Cain knew more about trees now than he’d ever thought possible. The Order had so many tomes dedicated to them he’d have laughed at their unhealthy obsession with dendrology, except that it was an established fact within monster society of the great bond between nature and the paranormal.
And this tree had sparked his interest immediately.
A tree that formed into a twisted shape of a heart, a tree that was also known as death’s embrace because of the sheer number of couples who’d either been found murdered or had committed suicide soon after visiting it.
Grace said nothing, but her eyes closed and with trembling hands she picked up the book, hugging it tight to her chest.
Adam flicked a glance at Cain, who shrugged, confused himself.
“We have it,” she finally murmured. “The key. We have it.”
“Key to what?” Cain grunted.
Her smile was tremulous as she said, “The key to everything.”
And as though called, Dean suddenly appeared. He spoke no greetings, merely held his hand out for the book.
Grace handed it to him obligingly.
Cain still didn’t like Death’s interference in their lives, but he seemed to be the only one.
Looking down at the tome, Dean quickly scanned the page before nodding. “I’ll take it from here.”
Nodding, Grace said, “Keep her safe, Death.”
Cain had no idea who Grace was talking about, but his answering nod seemed to give her great comfort.
Sighing, she smiled and wilted into her seat.
Death vanished and Cain asked, “Grace, what’s going on really? Why the secrecy? The midnight visits?”
But it was Adam who answered. Standing, he walked behind Grace and rolled her chair out from under the desk. “She needs rest, Cain. The questions can wait.”
And he knew he’d been dismissed.
Cain tried not to take it personally, but as he watched the two of them roll out of the room, knowing they kept secrets, it was easier said than done.
66
Flint
Flint was ready when the knock sounded on her door. Today she’d pulled on a crimson-stained gown that was split on both sides high up her legs and seemed spun of spider silk. It sparkled like silk would in the predawn light of morning when coated in dew.
It made her look powerful, fierce, and ethereal all at the same time.
Mom had always told her that when it came to confidence, fake it till you make it. Well, she was faking it hard today.
“Come in,” she called, laying her palm across her anxious belly, fully expecting it to be Idris come to whisk her away to the next challenge.
“Dean?” she squeaked when instead the suave grim reaper walked through her door, closing it softly behind him.
What did he want?
Styled in his familiar suit and tie, he said nothing until he stood almost toe-to-toe with her. Looking her up and down, he nodded to himself and said, “You’ve dressed for battle.”
“I’m glad you think so. I failed spectacularly yesterday.” She hadn’t exactly meant to spill the beans to him so soon on that score, but she’d barely gotten any sleep last night. All she’d been able to think about was the fact that it was already over before it’d even really begun.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small golden coin. “The Ciardah plays to win. His methods aren’t as fair as I’d like.”
She frowned when he pressed the coin against her belly. “What are you doing?”
“Wishing you luck.”
When he took his hand away, the coin—which she was pretty sure wasn’t really a coin at all—had somehow magically attached itself to the cloth belt of her gown, making it look more like a button now.
She traced a finger across the top of it and then hissed as a bolt of pure energy raced up her arm like a shock of lightning.
“What is this?” she asked, hugging her finger to her chest.
His jaw clenched. “Chicanery abounds here, Flint. I’m making this a fair fight.”
Lips parting, she wondered if he was referring to her almost drowning yesterday or if he knew what her challenge would be today. But she never got the chance to ask, because he vanished a microsecond before there came another knock on her door.
“Darkling, it is time,” Idris called through the door.
Her heart sank to her knees. She wasn’t ready. For any of this.
Nodding, she ran her fingers through her hair and rushed over to the door, flinging it open a second later.
Idris was dressed in tan leather from neck to toe. His hair was pulled back in a sort of faux-hawk ponytail, revealing the sharp points of his ears and also the fact that they were pierced. Dangling from them were twin skulls of some tiny creature.
“You know you were probably a taxidermist in another life, right?”
He snorted, pointing ahead of him. “You’re insane, halfling.”
But his words didn’t sting, instead he shoulder bumped her, and Flint couldn’t help but lean into him just slightly.
He was the only family she had here, and she needed that desperately.
“Don’t leave me, zombie boy.”
Grabbing her hand, he brought it to his lips and kissed it tenderly. “Never.”
Neither of them talked the rest of the way back to the stadium. But true to his word, he stuck to her side.
Flint shuddered as she once more walked through the doorway and stared up at the thousands of eyes that looked down on her like angry angels and demons.
The skies wailed with dragon song.
The Ciardah already stood in his place, and beside him was Dean. His strong countenance looking down on her grimly.
Flint was gonna be sick.
Grandpappy held up his hands, and the sudden quiet was daunting. Her knees shook, threatening to give out from under her. Idris caught her elbow, his grip firm and strong, holding her upright.
The ring on her finger pulsed with warmth.
He didn’t have to speak a word, but she felt his solidarity in every cell of her being.
“Yesterday we witnessed speed. Today is a trial of skill.”
