The talon was warm with life, not cold with demon death. I patted it, the claw black as soot on an equally silken black leg.
“Drake,” I said tiredly. “Nice to see you.”
Chapter Nineteen
Gabrielle
The battle wasn’t over. Drake had lifted me to safety, but both demons and the storm swirled around him.
Drake winged high, rolled, dove, and winged again until I was dizzy. Dragon flight. A delight of motion sickness.
The demons respected Drake’s strength and fire and gave him a wide berth. They continued to kick at the storm, having fun, but I didn’t know how long this could last. The entity controlling it might have vast stores of power, and we were only so strong.
Colby passed us, his fire bellowing. Whether he saw me in Drake’s talon or not, I couldn’t tell. He kept fighting, sweet guy. He could have run for it, but no, he stayed and did what he could.
The colossus of orange and black must be Titus. He was bigger even than Mick, and flame roared out from him, exploding rocks from the sky.
At Drake’s next pass, I saw Grandmother Begay totter out onto the roof. She supported herself with her polished walking stick made from strong cottonwood, its turquoise-studded handle shimmering with magic.
Maya hadn’t held her back, but then, no one stopped Ruby Begay when she decided on a course of action. Beside her was Chandra, her red, blue, and gold shirt and matching scarf a fusion of color in the dark sky.
Grandmother planted her walking stick in front of her and threw back her head, the threads of gray in her black hair moving in the wind. Superimposed upon her was the figure of a feathery crow with a gleaming dark beak and a bad-tempered glitter in its eyes.
I knew Grandmother Begay could take the form of a crow, or project herself into one—I was never sure which—though I’d never caught her at the transformation.
But maybe there wasn’t a shift. Maybe she was the Crow, and could become it whenever she wished, or maybe Crow became her. Explained why I, with my super-powerful goddess powers, didn’t argue when she told me to take out the trash.
Grandmother rested both hands on her cane and began to sing. I didn’t know the language of the words, but I understood them.
Her voice rose, wavering syllables calling to the Earth beneath us and the gods that inhabited it—the gods of places and sky and storm. She told them to gather, to calm the beast within the Earth, to appease the spirit that whirled in rage.
Chandra stood next to her, arms at her sides, her body swaying with Grandmother’s song. Her mouth moved, as though she chanted along or perhaps spoke an incantation of her own.
Looking at Chandra through the magic-infused haze, I saw another figure superimposed on her, one that made my heart stop.
Couldn’t be. Could. Not. Be.
I must be mistaken. Holy crap, I had to be. Fear gripped me so hard I nearly lost my hold on what power I had left.
Grandmother continued to sing. The storm softened. Not perceptibly at first, but then I noticed the wind had receded a bit, fewer rocks smacking against Drake.
Grandmother’s song changed, her voice stretching out the words, beautiful tones like crystal in the night.
She was calling the Earth entity itself, invoking the gods to bring it forth to answer for its deeds. I shook my head, as though she could see me—not that she’d take my advice if she did.
“No,” I said, my hoarse words lost to the wind. “Too dangerous.”
The wind groaned, and in its note, I thought I heard words.
Give me a vessel.
Near Grandmother’s feet, the mirror flipped over, reflecting a beam so bright I had to slam my eyes shut.
I heard the mirror’s cry above the wind. “No!”
Give me a vessel.
“Screw you!” The mirror shouted. “I ain’t no one’s vessel, honey.”
I opened my eyes as it rose an inch from the roof, shook until it rippled, and then it shattered into powder. Grit tinkled to the rooftop, and the mirror’s voice went silent.
I beat on Drake’s talon. “Down! Drake, put me down!”
He was busy fighting and didn’t hear me. I clenched Drake’s claws as he did a barrel roll and flamed the spot where the wind seemed to be coming from. I heard my screams, felt my world spinning, my stomach rising into my mouth. Goddess, I so did not want to barf.
The wind slowed. Drake let out a dragon screech and dove for the rooftop. He winged in fast, and when I was five feet off the ground, he dropped me.
