People don’t rise from the dead.
The whisper returned. The promise is fulfilled. Your fate awaits. Arise!
I couldn’t resist that voice. It lured me onward, and soon my hand burst free.
Heated, humid air caressed my cool, cool skin, so heavenly I surged ever higher. First my shoulder, then my neck, then my face emerged into the approaching dawn. On the eastern horizon, the sun would soon rise and with it a brand-new me.
In the half-light I caught a glimpse of my arms. The shade of the skin was dark, the texture supple and young. As I watched, the scratches I’d sustained from my battle with the earth faded first to thin white lines and then away completely. My lips curved. What had been promised was now delivered.
I was free.
Morning kissed the horizon. As the flames spread across the sky, strength spread through my body, blazing away every ache, every doubt and every last remnant of exhaustion.
The sun—ahh, the sun. It had been so long.
Is it all that you remember? asked the voice—louder now, no longer muffled by earth, but still far away and maddeningly familiar.
“More.”
It will be yours if you do what you promised.
“I will.”
I patted a rough-hewn sack that hung from a strap looped across my chest. My clothing—some kind of sarong-type dress—was in tatters, but that sack, though dirty, had remained in one piece, and inside rested something hard and rather large for a necklace.
There is a place prepared for you. Come.
I had no choice but to obey. In truth I wanted nothing but to obey. I ran past crumbling headstones. The spindly limbs of ancient trees reached toward an increasingly colorful sky as beneath my bare feet the earth rumbled and shook. The dirt spilled out its dead and they began to walk.
I lifted my arms to the dawn. As the warmth radiated over my skin, power returned and with it all of the magic.
CHAPTER 15
“Son of a—”
Pain yanked me out of the dream, but a final image flashed inside my head.
The sun rising, red lava against a gray sky and a woman flying straight into that fire, arms becoming wings, hair and skin turning into feathers brighter than the colors surrounding them, as she headed slowly toward a familiar, seductive whisper.
The sight of Luther with my own blood-covered knife in his hand made me bite off the end of the curse. Not that Luther hadn’t heard it all before, and he’d probably hear worse before this was over; I just didn’t like him to hear it from me.
“You okay?” he asked.
I sat up, my hand instinctively reaching for the wound, even though, now that the knife was out, it had nearly healed. My chest slick with blood, I was also naked.
Everything came rushing back. The shower. The shifter. The knife.
“Turn around!” I ordered. After tossing me a towel, he did.
The floor was slippery, the water pink. I’d bled a lot and the shower had continued to run even after the lion man had killed me.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Hell, I hope.” Luther took a cautious peek, turning when he saw I was decent. Or as decent as I got sitting naked beneath a tiny towel.
His head tilted, and his curling, tangled golden-brown hair shifted over one hazel eye. “Do the demons go to hell when we kill them?”
“Not a clue, kid.”
“If they do, then they would just fly right out again now that hell is an open doorway.”
I lifted my hand to rub my forehead, saw the blood and let it drop back to my side. “I guess.”
“Which would defeat the purpose of killing them.”
“Since they turn to dust, I think they’re just . . . gone.”
Luther considered that awhile and then nodded. “I think so too.”
We might be deluding ourselves, but right now I needed a better delusion than the one I’d just had, which I didn’t think was any delusion at all. But I couldn’t figure out just what it was.
I managed to get to my feet without falling on my ass. The slightly slimy sensation of bloody water squishing beneath toes would have turned anyone’s stomach, but not mine. As long as I—or someone I cared about—wasn’t dead in that bloody water, I’d grit my teeth and move on.
Another mantra—I had a hundred of them.
I quickly washed off my hands, my feet, then shooed Luther ahead of me and into the hallway. “Wait here,” I ordered, and ducked into the bedroom where I’d left my duffel.
Quickly I donned my usual costume of jeans and a tank top, good socks and tennis shoes. Once, I’d been partial to sandals, but that was before I had to fight for my life all the damn time. Flip-flops just aren’t any good on a battlefield.
My fingers brushed against a plastic sandwich bag that held two items of jewelry I’d once never left home without looping around my neck. Now, one could give me quite a burn and the other . . .