by Jus Accardo
“Here.” He skidded to a stop in front of a large, spindly pine tree. “Go. Climb!”
I did as requested but couldn’t manage to get my feet onto the first branch. “I can’t,” I said, shaking. “We have to fight.”
The look in his eyes was haunted. Panic like I’d never seen was etched in his features. He glanced up at the tree, then turned his attention to the woods for a moment before focusing on me. “You know I love you, right?”
“What?” Everything stilled.
“I love you, Sammy, and when it comes down to you and me, I will always choose you.”
“You’re scaring me.” It was more the look in his eyes than the words he spoke. There was a grave finality, something he was purposely avoiding saying.
“I’ll hold them off. Run.” He grabbed my arm and tried to move me away from the tree.
I shoved him away. “What aren’t you telling me?” I demanded.
Another howl filtered through the woods and Jax cursed. With a growl, he wrapped his hands around my waist and hefted me up so I could reach the first branch. Once I made it several higher, he clawed his way to me.
“They better not be able to fucking climb.”
“Screw the carnivi,” I said. “Tell me what the hell is going on. You’re injured, I get it, but it’s more than that. You’re terrified.”
He opened his mouth—to tell me the truth or spew some other bullshit, I didn’t know—but the tree jerked sideways. I grabbed the branch, hands covered in sap, and held tight. On the ground, the two carnivi were running, head first, into the trunk of the tree.
“This is a particularly sticky situation.” We both jumped as Heckle, now sitting a branch below us, wiped a smear of sap across the knee of his worn blue jeans. He nodded to Jax. “Nice to see you’re still with us.”
“Do something,” Jax said with a snarl. I watched, waiting for his eyes to flicker, or at least rim with black like they did when he got angry and the demon grew agitated, but they didn’t. They stayed solid gray.
“I can’t,” Heckle replied. He didn’t look sorry about it, either. “Not without a trade.”
“A trade?” I repeated, stunned. We were literally up a tree with the hounds of hell nipping at our heels and he wanted to play let’s make a deal?
“My hands are tied, Sam.” That time he actually did look sorry. A little. “There are rules. I’m forbidden to interfere without the proper bal—”
“Don’t,” Jax said and smashed his fist against the tree. The surrounding branches shuddered, and I cringed. “Do not fucking say balance.”
The carnivi had stopped ramming the tree and were circling the bottom like vultures. Occasionally one would glance upward, snarling, and chomp at the air several times in anticipation. At this point, they’d simply have to outwait us. We’d pass out from hunger, exhaustion, or exposure, and drop right into their wide open mouths.
“The rules state I cannot interfere. I am unable to provide you with an edge unless you offer something to tip the scales back.”
“The rules,” I repeated. “But didn’t you make the rules? Break them for fuck’s sake!”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t make the rules. I only enforce them. If it were up to me…”
Jax looked down, then fixed his gaze on Heckle. “What do you want?”
“What do you have?” The bartender waggled his eyebrows, and I could tell Jax just about lost it.
“What we have,” Jax said, tone threatening, “is certain death, waiting at the bottom. Of. This. Fucking. Tree.”
“What is it you want?” I tried. I didn’t think Heckle would leave us stranded here because Jax threw attitude, but I didn’t want to take the chance.
“A soul,” came his unexpected reply.
“A soul?” I repeated, not understanding. “What does that even mean?”
“I want a soul,” Heckle repeated. “Well, to clarify, I want part of a soul.”
“You want part of a soul…?” I asked, confused. With a quick glance at the ground, I said a silent prayer that he made this fast. The tree wasn’t going to hold up to much more abuse.
“Even clearer,” Heckle said with a slight frown. “I want a part of your soul.”
My soul? What good would it do him now? Once a Pure died, their soul—and the energy inside it—was up for grabs, to be used for good or evil depending on who managed to get their grubby hands on it first. But that wouldn’t happen when I died. My soul had already been claimed.