I landed on my ass, my skirt flying up to reveal my silky black underwear.
Darkness formed, and then Drake as human spun out of it, his midnight hair flying. He jerked and balled his hands to fists, as though he wrestled something I couldn’t see.
Colby touched down, already forming the inky blackness for his change before he landed. Colby as human broke free of it and sprinted toward me just as Drake reached me and locked his hands around my throat.
Why did everyone try to strangle me? First the slayer, now Drake. I shot Beneath magic into Drake’s hands and tore myself from him.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I yelled as I scrambled to my feet.
“This vessel,” Drake said—or at least his mouth did. Drake continued to jerk as though he fought, his eyes smoldering in fury. “Is unsatisfactory … Unsatisfactory. Huh. What an understatement.”
I stared. The voice was Drake’s, but the words were never ones he’d speak, not in that sarcastic tone. Drake needed a video class to understand most jokes.
“Who are you?” I asked, my breath hurting.
“The Abomination speaks. I don’t like that.”
Drake started for me again, but Colby jumped in front of Drake and punched him on the jaw.
Drake spun, moving with the hit, and when he straightened, he shook his head, his fists opening. Colby watched him, ready to hit him again, but Drake held up his hands.
“It is gone.”
“Gone where?” I asked in alarm.
Grandmother quickly raised her cane as though ready to ward off an attack. “I am no one’s vessel,” she said crisply to the air in front of her.
She grunted and jerked sideways, as though someone had hit her, and Chandra caught her, her dark eyes wide.
The door to the hotel was thrust open, and Cornelius exited, followed by a worried Maya. Cornelius wore his elegant suit, a diamond stickpin glittering on his lapel.
“My dear,” he said to me in distress. “Are you all right?”
He took two more steps, and then his voice … changed.
“Ah,” Cornelius said, straightening. “This is a good vessel.” He looked around, his eyes as cold as his diamond pin. “Dragons are much too hard to control.”
Grandmother and Chandra moved to me as I faced him.
“Just who the hell are you?” I demanded.
My skin crawled as Cornelius fixed his gaze on me. The cruelty in his eyes was not his, and the indifferent drawl was alien to him.
“Every time I rise, I find the world changed, and always in a bad way. This time is the worst yet. I haven’t fully manifested, but when I do, I will finish you all. I’ve tried fire and flood, even fucking asteroids, and still hell beings crawl on the Earth and pollute it. If you go back where you belong, I might spare the rest of the living things this time.”
He looked up at the demons I’d called. They fluttered and spun about the rooftop, eager to destroy anything I pointed them at.
But as soon as Cornelius’s focus landed on them, the demons turned tail and fled—the whole pack of them.
They raced out into the night, some streaming back down the Strip to the vortex I’d opened, some disappearing into the empty desert beyond the city. They flapped and tumbled, climbed and flew as though they couldn’t get away from him fast enough.
Chandra moved a few inches closer to me, her warmth incongruous to the magical thing I’d spied inside her. Drake, Colby, and Titus drew together, thre
e very hot men with nothing on their minds but tearing Cornelius apart.
Grandmother Begay stepped in front of Cornelius and tapped the ground with her walking stick.
“My granddaughter asked you a question. Who are you?”
“I am … everything.”
His reply drifted past me, because it couldn’t shake me more than Ruby Begay calling me her granddaughter.
I wasn’t her granddaughter—I wasn’t related to her at all. The term meant acceptance, that I was family, and even, on some level, it meant affection. A lump rose in my throat.
Grandmother wasn’t finished. “You are arrogant,” she said to the thing inside Cornelius. “That will harm you in the end.”
“Doesn’t matter, old woman. You won’t be here. Because you have taken abominations under your care, you will suffer their fate.” He swept a look over Colby, Drake, and Titus, and his lip curled in disgust. “I believe I will start all over again. I was thinking storms, but maybe lava this time. That way I can eliminate the dragons as well—they have become such pains in my ass.”
