Sacrifice (11 page)

He shook his head and he stood. His eyes glistened. “Again, my behavior was inexcusable and I’ve damaged what little progress we’ve made. I’m sorry.”

She pointed to the door. “Get out.”

His gaze focused on the floor as he walked to the door and paused at the threshold. “You cried for him again.”

Her breath caught as her pulse sped up.

“We’re days behind and I need you to be focused. The sleeping pills were supposed to help you get enough rest so you could concentrate.”

Her anger swelled, overtaking her caution. “Maybe I didn’t sleep well last night because some maniac threatened me.”

He hesitated for several seconds. “You need to get ready. We have a full day of work ahead of us. After your demonstration of power last night, it’s time you showed me what you’re really capable of. What you’ve been holding back.”

Hours later, Emma had been unable to repeat her use of power the night before, not that she didn’t like the idea of blasting Raphael across the lawn. She just couldn’t make it happen.

Desperation made Raphael short-tempered and dangerous. “Center yourself,” he said, making her focus on the same log from the day before. “Find your energy within yourself and concentrate on making the wood burst into flames.”

She narrowed her gaze, searching for the burn in her chest, then pushing it out.

Tiny flames licked at the tree trunk before sputtering out.

A vein throbbed in Raphael’s temple. “What is your game, Emma? What do you hope to achieve?”

Her hair clung to the side of her sweaty face. The afternoon was hot and humid and she was short-tempered herself. “What could I possibly gain from holding back my power from you, Raphael? You’ve said you won’t teach me the next step, getting power from other sources, until I master this one. And seeing how I really need to move to the next step so that I have even the slightest chance of saving my son,
why would I hold back
?”

He moved closer to her, his skin blanching around his mouth. “I don’t know, Emma. Perhaps manipulation of some kind.”

“Oh, isn’t that calling the kettle black. Seems to me you own the market in manipulation, Raphael.”

His pupils dilated and turned a faint red. “Do not push me.”

“Or what? You’ll get drunk and come to my room again?”

She wasn’t prepared when he backhanded her cheek.

Pure rage filled her and she lashed out, forcing her energy to him.

He stumbled backward, wisps of smoke wafting off his shirt. Squaring his shoulders, a murderous look filled his eyes. “Is that what it takes, Emma? Extreme emotional distress? Maybe you need to fight for your life to make your power work.”

The ground shook under her feet and she struggled to maintain her balance. A loud crack filled the air on her right and a tree fell toward her. She jumped out of the way, the tree branches scratching her arm as the massive oak crashed to the ground.

“Use your power, Emma!”

The tree skidded across the yard to her, knocking her face forward on the ground. The air flew out of her chest and she fought to suck in a breath.

“Get up,” he snarled.

He’d lost his mind.

He strode toward her and jerked her off the ground, then gave her a shove as he stepped away. “Defend yourself, Emma.”

She found a small burst of energy to shoot, which he easily blocked with the wave of a hand. The ground shook again and a small crack split the earth, zigzagging from Raphael and stopping at her feet.

Hands clenched at her sides, her chest heaved. “Do it! Finish it, Raphael!”

His eyes locked with hers, a green glow surrounding him. He looked wild and dangerous before he broke contact and turned away. “We’re taking a half-hour break, then resuming.” He stomped into the house.

Once he’d gone inside she allowed herself to pat her swollen cheek and wipe the blood from her lip. Tears burned her eyes before it occurred to her that he’d left her outside. Alone.

Her pulse quickened. He said he’d be gone a half an hour. How far could she get before he realized she was gone?

Did she dare leave?

The fact remained that while Raphael’s mental stability deteriorated by the hour, he was the only one who could help her at this point.

Unless she found Alex.

The thought made her skin crawl, but Raphael had quickly ascended the list of most hated people in her life, a hard list to climb. Still, there were so many problems with her plan, or lack thereof. She had no idea where Alex was, and Raphael was sure to find her before she got far. He tracked her somehow, and she was sure it had to do with her energy. All the more reason to learn to control it.

She walked down to the creek that ran in the trees along the back of the property. While she couldn’t run from him yet, she could get away from him for a short while. Kicking off her shoes, she sat on the bank and put her feet in the stream, the water cooling her down. She closed her eyes.

Raphael freely admitted he withheld information from her. The question was why? He must be spoon-feeding her, only giving her information absolutely necessary to finish this level then move on to the next. But what if she could figure out some of it herself? What if she really did do the very thing he accused her of—progress and hide her true powers from him?

The idea teased her need to retaliate.

Raphael controlled the earth. She’d seen him create earthquakes and make trees fall. He could move simple objects. He could control her. The last filled her with anxiety, but if she could figure out how it all worked, she was certain she could stop him and regain her free will.

Alex was air. Storms and rain and wind. He could probably do other things she hadn’t considered. He could control weather associated with clouds, but could he change climates? Could he control things in the air, such as planes?

She and Aiden were fire. She already knew she could create massive fires and make small items explode. She could turn men into piles of ash. She could control minds. Surely there was more. The fact that she needed extreme anger to use her power was crippling. During her skirmish with Raphael, her fear overpowered all fury, squashing her energy. She’d learned weeks ago that fear didn’t work for her energy source. Her power was fueled by pure anger. Lord knew she had plenty of anger to go around, but even she had her limits. She had to figure out other sources. And she’d be damned if she told Raphael what she was doing.

