B00AO57VOY EBOK

by Myers, AJ

  I tried to cry out his name, but my voice was locked in my throat along with my screams. The low sound of Bastian’s laughter, the pure triumph I heard in it, was the most terrifying thing I had ever heard.

  And in the middle of the room, I was burning. I could see my hair lifting in the flames. I froze, too petrified to move, and stared. I watched as those strands of hair caught fire. I couldn’t turn away as they turned as black and crispy as the skin on my arms, my chest, my face. I just stood there, trying not to gag, and watched myself burn.

  I snapped out of it, remembering what I was really there for, when my mark started burning fiercely. I reached up to rub it as I ran into the room. I screamed Nathan’s name just as the sword came down on the back of his neck. I fell to my knees, sobbing, as his head rolled toward me and stopped a few feet away. His eyes were open, those beautiful hazel eyes I had loved so much, and I felt my heart shatter into microscopic fragments that no one would ever be able to put back together as I watched the light go out of them.

  I didn’t look away from Nathan’s glazed eyes until a shadow fell over me. Slowly, I looked up to see Bastian standing over me, smiling victoriously. It was more than I could stand. All my pain coalesced into a burning flame of hate that was hotter than any fire could have ever been. I could feel the heat of it spreading through me and welcomed that heat with open arms.

  The last thing I saw was fire, the last thing I felt was vengeance, and the last sound I heard was my own inhuman scream as the world exploded around me in a burst of radiant golden light.

  A sharp pain in my cheek finally tore me out of my nightmare, and I opened my eyes to see Kim standing over me, her hand raised to slap me again if the first one didn’t do the job. The second my eyes opened, she started to cry and grabbed me up in a bone-crushing hug.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t wake up and you just kept screaming and screaming…”

  I patted her on the back consolingly while she cried, my eyes finding and holding Nathan’s. The part of me that was still stuck in the nightmare waited for them to glaze over, but they stayed bright and shining on mine.

  Don’t think about it! Don’t think about it! I told myself, trying to dispel the horrible dream even as it started an instant replay in my head. For some reason, I didn’t think it was a dream at all. It felt like a warning. It had been too vivid, too…real. It was like I had seen the not-too-distant future. My future.

  I had just had a front row seat to the high definition version of my own death.

  At least there was no mystery to solve, no date to guess at and dread. There was only one reason I would have been running down the deserted corridors of Oakhurst Academy in a formal gown. The Black and White Ball was an OA tradition. It signaled the end of Senior Goof Week. And if my nightmare came true, it signaled the end of something much more important.

  My world.

  “Tell me again,” Grams ordered, pacing back and forth in front of me. “I know it’s hard, but I need to know every detail of that dream. You said you were at school, the dance?”

  “Yes,” I said on a deep breath as I prayed for patience, having been through the whole thing umpteen times already. “I don’t know what else I can tell you. It was one of the rooms at the end of the hall in the west wing, and Bastian was standing there swinging this big freaking sword around while Nathan knelt in front of him like a damned idiot—which I’m pretty sure would never happen in real life.”

  “And where were you?” she asked, giving me a sympathetic look.

  “I was in a couple of different places,” I told her—again—sighing. “I was standing in the doorway, but I was also burning in the middle of the room.”

  Fire. Always fire. I had dreamed of burning my whole life. It was why I stayed away from open flames. I had watched myself burn again and again in my dreams. I knew the pain of dying by fire very well.

  Nathan hugged me closer to him and I burrowed into his side like I was trying to escape. His arm around me felt good, made me feel like I was safe. It was all an illusion, though. Neither one of us was safe anymore.

  I had gone over and over it, both with Grams and in my own mind, and I still couldn’t understand what I had seen—well, other than the love of my life having his head chopped off. That I had understood perfectly. The confusing part for me was why. Why would Nathan just sit there and let Bastian kill him?

  “I couldn’t save him,” I whispered as tear filled my eyes.

  “It was just a dream, baby,” Nathan murmured, holding me a little closer and dropping a gentle kiss on the top of my head. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Actually, I’m not so sure about that,” Grams said, giving us a sad look.

  “You mean we are going to die?” I asked, my voice shaking. “Are you trying to tell me all of that was real?”

  “At the very least, a very real possibility,” she said somberly. “The fact that you remember your dream with such clarity, such detail, leads me to believe you may have some precognitive abilities. If that dream was a premonition, it is possible that what you saw were the last moments you will spend on this earth unless we find a way to change it.”

  I turned to look at Nathan, too horrified to speak. I couldn’t watch him die. I knew I couldn’t. I knew because I had seen that firsthand. I had watched my grief and hatred kill me. I could still feel that heat, see that beautiful light, as I self-destructed. It was the only part of my dream I hadn’t told Grams about.

  But what if the future really wasn’t written in stone? What if I could save us both?

  “How do I stop it?” I asked quietly, turning back to Grams. “I can’t watch Nathan die, Grams. If I’m forced to do that, I won’t survive it. So, what do I do?”

  “We,” Nathan corrected. “What do we do?”

