by Cristy Rey
The day after the battle, Sunday woke in a sea of darkness but for the cracks of light between the thick, dark drapes over the window. The room was empty. Surely, the werewolves were all in another room where both Angel and Neal could watch over their priority patients. Her mind raced recalling the fight in the woods. Flashes of Eunice’s face tense with terror as the scarred familiar raised a silver knife over her chest, Constance writhing under Angel’s steel rod arms as he held her down, Cyrus hunched over the bleeding brown and white wolf, eyes red and swollen with tears, hair stuck to his face, and Cyrus throwing back his head and howling at the sky, the sound of his agony tearing from the deepest abyss of his body. Sunday watched all of it through a curtain of traumatic haze and confusion. Blood seeped into her eyes from the wound at her crown where the rock in Constance’s fist had met her skull. The injury still throbbed and Sunday touched it to find it still open.
She wasn’t sure if she had succeeded at doing anything other than getting the process moving, and she certainly didn’t know if she’d been able to maintain control enough to keep from draining Cyrus bone dry. The risk to him had been great. Giving life to another so close to death meant taking as much from the source. Even as she’d laid her hands on him and begun the transference of life force, she doubted whether she could keep Cyrus alive no matter how hard she tried.
Nausea rising, she rolled onto her side and fell onto the carpeted floor, crawling to the bathroom. There she found the toilet and became sick into it, crying as she heaved, praying to nothing and to no one in particular that Cyrus had survived and that she hadn’t failed to keep him alive. Though a memory from her youth had been triggered by the werewolves’ pleas for Sunday to do something, anything to save their fallen compatriot, it had since been swallowed back into the recesses of her mind with nothing but the scar of it remaining.
Not Cyrus. Not Cyrus. It was a mantra that she prayed silently. Not Cyrus. Not Cyrus.
After what seemed like an eternity in the darkness, Neal found her in a state of mental obliteration recalling the nightmare of the previous night. He wrapped her into his thick arms and carried her into the adjoining room where she found Marcus sitting up against the pillows on one bed with Angel at his side. Cyrus lay asleep on the other bed. The men were silent as she’d been carried in and was set beside Cyrus. She curled her body around him and set her head on the pillow. She nuzzled into his matted, tangled hair. Sunday sobbed, grateful that her prayers had been answered. Cyrus exhaled deeply then and brought a hand over her thigh to pull her in closer.
“Whatever you did,” Angel said, “it worked.”
Despite knowing that her future lay, unequivocally, on the road and far away from any dream of white picket fence mundane life, Sunday stayed in Columbia for the duration of Cyrus’ recovery, hunkering down at the motel with the wolves until they had each left but for Cyrus. Evidently, saving one of the wolves, even if it had meant almost killing another one of them, was enough to earn her a reprieve while they determined what the pack would do about the clients that sought her retrieval.
There was no small amount of disappointment leveled at her, however. The Incarnate had failed them. The purported conduit and master of all forces mystical and mundane had been little more than a nuisance during the whole scene. Ultimately, Cyrus didn’t hold it against her. He encouraged his packmates to leave him in the care of the Incarnate. Though they hadn’t wanted to, they relented when their Alpha, Stephen, had summoned them back home.
“What you did for Marcus, Sunday,” Cyrus began. “…thank you.”
Sunday shrugged into the mattress and patted Cyrus’ chest without any more acknowledgement of what he’d said. They had been alone two days, and though Cyrus had recovered enough to move about the room with little trouble, he wasn’t yet ready to embark on the trip home. The pair stayed about the motel room in those days, pretending that they weren’t both thinking about the moment that Cyrus felt well enough to leave. They basked in their unspoken truce, however temporary, that neither had exhibited any ambition to address.
Cyrus turned his head to look at Sunday, lying beside him with her head pressed gently into his side. His arm held her close, and his fingers nestled between the hem of her pants and her hip. Her attentions were turned to the television, and though seemingly intent on whatever was on, he doubted that she wasn’t thinking about the night in the forest when she had almost killed him so that Marcus could live.
