by D. N. Hoxa
“One last question: how old are you?” she eventually asked.
I laughed. “I don’t want to scare you.”
“Oh, come on. You won’t scare me, I promise,” she said with that smile. How could I resist?
I leaned closer to her on the sofa. “I’ll celebrate my three-hundredth deathday in August.”
Sinea wasn’t surprised, not in the least. She was no longer smiling, either. She only looked at me for a moment, and then, her hand rose and the tips of her fingers touched my cheek.
My eyes closed as the monstrous need to grab her in my arms came over me again. She had no idea what she was doing to me, caressing my skin, reminding me what it was like to have actual contact with another being, not just meaningless sex with random women. She leaned closer to me, crossed her legs underneath her, and I felt her breath blow on my face. Her heartbeat picked up, the blood in her veins rushing. I kept my eyes closed, afraid that if I opened them and saw her desire as clearly as I smelled it, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.
Her soft lips pressed against mine, slowly. A distant memory of a live heart beating in my chest came back to me, shaking me like a drum. She didn’t kiss me. She just touched her lips with mine, and I held still, afraid that if I moved, she’d push away from me. My whole existence, twenty-six years of living, and three hundred years of death, hung onto her.
And the lights turned on.
Sinea moved away the same second I jumped to my feet, my instincts taking over, clearing my ears, sharpening my teeth.
Across the room, I saw Moira by the light switch, looking at us through half-hooded eyes swollen with sleep.
“Your squirrel is in my room going through my closet. Do you mind?” she said to Sinea, without ever looking at her.
“I’ll go get him,” Sinea said in a rush and jumped to her feet, running toward the hallway with her head down.
Moira looked at me. I looked at her. She had me. She had me and we both knew it.
She turned off the lights and walked back to her room, leaving me to wonder how I hadn’t heard her. I heard everything, always. I heard her breathing every night, and it was the rhythm that guided me into a sleep-like state during the hours of the morning.
But I’d been so overwhelmed by Sinea that I had ignored the world around me completely. A mistake that could be fatal.
Another door opened in the hallway, and John’s silent steps reached my ears. He came in the kitchen fully dressed. “I have a lead in Brooklyn. I’m going to check it out.”
I walked to the elevator. “I’m coming with.”
A bit of cold air was exactly what I needed to clear my head and get Sinea’s scent out of my nostrils. Only after we walked out of the building did I realize that I hadn’t given Yutain, the Uprising, or even her—the woman I’d given a hundred and fifty years of my life for—a single thought until now.
Moira was right. I was in more trouble than I realized.
Chapter Seventeen
Sin Montero
I almost kissed him.
Almost.
Now, as I lay in his bed, wearing his clothes, and staring at the ceiling, my mind wouldn’t shut up about it.
And why the hell hadn’t he kissed me? I’d been right there, had offered myself wide to him, had pressed myself against him, and he hadn’t moved. He hadn’t kissed me like I’d wanted him to. Like I’d needed him to.
I jumped off the bed, restless. This had gone too far. I’d completely forgotten that Sonny—my brother—was away from me, and I had no idea how to even find him. I’d let Damian Reed get into my head with his stories and his laugh…UGH! Why the fuck was he so perfect? He was a vampire, for God’s sake. A vampire! And he’d even confessed that he’d killed his own father.
I knew better than to act like this. I knew better, damn it.
I pulled his shirt off and threw it on the bed as if it were on fire. Kit squeaked in protest when it landed on his head. I got dressed in the clothes Damian bought me, only because I didn’t have anything else to wear, and I wasn’t going to walk around the City naked.
That’s exactly what I needed—a walk outside, to focus on everything, anything, just to stop thinking about him, because imagining him with a baby elf in his arms was not doing me any favors.
