P.C. Cast - Burned

The earth beneath her feet, that tangible part of her element that Stevie Rae felt so connected to—so comfortable with—began to shake.

“Stevie Rae, you need to come outta there now. I don’t like all this smoke.”

“Can you feel that?” she called to Dallas. “Is the ground shakin’ out there, too?”

“No, but I can’t see you, and I got a bad feeling ’bout this.”

Before Stevie Rae saw it, she felt its presence. The feeling it gave her was terrifyingly familiar and in the heartbeat of an instant, Stevie Rae understood why. It reminded her of the moment she’d realized she was dying. The moment she’d begun to cough, grabbed Zoey’s hand, and said, I’m scared, Z . The echo of that terror paralyzed Stevie Rae, so that when the tip of the first horn took form and glinted at her, white and sharp and dangerous, all she could do was stare and shake her head back and forth, back and forth.

“Stevie Rae! Can you hear me?”

Dallas’s voice seemed to be miles away.

The second horn materialized, and, along with it, the bull’s head began to form, white and massive, with eyes so black they glistened like a bottomless lake at midnight.

Help me! Stevie Rae tried to say, but fear trapped the words in her throat.

“That’s it. I’m comin’ in there and getting’ you, even if you don’t want me to break the circle and—”

Stevie Rae felt the ripple when Dallas reached the boundary of her circle. So did the bull. The creature turned its great head and snorted a gust of fetid air into the inky smoke. The night shivered in response.

“Shit! Stevie Rae, I can’t get inside the circle. Close it and get out of there!”

“I-I c-c-can’t,” she stammered, her voice a broken whisper.

Fully formed, the bull was a nightmare come alive. Its breath gagged Stevie Rae. Its eyes trapped her. His white coat was luminous in the all-encompassing darkness, but it wasn’t beautiful. Its brilliance was slimy, its glistening surface cold and dead. One of the beast’s enormous cloven hoofs lifted and then fell, tearing the earth with such malice that Stevie Rae felt an echo of the pain of the wound within her soul. She ripped her gaze from the bull’s eyes to stare down at his hooves. She gasped in horror. The grass around the beast was broken and blackened. Where he had pawed the earth—Stevie Rae’s earth—the ground was torn and bleeding.

“No!” The dam of terror broke enough for her words to finally escape. “Stop! You’re hurting us!”

The bull’s black eyes bored into hers. The voice that filled her head was deep and powerful and unimaginably malicious. “You had the power to evoke me, vampyre, and that has amused me enough that I choose to answer your question. The Warrior must look to his blood to discover the bridge to enter the Isle of Women, and then he must defeat himself to enter the arena. Only by acknowledging one before the other will he join his Priestess. After he joins her, it is her choice and not his whether she returns.”

Stevie Rae swallowed her fear and blurted, “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Your inability to comprehend has no bearing on me. You summoned. I answered. Now I shall claim my blood price. It has, indeed, been eons since I tasted the sweetness of vampyre blood—especially one filled with so much innocent Light.”

Before Stevie Rae could begin to form any kind of response, the beast started to circle her. Tendrils of darkness slithered from the smoke surrounding him and began to snake their way toward her. When they touched her, they were like frozen razor blades slicing, tearing, ripping her flesh.

Without conscious thought, she screamed one word: “Rephaim!”

Rephaim knew the instant Darkness materialized. He’d been sitting on the rooftop balcony, eating an apple, staring up at the clear night sky and trying to ignore the annoying presence of the human ghost that had developed an unfortunate fascination with him.

“Come on, tell me! Is it really fun to fly?” the young spirit asked for what Rephaim thought was probably the hundredth time. “It looks like it’d be fun. I never got to, but I’ll bet flying with your own wings is way more fun than flying in an airplane any day.”

Rephaim had sighed. The child talked more than Stevie Rae, which was pretty impressive. Irritating, but impressive. He was trying to decide if he should continue to ignore her and hope she’d finally go away, or come up with an alternative plan, as ignoring the girl didn’t appear to be working. He’d thought perhaps he should ask Stevie Rae what to do about the ghost, which had turned his mind to the Red One. Though, truth be told, his thoughts were never far from her.

“Is it dangerous to fly? I mean with your wings? I guess it must be because you got hurt, and I’ll bet that was from flying around . . .”

The child had been babbling when the texture of the world changed. In that first, shocking moment, he felt the familiarity and believed, for the space of a heartbeat, that his father had returned.

“Silence!” he roared at the ghost. He stood and whirled around, glowing red eyes glaring into the dark land surrounding him, hoping beyond words that he could glimpse the raven blackness of his father’s wings.

The ghost child made a shocked squeak, cringed away from him, and disappeared.

Rephaim gave her absolutely no thought. He was too busy being barraged with knowledge and emotions.

First came knowledge. He knew almost immediately that it wasn’t his father he’d sensed. Yes, Kalona was powerful, and he had long allied himself with Darkness, but the disturbance this immortal was making in the world was different; it was far more powerful. Rephaim could sense it in the excited response of the dark hidden things of the earth, sprites that this modern world of man-made light and electronic magick had forgotten. But Rephaim had not forgotten them, and from the deepest of the night’s shadows, he saw ripples and quivers, and was baffled by their reaction.

What could be powerful enough to arouse the hidden sprites?

Then Stevie Rae’s fear hit him. It was the rawness of her complete terror coupled with the excitement of the sprites, and that instant of initial familiarity, that provided Rephaim with his answer.

“By all the gods, Darkness itself has entered this realm!” Rephaim was moving before he’d made a conscious decision to do so. He burst out of the front doors of the dilapidated mansion, knocking them aside with his uninjured arm as if they were made of cardboard, only to come to a halt on the wide front porch.

He had no idea of where he should go.

Another wave of terror engulfed him. Experiencing it with her, Rephaim knew Stevie Rae was paralyzed by her fear. A horrible thought filled his mind: Had Stevie Rae conjured Darkness? How could she? Why would she?

The answer to the most important of the three questions came as quickly as he thought it. Stevie Rae would do almost anything if she believed it would bring Zoey back.

Rephaim’s heart thundered, and his blood pumped hard and fast through his body. Where was she? The House of Night?

No, surely not. Were she to set about conjuring Darkness, it wouldn’t be at a school devoted to Light.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” he shouted his frustration into the night. “I know Darkness; you do not!”

But even as he spoke, he admitted to himself that he was wrong. Stevie Rae had been touched by Darkness when she had died. He hadn’t known her then, but he’d known Stark and had witnessed for himself the Darkness that surrounded the death and resurrection of a fledgling.