Blood Ties (29 page)

Catherine was so frenzied by my presence, James was having a terrible time controlling her. She couldn’t even speak; all she could do was screech.

Meanwhile, Addison, Hari, Aunt Evelyn, and Julie fought off protégés who were busy gorging on the weaker wolves. It became clear to them that these were not average protégés. They were staggeringly powerful, and more hungry than usual. Catherine must have imbued them with extraordinary strength.

“Hide, Grace! Hide!” James screamed as he held Catherine down by her neck. I could see he was having difficulty keeping her down, and I didn’t have much time to get away. In my severely weakened state, I summoned any power I could. I saw a boulder and focused on it. It lifted and floated over to James and Catherine.

“James, move!” I yelled. He did so just in time for the boulder to fall on Catherine.

Surrounded by chaos, he stood there minding the boulder, waiting to see what would happen. There was no movement underneath. Then the rock wobbled some. He knew Catherine would emerge with a more pitiless attack.

“Grace, run,” he said, readying himself for the fight.

I ran past the chief. He was trying to save Kaya from the jaws of a protégé. He made a spectacular wolf—tall, strong, and lean, unlike his human form. He grabbed the protégé and broke its neck. The protégé released Kaya’s mangled body from its drooling mouth, and the chief’s devastated emotions caused him to morph back to his fragile human form. He picked up Kaya and rocked her in his arms. Kaya smiled at him and then passed away.

The chief didn’t even have a chance to grieve as another protégé came toward him. The chief grabbed as stick. As the protégé was about to pounce, he stood the stick straight up, and the protégé landed on it. It went straight through its heart.

Nick and Tamara stalked toward me, and Julie saw it. The enchantment that forced her to protect me kicked in. At the same time, she saw Hari running a protégé down in the sparse part of the woods, unaware that another protégé pursued him. Julie was conflicted. She wanted to rescue her brother, but was spellbound to help me instead.

“Hari, get out of there! Someone’s on your tail,” Julie screamed. He didn’t hear her.

Nick and Tamara circled Julie and me. “All you have to do is go after your brother. Let me have Grace,” Tamara said.

If Julie could have, she would’ve left me there to fend for myself and gone to save Hari. I couldn’t blame her; I would’ve done the same thing.

“Okay, I’ll go get him for you.” Tamara snickered. She ran at top speed after Hari. Julie was left there to protect me from Nick.

Her eyes welled up. “Please, Hari… Please run faster.”

The protégé Hari was chasing made a sudden turn into the woods and disappeared. Tamara and the protégé who was after Hari caught up with and surrounded him. Tamara took a close look at Hari. He resembled a younger version of her daddy. Therefore, in her mind, he
really
had to die.

“Let’s get this son of a bitch,” she told the other protégé. They ran Hari into a tree with a thundering crash, causing long splinters to stab into his arms.

“Pup, you’re out of your league. And I have no problem with euthanasia,” Tamara said to him.

Hari was limp and broken. He barely had breath in him, but he wasn’t going down without a good fight. He lashed out blindly. Despite being able to hear his cracked bones scraping together under his skin, he made his fist connect with the protégé’s concrete body. Hari heard deafening snaps as the bones in his hand crushed.

Not deterred, he garnered his energy, howling to summon and release his concentrated life force. Tamara was unimpressed, and overconfident in the protégés’ positions, figuring Hari had only one shot at the two of them.

Hari also knew that if he didn’t kill both of them, it would be over for him. He ran to the closest tree, jumped, and ricocheted off two others. He soared through the air with the protégés’ faces inches away from his grasp.

Tamara slapped him mightily. He hit a tree with such force, its trunk splintered. Hari couldn’t move. His breathing became shallow and erratic. He tried to get away with a slow crawl as the protégés stood over him. Tamara held him down firmly into the dirt.

Meanwhile, Julie fought off Nick with skill while I tried to get the knife out of my boot. It was stuck. We both heard Tamara laughing from the woods.

“See? It’s over, Julie,” Tamara said. “You should’ve just given me Grace in the first place. You know we’ll win in the end. Now you’ll have the pleasure of listening to your brother’s last breath.”