I went to the door and pressed my ear against the wood. I couldn’t hear anything. I wasn’t a freaking vampire. But I had a few tricks of my own. Closing my eyes, I let my magic wander out the door, searching for an essence, any kind of magic to replicate, to steal for my own. I found Moira, in her room, and another vampire—not as strong as Damian, but there was nobody else. It was incredible how far my magic stretched—farther than ever before. I don’t know what that amulet did to me, but I could feel everything with such clarity, it was ridiculous. And the way my fingers had lit from within…
There was nobody there. Damian was gone, and so were John and Emanuel. I pulled the door open as slowly as I could and patted my thigh. Kit climbed up my leg, my jacket, and sat on my shoulder, wrapping his tail around the back of my neck. The hallway was dark, deserted. I walked slowly without making any noise. Sunlight drenched the entire living room and kitchen in a rich orange light. I could see that they were empty. When I woke up at three in the morning and came for a glass of water, Damian had been there, hiding in the darkness, as still as the drapes behind him. I’d had no chance of seeing him, and I hadn’t turned to my magic because I’d trusted my eyes. That was a mistake I wasn’t going to make again.
But he was gone. That’s all that mattered.
By the time I stepped into the elevator and the car took me down, my mind had cleared up halfway. My first plan was to find Travis again and make him tell me exactly where Sonny was. I wasn’t going to wait around until midnight, giving myself the chance to do something stupid again.
Like kiss Damian Reed.
It was this whole situation doing me in. Sonny and my magic and then his laugh…No. I wasn’t going to let myself go there again.
I stepped out of the building and pulled up the zipper of my jacket. It was cold outside. I turned right and walked toward the Shade. If Damian was anywhere near and he saw me, he didn’t come out to stop me, a fact for which I was thankful.
Calling Jamie was on my to-do list as well. I hadn’t been able to talk to her the night before, only to Malin. She was working so she couldn’t pick up the phone, but if there was someone around here who knew more about the Uprising, it would be her. Or if she didn’t know, she could find out. Like I said, everybody loved Jamie. They didn’t hesitate to tell her things, not like they did with me.
I turned the corner of the street, and the view in front of me blurred for a second. That’s when I noticed that I was sweating. Since when? It was cold out there. Maybe the jacket was thicker than I’d realized, so I undid the zipper. I walked a few more steps and stopped. Why was I feeling so sleepy all of a sudden? The few cars passing me by were all a blur.
Too late did I realize that I was being attacked.
I turned around and looked at the street, magic at the tips of my fingers, ready to shoot at whoever was spelling me. But there was nobody there.
Was I imagining it? It didn’t feel like a spell, now that I was thinking about it.
“Kit,” I said, as his cold nose pressed against my jaw, sniffing me. “I don’t feel so well…”
That’s what I think I said before I collapsed onto the asphalt, unable to hold myself upright any longer. I blinked and blinked about a million times, but there was nothing I could see. Even so, I felt a presence looming over me, a breath blowing on my face.
“There you are,” a male voice said, and darkness sucked me in completely.
I woke up to a pounding, but it was coming from inside my head. The headache took me by surprise—I didn’t get them very often, so it took me a second to remember what had happened. Focusing on my eyes, I opened them, and the blinding light turned the pain up a notch.
“Sin?”
Screw the light. I sat up, heart beating in my throat. I knew that voice. It was…
“Sonny!”
It was my brother, and he was right in front of me, his shirt and pants glowing blindingly. I had no idea if it was a dream or what the hell was going on, but I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed him with all my strength. He was here. He was alive. He was well.
And he was laughing.
“You’re killing me, Sin,” he said, tapping my arms to make me let go. Just a little bit longer.
“I missed you so much,” I told him and breathed in his scent of peppermint. I pushed him away from me and checked him. The spell I’d put on his clothes to make them glow was already fading away now that I’d found him. His skin looked okay. Normal. He didn’t have any cuts or bruises that I could see. He looked clean, with a dark green shirt and a pair of jeans on. He was okay.