“I know what you’re thinking.” He stole a glance at the carnivi below. “And no, I do not wish to steal your power. I have my own reasons—reasons that I can assure you contribute to balance.”
I looked at Jax.
His mouth fell open. “You cannot seriously be considering—”
“Fine,” I said before he could get the rest out. From the start, Heckle had claimed his motivations were to keep balance, but the more light we shone on them, the sketchier things got. But we didn’t have a choice. There was no other way out of this tree. “I agree. Get us the hell out of here!”
Chapter Twenty-One
Jax/Azirak
When I opened my eyes, I found myself back in the white room. But this time, Azi was standing in the opposite corner than it normally did, across from the wheel. “Fucker!” I lunged at it without thinking. As with each time before, the demon dissolved into smoke and reappeared out of reach. “You took back control. We had a deal.”
“I did not betray you. You are still in control.”
I looked around. Yep. Still in the room. Still having a conversation with the demon. I spread my arms wide. “Then explain this.”
“I do not understand. What is it you wish for me to explain?”
“This,” I said, and balled my fists tight. “You. Me. Here. Talking.” Deep breath. “Before you hijacked my body, we couldn’t do this. You couldn’t talk to me.”
“Actually, I could.”
“Huh?”
“I did.”
“Did what?” I was getting pissed.
“Talk to you. When you were an infant. When you were scared and alone. When, even as a toddler, you were able to feel the hostility rolling from your father. I spoke to you, was the voice of companionship whispering in your ear.”
“Bullshit.” That was something I would have remembered. This was a ploy of some kind. A trick to disarm me.
“It is true.”
“Then how come I can’t remember this? How come you haven’t said anything else until now?”
“As you aged, you fought my presence. More and more. Harder and harder. You blocked me out, Jax. I had no desire to cause you distress, so I did not fight it.”
“If you have no desire to cause me distress, leave.” The desperation in my voice made me sick, but I was fading. Fast. “Turn the fuck around and let me live my life. I get one chance with Sam. You have an infinite number of lifetimes.”
“Your body is waking…”
And just like that, I was in a small half enclosure, propped up against something solid as rain beat down around me. The tree was gone, as was the smell of the forest, replaced by a stale, acidic aroma.
“Sam!” I pushed off and threw myself forward. She was a few feet away, sprawled out across a bench. We were in a bus stop enclosure. Heckle must have sent us here after we’d agreed to his terms.
“Jax?” She picked her head up and scanned the area through hooded eyes. “Where…?”
“No fucking clue. All that matters is where we’re not.” I glanced around to be sure. “And what we’re not with.”
She threw her legs over the side of the bench and leaned forward. A quick glance right, then another, longer one to the left. “We’re alone?”
“No drooling hell beasts,” I confirmed.
She nodded and stood. With a completely blank expression, she knelt down, and smacked me hard across the face.
“What the fuck was that for?”
“I want the truth. How did you
get control back from Azirak?”
Sam was smart. She was suspicious even before Heckle had made all of his annoyingly vague comments. Still though, I’d hoped to put this off. Wait until the very last moment to come clean. “We should really find out where we are. We don’t have a lot of time.”
She folded her arms and backed up to the bench. “I’m not leaving till you spill.” Her expression softened, and she sat back down. “Come on, Jax. Do you really think I can’t see that you’re hiding something important?”
A wide range of emotion welled up. They were a combination of hers, swirls of red and gray churning like a storm, mixed with my own. In that instant, I was furious. Enraged that I had no options left. Incensed that I had to break her heart. Again. “Azi gave me control, Sammy. It let me come back.”
“Why?” There was no hope in her voice. “Why would it do that?”
“As a favor, I guess? Because of you? Who the fuck knows?” I moved to settle in front of her. “I’m done, Sammy. It’s over. There’s nothing I can do.”
“I…what? No. What are you talking…?”