Julie turned her head away. She refused to watch the protégés tear Hari apart. She took it out on Nick, and chopped in him in the temple. He grabbed his head and fell to the ground.

Back at the bonfire, Catherine tossed off the boulder and threw a magic circle around James. It acted as a bubble and trapped him. Catherine then threw black magic bolts at Julie as she was about to kill Nick, and knocked her unconscious. Just as Catherine was about to fly over to me, Addison and Aunt Evelyn combined their energies and put her in an invisible chain. With Catherine incapacitated, the magical bubble around James burst, with lights falling out like firecrackers.

With Nick writhing on the ground, I took refuge behind the rock. I was still struggling to get the knife, and cursing myself for wearing such tight boots. Just as it was about to slide out, a phantasmal figure came out of the darkness. As it drew closer, it coalesced into a solid form.

“We meet again,” Adrian said. I was so weak, and still didn’t have the knife out to protect myself. My only option was to run. But Adrian had no trouble taking me down. I fought him off the best I could, but he controlled me with punches to the head.

With Aunt Evelyn and Addison managing Catherine, James flashed over to Adrian and me. They exchanged no words. Adrian let me go to engage in some mortal hand-to-hand combat with James. They did not use magic spells or tricks because this was so personal. It required skin-to-skin, soul-to-soul contact.

The fight was barbarous. Both men, now in their monstrous forms, bit and chewed on each other. Ham-fisted blows skyrocketed them deeper into the woods, away from me, leaving me alone. They fought to exhaustion, and James emerged the victor. He had Adrian on the ground in a headlock.

“Why, Adrian? You were my brother. I loved you.”

Adrian let go of his last smirk. “I always hated you.”

The brothers had no more to say. James twisted Adrian’s head off, and wept as it rolled into a creek bed.

Meanwhile, Tamara and her protégé partner helped Catherine get leverage over Addison and Evelyn. Catherine was free to go get me—and she did. At the same time, I was able to yank the knife out of my boot.

“You have to know how to use that knife for it to work,” she said to me.

I slashed the air wildly. “You didn’t have to hurt all those people. This has always been about you and me. So come on with it.”

Catherine moved closer to me. “My, what a brave one you’ve grown into. I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

“Not today, bitch. Not ever.”

All of a sudden, I saw a blur, and Catherine was on me. I dropped the knife as I tried to fight her off. She accidently ripped a hole in my abdomen with her longest claw during the struggle.

“Oh, you idiot! See what you made me do?” she screamed.

I was bleeding out like a sprinkler, and my intestines were exposed. Catherine knew if she wanted my power, she couldn’t let me die there. She had to eat me during a specific ritual.

“Hurry, children!” she said to her two remaining protégés, Nick and Tamara. Her minions came to her side.

“Why aren’t you eating her?” Tamara asked.

“I have to heal her and then perform the ritual. Not before a lot of torture, though,” Catherine explained, then dug her claw-like nails deep into my arm so she could handle me better. She created a crackly, five-dimensional portal for us to transport through. She spotted the knife and picked it up.

The vortex whirled up, and I could feel my molecules compressing.

James made it back to me just in time to reach into the vortex. I could see the atoms of his hand dematerializing as he pulled me out right before I reached my event horizon.

“The knife!” I yelled.

Catherine and her protégés were already pixelated. She was holding the still-solid knife. James reached back in, but couldn’t take the knife from her puzzle-pieced hand. With a puff of smoke, Catherine and her protégés disappeared—along with the knife.

And I was dying.

“You’re not leaving me now,” James said as he picked me up. He ran me back to the bonfire area. It was filled with injured and dead wolves, and wailing survivors. Somehow the wolves had managed to kill almost all the protégés.

James spotted a dying, young tribeswoman. He put me down next to her. “Eat,” he said. “It’s the only way to keep you alive. She’s going to die whether you do it or not. Feed. Right now, Grace.”

I tried to stall. “You said feeding was only to be done in ritual.”

“This is an emergency.”

“No, James. I can’t do that. It’s wrong. It’s murder,” I said, feeling myself slipping away.

James tore some of the young woman’s flesh and put it into my mouth. It tasted good, and I could feel my body healing itself. My hunger rose up and compelled me to take more. I sank my fangs into her and ate. I changed into the same gargoyle-looking creature the other witches had when they’d ate the little man. The young woman passed away, and I was satiated on her blood and flesh.

