Promises to Keep (23 page)

Brina looked at Jay, wondering whether the new world painted this day would be better
than the one before, or even the one that would have resulted had they not interfered
with Shantel’s plans. He heard the thought, pondered, and then said, “I need a nap.”

Brina nodded. Others could clean up the mess left behind … whatever was left behind.
They had done their job.

J
AY COULD NOT
rest until he had made several phone calls ensuring that those he loved were still
alive. Some were in critical condition, but if there was a spark of life left within
them, he trusted the elementals to save them.

For their own purposes, perhaps, but the elementals would save them nonetheless.

Next, he decided to sleep for a week. Unfortunately, the rest of the world insisted
on getting in the way of this triumphant hero’s nap—including Brina, who he had thought
would be on his side.

She shook him and demanded he stand up because she wanted a model
right now
. He had no idea where she had found the materials. When he looked up with every intention
of telling
her to come back in another seven days, he had the irresistible desire to kiss her
instead. So he did. And then he modeled.

Brina painted in a new way. She used her brushes and her oils—with windows open despite
the frigid winter air—but occasionally she reached for the canvas and caressed it,
sliding fingers over wet or dry paint. The image would shift, lines and tones responding
to the pictures in her head in a way that normal paint could not.

Strangely, she was neither disturbed by this development nor delighted. She merely
considered it a new tool, one she was happy to get to know, but she never questioned
it. Jay would say that she took it for granted, but he might as well have said that
she took
everything
for granted.

For Brina, each moment was new, as it is, and perfect.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one asking for his time. Some of the people who
insisted on bothering him brought good things, like food. Others
wanted
things from him.

Jay, what’s going on? Jay, our magic is doing odd things. Jay, so-and-so has recovered
from the flu but now keeps shapeshifting into a chicken
.

Okay, he hadn’t heard the bit about the chicken
specifically
, but there had been reports of unexpected shapeshifting, especially among those who
had been in the circle when the elementals had been summoned. Powers that people had
long controlled were gone, but others spontaneously manifested. Some of those new
powers were gifts. Some were darker, ranging from empathy like Jay’s—but without a
lifetime to learn
how to use it or control it—to power over life and death, healing’s inverse.

Individuals who before had only needed to eat as humans did found themselves needing
to
feed
, while others who had fed on blood or power for centuries now had entirely different
hungers.

The world had changed. Jay still didn’t know how many of Midnight’s trainers and traders
had survived. Most of the vampires he knew had no interest in updating him, and having
just barely saved the world from his last series of best intentions, Jay believed
that it might be best to let this sleeping dog lie. For now.

He had other priorities.

Jay stood next to Jeremy as the groom waited, struggling not to fidget or wipe his
sweaty palms on his tuxedo pants. Something to do with saving the world, or at least
Caryn’s life, or maybe just the super-flu leaving much of the original wedding party
feeling under the weather, had caused them to promote Jay from usher to groomsman.

The human looked good—though, these days,
human
might not have been the most accurate word. Jeremy had been born human, but he had
also been in the circle when the Shantel elemental had been summoned. No one knew
quite what had touched the doctor-in-training, but Jay knew Jeremy’s eyes had a phosphorescence
visible when the room was dark, and he tended not to notice anymore when no lights
were on. So far, that was the extent of his manifested power; maybe that was all there
would be.

Whatever he was, Jeremy could still sweat. He looked to Jay anxiously. He had all
the faith in the world that Caryn would appear and walk down that aisle … but what
if she didn’t? What if she had changed her mind? What if she was …

The music rose. Caryn had chosen “Colors of the Wind” as her wedding march.

It was beautiful; the bride was beautiful.

Jay barely managed not to laugh out loud as Brina’s idle thought reached him:
So provincial, so traditional. Nothing original. Beautiful dress, but portraits of
brides in their beautiful dresses are a dime a dozen
.