I hated that I was doing this to her. “This is just the way it is. The both of us can’t stay in here.”
“But—”
“I’m sorry.” What the hell else could I say? There was nothing I could offer her. No words would make this easier—or different. I felt it now, as surely as I felt the air in my lungs. The inevitability of death. The grim reaper was knocking on my door, and if I didn’t answer, the fucker would huff and puff until he blew my whole house down. End of story.
A choked sob escaped her lips, and she cringed away from me. Her colors went from dismal to determined. “I don’t believe you. There has to be something we can do. There’s always something we can do.”
“It was always going to go down like this. Should have happened years ago, actually. There’s just not enough room in here for both of us.”
For the longest time, she just sat there watching me, saying nothing. Her wide eyes, filled with tears, stared unblinking. Then, without warning, she jumped up and hauled me to my feet.
But before she could say or do anything, I wrapped my arms around her. She fought me, tried to pull away, but I held tight and crushed her close. I had to hold my breath to tamp down the howl building inside. I wanted to give her hope. To lie and offer comforting platitudes just to ease her pain. She’d never done a damn thing wrong, and yet she was getting the brunt of all this. She’d be the one left behind. I would just be…gone.
I’d had to leave her once, but the thing that made it bearable was knowing that she was out there, living her life. If she hadn’t been, if I’d lost her so completely, I wasn’t sure I could have survived it.
But Sam was strong. So much stronger than I was. Stronger than I could ever be.
I kissed her head and rested my chin for a minute before pulling away. “Hey.”
She avoided my gaze by keeping her head down. The blue was gone now, replaced by a fiery red. Anger. Good. I’d always said anger was easier to deal with. It could keep you going. Motivate you in all the ways sadness failed. It wasn’t healthy, but in time I hoped she’d get over it.
I lifted her chin. The whole thing sucked. It was unfair and cruel in a way even the demon couldn’t reconcile. But she could mourn me later. After she was safe. “Sammy, listen to me, okay? We have to go. We need to figure out where Heckle sent us and get to the Dandus Preserve.”
“How,” she asked, her head shaking slowly. “How can you just accept this? Give in and keep going like… I can’t believe you’re willing to give—”
“It is what it is. Do you think I wanted to leave you?” I gripped the sides of her face. “Rick told me that you were my North Star. He said it when I was a kid, and he said it the night I left Harlow. That no matter where I ended up in the world, I’d always find my way back to you somehow because you were home. And he was right. If I had a choice, Sammy, I would marry you. I would spend the rest of my days making sure you knew exactly how fucking amazing you are. My only goal in life would be to see you happy.” I let my hands fall away. “But there’s no choice here. The hand’s been dealt, and no one is going to reshuffle the deck. But I’ll be damned if I leave this world with your fate hanging in the air.”
…
As it turned out, we were lucky. Though with Heckle involved, it probably had nothing to do with luck. We’d landed only four blocks from the Dandus Preserve. The Bastard of Balance had sent us here for a reason—I’d bet my dick it wasn’t for our benefit. I was beginning to see why both heaven and hell alike hated Heckle. He was a selfish shit with an agenda all his own.
Sam had been quiet on the walk over. We’d met right after her parents died, and I’d never forget seeing her emotions as bleak as they were then. I could barely make her out through the swirling blue cloud. For months she was overcome by it. There was sadness now, but it was different somehow. Resigned and determined. She was either handling this amazingly well—or she was in denial.
We managed to get past the gate at Dandus just as they were locking up. The place was quiet, probably due to being off-season, so it’d been easy to slip by unseen. “Van said the stone was in a cave.”
“An underwater cave,” Sam corrected. She sighed and pointed to the trail map a few yards down the path. She picked up a pamphlet and shook it open. “First things first. Need to find the water. She made it seem like it was part of Dandus, so there has to be some mention of it in here.”