And I was totally healed.

Chief Weylen was horrified by what he saw. He still had the stick he’d used to kill the protégé, and beat me away from the young woman’s body with it. He chased me, giving my body swats and lashes. “You all are nothing but devils. Pure devils!”

The rest of the wolves chased us witches off the property while performing some sort of exorcism. As we were running off the field, I could see the blood-stained sheet covering Kaya, and Julie exiting the woods carrying Hari’s dead body.

She yelled at me. “All of this…for you! I hope you’re happy.”

The chief went to Julie and helped her carry Hari away.

“She needs me,” I said to James. He was pushing me toward the car.

“That’s really not a good idea right now. Let her be with her people.”

I broke free and ran toward Julie, but the other wolves stopped me.

“Devil! Leave,” Julie said. She then disappeared into Chief Weylen’s house.

“Come on. We’ve got to go,” James said. “Don’t look back again.”

This was not part of the plan. I existed to save life, not take it away from those who were only trying to help me. Maybe the Council, Amari, and Chief Weylen were right after all.

Maybe I really was the devil.

Chapter Twenty-Four

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.

—Orson Welles

I
f they had chased us with pitchforks… If they had swung ropes to lynch us… If they had mobbed and beat us down mercilessly… I would have understood.

After Catherine’s gruesome attack on the tribe and my subsequent feeding on the young woman, we witches had to make a mad scramble to our vehicles. It wasn’t so much that we were afraid of the shape-shifters. The escape was necessary for us to avoid defending ourselves against them. If that unfortunate situation arose, the catastrophic result would have been more unnecessary loss of life—theirs, not ours.

I was running hard, trailing James. He gripped my hand so tightly, I thought it was breaking. As if he were Lot and I was his wife, he ordered, “Don’t look back.” I did as I was told, but noticed that the impenetrable, dark cloud that had settled over the reservation seemed to be following us. Its movement was imperceptible to an undiscerning eye, but I caught it. It scared me so, I ran ahead of James and started dragging him instead.

The berserk chants of the tribe seemed to be right at our backs. The faster we ran, the more incensed and agonized their conjurations became. Our brothers and sisters in wolf ’s clothing had retained their occult abilities, though they weren’t as strong as ours. Their whammy generated an unseen wall of hands that literally pushed us—the evil spirits—off their property. The hands’ slaps drove stinging, ghostly bristles deep into our backs.

Without any of us dying or having to kill more of the shapeshifters, we finally made it back to our vehicles. In somewhat of a panic mode, Aunt Evelyn and Addison both struggled with their door handles before jumping into the minivan. Directly behind them James helped me into the car and buckled my seatbelt for me. He was meticulous about it. He took the time to make sure I was strapped in tight, in total disregard of his own safety.

The wolves hung back. “You okay?” he asked while looking over his shoulder at the mob of shape-shifters practically foaming at their mouths.

“I’m good,” I said quickly, so he’d hurry and get into the car.

I could see some of the shape-shifters still hadn’t retracted their fangs, and I wondered if they were for us. The chanting had stopped, but some in the crowd still heckled. “Good riddance!” shouted an anonymous voice while someone else spit on our tracks. But no matter how much they assailed, the shape-shifters never advanced. They just wanted us gone.

Shaking, Aunt Evelyn turned the ignition and put her hands on the steering wheel, but quickly removed them. She rubbed her fingertips against her palms. The sparkly yet gritty traces of killer-defensive magic were still on her hands. Disturbed, she reached into the backseat for her purse and searched through it.

From James’s car I could see her muddling about. I was sure the shape-shifters saw her as well, and were wondering what the heck she was doing. What I didn’t know was that Aunt Evelyn was thinking her magic didn’t do much good, seeing that Hari was gone. And she just wanted the useless conjury off her hands.

Aunt Evelyn squirted a glop of Purell onto her grainy palms and furiously rubbed them together. The magic was thick and did not come off easily. She reached for one of the countless fast-food napkins she had stashed in the glove compartment. As she did this, she noticed one of Hari’s hairs lying across the center console.