by Cristy Rey
Ignoring their rage, Sunday ran toward Eunice who was being dragged by the hair toward the warlock by a man twice her size and half her age, the familiar. His throat was long and white and cut with ghastly scars that were freshly healing over with puffy pink flesh. The older woman was fighting her much stronger tormentor in vain, struggling sluggishly through the still-present drugs that they’d used to knock her out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Constance and the familiar were startled and both looked up to see Sunday barreling at them. Eunice’s eyes flew up when she took note that her tormentor had become frazzled. Catching sight of Sunday careening toward them through the massive wolves who stood open-mouthed and foaming, growling threats to the warlock, Eunice wailed an agonizing plea for help.
“You have to stop her!” Eunice cried. “Constance is a warlock! She’s killed another witch, and she’s using my power to raise a demon!”
Hands bound together by rope, she could hardly raise her arms to fight off the familiar that was straddling her with a knife thrust upward into the sky and the blade pointing down at her. Seeing that he was going to kill her, Constance screamed to make him stop.
“You can’t!” Constance yelled, her dainty voice turning guttural and vicious as it broke into the night. “She’s my conduit! You can’t kill her!”
The familiar turned his blade back and kicked Eunice in the ribs, causing the elder woman to howl in pain. With a flick of the wrist, Constance raised her palm and sent a searing gust of wind at Sunday, knocking Sunday onto the ground.
“I know everything, Eunice, and I’m going to get you out of here!” Sunday said as she raised herself onto her knees in an effort to stand.
“What the hell are you doing here? You’re nothing! You’re nobody! Leave this to me!” Constance screamed.
Turning her attention back to the spell at-hand, Constance closed her eyes and started chanting to summon her demon’s power so that she could keep Sunday down. As she spoke, she lifted her arms in front of her. Another zephyr crashed into Sunday, and she fell back again. Sunday yelled upon impact, and the intensity of her shout fueled the fire in the pit. For a moment, it pulsed, bathing the scene in an orange glow. Constance looked at the fire and smiled sure it had been the potency of her own magic that caused that reaction.
“None of you can stop me!” Constance bellowed through a hearty, graveled voice. Her features, once petite and darling, were drunk with arrogance and twisted by wickedness. “I’ve taken down powerful witches and I’ve touched great power and some little weekend witch and her dog friends aren’t going to stop me when I’m at my strongest.”
Sunday didn’t know what the werewolves were thinking. Between Angel and Cyrus hiding in the shadows somewhere behind her, and Marcus and Neal standing like guard dogs at either side of her doing little more than growl and look threatening, Sunday didn’t perceive them making a move. If only she could hear what they were planning among themselves, she could know if they were gearing up to attack Constance and the familiar or if they were concerned with the two vampires that had come to oversee and end Constance’s little charade of a demon raising. But Sunday was having enough of it, and as much as she didn’t want to go all Incarnate with vampire and witch witnesses, and potentially, victims of her wrath, she couldn’t keep standing by without making a move of her own.
Before Sunday could even consider what she would do for another second, Angel ran out from the shadows behind Constance and tackled her to the ground. They were grappling hard, Constance fighting Angel’s massive weight, and kicking behind him raising a dust cloud with the wake of her struggle.
Simultaneously, stalking from behind Eunice and the familiar, Cyrus grabbed the man’s head between his hands and snapped his neck with a single motion as smooth as if he was combing out the man’s hair. The familiar collapsed on Eunice, and Cyrus reached down to pick her up and throw the older woman over his shoulder. Not knowing who he was or what he was doing, the witch fought back, kicking as she flailed around trying to get loose.
“Eunice, no!” Sunday cried. “Let him take you!”
“It happens tonight,” Constance screamed as Angel wrestled against her flailing arms and her jutting knees. “He will rise! He will rise!”
