Token of Darkness (16 page)

“Yeah, for a while, but then there were some basic ideological incompatibilities. None of that neo-pagan earthy no-personal-gain stuff for that girl,” Brent said. “I’m not sure she fancies the ‘harm none’ principle, either.”

“So she
is
a witch?” Cooper asked. “I thought maybe she was like you or something.”

“She doesn’t like to be called a witch,” Brent answered. “She says that gets her confused with the Wiccans and stuff. She plans to become a registered member of the C.O.S. when she turns eighteen.”

“C.O.S?”

“Church of Satan.”

“Now I
know
you’re messing with me,” Cooper said. He leaned back, shaking his head. Brent was probably making stuff up to distract him. Probably.

“The Church of Satan isn’t the way it’s portrayed in movies, with human sacrifice and killing kittens and that Hollywood crap,” Brent explained. “A lot of it has to do with personal power, which I’m fine with. However, they
do not believe in being kind to those who have ‘wronged’ them, so I imagine Delilah might have some choice words to say about me, since I kind of implied she was a sociopathic freak when I broke up with her. I think she expected me to be a whole lot more grateful that she passed my name on to Ryan, and she
didn’t
expect him to be more impressed by the abilities I got by accident than he is by the ones she worked on for … oh, never mind.”

Cooper looked up at the road—which was a mistake. He knew this stretch of highway. He had seen it in his dreams so many times. The road crested in a hill, and over the hill—

“Stop the car,” he gasped.

Brent responded promptly, putting on his hazards, checking for other cars and easing onto the shoulder as quickly as he safely could.

Cooper nearly fell out the passenger-side door, while Brent waited in the car. Leaning over the guardrail, he tried to pull in enough air to keep from passing out as the rain soaked through his clothes. He had nearly succeeded before he lifted his eyes and saw the two white crosses.

He scanned the area, taking in the dents in the guardrails, his mind seeing another day … and suddenly all the memories came flooding back.

He put a hand on the guardrail, in the exact spot the girl had been.

Had Samantha been the one who leaped in front of his car that day? But there had been no mention of a girl being killed in the crash. Cooper had checked. Unless Ryan was right, and she had never been alive in the first place. In which case the real question was: had she known what she was doing, and the damage she would cause?

D
elilah felt like she was drowning, not in rain, but in fire. The world seemed to be ablaze. She couldn’t make sense of it. She wished she was dreaming. If she had been, she could have woken herself. But this was more like wandering, lost.

She remembered the way the skies had split while she tried to figure out how to link to Samantha. The rain that had fallen around her had been so thick she couldn’t draw air into her lungs. With every breath, she had inhaled more water. But this was something different, someone else’s memory of another time and place.

Delilah knew she wasn’t some helpless child. She was a sorcerer.

I think, therefore I am
, she pondered. If she still existed, then she was still alive, and she did not have to linger this way. And if she was alive, then she could learn.

Instead of struggling toward consciousness, she reached for the memory of fire. She had tried to bind a water elemental, and had found a vision of flames and … something. Pain, yes, but more than that.

    She woke in the hospital with a shudder and found herself shouting, “Leave me alone!”

Her eyes were barely open before Ryan began the lecture she had anticipated. “What did you think you were
doing?”
he demanded, only to answer his own question before she could draw a breath into her aching lungs. “No, I know what you thought you were doing. You thought you were being clever, and bold.”

“No less so than Arabella le Coire once was,” she managed to gasp out. Ryan’s ancestor had bound herself to an earth elemental and set herself up as lady of a great manor—the same manor where she had been imprisoned, awaiting death for heresy and witchcraft before then. Hundreds of years later, the le Coire family still had immense power, all from that ancient bargain.

“One would think you might have learned
something
after you were nearly devoured by the scavengers when you were twelve, but no! I hoped that, sometime in the three
years you’ve worked with
me
, I would have imparted some actual wisdom. And I
prayed
you would learn when you sent three other people into howling madness with that trick you pulled last spring—but by then I was a little less optimistic. Now this!”

He stood up and began to pace. Delilah shut her eyes again, exhausted.

“Do you even know whose flesh you’re wearing?” he demanded.

“What?”

That got her attention. She tried to sit up, only to have pain ricochet through her body.

“Her name was Margaret,” Ryan said. “The last time I spoke to her was in May. She told me she had found a way to bind one of the elemental powers. I can only assume it was based in fire, since the next thing I heard was that her entire family was lost in a pyre so hot it melted the steel frame of the car in the driveway. She managed to make it out of the house. Some hikers found her in the forest two weeks later, battered and savaged by animals. She wouldn’t have survived physically if she hadn’t snagged
some
power from her elemental, but since her mind is completely gone, the fact that her heart is still beating doesn’t make much of a difference.”

Delilah tried to lift her head to look at herself, but would not have succeeded if Ryan hadn’t cranked the bed up. Even covered by a sheet, she could still tell that this thin and wiry body was not her own. She struggled to lift
her arm, and saw that her nails had the remnants of chipped, mauve nail polish on them. When she touched her head, she found dark hair barely long enough for her to pull it forward to look at it.

“Why am I here?” she asked Ryan.

