Mrs. Jensen gather them to take them with her.
Before she leaves, she assures me that Derek is not really gone. He will be reborn from his ashes in six days.
I wish I can go with her but I can’t. My grandfather is lying dead in the same garage Derek burned in. I have to tell my dad he just lost his father and my grandmother that she just lost her husband.
EPILOGUE
You don’t really know how long six days can drag on until you have to spend them waiting on your boyfriend to return from death, and it will not be until you see him alive with your own eyes that you let the breath out that you have been holding since you watched his body combust into flames.
On a rational level I know Derek isn’t really gone for good, but on an emotional level it sure feels like he is.
The six days it takes a phoenix to be reborn from their ashes are the hardest six days of my life. I mourn Derek and fight to keep my head above water every single one of them. I barely eat, I can’t sleep, and I do not leave my room. I don’t tell my family about Derek’s and Mrs. Jensen’s roles in things so they assume I am dealing with the trauma of the ordeal with my grandfather.
On the sixth day I force myself to wait until it is after the time Derek died to make it a complete six. I know I will break apart if I go to his house and he isn’t in it. When I arrive Cassie opens the door. My heart falters. I was expecting Derek to open it like he always does. The look on her face and the identical one on Mrs. Jensen’s makes it completely shatter in my chest.
“Where is he?” I ask. “Why isn’t he back?”
They don’t have an answer to either question. I collapse. Mrs. Jensen tells me to stay over in the guest room. She doesn’t want me driving home with the wreck that
I am. I can’t. I cannot stay in Derek’s house if he is not in it.
I drive home numb. I curl into a ball on the floor beside my bed and cry until there are no more tears left to cry. I don’t go to sleep.
Hope is a funny thing. It makes you believe in the impossible and sometimes the irrational.
I drive to Derek’s house on the seventh day and drive back home number than on the sixth. I climb the stairs to my room and crumble to the floor as soon as I close the door behind me. I pull my knees to my chest and struggle to breathe.
On the 8th day I think, Maybe Derek really isn’t coming back, and my heart twists in my chest at the thought. But hope makes me drive to his house again. When I climb into my bed, I bury myself beneath the sheets and know that I will probably never emerge. I don’t fight to keep my head above water any more. I let the grief pull me completely under.
Derek isn’t coming back. He’s gone. I close my eyes on that thought.
I come alert to the feel of my mattress shifting around me. I open my eyes and hyperventilate. Derek is here. He’s in my face. I’m looking at him. I thought I’d lost him and he’s back.
I reach up and grab his face. I drag it to mine and I don’t just kiss him, I drink every last drop of him in.
He’s here. He’s not gone. He’s back.
I break from the kiss breathing heavily. I’ve kissed him until my lungs forced me to stop.
“If dying gets me kissed like that, maybe I should die and come back more often,” Derek grins down at me.
“Don’t you dare,” I say shoving at his chest. “In fact don’t you ever die on me again!”
Just thinking about the last eight days has me hyperventilating and near hysterical.
“Ash, calm down,” Derek relaxes onto the bed and pulls me into his arms. “I’m fine. Okay?”
I take a deep breath and then nod.
He looks at me intensely. His normally dark eyes are painted bright with gold. Then kisses me. “I was so afraid for you,” he murmurs against my lips. “And I was completely helpless to do a damn thing about it. The worst part about dying was leaving you alone. At first awareness leaves you, but then it slowly returns. I spent the eight days it took me to come back in the void between our world and the one of the dead. I was prepared for that. It’s where we go in between. What I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer terror of not knowing rather I would come back to you being alive or dead. I knew that if you were dead I didn’t want to come back because I love you Ash. And I didn’t really start living again until I met you. I was kind of just existing. I don’t even want to do that in a world that doesn’t have you in it.”
Derek’s words strip me bare. There is so much I want to say in return but I could never be as eloquent. Still, I try to tell him everything I feel and felt for him. “When I saw you die, I felt like I died too. And when I watched you burn, I found out what a living hell is like. I thought the six days you would be gone were going to be the hardest of my life, but I was wrong. The two extra days when you weren’t back and you should have been were. I wanted to give up on everything and drown. I wanted to fall asleep and not wake up if I wouldn’t be waking up to you. I wouldn’t have been able to go on if you didn’t come back. I love you too Derek. And I don’t care if you have five more rebirths left. Don’t ever die on me again because I don’t think I can survive it a second time.”
I kiss him again and put everything I just tried to express in words and more into it.
He stretches out on his back in the bed and I lay my head on his chest. He curves a hand around my waist and I do the same to his side. Our breathing eventually evens out and after a while it syncs up. I know he has to leave at some point before the morning, but for the time being I just want us to stay like this for a little longer.
“How’d you sneak up here?” I tilt my head up to look at him.
He nods his head towards my unlatched window. “I turned into a bird and flew.”
My eyes go wide. “You can do that?!” I thought that part was just added myth.
When his lips begin vigorously twitching I elbow him in his side. “How did you really get up here?”
“I used the tree outside your window. It’s easy to climb,” he confesses.
We settle into another comfortable silence.
“Derek,” I say after a long while. “What took you so long?”
When his body goes taut beneath me I know I am not going to like the answer. I look up at him and see shadows swirling within his eyes.
“Derek?” I prompt after he doesn’t answer.
He sighs heavily then finally says, “My dad. There was something that he needed to tell me…and show me. Something that is coming and we need to be prepared for it.”
Other Works by Nia Davenport
Two-Faced (Assassin at Court Series, Book 1): YA Fantasy
Chaos (Assassin at Court Series, Book 2): YA Fantasy
Born in Blood (Born Hunter Series): Paranormal Romance
Coming Soon
Ascension (Assassin at Court Series, Book 3): YA Fantasy
Jinn: New Adult Fantasy
Fated: Working title in a New Adult Paranormal Romance series
A modern YA contemporary novel
Nia lives in Texas with her husband, two daughters and a dog named Bruno...he was named after both the singer and the dog from Cinderella. When she is not writing paranormal romance or young adult fiction, she is reading it.
Follow me on twitter @Nia_Davenport, or Instagram @ Nia.Davenport for exclusive content, updates, and sneak peeks.
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