Jory Strong: Ghostland

Through tear-filled eyes she saw the spiderweb strands crisscrossing Javier’s face and hands. She forced aside the wild pain crashing through her heart.

“I have to touch him,” Aisling said, the words barely a whisper. “And unless you want Zurael’s spirit to take over Aziel’s body, he can’t touch me while I do it.”

Javier’s eyes turned to black ice. “Is she telling the truth, Zurael?”

“I don’t know.”

Javier hesitated a moment. He studied Aisling closely, then finally nodded. “Release her. But my earlier command stands. If she tries to summon help, kill her.”

A shaky breath escaped from Aisling when Zurael’s deadly talons dropped away from her neck. She took an unsteady step forward, kept her head down and tried not to broadcast her intentions.

Javier backed away from the altar. The athame remained in his hand, as if, like Aubrey, he felt vulnerable without a hostage in front of him.

Aisling blinked away tears and tried to appear as if her only focus were her dead pet. She was small and Javier was armed, confident not only in his personal strength but at having Zurael under his command. He never expected a physical attack, hadn’t thought to command Zurael to prevent anything but a cry for help.

With each step Aisling reinforced the desire for Javier’s death, just as with each swing of the owl fetish in her workroom, she’d desperately wanted her assailant to perish.

When she was close enough she lunged forward, and felt the slash of the athame blade across her palm as he instinctively defended himself. But if anything, the gift of her blood only ensured that his soul was delivered to those whose names she called upon in the spiritlands.

As soon as she touched him, his eyes widened in disbelief. They filled with horror in the instant she felt his soul part from his body, cut through cleanly like a scythe through wheat.

Raw emotion surged through Zurael as the entrapment spell dispersed. He reached Aisling before Javier’s corpse hit the floor, took her in his arms and held her as she gave in to the anguish of losing Aziel.

“Aisling,” he whispered, eyes burning as he pressed kisses to her wet cheeks, her lips, to the places on her neck where his talons had pierced her skin.

Fear for her, the fury and terror of being enslaved and forced to hurt her, to watch helplessly as she was hurt-all of it paled in comparison to the wrenching agony of witnessing her heartbreak and knowing he had to leave her.

He had to take the tablet and return to his father’s kingdom. It wasn’t just his honor at stake, but a future with her.

His chest grew tight with worry and fear. The task she’d accepted in the spiritlands wasn’t complete. Peter Germaine still lived.

Against his chest her sobs gave way to tremors of pain, to shuddering gasps. He rubbed his cheek against her hair, told himself she was safe at the moment and he wouldn’t be gone long.

“Aziel will come back,” Aisling whispered against his chest, repeating it several more times, each time with more certainty, as if saying it would make it so. She pulled away then, lifted a face ravaged by sorrow, and Zurael found her exquisitely beautiful, utterly compelling in her vulnerability.

He brought her hands to his mouth, pressed a kiss to her palms in silent acknowledgment of what she’d done, saved them both. He understood now her silence since returning from the spiritlands after taking Felipe and Ilka there, could guess what had happened, what terrible price she’d paid for a gift she wouldn’t welcome.

“I need to leave, Aisling,” he said, and was barely able to endure the pain slicing through his heart when tears formed in her eyes.

She exhaled a ragged breath and gave a slight nod of understanding. “You want the tablet.”

He leaned in, kissed the tears away. “I want you, Aisling, only you. If I hadn’t promised to return to the Djinn as soon as I gained possession of the tablet, then I wouldn’t leave you, not even for a moment.”

His lips took possession of hers. His tongue sought hers, spoke of the things he hadn’t yet put into words, the emotions she elicited, what she’d come to mean to him.

“I’ll return to you,” he said when the kiss ended.

Every instinct fought leaving her. But honor and duty demanded it.

He pulled away, turned to the altar where Aziel’s lifeless body lay and felt a renewed surge of fury. The sting of failure.

Zurael gathered the tablet pieces. And when it was done, he kissed Aisling again, promised again, “I’ll return to you,” then gave up his physical form and went back to a place that was no longer home.

Silence settled around Aisling, heavy and thick, like the numbness making it hard to think, to know what to do next. Slowly she became aware of the metallic smell of blood clinging to the air, the death stench of voided bodies.

Elena. Aubrey. Javier.

Aziel.

The tears started flowing again. She wouldn’t leave him here with the others.

Aisling picked him up, intending to escape the house. But as she stepped past Elena, she felt the phantom prick of Aziel’s claws in her shoulder, the warm imagined brush of his tail against her cheek, as if even in death he served as her guide-reminding her of the promise she’d made to Sinead in exchange for being led to where Nicholas was bound to the altar.

It wouldn’t wait. As dangerous as it was to travel to the spiritlands in this house where magic had been raised by human sacrifice, Aisling knew the longer she waited, the more treacherous it would become to locate Elena and reunite her with Sinead. Even so, she might have delayed performing the task, convinced herself that with no one to stand guard over her physical shell, it would be better to wait, perhaps seek shelter with the Wainwright witches until Zurael returned and Peter Germaine was dead. But the heavy feel of the crystal amulet in her fetish pouch, the cold still radiating from it-so different than Zurael’s heat-made her feel as if the being it represented was aware of her plight and stood ready to protect her.

She left the room where the corpses lay as they’d fallen. The house had the quiet, empty feel of abandonment.

It was in the red zone. She wondered if that would protect her from being arrested or if she should step forward and claim to be a victim before the bodies were discovered. Elena’s driver could testify she hadn’t come willingly.

Aisling pushed her worries aside for later, for after she’d paid her debt. She slipped into a small room, an office with a door that locked. She knelt on the floor without ceremony and fixed the name of her most powerful protector in her mind, though she didn’t summon him as she slipped into the gray world of the spiritlands.

THE elaborately carved door to the House of the Spider opened. The same male Djinn wearing the simple white trousers of a student bowed low and stepped back, out of the way. “Welcome, Prince Zurael en Caym of the House of the Serpent. You honor us with your presence.”

Zurael entered and found Malahel en Raum waiting for him. She was once again dressed in the gray concealing robes of a desert traveler, with little showing except for eyes so dark they appeared black.

“You were successful, I see.”

He gave her the tablet, anxious to be rid of it, anxious to leave. Despite all the arguments he’d fashioned and his plans for making Malahel en Raum and Iyar en Batrael his allies, he felt a desperate, urgent need to return to Aisling.

“The human female who summoned you is dead?” Malahel asked.

Even the question sent a spasm of pain through his heart. “No. She isn’t an enemy to the Djinn. I won’t allow her to be harmed.”