by Lainy Lane
“No!” I squealed. I had a million defenses for him running through my mind. Ways that would convince her Phoenix wouldn’t deceive us, but they all refused to come out at that moment.
“You don’t find it in the least bit odd, Acqua? Really? Think about it!” A sarcastic smile crossed her face.
“He wouldn’t!” It sounded simple enough, but my voice deceived my head and let a sliver of doubt enter into the words.
“You sure about that? What if, all this time, he’s just been using you? It is a Blue Moon, after all if full moon blood strengthens them the way it does, just imagine the things they could do with Blue Moon blood.”
I shook my head furiously in response. “We are bonded!” I squealed unwillingly.
“Or did he conveniently convince you that the bond was there so you would play into his little plot?” Ember’s eyes gleamed wickedly as she furthered her accusations.
Ethereal stood to the side of us and looked back and forth as she followed the conversation that was increasing in heat by the second. She had a nervous look on her face as she contemplated what the best route would be to put a stop to the impending fight that Ember and I would both end up regretting in the end.
“We are wasting time! We have to go back!” I took the hint Ethereal was giving with her glare and attempted to keep the argument at bay.
I refused to respond to her latest accusation. There was no way it was true. I felt the bond, which meant that it had to exist. Although wouldn’t it just be my luck to finally fall in love and have it all turn out to be a big sham. A screwed-up kind of love was all I was capable of after all. Ethereal looked around at the ever-increasing crowd gathering around us. Drawing attention to ourselves was never a good idea. Bringing attention to ourselves on a Blue Moon while we argued about vampires was liable to turn out to be an odd form of suicide.
“Hey guys,” Ethereal whispered. “I think getting out of here is a good idea at this point regardless of the other issue.” Her eyes nervously twitched back and forth around us as she spoke.
I looked around and realized the crowd was beginning to close in on us. No one seemed happy. I couldn’t differentiate between my fear and panic and Phoenix’s anymore, so I wasn’t sure if the change was from what was happening around us or if it was due to something that was going on back at the cemetery. I stomped my foot on the ground, deciding to take a stand and not make it an option anymore.
“I’m going back—now!” I yelled louder than I had intended to, “you are either coming with me or not!”
I pulled out the small cross that had been ripped off of one of the posts surrounding our little home in the cemetery a long time ago. Not long after we had settled in our home together, I’d used a spell to dislocate the once flesh piece of the door from its original position. It was small and made of gray concrete that still held the chill from the night I first removed it from the cemetery. Ember had managed to form a hole in the center of it, and I placed a black piece of ribbon through it. For safety reasons, I always wore it on me to have a connection to the house should the need to transport ourselves back there ever arose. The current situation qualified as the need arising as far as I was concerned. I didn’t have time to pull out the smoky quartz this time. I’d have to rely on myself to ground and connect our magic on my own. We had no time to spare on technicalities.
Ethereal was next to me instantly. Ember took a moment to look around as if she was considering staying after all. Was her grudge against Phoenix vast enough to stay behind with a bunch of humans that had just discovered witches standing outside of their houses? After a moment, she finally thought better of the situation. With a massive sigh of disapproval, she joined Ethereal and I to leave.
I pictured our home. It was hard to concentrate on just imagining our house and not allow myself to get distracted by what may or may not be happening to Phoenix inside. I had no idea what to expect when we arrived back to the cemetery. I was hoping for the best, but expecting the worst as I transported us away from the ever-growing danger surrounded by power hungry humans closing in on us. My nerves were obviously too high not to use the quartz to ground us, which became apparent the moment I opened my eyes and took a look around.
Something was very wrong, Ethereal and Ember were with me, so I had at least managed to do something right. The cemetery surrounded us, but it didn’t look right. It was night, and there was a thick fog engulfing everything. The Blue Moon still shone down above us surrounded by black sky and twinkling stars. The mausoleum stood in front of us, but there was no nameplate on it. The side of the building was empty. No crosses were surrounding it, no flowers, nothing. I looked over to Ember, who was staring at Ethereal with her jaw dangling down.
