Penn was a parkour junkie, why were we even trying to catch her?
I hated this. I was drinking five—no, ten—coffees after we got out of here. I could get a caffeine high and rip off Crayton’s head and still have enough leftover energy to strangle my best friend’s cousin with.
“Where is she going?” I shouted. Jackson just flailed his shoulders in some ugly approximation of a shrug and kept running.
Ahead, Riley screamed Penn’s name.
The sound tore through the hushed seconds of silence between footfalls, amplified and full of terror. Her fear was a sharp blade stabbing into the ancient air, tearing a hole that let all the oxygen drain out and left room for nothing but bone-deep anxiety.
I tore around a pillar after Jackson, relics passing in my peripheral vision, pieces of people like me trying to cling to themselves throughout lives, and then they were in front of me. Standing on the edge of a pitch black canyon.
There was no end in sight, and I couldn’t see how far it stretched into the distance. It could have gone on forever in every direction for all I could see.
I pulled to a stop in time to stop from crashing into Jackson, barely, and grabbed Riley’s arm to yank her bank from the edge. Strands of hair clung to her wet cheeks, dark skin flushed, a snapshot of hysteria.
Penn stood with her back to the chasm, eyes wide. She pointed at the void. “It was coming from down there!”
She was precariously close to the edge, and a flash of unease wound through me like a string pulled taught.
“Get away from the edge, you lunatic!” I dropped Riley’s arm. “We need to get the hell out of here, we don’t have time to watch you talk to a hole in the ground. This place is messing with your head, Penn.”
Getting angry and mean when you’re scared or hurt is one of the worst things, like a curse. You want to tell someone, Stop, don’t, quit doing this dangerous thing, quit hurting my heart, but all you really do is end up snapping at them, making them think you care less than you do.
I hurt people when I cared about them enough to worry. Another reason not to get close.
She pursed her lips. “There’s something down there. It sounded exactly like—”
The darkness moved behind her, pulsed like black tar flooding from the ground, and then something started to take form. The visage of a woman rose from the chasm, a mask of white smoke and cold air, and she embraced Penn from behind like a lover, and dragged her off the edge.
“No!” Riley dove forward and Jackson and I reached for her at the same time. I shoved her behind me, hoping he was there to catch her, and leaned over the edge.
Darker than the oblivion. Nothing, no sign of Penn, no sign of the bottom. Jagged chunks of stone stuck out from the rock face on the way down.
“I—” I looked at Riley, frozen in shock, and cut myself off.
I don’t think she could survive that. Could anyone?
Ice spread in my chest, a thin barrier between me and full-on hysteria. White petals floating on ashen water. Air flying past a falling body. Impact.
I grabbed Jackson’s arm. “Is there any way we can get down to her?”
Riley had fallen silent, leaning back against the stone wall, hands on her knees, heart spilling over her eyelids and down her cheeks. She stared at the chasm, mouth open, silent. Jackson pulled away and stepped back up to the abyss.
He leaned forward and cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “Penn!”
Seconds passed where the only sound was Riley’s rough, uneven breathing, the shuffling of my feet on the ground, the pounding of my pulse in my ears, in my chest, a drumbeat pumping through everything.
And then, “Hello? Guys?”
“Penn!” Riley flung herself forward so fast she nearly went over the edge herself. “Hold on! We’re gonna find a way down to you, okay? Stay there!”
“What?” Her voice was hoarse. There was a sound like shifting rocks, crumbling dirt. “I think I can—uh—just. . . .”
My breath clouding in the cold air. An unsure glimpse from Riley.
I called down. “Penn?”
The darkness shifted, and Penn levitated into view like the form of the woman from before, like a saint rising above sin. Air whipped around her, toying with her choppy hair. She hovered over us, legs tucked together, arms outspread as if she was treading water. I backed away, nudging Riley along with me. Jackson stood his ground, staring her down as if she were a kid doing magik tricks at a birthday party.
“Oh,” he said.
Penn was flying.
“They. . .those things. . . .” Her voice was raspy and tinged with panic, though she was clearly working to steady it. She sounded like herself. “They crawled into my throat and—it was like they dissolved into me.”
“Air Elementals,” Jackson said. He shook his head. “I never thought I would see this.”
“What the hell is going on?” Riley shoved out from behind me. “Explain.”
Penn moved forward, then down, stepping uneasily onto the edge of the chasm and easing away from it. Jackson didn’t seem worried, which made me less anxious, but Penn didn’t look like someone who’d just fallen into an underground ravine—no clear wounds at all. Just a lot of dust.
There was also the fact that, last time I checked, she couldn’t fucking fly.
“When Elementals are at the end of their natural lives, they can give their essence, so to speak, to a lesser being. mortal, Charmer, Werewolf—doesn’t really matter. What matters is the result.”
