Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

Cooper looked up at the road—which was a mistake. He knew this stretch of highway. He had seen it in his dreams so many times. The road crested in a hill, and over the hill—

“Stop the car,” he gasped.

Brent responded promptly, putting on his hazards, checking for other cars and easing onto the shoulder as quickly as he safely could.

Cooper nearly fell out the passenger-side door, while Brent waited in the car. Leaning over the guardrail, he tried to pull in enough air to keep from passing out as the rain soaked through his clothes. He had nearly succeeded before he lifted his eyes and saw the two white crosses.

He scanned the area, taking in the dents in the guardrails, his mind seeing another day … and suddenly all the memories came flooding back. He had tried to slow down, seeing the thick, white fog, but he knew there were people close behind him, and that braking too suddenly on the highway was as dangerous as going too fast. He was riding the brake when he barely saw the flash of movement and color out of his peripheral vision .

He put a hand on the guardrail, in the exact spot the girl had been. Without slowing, she set one foot on the metal rail and vaulted onto the road . She landed in front of him, and only then did she turn and seem to see him. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened. He jammed the brake pedal into the floor mat, but she was barely an arm’s length away, and nothing could stop the series of collisions that followed . An enormous crash, and then he was airborne. Shattering glass, and impact .

Had Samantha been the one who leaped in front of his car that day? But there had been no mention of a girl being killed in the crash. Cooper had checked. Unless Ryan was right, and she had never been alive in the first place. In which case the real question was: had she known what she was doing, and the damage she would cause?

Delilah felt like she was drowning, not in rain, but in fire. The world seemed to be ablaze. She couldn’t make sense of it. She wished she was dreaming. If she had been, she could have woken herself. But this was more like wandering, lost.

She remembered the way the skies had split while she tried to figure out how to link to Samantha. The rain that had fallen around her had been so thick she couldn’t draw air into her lungs. With every breath, she had inhaled more water. But this was something different, someone else’s memory of another time and place. She drew a breath, but it was a futile one. Her lungs were scorched by smoke and heat. She struggled forward despite every survival instinct telling her to run, because she could hear screaming .

Delilah knew she wasn’t some helpless child. She was a sorcerer.

I think, therefore I am, she pondered. If she still existed, then she was still alive, and she did not have to linger this way. And if she was alive, then she could learn.

Instead of struggling toward consciousness, she reached for the memory of fire. She had tried to bind a water elemental, and had found a vision of flames and … something. Pain, yes, but more than that.

She woke in the hospital with a shudder and found herself shouting, “Leave me alone!”

Her eyes were barely open before Ryan began the lecture she had anticipated. “What did you think you were doing?” he demanded, only to answer his own question before she could draw a breath into her aching lungs. “No, I know what you thought you were doing. You thought you were being clever, and bold.”

“No less so than Arabella le Coire once was,” she managed to gasp out. Ryan’s ancestor had bound herself to an earth elemental and set herself up as lady of a great manor—the same manor where she had been imprisoned, awaiting death for heresy and witchcraft before then. Hundreds of years later, the le Coire family still had immense power, all from that ancient bargain.

“One would think you might have learned something after you were nearly devoured by the scavengers when you were twelve, but no! I hoped that, sometime in the three years you’ve worked with me, I would have imparted some actual wisdom. And I prayed you would learn when you sent three other people into howling madness with that trick you pulled last spring—but by then I was a little less optimistic. Now this!”

He stood up and began to pace. Delilah shut her eyes again, exhausted.

“Do you even know whose flesh you’re wearing?” he demanded.

“What?”

That got her attention. She tried to sit up, only to have pain ricochet through her body.

“Her name was Margaret,” Ryan said. “The last time I spoke to her was in May. She told me she had found a way to bind one of the elemental powers. I can only assume it was based in fire, since the next thing I heard was that her entire family was lost in a pyre so hot it melted the steel frame of the car in the driveway. She managed to make it out of the house. Some hikers found her in the forest two weeks later, battered and savaged by animals. She wouldn’t have survived physically if she hadn’t snagged some power from her elemental, but since her mind is completely gone, the fact that her heart is still beating doesn’t make much of a difference.”

Delilah tried to lift her head to look at herself, but would not have succeeded if Ryan hadn’t cranked the bed up. Even covered by a sheet, she could still tell that this thin and wiry body was not her own. She struggled to lift her arm, and saw that her nails had the remnants of chipped, mauve nail polish on them. When she touched her head, she found dark hair barely long enough for her to pull it forward to look at it.

“Why am I here?” she asked Ryan.

“Your exposure to Cooper probably made you vulnerable,” he answered. “When your body was stressed, you lost control of your tie to it. You’re lucky you were able to protect yourself long enough to find another vessel to keep you alive, since I imagine it would have been impossible to return to your normal form while it was still on the verge of death. I had a hard time purging the extra power from you long enough to clear the water out of your—oh, there they are. Cooper! Brent!”

She managed to turn her head enough to see the guys respond to Ryan’s call. Both were dripping wet, and Cooper was as pale as the sheet covering Margaret’s body.

“They said Delilah is in room—”

“Delilah’s right here for the moment,” Ryan interrupted. “Cooper, would you check Delilah’s room to see if Samantha is there?”

“Wait,” Delilah objected. “What exactly do you mean by that?” It was one thing for her to be accidentally and temporarily in someone else’s body. It was another if the power she had attempted to harness had helped itself to her body.

“Just check, Cooper,” Ryan said. “Brent, tell the nurse on duty that Margaret is conscious.”

Brent and Cooper exchanged confused glances, but then hastened to obey the command. Delilah wasn’t surprised. Brent always did anything Ryan ordered, most of the time without bothering to even ask why.

She hated to ask Ryan for anything, especially given how often she ended up doing so, but she swallowed her pride. “Can you help me stand?”

“No.”

“Just help me up already,” she grumbled. “I want to see my own body, and make sure it’s all right.”

“Given this body has been unconscious for months, I’m not even going to let you sit up completely until a medical professional assures me it’s safe. After that, we’ll need a wheelchair. Or have you not tried to move your legs yet?”

She hadn’t. In fact, she hadn’t even thought of them. The rest of her body was in pain, so her legs had been the least of her worries. Once he had pointed it out, though, she realized the obvious. “I can’t feel them.”