by Cristy Rey
Bound. That’s exactly what Cyrus was: bound to the Incarnate. And he wanted no part of it. There was no room for any of that in Cyrus’ cursed life. He hardly committed himself to a pack, and he was ready to leave them at this moment. There was no way he could commit himself to some god-kin child. What would he do for her anyway? Protect her? Even the thought of that was a joke.
“Then it’s her magic,” the witch assessed. “She must truly be the Incarnate if her magnetism is such that it draws your wolf out when otherwise unbidden. Do you see the danger a creature like that poses to our kind? Can you imagine the wide scale devastation of a child like that unleashed to walk among us?”
“Can you make it stop? Can you fix what’s happening to me?”
“I’ll make you a deal, Moonchild.”
Cyrus hated when witches called his kind ‘moonchildren.’ It was a way of putting them in their place. It lowered their rank to something akin to peons of nature, beasts of lunar circumstance and nothing else. But they were so much more than that. Witches thought that they could call down the moon and had authority over his kind, over everyone’s kind. But they were wrong. They were dead wrong. Cyrus’ lip curled into a snarl and Bernadette sighed exasperatingly and rolled her eyes not unlike the petulant teenager she’d just acquired.
“I’ll tell you what,” the witch continued. “You should stay in town for a few days. I’ll keep you abreast of the situation with the Incarnate. If it turns out that she is the one we’ve been looking for, then I’ll likely need to staff around her. She is very powerful. Even if that child is not the Incarnate, she is extremely gifted.”
“Is there a chance that she isn’t what you’re looking for?”
“In my opinion, no. She is the Incarnate. The genuine article. And she needs to be restrained. It can only be done the way that I have envisioned it though not all agree. She will be regarded highly among us and she’ll be tutored in my ways and grow to be a very successful woman. Ultimately, she will inherit my enterprises.
“What I want from you, however, Cyrus Barrow, is the assurance that you will tame your beast. I cannot and I will not place that very special package in hands that tremble from failing restraints to keep from harming her. She is an exceptionally gifted girl and, as Incarnate, we will have to be very careful about what power is made accessible to her. Do you understand?”
“Truthfully, no,” Cyrus answered flatly. “But I don’t care. I’ll take it.” He pushed up to his legs and shoved his seat out from behind him. As he walked away, Cyrus called out over his shoulder, “Keep in touch, witch.”
True to her word, Bernadette kept in touch. A couple of days later, she called with the word that she was certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Sunday was the Incarnate. He’d been given the spiel that all the other bodyguards had been given in anticipation of the Incarnate’s induction ceremony into Bernadette’s bloated coven. There were policies to follow and unbreakable rules that could cost lives as penalty for failure to adhere to.
On the first night that Bernadette held Sunday’s head and dropped the wool of forgetting over the child’s eyes, she and Cyrus had an understanding. Cyrus was to head Bernadette’s protection team and coordinate security for the mansion built like a military compound. He was to plan for attempted kidnappings of the Incarnate and assassination attempts against Bernadette. He was to plug up any gaps in security that would let villains in.
Because of the child’s particular effect on Cyrus, however, he was never allowed to make contact with her. The witch promised to help remedy his ailment under that single strict condition.
For two weeks, Cyrus took store of Bernadette’s compound and pored over blueprints. He identified areas of lax security and wrote up plans to ensure that all vulnerabilities were covered. Bernadette wasn’t kidding when she said that hers was a burgeoning empire. The Seattle storefront for the tele-psychic enterprise was jelly beans compared to the base of operations. On the grounds resided a coven of thirteen men and women, seasoned witches subordinate to Bernadette. She was ‘Mother Bernadette’ and her children were as committed to the cause of the Incarnate as she was.
Since they’d arrived, the estate was abuzz with activity. Every second of every day, someone was dashing down the hallway to and from the dungeon where they held the child for the ritual. Cyrus never saw inside, but he could hear the chanting echo down the hall. He could also hear the screams… until they stopped.