In the blink of an eye, two vampires clad in dark pants and jackets manifested at the foot of the pit and pulled Angel from Constance. Constance was feverishly grabbing at the ground, trying to pick up whatever amulets she had been using for her casting when Sunday ran up to her and threw herself on her body. The massive black wolf leaped over the pair of women struggling with one another on the ground and landed on the back of the vampire that was holding Angel to his chest, landing all three of them beside Constance and Sunday.
Taking the chance to wriggle herself from under Sunday, Constance grabbed a rock from the ground and balled it up in her fist, landing a punch with it to the side of Sunday’s head. Immediately, Constance took up after Cyrus and threw herself onto his back, pulling Eunice by the waist as well as she could from such a disadvantaged height. The brown and white wolf came upon Constance, trapping her under its legs and snapping its jaw in her face to get her to stop running.
Sunday was still reeling from the bash against her head as she watched Marcus’ wolf get in Constance’s way. Blood dripped down Sunday’s temple, the warmth of it oozing its way to her jaw. Sunday grabbed her head and pulled herself into a fetal position, rubbing herself into the dirt as she shook her head trying to get herself through the pain.
Behind Sunday, the werewolves, one human and one wolf, fought the vampires. Angel grabbed at the hair of a vampire he was sitting on and pulled his head back, breaking the neck of the monster who could heal from it. The werewolf took the moment that the vampire would need to reconstruct his fractured bones to reach over to the wood that fueled the warlock’s fire and pick out a stake. Turning back in a swift movement, Angel dug the burning stake into the vampire’s back where he had just sat, and turned it into his body until Sunday could hear the bones of his chest cracking above the sound of the crackling fire. Sunday groaned through the pain on the side of her head as more angry unleashed spirits sought an entry into the fractured Incarnate.
The vampire with the black wolf saw that his comrade had been slain and fought his way out of the werewolf’s jaw tearing into his thigh. As soon as he was free, he turned to flee, instantly disappearing into the darkness of the trees. Sunday watched in horror through blurred uneven vision and braced herself up on her hands pushing herself onto her knees. She had been so caught up with getting herself together that she failed to realize the frenzy behind her. She turned to find Constance bearing down all of her body’s strength behind the blade of the fallen knife into the chest of the brown werewolf that fought her. The werewolf toppled over. The knife had been silver—the one weapon that she could have used to register more than a tickle to the wolf’s hide.
“No!” Angel shouted. “You bitch, you evil bitch!”
Both he and the black wolf darted ahead of Sunday, Angel falling upon his fallen friend who was writhing in agony and bleeding profusely. The black wolf lunged himself onto Constance and closed his powerful jaw around her throat, pulling at it until her head fell limply, nearly decapitated, and her body seized beneath his large paws. In the seconds after she had stabbed their packmate, Constance lay dead on the ground, her body crushed under the weight of the black wolf.
Angel turned to look at Sunday through tear-filled angry eyes. He was pressing his hands with all his weight over the gaping wound into the brown wolf’s chest. The wolf’s white fur was dark red with the blood that poured out of the gash.
“Why didn’t you do anything?!” he yelled, his voice so garbled and broken that it sounded like he’d called upon the suffering of all the souls burning in the pits of Hell. “You’re the Incarnate?! Is everything about you a lie?!” Feral eyes boiled over with fury as they pored over Marcus’ wolf. “You killed him. This is all your fault!”
&
nbsp; “I w-w-was…” Sunday stammered, placing her hand on the oozing wound at her temple. She looked wildly around at the dead bodies. It was a gruesome, blood-soaked scene that she had hardly participated in creating. Woozy and concussed, her eyes darted between her remaining companions seeking Cyrus.
Standing atop Constance’s lifeless body, the black wolf howled. It’s tone cracked any will Sunday had to do anything other than all she could do to save the wolf that was Marcus.
