Promises to Keep

chapter 13


JAY COULDN’T BEGIN to recall where he had left his gloves, though he wished he did when he set his hands to the steering wheel. He half expected his GPS to swear at him for waking it up when it was so cold.

He programmed in the address from the mysterious telephone voice and let out a whine when he realized it was almost three hours away. He wouldn’t get there until noon, if he didn’t hit traffic.

After an hour on the highway, he turned on to progressively smaller, more winding roads. Midday became early afternoon, and he hadn’t yet arrived, because he had needed to drop his speed to avoid spinning out on the increasingly common patches of black ice on the badly plowed, poorly marked back roads.

Whoever he was visiting, she didn’t like visitors. Jay missed the unmarked driveway the first time and had to turn around. His tires got a beating as he bumped his way across potholes big enough to bury a body in.

Finally he reached the house, which was overhung by several bare maple trees.

I hope this is the right place, Jay thought as he walked up the narrow, recently shoveled path. There didn’t seem to be a bell, so he knocked on the door.

The person who answered the door was a young woman, maybe twenty years old at most, whose brown eyes had dark circles beneath them. She exuded no particular thoughts but a sense of bone-deep weariness that made Jay want to curl up and sleep for a month just looking at her.

“Are you the person I’m supposed to meet?” he asked.

She stared at him for long, silent moments before saying, “I doubt it. Rikai’s in her study. I think she’s expecting someone.”

Rikai!

The phone caller’s warning made sense now; like vampires, Tristes needed to feed, but they did so by absorbing raw power instead of by taking blood. Of the three Wild Cards, Jay had been excited to meet Xeke but hadn’t ever wanted to meet Rikai.

Nervously, Jay followed his guide to the study.

The walls in the hallway were painted a cool gray-rose color above wood paneling that had been stained silvery birch. The floor was carpeted in a two-tone beige. The overall effect was stylish but not warm.

Rikai’s study was lit by only two candles—a fat pillar on top of the fireplace mantel, and a beeswax taper on a short table near the door. They barely illuminated the full wall of glass-front bookcases, a desk scattered with unidentifiable objects, and two chairs that were somehow ominous. Maybe Jay was simply crediting the atmosphere to the chairs, but he didn’t want to sit down.

It took a moment for him to realize Rikai was even in the room, partially because her long black hair matched a body sheathed from neck to ankle to wrist in more black, but more so because his mind registered nothing.

Jay had occasionally met people who could put up walls against him, or who tried to fight his power. He had rarely met an individual who was a complete blank.

“Jay Marinitch,” she said. Her voice had a soft lilt, lower than he might have expected, like the sound of ocean waves moving over sand. “Of the Marinitch witches. Please, sit.”

Jay looked to the chair nearest him, and hesitated.

“The power you’re sensing isn’t intended for you,” Rikai said. “If you can’t bring yourself to overcome your instincts enough to sit in a chair to speak to me, you might as well leave now.”

Jay sat, even though doing so made his skin crawl. The chair was nice enough, but whatever power Rikai had going on here made his teeth ache.

Rikai leaned back in her deep, plush chair, stretching her legs out in front of her and propping her feet on some kind of twisted sculpture that apparently doubled as a footrest. Her dark eyes had a strange shine to them as she looked at Jay.

“So. Why do you want to know about the Shantel?”

“Do I need a reason?” he asked. He wasn’t coy by nature, but he hadn’t expected to be asked why by a contact set up through Bruja.

“You’re a witch, an empath, and a hunter. You are not a scholar. You are tainted by all sorts of interesting power, though.”

“Such as?”

“Answer my question, and maybe I’ll answer yours.”

She leaned forward, bending at the waist, reminding him of a praying mantis. He had a powerful feeling that it would be unwise to lie to her.

“I think I’ve met a Shantel,” he answered. “Specifically, a sakkri. I’d like to know more about her abilities.”

“Out of pure idle curiosity, oh?” Rikai replied. “How very SingleEarth, but utterly unlikely for you. Where did you stumble across the spirit-witch of a dead civilization?”

Cautiously, he said, “Answering that question may put you at risk, which I would rather not do.”

“Sweet of you.” Did she ever say anything sincere? “If something you say to me here travels beyond my home to cause me problems, it will be because you carried it with you. That said, share, and I’ll judge whether it’s worth letting you out of here alive. If it comforts you, I rarely find information threatening.”