“You turn into one of the freaking X-men?” I was starting to sound like Kent.
“You absorb their abilities. You become one with an element.”
Penn didn’t look like she was one with an element. She looked pissed off and scared. Makes two of us.
We didn’t have time for this. “Is she safe?”
“Perfectly. She’s an Elemental. A Sylph.” Jackson was watching her with curious interest, the way you watched a zoo animal from the other side of the cage. I shoved him on the shoulder. “What?”
“Let’s get out of here, then.”
Penn said, “That would be nice.”
Riley had been staring at her cousin, checking her over. Now she faced me, arms crossed. “Are we really doing this? Killing this Crayton guy?”
“We are doing nothing. You and Penn will be back at Temptation. I am going to. . .do what I have to, whatever it is, while Jackson and his guys back me up.”
“I’m coming.” Penn said. “Whatever I am now, it isn’t mortal. I can help, and I’m coming.”
“You’re a Sylph,” Jackson repeated. “And more than welcome to come kick some ass.”
I’d never seen Penn in a fight before, but I’d seen her strength—sinuous muscles, fast, sharp movements—she turned her body into a swift, merciless weapon. I was going to love seeing that meet magik powers.
“Fine, whatever. But Riley stays put. And now we have to get our asses back there and plan. We still have to find his location.”
“This way.” Jackson walked off, leaving us to follow.
We moved on in determined silence, but inside I was still standing back at that ledge watching Penn ascend from the dark, no longer human. Another grain of my world slipped into the other side of the hourglass, another piece of humanity peeled away by magik and monsters.
One with an element. What powers would this leave her with? Magik was like a scar, I’d realized.
It wasn’t something you did, but something that was done to you. You could push it in a certain direction, wrap it around you in some particular way, but at the end of the day it was part of the world, an element of its own, and it did what it wanted. Crashed over you like a wave and pushed you down until the weight of it crushed you or cut into you, left its mark on your soul and skin and sealed itself inside you, another weight to carry.
An entire world shaped by forces none of us could control.
TWENTY-EIGHT
MISUNDERSTANDINGS
> Hunter was the first thing I saw when we stepped into Temptation. The door I’d destroyed had already been replaced with a sleek red one, and the minute it swung aside he was there, a dark figure standing in stark contrast to the luminous dance floor.
Although the lights were all on, the place was deserted of patrons. I watched them flash around him, running into a wall of longing.
It reminded me of the first night we’d formed the bond, him standing against the window of his hotel room, features aglow with the city lights.
Hunter stood alone. A few employees buzzed around the bar, talking in hushed voices. Jackson had called ahead and told them not to let anyone in, and the sidewalk outside was, amazingly, not crowded with a line of eager clubbers, which made me suspect they’d put up some sort of ward magik to keep mortals away. A disguise or wall of some kind. Though I was under the impression now that not many of their customers were mortal at all, at this point.
“Sky.” Hunter looked at me like I was a walking corpse. “I felt you panicking, I thought that—”
“Why haven’t you broken the bond?”
I was aware that the others were watching us with open curiosity—as if they hadn’t had enough of a show tonight—but I didn’t care. The question had been burning inside me like a coal for hours, singing me every time I started to forget it. I had to know.
Hunter wanted to keep the bond. That was a lot to process. And why? Why chain us together for the rest of our lives? Some invisible line strung between us no matter where we went, how far we ran.
Why would you want that? Why would you want that with me?
I was also pretty sure I’d made him hate me earlier.
As for myself? I was still angry. Furiously, bitterly angry. Like a cat that had had its tail yanked on too many times. I couldn’t act like I wasn’t pissed at him.
But I also couldn’t lie myself into believing I wasn’t happy to see him. Alive, safe, not kept in some massive bird cage in the Faerie realm or running from a pack of pissed Werewolves somewhere. Or worse.
I wasn’t letting him see the relief. Bastard.
“I. . .” He rubbed the back of his neck, his dark eyes moved between me and the others and narrowed, as if noticing them for the first time. “Can we talk in private?”
No, I started to say.
Jackson cut me off. “We have time. Now that we know he isn’t rushing off to break the bond. Go talk, lovebirds.”
I was going to kill him.
But Hunter froze. Something akin to error, error, command not recognized, system failure, flashed in his eyes. “Wait. You don’t want me to break the bond?”
“Not until after we kill you father,” I said, and his gaze moved back to me. “Well, not until after I kill him.” I considered that for a second. “Sorry.”
He watched me with that closed-off, inscrutable gaze. It slid over my sides, my crossed arms and narrowed eyes. The heat there made me dizzy.
What was he thinking?