“How did you manage to time travel as well as transport us?” Ethereal’s voice wasn’t her usual chipper self, which scared me more than anything else. Ethereal was someone who could keep her cool no matter the situation. She was the irritating girl who was still squeaking out stay calm messages even though the sky was falling. I had never heard her voice sound like it did at that moment.
“Time travel?” I squealed. “How do you—” Before the question escaped my mouth, I realized how she knew what I had done.
Ember’s name wasn’t engraved into the mausoleum. No one had been buried there yet. I turned to face her. Despite our current argument, she was my sister, and I had to gauge how she was handling the situation. Her eyes were completely spaced out, her face was blank, and she was staring at the moon. I opened my mouth to ask her what she was doing, but Ethereal grabbed my arm and motioned for me to hush before anything escaped me.
“It’s the last Blue Moon.” Ember’s words were barely audible.
Ethereal and I looked at each other. Surely there had to be something we were supposed to say. I felt like it was our duty to say something, but my mind couldn’t figure out what the protocol was for this kind of situation. Ethereal dug her long, bright red nails into my elbow and tugged on it to get my attention. She shook her head ferociously when I looked at her, her chocolate eyes gleaming with a message to stop asking questions. I couldn’t understand exactly what was so vital about this situation. Sure, we had time traveled on accident and managed to end up in a time before Ember’s attack that resulted in her death. However, that shouldn’t have been a reason to stop time and creation as far as I was concerned.
“Two years ago,” Ethereal finally spoke, but her voice was more timid than I had ever heard it. “The last Blue Moon was two years ago.” She turned to look at me when she spoke to clue me into the conversation that apparently didn’t need words for Ember. “Just before you joined us, Acqua.”
“Exactly two years,” Ember said.
How had we not realized it was the two year anniversary of her passing? Another year marked off of the countdown of keeping her alive through the magic Ethereal had pieced together for her. Time was running out and Ember hadn't even mentioned it.
She still had her head facing the sky and had yet to take her eyes off of the moon. There was a single tear sliding down her cheek. “How did you do it, Acqua?” She finally snapped out of the spell she seemed to have been enchanted under and looked over toward Ethereal and me.
“I—I have no idea,” I stammered out. “I guess my nerves got the best of me?”
It was the best reasoning I could piece together. I had been in the midst of an emotional breakdown, and I hadn’t used the quartz to ground my magic. I didn’t have enough control of the situation and something had gone screwy during the transport.
There was a sudden glimmer in Ember’s eyes and I couldn’t tell if it was another tear trying to fall or something else entirely. The thought of the impending emotional breakdown that had brought us here reminded me of the situation we had going on back home, at present, and I realized we desperately needed to figure out how to get there.
“Phoenix!” I practically screamed out when the reality of the situation I’d gotten us into hit me. “We have to g
o!”
My eyes searched around frantically as my brain tried to process how I was supposed to get us out of here. Seeing as I was unsure of how I’d managed to get us into the situation, I had no clue how to even begin to get us out of it.
Ember closed the distance between us and she grabbed onto both of my arms with a firmer grip than necessary. Her eyes burned into me with a panic that I didn’t understand.
“Can you do it again?” she asked desperately.
“Do what again?” My thoughts scattered away under the pressure of her gaze.
“Get us here.” Her voice and eyes were desperate.
“You mean get us back home? Where we need to be right now!” I reiterated my point, as she didn’t seem to have any desire to leave where we were.
“No! Screw home for the moment. Can you time travel again? Can you get us back to this moment again if we were to leave now?” Her grip on me squeezed with each word and was beginning to grow moderately painful.
