Promises to Keep

chapter 26


“WE’RE AT NUMBER Two,” an exhausted human voice said, rousing Brina, who was still wrapped in Jay’s arms. She hadn’t wanted to let go of him as they had stumbled, semiconscious, from a car to a plane to another car, with people asking desperate questions but finally just accepting Jay’s often-repeated statement that they had to get back to Haven #2.

What Brina had seen in her nocturnal visions swept over her and dragged a sob from her throat. Thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of humans must have died in the last twenty-four hours. Those who believed called to their gods for explanations and help.

The humans were not alone.

Some of Leona’s bonds had succumbed to the siphoning away of their power, or to human ailments such as pneumonia, or to physical frailties such as heart attack and stroke. Some of the other elementals that had come to fight Shantel were trying to support Leona’s damaged bonds, but they could do only so much.

Jay stirred with a moan, and then pushed himself up, groping for the car door handle so groggily that they both nearly fell when it opened.

“We need a blade,” Brina said. She remembered everything the powers in the forest had told them, and she did not intend to hesitate.

She saw Jay seeking out specific faces in the crowd, but neither delayed their task. They both snapped commands to nurses and secretaries. Shouting over the protests, they had the ill in the gymnasium moved, until the group could form a rough circle around the outside of the room.

“Take hands,” Jay said to those surrounding him—sick and well, human, witch, and shapeshifter alike. “If the person you are next to cannot grip, then hold on to them as tightly as you can. We cannot break the circle. Is that understood?”

Jeremy looked up with bleary eyes as he took the hands of those beside him. “Jay … what are we doing?”

“Saving us all,” Jay answered.

“Possibly dooming us all,” Brina added more honestly.

There was no choice, and no time to explain the danger. The ritual could drain the power from every creature in your circle, or grant them immortal life … or grant them immortal hunger.

Jay quashed the protest from his conscience that there was enough time to say a few words of warning. With so much at stake, he couldn’t afford to give people a chance to refuse. He kept silent.

Brina and Jay walked to the circle’s center carrying their tools.

Each element required a different form of sacrifice to call it. Water asked for tears. Air was called through breath and voice. Fire answered only to blood. Earth, like the power of the Shantel, was bound in flesh.

Brina needed only to remember what she had recently seen, and the tears ran down her face. She further recalled her brother’s destruction, and well before that, the blackening bodies of each of her family. The end of safety in her world. She did not know what memories Jay pulled upon, but she did not need to. When their eyes met, the witch’s were glistening.

She felt the world shift around them, wavering as power responded to their wordless command for attention.

Invoking air at that moment was more challenging, because Brina’s throat was still tight with tears. She choked on her first attempt to draw breath, and so it was Jay who began with a traditional folk tune. It didn’t matter what the words were, though Jay had chosen a tune of longing and loss. It mattered only that their voices mingled in the air.

Jay passed Brina his blade, clenching his jaw as Shantel’s power within him fought against Leona’s power embedded in the silver. He held up his arm, and Brina drew a line of blood across the palm of his hand; he took the knife and did the same for her.

Normally, a sorcerer willing to risk life and soul might have summoned one elemental, in an attempt to dominate it and win incredible power. But no trained sorcerer was foolish enough to invite this many forces into their circle at once. They would tear each other—and the mortal arrogant enough to summon them—to shreds.

In this case, that was the point. The other elementals were the weapons Jay and Brina needed to wield.

“Only one guest left to invite,” Jay muttered to Brina, his voice wavering with nerves.

The name the elemental had spoken to her, Brina uttered now, not with breath but with the power gathered within the circle. She whispered it as a prayer and screamed it as a demand simultaneously, and as she did so, she reached for Jay, drew him close, and kissed him.

Their bloody hands twined, pressure stopping the blood’s flow, and the kiss cut both of their voices off, leaving only the original mortal power: the touch of flesh to flesh.