“Sunday,” Cyrus started, grabbing her chin and tipping it up to meet his gaze.
“Don’t. Don’t you talk about it. You’re welcome. Marcus is alive. You’re alive. You’re welcome. We don’t need to talk about it.” Quickly, she shook her face free of his hand and returned to her place at his side with her eyes fixed to the screen.
“We need to talk about what happens next,” Cyrus insisted. He pushed himself upright and grabbed Sunday’s arm, pulling her with him. They faced one another, Sunday’s expression unyielding, and Cyrus’ eager for conversation.
“What do you think happens next, Cyrus?” Sunday challenged, slapping the bed. “I can’t stay here.”
They both knew that Sunday wouldn’t stay in Columbia. She wasn’t answering her friends’ calls. She wasn’t offering to take Cyrus back to her house to keep recovering. What she was really saying was that she couldn’t stay with Cyrus. The acknowledgement of it burned in his chest.
“I’m not staying here either,” Cyrus countered. “There’s pack business that I have to attend in Alaska, and I want you to come with me so we can settle it with Stephen.”
Sunday huffed and shot up from the bed, grabbing at her belongings stashed around the room. In a second, Cyrus leaped to her side and stopped her. As she pushed him aside to get around him, he blocked her, virtually pinning her to a tight corner of the room.
“I need to know that, now that this is over, you won’t get away from me. You want me. You want to be with me. And before you can tell me that it’s all my imagination, I’m telling you that I know it’s true. I saw it in you.” Cyrus held Sunday’s face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers. Rather than give into his kiss, Sunday shoved him away.
“What’s true and what’s not true doesn’t matter! Don’t you get it, Cyrus? There is absolutely no place for me, here or anywhere else. Not with you. Not with friends. Not with family. With no one. Don’t you get what’s going on? All of this,” she continued, fanning her hands around her, “this is all part of some great plan that I have been trying desperately to avoid. The minute I settle down, all Hell breaks loose. It happened when I was a kid. It happened when I figured out the truth about Bernadette. It happened here, now, when I thought I had finally outrun it. There’s no gaming Fate, Cyrus. Not for an Incarnate, and certainly not because some werewolf falls for her and thinks he can make it so.”
“You don’t know.”
“I do, Cyrus. I do. That’s what you don’t understand.” She began shaking as she made her great revelation. Sunday stumbled and grabbed hold of the wall to steady herself. When she looked up at Cyrus, her eyes were filled with tears.
“I might not remember a lot of things about my past, but I remember enough. Worse still, I remember the dreams I have every night. The nightmares of the past I wake from, the visions of the future that’s ahead of me. Every awful thing I’ve ever done: the killing, the reaping, the slaughter. I live it again and again. I close my eyes, and I all I see is the blood and the destruction I’ve left behind. I can’t remember what I want to remember, but I remember everything else. Absolutely everything else. Like everything else I feel, it’s not just surface-level, it’s deep. It’s not a vision of what I’ve done and what I’ve been through, it’s feeling it all over again as if it’s happening for the first time. Except now… now I know what I’ve done. I really know. The visions of the future that can be mine if I just take the smallest step in the wrong direction. It’s just as bad as what I’ve been through.
“Do you want to know why it’s
so hard for me to be with you? Because I work so hard to push all of it aside that I can’t afford the effort it takes to hold what you’ve got inside of you from spilling over. You have so much guilt about what you’ve done to me—things that I can’t possibly know, that I’ll never learn—that it sparks up memories of my past and memories of my future. It’s fucking torture that I can’t rip myself away from. All of that heaped on top of everything else that I’m trying to ignore makes it impossible for me to keep myself in check. Bernadette told me I had a role to play. A role. In what? I don’t know. I don’t know anything! And I don’t care. I don’t want it and I’m not going to have it. I’m not going to let it catch up to me no matter how badly I want to stand still for just a moment and let the good things happen to me.”