This was the Incarnate’s first night outside of the coven’s torture chamber. Cyrus stood guard outside the room he’d placed her in to ensure that was the case. According to Bernadette, she was no longer a threat to anyone under her service. Bernadette requested that, on this one occasion, Cyrus make contact with the girl, if only to prove that she was no longer a threat. He was to transfer her from the ritual area to her new room.
Crumbled into a ball of oozing, broken, and tender flesh, the girl he’d carried in his arms was nothing Cyrus couldn’t handle. Yet what her survival signified created a panic in him. When she looked up through thin slits to his face as her head lolled on his shoulder, he caught himself wondering if he shouldn’t just drop her and run, get the Hell away from her before she destroyed him. The witch seemed to sense it, too. As soon as Cyrus stepped out of the room where he deposited Sunday, Bernadette met him in the hall.
“You see now that she is fixed,” she said, grinning and with a glint in her dark eyes. “Yet, you, Mr. Barrow, are not fixed. Let this be a lesson to you about the magnitude of her ability. Be it the strength of her magnetism or some unshakeable consequence of your curse, you will do well to sever yourself from her entirely. As obligated.”
Cyrus nodded sharply with stone-like expression before pulling the book from his back pocket and settling into the chair across the hall.
“I’ll watch her for the night and then I’ll assign one of the others to take over.”
Just as Bernadette reached the doorknob of Sunday’s room with her thin hand, Cyrus added.
“A part of our agreement was to rid me of this. You’re beholden to your end of that too.”
She looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with him for a moment, assaulting him with unspoken intimidation. Her narrow speculation would have chilled a lesser man to the bone. . To Bernadette, she had all the power and Cyrus was nothing but an employee.
“We are beholden to it,” she eventually said. Sharply, she nodded, and turned away again.
The door shut and a wall between them, Cyrus’ ears were keen enough to hear within. After overseeing the physical and psychic two-week-long torture session, Bernadette encouraged the girl in whispers and showered her with loving coos. Who was he kidding? Those weren’t torture sessions. Sessions end. What happened to Sunday was still going on. Even though she’d been moved from the sigil-etched bare-bones dungeon to the plush guest bedroom upstairs in the main house, she was still a captive.
When Bernadette spoke, her voice hummed with spell-casting. Cyrus had enough experience with witch shit to know what she was doing. He could have smelled the magic from a mile away.
“It will grow, Incarnate,” Bernadette said. “It will grow and you will be a beautiful girl once more.”
Under the witch’s hands, Sunday cried into the soft white pillow on the bed. He could hear her heaving sobs sucking and vomiting breath and spit. While he’d carried her to the room last night, her eyes were so heavily bruised that they’d swollen shut. Her body was covered in long slashes, some that had started to scab over and others that were freshly made. She’d shivered. No matter how much heat radiated from his chest as he’d cradled her against it, she hadn’t stopped. The girl might as well have been having a seizure for how much she shook.
Any mundane, having gone through what she had gone through, would have surely died. She, on the other hand, survived nearly two weeks of torture. She was but an infant, fourteen years-old, yet she’d displayed incomparable endurance and strength. As much as he wanted to hate her for the way
she ignited his fury, he couldn’t help but be impressed.
That she survived meant something. It meant that she was, indeed, the Incarnate, just as Bernadette suspected. It meant that, in the body of that battered and broken teenager, was a power so great that it could level a civilization. It meant that no one was safe. No one magical or mundane. If there had been any doubt to the threat Sunday posed to the werewolf earlier, there was none now. In spite of all that potential horror, Cyrus wanted to protect her. He wanted to wrap her in the tsunami of his unhinged ferociousness and hide her away from the masses, even himself.
He wanted none of this dichotomy. Not the rage, and not the possessiveness. Killing her would end it all, but he was true to his word. If Bernadette could save him from himself, then he could one day walk away from the girl unscathed. That was the only conclusion that mattered.