Dipping her foot deeper in the water, Emma let her guard down and thought of Will. If he were alive, he would rip Raphael apart for the way he’d treated her the last two days. But Will wasn’t here and the fact remained that Will was no match for Raphael’s powers. Even if he were alive.

Raphael had been right. She cried for Will again, but she’d dreamed of him too. A more concrete dream than the previous ones. He appeared to her in the darkness of her grief and not only knew who she was, but held her in his arms and looked down at her with love. But four words in her dream ate at her resolve.

I’m not dead, Emma
.

She scooped up her hope and held it tight in her fists. Could it be true? Raphael insisted that Will had died.

Raphael insisted
.

It made sense that he would encourage her to leave Will behind. Raphael saw Will as a threat, even in death. But would he lie to her and tell her that he was dead for his own benefit? Hell, yeah, he’d do it.

Yet she couldn’t ignore that Will’s presence wasn’t out there anymore. The mark had to be the reason, but if their marks were gone, how could they have a connection in their dreams?

Jake didn’t have a mark and she could communicate with him telepathically. Until Aiden’s interference. But Jake was half-deity, or whatever they were. That had to account for something.

Could Will be alive? Raphael was right about one thing—when she searched deep in her heart for the answer, the cold truth ached in her bones. Will was dead. They had tossed his dead body into the van. The surety permeated every part of her. But her subconscious just couldn’t let him go yet.

When she allowed her head to consider the bigger picture of who she was, she found herself on the verge of a panic attack. Most people would jump at the opportunity to be part of something bigger, something immortal, but Emma had always craved normalcy. The chance to live a safe and ordinary life. And as sucky as her existence had been the last twenty-seven years, an eternity of it was more than she could stomach.

A week ago she would have settled for life with Will, Jake, and their baby, driving a minivan, and complaining about Will forgetting to take out the trash.

Now she didn’t know what to hope for.

Chapter Nine

“James, how can you be sure that the bag is still at the cabin? First of all, wouldn’t Kramer and his men have taken it? And if it had been left behind, wouldn’t the management have taken it?”

“I told you I had insurance. This was just one of many pieces. I knew you had the book and I figured Kramer would want it. So I hid it in the crawl space under the cabin after you left to go look for Jake. How many campers are climbing into dirty, cobwebby crawl spaces? Trust me. It’s there.”

“So what are the other pieces?”

James’s chin jutted then he turned to Will, his eyes full of worry. “We can talk about this later. You need to eat more of that grease feast in a bag and get some sleep.”

Will shook his head and tossed the fast food bag into the backseat. “I think a couple of hamburgers will hold me for a few hours.”

“You need sleep. You look like shit.”

“You’re no beauty queen yourself.” James was evading him.
No
. Will was paranoid and crazy. James was concerned about him and wanted him to rest. It was no secret that James was the mother hen of the two. James had always gone to great lengths to protect him, acting like the brother Will never had. Will had almost died in the compound and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the realization had kicked James’s protective instinct into high gear.

Still, the voice had warned him.

Will nearly laughed at his thought. The voice. He was listening to the advice of a mysterious stranger over his best friend of twenty-plus years? That was fucked up. There was no voice. The voice had been his mind’s way of trying to cope with the situation.

Will leaned back into the seat and closed his eyes. “I need to know what happened. What I’ve been doing the last month.” He needed to know more about Emma.

He felt James tense. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“Consider it a bedtime story.”

He hesitated then shifted his weight. “I’m not sure you want my version. It’s not pretty.”

James’s answer was no surprise, but Will wasn’t sure he was ready to let go of the fantasy in his head.

“You showed up on my doorstep after getting the shit beat out of you. Emma was with you and had brought you to me.”

“So she knew about you? That’s totally unlike me.”

“I know. I guess you told her because you were desperate. In any case, you were in bad shape, with broken ribs and, I suspected, a punctured lung. I told you that you had to go to the hospital and you refused. You said they’d find you there and get Emma. Emma, to her credit, wanted you to go as well. But then again, you weren’t any good to her if you were dead.”

Will tried to associate the cold, calculating woman James painted with the woman in the woods and in his dreams. The two didn’t correlate. “Wait. How long ago was this? If I had broken ribs and a punctured lung—”

“No jumping ahead in the story. Like an idiot, I agreed to let you stay at my house, and that night I woke up to Emma screaming. You couldn’t breathe and had turned blue, so I told you I was in charge and ran out to pull my car up to the door to take you to the hospital. When I came back I nearly shit my pants.”

Will opened his eyes. “What happened?”

“Emma was leaning over you in the bed, surrounded in this bright yellow light, and a spark of, like, electricity shot through you. Then Emma passed out.”

“What was she doing?”

James released a heavy sigh. “She healed you. All of your broken bones were gone, you could breath, even your bruises were gone.”

“How could she do that?”

“Her pendant. She had a pendant of fire that gave her power. But it’s gone now. Kramer took it.”

“So she’s powerless?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

But that didn’t ring true. Will remembered Emma using her power in the woods. The grease in his stomach tumbled like a washing machine.

“The next day you left her with me to run off to South Dakota so you could figure out how to steal the book. She got pissed and ran off to Raphael.”

“The guy in the woods? The guy who might have her now?”

“One and the same. See? If he has her now, she’s there of her own free will. She left you to die in that compound.”

Will wasn’t so sure about that, but kept his opinion to himself.

“That night, Kramer’s men found her in town and tried to capture her. She got away but caused a massive forest fire in the process. You arrived back in town in time to help her get out of the woods alive.”