  Grams just sat there looking at us for a long, silent moment. There was something about the look in her eyes that made me feel like I had been put under the lens of a huge microscope. I felt like she was searching out all my flaws and weaknesses and magnifying them to ginormous proportions so she could determine just how to remove them. Considering how many flaws and weaknesses I happen to have, it wasn’t exactly a comfortable experience.

  “It’s going to take a lot of work for you to learn everything you need to know in such a short amount of time—not to mention discipline and concentration,” Grams said, sounding unsure. “You’re going to have to work ten times harder than everyone else and then ten times harder than that just to catch up. It won’t be easy, sweetheart.”

  Since when was anything easy for me? I could be disciplined and I was a fast learner. I didn’t think I had ever met a challenge I didn’t like, either. When someone told me I couldn’t do something, I did it just to prove them wrong. I could learn to be a kick ass witch like Kim. I could learn to control my emotions, to be calm in the face of death and danger.

  I just needed Grams to teach me how.

  “So, when do we get started?” I asked in answer, causing her to smile.

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” she said, looking like I had just given her a gift. “In the meantime, I think we should start trying to determine what kind of demon we’re dealing with. I could use some help with the research.”

  “How will that help?” I asked, frowning slightly.

  “In order to banish a demon, you have to know what it’s drawn to, what its weaknesses are,” Nathan answered. “Every demon is different, you see. What will get rid of one won’t necessarily work on another. Determining the true nature of a demon is very hard to do, though, because there are so many of them. You have to look at every single thing it does, watch for patterns and the like. And then you have to hope they’ve repeated those same patterns before and that they have been recorded somewhere down the line. It’s not an easy job.”

  It sounded like an awful lot of ifs had been left out of that little speech. We could get rid of the demon if we could figure out what he was drawn t
o. We could figure out what he was drawn to if he had ever acted out the same little drama before. We could find out if he had only if someone had thought, Hey! I’m being stalked by a psycho demon, maybe I should record the experience for future stalkees to find.

  Like I said, a lot of ifs.

  “Okay, so how do we figure out what kind of demon he is?” I asked, hoping I didn’t look as overwhelmed as I suddenly felt.

  “We’re going to split everyone up into research teams,” Grams said, straightening her shoulders and reaching for a pen and notepad on the table next to her. “There are a great many places we can start looking for information, including the public library here in Moonlight and the one at the school. Since I am on the Council of Elders, I will start going through the archives. I had been saving that as a last resort, seeing as they frown upon it, but desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  “Ember, you and Kimberly start with the library at Oakhurst,” she continued, scribbling away on her notepad. “Nate, you can take Blake and Tyler and start on the library in town. Moonlight has a dark underside to its history. Perhaps something was written down at some point that will help us.”

  I cringed, expecting Nathan to react badly to Grams’ plan. I had been surprised when Tyler had shown up with Mrs. Amelia the night before, but Nathan’s reaction had been so unpleasant that it had raised more than a few eyebrows. He had reverted back to the possessive caveman at the first sight of Tyler—and Tyler had egged him on the whole night like it was funny to him.

  In between being interrogated, that is.

  Grams, using my safety as her excuse for being so rude and intrusive, had grilled Tyler for almost an hour when he arrived. For every question she asked, he gave her an answer that wasn’t really an answer. In the end, she just sat back in her chair and studied him like he was a fascinating new species of insect. The look in her eyes kind of threw me. I would have expected suspicion or even outright mistrust.

  Instead, she looked…curious.

  “Tell me, Tyler,” she said softly, when she had stared at him so long that he had started to fidget, “how long have you looked like you do right now?”

  “A while,” he answered, evasively.

  He gave her a look that basically begged her to let the matter drop, but he didn’t know Grams. She wasn’t going to let it go until she had the answers she wanted. I found myself on the edge of my seat as I waited to see if she would succeed, just as curious as she was.

  “But, you are a witch?” Grams asked, pressing on.

  In answer, he just gave her a look—a pretty damn cold one.

  “No, I thought not,” she said with a slight smile.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” he muttered, his tone bitter, throwing himself back in his chair and giving her an insolent look. “You know, I was under the impression I was here to help with Bastian. If I had known I was going to have to submit to the Inquisition, I would have declined the invitation. Now, do you want my help or not?”

  I frowned at him, confused. Why was he being so secretive about what he was? What could be so terrible that he wouldn’t even admit it to the bunch of freaks he was sitting with? I mean, it wasn’t like any of us were normal, either, you know.

  Grams just gave him a knowing smirk and waved her hand, “Please, by all means, wow us with your expertise, Mr. Jordan.”

  I stared at her, too shocked to even blink. My Grams, the woman who was worse than a dog with a bone when it came to a mystery, who would gnaw and chew at it until she’d sucked all the secrets out of it, had backed down.

  I mentally recorded the time and date. History had been made.

  Not that Grams had actually given up. Not my Grams. No, she was just coming up with a new plan of attack. If I’d been Tyler, I would have told her what she wanted to know just to shut her up. But, so far, Tyler was doing a remarkable job of stumping her. Curious as I was about what he was, I found myself rooting for him to win.

  “I really don’t think it will take three of us to research what little documentation we’re likely to find at the local library, Shea,” Nathan grumbled, apparently not happy about his new research partners.

