The Red Witch (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 6) (32 page)

I thought of Aaron, then, of our engagement. I thought about Damien and Frank, and how I wished they were here right now; how I hoped they were okay. Then I thought about Collette and remembered how brave she had been to take Linezka on by herself even if… wait… where was Collette?

The shadows came out of nowhere, wrapping themselves around Linezka’s hands and pulling them away from me. Collette forced Linezka to turn around to face her, so that Linezka could see—in her shadowy form—the deepness of the Underworld, the place from where her power came, and so that the devil could see through Linezka’s eyes, just how unafraid Collette was of its bitch.

I knew, then, what was about to happen and a shriek of terror peeled from my throat.

“No!”

Contact was instant. Whatever Dark Fire Magick Linezka had prepared for me touched Collette instead, igniting her shadow form into a mesmerizingly beautiful, hot, and unwatchable mess of flaming tendrils. But Collette didn’t scream, and though her shadow body was burning, it was still able to wrap itself around Linezka and smother her in fire and shadow alike.

There was a scream then, but this one didn’t come from Collette; it was Linezka, burned by her own Magick.

As I watched, the doors to the Hall opened and three people came spilling in—Damien, Frank, and someone else. They were carrying him between the two of them, but when they saw the flames rising and rising, whirling, spinning out of control, they let him go and shielded their eyes from it. The man they were holding fell to his knees and observed the event, his face awash with sick green light.

Linezka’s scream then cut off suddenly and the shockwave that rippled out from within the mass of whirling fire and shadow was powerful enough to knock me back again and send me rolling away. When I looked up again, green embers were falling from the sky as were the tattered remnants of burnt, ripped clothes.

On the floor, scattered about the hall like broken toys, were Aaron, Damien, Frank, the man they had been holding, and Collette. But no Linezka.
Did we do it? Has she been killed?

“Collette!” I said as I struggled to my feet.

My heart wedged itself in my throat. My head felt three sizes too big, my feet like they were dragging weights, and now that the rush of adrenaline was starting to taper off, the pain in my knees, back, and chest was coming back. It was possible Aaron was stirring, but my body was hauling toward Collette. Collette.

Collette!

When I got to her and went to turn her over, the heat her skin was giving off forced me to pull my fingers away and cry out. Much of her dress had been consumed by the fire, and what flesh I could see was charred and cooked, and sticky with blood. She smelt of fire and ash and… death. Finally, I grit my teeth, grabbed her shoulder, worked through the pain of contact with her burning skin, and turned her to her back.

The thing lying on the floor before me bore only a passing resemblance to Collette. Her hair had been singed, the skin of her face—
Gods, her beautiful, beautiful face—
had melted in parts exposing the bone beneath. Her eyebrows were gone. Blisters and sores had opened up and her eyes…

I turned away from her face, fighting the urge to heave, and instead screamed into the floor. A surge of Power spilled into the world as my voice exploded outward, cracking the marble beneath me and causing the very building to shake. Again I went to Collette, hoping to see that her skin was healing, but the blackened face I had stared into a moment ago at hadn’t magically morphed into Collette again.

“The Dark Fire,” came a voice from out of nowhere.

My head snapped around, fire building in my chest, blood boiling. It was the man Frank and Damien had brought into the room. He was on his knees again.

“It was beautiful,” he said, “The Mistress, our Dark Mother, has blessed me. I have been chosen to receive her gift.”

I wanted to rise to my feet, but my muscles weren’t listening. They were twitching and turning, and the motions made me feel sick. But the fire inside of me continued to grow, to rise until I thought it would choke me with its fumes. But it didn’t choke me. The fire filled me, empowered me, turning my blood vessels into little balls of red flame.

Damien and Frank stood up now. The man on his knees spun around to face them and from out of his hands came two flashing beams of green light. They missed their marks, but the attack drove Frank and Damien away from him and into hiding behind a set of overturned tables. The man cackled and laughed.

“Don’t you see?” he said, “I am chosen, Damien! And you are chosen too! And together we will finish the Mistress’ work and… kill the Red Witch.” He spun around to look at me and flashed a wicked grin. “We can kill her right now, cousin.”

My breathing hitched and loosened, hitched and loosened. I was having trouble breathing, but this wasn’t because of whatever pain I had been in a moment ago. That was gone. Hot, shake-inducing adrenaline was pumping hard in my veins now and reducing the pain in my body to a dull throb. Or, at least, it did for a second.

My spine broke in two places. I screamed, and my voice exploded out of me like a shotgun blast that caught everyone’s attention. My shoulders followed, splitting, moving, and reshaping in ways they were never meant to move. Hot tears came rushing out of my eyes. I doubled over, planted both of my palms on the ground, and screamed into the marble floor; and it, too, cracked with the power of my voice.

A moment of respite came and I caught my breath, alternating between deep heaves and quick pants. Damien and Frank were rising too, now, but stepping away from me. Aaron, almost completely recovered, looked on, wide-eyed and pallid. The man who had threatened to kill me didn’t move, didn’t break his ground, but this didn’t have anything to do with courage. He was rooted to the spot, afraid, and when I saw what was happening to my fingers, I knew why.

They were lengthening. The bones in my hands, my wrists, and my arms were splitting and repairing, the muscles ripping apart to allow new blood to flow through them, and the nails at the tips of my fingers were growing into wickedly sharp tips. Then the fur came, rising out of my pores like grass on a time-lapse video. It, like my hair, was the color of fire.

The pain came back in a heady rush, but with it came anger now; hot and primal and raw.

I looked up, breathing hard, and saw the man’s chin quivering; but my eyes didn’t go to his chin, they went to his throat. The weakest point in his body, the place where his lifeblood would come pouring out of when I was done with it. And suddenly my legs were moving, my arms, and my shoulders and back were in it. Locomotion, running on my hands and feet, bounding, snarling, leaping, raking, biting.