A memory flashed through me of another time he’d worn the same expression—late Saturday night, or maybe early Sunday morning (the proximity of him in the dark was so hot it made the hours melt into each other), his rough, callused hands on my bare skin, moving down my rib cage, gripping my hips hard enough to leave bruises.
“Kill Crayton. Us.”
“Me,” I said, looking away. We couldn’t ask him to kill his own father. “Using your powers, though, I guess.” Was I the only one who could use a shot right now?
“Sky, are you out of your damn mind?”
“We went to the cathedral,” I said, mostly to change the subject, still not looking at him, “and one of the relics reacted to me.”
“A relic?” He strode forward, grabbing my chin and forcing me to look at him. “That explains the shock I felt through the bond, and the vision I had—”
“Vision of what?” Had he seen my fight with the Skinwalker?
I still didn’t know what to make of it. How old was Dezba? When had that vision taken place?
Hunter’s gaze darkened, ink on midnight sky, and he shook his head. “You,” he said. “A fire.”
“Very specific.” I jerked my face out of his grasp, stepping back.
“Whatever,” he snapped. “All of my visions are of fire. I can’t get away from the shit. I’ve stopped being annoyed at how cryptic they are. You aren’t fighting my father without me.”
I glanced back at him. “You don’t—”
“I wasn’t asking your permission. I will chain you to the floor of this club if I have to, but if you try to walk out that door without me you aren’t going to get far. You aren’t fighting him alone—”
“That isn’t your decision!”
He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “—or at all, if that’s what I decide.”
I could feel everyone’s eyes on us, a palpable weight.
“Oh, if you decide? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I needed your permission. I’m not fucking five years old. While we’re at it do you wanna remind me to brush my teeth? Install a nightlight in my room? You’re not my long lost soccer mom, Hunter.”
He opened his mouth and closed it. Emotions bit at me through the bond like thorns drawing beads of blood. Annoyance, amusement, lust, more annoyance. “No,” he said. “I’m your bondmate” —that sounded too close to soulmate for my comfort— “and I’m not going to stand by and watch you die. By all means, Sky, tell us how you plan to kill my father. What powers did you gain from your relic?”
He had me there. Even I had to admit, he had me there.
Whatever talents I’d absorbed from my relic hadn’t awakened or made themselves known yet. I could feel magik coiling through my limbs, though, and the paintbrush, pressing against my thigh in the front pocket of my jeans. For a second I blocked everyone out and tried to force something to rise, but no magik met my call. Nothing bubbled up inside me. Things weren’t going my way today.
Hunter smirked into the silence, perfectly satisfied with himself. “Exactly,” he said. “You’re not going without me.”
“Whatever. We need the extra brute force anyway.”
“Can we go back to the part where you tie him to the floor?” Jackson asked. “Because that was hot.” I glared at him, and he patted his stomach. “What? All that sexual tension sounds like a good meal! Some of us have to eat, you know!”
“Stick a spike up your ass, incubus.”
“Not my scene,” he noted, “but thanks for the suggestion.”
Hunter sighed. “Enough,” he said. “I really need to speak to you in private, Sky.”
“Well that depends,” said Riley, stepping up to my side, “on whether or not he wants to talk to you alone. And whether or not I decide I like you.” She was in full-on protector mode now. He stood no chance against her.
“Stand down, soldier.” I patted her on the shoulder as I stepped around her. “We can talk in the back,” I said, knocking his shoulder aside as I walked by.
Behind me, I heard Jackson make a muffled comment to Riley and then the sound of him lurching away after she smacked him on the arm. Penn spoke up, probably to intervene before they killed each other. I passed through the door into the back hall and couldn’t hear them anymore.
Hunter was close behind me, and he nearly crashed into me as I turned around to face him. This was what we were together, though, wasn’t it? A mess of accidents waiting to happen.
I had already resigned myself to hate every second of this conversation, the white-hot closeness of him lingering just out of my reach, all of his emotions projected in his eyes, filtering through the bond more clear than my own. I didn’t even want to talk: I wanted to shove myself against him, reach around his neck and pull his stubborn mouth to mine—to kiss it or bite it hard enough to draw blood—I didn’t really care which, as long as his lips were on mine.
I was fascinated by people’s lips. We spoke with them, kissed with them, licked and poked and bit and sobbed and screamed with them. Somet
imes I think of all the boys I’ve kissed, all the broken sobs I’ve loosed and the cigarettes I’ve smoked and the lies I used these lips to tell and break, and think that if anyone stares at my mouth for too long, they’ll find all my secrets just hanging there on the edge of my smile, dripping from my gums like blood.
I wanted to taste his, all the secrets he kept, pieces of him he hid from me. I had no right to them, and I didn’t care. I wanted them anyway.
The door fell shut behind us, and he leaned against the white cinder block wall beside it, brooding down at me.
Shadows of Ourselves Page 30