Taking Back Sunday

by Cristy Rey

  “Listen, wolf,” she started coldly. “I’m letting you all keep me here because you’ve got information that I need to take down this cold-hearted black magic witch. The minute you become a thorn in my side, you’re done.” With her eyes locked on Neal’s, she tipped her chin gesturing to Cyrus. “You have a doubt about that, you ask your friend over there. There’s another one of you missing in action right now that you could ask, too.”

  “Cut it out,” Cyrus interrupted.

  “He started it,” Sunday quickly retorted.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” Cyrus narrowed his eyes at Neal threatening him to back down. “Have you been able to track down the vamps from the club?”

  “Negative, sir,” Neal replied. Cyrus sighed in defeat wishing the news had been different. “You’re sure the vamps were tourists?” Neal asked him.

  “Not anymore,” Cyrus admitted.

  This was the first time Sunday had heard any of the wolves mention the vampire couple at the club. Sunday had encountered them over the past few months lurking at the Lair. She had noticed them then and carefully avoided them. From their demeanor, she assessed that they weren’t immediate threats to the humans around them. All of the madness surrounding the days since she’d last seen them had made her forget they had even been there that night, the night she first ran into Cyrus.

  “They’re either tourists, or they’ve only just arrived,” Sunday responded, finally showing some interest in interacting with the werewolves. All eyes fell on her when she’d made the revelation.

  “You know those two bastards?” Cyrus asked, his voice aggressive and scolding.

  “I didn’t say any of that, sunshine,” she bit back. “I’ve seen them before a handful of times, but not any earlier than, say, June or July, and I never see them outside a club. It’s not like nests to pick up older vampires that aren’t already part of the family, is it?”

  “How do you know that?” Neal asked.

  “Don’t you know what I used to do for a living? It was my job to know those kinds of things.”

  “Do you know where they’ll be?” Marcus interjected. “A club they might be going to tonight?”

  Sunday laughed humorlessly as she through her head back and sighed. The werewolves were so much more clueless than she’d imagined. If they needed to track down a couple of vampires that at least one of them had gotten a good look at, then she didn’t need to guess where they were going to be. Maybe was the reason that they hadn’t found her sooner. Evidently, none of them had consulted with witches, or at least, they hadn’t consulted with really skilled, really clever ones. They could have easily pinpointed the vampires’ locations by casting a spell.

  “I’m gonna need a map, boys. And you, Cyrus, you’re going to have to start meditating on those boys’ faces until you can get a really clear view of them.” She looked around at the men, all growing more confused by the second. “Anyone got matches?”

  It took fifteen minutes for Marcus to return from the corner gas station with a driving map of Columbia and four books of matches. Before she began the spell, she made the werewolves promise, with the threat of death if they didn’t keep it, to let her break in to Constance’s warehouse while the others followed her directions to the tourist vampires. Cyrus insisted that he would accompany her, and in spite of her mounting suspicions of him, she agreed.

  The ritual lasted all of four minutes. Sunday laid the map facing down on the carpet as she kneeled over it. She instructed Cyrus to close his eyes until he could fix a perfect picture of the vampires’ visages in his mind. Taking his hands, she laid them over the paper and held them down with one of her own. Her consciousness bled into Cyrus until she could see the images in his mind clearly. Then, she recited a simple spell in a language that none of the wolves understood. She waited a few seconds after she finished, and rolled her weight back onto her heels. Releasing Cyrus’ hand, she asked him to take his hands off the map.

  “Is that it?” Marcus asked. His expression was pinched, and his hands balled into fists at his hips.

  “Are you serious?” Sunday quipped. “I just performed some grade school spell casting that none of you doofuses had managed to conjure up and I found you some vampires and you’re asking if that’s it?”

  “I don’t see shit, lady,” Neal barked.

  “Whatever.” Sunday rolled her eyes, and she grabbed the map off the floor. She crumbled the paper in her hand and tossed it to Cyrus.

  “Burn it. It’s gonna catch fire real fast, so you better get rid of it quick.”