I shrugged my shoulders unaware of why it mattered one way or another. “I don’t know. I'm not exactly sure how we got here in the first place. I guess I might be able to, but I’d have to figure out what happened to do it again. It’d probably take some time to figure out.” I felt myself backing away from her against my will. The look in her eyes was more devious than I’d ever seen her be before and I felt as if I would burst into flames underneath it.
“How much time?” she demanded.
“I don’t know!” I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me, but I felt confident I was unable to give it to her.
“Damn it, Acqua, focus!” she yelled and her eyes burned with intensity as her grip on my arms tightened further. “How long would it take you to figure out how to get us back here?”
“I don’t know!” I repeated my previous response as my element began to come to my protection without me calling on it. The mist started to fall and it created steam against Ember’s burning skin when it touched her.
“Figure it out!” she screamed.
“Why does it matter?” I charged as I made every effort to pull my emotions back in and force the rain to stop. Instead, the rain began to fall harder as I felt Ember’s heat raising and burns began to form on me under her touch.
“Because,” Ethereal’s voice came from behind me, it was back to her soft and reassuring tone once more. “This isn't just the night and place Ember died." Ember finally released my arm, and I let out a deep sigh in the absence of the searing on my skin. "It's the place and just moments before her attack."
CHAPTER TEN
The air deflated from my chest. We all stood in silence for what seemed like an eternity as the words Ethereal had spoken settled around us. Ember’s breathing increased in speed and depth, but her eyes didn’t change, and nothing else around us moved. It felt like time was standing still, enough so that I had to wonder whether or not I’d somehow managed to do that as well accidentally.
“Ember,” Ethereal’s soft voice was the one to break the silence finally. She reached over and placed a hand on Ember’s shoulder. “I think you need to step back and breathe for just a moment, dear.”
“No!” Ember roared back without taking her eyes from me. “This is it! You don’t get it, do you, Acqua? This is just before I died. Any moment he’s going to come from right over there, dragging me behind him.” Tears billowed over her eyelids.
I twitched in fear, and for the first time since I’d known Ember, I wondered if I could trust her. I wanted to understand the importance of the moment, but Phoenix's fear coursing through me wouldn't allow me to focus on anything else. She looked as if she had flown off her handle completely. I was the one that was supposed to be inconsolable right now. I was the one with a boyfriend back in present time experiencing who knew what at the hand of his clan and now Ember wouldn’t even let me attempt to get us back to him. The fact that his emotions were beginning to dwindle had my mind running through a million different possibilities of what was going on, and none of them made me feel any better. Yet, here was Ember, reliving her worst night, literally. I felt terrible. I wanted to help her stay here and fix it, yet I knew I couldn’t do that.
“Ember,” Ethereal whispered again.
“Don’t you see, Ethereal?” She finally let go of me and stepped back slightly. She looked at Ethereal, and her eyes were ravenous. “We can stop him! We can make everything go differently! We can fix it all!”
“You know that we can’t!” Ethereal said sternly.
“You didn’t think we could get here in the first place and we did! You told me this was impossible, but here we are!” Ember had a look of rage in her eyes.
“I didn’t say it was impossible to get here, Ember,” Ethereal sighed, “I said it was impossible to change your fate this way. We already did insane magic, that’s how you’re still alive, remember?”
“But—” Ember looked around the cemetery desperately, “Soon he’ll drag me from right over—” Ember pointed off into the distance as she spoke. “And then you’ll come after me from over there,” she pointed in another direction. “And we’re right here! We just wait for it to all go down, and we can stop it from happening.”
“No!” Ethereal responded directly.
“How could you deny me this?” Ember was wounded, her voice cracked as she spoke. “You know I’m running out of time!”