Her mind went back to wandering more interesting paths. In the last days, Brina had
not regained her vampirism. Jay knew she had considered contacting Kaleo, the one
who had changed her nearly four hundred years ago, though she had not spoken of it
out loud. She hadn’t decided what she planned to do. At Jay’s prompting, she had called
Nikolas and officially given him permission to take charge of all her “property,”
to do with as he saw fit. SingleEarth had accepted several of the slaves into their
psychiatric rehabilitation program.

She was getting used to taking care of herself, and being independent, just as she
was getting used to her heartbeat, and her breath.

Jay was getting used to her primal, childlike joy. They had taken a break from painting
once when Brina had needed fresh air, and she had followed him, running through the
forest, delighted by the falling dust of snow. With Lynx by their side,
they had leapt, tumbled into snowbanks, and reveled in the crispness of nature.

Jay fervently hoped she didn’t choose to become a vampire again.

Especially since he was pretty sure she had the makings of a powerful witch.

It had taken Jay’s kind many millennia to develop their powers into what they were
these days—the Vidas with their ability to manipulate raw power, the Smoke line’s
ability to heal, and all the other specialties Jay knew only a little of. Now they
were all back at the beginning again. None of them knew what they were or who they
might be in coming generations.

Jeremy and Caryn—would they be the parents of a new line of witches? Or of something
else entirely? For that matter, what might Jay’s children be, if he chose to have
children?

At that moment, all that mattered was the way the crystals on Caryn’s gown sparkled
in the light, wreathing her in rainbows. It wasn’t a strange new power that gave her
such a glow—no, it was love, and hope, and relief, and joy.

She smiled up at her husband-to-be with absolutely no concern about what Jeremy might
be or might become. It didn’t matter to her. She knew who he was. Who cared what he
was?

His parents cared, more than a little. A few people in the audience were simmering
with resentment and built-up anger that Jay suspected might lead to a fistfight in
the lobby during the reception.

Jay tried to come up with a plan to defuse the potential mayhem. After all, Jeremy
had given him this job because he had
unique talents that were supposed to help him avoid bloodshed over the wedding cake.

“Do you have the rings?”

Oh—and that!

Jay did have the rings. He passed them to Jeremy, and then there wasn’t much more
for Jay to do except stand there and look interested while letting his mind wander
across the thoughts of all those assembled.

It was amazing how few of them were thinking about the recent illness, or all the
loss, or their fears of the future. All their thoughts were on this day, this moment,
as Jeremy and Caryn leaned toward each other to kiss.…

Meanwhile, in a small but elite penthouse bar in New York City …

Kaleo and Theron leaned back and watched fireworks from the balcony. No disaster could
keep humans down long, it seemed.

“I knew a Malinalxochitl witch once, but I never had the magic myself,” Theron commented.
“The Azteka were mostly after my time. So why do I suddenly find myself doing things
like this?”

He glanced at the candle flickering at the center of the table. Theron held up a hand,
and the tiny ball of flame came to his palm like an obedient puppy. With a flick of
his wrist he juggled it to the other hand, and then sent it back to the candle, where
it flared at least three feet high before settling back to its normal and natural
state.

Kaleo watched the display and shook his head. “I’m sure you will make good use of
this new talent. It is more useful than some of the aberrations that have come to
my attention.”

“I’ve heard the rumors, of course,” Theron said. “I’m looking into them, and trying
to determine which of the wild speculations is most correct. So far, most of what
I’ve heard has been barely credible, and some of it has been outright impossible … like
vampires turning human.”

Kaleo nodded, his gaze going distant. “Indeed.”

“I heard about Brina,” Theron said. “What are you planning to do?”

“Legally, I suppose she’s mine, since she was before the change. I would appreciate
it if you could help me spread the word that I will enforce that claim, should anyone
attempt to harm her.”

“Do you intend to bring her in?”

