Authors: David James
-Calum-
The sky was on fire.
The high trees burned, lighting the field in a cage of danger.
The Orieno crawled across the field, rising and falling in waves of dead-gray, moving as if one large breath of darkness.
My Dad’s cold fingers grabbed at me, tearing bits of my flesh away until I felt the warmth of my blood drip down.
A cry broke through the moaning of the Orieno, a scream in the night so dark. Morphis: “Die, Dreamer! Die like you should have years ago!”
My head fell back and I saw the stars above, saw the moon shining full and bright in the otherwise darkened sky. I saw the leaves fall from the trees like drops of blood bleeding down from the stars.
My dream
, I thought.
This is my dream.
This is the future, the past come true.
And then the sky exploded in a light so blinding white it seemed almost black.
They fell from the burning sky like red leaves drifting down from autumn trees; broken constellations turned fallen stars. They were hundreds, covering all but a lone patch of moonlight next to me that shone red with blood.
“Caeles!” a voice called from above.
The Bloodletter snarled and fell back, rolling until he was feet from where Morphis stood with Kate’s sisters still bound and gagged.
“Orion!” I cried as a gust of wind hit my face.
The clouds around his body swirled menacingly in the night. He landed next to me and said, “Caeles, it’s come to this: You must choose a path. Life or death.”
His hand reached out and touched my neck, a cold moment in a dark night, and I felt better.
“I don’t want to die,” I said. “But I don’t want to be the only one left living, either.”
“A difficult choice.”
“I want to save who I can.”
Orion nodded. “You always have. You’ve dreamed it haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But what does that have to do with anything? I already know the prophecy. I have to die.”
Around us, the Orieno demons and those possessed shouted and my heart exploded in fury. It was as it always had been: Death on death on bloody death.
“Please, Orion,” I pleaded. My throat exploded in pain. “How do I stop this?”
Orion’s hand fell to my birthmark. His skin matched mine exactly. Brilliant stars fell fast down his arm and shot through his hand to meet my own version of a night sky. Clouds swirled around my wounds and I felt myself heal. “The prophecy you heard was nothing more than words strung together by a witch who liked the taste of blood. Remember, Caeles, that you are the Dreamer, and the true prophecy was just a dream you had long ago. Anything can become true if we allow it, but what do you think dreams are if not the moments we step through time to see what could be? You can step through this. You can stop this, too, if that is what you want. Perhaps that is what the prophecy meant all along.”
“I can stop this?”
He nodded. “You are the Caeles. Use your power.”
“How?” I asked, my heart beating fast.
“Feel it in your heart, Caeles. Love is the key to everything. Let desire burn through your veins and explode out your hands in fiery glory.” His voice grew beyond the cries of the Orieno and the Order. Bold and fearless, he shouted, “Use your love to rid the world of everything against it, until the only thing left is your heart bursting, rising in love!”
I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut, and thought of the girl I met days before who I had known forever.
Kate
.
My heart boomed against my ribs until I could barely breathe and all I could think about were her eyes. So violet in a shadowed world. Our eyes meeting and that one moment lingering forever, shining a bright light in my life so dark.
You’re my reason to fall in love.
I thought of leaning forward, brushing my lips to hers and feeling the heat and the fire and the entire world burning around us in love.
Kate.
It had always been about love.
I opened my eyes and saw Orion smiling in the center of a mad world tinted red with blood. When I looked down, my hands were on fire, bursting with bright flames flickering blue-violet in the dark, red night.
-Kate-
I ran against stars and Warriors falling dead.
Move
, I told myself.
Faster.
Run faster.
Almost there.
I pulled my hand back in a tight fist-
felt the rush of anger feed into my
leviti
as I gripped the dagger.
Five more feet
, I thought.
Four.
Kill.
Three.
Just kill him.
Two.
Kill Morphis!
One.
“You’ve taken nearly everyone I’ve ever loved!” I yelled as I let my fist fly. “I will die before I let you take my sisters from me too!”
-Calum-
Among the falling stars, I could not find my heart.
And then, I saw her jump toward Morphis, saw him smile and grab Kate and sink his teeth deep into her neck. Saw the look of pleasure on his face as he sucked and swallowed her life.
I saw her fall.
“Kate!” I shouted. “No!”
Against everything, I ran.
My heart flew in front of me, carrying me forward so fast it was like I was flying through the air. Wind ripped my hair back and stuck in my eyes like needles.
In a second, I was there.
I slammed into Morphis, grabbed him by the waist and threw him against a tree. He stood, but I shot a blast of fire that hit him in the chest.
“Kate?” I leaned down and wrapped my arms around her body. I shook her.
Nothing.
“Kate!” I cried. “Be alive! Please, Kate! Please!”
“She’s dead, Dreamer.”
Morphis moved like a ghost across the field until he was standing before me.