I watched them carefully, unsure of what all of it meant. I knew very little about the situation. They had only told me the bare minimum regarding how Ember was alive, but not when I came along. Ember was dead, and her body buried in her casket, the one we resided underneath. Ethereal had used some spell to give her soul a body, so she was still kind of alive, in a sense, despite being dead. I knew there was something more that had to be done to once again join Ember’s actual body and the temporary one the spell had created. I knew we were on borrowed time in making it happen. I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to happen, or what would happen if we didn't succeed in doing so before time ran out. Those were questions I’d asked when the story had first been told to me, but I had been informed that I didn’t need to know all of the details, not yet. I had never brought it up after that. I knew that when the time was right, the rest of the specifics would emerge. I knew that until then, we had to keep an eye on Ember’s physical body, which is why we’d decided to build our house underneath her casket.
“Revenge is one thing, Ember,” Ethereal’s voice seemed sweeter than usual, which was saying something for Ethereal. “Changing the past is quite another. You knew what the plan was all along. We can’t change that just because of this discovery. Now we need to go back, and we can discuss this later.” She had taken on the mother hen role. That was usually my role, but seeing as I was the only clueless one in the situation and what it involved, I didn’t know how to play it this time.
“No!” Ember screamed, “I’m not going back! I refuse unless she promises me she can bring me back to this exact moment!” She stared at me, and I had to wonder for a moment if I was going to melt on the spot.
Ethereal and Ember were both giving me expectant glares. I still didn’t entirely understand what I was agreeing to. What I did know was that I couldn’t risk losing any more time before returning to the present and helping Phoenix. It was a valid possibility that his life was hanging in the balance and until I got back to help him, the danger of that wasn’t dissipating any. I didn’t know if I fully intended to keep the promise, even as I spoke the words, but I had no choice but to dive in and tell Ember what she wanted to hear. Though I would still never even consider admitting it to them, the only thing that mattered to me at that moment was Phoenix, so I did what I had to do for him.
“I promise I will figure out how to get us back here!” The words rushed out in one long breath. They, too, knew they were terms that I more than likely couldn’t keep.
I couldn’t allow myself to feel guilty about the lack of truth in my promise at the time. I wasn’t feeling Phoenix’s emotions any
longer, and I had to figure out if that was due to being in the past or another possibility. The other option would be one bad enough I couldn’t even manage to piece it together entirely in my mind.
Ember rolled her eyes, which I was pretty sure indicated that she was onto my scheme. My heart jumped into my throat, afraid of what her next move would be. Her eyes flashed her doubt clearly, and Ethereal must have caught onto it because her body tensed up. There was a rigid moment of us standing in silence. We were all questioning each other’s motives and preparing for the next move, though no one seemed sure of what that might be. No one wanted to volunteer to be the first to decide who would break down and give in.
Ember sighed and everyone relaxed slightly. “Whatever,” she breathed. “Let’s go… but don’t you think for a second that I won’t hold you to this, regardless of your intentions at the moment.” The look in her eyes guaranteed it was a threatening promise and I swallowed hard.
I still had the cross in my hand and was sure I had the imprint of it in my palm as tightly as I’d been holding it. I felt my hand getting sweaty around it from the high levels of stress and nerves coursing through me. I rubbed my thumb over it several times as I took the quartz out of my pocket. I wasn’t taking any chances this time around. I didn’t have any time to waste on mistakes.
Ember and Ethereal took up their respective points of our pyramid, and I felt the quartz start to bind our magic together. The strength it sent speeding through me eased my emotions to an extent, but not nearly enough to make me feel better. The edges of my vision began to blur as I willed the trip back to the present. I ran the cross through my hand over and over and focused harder than I ever had before. I saw our cemetery in front of us. I made my mind envision the nameplate with Ember’s name and dates etched into it. I held my breath for a moment, still unsure of whether I trusted myself enough to believe the scene before me was real. We were back. The Blue Moon hung in the sky and the fog was gone. Ember’s birth name was on the side of the stonewall this time. I looked around, searching for any sign of movement. A struggle or any indication of what might have taken place while we were gone. There was nothing. Everything was still and quiet, except for my heart, which was attempting to pound out of my chest.