Lightning flashed, punctuating his statement and filling the air with ozone.
The elementals practically danced in the frothing storm. Black clouds rolled in heavily, threatening rain.
The stone chamber she stood in was no longer simply stone but a landscape of towering trees and rolling knolls. Ghostly flames danced in tight glowing balls of orange through the nighttime sky.
Her vines shuddered.
“You will be paired against Echo. Be careful with her, Flint. She’s fast and she’s skilled,” Idris whispered into her ear.
Never taking her eyes off The Ciardah, Flint nodded. “What’s her weapon of choice?”
“Fire.”
Saying peachy again would just be so cliché, but… “Peachy.”
He rubbed her shoulders, and then just as before, they were all gone. Flint didn’t know how they did it, but that didn’t matter at the moment either. All that did was making sure that she didn’t—
A twig snapped and in less than the time it took to blink, Flint was twirling around and roaring for Truth to come to her.
It came in a shocking explosion of blue lightning that lit up the world around her.
Flint wished she could say that holding the solid fae-made steel in her hand made her feel safe and secure, but the woman standing behind her made her realize she was anything but.
Echo was a thing of impossible-to-imagine dark beauty. Her skin was as ebony black as The Ciardah’s, but magma-red filigree throbbed like living streams of fire beneath her skin.
Dressed in silks spun of glittering shadow, she moved in the deadly and graceful ballet of a king cobra—movements precise, sharp, and sensuous.
Her hair was long and curled like fire down her back. The color of her eyes was also like the fire she seemed to cherish.
“You must be the halfling basta
rd of the whore.” Echo’s laugh was like the scrape of nails down a chalkboard.
Flint couldn’t help but shudder; Echo circled her slowly like a shark circling prey.
If there was one thing she could do, she could fight.
Eyes open, chin up, DeLuca. You got this.
“Oh, I see you don’t like Grandpappy either. Good, then let’s just call this a draw and live to see another day, what do you say?”
Echo’s full red lips curled up into a menacing smirk. “You don’t have to like someone, you just have to respect them. Especially when they’re as powerful as The Ciardah.”
Flint stayed light on her toes, making sure Echo never got too close to her or in case she made any sudden moves. Holding her sword out in a defensive position, she circled when the dark sidhe did.
“So what you’re saying is—”
“Fight’s on, whoreson.” Echo’s words dripped venom.
Then the world turned into a blur as fire suddenly sprayed her eyes. Little pellets of burning fuel had sparked from the very tips of Echo’s fingers.
“Frack!” Flint screamed, blinking against the blinding pain and now streaming tears. She whirled around, but Echo was already gone.
And suddenly she knew why the fae was called Echo, because the woods burst with laughter that resonated through every branch, leaf, and tree.
“You don’t fight fair!” Flint yelled.
“Oh gods, you’re going to be too easy.”
If she could only pinpoint the point of origin of Echo’s voice, she’d be able to fight her, but it was impossible with the way the trees amplified her voice.
Fire rained down from the sky in sheets, catching the hem of Flint’s gown. In a second that fire was traveling up her legs like it had little claws.
She screamed. And then did the most basic thing she could think of. She stopped, dropped, and rolled.
More laughter. “Just lie there and die, halfling. Stop wasting my time.”
Flint’s ankles burned, throbbed where the flame had begun licking at them. But there was no time to focus on the pain; she needed to find shelter, needed to stop being so exposed.
“Sword,” she hissed at it, “you were born in lightning, so light it up!”
A bolt ripped from the tip, powerful and brilliant, arcing in the pattern of a veiny fracture forming on a thin sheet of ice.
Echo screamed and Flint gave a grim smile.
“You want to play like that do you, darkling? Now you’ve made me angry.”
“Like you weren’t before, you fat cow!”
Flint clamped down on the yelp threatening to fall from her lips when a string of flame whipped down her spine. There was actually a method to her madness if she could only live long enough to make her plan happen.
She climbed up the tree, shimmied up the thing like the monkey she was. And this time, instead of panicking she focused on the things she could do.
Her body ached, so she commanded her vines forward to wrap themselves around the wounds.
The healing wasn’t nearly as effective as being taken beneath ground would have been, but at least she no longer had seeping sores.
Fire followed her wherever she went. So she ran, and she didn’t stop running. She leapt from one broad branch to another, remembering the times when she used to run from building to building for no other reason than the sheer joy of being alive.
She used those skills now, moving in ways that made it hard for Echo to pin her down. Flint only wished she could alter the landscape here the way she could in her room. She tried several times to think up new environments, but clearly The Ciardah had created the setting and she was stuck with it.
“You’re only delaying the inevitable, you little witch.” Echo blasted the words, and it was all Flint could do not to drop to her knees and clamp her hands over her ears.
Her skin was on fire, but it was her ears that bled.
Either she’d be burned alive or her brain would get scrambled from the sonic frequency.
“Yeah, well. If you’re so tough, why don’t you come and get me, beeyatch,” Flint called back. Riling up the fae might seem like a bad idea.