Colby started forward, but I grabbed him. “Don’t hurt him,” I babbled to Colby. “Cornelius is in there. Not his fault.”
“Cornelius is, indeed,” the entity said. “I think I’ll kill him—just to upset you.”
He lifted his own, neat hands to his throat.
Nash tackled him. Both men hit the rooftop, Nash the trained army officer performing a perfect takedown.
Cornelius’s head smacked the ground with an audible thunk. He struggled, but to no avail. Nash was in great shape—I’d seen his house, which was more or less a gym with a bed in it.
The entity grunted. “Well, shit. What the fuck are you?”
I punched the air. “Go, Nash! Let him suck on your un-power.”
“Oh, you total bastard.” the entity growled, then it gasped, and Cornelius’s eyes went blank.
Nash ceased struggling, but held Cornelius down, wary.
Around us the storm ceased. The mud, rocks, boulders, and roots that had been part of it pelted down around us, no longer animate, and dust flooded the rooftop.
Cornelius’s eyes cleared, and he coughed.
I rushed to him. “Get off him, Nash.” I knelt and touched Cornelius’s face. “Are you all right?”
Nash gave Cornelius a last measuring look then helped the man to his feet. Cornelius reached down for me, and once I stood next to him, he brushed off his suit with trembling hands.
“I appear to be fine,” he said. “If a trifle bruised. Thank you, sir, for your timely intervention.”
“What happened?” Maya wrapped her fingers around Nash’s arm as Nash gave Cornelius a nod of acknowledgment. “Did you, you know …” She made a pulling motion. “Negate him?”
“I don’t think so,” Nash answered. “I felt him try to go into me then sort of—get stuck. Then he—it—disappeared. Gone.”
Drake rubbed his arms. “I too no longer feel his presence. It is interesting—the dragon slayer also said something about being a vessel. Perhaps it is the only way the Earth entity can articulate what it needs to.”
Cornelius looked Drake up and down, his brows raised, then gave Colby and Titus the same appraisal. “Should I ask why you and your friends are on the roof unclothed?” he asked Colby.
Colby grinned. “Let’s just say the storm blew our socks off. Me and Drakey weren’t up here making passionate love or anything. He’s not my type. Titus, well, he was just passing by.”
Drake looked affronted, as usual when Colby talked about … well, anything. Titus only folded his arms and looked as formidable as a naked man could. He had tatts similar to Drake’s, wings that filled his back and flowed over his ass to his thighs.
I ignored them to walk to Chandra, who hadn’t moved during this exchange. She regarded me calmly, her head up, knowing what I’d seen.
“You,” I snarled, putting all the anger I’d experienced in my entire crazy life into the word. “I saw you. Liar! Pretending to be my friend and lying to me, you total bitch.”
“Gabrielle,” Grandmother Begay rebuked me in a shocked voice.
I didn’t look at her. My focus was on Chandra, and the roiling betrayal inside me.
“I know what I saw,” I went on. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice, Ruby. She’s the Beneath goddess. She’s my mother.”
“No,” Chandra said, the only word she could get out before I lunged for her, ready to rip out her throat.
Chapter Twenty
Gabrielle
A blast of Beneath magic more powerful than any I’d ever felt lifted me from my feet and blew me backward to the edge of the roof.
Colby started for me, but before I could hurtle over the wall to the crowds below, another wave of magic caught me and brought me back, setting me gently on my feet.
I staggered, fighting for balance, and found Chandra in front of me, her hands on her hips.
“Now Gabrielle,” she said. “Is that any way to behave to your auntie?”
I blinked at her, unsteady. I tasted blood on my lips, and a warm desert wind blew my long hair into my face. I brushed it impatiently away.
“What do you mean auntie?” My voice was hoarse, words clogging my throat. “What are you talking about? You’re her. The goddess.”
“I am a goddess,” Chandra said. “Sister to the one who caused you to be born. I knew my sister would never amount to much, but she did produce a beautiful child.”