  Cyrus’ brows gathered in question and he looked up to his brothers. They all shrugged, and Neal took a book of matches and tossed it to Cyrus. He struck a match and held it to an edge of the paper. Instantly, the wad ignited, and Cyrus fell back in shock as he threw it into the air. The other two werewolves leaped in unison. Ashes fell from the fireball as it fell to the floor. A section of the map no larger than a dollar bill remained as the flames shrank and extinguished. The edges of the paper were singed to a crisp.

  “What the hell was that?” Marcus balked. He lowered himself to his knees beside Cyrus, and knelt to examine the charred paper.

  “That was witchcraft,” Sunday answered smartly, holding her head high and cocking an eyebrow. She picked up what remained of the map off the floor and held it up so that all of them could see it. “This is where you’ll find the vamps you were picturing,” she said. She handed it to Cyrus, and got to her feet.

  “Now,” Sunday stated firmly, “you’re taking me to the warehouse.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The city streets were abandoned this late on a weeknight. As Cyrus and Sunday made their way to Congaree Vista, the streetlights flashed, painting the darkened streets red and yellow intermittently. Dread loomed in the shadows. Nothing good lay ahead of them as they neared their destination. Dark magic, with all its malicious intent and the cruelty of its design, was a difficult thing for Sunday to willingly or eagerly confront. The ambiguity of what Constance was cooking only made the situation more dangerous. Not knowing exactly what to expect meant Sunday had to be prepared for anything.

  It was everything Sunday thought she’d left behind when she’d destroyed Bernadette and fled, living in secret for all these years. Confronting wayward ambitious witches and creatures had been the ways of her past. Under Bernadette, Sunday had been an enforcer. At the witch’s side, she’d known what it was like to be feared. She’d known what it was like to be drunk with power. This was all the story of the Incarnate’s past, and it was fast becoming the story of her near future. As much as she never wanted to do it again, she would, however, because, whether or not they knew it, her friends depended on it. Sammy and Kayla had no idea what they’d walked into. One of the witches in their friendly coven sisterhood was a murderer. When it came to witches, mundane murders were a sign of something much more sinister in store.

  The temperature had dipped into the low fifties, and Sunday tucked herself in a thick striped scarf and puffy jacket. Sunday sat in the passenger seat, knees pressed to her chest, while Cyrus drove them. Since they’d gotten in the car back at the motel, they hadn’t said a word to one another. Cyrus’ eyes stared at the road ahead with fixed eyes and a heavy brow. Sunday did the same. All the while, Sunday tried to ignore the frigid air and worked on her meditations. But the more she tried to ignore the elephant in the room, the louder it bellowed.

  “Did you know the whole time?” Sunday asked. Her voice was taut and her throat seized as she’d spoken. She forced herself to keep staring straight ahead and not to Cyrus, but she shot glances out of the corner of her eye, watching for his reaction.

  As they’d driven, the reality of their situation finally hit her. The man she had grown affectionate for and was still strongly attracted to was a liar. He had conned her into falling for him, and he was conning her again. This time he was manipulating to comply with a truce so that he and his packmates could help her figure out what Constance was plott
ing. She didn’t want to believe that she had been so completely fooled by him in the time they’d spent together. Her inability to detect the threat was just as hard to swallow his betrayal. At the end of this affair, she would be short the only two real friends she ever had and a blossoming relationship with Cyrus. A normal life wasn’t in the cards for her, as if she’d needed some black magic brouhaha and a murder to remind her!

  When Cyrus didn’t answer, she turned to face him and asked again.

  “Did you always know?” she asked again. Her voice cracked.

  “Yes,” Cyrus answered shortly, eyes fixed to the dark road ahead and body like a statue. “I’ve known who you are for longer than you can remember. I kidnapped you with Angel and Stephen, our pack Alpha, and I took you to Bernadette.”

  “There’s more that you’re not telling me. I don’t have to be a psychic to know it,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and holding her body tense.

