Promises to Keep (22 page)

Out of the forests came serpents with bodies of sand and jaguars whose heavy footfalls
left behind smoldering ash. From the canopy came birds made of vibrating light, brilliant
against the darkening night sky, their wings making a crystalline ringing sound as
they struck the air. Looking at them made Jay’s eyes water and his body ache. When
he finally forced himself to turn away, he saw that Rikai too had changed in the last
few minutes. Jay wasn’t certain what power had ridden her into this place, but it
made every hair on the back of his neck rise. Earth, air, fire, and water were neutral
elemental powers. The one Rikai had brought was mad and dark and hungry.

Her oil-slick eyes had become vortexes. In a voice like nothing he had ever heard,
she said to him, “You want to run now.”

Jay grabbed Brina’s hand and called to Lynx, and they nearly flew over the wall. Behind
them, he felt heat and concussion as the immortal powers collided. He could hear the
hiss of snow vaporizing and—

Brina screamed as they stumbled into a solid mass of branches.

Can’t go that way
, he thought to her.

They turned, but they both knew the truth; the forest was trying to hold them here.

“Shantel has bonded itself to you,”
a voice on the wind said. One of the other elementals had diverted its attention
enough to speak to them.
“When it keeps you close, it is stronger. You must
get out so we can contain it. Get far away—back to your home, if you can. From neutral
ground, you can summon Shantel. You are not strong enough to bind it to your will,
but if you call to us as well, we will assist you.”

How?

There was a long hesitation, and a mournful cry.

“Betrayal to tell you this,”
the voice said,
“but there is no other choice.”

What followed was not words but an expression of power. Within the power was a name—one
that mortal vocal cords could never utter aloud, for it was the true name of one of
the immortals. With this name, the immortal could be commanded if one’s will was strong
enough. And then came knowledge of the ritual they needed to perform.

“Why would you help us?” Jay gasped as he ran, wary of making yet more deals with
immortal beings. No, that wasn’t the right question. “Why do
you
need
us
to help you fight? We’re just mortal.”

“Shantel has crippled us all through its sly feeding all these years, and now it would
destroy us in its mad quest for impossible vengeance,”
the elemental replied. “
We are too weak to overpower it unless it is summoned and bound.”

“But—”

“I do not know what this will do to you,”
the power warned.
“Such binding is unpredictable. The ritual could drain the power from every creature
in your circle, or grant them immortal life … or grant them immortal hunger. There
is no way of knowing until it is done. But it must be done. Now go!”

The wind shoved hard at their backs, blowing shards of stone and earth at them and
nearly knocking Jay off his feet.

This way!
Lynx yowled at them.
No, no, not there. Close your eyes, humans
, Lynx howled.
Ignore these illusions. Follow me. Trust me
.

Jay closed his eyes without hesitation. Brina, too, shut hers and threw her senses
into the lynx.

Blindly, they ran. Cold and exhausted, they forced their bodies to move, and keep
moving.

At times they fell, and their bodies slept deeply. Lynx commanded Jay’s power to keep
them from freezing.

When at last they stumbled out of the woods, they could do nothing more than climb
into the car. Too exhausted to drive, Jay dialed his phone with trembling hands and
begged someone from the closest SingleEarth to pick them up and arrange for the fastest
transport possible back to Haven #2.

Then they slept, but could not rest, because their dreams were still twined with the
elementals’ thoughts, and they both dreamed of the ongoing battle.

They wept as they saw what was happening to the world around them. An off-season hurricane.
Abrupt, unexpected blizzards, dropping snow and sleet and hail and freezing rain.
In another area, wildfire. A volcano came to life, rumbling out of its centuries of
sleep. As the earth shook, buildings tumbled.

These poor creatures
, Brina thought.
So helpless, so frightened
.

Jay needed to hold her. She let him, and they continued to sleep.