“My mother didn’t have any sisters,” I said, dazed, but the truth was, I had no idea. It’s not like I ever had a heart-to-heart with Mommy Dearest. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with me.
“She has many,” Chandra said. “Brothers too.”
I couldn’t catch my breath. Colby and Drake moved to stand on either side of me like bookends, regarding Chandra in a wall of dragon fury.
Grandmother clenched her walking stick, her face red with anger. Apparently she hadn’t known either. Chandra had been able to mask her true self well. I had to wonder why she’d chosen to reveal her identity now.
“Why were you so nice to me?” I demanded. “You sat beside my bed, were kind and caring. Why, so I’d trust you? So you could get close to me and kill me more easily? Or grab me and take me to her?”
Chandra regarded me with her night-dark eyes. “No, Gabrielle. If I had wanted you to die, I would have let the dragon slayer kill you in the pool. He was no match for me.”
She didn’t boast—she simply stated a fact.
“You pulled me out?” I dimly remembered strong hands yanking me upward while I fell unconscious. “I thought that was Colby.”
“No,” Colby said. “You were gone by the time I reached the pool. She must have vanished you, leaving the dragon slayer barely alive. Probably why Drake was able to bind him.”
Chandra kept her gaze on me. “I did fight you away from that awful slayer, and the woman from Beneath is indeed my sister. I came to America to find her daughters, my nieces, and keep them safe from her.”
“But — you’re nothing alike. She’s …”
“Pale as snow? Or a ghost? She chose to be colorless, pretending she was pure. I chose to live in this world, in Nigeria, with a good family, and so I took their coloring.”
I waved my hands. “Let me understand this. You’re my aunt? How is that even possible?”
“What is possible on the Earth and what is possible in the world Beneath are different things.”
“Regardless,” Grandmother said in a hard voice. “You should have told us. Go back to the hell you came from.” She raised her walking stick, the turquoise glowing in the moonlight. Power danced in her, the magic of the Crow.
“I came to help,” Chandra said impatiently. “Gabrielle, you are special. You prove it every moment of every day. I can help you—teach you—”
“I am teaching her,” Grandmother Begay interrupted. “I am teaching her how to control what is inside her, how not to cause destruction to everyone a
round her.”
“Stifling her,” Chandra said, scowling. “She believes that she is evil, that she must constantly be afraid of her power, her self.”
“Because the magic of her mother flows unchecked in her,” Grandmother said emphatically.
“The magic, yes, but her mother does not. I ought to know. Where is the evil in this little one? Where?”
Both stared at me until I felt like a smudge of bacteria in a Petri dish.
Grandmother answered, “She once resurrected a man who went on a killing rampage.”
“Undead Jim,” Maya said from Cornelius’s side. “Ugh. He was awful.”
True, I had found the guy dead and tried to bring him back to life. He’d gotten away from me and out of control, wreaking havoc and holding Maya hostage in her house until Janet chased him off.
Chandra pinned me with a stare. “And why did you create this zombie?”
I shrugged, my heart pounding. “I felt bad for him. I was trying to help him.”
“You see?” Chandra turned on Grandmother in triumph. “She had goodness in her heart. She is simply untrained.”
“She had arrogance in her heart, the idea that she could create life and not pay any sort of price.”
“Why should she pay a price for trying to be kind?” Chandra demanded. “There is a difference between being misguided and being monstrous.”
“A very fine line,” Grandmother said sternly. “One you seem to be crossing. You leave Gabrielle alone.”
“You leave her alone, old woman. You have her head twisted around so far that she doesn’t know up from down.”
“Don’t call me an old woman. You are far older than I am, if you are telling the truth. No goddess from Beneath can be trusted. You stay away from Gabrielle.”
“And leave her in your care?” Chandra asked, incredulous. “She will wither and die.”
“Would you let her destroy the world to prove she can run about unchecked? You persuaded this man to be so foolish as to give her a job.” Grandmother waved an imperious hand at Cornelius.
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