Taking Back Sunday

by Cristy Rey

  They drove around in circles, scouring the street for the Incarnate. With the windows rolled down, they pushed their senses further than humanly possible, trying to pick up her scent. She was out there somewhere, and Cyrus knew she wouldn’t leave.

  If she hadn’t left yet, she’s not going to leave now.

  “She didn’t know about him,” Angel stressed. “She asked what I’d done to a witch. I didn’t know what the Hell she was talking about. She stopped asking about it and asked how I knew her. That’s when she put the Voodoo on me. I fought it, but I had to tell her. She screamed that I was lying to her, but in my mind, I could hear her believing me. She was thinking a million things at the same time, but she wasn’t thinking them to me. She was in her own head. I heard something break. That’s when she grabbed her head. She pulled at her hair. She was going to rip it right out, then everything went to shit. Cars crashed. A window blew out. And she fucking dipped.”

  Angel paused, dark eyes digging sternly into Cyrus.

  “And you. She knew your name. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me how the Incarnate knows your name, when she couldn’t remember your face even a few fucking days ago?”

  Now she knows. She knows everything.

  And now Angel was going to know everything, too. Cyrus had allowed his partner to believe that the hunger for capture was what had driven him these past few days, but the reality was anything but. Hearing that she’d lost control of her ability for the second time in hardly a day, Cyrus’ mind replayed her howls of pain like a broken record. Awful. Guttural. Ripping through her delicate throat like razors. Searing into his eardrums. Revelation upon revelation of her past. The chain Angel had heard break apart in Sunday’s mind, Cyrus had felt slamming into his chest the previous night.

  She had no idea. And now she knows everything.

  What Sunday had seen in their minds, she agonized over. She had to have known the truth, now. Angel had felt every emotion as it washed over Sunday. It wasn’t just Cyrus’ betrayal that she suffered; it was the betrayal of what she believed about her entire life.

  “We have to get to her,” Cyrus demanded. His heart beat loudly in his chest. The words flew rapidly from his lips. “If she doesn’t know who she really is, that could explain why she hasn’t gone home. She’s afraid. She doesn’t have anywhere to go.”

  “Maybe she’s not what everyone thinks she is,” Cyrus bellowed, slamming his fist to his thigh. It would bruise, but it would heal quickly. Such was their werewolf gift.

  “It’s not our call, Cyrus!” He was infringing on a delicate balance of power, but Angel didn’t care. Fueled by frustration, pack pecking order didn’t matter anymore. “You can’t deny that she’s dangerous. No matter what the hell is going on between you two, you can’t deny that she killed all those people.”

  For all these years, Cyrus and his pack had been led to believe that the Incarnate was singularly dangerous. The child they abducted and laid at Bernadette’s feet had to be controlled in order for her power to be contained. Age-old wisdom made sense in the case of the Incarnate: the Devil you know is better than the Devil you don’t. Better to have Bernadette, a human, get her hands on the Incarnate than allow the Incarnate to reach her full potential in the hands of much more powerful creatures. Better to have her under control than let her roam free.

  “Maybe it was Bernadette. She was a power-hungry bitch set on world domination. I was there, Angel. I knew her. I worked for her. Maybe she lied about Sunday being the Incarnate. What the fuck is the Incarnate even? It’s just her bullshit lie! The woman doesn’t even remember us kidnapping her as a kid. She doesn’t remember anything. You know it’s true!”

  “Bernadette’s not our job anymore. We’re here for the Pastophori. The cult wants her, and that’s all that matters. Get over this shit, brother. Get over it right now.”

  Angel was right. They had to find her. He needed her, and she needed his protection so much more than he could have ever anticipated. Powerful and broken simultaneously, Sunday was a catastrophe waiting to happen, with all the power of a god-like creature that she never asked to be.

  Angel repeated the question that Cyrus refused to answer with the exclamation point of his fist pounding onto the dashboard of their truck.

