The Amber Lee Boxed Set

by Katerina Martinez

  “Enough,” she said.

  “Already?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’ve had enough of this. We could fight each other till the end of time and neither of us would win, or you can surrender and I can save the life of your friend.”

  “Or I could kill you and save him myself.”

  “Sorry, wrong answer. That wasn’t one of your options.”

  She made a gesture with her hands, a kind of grabbing gesture, and I felt my chest tug out and up. My feet lost contact with the ground, and I realized I was levitating. But that wasn’t all. Something was happening inside of me. In the back of my mind, I heard a scream filled with the agony of a thousand men slowly dying on spikes growing in intensity, as if someone were turning the volume up in small increments.

  Or as if the sound were coming toward me.

  I could feel the wolf’s fear rising too, its anger. Ever since the cabin, ever since that moment of understanding with Aaron, the beast had seen the darkness inside of me as prey, as something to hunt and dominate, and I had been able to control it. But now the thing that had tried so hard to keep hidden was coming out. It was coming out!

  Acheris made a pulling gesture and I flew toward her, paralyzed and unable to stop the motion. She grabbed me by the throat and squeezed, prohibiting my ability to breathe. I was able to grab hold of her hand with my own, but she was too strong—I couldn’t pull her off—and something was preventing the wolf from breaking through to the surface and taking my skin.

  “I hope you didn’t think I came into this without a plan B,” she said, smiling.

  I tried to speak, but I couldn’t.

  “What’s that?” she asked, “I’m better than you? I know. As long as you have that darkness inside of you there’s nothing about you that worries me. You’re about as dangerous as a fish out of water, and as delicate as a flower.”

  Her hand continued to press on my throat. I could feel the life draining from me in a slow, unbearable flow. Every second stretched into its own universe where I watched, helpless, as this woman took away everything I cared about. Collette, Damien, Aaron, Frank, and then the world; nothing was safe, and I was powerless to stop her.

  Ze pendant.

  The whisper almost came too late. I wasn’t sure I had heard what I thought I heard until I remembered I had a pendant in my pocket. Frank’s pendant. The pendant he was using to track Damien’s whereabouts. The pendant he had used as a reliquary for a demon for a very, very long time. For as long as I had known him.

  You’ll know what to do with it when the time comes Damien had said when he gave it to me earlier. I didn’t know what he had meant at the time, but now it all made sense. Frank had brought a demon to the cabin with the intention of infecting me with it and washing out the darkness all at once. The spell had failed and Damien had destroyed the older demon in a blaze of Dark Fire. But there was a second demon… and it was in my pocket.

  I gave the wolf an inch and allowed it to empower my muscles, even if I wouldn’t let it out altogether. My nails extended into sharp claws and I slashed one across Acheris’s face, forcing her to let go of me even if it was only for a moment. A moment was all I needed. In the confusion, I pulled Frank’s pendant out of my pocket, slammed it into a nearby stone column, and with a bolt of telekinetic energy forced the metal to split in two.

  “What are you doing!” Acheris screamed.

  As the inky black mass began to spread out and spill into the air from beneath my palm, I opened my mouth, and with the simple power of intent, allowed the darkness to enter. The blackness flew into me as if by gravity and my throat swelled up, just as Damien’s had, as the thing reached into my body and climbed in. When it was done I doubled over and coughed. I wanted to throw up, to pass out, or to die. Anything to rid myself of the foul, disgusting taste in my mouth—a taste I never thought I would ever be rid of. But instead, I stayed where I was and I heaved through the moment, waiting for it to pass.

  “You stupid bitch,” Acheris said, “You’ve fallen right into my hands.”

  I looked up at her from behind eyes which shone with the light of the sun. A battle was raging inside of me; light against dark, good against evil, chaos against order. I felt myself leave the moment, leave the church, leave—wherever this place was—and travel into myself. To a forest much like the one back home in Raven’s Glen, a forest filled with wolves, birds, and other animals; a forest that was very much mine to protect, to keep, and to tend to. But darkness was coming. Ash was falling from the sky, the trees were starting to blacken, and at the root of it all there was the figure of a man.

  I remembered a dream I had like this once, a long time ago, only when I had the dream I had thought the dark figure had been Collette’s shadow come to devour my home. But Collette was beside me now with her hand in mine. Behind us there was light, before us there was darkness, and she was staring into it with me.

  “Zis is ze moment, Amber,” she said. “We both dreamed zis dream.”

  The need to question her being here, or her speaking to me, didn’t arise. Her presence was the most natural thing in the world. Here, she wasn’t dead. “We have been wrong about so many things, Collette” I said.

  “I know. But ze truth will always find a way out, and ze truth iz here. You must choose.”

  “Choose? Choose what?”

  “Ze light, or ze dark.”

  “I can’t fight her if I’m fighting this thing.”

  “Zen don’t fight it.”

  I let go of Collette’s hand and walked toward the darkness. Only once did I look over my shoulder, at that perfect, beautiful scene of light and wildlife made even more perfect by her presence in it. But I knew I didn’t belong there. That life was a lie. The only truth was the one before me, coming for me, devouring me from the inside.