“Your exposure to Cooper probably made you vulnerable,” he answered. “When your body was stressed, you lost control of your tie to it. You’re lucky you were able to protect yourself long enough to find another vessel to keep you alive, since I imagine it would have been impossible to return to your normal form while it was still on the verge of death. I had a hard time purging the extra power from you long enough to clear the water out of your—oh, there they are. Cooper! Brent!”

She managed to turn her head enough to see the guys respond to Ryan’s call. Both were dripping wet, and Cooper was as pale as the sheet covering Margaret’s body.

“They said Delilah is in room—”

“Delilah’s right here for the moment,” Ryan interrupted. “Cooper, would you check Delilah’s room to see if Samantha is there?”

“Wait,” Delilah objected. “What
exactly
do you mean by that?” It was one thing for her to be accidentally and temporarily in someone else’s body. It was another if the power she had attempted to harness had helped itself to
her
body.

“Just check, Cooper,” Ryan said. “Brent, tell the nurse on duty that Margaret is conscious.”

Brent and Cooper exchanged confused glances, but then hastened to obey the command. Delilah wasn’t surprised. Brent always did anything Ryan ordered, most of the time without bothering to even ask why.

She hated to ask Ryan for anything, especially given how often she ended up doing so, but she swallowed her pride. “Can you help me stand?”

“No.”

“Just help me up already,” she grumbled. “I want to see my own body, and make sure it’s all right.”

“Given this body has been unconscious for months, I’m not even going to let you sit up completely until a medical professional assures me it’s safe. After that, we’ll need a wheelchair. Or have you not tried to move your legs yet?”

She hadn’t. In fact, she hadn’t even thought of them. The rest of her body was in pain, so her legs had been the least of her worries. Once he had pointed it out, though, she realized the obvious. “I can’t feel them.”

“Margaret’s back is broken,” Ryan answered. “The doctors have told me that it’s a low break, so it doesn’t affect any major systems, but the paralysis of her legs is probably total.”

Cooper returned, and reported, “Samantha isn’t there, and Delilah is still unconscious. They’ve got her on some kind of breathing thing. So,
who
is this?”

Before Ryan could answer, Brent returned with the nurse, who had a slightly dazed look in her eyes. Ryan or Brent or both of them had probably done a number on her
mind, convincing her to let them all in here outside visiting hours.

The nurse checked Delilah’s … no,
Margaret’s
vitals. Delilah refused to think of this body as herself. She was borrowing it for a little while. That was all.

“When can you get me out of here?” she asked Ryan. “And back in my own body?”

Ryan nodded, though slowly. “Cooper should be able to knock you out of this body. I can keep the shadows at bay so you are not damaged without your flesh. With your own power to guide you, you should be able to reinhabit your own body without trouble now that it is no longer drowning.”

Cooper seemed less calm. “Wait, I can
what?
Who says I can do this intentionally?”

“You were going to come back to study with me, weren’t you?” Ryan asked. “Consider this your first lesson.”

“I’m not entirely comfortable with having my ‘first lesson’ involve another person,” Cooper said.

Delilah found herself smiling, impressed to see Cooper, who she had always thought of as something of a teddy bear, standing up to Ryan. He did so in his own mellow way, but it was still more than she had ever seen Brent do.

At that moment, for example, Brent was leaning against the far wall with his eyes closed. She could recognize the tension between his brows as a sign of one of his ever-present headaches.

“It’s all right, Cooper,” she assured him. “Sometimes you have to risk a little to learn a little.”

Cooper looked like he was going to continue to argue, but before he could, a flicker of shadow caused them all to turn toward the other side of the room. Samantha’s colorful form looked like crystal as the afternoon sun streamed through it. There were tears on her face.

“I didn’t mean it!” she cried. “I didn’t know what was going on. I got scared! I just—I mean, I—” She broke off as she noticed the figure on the hospital bed, and her face took on an expression of cold horror.

“Samantha. Nice of you to join us,” Ryan said. He looked wary, but to his credit, he stepped between the elemental and the three humans without hesitating. “I gather you have benefited from Delilah’s experiments, since the four of us can all see you clearly now. Delilah didn’t fare quite so well, but she’ll be fine in a few minutes. Cooper, is that the face she has always had to you?”

Cooper nodded, and pushed past Ryan, heedless of any danger the elemental might represent. “Samantha, are you …” She lifted a hand as if to grasp his, but her hand passed through his. They both frowned. “I believe you that it wasn’t your fault.”

“Then you’re the only one in this room who does,” Ryan muttered under his breath.

“What happened to the person who was in this body?” Cooper asked, looking at Delilah.

Ryan swallowed tightly, and for a brief moment, Delilah thought he might actually display a hint of emotion. His words, however, were blunt. “She’s gone. Once Delilah’s
essence is returned to its rightful place, this body will once again be inert. Margaret has no blood relations left, so her guardianship has fallen to my family, since we were her mentors. I have been pursuing the process of having her body taken off life support.”

“There’s no possibility of her recovering, even with your magic?” Cooper asked.

Ryan shook his head, though he was looking at Samantha, who had crept toward the bed. Having her so near made Delilah nervous. She might have looked like a pretty teenage girl, but the expression in her eyes as she stared at Delilah was very far away, and not entirely human.