  “How did the Incarnate know your name, Cy? Why on fuck’s earth did she feel like I’d ripped her heart out when she pulled your name out of my head? What happened that you’re not telling me? Because something happened, Cyrus, and I don’t like not knowing my ass from my elbow when I’m face-to-face with the fucking Incarnate.”

  The tension was taut between them. Neither man spoke for a while. Angel could poke Cyrus, but Cyrus wouldn’t bite. There was nothing to say and nothing he could say that would make going behind Angel’s back acceptable. Instead, Cyrus moved onto the more pressing issue.

  “Go back to the witch.” Cyrus sighed. He rolled his shoulders to force himself to calm down. Even so, his muscles twitched. “Let’s figure this out. What was she talking about when she asked what you did to the witch? Which one was she following again?”

  Angel growled. His nostrils flared. The wolf had baited Cyrus, his dominant, but Cyrus had backed off. It was clear that Cyrus wasn’t going to answer Angel’s question. Right now, it didn’t seem to matter.

  The wolves hadn’t learned the names of the witches besides Sunday’s friends, Kayla Thompson and Samantha Wills.

  “One of the young ones. Dark hair. Not the one who lives in the house or the Asian one. The other one.”

  “Let’s go, brother,” Cyrus said as he made a U-turn in the middle of the road. “We’re retracing your steps.”

  The blue lights from police cars strobed ahead of them as the wolves drove up to the street where Angel encountered Sunday. A crowd of people gathered around the yellow tape of a crime scene perimeter set up by the cops. This part of town shouldn’t have drawn so much foot-traffic at night. It was a commercial strip of stores and businesses that didn’t stay open this late. The wolves slowed down behind a rubbernecking driver in the car ahead of them. Following their lead, the men looked at the scene to pick up any clues as to why Sunday had been there earlier. The cops were searching an establishment called Bearers of Mystical Fruit. As they were about to pass it, a police officer stopped them and directed a black coroner’s van to cut them off.

  Things were ticking into place and Cyrus didn’t like what they suggested.

  “You said Sunday went in after the dark-haired witch?” Cyrus asked.

  “The Incarnate watched for a while from there,” Angel responded pointing to a spot along the street that was currently occupied by another car. “She waited for almost a half-hour, and then she got out of the car. I looked into the window of that hippie shop when I walked by, and she was in there walking through the merch. When I was coming up on the block again, she was getting into her car. That’s when she saw me.”

  “Was she bloody?” Cyrus darted probing looks at Angel as he maneuvered the truck around the farther block.

  “Nah, man. But she doesn’t have to get her hands dirty to kill someone,” Angel reminded him.

  “If there wasn’t blood, the cops wouldn’t have set up shop for a crime scene investigation, Angel. Think about it. She could have made it look like a heart attack. Natural causes.”

  Angel responded with a humorless chuckle. He was completely biased against her and wasn’t buying that Sunday was innocent of murder.

  “She asked you what you’d done to the witch,” Cyrus reminded him. “She thought you did something.” Angel shifted in his seat and exhaled a cloud of smoke, forced to begrudgingly accept that Cyrus had a point.

  “Did she think anything or say anything to lead you to believe she had been lying when she asked you about it?”

  Angel shook his head in response.

  “We know when the Incarnate gets the juice flowing, she’s destructive. Did the windows of that shop look blown out? Did it look like a hurrica
ne smashed through it, or a wildfire?” Cyrus was forcing Angel to look at the evidence, to comb through his own testimony for verification of Cyrus’ hunch. Angel shook his head again, puffing with intensity, projecting his fury through his cigarette.

  “That’s what I thought,” Cyrus continued. “What we have here is proof that the Incarnate found something out and was suspicious of one of the witches.”

  “When did you become her biggest fan?” Angel snapped accusingly. “At the club? She shake her pretty tits in your face and cast her siren-spell on you?”

  Cyrus ignored his question. Angel was trying to get a rise out of him, and he knew it. Turning his attention back to the matters at hand, Cyrus rounded the block again to drive past the crime scene one last time.