  Cyrus shot her a quick look before looking back to the road. This was his chance to absolve himself of the torch he’d been carrying for so long. The truth bubbled in his chest aching for release. He drew in a long, deep breath through his nose and let her scent stew in his chest. When he exhaled, he looked over his shoulder at Sunday again. His gaze sliced over her face, examining her. He shook his head and looked away again.

  He didn’t know how much he could tell her, but he knew he couldn’t continue lying. After all she’d been through in her life, and now knowing that she’d been so burdened by the running, he couldn’t just let her go on feeling trapped. She was, after all, so much more than some magical, hallowed trophy to him. She’d become so much more than that to him.

  “For years, I couldn’t get you out of my head. I hated you. The minute I saw you, my heart exploded in my chest. My blood boiled. My fucking mind collapsed.”

  He made of a fist of his hand and punched his chest. He pounded it again harder, and Sunday winced imagining the pain. Cyrus quickly glanced at her. His eyes were glassy as if he couldn’t contain the emotion bubbling up inside of him.

  “I didn’t understand what was happening. I’d never felt that way before. I’m a fucking monster, and I’ve never felt so much fucking hate in my life. You were just a kid, but looking at you seeming so innocent and knowing you were this… this thing… No one should be that powerful. No one should be capable of the things they said you could do. Right when I saw you, I knew it was true. The way you made me feel–”

  Cyrus’ voice caught in his throat, and he shut his mouth. He grabbed at his long hair and yanked on it, scowling.

  “After we dropped you off at Bernadette’s, I couldn’t let you go. My feet were planted into the ground, and I couldn’t move. All I knew is that you brought out all this rage and all this anger in me, and I should have been running as far as I could fucking get from you, but I couldn’t. I had to see it through. Whatever happened to you, I needed to be a part of it. I needed someone to tell me what was going on. When I told her, Bernadette said it was in your nature. It was your gift to bring out the curse in me, the werewolf in me.”

  “That was a lie, Cyrus. Bernadette was a liar,” Sunday said, raising her voice and gritting her teeth. Face red and fuming, Sunday threw her head back against the seat.

  “I was only a little girl, Cyrus! I didn’t make you a werewolf. What you felt back then wasn’t my fault. Whatever Bernadette claimed I was or what I could do, I didn’t deserve what she did to me. I didn’t deserve that. Any of it. I didn’t deserve you fucking hating me. I didn’t want to be the Incarnate. Bernadette probably just found a kid with some rumored ability and had you all kidnap her. Then she slapped the label of Incarnate on me, and voila, suddenly I was some purported god-kin she could use like a puppet.”

  “I didn’t hate you because of what you were,” Cyrus cut in quickly. He faced her sharply and his eyebrows rose. “You’re not the Incarnate to me. I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t understand it for a really long time. But I know now. I don’t hate you, Sunday. I could never hate you.”

  His breaths were ragged, and his chest trembled as he breathed. When Cyrus reached out his hand to touch her, she recoiled from it. She scooted as far away from him as she could until her back pushed up completely against the cold car door. She pulled her knees closer to her chest and propped her chin on her knees.

  “But you and your friends were looking for me again, weren’t you?”

  “We were. I was,” Cyrus answered.

  “Sunday, you need to know that, however it’s been, it’s not going to be like that anymore. I’m not going to keep hunting you and no one’s going to get in your way but…” his voice trailed off. He pictured the long road ahead of her back on the lam, running away from the phantoms of potential recapture. It was the cult, not Bernadette, who sought this time. All the same, he couldn’t turn her over to a similar fate again.

  “Are you saying that that’s it? I’m done running?” she snapped. “What are you going to do now, Cyrus? Offer me some kind of deal: I go with you willingly or I keep on running and eventually you find me and it will be so much worse?”

  It was hard to believe that, in the midst of all the worries about her friends, Constance, and the vampires, Sunday was engaging with Cyrus in a discussion about what would happen after their battle was fought. The life that she’d etched out for herself was slipping from her grasp, and she suffered for the eventual loss of it. The idea that she would have to live the rest of her life in a car, driving, fleeing, moving from one place to another without setting roots into the ground was overwhelming. She would have to start using aliases. She would have to practice defensive tactics, even offensive tactics.