“W
E’RE AT
N
UMBER
Two,” an exhausted human voice said, rousing Brina, who was still wrapped in Jay’s
arms. She hadn’t wanted to let go of him as they had stumbled, semiconscious, from
a car to a plane to another car, with people asking desperate questions but finally
just accepting Jay’s often-repeated statement that they had to get back to Haven #2.

What Brina had seen in her nocturnal visions swept over her and dragged a sob from
her throat. Thousands—no,
hundreds
of thousands—of humans must have died in the last twenty-four hours. Those who believed
called to their gods for explanations and help.

The humans were not alone.

Some of Leona’s bonds had succumbed to the siphoning
away of their power, or to human ailments such as pneumonia, or to physical frailties
such as heart attack and stroke. Some of the other elementals that had come to fight
Shantel were trying to support Leona’s damaged bonds, but they could do only so much.

Jay stirred with a moan, and then pushed himself up, groping for the car door handle
so groggily that they both nearly fell when it opened.

“We need a blade,” Brina said. She remembered everything the powers in the forest
had told them, and she did not intend to hesitate.

She saw Jay seeking out specific faces in the crowd, but neither delayed their task.
They both snapped commands to nurses and secretaries. Shouting over the protests,
they had the ill in the gymnasium moved, until the group could form a rough circle
around the outside of the room.

“Take hands,” Jay said to those surrounding him—sick and well, human, witch, and shapeshifter
alike. “If the person you are next to cannot grip, then hold on to them as tightly
as you can. We
cannot
break the circle. Is that understood?”

Jeremy looked up with bleary eyes as he took the hands of those beside him. “Jay … what
are we doing?”

“Saving us all,” Jay answered.

“Possibly dooming us all,” Brina added more honestly.

There was no choice, and no time to explain the danger.
The ritual could drain the power from every creature in your circle, or grant them
immortal life … or grant them immortal hunger
.

Jay quashed the protest from his conscience that there
was
enough time to say a few words of warning. With so much at stake, he couldn’t afford
to give people a chance to refuse. He kept silent.

Brina and Jay walked to the circle’s center carrying their tools.

Each element required a different form of sacrifice to call it. Water asked for tears.
Air was called through breath and voice. Fire answered only to blood. Earth, like
the power of the Shantel, was bound in flesh.

Brina needed only to remember what she had recently seen, and the tears ran down her
face. She further recalled her brother’s destruction, and well before that, the blackening
bodies of each of her family. The end of safety in her world. She did not know what
memories Jay pulled upon, but she did not need to. When their eyes met, the witch’s
were glistening.

She felt the world shift around them, wavering as power responded to their wordless
command for attention.

Invoking air at that moment was more challenging, because Brina’s throat was still
tight with tears. She choked on her first attempt to draw breath, and so it was Jay
who began with a traditional folk tune. It didn’t matter what the words were, though
Jay had chosen a tune of longing and loss. It mattered only that their voices mingled
in the air.

Jay passed Brina his blade, clenching his jaw as Shantel’s power within him fought
against Leona’s power embedded in the silver. He held up his arm, and Brina drew a
line of blood across the palm of his hand; he took the knife and did the same for
her.

Normally, a sorcerer willing to risk life and soul might have
summoned one elemental, in an attempt to dominate it and win incredible power. But
no trained sorcerer was foolish enough to invite this many forces into their circle
at once. They would tear each other—and the mortal arrogant enough to summon them—to
shreds.

In this case, that was the point. The other elementals were the weapons Jay and Brina
needed to wield.

“Only one guest left to invite,” Jay muttered to Brina, his voice wavering with nerves.

The name the elemental had spoken to her, Brina uttered now, not with breath but with
the power gathered within the circle. She whispered it as a prayer and screamed it
as a demand simultaneously, and as she did so, she reached for Jay, drew him close,
and kissed him.

Their bloody hands twined, pressure stopping the blood’s flow, and the kiss cut both
of their voices off, leaving only the original mortal power: the touch of flesh to
flesh.