It was the power that passed between mother and infant when she held her child for the first time. It was the power of a gentle touch to the cheek, a reassuring pat on the shoulder, a sympathetic hug—or an angry slap. Every human being knew the power that arose when flesh met flesh.

Brina could have just held on to Jay, leaned her cheek against his, and used that contact for the leverage she needed to summon the Shantel elemental. They needed only to invoke it, not to provide the kind of sacrifice that would have been necessary to call it the first time. She chose this because she had wanted to kiss him since sometime in the forest.

Jay, though surprised, responded as she had hoped he would—willingly, with the same memories of shared experiences and an understanding of all the beauty and agony they had both endured recently.

The power that passed between them was sweet, and gentle, and the opposite of everything the Shantel had fed on for the last two centuries. It was a reminder of what had been, and what could be again. It drew Shantel close, until the circle around them shuddered with the elemental’s appearance, hands clutching hands in the effort to contain the power.

The power of flesh could be compassion and forgiveness—but not this time. Shantel would find no absolution here. Too many lives had been lost, and neither Jay nor Brina was the turn-the-other-cheek type. The other elementals who had stepped into the circle around them, some claiming bodies too worn down by disease to even open their eyes on their own, were also not the types to let the matter be forgotten.

As one they struck.

The circle constricted, creating a noose that strangled the Shantel elemental, siphoning its power away.

Brina could have interfered. She and Jay had summoned the elemental. They could have commanded the others to leave it; they could have claimed its power for themselves.

And such power it would have been!

I’m sorry, Brina said to it. Not just for the horrors of Midnight; that was not what had truly undone this elemental. She was apologizing for keeping away from the Shantel the one person who had been able to speak to it, and hear its voice, and let it be truly alive. Without its sakkri, it had been voiceless and helpless.

The Shantel elemental buckled, unraveling. Other elementals stole its memories, all the thoughts that gave it form, ripping them away like children tearing paper off Christmas presents.

Jay and Brina both collapsed to their knees as those memories lashed at them, seeking new homes. They accepted the ones they wanted, some beautiful and some terrible, some as ancient as the land itself and some as recent as Brina’s trying to hang herself from the rafters and Pet struggling for hours with the knowledge that her mistress had not given her any orders regarding cutting her down, but surely she couldn’t intend to stay that way forever.…

That which was immortal could not die. But without mortal memories to hold it together, it could not maintain its consciousness.

Brina whispered the Shantel’s name once again, but received no response. The entity had been reduced to a mere child of its kind, barely sentient, with no recollection of what it had just done.

It had no physical form in the room, but she could sense it, and she knew it rested deeply.

“It’s over?” Jay asked, looking up, his expression as dazed as Brina felt.

One of the ill spoke up—no, this being was beyond ill. Brina knew that the human form she was looking at was deceased, though it had been appropriated by one of the elementals.

“Leona has been injured. Weakened,” it said. “She cannot hold all of her bonds any more. Many will die yet.” A wail arose from somewhere in the crowd, before the elemental added, “Unless they are willing to make other arrangements.”

“We can pick up the slack, so to speak,” another voice said. This elemental was gentler, but Brina knew it was hungry as well.

Jay started to speak. “My family—”

“We are grateful for your help. Looking after your kin is the least we can do,” one of the voices offered, before another swiftly interjected, “Leona’s mortal children are numerous, of course. It may take more than one of us to save them.”

Some of the voices sounded kind; the last one just sounded sly. Leona had been the most powerful of the elementals. Now she had been laid low, and though other elementals had saved her, they did not plan to let her regain the same level of power ever again. That meant claiming her weakened bonds as their own. It would save lives—if it wasn’t too late—but this world was never going to be the same again.

Brina looked at Jay, wondering whether the new world painted this day would be better than the one before, or even the one that would have resulted had they not interfered with Shantel’s plans. He heard the thought, pondered, and then said, “I need a nap.”

Brina nodded. Others could clean up the mess left behind … whatever was left behind. They had done their job.