Nope. That didn’t comfort him.

“I suspect she used to be a slave in Midnight,” he explained. “I believe she was taken into Midnight before the fall of the first empire, and somehow remained—”

“Oh,” Rikai interrupted. “Pet.”

Jay stiffened. That was what the shapeshifter remembered the trainer calling her. He had been the only one with the audacity to name the sakkri. “You know her?”

“Before they were shapeshifters, the Shantel were a Native American tribe whose magic came from their connection to an earth elemental. After Leona claimed them, the combined powers made them strong enough that even Midnight was never able to fully control them. At any given time, the Shantel had dozens of trained witches, but their true strength was wielded through their sakkri, a priestess whose only function was to communicate with and command the earth elemental who had first given them magic.

“But Pet is … well, nothing, anymore. Midnight’s trainers did their jobs well. That woman hasn’t had a spark of free will in her for more than two hundred years, and since her power requires that she be neither owned nor named, it’s impossible for any would-be master to use her power for his own purposes. Last I heard, she belonged to Daryl.”

“What if she was fixed somehow? Healed?” Jay asked. “What would she be capable of?”

He wanted to ask outright, Could she really bring down Midnight? But he didn’t dare breathe those words aloud. Rikai wasn’t allied with Midnight, but Jay wasn’t sure how she felt about the empire, either.

Rikai scoffed at his question. “Anyone who has ever tried will tell you it can’t be done.”

“Hypothetically,” Jay said. “What would she be capable of?”

“Even if through some miracle Pet were restored to her former state, the sakkri was always forbidden from violence or bloodshed. I doubt she would even know how to fight. She might be able to hide herself or others from those who choose to pursue her as escaped property, but I’m not even sure she could still do that. Elementals gain power through the mortals bound to them, often as they are worshipped. The Shantel have been gone for centuries. Their elemental would have weakened.”

“I think the Shantel elemental spoke to me, through Pet,” Jay said.

“It spoke to you?” Rikai asked, sounding intrigued. “You’re lucky you’re still alive. I suppose using Pet as a conduit protected you. What did it say?”

Moment of truth?

Not yet. “I’d rather not share. But it didn’t seem weak.”

“A weak elemental is still the strongest thing you will ever encounter in your life, short of a stronger elemental or a bona fide god, should such a thing exist,” Rikai answered. “Even now, the power it left on you from your brief encounter is dripping off you in buckets.”

“What?” Now he knew how people felt when they spoke to him. What was she talking about? “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“It’s the only reason you and your ‘rather not share’ are still sitting in my study,” Rikai answered with a smile that was more predatory than pleasant. “You have traces of half a dozen different magics on you, which I suspect you gained by wandering into areas where you were not welcome. For Xeke’s sake, I’ll warn you that some of those spells learn. Escaping them will prove more difficult next time.”

“Thanks,” he whispered. It had been hard enough to escape them last time. “Xeke mentioned me?”

“No.”

Then how … No, never mind. “Do elementals, I don’t know, grandstand? This one offered a lot, but you’re saying it probably can’t deliver.”

Rikai laughed. “Little witch, most elementals think of themselves as gods. They crave worship, and I have never met one capable of admitting to its own limitations. Most of them will offer anything, in exchange for a mortal’s devotion. Grandstanding, as you put it, is all they do.”

So the Shantel elemental probably couldn’t do anything. It hadn’t been strong enough to reach its sakkri on its own, but it had obviously been desperate to do so. It knew Jay was afraid of Midnight, so it had told him what he wanted to hear.

Simultaneously disappointed and relieved, Jay rose to his feet, saying, “Thank you for your time. You’ve been very helpful.”

Rikai didn’t bother to stand. “I had thought your question might be more interesting.”

“I’m kind of glad it wasn’t,” he answered.

Jay couldn’t help the shapeshifter unless she asked for his help. In the meantime, if the sakkri went up against Midnight and failed, it would be sad, but if Jay understood Midnight’s rules right, the mess wouldn’t land on SingleEarth. The sakkri’s so-called owner would be the one held responsible.

Honestly, if he awoke after two centuries of slavery to discover his entire culture had been destroyed, Jay would probably be willing to throw away his life on a hopeless quest for vengeance, too. What did she have to lose?