It was the power that passed between mother and infant when she held her child for
the first time. It was the power of a gentle touch to the cheek, a reassuring pat
on the shoulder, a sympathetic hug—or an angry slap. Every human being knew the power
that arose when flesh met flesh.

Brina could have just held on to Jay, leaned her cheek against his, and used that
contact for the leverage she needed to summon the Shantel elemental. They needed only
to invoke it, not to provide the kind of sacrifice that would have been necessary
to call it the first time. She chose this because she had wanted to kiss him since
sometime in the forest.

Jay, though surprised, responded as she had hoped he would—willingly, with the same
memories of shared experiences and an understanding of all the beauty and agony they
had both endured recently.

The power that passed between them was sweet, and gentle, and the opposite of everything
the Shantel had fed on for the last two centuries. It was a reminder of what had been,
and what could be again. It drew Shantel close, until the circle around them shuddered
with the elemental’s appearance, hands clutching hands in the effort to contain the
power.

The power of flesh could be compassion and forgiveness—but not this time. Shantel
would find no absolution here. Too many lives had been lost, and neither Jay nor Brina
was the turn-the-other-cheek type. The other elementals who had stepped into the circle
around them, some claiming bodies too worn down by disease to even open their eyes
on their own, were also not the types to let the matter be forgotten.

As one they struck.

The circle constricted, creating a noose that strangled the Shantel elemental, siphoning
its power away.

Brina could have interfered. She and Jay had summoned the elemental. They could have
commanded the others to leave it; they could have claimed its power for themselves.

And such power it would have been!

I’m sorry
, Brina said to it. Not just for the horrors of Midnight; that was not what had truly
undone this elemental. She was apologizing for keeping away from the Shantel the one
person who had been able to speak to it, and hear its voice, and
let it be truly alive. Without its
sakkri
, it had been voiceless and helpless.

The Shantel elemental buckled, unraveling. Other elementals stole its memories, all
the thoughts that gave it form, ripping them away like children tearing paper off
Christmas presents.

Jay and Brina both collapsed to their knees as those memories lashed at them, seeking
new homes. They accepted the ones they wanted, some beautiful and some terrible, some
as ancient as the land itself and some as recent as Brina’s trying to hang herself
from the rafters and Pet struggling for hours with the knowledge that her mistress
had not given her any orders regarding cutting her down, but surely she couldn’t intend
to stay that way forever.…

That which was immortal could not die. But without mortal memories to hold it together,
it could not maintain its consciousness.

Brina whispered the Shantel’s name once again, but received no response. The entity
had been reduced to a mere child of its kind, barely sentient, with no recollection
of what it had just done.

It had no physical form in the room, but she could sense it, and she knew it rested
deeply.

“It’s over?” Jay asked, looking up, his expression as dazed as Brina felt.

One of the ill spoke up—no, this being was beyond ill. Brina knew that the human form
she was looking at was deceased, though it had been appropriated by one of the elementals.

“Leona has been injured. Weakened,”
it said.
“She cannot hold all of her bonds any more. Many will die yet.”
A wail arose from somewhere in the crowd, before the elemental added,
“Unless they are willing to make other arrangements.”

“We can pick up the slack, so to speak,”
another voice said. This elemental was gentler, but Brina knew it was hungry as well.

Jay started to speak. “My family—”

“We are grateful for your help. Looking after your kin is the least we can do,”
one of the voices offered, before another swiftly interjected,
“Leona’s mortal children are numerous, of course. It may take more than one of us
to save them.”

Some of the voices sounded kind; the last one just sounded sly. Leona had been the
most powerful of the elementals. Now she had been laid low, and though other elementals
had saved her, they did not plan to let her regain the same level of power ever again.
That meant claiming her weakened bonds as their own. It would save lives—if it wasn’t
too late—but this world was never going to be the same again.