As she skimmed the paper, I scanned the area. So far so good. The last of the cars had left the lot, and there didn’t appear to be night security of any kind. Since we weren’t technically breaking and entering, I figured we should be safe.
“Here’s something.” Sam held the paper up to the fading light. “The Quartz Grotto is located at the edge of the property. ‘A long forgotten grotto with walls of white quartz…is said to have purification powers. The only known one of its kind, the grotto boasts an expansive series of tunnels leading in from a small entrance beneath the water.’”
“Looks like we’re going for a swim.”
…
Sam stood at the water’s edge and waited while I pulled off my boots. Another spasm rolled through me, and I was thankful she wasn’t looking. I wouldn’t have been able to hide this one.
It won’t be long now…
I know.
To Sam, I said, “You ready for this?”
She dipped her toe into the water, and a shiver that I knew had nothing to do with the temperature racked her body. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
I held out my hand. “You can. I won’t let go.”
She didn’t take it. “I don’t mean the water.” She sighed. “I mean, I do, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I know.” It was all I had. Fucking weak and useless. “But I need you to do this. For me. I need to leave knowing that we finished this.”
She hesitated, then nodded her head. Just once. Without another word, she sucked in a breath and jumped over the edge. I followed her and dove into the icy waters. My eyes adjusted quickly, a perk of the demon’s presence. I grabbed Sam’s hand and pulled us deeper beneath the surface.
The cave wasn’t that far down. The opening was small—I almost missed it—but large enough for us to both fit through at the same time. My head broke the surface as Sam’s did. She gasped and sucked in a greedy lungful of air as we splashed toward solid ground. The water was frigid, but we managed to drag ourselves from the icy drink.
She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. “We’re how many feet below the surface, cut off from natural light. Is it just me, or is the fact that this place is lit like a Christmas tree creepy?”
“Yeah,” I said. I pulled off my shirt and twisted it, squeezing out as much water as I could before pulling it back on. “You okay?”
“You mean besides being a human icicle?” She worked to wring the water from her own shirt by pulling sections and
twisting. “Sure. Great. Fan-freaking-tastic. If we screw up and Chase gets here first, I don’t have to worry. The cold will kill me long before he ever gets the chance.”
Without another word, we started into the tunnels. Like the brochure advertised, the cave was something to see. Quartz lined the walls, so thick in some places that you couldn’t see the rock beneath it. The cave floor was covered in super fine white sand. It oozed through my toes with each step—steps that were becoming more and more difficult to take.
A burst of pain hit me, unlike anything I’d felt from the demon, and I stumbled, dropping to my knees.
“Jax?” Sam fell beside me, and the red cloud around her shifted predominantly to gray. Normally it would have incited some kind of reaction from the demon. A spark, a twinge of hunger. Now it stayed dormant, leaving me to deal with the emotion on my own.
“I’m…I’m okay.” I let her help me up. The pain was still there, a pressure in my chest, almost as though someone was pushing on my ribs from the inside. But it was bearable. For now.
It will become worse.
I ignored the demon and forced my feet to move forward. The tunnels were long, but they were easy to navigate. So far there seemed to be just one path. My sense of time had always been shit, but if I had to estimate, we’d walked for twenty minutes by the time we reached the end. The tunnel narrowed, and as we came to the thinnest part, we found that it emptied into a cavern.
“Oh my God,” Sam said, her voice barely a whisper.
“We did it, Sammy.” The stone lay several feet away, in the center of what almost looked like a small version of Stonehenge.
But Sam didn’t answer. She wasn’t looking at the stone anymore. She was staring at me. “It’s not over,” she said. Pink burst from around her head and shoulders. “I have a plan.”
“A plan,” I repeated. Suddenly I understood her reaction to all this. Her lack of despair. She thought she had a way to fix things.
“Sammy—”
She jabbed a finger toward the stone in the center of the grotto. “That thing is crazy powerful, Jax. I think if we can get Van back, she can use it to get rid of Azi. She can—”