The way Sunday cried under the old witch’s hand now, helpless, afraid, and confused, made Cyrus flush with shame at his cowardice. Cyrus was never afraid. He was afraid of nothing. Not even, he would convince himself, of that little girl or the demon-goddess that lived within her.
“I will teach you all the ways of the Incarnate and you will shine as a star shines, only brighter. Yours will be the light of the sun and we will all be strong together.”
Bernadette’s words permeated the barriers between him and the pair. Those words planted seeds of hope in Sunday. They wove a spell of song onto her body so that she would heal quickly and thoroughly. It hummed down the hallway so that even Cyrus could feel its potency from where he sat.
The witch emerged from the room an hour later. Cyrus met Bernadette’s beaming enthusiasm in the hallway with a raised eyebrow and a glower. They were still in uncharted territory, regardless of Bernadette’s attitude. She slowly walked to Cyrus and stopped a foot away from his boot that jutted nervously. It was the only sign of anxiety in his demeanor and, in truth, it was less anxiety than old habit, but Bernadette hadn’t known that. He hooked his finger between the pages where he’d stopped reading, and closed the book over it.
“How’d that go?” Cyrus asked without a hint of affect. Business. The only thing he cared about the Incarnate was business.
“I don’t think we’ll have anything to worry about from her,” Bernadette said happily.
She turned to rest her back on the wall and hugged herself with all the satisfaction of having fulfilled a lifelong dream. When she closed her eyes and smiled, tears tugged at the corners of her eyes and ran silently down her cheeks.
“I finally found her and she is so wonderful. Thank you for bringing her to me, Cyrus. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You cannot know the good thing you have done. Not just for me, but for all of our kind.”
Cyrus’ foot stopped moving. For a second, he wondered if it wasn’t a bit odd that Bernadette thanked him for doing something awful and enabling her to do something even worse to an innocent little girl. His forehead wrinkled as he took in the sight of this woman and how she was so happy that she was shedding tears. She had just walked out of the room of what she claimed was a harbinger of all things horrible that could befall mankind if she went unchecked and, after singing her a goddamn lullaby, she was sure that everything would be smooth sailing.
If it was that easy to tell, then, really, maybe Bernadette was a little full of shit. But, in his world, there was really no point in asking questions to either suspend or support his suspicions. So what if she had acquired the Incarnate for her own benefit rather than to save the world from devastation at her hands? It made absolutely no difference, not to Cyrus and not to anyone else who cared. Considering no one else had come after her when she’d been kidnapped, Cyrus was banking that not many people cared about Sunday, anyway.
After a minute or so, Bernadette opened her eyes and drew a deep breath, exhaling shakily as she trembled with happiness. She pushed herself off the wall and patted Cyrus’ shoulder as she walked past him and back to her room. Alone there, with the Incarnate just at the other side of a door a few feet from where he sat, Cyrus turned back to his book and propped his elbows onto the armrests of his chair and kept reading from where he’d left off.
CHAPTER SEVEN
One month later…
The soles of her boots squeaked on the recently mopped tiles as Sunday crossed from the front door to the stairway. After a full afternoon of shopping, she was pooped, but not too pooped to play with all her new things when she got to her bedroom. The over-long sleeves of her oversized knit sweater hid her fists. In them, she carried bags of goodies from her trip into Seattle with Astor, her traveling guard. Sunday still didn’t know why anyone would want to hurt them, but the threat was real enough that they required constant security.
Astor was a big guy, way bigger than most of the people at the house. Even though she was tall for a girl her age, he towered over her. Inky curls cascaded down his back. His hair was long, much longer than Sunday’s which was only now starting to grow into something other than a buzz cut. He wasn’t exactly mundane. She could sense that much about him, but she didn’t know exactly what he was. Bernadette taught her that some things were better left unknown, and, like everything else that she said, Sunday abided by that tenet like gospel.
When Astor thought of how annoying Sunday’s high-pitched squeaky steps were, she cocked an eyebrow and tilted her chin to look at him. The corner of her lip curled up into a dimple and, with a glimmer in her whiskey eye, she winked at him.