Cyrus ran out of the forest racing to meet the body of his best friend bleeding out, whimpering with the last gasps of life. He had heard their screams and the wolf’s howl. In his mind was every thought and emotion of his fellow man. Cyrus and his pack felt every bit of Marcus’ desperation as he grabbed for the life that was fast pouring from his wounds. The silver infection burned through their bodies as if it had been their own that had been stabbed. Marcus convulsed violently as the poisoned blood coursed through his veins. Everything inside of Sunday fell apart as she watched Cyrus fall to his knees, push Angel out of the way, and hold Marcus’ seizing body in his arms. The wolf’s eyes were open and staring into the dark wood, his open mouth released his long pink tongue, and his nostrils flared grasping for air that would very soon stop coming. He was fighting to breathe, to live, and he was bleeding into his lungs in the process.
“Do something!” Cyrus yelled at Sunday through a tear-streaked red face and heaving sobs. “Do something!”
Sunday didn’t know what she could do. She thought of everything she had learned, anything she had read about. There was lore, there were stories, but they were little more than fairy tales and myths. Instead of offering any consolation or making a move to action, Sunday sat frozen, watching Cyrus cradle the wolf in his arms and rock back and forth, hoping that the next breath wouldn’t be the last. The black wolf howled again, and Angel tore into the woods unable to contain his anger and his grief. All the while, Cyrus mumbled into the wolf’s fur how sorry he was and how much Marcus had meant to him.
The grief and the atrocity of the night’s events poured into Sunday, her shields unable to withstand the fury of the wolves’ pain, and the violent loss of the familiar’s and Constance’s lives. It bled through her, filling her with the agony of defeat, of death, of loss, and abandonment of all hope. Within her, a grave knowledge rumbled waiting to be shared, a great power waiting to be released that had been given life by the wealth of emotions she was absorbing. She looked at Cyrus and considered what she could say… or what she could do, if she allowed herself to do it.
The wealth of the reservoir’s power and the spirits of the slain humans lying beside her fused with the aura of the wolves. Above them, a single streak of white lightning cracked against the sky, and Sunday’s palms tickled. Both Cyrus and the black wolf stared at Sunday. They could feel the energy swarming around her. It buzzed and cracked in the air. The wind whistled as it broke through the trees, extinguishing the once raging fire. The black wolf backed away from Constance’s body and circled Sunday, growling again with his teeth bared. Cyrus’ eyes were glassy, his spirit broken. He was asking her without saying a thing. Is there something you can do? Is there a way to save Marcus?
As Sunday staggered to where Cyrus and Marcus lay, Neal’s wolf followed her with monstrous determination. If she did nothing, he would pounce on her and end her as he’d ended Constance. The knowledge of Neal’s impending wrath bore a terrible weight on her back. Sunday knelt beside them and placed a bloody hand on Cyrus’ face trying in vain to wipe away his tears. Cyrus, the man who had hated her, had hunted her, and had come to love her, would have to make a choice that she didn’t want him to make. His every thought was a prayer, pleading and desperate, and Sunday knew it meant everything to him to have the choice that only she could offer him. There was something she could do, a secret gift of the Incarnate, a gift that she had discovered when she’d been only a girl and the knowledge of which had lain dormant up until this moment. She couldn’t remember when or what had happened, but she’d known that it was real and that it was true.
“There might be something…,” she whispered, her eyes turned entirely to Cyrus waiting for him to respond. She brushed the back of her palm against her cheek, drew it away filthy with dirt, and smeared with her own blood. When no sound came from him but his ragged breathing, she continued.
“The Incarnate can’t make things or erase them,” she began, “but she can challenge them and move them and put them into place.” She looked at the wolf and laid a soft hand on his belly by his wound. The bleeding would stop any second, and as soon as that, the wolf would be dead. “I can give you a choice, Cyrus, but goddammit, I don’t want you to make it. You have life to give, Cyrus, and his is draining from him so quickly…. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Yes,” Cyrus answered, gasping for air as he opened his lips. “Yes. Do it.”
“Cyrus, you can’t know–”
“Do it!” he growled. “Do it now!”
In spite of every desire in her body to go against his wishes and disappear into the woods, Sunday laid one hand on the bleeding wound and held her other hand around Cyrus’ splayed out on the wolf’s back.
Please don’t let this be your choice, Cyrus, she begged. I need you here in this life.