“I missed you, too. I’m so sorry I left the way I did. I wanted to tell you, but—” he said, his warm brown eyes sparkling with excitement.
“It’s fine! It doesn’t matter.” I ran my hand over his hair. He always kept it a bit on the long side but never this long. Maybe they didn’t have barbershops here.
Which reminded me… “Where are we? Where were you?”
I jumped to my feet, looking at the small room we were in. Light wooden walls surrounded us. The twin bed I’d been lying on had no sheets, and the mattress didn’t exactly look clean. There were holes in the wood panels of the floor, and the wardrobe by the opposite wall looked ancient, barely standing. A window showed me a blue sky and a line of dense trees, and there was a stuffed deer head mounted over the door across from it, except this one was completely white. And it didn’t look exactly like a deer because its antlers twisted and turned into spirals, and there were four of them.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” Sonny said. He grabbed my hand and pulled me to the door. It wasn’t locked, like I’d expected, and my daggers were in their sheaths around my hips, too. It made me feel a bit more in control.
The outside air was warmer than it had been in the City. But we were far away from the City now.
Small wooden cabins stretched to my left, as far as the eye could see. Across from them, about a mile away, a twenty-foot wall made of stone surrounded what looked like a castle with two thick towers, each rising a hundred feet in the air. The wall went as far as the woods on the right, so close it brushed against the huge trees. Behind it, in the distance, a row of mountains of all sizes topped with snow acted like another wall, surrounding us on all sides. In the open space between the cabins and the stone wall, rows and rows of different wooden structures took up half of the space, and on the other side was a sand pit over sixty feet wide. People were sparring in it, about thirty that I could see, and the sounds of metal clashing made me realize that they were using real weapons.
“What is this place?”
“They call it Tachtoh, but I don’t think it’s a real name,” Sonny said. “I have no idea where it is, but it’s not on Earth. I’ve got a few theories.”
“So we’re in another realm,” I whispered to myself. I never thought I’d ever find myself anywhere other than on Earth. Up in the sky, a bird flew over us in circles, as if searching for something. Analie—Sonny’s familiar. “Have you by any chance seen Kit around here?” He’d been with me before in the City, but not when I woke up.
Sonny shook his head. “No, it was just you.”
“Do you have any idea how I got here?” I remembered the feeling with perfect clarity. My limbs had been so heavy, my eyes closing, and I’d had no control over my mind at all as it shut down.
“Probably the same way as all of us—Faron. He’s a fae. Before we got here, he put us all to sleep in the transporter. Extremely powerful,” Sonny said.
Shivers washed down my back. A fae? What the hell? “What does a fae want with…” I looked around. “Who are these people, Sonny?” I looked at the people sparring once more. Most of them were just kids, close to Sonny’s age.
“The Uprising,” my brother said, scratching the back of his neck. “Darkling. Well, most of them. Come on.” He started walking to the left, and I followed. So many cabins—at least fifty of them divided into three lines. “The Uprising is a darkling movement. They’re people who aren’t pleased with the way the Guild runs things. Mainly, how the Guild Nulls them when they’re children, and then discriminates against them their entire lives. So they’ve been gathering people to help make a change. They believe darkling are just as important as the Sacri and that they should be treated equally.”
To be fair, I sometimes felt the same way, but my opinion wasn’t objective. I was darkling, too—and the Guild didn’t make a secret out of hating us. Their name said it all—the Sacri Guild.
The sound of the people sparring together grew distant and at the end of the cabins, Sonny turned left again, away from the castle. There, about thirty feet away, was a lake with dark green water, so still it looked like a mirror. Over it rose a round stone bridge, its reflection on the lake creating a perfect circle. Behind the bridge stood a structure with no walls, with six thick yellow pillars and a round roof over them.
“Wow.” It was absolutely breathtaking.
“The Sacred Temple,” Sonny said. “People used to worship the gods in there, but it’s been abandoned for a long time.”