  “Come,” I said to the darkness, “I’m waiting.”

  When we opened our eyes, we were surrounded. Hands were groping at our stolen flesh, tongues lapping at our ears, fingers, and cheeks. We couldn’t see, our breaths were short and forced, and our head was pounding. A thin film of sweat covered our body making us cold from top to bottom, only we didn’t know where top and bottom were. At least, not until we could see what was happening.

  We had floated to the ceiling, and all around us our brothers and sisters were… adoring us. We laughed, a hard cackle, and they started to chant in reverse. But the sounds were painful to our ears, and that didn’t seem right to us. It didn’t feel normal. We couldn’t understand why the perversion of the Lord’s Prayer wasn’t soothing our heart or stilling our breath.

  Something was wrong.

  I am the wolf, said a voice, whose words brought comfort to our new body. I am the witch. I am the demon.

  We felt ourselves fall, our grip on the host slipping, slipping, and slipping. Hands were pulling at us from above to keep us close to the ceiling, but invisible hands were tugging at us from below, dragging us down, down, down into a place where we didn’t want to go. Not back there. Not into the dark again. Never into the dark!

  I hit the ground hard. An explosion of pain rocked my body as my shoulder cracked on the stone floor, but I was myself again. The demon had let go. It was time to finish this.

  Acheris took a step away. She had been watching, dumbfounded when she witnessed my momentary possession, and now stunned that I had rid myself of it so quickly. I lunged at her, and the wolf slipped out of my skin and took control. She moved quickly, ducking and dodging away from my claws and snapping jaws, but there was little room for her to maneuver. She slashed with claw-tipped fingernails and cut me along the arm. I roared and grabbed her by the throat, and then I plunged my other hand into her gut, tearing into the soft flesh of her belly and feeling her cold blood rush all over my fingers.

  Acheris let out a gut-wrenching scream, and it was the most painful and blissful sound to have ever graced my ears.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  The wolf relinquished control and allowed me to retu
rn to my own skin. Acheris lay against the altar, her blood spilling out onto the stone floor, her breathing ragged. I stepped back, wiped her blood on my thigh. And then I looked at her, and I pitied her, because for all her unnatural and immeasurable power, there she was—at my feet.

  “You killed my friends,” I said to her.

  She said nothing, just stared at me through her dead, black eyes. The chorus above us had ceased, too, leaving the moment wrapped in silence. “You murdered witches, left a trail of suffering in your wake, and irrevocably changed the lives of so many innocent people. And for what?”

  “Why does a scorpion sting?” she said.

  “You are no scorpion. You’re a pathetic thing, just like those demons you use to do your dirty work. A creature so overcome with torment and pain you inflict it on others to sate your own. Scorpions have a place in this world, a reason for being. You don’t. You’re a cancer.”

  “So are you going to tear me out, Red Witch?”

  “No,” I said, approaching her and squatting. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to bind you, Acheris; bind you from doing harm to others, and from doing harm to yourself. And then you’re going to answer to every single person whose life you’ve touched. You’re going to make their pain your own.”

  “I have enough pain to spare, Amber. A little more won’t hurt.”

  “It won’t hurt you, but it’ll help them.”

  “Really? You would let me live and fail to avenge your dead friends in order to help some witches you don’t even know?”

  “Absolutely I would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I understand you now. All this time you’ve wanted me and my power, you hunted me, tested me, and I thought what you wanted me to do was become your… your slave. But I see past that, now. I know what you truly want.”

  She furrowed her brows and pressed her lips into a thin line.

  “I’m not going to give you that peace,” I said, and I stood again.

  “Amber,” said a voice behind me. Damien!

  I spun around and saw him standing at the foot of the altar. His chest was red and black, and blood had dripped down his abdomen and was spreading over his jeans, but he was alive and the bleeding seemed to have stopped. At least for now. The green fire I had seen explode out of his chest had burned the skin in a major way. He would need medical attention if magical attention didn’t work.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, almost as if I dared not to.

  He nodded. “I’m in one piece.”

  “We need to get you and your sister out of here.”

  “I won’t argue with you there.”

  “Where is she?”

  Damien turned around. The church was mostly dark save for the flickering glow coming from the candles at the back. I remembered Damien’s sister being flung across the room and hearing a crack or a thud. My stomach went cold.

  “Lily?” Damien asked.

  A feather tickled the back of my neck and I turned in time to catch Acheris’s cruel smile. My gut, already cold, twisted into a knot; and then I saw it. Lily came barreling out of the darkness with her hands outstretched, venom in her glowing green eyes, and fangs the size of daggers in her mouth. She hissed, vaulted over the altar where Acheris was lying, and tackled me to the ground.

  White hot pain surged throughout my body as the fangs pierced my chest and I screamed, high and loud, and the things waiting in the darkness above us screamed in return. My blood had been spilled, and they were hungry for it. The darkness began to swirl and move, and two by two, the possessed men and women with their white eyes, coarse hair, and sunken faces came crawling down the marble columns.

  ***

  Damien’s eyes didn’t know where to go. Acheris was starting to stand, Amber was screaming and struggling with the thing that until a moment ago had been his sister, and there were sounds coming from above him he knew no human throat could make. To make things worse, the door behind him was opening and the room was starting to fill with even more of Acheris’s cultists.