Cyrus shook his head at Sunday’s voice in his mind and fed into hers his demand. His life didn’t matter. Not anymore, not if Marcus wasn’t in it. Images of death flashed in her mind, Cyrus’ memories. Sitting at the bedside of loved ones. Watching their eyes flutter momentarily, then freeze with lifelessness. Coffins lowering into graves. All the while Cyrus watched helplessly, unable to affect the outcome, and stewing with guilt over having been the one left behind. No, for Cyrus, there was no choice to be made. Had he been able, he’d have given his life a dozen times to save the ones he loved. After nearly a century of impotence, this was Cyrus’ moment to shine.
I can do something, he told her. Take everything I have, and save Marcus.
Closing her eyes as they welled over with tears, Sunday let the energies of the night take her. She filled her belly with the ache of the reservoir to be set in motion, she drew in the ghosts of the dead, and she forced them to do her bidding. She let herself grow powerful with the agony of the wolves for their fallen friend and she poured into Marcus’ wolf the will to heal, to live, and to take from Cyrus the spark of wellness and life. She worked between them, taking the life from the one and the death from the other, and sat there for minutes focused entirely on the task until she collapsed onto the pillow of the wolf’s fur as Marcus drew a deep, reinvigorated breath into his lungs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It wasn’t her fault that Constance had decided to conjure a demon and had used the coven to outsource the requisite energy for her spell, but Sunday felt responsible nonetheless. As much as she believed that all things happen for a reason, and that things happen as they’re meant, she couldn’t help but think that the reason for it had been that she was there, the Incarnate, walking and living among the mundanes. As though the mere fact that she had taken up residency there had been enough to spurn a witch to summon demons and kill countless animals and people to do it. The truth is that, even though Constance had been in Columbia far longer than Sunday, no one could really tell when she’d made that tragic, complicated, and fateful leap to the dark side. And no one could guess what she would have done had she not felt the surge of power that the Incarnate brought with her to the warehouse that night.
It had been a week since she’d last seen Kayla and Sammy, but the girls hadn’t stopped calling. Each one took a turn every day to leave a voicemail that Sunday would never listen to, or send a text that Sunday would read and then ignore. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it: Sunday didn’t belong, the Incarnate didn’t belong, in Kayla and Sammy’s world. They had given her a new hope for a life of normalcy that she could lead, but it was just as audacious and fickle a hope as had it come from a dream. A normal life was a far cry fr
om what Sunday had experienced in South Carolina.
There was no way to turn the clock back and start anew. The only right thing to do now was leave it all behind and hope that Kayla and Sammy could forget her sooner rather than later. Sunday had never been herself in Columbia, and she felt no small amount of remorse about it. Every day she had lived among them, calling herself their friend, Sunday had been perpetuating a lie. She’d never really been their friend, however authentic their end of the friendship had been. They didn’t even know her at all. It was cruel. It was awful. And they didn’t deserve to get strung further along with her lies.
Through the days and nights that she’d sat around the motel room while Cyrus recovered, Sunday was never tempted to return a call or answer a text from the only two people who had felt like family to her in the last six years. She would be leaving the only place she had ever chosen to call her home, and she would be getting back on the road to no place in particular, knowing full well this time that someone was on her tail, and sniffing every breadcrumb she would drop along the way. Like the stuff that dreams are made of, Sunday had to learn to let go of the life she’d made for herself: her home, her hobbies, and most of all, her friends. She was returning to the road better for it, but more certain than ever that whatever doom she was fated to face wouldn’t take place anywhere near the people that she loved.
Sunday spent her final days in Columbia doing little more than curling up beside Cyrus as he healed. The first day had been the most difficult. Neal and Angel had dragged Marcus, Cyrus, and Sunday back to their motel rooms. Even without the added trauma of having her head bashed by Constance, it would have been difficult for Sunday, for anyone, to maintain consciousness after using herself as a channel for Cyrus’ self-sacrifice, and she had found it impossible to stay awake.