  “Call Neal. Tell him and Marcus we stumbled onto something else.” Angel dug into his pant pockets for his phone. “Tell them that Sunday has been stalking a witch from some nothing coven. We’re going to need to get on this ASAP and we’re going to need them on board. The Incarnate’s involved, and she’s not going to let this go if it concerns her friends.”

  Angel made the call, and briefly told Neal all of Cyrus’, and now his, suspicions.

  “You’re taking us to that witch’s house from this morning,” Cyrus ordered as he pulled the truck over to the side of the road and thrust the shifter to park. “Jump seats, brother,” he said before he opened the driver’s side door. “You’re driving.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The wolves held their pow-wow almost as soon as Neal and Marcus arrived the next day. They gathered in Cyrus and Angel’s room and listened closely with stone faces while Cyrus briefed them on their latest findings. Angel leaned on the dresser beside him, nodding along as Cyrus spoke.

  As much as he’d fought against doing it, Cyrus had confided in Angel about going behind his back to meet Sunday. After a long drive and more than a few drinks at a country bar, he stumbled into the motel room, woke Angel, and confessed that he’d been with her on the night prior to their latest encounter. He’d apologized, telling Angel as much as he could of the truth without implicating himself in some grand conspiracy to whisk her away. He told Angel, Neal, and Marcus that he’d wanted to try to gather enough intel directly from her so that they could figure out a way to get her to come willingly.

  “We have to find a way to lure her out, to get her to trust us,” he said.

  “Not you, though, right? We can’t get her to trust you anymore, right?” Angel spat.

  “Not anymore,” Cyrus conceded with a sneer. “Drugged or not, just grabbing her off the street isn’t going be possible. What she did to Angel and to me, she can do to the whole city, just like she did in Washington.”

  As he tried to convince his brothers that his dalliance with Sunday didn’t pose a threat to their mission, he’d bitten back the part about him being a possible threat to it. Never once did he even suggest that they might fall back on their pack’s word. Though he admitted growing fond of her, he made it clear that he was sticking to the terms of their agreement with the cult.

  Neal sat with his legs stretched out in front of him and arms crossed at his chest. He was a big man, the largest in the pack. His chocolate skin morphed into a midnight black pelt when he transformed. With close-cropped hair and a short, neatly trimmed beard, Neal looked every part of the strict military man he had been before he’d left the service.

  Marcus sat across from him at the under the room’s window to the parking lot. Marcus was muscular and often wore t-shirts that were almost a size too small to emphasize the effect. Rather than keep his hair long as Cyrus did, Marcus wore his short. That’s where the differences in their appearances ended. Even as wolves, they looked like brothers. Perhaps it was that resemblance that made them as close as they were. Cyrus counted Marcus the closest thing he had to a best friend among the pack.

  Cyrus’ expressions and demeanor could mask a hell of a lot of what was really going on inside of him, but Marcus could read through them. Marcus could bet without Cyrus telling him that Cyrus was leaving something out.

  It was Neal who first spoke when Cyrus and Angel ended their briefing.

  “What do you think is going on with the witch?” he asked.

  “We’re not sure,” Cyrus admitted. “We were able to identify her from public records, the leases on her house and on her car. She was most recently employed at a kid’s museum as an art teacher, but she hasn’t held a job that we could find for two years. Based on Angel’s surveillance, we know that she was the person Sunday followed into the store where the witch’s body was found.

  “Like I said before,” he continued as he grabbed copies of the police report Angel had retrieved the previous day. He handed them to Neal, “stabbing. Five stab wounds: two to the gut, two to the lungs, and another that caught a shoulder. We’re convinced our girl walked into a crime scene and got out of there as fast as she could. That’s when she spotted Angel.”

  Neal set the papers on the table and slid them over to Marcus, who flipped through them scanning the text but looking more closely at the coroner’s diagram of the body.

  “Since then, the Incarnate has fallen off our radar,” Angel grudgingly admitted.

  Cyrus turned sharply and directed a glare at Angel. Angel shrugged and went on.