The tension was thick in the room and Cyrus stood helpless against it. Sunday was expressing her every fear, her every insecurity. She was running because it made her feel safe from what being the Incarnate meant. She had probably read all the stories about the Incarnates of the past. She knew that they all either suffered or rose to impossible power. It was being a god, and she was turning away from all of it. Despite his intentions to keep her safe, Cyrus knew that he could never truly do so. In the end, it was all inside of her. Her past—known and unknown. Her future. She was a monster fighting with every breath to transcend her nature.
“Then I’ll come with you,” he determined. “You run and take me with you. You don’t want to be the Incarnate? Fine. I don’t want that for you either. You’re not saving a civilization from a drought. You’re not taking over the world’s covens. You’re not sitting at the right hand of vampire royalty. I don’t care. I’ll come with you. Wherever you go.”
Cyrus paused, extending a hand to Sunday that she wouldn’t take.
“You said things happen for a reason. It’s the truth of the universe, your truth. This… us… there’s a reason, Sunday. There’s a reason you were set in my path over a decade ago, and there’s a reason that I couldn’t let go of you for that long. There’s a reason that, after all this time, I find you, and when I do, I fall fucking in love with you. You, the Incarnate that I’ve hated for so long that my hate defined me. We’re meant to find each other, Sunday. We’re meant to be with each other. You said it yourself. We just have to let it happen. We just have to go along for the fucking ride.”
Cyrus threw his hands in the air and brought them down into fists that slammed at his thighs. For the first time in so long that he couldn’t remember, Cyrus was fighting tears. He just admitted everything to Sunday, everything, and she stood apart from him, her arms crossed, pulling her further and further away from Cyrus.
“This is our chance, Sunday,” Cyrus said. “We have to take this chance. I want to take it, with you. This is our Fate. It’s not Incarnate shit. It’s ours, yours and mine.”
For a while, the couple stood quietly, Sunday with her arms crossed and Cyrus beckoning to her with every expression and gesture. Before he even started talking, Sunday had known what he would say. Of course, Cyrus would want to come with her. Of course, he’d want to stay at her side. She had seen it all inside of him. When she’d toyed with his mind to find out why he’d been after her, and when she’d shifted his life from Cyrus to Marcus, she’d been privy to his innermost thoughts. He felt responsible for her. More than wanting to be with her because she was cute and funny and all the things he’d have wanted to find in a woman, Cyrus felt obligated to correct his past mistakes.
The way that he’d harped on hating her for as long as he had to justify the shame at putting her into the hands of Bernadette and her minions had shaped his feelings for her now. He was a broken man. The fissures ran so deep that even he didn’t know where they ended. Between those cracks, emotions for Sunday had poured. All the years of all those feelings for her had been the marrow in his bones. It had held him together with purpose and fueled his will to live. His feelings for her might have changed, but little else had. Sunday was still the reason for his tomorrow. She was the core of his existence. Holding her in the palm of his hand now meant never letting go or he’d lose himself. He’d lose everything.
Before he would get an opportunity to gauge her reaction to his offer to run away with her, Sunday had already made the decision that, no matter what, Cyrus had to be taken down or she wouldn’t be able to make her escape. As soon as he stopped talking, Sunday raised her hand to him, and with nothing more than the desire to see it happen, Cyrus dropped to the floor, unconscious.
Cosmic design notwithstanding, it was the only thing Sunday could do. Cyrus led her back on the path of the Incarnate, no matter that his intentions might have been to steer her clear from it. As she stepped over his body in making her final exit, Sunday felt her heart breaking. Cyrus was right. He was absolutely right. She wanted to be with him. She wanted to love him. She wanted to run away, Cyrus and Sunday against the world. Fuck the Incarnate, leave the whole mess behind, and keep running forever as long as it meant that they could be with one another. Unfortunately for them, however, she had been right, too. There was no way being with Cyrus would do anything other than force her to be the Incarnate every minute of every day because being with him meant feeling everything he felt and thinking everything he thought. It was a guarantee that Sunday would never be at peace and that Cyrus would never be safe from her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Upon leaving the motel, Sunday’s first stop was Eunice’s house. There she found the elder witch tending her garden of mandrake root and belladonna. Even out of season, a witch’s garden could flourish and grow. The right kind of spell could ensure a green thumb in even the sparsest of terrain, and a witch, especially one as gifted as Eunice, required a full luscious garden of herbs and flowers. Eunice looked up from beneath the rim of her floppy garden hat and smiled generous, kind eyes to Sunday as she made her way to Eunice’s gate.
