by Cecy Robson
Emme reached in further, and clenched me within her magic. She meant to help me, but then something changed.
My back abruptly bowed, my spine cracking like something out of a chiropractor’s wet dream. That earned me another “Holy shit” from Taran. Emme screamed and yanked her hands from mine. Through my muddled mind I could sense her light cocooning me and levitating me from the floor. My tigress licked her chops excitedly and propelled through my sternum, severing our connection. I tried to tilt my head to see where she’d gone. She’d never left me before. Through my haze, I caught her prancing around the room like freaking Bambi.
My sisters screamed louder. Taran’s hysteria made her especially vocal. “Put her back in. Put her back in now. Goddamn it, Emme—get her tigress back in ’er!”
“I-I-I don’t think I can.”
“Omigod, omigod. She’s looking at us.” Shayna’s panic boosted her voice several octaves higher. “Why is she looking at—omigod, she’s gonna eat us!”
Their voices morphed into distant whispers while the most painful of my memories swirled like a windstorm and demanded my attention. My sobs released harder, raw at first, and violent enough to jerk my body. But with each ragged breath, the brunt of my memories left me.
Relief washed over me with each drop of my tears. To say I’d never again hurt from my past would be a lie. I knew the memories would always haunt me. But I hadn’t realized the depth of my emotional wounds until Emme’s power reduced them to mending scars.
Time slowed as my body twirled in the air like a petal falling from a rose. I opened my heavy lids after what seemed like forever to find my cuts healed and my golden tigress sitting with her back to me. Her tail flickered from side to side as she examined my sisters with amused interest. Smooth blond-and-white-striped fur draped close to four hundred pounds of lean muscle. Although I’d felt her presence stirring within me for years, I’d never really seen her until that moment. My God, she was beautiful. I could have stared at her for hours.
My poor sisters, conversely, weren’t exactly awed by my beast. They huddled in the corner, clutching each other. I tried not to laugh. So much for stopping me at all costs.
My tigress glanced over her shoulder at me as my feet touched down and Emme’s residual glow faded. The beast tilted her head as if gauging whether I was ready for her. I was. It may have been minutes or moments since she’d left me, but they were minutes and moments too long. I smiled, my eyes watering. For the first time since she’d birthed within me, I accepted her. I wanted and needed her with me.
“Here, kitty-kitty.”
She shared the same olive eyes as me. I guess we were more alike than I’d ever given her credit for. That familiar stare widened when I called her to me. She was happy that I wanted her back. In one graceful leap, she pounced with front paws extended and tackled me against the concrete.
My sisters screamed as I was slammed backward. I lost my breath from the strike and from my tigress’s soul merging with mine. My body convulsed violently, riled by the unfathomable boost of her power. Energy fired through every nerve, every synapse of my sprawled and bewildered form, causing one hell of a roar to rip through my throat.
The windows and garage door rattled, sending my sisters into full-out panic. “Shit, shit, shit. Emme, heal her!”
“I can’t touch her, she’s seizing!”
“Just do it!”
Emme gripped my shoulders as my body melted into the floor.
Oh, my God!
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t smell.
I tried to flail my arms, but I no longer possessed them. My body broke into a billion minute particles. Like sand passing through a colander, what remained of me slid through the heavily packed earth. Thank heavens, my tigress shoved past my alarm and took control. Instinctively she stopped our descent into the ground and lurched us up and across.
Just when I thought I would die of asphyxiation, I broke through the soil. I spit out the dirt clogging my mouth while my hands swiped at my eyes, trying to clear the grit out so I could see where the hell I was. My body remained buried in the earth from the waist down. I’d appeared in the yard next to a row of scraggly bushes, a few feet from the old garage.
And I wasn’t alone.
Emme’s filthy and stunned face met mine and her grip on my shoulders tightened. She screamed—holy hotness, did she scream!—alerting Taran and Shayna to our whereabouts. They raced outside, and joined Emme in voicing their terror.
“Stop!” I yelled over their shrieks. “You’re hurting my ears!” Good grief. My supersized hearing had at least doubled in acuity.