  “We split up last night, and this morning. Cy covered the Incarnate, trying to pick up her scent, and got nothing. And I covered Constance. Smith stayed in most of the day. At about six, though, the woman took a tour of the goddamn city. I followed her till after midnight when she finally returned to her place and settled in for the night. Lights stayed on ‘til about two thirty, and after that, lights out.”

  “Where’d she take you?” Marcus finally asked. He flipped the final sheet of paper over and laced his fingers over them.

  “I GPS-ed it, take a look.” Angel picked up the laptop from the bed and flipped it opened. He sat on the far bed, facing the boys at the table, and finding the webpage he was looking for, set the computer on the center of the table so that both wolves could get a look at it. The screen displayed a digital map of the city, and on it were ticked off locations that Angel had flagged.

  “One of those red dots,” Angel said as he pointed to the screen, “is another witch’s house. Eunice Johnson, fifty-six year old librarian, and one of the elder witches of her coven. This is the same coven that we witnessed the Incarnate observing.”

  Angel bent toward the laptop and switched back to the desktop where he’d kept a file labeled “Columbia SC Oct 2012.” He double-clicked a few times and pulled up two photos, one of Kayla and another of Sammy.

  “Gentlemen, meet the Incarnate’s only friends in the world: Ms. Kayla Thompson and Mrs. Samantha Wills.”

  “Those women,” Cyrus interrupted, pointing to their images on the screen from the other end of the room, “are the only reason Sunday hasn’t skipped town.”

  Marcus darted his eyes to Cyrus.

  “She tell you that?” Marcus asked, daring Cyrus.

  “She did,” Cyrus answered curtly.

  Even after Neal and Angel turned their attentions back to the computer screen, Marcus continued glaring at Cyrus. He wasn’t going to let it go. The Incarnate had been the bane of Cyrus’ existence for over half the time that they had known each other. If anyone was going to dig any further into his relationship with Sunday, it was Marcus. Cyrus nodded and moved his gaze to the computer screen where the other men had been holding theirs.

  Neal looked back to Cyrus and lifted his chin to the dominant wolf in the room.

  “So now what?” Neal asked. The command was clearly Cyrus’ to give. He’d been driving the hunt and he hadn’t been ordered off it.

  “Now, boys, we split up and cover Sunday’s friends and Constance. We stay on them ‘round the clock. No one leaves their spots till someone else takes over. We find out what Sunday’s onto, and we either wait it out or we end it.”

  Cyrus crossed his arms over his chest and sto
od with his feet firmly planted shoulder-width apart. With his hair tucked into his black knit cap and the edge of it framing his strong brow, he looked every bit the dominant wolf, staring down his subordinates, giving them orders they had no choice but to follow.

  “The Incarnate tell you anything about what she thinks is going on?” Neal asked.

  “Just that she was onto something that was endangering her friends.” Cyrus pointed back to the images on the computer screen with his chin. “Those women. She didn’t say anything else, but she was obviously troubled by it. We’re figuring it’s this Constance situation that she’s been pursuing. The Incarnate’s had loads of experience with witchcraft, and this isn’t a girl who’s going to perceive a threat in some benign witches gathering to make love potions. What she’s onto has to be some dark shit. The other women in the coven checked out. This Eunice that Constance visited with Angel on her tail is one of the two older witches in the group. If she’s watching her, she’s probably making a play for her. She’s not stalking someone that she’s not plotting against in some way. We’re not sure what else Sunday knows, even if she knows as much as we do about Constance.”

  “I take it you’re going for the girl on your own.” Marcus stated. He hadn’t asked a question; nonetheless, he was expecting a response.

  “No,” Cyrus snapped. His aggression at Marcus’ challenge was evident. Marcus would have his opportunity to grill Cyrus about Sunday and make his accusations, but it wouldn’t take place in front of the other wolves. “Sunday won’t stray far from her friends. We’ll follow them and Constance, and she’ll turn up. Then, we can approach her with a negotiation.”

  In unison, all the eyebrows in the room raised. All but Marcus’.

  Marcus barked an incredulous laugh in response. It was aggressive, too aggressive for Marcus, but he wasn’t thinking about propriety right now.