“No, I think not,” Kaleo said thoughtfully. “I killed her once, and discovered then
that she is a very different woman as one of us than she was as a mortal.”

“She’ll die,” Theron pointed out.

“Nothing beautiful lasts forever.”

And in the heart of New Mayhem …

Fala stared at the corpse in front of her as it rapidly deteriorated. It wasn’t rotting;
she knew what it looked like when a body rotted. This one was decaying in a different
way, like a mummy in dry sand.

Moira and Jager had both been unconscious, wrapped in wild dreams, for days. Fala
had drawn on magic in order to sustain them, magic she had barely used since she was
a human sorcerer. When they had woken, the three of them had hunted like wild animals,
desperate to renew their strength. They had barely survived.

Apparently, some others had not.

The body in front of Fala, which she suspected would be dust within days, was wearing
one of Silver’s thousand-dollar suits. It was also in his office.

Should she do something for him? Maybe she could bring a mortal in here, slit its
throat over the body, and see if the cascade of blood would revive the decomposing
ancient.

She kicked it instead, sending debris flying like ash into the air and causing the
body to crumble further. That way, she didn’t have to wonder whether or not he would
wake up.

She went looking for Aubrey, to see if he had survived this cataclysm. Given her bad
luck, he probably had. It seemed like the younger vampires had fared better. Moira
had been in better shape than Jager; Aubrey was younger than Moira by about five centuries.
Sadly, he was probably fine.

And in a small town in Maryland …

Kyla leant her shoulder to clearing wreckage from what had, a few days before, been
the entrance to the Dragon’s Nest club. More recently, it had been a sick ward for
serpiente who had fallen ill, including Kyla’s brother, Lucien Cobriana.

Somewhere in the worst of the fever, Lucien had started raving in the ancient language,
too rapidly for Kyla to follow with her limited understanding of the tongue and the
fever filling her own brain. It had sounded like he was arguing with someone.

Then the ground had started to shake, as if the earth itself were shivering. Lucien
had opened eyes that were no longer just the rust-red of cobra eyes but that had burned
like liquid magma. He had grabbed her arm. Dragged her up. Shoved her to the door,
and commanded,
“Run!”

He had evacuated most of the serpents in the nest, but when the ground had collapsed,
it had swallowed him. Kyla hadn’t been able to inform the rest of the family, because
no one had been able to reach
anyone
else in the serpiente royal house. All she could do was supervise the rescue attempt,
and pray.

And in the Le Coire manor …

“Are you ever going to tell us what the hell that was all about?” Brent asked.

“Once I fully understand it, and know what I am allowed to tell you, I will consider
whether or not I want to bother,” Ryan replied.

Samantha sighed. It had been a difficult few weeks. She knew that whatever had happened
had involved others of her kind, but she hadn’t had enough power to participate in
the fight … or to even know who was fighting, or over what, or who had won.

Ryan had only come downstairs to eat. Otherwise, they hadn’t seen him in days; he
had been sequestered in his private ritual area, trying to communicate with the ancient
powers to which his family had long ago tied themselves.

All he had reported so far was that there had been a major shift in power globally.
No one currently in the room had been seriously affected, but word on the street was
that many things had changed.

And in a coffee shop in Boston …

The three known as the Wild Cards sat around the same table where they often gathered
to chat.

Rikai’s skin had returned to its flawlessly smooth porcelain, the scars hidden, and
her muscles and joints were once again functioning as they had before the Inquisitors
had treated her to the third degree. The elemental that had ridden her had been one
she was already familiar with, a creature not of one of the pure elements—fire, earth,
water, and air—but of agony and rage.

Xeke had fed once since they had returned from the forest, but it had been mostly
out of habit. He suspected he didn’t need blood anymore. The power given to him by
the elemental had shifted his needs. Thankfully, he had plenty of mortals willing
to stay near him and sleep in his arms, keeping the power well fed and content … and
he could still appreciate a macchiato, which this particular café made very well.