I shook my head and turned to him. “Why are you here, Sonny? You’re not darkling, are you?”
He smiled sheepishly. “No, of course not. I’m here because of you.”
“What do you mean, because of me?”
“Come on, Sin. I know what you are. And I know how you hate it that you can’t even tell anyone about it, so when I heard about the Uprising, it seemed like a good idea to see what they were about. You know, so I could make a difference in the world.”
The blood in my veins turned ice-cold, and I looked away at the lake again. “You…you know?” I asked when I found my voice.
All my life I’d never spoken to anyone about my Talent. All my life I’d shied away from every conversation about magic, was forced to lie to my brother, to my friends, to the entire world. The need to talk about it was so, so great sometimes. It got exhausting keeping secrets of this kind. But it had never occurred to me that Sonny knew. Never in a million years.
“Yeah, I know. I’ve known since we were kids, before my test, when you tried to make me see people’s essence.”
Tears in my eyes. I pulled him to me again and hugged the shit out of him, squeezing my eyes shut as tears wet my cheeks. I remembered that time, right before his testing, when I wanted to make sure that Sonny was not like me, or that if he was, he’d know exactly how to pass the test. Because Analie could have been a hellbeast, just like Kit. I didn’t know what the truth was, not for sure, and at that time, his Talent hadn’t come to light yet.
Sonny hugged me, patting my back. It was supposed to feel good, to know that my brother knew, but instead, it made me feel guilty as hell. He was here, in this place, because of me.
But it didn’t matter, because he was okay.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked in a whisper and let go of him.
His cheeks were flushed. He blushed so easily, it was adorable. “I didn’t know how. I wanted to, so many times after we were out chasing hellbeasts. But you should have known that I knew, Sin. The times when we had to kill bigger hellbeasts, the way you’d go wild all of a sudden, and kill them on the spot.” He laughed. “I knew you used your Talent on me.”
My smile fell. “But I didn’t.”
He laughed again. “I know you did. C’mon, Sin.”
I shook my head. “I never stole your magic, Sonny. Not once.” And this was exactly the reason why I’d never wanted anyone to know about me. Not even Malin and Jamie. When I replicated someone’s magic, they had no idea. No clue. And of course they’d think that I was doing it without their knowledge or consent. And apparently, so had Sonny.
He narrowed his bro
ws. “But then how did you kill them so quickly?”
“Aunt Marie’s spells. I always tried standard Guild issue spells first, and when they didn’t work, I turned to stronger magic.”
“Not even with the bear hellbeast in Grand Central?”
“Not even then,” I confirmed with a nod. I remembered the hellbeast he was talking about—he looked like a grizzly, except bigger and stronger and, you know, a hellbeast. I’d had to use some of the strongest spells Aunt Marie had ever taught me to bring him down. Sonny thought that I’d taken his magic to do it.
“Wow,” he whispered, looking at the ground. “But just so you know, it would have been totally cool if you’d replicated my magic, too.”
I smiled and ruffled his hair. He hated that. “I know, Sonny. I know.”
“And you totally didn’t need my help with anything,” he said with a flinch. “I wish I’d told you about these people before.”
I swallowed hard. “How did you find them in the first place?”
“Travis,” he said. “He’s darkling, too.”
No way. “But he has a familiar.” An orange cat named Dale. He was with him all the time.
“A pet,” Sonny said. “Just an animal he’s had since he was eight years old.”
“But how—”
“His mom. She took care of all of it.”
Ah, of course. Marilyn Bennet worked in the Guild as the CFO of Supernatural Affairs. She was very powerful, and I could imagine that she would be able to alter her son’s test results without too much trouble. Which was insane. Before all of this, the only darkling I knew that wasn’t Nulled was Ms. Arnon, Malin’s mother, and that’s because something had gone wrong with the procedure and the Guild hadn’t checked twice. Now, it seemed everybody had a secret.