Emme panted against me, mud oozing from her mouth and chunks of dirt falling from her hair. “Wh-what was that?”
Taran and Shayna didn’t wait for an explanation. Taran reached beneath my arms while Shayna took hold of Emme. They tried to haul us upward, only to knock heads. “Son of a bitch.”
My tigress nudged me, directing me once more. “Wait, I think I can get us out,” I said. “Hang on to me, Emme.”
She clutched me as if we dangled from a cliff. I held my breath, and concentrated on forcing my body upward. Well, seems like I concentrated a little too hard. Emme and I were flung from the soil and toppled onto the grass. We rolled off each other in opposite directions, both of us breathing hard.
Shayna loomed over us. “Ceel … did you just travel underground?”
I swatted more dirt from my eyes. “I think so.”
“Like a gopher, Ceel?”
I thought back to how every bit of me and Emme had dissolved into minute particles. “Um. No. Not exactly.”
Emme turned her head in my direction. “We shifted like, like, flour.”
I examined my hands, grateful my fingers seemed to be in the right place. “I guess that’s a good way to describe it.”
Emme rose on wobbly legs with her palms out, wary of the ground as if it might swallow her whole. She patted the back of her shorts. “Oh, no, I think I lost my phone in our … travels.” She peered at the patch of overgrown weeds we’d emerged from. Aside from being flattened, the section appeared undisturbed. “What else do you think you can do?”
I pushed up on my elbows. Dirt smeared every inch of me. “I don’t know. I’m almost afraid to find out.”
“No shit,” Taran muttered. She stared at her hands where mini-bolts of lightning sizzled from her fingertips. “Girlfriends, this could be really good or really, really bad.”
Okay. That was new. I stood, mesmerized by all her sparks, when the gate to the yard squeaked. Nieve stood there, watching us quietly. A single tear fell from her eyes. She nodded once as if satisfied and then ran for all she was worth. I raced after her. “Nieve, wait!”
As fast as my tigress moved us, I just barely caught her disappearing around the block. My sisters staggered to a halt behind me. “How did she …”
My stare narrowed. “I don’t know, Shayna. But she’s headed back toward the neighborhood we found her in. We can’t let her get away.”
The new me could have caught her, but although my sisters possessed heightened power, no way would my tigress and I chance abandoning them. So we jogged along as fast my sisters’ pace allowed until we reached the apartment complex that we’d searched earlier.
My tigress was sure we could find her by scent. But there was no trail to pick up. For the first time, it occurred to me that I hadn’t caught even a trace of Nieve’s aroma. The realization unnerved me. Everyone and everything carried a scent as unique as their being.
Except Nieve …
“She doesn’t carry a scent,” I said aloud.
Taran’s head jerked in my direction. “What the hell does that mean? I thought you said every living thing has one.”
“They do.”
Emme slowed to a stop, breathing hard from the run. “Could it be that she’s in league with Griselda?”
I attempted to dust off the dirt coating my arms. “If she was, she wouldn’t ha
ve led us to the altar.”
Taran glared. “Unless she thought it would kill us.”
“I don’t think so. My tigress gets pissy around people she perceives as a threat. She didn’t with Nieve. Come to think of it, she didn’t even react.”
Shayna tapped her bat against her palm. “Unless she didn’t realize she was there. If she couldn’t sniff her, maybe she couldn’t see her either.”
My beast stirred within me, riled by my sisters’ suspicions. I soothed her back into quiescence, surprised by how easily and well she responded to my efforts. “Look, I’m not sure what’s happening. But we need to find out—especially if Nieve can somehow prevent us from helping Danny. Come on, we need to hurry.”
Emme gripped my wrist before I could step onto the old stoop. “Wait. If you can’t smell her, how do you know which way to go?”
My head involuntarily wrenched up and I found myself gazing at the upper stories of the battered old apartment building. “I don’t know. But something is luring me this way. Let’s just hope we don’t have to kill it.”