“You could be a little more cautious,” Astor quickly answered.
“Everyone knows we’re here anyway,” she said, pursing her lips. “There are cameras at the gate. You should know about that, Mr. Big Buff Security Guy.”
Astor barked a chuckle and shook his head at the girl. He was fond of her, and she knew it. Over the few weeks that he’d been assigned to her detail, she’d endeared herself to him. The same could be said for anyone in their entourage, really. Everyone liked Sunday, and Sunday liked everyone. If they lived on the estate, then they were as good as family to her. Even though she knew that some people, like Astor, were paid service personnel, she loved them just the same.
Family, companionship. They were abstract words, big words. What they signified was something so much more than what could be held in one’s hand. Yet, Sunday felt them tangibly. Astor, Bernadette, Justin, Genevieve, Theodora, and the dozen or so others, were patches of the quilt that wrapped her up tightly and kept her warm. Within her, their auras danced and, with that energy, Sunday came alive. She was powerful. She was glorious. And she was grateful. It didn’t matter that they quivered when they recognized the strength of her abilities. She was nonetheless humbled by them.
Just when Sunday tried to think of a time before she knew any of them, she stopped dead in her tracks.
Nothing.
She simply couldn’t remember a time before living in Bernadette’s house or before Astor went everywhere with her. If she tried to think of a time when she had long hair or when she’d made a new friend outside the gates, she hit yet another wall of the unknown.
Astor stopped when he realized the absence of Sunday’s noisy steps. Over his shoulder, his bright blue eyes narrowed as they inspected her. She was lost in thought, gaze fixed to the middle of the staircase, looking at nothing.
“Sun?” Astor started, his raspy voice pitched with question. “Babe, you alright?” His brow was tense now, skin pulling tightly around his eyes until all his features were pinched with speculation.
Sunday didn’t answer. Rather, she stayed locked in her own head, playing ping pong with a missing ball and the unseen walls in her mind. As the seconds ticked by, her face hardened with tension. Her eye twitched, and her nose crinkled.
Astor’s face reddened, and he dropped the bags he’d been holding. The thump as they hit the tile got Sunday’s attention. She snapped into the moment, and shook her head free of her thoughts. After a deep breath, her expression softened until her forehead was once again smooth of worry lines. When
her eyes met his, they were sparkling again, and alive with awareness.
“You okay, Sun?”
“Of course, jerk!” she returned with a mischievous grin. Playfully lobbed insults were just another one of her endearing quirks. Astor sighed heavily, straightening his back and releasing all concern for her as he exhaled. His favorite fourteen year-old was back, and she was spunky and sassy as ever.
“You had me worried for a second there. You were lost in space. Dazed like a zombie.”
Sunday rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue.
“You’re such a weirdo,” she mumbled, loud enough for her bodyguard to hear. “Can we just get upstairs with all my stuff?”
Bernadette came into the room just as Astor placed the shopping bags onto Sunday’s bed. It was the same room she’d always lived in at the estate. For as long as she could remember, these painted walls had surrounded her. Today, she’d add a My Bloody Valentine poster. In another week, perhaps another band’s would accompany it. Maybe in a few more years, she’d be over her shoegaze phase, and then she’d peel them off and redecorate entirely.
“I hope you enjoyed your little trip into the city, because we have quite a bit of work to do later,” Bernadette said as she plopped down beside the bags on Sunday’s bed.
Bernadette grinned as she always did. Faint lines fanned around her eyes and lips. To see the only woman she’d known as a mother happy made her happy. Instantly, Sunday skipped across the room and threw her arms open to grab Bernadette in a hug as soon as she reached her. Bernadette had the infallible ability to affect Sunday’s emotions so completely. Sunday felt every bit of what Bernadette was feeling, and vice-versa. A thousand invisible strings tied them together. They were one.
If Sunday bothered to think about it, she might have found it strange. But she didn’t. When it came to Bernadette, she never questioned her intense adoration and devotion.