  He had played all his cards; now all he had was an empty hand and blindingly painful wound on his chest.

  So he acted, on instinct, and grabbed Lily’s shoulders. She looked up at him with eyes which were once his sister’s and hissed, her mouth full of blood, and Damien shoved her to the floor and off Amber. But Amber was bleeding now, and struggling to breathe. He knelt, placed his hand on her chest, and pushed his healing magick into her as quickly as he could, but it wasn’t enough. Lily came again and tackled him, tossing him to the floor like a doll.

  Damien wrestled with his sister. Acheris laughed as she rose to her feet. The hooded men closed in, and the wailing horde above—he could see them now—descended like human spiders. He had no choice but to use the Dark Fire again, to summon it from the deepest parts of himself and let it feed as he had done a moment ago. Even if it killed him.

  He fought with his sister, shoved his hand into her face, and drew the Dark Fire from within himself. The foul magick poured out of his hand and he heard her skin start to sizzle and crackle. Lily screeched and retreated, and before any more Dark Fire could come flooding out of him, he bit down hard on his lip and forced the magick back into containment.

  When he turned his head he saw Amber starting to rise, starting to change shape, but Acheris was coming for her. He threw his hand up to attack, but an explosion rocked the church and sent him rolling along the floor and into a stone pillar and sent the pews groaning in all directions.

  Reality itself tore in two with a great ripping sound, as if a blade had been run through it and then twisted to force the tear open further. He watched as, in an instant, a number of broad shouldered, tall, muscular werewolves came through the tear. Their footfalls were as heavy as the breaths they were taking, their claws were sharp and ready, and in their eyes he could see their lust for battle; their need to slay anything that was an enemy.

  The entire church had fallen silent, staring as the werewolves made their entrance and formed a perimeter around the portal’s mouth. Then from the portal another figure emerged. A tall man, though not as tall as the werewolves, and lanky, with a head of bright blond hair and a grin from ear to ear. Frank came through like he was royalty, and Damien had never been happier to see him.

  “I hope we didn’t join the party too late,” he said, and then chaos erupted.

  Three hulking werewolves pounced into the fray. Two of them, larger shapes, tore into the group of hooded men entering the room. Damien couldn’t see very well in the dim light of the church, but he could hear the shouts and the roars—and the spilling of blood—from where he was. Another werewolf came charging at Acheris and engaged, claw for claw, tooth for tooth, but Acheris was quick and even with the injury to her stomach she was able to hold her own.

  “Hey,” said a familiar, female voice.

  A hand came down to grab him and Damien took it, and stood. It was Jackal, and she had a grin on her face. “Sorry we’re late,” she said.

  “Better late than never.”

  “We’ve got company.”

  Damien looked up. Two men with white eyes, purple lips, and scabs on their faces were almost right on top of them. Jackal threw herself at the stone column and in the time it took Damien to blink, she had transformed into her tall, lithe, beast form and was climbing up the stone column to greet the descending creatures—her jaws and claws at the ready.

  An arm with a vice-like grip grabbed Damien’s wounded shoulder and forced him to turn. Damien saw the knife coming and, for a moment, froze like a deer caught in headlights. But the knife didn’t reach his skin. He watched as Frank’s hands clamped down on the hooded man’s head and shrank away from the wail that came out of the man’s mouth. The knife slipped out of the man’s hand as Frank’s debilitating magick assaulted the hooded man’s brain. Damien then grabbed the knife, and plunged it into the man’s chest.

  Another wail, a fading struggle, and when Frank released him the assailant f
ell limply to the floor.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Damien said, smiling.

  Frank returned it. “Fashionably late, as always.”

  “As always.”

  “Look out!”

  Damien turned, knife in hand, and swung it in a hard, blind arc. The knife connected with the soft tissue of a neck. Hot blood spilled out over his arm, shoulders, chest, and face, and then he saw; it was Lily. A sound escaped his mouth that was neither a scream nor a choked cry, but somewhere in between. His body went cold, he dropped the knife, and then screamed.

  Lily fell to her knees and collapsed into a heap. As the blood pooled beneath her, Damien could almost see past the elongated teeth and the green glow of her eyes. He knelt beside her, as did Frank, and he ran his fingers through her hair. Her cheek was black and burned, her neck was open, and her blood was spilling onto the floor.

  “I’m sorry, Lily,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Lily?” Frank asked from above. “No… that couldn’t have been Lily.”

  “I can save her,” Damien said, reaching for her face with his hands.

  Frank grabbed his shoulders and wrestled with him. “No!” he said, “That’s not Lily! It isn’t her, Damien!”

  Lily convulsed as the last of her lifeblood trickled out of her throat, and then she stopped moving entirely. Damien screamed, tears fell from Frank’s eyes, but both men knew it wasn’t her. It had looked like her, sounded like her, and acted like her—and now Damien had killed her. But it wasn’t his sister.

  “She was a fake,” Damien said, swallowing the pain. He wiped a tear from his cheek, succeeded only in smearing blood all over himself instead, and stood.