  Everything… everything… was crumbling. She didn’t know what the werewolves wanted from her, and she didn’t care. Maybe they wanted to exalt her as a goddess among their society. Maybe they needed to become more profitable. Maybe they needed protection from some other group of preternatural creatures. All that she was sure of was that they, and Cyrus among them, had looked long and hard for her. Now that they finally found her, they had plans of their own. Of that, Cyrus wasn’t sharing. He could make all the promises in the world, but she didn’t trust that he would keep them.

  Rain started falling as they turned onto the industrial street where Constance’s warehouse lay. The rain wouldn’t last very long, but it was an omen if she’d ever seen one. Though Sunday knew that Constance was currently being watched on the other side of town at her house, she asked Cyrus to wait for a while before they went in. She wanted to make sure that no one else was around. In the event of an outburst, she wanted limit any collateral damage. Constance showing up was just the tip of the potential iceberg. If there were other people around, they could get hurt, too. She didn’t want any more innocents slaughtered on her conscience. She already had enough for a lifetime of guilt and remorse.

  Cyrus shut off the engine and rested back in his seat. It was almost eleven, and Cyrus didn’t know what they would find in that warehouse, or if they were even safe to investigate for long. Sunday dug into her purse and found a cigarette. She cracked her window and lit it, puffing the smoke into the light rain.

  “Those things will kill you,” Cyrus said in attempts to break the ice that had built up between them.

  “What if I told you,” Sunday began after exhaling a long, white breath out into the night air, “that I am certain, beyond a doubt in the world, that this won’t be the thing that takes me out?”

  “I’d ask you if you were serious.”

  Sunday didn’t respond. Instead, she shook her head, and through a furrowed brow and with a crinkled forehead, turned to Cyrus. Using the cigarette between her fingers, she pointed ahead to the warehouse they were about to enter without an invitation.

  “Do you know that whatever’s in there can probably kill us?” she asked. “What am I thinking? You didn’t even know how to conjure a location spell. You probably have no idea the kind of audacity it takes to cross th
e line between asking yourself if magic could possibly exist, and slaughtering animals to put illness curses on people.”

  “So why don’t you tell me what you think is going on here, Sunday?”

  “I’m not sure,” she confessed. “All I know is that Constance has been deriving power from my friends and their friends. She’s probably been doing it for a while. The rest of it is stuff you already know. Now I find out that she’s working with vampires. That can’t possibly be good. Unless she’s working contracts for them, she shouldn’t be cavorting with them.”

  “Is there any reason you can think of to explain the vampire connection?” Cyrus asked.

  It concerned them that Constance was communing with vampires. It was a source of much speculation among the wolves, and lately with Sunday, that Constance had gone out of her way to meet with the vamps at this critical juncture in their investigations. It suggested there was a link between whatever she was plotting, and the vampires residing in the area. These particular vampires were well established in the community, and likely, a strong sect if they were so brazenly entrenched in the mundane world. Taking down a single witch was one thing, but taking on a whole nest of vampires was an entirely different matter. Incarnate or not, the small team of wolves who were well out of their territorial jurisdiction were in no place to wage preternatural war.

  “I can’t figure it out, Cyrus, any of it. I know that something wicked this way comes and all that. I know that I’m going to have to deal with a witch and whatever vampires in the area she’s connected to. But…” Sunday hesitated. She threw out her cigarette and fixed her attention to Cyrus, releasing her legs and turning to face him entirely.

  “There’s this belief that I have, and it’s not just my belief. It’s this organic truth of existence or something. It’s that things happen like they’re supposed to, and that we, you and I and everyone else on this planet, just kind of have to go along with it and take the punches as they come. We get to fight back sometimes, but not against the bigger picture. Right now, with all this going on: Sammy and Kayla finally getting me out to the coven, Constance being an evil witch or something, some ancient Malaysian black magic charm floating around there, vampires running funeral parlors, werewolves flying in from Alaska to find me, and all this stuff about you… I can’t really see how all those things fit into the bigger picture. And I just want to get it over with.”