P.C. Cast - Burned

His fisted hands loosened. His heartbeat quieted. Rephaim stumbled heavily back to his makeshift nest and rested his head against the closet wall behind him.

“Pathetic,” he murmured aloud. “The favorite son of an ancient immortal reduced to hiding in refuse and talking to the ghost of a human child.” He tried to laugh but failed. The echo of the music from his dream, from his past, was still too loud in the air around him. As was the other voice—the one he could have sworn was that of his father.

He couldn’t sit anymore. Ignoring the pain in his arm and the sick agony that was his wing, Rephaim stood. He hated the weakness that pervaded his body. How long had he been here, wounded, exhausted from the flight from the depot, and curled into this box in a wall? He couldn’t remember. Had one day passed? Two?

Where was she? She’d said she would come to him in the night. And yet here he was, where Stevie Rae had sent him. It was night, and she hadn’t come.

With a sound of self-loathing, he left the closet and his nest, stalking past the windowsill in front of which the girl child had materialized to a door that led to a rooftop balcony. Instinct had driven him up to the second floor of the abandoned mansion, just after dawn, when he’d arrived. At the end of even his great reservoir of strength, he’d thought only of safety and sleep.

But now he was all too awake.

He stared out at the empty museum grounds. The ice that had been falling for days from the sky had stopped, leaving the huge trees that surrounded the rolling hills on which sat the Gilcrease Museum and its abandoned mansion with bent and ruined branches. Rephaim’s night vision was good, but he could detect no movement at all outside. The homes that filled the area between the museum and downtown Tulsa were almost as dark as they had been in his postdawn journey. Small lights dotted the landscape—not the great, blazing electricity that Rephaim had come to expect from a modern city. They were only weak, flickering candles—nothing compared to the majesty of the power this world could evoke.

There was, of course, no mystery to what had happened. The lines that carried power to the homes of modern humans had been snapped just as surely as had the ice-burdened boughs of the trees. Rephaim knew that was good for him. Except for the fallen branches and other debris left on the roadways, the streets appeared mostly passable. Had the great electric machine not been broken, people would have flooded these grounds as daily human life resumed.

“The lack of power keeps humans away,” he muttered to himself. “But what is keeping her away?”

With a sound of pure frustration, Rephaim wrenched open the dilapidated door, automatically seeking open sky as balm to his nerves. The air was cool, and thick with dampness. Low around the winter grass, fog hung in wavy sheets, as if the earth was trying to shroud herself from his eyes.

His gaze lifted, and Rephaim drew a long, shuddering breath. He inhaled the sky. It seemed unnaturally bright in comparison to the darkened city. Stars beckoned him, as did the sharp crescent of a waning moon.

Everything within Rephaim craved the sky. He wanted it under his wings, passing through his dark, feathered body, caressing him with the touch of the mother he’d never known.

His uninjured wing extended itself, stretching more than a grown man’s body length beside him. His other wing quivered, and the night air Rephaim had breathed in burst from him in an agonized moan.

Broken! The word seared through his mind.

“No. That is not a certainty.” Rephaim spoke aloud. He shook his head, trying to clear away the unusual weariness that was making him feel increasingly helpless—increasingly damaged. “Concentrate!” Rephaim admonished himself. “It’s time I found Father.” He still wasn’t well, but Rephaim’s mind, though weary, was clearer than it had been since his fall. He should be able to detect some trace of his father. No matter how much distance or time separated them, they were tied by blood and spirit and especially by the gift of immortality that had been Rephaim’s birthright.

Rephaim looked up into the sky, thinking of the currents of air on which he was so used to gliding. He drew a deep breath, lifted his uninjured arm, and stretched forth his hand, trying to touch those elusive currents and the vestiges of dark Otherworld magick that languished there. “Bring me some sense of him!” He made his plea urgently to the night.

For a moment he believed he felt a flicker of response, far, far off to the east. And then weariness was all he could feel. “Why can I not sense you, Father?” Frustrated and unusually exhausted, he let his hand drop limply to his side.

Unusual weariness . . .

“By all the gods!” Rephaim suddenly realized what had drained his strength and left him a broken shell of himself. He knew what was keeping him from sensing the path his father had taken. “She did this.” His voice was hard. His eyes blazed crimson.

Yes, he’d been terribly wounded; but as the son of an immortal, his body should have already begun its repair process. He’d slept—twice since the Warrior had shot him from the sky. His mind had cleared. Sleep should have continued to revive him. Even if, as he suspected, his wing was permanently damaged, the rest of his body should be noticeably better. His powers should have returned to him.

But the Red One had drunk of his blood, Imprinted with him . And in doing so, she had disturbed the balance of immortal power within him.

Anger rose to meet the frustration already there.

She’d used him and then abandoned him.

Just like Father had.

“No!” he corrected himself immediately. His father had been driven away by the fledgling High Priestess. He would return when he was able, and then Rephaim would be at his father’s side once more. It was the Red One who had used him, then cast him aside.

Why did the very thought of it cause such a curious ache within him? Ignoring the feeling, he raised his face to the familiar sky. He hadn’t wanted this Imprint. He’d only saved her because he owed her a life, and he knew all too well that one of the true dangers of this world, as well as the next, was the power of an unpaid life debt.

Well, she had saved him—found him, hidden him, and then released him, but on the depot rooftop, he had returned the debt by helping her escape from certain death. His life debt to her was now paid. Rephaim was the son of an immortal, not a weak human man. He had little doubt he could break this Imprint—this ridiculous byproduct of saving her life. He would use what was left of his strength to wish it away, and then he would truly begin to heal.

He breathed in the night again. Ignoring the weakness in his body, Rephaim focused the strength of his will.

“I call upon the power of the spirit of ancient immortals, which is mine by birthright to command, to break—”

The wave of despair crashed over him, and Rephaim staggered against the balcony’s railing. The sadness radiated throughout his body with such force that it drove him to his knees. There he remained, gasping with pain and shock.

What is happening to me?

Next, an odd, alien fear filled him, and Rephaim began to understand.

“These are not my feelings,” he told himself, trying to find his own center within the maelstrom of distress. “These are her feelings.”

Rephaim gasped as hopelessness followed fear. Steeling himself against the continued onslaught, he struggled to stand, fighting the waves of Stevie Rae’s emotions. Resolutely, he forced himself to refocus through the onslaught and the weariness that tugged relentlessly at him—to touch the place of power that lay locked and dormant for most of humanity—the place to which his blood held the key.