“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Sunday asked. She was hesitant in spite of Eunice’s expression of welcome. Rather than verbally admit her, Eunice stood up and walked to the gate where she took Sunday into her grateful arms and hugged her, swaying in an embrace that drew Sunday into the warmth of her caretaker aura.
“Sister,” Eunice spoke softly into Sunday’s shoulder, “you are always welcome in this home.”
Tea was prepared and shared as the women spoke. Never breaking her own confidence, Sunday kept the word “Incarnate” safely outside the realm of their conversation. Instead, when Eunice asked how Sunday had known about Constance’s dark designs, Sunday had suggested that she had been tipped off by the news of Ryan Sanders’ murder at Bearers, and though she didn’t know who he was to Constance, she surmised a connection based on some preternatural hunch, or so she’d described.
“I still don’t know who that witch was,” Sunday confessed. In truth, it had been bothering her. It was true that the visions of Constance hacking the man to death had been the thing that assured Sunday and the wolves that Constance had been the source of the undercurrent of malevolence in the coven’s circle energy. But neither Sunday nor the wolves could make out anything more than a coincidence of the murder occurring so closely to the demon raising. Cyrus had implied that Sunday had known more about the Sanders connection than she was letting on, but that had been erroneous. Sunday had picked up nothing at the shop from either Sanders’ fading spirit or from any intel she’d learned since.
Checking up on Eunice had only been a part of the reason why Sunday had stopped by for a visit. The other part was figuring out what angle Constance had been playing with Sanders and why she’d seen the need to end their involvement in such a violent way.
“Ryan was a friend to the community in this region,” Eunice explained. “He was a gifted witch and a gifted entrepreneur. He bought and sold properties through the real estate market that he would procure for… a selective clientele.”
“What relation could Constance have possibly had with Mr. Sanders? What kind of business would they have been in tha
t would have made her kill him? Was he a warlock like she was?” Sunday asked innocently enough to seem like she didn’t know anything about selective clienteles in the magical community and genuinely as she didn’t know what Eunice was getting at exactly.
“Not at all!” the elder witch exclaimed. “Constance had some trouble with her neighbors in the past who had been speculating on her magical character and she asked if there were any properties that she could acquire for housing and storage for her family heirlooms where she could find little intrusion from suspicious neighbors. What we do is often suspect to people who think that witchcraft is something devilish or evil.”
Eunice shook her head. Little had she known that, in Constance’s case, any rumors of her black magic craft were more than substantiated by her practices. The neighbors that she’d complained about had been right on the ball with their suspicions. When she put Constance in contact with Sanders, she hadn’t dreamed that it might eventually lead to his death. She thought that Sanders could secure a property for Constance where she could be safe of her neighbors’ suspicions and be free to practice her craft. Unfortunately, neither Eunice nor Saunders figured out that Constance was a warlock.
“She had a warehouse in the old district,” Sunday informed Eunice.
“Yes, that’s likely one of Sanders’ acquisitions. He had many dealings with me and my friends in the past trying to find us locations where we would be well protected from prying eyes or suspicious minds. I suspect that he learned, in some way, that Constance was practicing the dark arts and that he confronted her.”
Her expression became dark, and she lowered her chin to look at her lap. Eunice was a caretaker. The idea that she had done something to adversely affect her friend’s wellness was devastating and she was so sorry for it that her deep sigh sang of grief and guilt.