We climbed three flights of steps and cut right, into a long hall of closed doors. I continued forward, passing each one until I reached the last door. Before I knocked, I knew we were in the right place. I could sense Nieve’s presence, although I couldn’t exactly tell how. I rapped my knuckles against the splintering brown door and stepped away from the threshold, just in case someone answered with a spray of bullets. Yeah, I’d seen my share of crime shows.
“Who’s there?” an old woman croaked in Spanish.
I motioned to Emme, knowing her voice would sound the least threatening. “Pardon me, ma’am. Is Nieve home?” she asked in the same language.
There was a brief pause. “You know my granddaughter?”
Emme glanced at us before answering. “Um, yes. From, um, school.”
The door creaked open and a woman dressed all in black answered the door. I wasn’t tall by any means, but I absolutely towered over her hunched form. Cataracts dulled her soft brown eyes. It was a wonder the poor woman could see at all. She motioned us forward. “Welcome, dear ones. I’m sure she’d like the company.”
Taran and I exchanged stares before I took my first step forward. Roaches scurried along the battered wood floor as we slowly crossed the small alcove. A tiny kitchen was crammed against the wall on the left, and what appeared to be a small bedroom lay directly ahead.
But I barely noticed anything past that, too stunned to move when I caught sight of Nieve.
She lay semi-reclining in an old metal hospital bed with her long braids draped over her bony shoulders, dressed in the same stained pink shirt we’d seen her in just minutes ago. The nasal cannula taped against her sunken cheeks whistled with the oxygen futilely trying to ease her short pained breaths, and thick white fluid from an IV dripped into a vein in her left arm.
Nieve didn’t acknowledge our presence. Then again, how could she? She was barely alive.
The old woman gave us her back and shuffled to her kitchen, oblivious to our stupefied expressions. She poured soup into a bowl and then returned with it and sat beside Nieve. With her free hand she placed a dish towel over Nieve’s chest, as best as her arthritic and swollen fingers would allow. “I’m not very good at feeding her,” she admitted, her wrinkles etched with sadness.
Emme closed in, taking in Nieve’s emaciated form with eyes that brimmed with impending tears. “I-I’m so sorry. We didn’t realize she was sick.” She placed her small hand over Nieve’s forehead and called forth her touch. Nieve’s grandmother glanced up, confused by the source of the light. She stood and went to the windows, tugging the drapes closed.
Emme withdrew her touch as the woman returned to the bed. She shook her head at us. Her power failed to have an effect on Nieve’s condition. That wasn’t a big surprise. Emme could only heal injuries, not illnesses. The sudden boost in her power didn’t seem to have changed that. “How long does Nieve have?” she asked the old woman.
Taran and Shayna gasped, surprised by Emme’s bluntness. But my little sister’s hospice training told her death wasn’t far from finding Nieve. Her grandmother didn’t answer, but her quivering lip was enough of a response. So were the tears that glazed her opaque stare.
I didn’t argue or attempt to offer hope. I knew Emme was right. While I’d failed to pick up Nieve’s scent before, I could smell her now. Her scent of drying autumn leaves was unmistakable. So was the aroma of life leaving her body. Nieve’s lungs would soon take their last agonized breath. And there wasn’t a damn thing any of us could do about it.
“Why?” Shayna clutched her bat tight, trying not to cry. “Why is she like this?”
Nieve’s grandmother poured a bit of soup from a spoon into Nieve’s mouth. Most of the broth dribbled down Nieve’s slack jaw and onto her neck. The woman wiped Nieve’s skin with the towel, her crackling voice hoarse with regret. “Because bad things happen to good girls who stand against the dark ones.”
Chapter Eight
We gave Nieve’s grandmother every last dime in our pockets and silently whispered our thanks to the cousin we’d found too late in life. We didn’t speak again until we returned to our car. As much as we wanted to stay, we couldn’t help her. But we could still help Danny.
The people gathered near our sedan quickly scattered. Dirty, blood-smeared women, I supposed, had that effect on them.