And it was, but… she had a plan.
There was an eardrum-splitting screech. The sound was so jarring that just as Flint was maneuvering from one branch to another, she twitched.
That twitch cost her, and all her plans flew out the window.
She missed the neighboring branch and dropped like a stone fifty feet to the ground. Thankfully she’d made sure to banish the sword before she landed or Echo wouldn’t have needed to bother swinging the killing blow.
Flint landed in a heap on the ground, and her left hip and thigh exploded upon contact—the bones shattering into what felt like hundreds of pieces.
She shrieked as her body was suddenly racked with blinding, white-hot, searing pain.
Echo laughed, materializing from thin air and standing like a conquering Valkyrie over her. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled through the heavens.
The trees themselves shook with fury; leaves whipped off the branches and buzzed through the air with a force that turned them from harmless bits of foliage into razor-tipped projectiles.
The vines that’d just been simple healing plants began to writhe and churn from out of her flesh and started to grow thorny and barbed.
They shot out like missiles at Echo, but she burned them before they could even get within ten yards of her.
She wore of look of supreme satisfaction.
Flint whimpered, biting down on her bottom lip to keep the scream trapped in her throat.
“You are a waste of air and my precious time,” Echo intoned like some conquering angel of death.
Unlike in the movies where a villain would monologue the hero to death, there was absolutely none of that here. Echo was on Flint in less than two seconds, her hands wrapped around her throat. The filigree of magma was no longer just on her face but crawling out of her much the same way Flint’s vines did.
Flint’s struggle to keep it together had been in vain. Once she started screaming, she couldn’t stop. Anywhere the magma touched, it burrowed straight through her.
Consuming her. Eating her alive.
Just like yesterday, she knew she faced death, except this time she didn’t think she’d survive it.
No matter how many times Flint tried to shoot the vines through Echo’s heart, the fire burned them up. The sidhe huntress had also known to keep Flint’s hands pinned beneath her knees. There’d be no shoving of poison from out of her claws, not now.
Not ever.
Somehow she had to turn the tables. Figure out a way to make the magma consuming her consume its master.
Then a humming started.
But Echo didn’t hear it.
Her eyes were on Flint alone. They danced with cruel delight as she squeezed the last of the air from out of Flint’s body.
How could she think so clearly? How was it possible that she wasn’t gasping and choking, seizing the way she had in the water yesterday? Her thoughts had never been more focused in the face of death.
She looked at the magma, shutting out the pain and any other type of distraction. The magma was the key.
The humming grew louder, and this time a wave of heat shimmered with it, curling around the two of them.
For the first time, Echo finally seemed to be aware that something was happening.
“What is—” she asked in a daze.
But she didn’t get a chance to finish her thought because the magma that’d been burning through Flint now returned to its master.
A master it no longer seemed to recognize.
Echo’s eyes widened, her mouth parted, and then… she screamed. The sound of terror mingled with pain sent bolts of black ice to skate down Flint’s spine. The woods themselves seemed to tremble, as though aware of the horrors occurring inside them.
The tips of Echo’s fingers turned to ash.
Her hands, which’d
once been cruelly wrapped around Flint’s throat, were now clawing at herself as the magma burrowed like fiery worms of Hell through Echo’s flesh.
“What’d you do to me?” she screamed with lips that’d begun to melt like wax.
Flint shook her head, unable to move or even to stand. All she could do was gaze on in silent horror as the fire consumed its mistress. She’d only thought it, she’d not actually been able to do anything though.
And yet… a sixth sense inside her quietly whispered that this was no accident.
Echo flung her arms wide, running in a panic like a chicken being chased by an axe-wielding farmer’s wife. She slammed into tree trunks, rubbing herself down on the bark as though to extinguish the flame.
But where Flint had managed to quench its ravenous thirst when she’d rolled in the dirt, this new fire was the very devil itself. Rather than gutter and die, it only sparked hotter, flamed higher.
Soon Echo was a tower of fire that burned brighter than a beacon in the night.
Flint covered her mouth with her hand as tears spilled heavily from her eyes. Surely she hadn’t done this. She couldn’t control fire.
Echo would have killed her, had been on the verge of doing it, but the sight of her death was too barbarous for Flint to just stand by and watch.
Snapping out of the heavy miasma of shock, she whispered to the earth to take the woman under. The earth shook.
Echo had stopped screaming. She was lying facedown on the ground. She was probably dead already, but Flint had to try.
Ramming her fingers into the ground, she called the power deep inside her to obey. It rippled from her in waves, exploding through the ground like a military air strike, turning the earth soft and soupy.
“Take her now!” she commanded her vines that’d ripped out of her flesh and were now the same thickness as the tree trunks surrounding them.
The hooked thorns, dripping a green, viscous fluid, pierced every inch of Echo’s exposed flesh, and for just a second Flint trembled in relief when the fallen fae screamed.
She was alive, but barely.
The Complete Tempted Series Page 76