Darkness & Discovery (The Bespelled Trilogy #2) (23 page)

“He…wait,
what?”

Augustine
said, “Bryn transported himself out of his own body, essentially.”

“Oh
God. I’m so confused,” I said, pressing a hand to my forehead. “Wait, hang on
one minute. I want you to explain this to Alastair and Joey.” I leapt up and
threw open my bedroom door and raced down the hall to the living room, where
everyone was gathered. I hit speaker phone and told my companions, “Bryn’s in
the hospital. Augustine’s on the phone. Are you with him right now, Augustine?”

“Of
course. I haven’t left his bedside, and I’m not going to.”

“Tell
everyone what you told me,” I said as I dropped down shakily onto an ottoman.

“Bryn
decided to teleport to France. His body stayed behind. He’s…more or less in a
coma now,” Augustine said.

“He
tapped into the power grid. That blackout earlier was Bryn,” I mumbled, hugging
myself with one arm while holding the phone out in front of me with the other.

“So
his mind and body separated?” Joey asked, wide-eyed.

“Essentially,
yes.” Augustine sounded weary.

“You
were supposed to be taking care of him, Augustine!” Joey yelled, shock turning
to rage in an instant. “You know he can’t teleport that far. Why didn’t you
stop him?”

“You
think I didn’t try?” Augustine’s voice was thin and pained. “You can’t stop
Bryn when he decides to do something, he makes sure of it. He immobilized me with
a quick snare spell so I couldn’t do anything but watch as he told me what he
had planned, watch as he drew a million volts into his body, and then watch as
he launched himself into the universe.”

“Are
you sure that’s what happened?” I asked. “Are you sure he didn’t actually
electrocute himself?”

“I’m
sure. I watched his essence leave his body and hang in the air a moment before
shooting off into the ether.”

A
loud banging on the hotel room door made all of us jump to our feet. “What is
that?” I asked.

“Um,
I’m guessing Bryn’s protection spell just went down,” Joey said. “Augustine,
we’re going to need to call you back.”

“Wait!”
Augustine yelled. “I need all of you to come to the hospital. I’m going to try
to work a spell to reunite Bryn and his body. We’re at Cedarwood Memorial on
the east side.”

“May
take us a little while to get there, Augustine,” Alastair yelled over the noise
as Joey darted from the room and the banging got louder. Athos sprang into
action too and started piling heavy furniture in front of the door.

“I’ve
been researching spells as we’ve been speaking,” Augustine said. “I haven’t
found the right one, so I don’t need you here in the next five minutes. But I
do need you here soon, because the minute I find a spell, we need to use it.
The longer we leave Bryn hanging out there somewhere in space, the harder it’ll
be to put him back together again.”

“We’ll
get ourselves there,” Alastair promised. “See you soon.”

I
hung up and shoved the phone in my pocket, then ran to my room, quickly
stuffing my feet into my boots and pulling on a jacket. The little serpent
knife was sitting out waiting for me, and I grabbed it and clutched it tightly
as I ran back into the living room. Loud voices and yelling could be heard out
in the hall. Athos appeared beside me and said, “I barricaded every door to
both suites, but they’re not going to hold for long. We need to get out of
here.”

“Brilliant
deduction, Ath, but we’re on the top floor and totally cut off,” Joey grumbled,
appearing beside us with a long knife in each hand. He handed one knife to
Athos though, even as he mocked his suggestion.

“No
we’re not. We can’t go down, but we can go up,” Athos said simply.

Alastair,
who was calmly contemplating the situation, scratched his bottom lip with his
thumbnail and said, “We could bust through the ceiling to the roof, but that
would only buy us a few minutes. We’d be every bit as cornered up there as we
are in here.”

“We’re
not going to the roof,” Athos said. And then he picked up the big leather
ottoman and threw it out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, which shattered
into a million pieces and rained into the fountain below. “Two of the four of
us can fly. We’ll carry the other two. The biggest threat right now is the
Order, and it’ll be easy for them to catch up to us when we’re weighed down
like that, so we’re not going to try to outrun them. We’re only going to try to
make it past the Strip, out into the desert, and then we’ll land and fight
them. They’re the only ones that can follow us on wing, the rest of the hunters
won’t be able to catch up.”

“That’s
a great plan, except for one thing,” Alastair said. “I have no idea how to
transform into my angel half.”

“You’re
kidding,” Athos said, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I’m
really not.”

“But
it’s like breathing. It’s not something you can actually forget,” his
half-brother insisted.

“Nevertheless.”

“You
might have mentioned that before I punched a hole in the window,” Athos said.
“The Order’s going to come flying through there any second, you know. And I
like our odds of defeating them a lot better on open ground, rather than hemmed
in like this with a couple hundred other hunters about to break in here.”

“I
don’t know what to tell you,” Alastair said.

Athos
stuck his head out the open window, then said, “Ah, so that’s why they’re not
up here yet. Several dozen vampire hunters are trying to take them out.
Probably see the Order as too much of a shoo-in for your bounty. We caught a
break there, but it’s not going to last. So come on, brother. Make with the
wings. Like this.”

Athos
quickly shucked off his leather jacket and t-shirt as Joey muttered, “Ugh.”

And
then Joey, Alastair and I all shielded our eyes as the room flooded with
blinding white light. Joey and I turned away from him, and Alastair
straightened up and said, “I’m telling you, I don’t know how to do that. So
take Lu and Joey and get out of here. I’ll fight as long as I can and take out
as many of the Order as possible so all of them won’t come after you.”