I yanked open the rear car door and hurried inside. “Shayna, text Danny and let him know we’re on our way.”
She whipped out her phone from her pocket and buckled herself in before sending the text. Taran peeled away from the curve and toward the back roads leading to Route 22. “Okay, this whole thing wasn’t batshit crazy or anything.”
“No, not at all,” I muttered.
Taran stopped at the light. “What I don’t get is if Nieve’s half dead, then what the hell were we talking to?”
I shrugged and slumped in the backseat, suddenly unbearably tired despite the anxiety racing through my bloodstream. “Near as I can figure, I think it’s a fragment of what remains of her.”
Shayna turned around from the passenger seat to face me. “Do you think we can help her? I mean, she helped us and she wasn’t even, like, totally real.”
Emme played with her palms. “I don’t think anything can help her, Shayna. From what I can tell, she has a week at most. I’m surprised she’s held on this long.”
I leaned my head back, trying to get comfortable. My unease at finding Nieve in her ailing state and my anxiety over the fight we still faced with the vamps made it impossible. “She seemed so thin when we saw her. But I never would have guessed her condition was related to illness—or whatever has caused her slow death.”
“You mean whoever.” Taran peered at me through the rearview mirror. “You know Griselda or her hell spawn did this to her. Nieve admitted as much when we spoke to her—so did her grandmother.”
“I think you’re right. If she had more time, maybe we could …”
My voice trailed off at the sight of the misery edging its way along Emme’s gentle features. “She doesn’t have the time we would need, Celia.”
Yeah. And neither did Mr. Matagrano.
All was quiet except for the hum of the tires against the road and the rock ballad playing on low volume through the speakers. “You know what I think?” Shayna said after a while. “I think Nieve’s been waiting for us to come along.” She smiled softly at Taran’s quizzical stare. “It’s not such a crazy thought, T, when you consider how she came to us.”
Taran focused on the road. “Maybe. Maybe not. But like Emme said, there’s nothing we can do for her now. God willing, the poor thing will find her peace soon. In the meantime, the goddamn night isn’t over yet.”
“It’s sure not.” I leaned my head against the glass, trying to figure out a way to find Danny’s dad. The locating spell wouldn’t work without Mr. Matagrano’s fresh blood. And the poor man probably had none to spare with Giovann
a …
My eyes closed without permission. I hadn’t expected to doze, much less dream. But I did.
I walked through a white haze as a soft breeze swept my long hair against my bare breasts and shoulders. Despite my toned muscles and flat stomach, I hated being naked. Nakedness represented vulnerability.
And I refused to be vulnerable.
But there, wherever there was, wasn’t a place to fear. The sense of peace and safety that drifted with each soft caress of the breeze lulled my fears and assured me that I was protected. I thought I was alone until the hulking form of a tall male stepped through the thickening haze.
My eyes widened, but they didn’t help me see. This man wasn’t really a man, he was more like a shadow, if shadows could manifest into a physical form. He chuckled and spoke in a deep-timbred voice intermixed with soft, gruff growls. “So, you found a way to let me in, little tigress.”
“Huh?”
I stepped away as he advanced, but my actions didn’t dissuade him. He smiled. Or I thought he did. Crap, what exactly was happening here?
“Don’t you know me, Celia?” he asked.
“No.”
I didn’t see him move, I just felt a strong arm gently circle my waist while a large hand passed through my hair to skim along my bare back. Soft lips swept along my jawline. “Are you sure you don’t know me?” he rumbled.
In my reality, I would have shoved him away, but not before I snapped off at least one of his wandering hands. But every stroke, every whisper of his warm breath, soothed and enticed me. My lids fluttered. “Oh, no … I’d remember you …”
His heartbeat pounded against my breasts, reassuring me with each rhythmic pulse. This was right—no, he was right.
Somewhere deep within my mind, I recognized this male as another preternatural. One that wasn’t a part of me, but one I had no desire to abandon. Perhaps he was the start of REM sleep—a developing dream or fantasy of what I really needed in a man. Or maybe, just maybe, he was real.