  “Oh, Blake won’t be there to help,” Grams said, not even bothering to look up.

  “Then why send him with them?” I asked, confused.

  “To play referee,” she muttered.

  Yeah. That was probably a really good idea.

  Having received our assignments, we decided it was time to make our escape while Grams was distracted. I didn’t think I could take another dream replay. Having to repeat it over and over for the better part of two hours had been bad enough.

  “You know what I think?” Nathan murmured once he had me all alone. “I think you need to think about something else for a while. Lucky for you, I know the perfect way to distract you.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked, smiling at the teasing tone of his voice. “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “Just.” He leaned down to nuzzle the side of my neck, his cool breath sending a shiver down my spine that made me feel like I had dissolved into jelly. “Like.” He whispered against my earlobe before catching the soft skin between his teeth and giving it a playful little nibble. “This.”

  His lips closed over mine as he pulled me tighter against him, molding us together. I forgot everything but Nathan and the taste of his lips and the feel of his fingers against my skin. I lost myself in him, let my senses drown out the warning voice in my head and the doubt in my heart.

  “So soft,” Nathan murmured when he decided I needed to come up for air, letting his finger slowly trail across my collarbone. “So beautiful.”

  I had barely caught my breath when he leaned down and caught my lips in another long, drugging kiss that left me aching for more as he started backing us toward the bed. I didn’t stop him when his hand slipped beneath my shirt in search of skin. But when I reached down and worked it up and over my head, Nathan froze like I had doused him in ice water.

  It was only then that I remembered the bruises.

  “You should have had Shea heal you,” he said, his silky voice gruff with worry, running his cool fingers lightly over a particularly nasty bruise on my stomach. “Why didn’t you say anything? These look pretty painful, baby.”

  “Grams was a little pissed, if you’ll remember,” I whispered, trying to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head as he continued tracing my bruises. “I’ll get her to look at them tomorrow.”

  I had been afraid to let her know just how battered and bruised I was, to be honest. The lecture that would have brought on probably would have lasted for days.

  “There’s no need for you to wait until tomorrow,” Nathan purred with a wicked smile. “I can help.”

  “Oh?” I arched an eyebrow at him, pretending my skin wasn’t tingling from the way he was looking at me. “And how are you going to do that?”

  “Being a vampire isn’t all bad,” he whispered pushing me onto the bed gently before ducking his head to place a gentle kiss on one of my bruises. “It does have a few advantages.”

  “Like what?” The gasp that slipped through my lips had absolutely nothing to do with my bruise and everything to do with the feel of his mouth on my skin.

  “Our saliva has healing properties,” he explained, his voice a husky caress that set my entire body on fire. “That’s why you never read about dead bodies showing up with fang marks. No vampire would leave behind that kind of evidence when they can just flick their tongue over them…” He swirled his tongue around my bruise to demonstrate and I nearly came up off the bed, the pleasure that shot through me was so intense. “…and make them disappear.”

  If he continued his explanation, I missed it. I was so lost in the desire he was making me feel that I wouldn’t have heard it if a nuclear bomb had gone off in the room with us. With every touch of his mouth on my skin, I found another reason to give in to him. With every caress of his fingers, a new fantasy. By the time he was finished he
aling all of my wounds, I was nothing more than a burning puddle of sensation beneath him.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing to me?” he breathed raggedly, kissing a line down my spine. I couldn’t even remember turning over, that’s how delirious he had made me. “Tell me you want me, baby.”

  “I want you,” I gasped, trying to turn over. He wouldn’t let me. Using his weight and his mouth to keep where I was, he swirled his tongue around the sensitive spot at the base of my spine. “Please, Nathan!”

  “Tell me you need me,” he whispered, his cool breath fanning against my overheated skin.

  “I need you!” I practically sobbed. If he kept it up, I was going to spontaneously combust for real.

  “Do you trust me, Ember?”

  I froze beneath him. Did I want him? Hell yes! Was I in love with him? Completely and totally. But trust? That one I was still having some trouble with.

  “Do you, Ember?” he asked, softly, turning me over so I would have to look at him.

  “I want to,” I murmured, feeling a wave of sadness that I couldn’t cool the desire in my blood. “I just—”

  “You want to, but you don’t,” he said, cutting me off with a hard smile. “Why is that, do you suppose?”

  He moved away from me and propped his back against the headboard, studying me through narrowed eyes. Part of me was pissed that he would demand trust from me, but the other part of me knew he had every right to ask for it. I had been ready to let him make love to me, but without trust what would that have meant? Nothing. Without trust, it would have been the equivalent of a one night stand.

  “Trust is earned, Nathan,” I muttered, pulling my shirt on. “You can’t just demand someone trust you. Do you trust me?”

  “Implicitly.”

  “Yeah, well it’s easy to trust somebody on a leash, isn’t it?”

  I immediately wished I could take those words back. Nathan flinched like I had slapped him and I saw something in his eyes die. I watched, speechless, as he stood up and walked to the door. I knew I should call him back, that we needed to talk it out, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. For a long moment he just stood there, his shoulders sagging in defeat.