“Take
Joey! Yeah right!” Joey exclaimed, turning to face Alastair while holding up
one hand toward Athos to shield his eyes. “I’m staying here and fighting with
you, Allie, not running off like some total wuss. And I’m sure as hell not
getting whisked off by your total nug of a half-brother, I can tell you that
right now!”

 A
loud cracking sound reverberated through the hotel room as one of the doors to
the suite gave way. I stared at it in a panic as it banged again and again
against the wall of furniture piled against it, then turned to Alastair and
yelled, “Allie, do what you do when you light your hand up. Only, don’t hold
back, totally give in to it. You can do this, I know you can!”

“Lu,
go with Athos. Get out of here,” Alastair yelled over the noise from the
hallway.

“No!
Come on, Allie! Don’t think about it. Just transform!” I yelled.

“What
if I can’t turn it off again? What if I lose myself to that side of me?”

“Is
that what you’re worried about?” I yelled as a heavy piece of furniture crashed
to the floor near the door where the mob was breaking through. He nodded, and I
yelled, “You won’t lose yourself. I won’t let you!”

“Go,
Luna! There’s no time!” Alastair yelled, and Athos started to reach for me to
fly me out of there, but he backed off quickly when I pointed my little knife
at him.

 “I
love you, Alastair,” I yelled as another piece of furniture fell. “And I’m not
leaving without you. So either we stand and fight together, or you transform
and fly us both out of here!”

Alastair
had been standing between me and the demolished doorway, and he ran toward me
now with a look of intense determination. He grabbed me in his arms and ran
toward the smashed out window.

And
he leapt out into the night.

Chapter Fifteen

For a moment, there was
only the cold, and the wind rushing past us, and the dark.

There
was falling.

And
Alastair, his arms strong and secure around me.

I
pressed my eyes shut a second before the world erupted into blinding white
light, and the whoosh of powerful wings stirred the night.

Lifting
us.

“I
love you too, Luna,” Alastair said, his mouth close to my ear. “I wanted to say
it earlier in the pool, but I chickened out.”

I
pressed my face into his shoulder, my eyes still tightly shut, and said with a
smile, “I knew you could do it.”

“Transform
into an angel, or gather the courage to tell you I love you?”

“Both.”

He
chuckled and tightened his grip on me, and I wound my arms more securely around
his neck. Something incredibly soft brushed my hands, and my heart leapt.

“Aren’t
you going to look at me, Luna?” he asked gently.

“No.
Absolutely not,” I said, my face still in his shoulder.

“Why
not? Are you worried I’ll be too frightening?”

“No.
I’m worried you’ll be too beautiful. You’re already almost more than I can take.
If I look at you now and you’re even more beautiful than usual, I think my
heart might actually explode.”

“That
would be unfortunate.” I could hear the smile in his voice.

“You
know, for someone that just turned into a mythical winged entity, you sound
exactly the same,” I pointed out.

“I
feel the same, too. I still feel like
me
. I really didn’t think I would.
I was convinced that the Alastair you knew would cease to exist when I was like
this.”

“But
here you are,” I said with a smile.

“Yes,
here I am,” he said. “You sure you don’t want to take a look at me?”

“Why
is this important to you?” I countered.

“I
just…I need to know you’re not afraid of me,” he said softly.

I
pulled my head back. And then I opened my eyes.

For
a moment, I was completely blinded. But then my eyes adjusted to the light, and
I tilted my head back to look into Alastair’s face.

“You’re
smiling,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”

“You
are
still you,” I said. “You’re still Alastair.”

“Do
I look any different?”

“Not
really. I mean, aside from the fact that you’re radiating this pure, white
light. And ok, you have – yeah, I can’t actually look at your wings right now,
because that’s just a little more than my brain can process. But you still
absolutely look like my Alastair.”

“Your
Alastair,” he said with a smile. “I like that.”

“Me
too,” I cuddled against him again. After a moment I said, “I don’t know why
Joey thought angels were scary.”

“He
said full-blooded angels are frightening because they’re so otherworldly.
Apparently nephilim are another thing all together.”

I
noticed the sound of yelling off in the distance, over the rush of the wind. “Speaking
of Joey, I assume that’s him I’m hearing.”

“It
is. He actually hasn’t stopped swearing since Athos scooped him up and flew him
out the window. He has an exceptionally colorful vocabulary.”

I
turned my head and looked down, then immediately buried my face in Alastair’s
shoulder again. We were really high up, flying over the outskirts of Las Vegas,
just a few scattered lights far below us. “You know,” I said after a bit, “That
running toward the broken window maneuver back at the hotel was really gutsy.
You were that sure you’d transform, huh?”

“I
had my doubts, but I relied on your steadfast belief. You absolutely knew I
could do it.”

“That’s
true. But how did you know I was thinking that?”

“Because
I can smell fear. And even when you realized I was about to run us out a top
story window, you still weren’t afraid. You simply believed in me.”

“I’ve
always had faith in you, Allie. And you’ve never let me down.”

“And
what a terribly literal way of letting you down that would have been, had I in
fact not been able to transform after I’d hurled us out that window,” he said.

“Yeah,
but it didn’t happen.”

I
adjusted my grip on him, then tentatively slid a hand down his broad shoulders,
feeling his powerful muscles flexing and releasing. I kept sliding my hand down
until my little finger grazed something extraordinary soft, right about at his
shoulder blade. And then I ran that same fingertip hesitantly over the softness
in short little strokes.

Alastair
chuckled. “Are you petting me?”

I
smiled at that. “Kind of. I’m trying to slowly wrap my head around the fact
that you have wings. It’s not an easy concept to process. But they feel really
good, I’ve never felt anything that soft. And I guess I’m touching them as a
way of slowly acclimating myself to them.”