Warm blood filled my mouth as my newly grown fangs dug into the tender, exposed flesh. I had moved so fast he hadn’t been given a chance to defend himself. He was strong, yes, I could taste it in his blood, but I was stronger. And that’s all that mattered now; who could kill who the fastest. No logic, no cognitive thought, just instinct.

CHAPTER 33

I came to outdoors somewhere. The cold bite of an October wind was nipping at my skin, but the man whose chest my head was rested against was as hot as a furnace. The taste of blood lingered in my mouth, dry and metallic, and my throat was on fire; but whatever aches and pains I had felt earlier in the night were gone, as was the fever I had been running.

“Aaron?” I said, my voice hoarse.

He looked down. “It’s alright,” he said, “You’re okay.”

We were in motion. Aaron was carrying me, and I wasn’t sure where we were or where we were going, but I wasn’t concerned about that. Collette’s face came rushing into the forefront of my mind, and I almost choked on it.

“Collette,” I said, tears spilling out of me like waterfalls. “Gods, Collette.”

Aaron shifted my cloak, which seemed to be the only piece of clothing I was wearing, and wrapped it around me more tightly, shutting out the night air that had been trying to search for a piece of flesh to bite.

“We have her,” Aaron said.

“Have her?”

“Her ashes. Damien picked them up.”

“A… her ash…” the tears came again.
She turned to… ash?
This time they didn’t stop until we reached the house, but by the time Aaron carried me through the threshold I didn’t think I could cry anymore even if I wanted to.

“I’m gonna put these ashes away,” Damien said.

I looked at him, then looked at the plastic container he had stored Collette’s ashes in, and nodded. I didn’t know how he had managed, though he would later tell me it had been Magick and that the ashes weren’t contaminated. That they were pure. That they were all Collette. Every last bit of her. And I would cry again.

Frank disappeared too, without a word, but then what was there to say anyway?

It wasn’t until I arrived, dragging my feet, at the door to my bedroom that I remembered what Collette had said before we left the house. She had told me that she’d left a few things in my room for me, things she no longer had a use for. The thought made my hand tremble as I went for the doorknob, and I almost didn’t twist it, but Aaron’s hand clasped around mine, and we turned it together.

She hadn’t left a
couple
of things on my bed—these weren’t nick-knacks and gewgaws—the bedroom was filled with Collette’s things. Her dresses, her jewelry, her books, her perfumes; Collette’s personal belongings had taken up residence in my bedroom, and they showed no signs of wanting to leave.

“Are these…?” Aaron asked.

I nodded. “Her things.”

“I don’t understand. Why did she leave them here?”

“Because… it would have been different if we had gone into her room and found them after tonight. She wanted to give them to me.”

“How can you know that?”

The distant cousin of a smile formed on my lips. “Because she knew what would happen to her.”

“How could she have known?”

I walked up to the bed, rifled through some books, leafed through another, and then put it down again. “She was a Necromancer. Her life and power were borrowed from the dead, and now she’s paid her debt.”

“I don’t get how you can talk about her like that.”

I turned around and looked at Aaron. “You don’t have to understand, Aaron. This is just the way things are with witches. Werewolves have their own mysteries too, don’t they?”

Aaron nodded.

“I’m going to have to learn those too, then, huh.”

“Yeah… about that.”

“We probably shouldn’t,” I said, before he could speak, “Not tonight. Tonight should be about Collette.”

Aaron pressed his lips together and nodded. “Alright. It’s about Collette.”

I nodded and turned around again, going through more of Collette’s things.

I found her necklace, that black onyx stone she always wore and never left the house without. Thinking about it now, I had noticed something strange about her moments before we headed toward the party. I hadn’t realized it then, but she wasn’t wearing the pendant. She truly had known she would die tonight, and I knew then, as I went through her belongings, that she had been preparing herself for her own death since we landed on American soil—maybe even sooner.

Strobes of clarity were coming to me as the pieces making up tonight’s puzzle fell into place.

Linezka was still alive. She had used her link to the man Damien had been holding as an anchor for her teleportation spell, and then pulled herself back the instant she realized her mission had been foiled; that she had been too late to turn me to her side before my transformation took place.

Because it wasn’t my child Linezka wanted. Despite the things she had said, it was always me. Me she needed. Me she had been testing until tonight.

My fingers landed on a thick, leather-bound book. As I pulled it out of the pile of things on my bed, my heart began to beat hard.

I must have not moved for a while because Aaron came up behind me and asked me if I was alright.

I nodded, and said, “Yeah,” because no other words would leave my mouth.

“A Book of Shadows,” Aaron said, reading the dust jacket of the book in my hands. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yeah… it is… this is Collette’s legacy.”

EPILOGUE

We were gathered in my back yard, which was quiet save for the whispering breeze and the chorus of light chirping being volunteered by the local swallows. The sky was lead, the morning sun knowable only as a patch of lightly colored clouds in an otherwise dark mantle. It could have started to rain at any moment, but it hadn’t yet.

The four of us—Damien, Aaron, Frank, and I—were gathered around a headstone made of black marble. Inscribed upon it in beautiful silver calligraphy were the words
‘Collette Picarde – memento mori, ma cherie.’
Simple. Exquisite. Serene.

Aaron, Damien, and Frank were standing in black suits that had been pre-rented for them for the day. I was wearing one of Collette’s black gowns with a lacey bodice and a flowing skirt black. It seemed as if, the morning-after Collette’s death, everything had happened in fast-forward, and we had been brought to this point in time on the back of a powerful current none of us had any control over.