He grinned and blood spilled down his chin. Kate’s blood. “Pity, though. She tasted so good.”
Rage like I never felt before shot through my veins and beat my heart until it was all I could feel, until the world turned so blue it burned for the one thing I missed.
I gripped the fire in my hand, pulled Morphis against me, and shoved a fiery burst into his stomach.
He stumbled back. “You’ll need to do better than that if you want to defeat me.”
I turned my head up to face the moon, thought of my Dad and Mom and Tyler and Kate and everything I’d ever lost, and felt the light of the moon shine down on me like hope.
I closed my hands tighter, turned to Morphis, and let out an explosion of blue-violet.
He raised his hands in a shield of burning red.
“Your dreams are nothing,” he said. “You have no-”
He stopped, and put a hand against his throat.
“What is-” he choked.
His body started to glow, shine as though a fire had started inside of him. Slowly, the fire broke through his skin and erupted in violet flames over his entire body.
“The blood oath,” a voice from below whispered.
I looked down. “Kate! You’re alive!”
“It wasn’t for you.” Weak, she tried to smile.
I slid my hand under her head. “What wasn’t for me?”
“Before I knew you, Marcus forced me to make a blood oath with him. To kill you.” Her breathing came slowly. “I... I think the blood oath I made with Marcus was meant for Morphis, not you, Calum. Marcus knew all along that Morphis couldn’t have my blood. It was cursed to poison him. Marcus was protecting me.”
And, as Morphis exploded in a burning violet light, I leaned down and rested my lips against Kate’s.
-Kate-
“Kate!”
As I pulled my lips away from Calum’s, I heard a voice I had not heard for years.
“Kelly?” I shouted.
I felt a burst of happy energy.
All around us the Orieno were slowly falling back to sleep, and I knew they would wake as the people they once were. The Guard were rising back to the sky, and Calum was next to me.
I opened my mouth. “Karen?”
I looked and saw them walking slowly towards me. Shadows still covered their arms and legs, but they were smiling with tears in their eyes, calling me.
I smiled and, for that moment, my heart felt like it was bursting out of my chest.
I grabbed at Calum’s arm and pulled myself up. I didn’t feel the burn in my legs, or the pain in my neck. I just ran.
And then a man came out from the shadows, walking towards my sisters with a knife in his hand.
The Bloodletter.
“No!” I screamed and ran as fast as I could.
“Kate! Wait!” Calum shouted behind me, but there was no time.
Feet from them, I pulled Gae’s knife out and shoved it deep into the Bloodletters skull.
He fell.
Dead.
I flung my arms around my sisters, finally.
“I missed you both so much,” I cried.
“We love you,” they said with their faces buried in my sides.
I turned to find Calum, but when I saw his face I didn’t recognize him.
“He couldn’t have been the Bloodletter anymore. Morphis is gone,” he whispered. “He couldn’t have been possessed anymore. He wasn’t the Bloodletter.”
Chapter Twenty
Blood Calls Back
-Calum-
I heard her voice as though she were miles away. She kept calling my name, saying words I couldn’t understand, her eyes pleading with me to forgive.
I looked at her through eyes streaked with tears. She didn’t look the same. Her hair was just as wild, her eyes just as violet as they had always been. Her freckles, the same. I searched still, but couldn’t find the girl I loved beneath everything she had become.
“Calum?” Kate asked, her voice breaking. “I had to. I thought I had to.”
Just then the sun broke through the clouds, streaking in jagged lines through the dust. The light played against my skin. A new day was starting. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky until it became a beacon.
“Calum?”
The sun hit her body from behind. Standing a few feet away from Kate, I was trapped in her shadow. There, in that gray and cold limbo, I felt something inside me change. The fingers of the sun trailed across my hands, my arms, and then my neck. A disembodied soul. It seemed the hands focused there, each finger like a burn. Like sweet betrayal choking me.
Who did I blame for this?
“Calum, please. I had to.”
“I know, Kate,” I said, caught in the darkness she had made. “I forgive you.”
-Kate-
Blood.
I heard it singing my name-
calling to me louder than before, and I knew Magda was gone.
Dead and gone.
I reached out to touch Karen’s fingers, to brush my hand against Kelly’s, but I felt a dark shadow inside me pulling me back, away. My body flung back.
I heard my sister’s screams.
I said, “Keep them safe.”
Calum nodded but said nothing.
I met his eyes, deep and blue and wild as an untamed sky, and said goodbye.
The blood called me back to a place already dead.
Chapter TwentyOne
Those Found and Lost
-Calum-
Two bodies clung to me and, although I
didn’t know them, I hugged them back just as desperately as if I did. I ran my fingers through their hair, squeezed their shoulders, and told them not to worry.
“Where did she go?”
“Where did our sister go?”
I pulled them closer.
“She’ll be back,” I said against their screams.
In this first light of morning, the world looked darker than it should have. Bodies littered the ground in pools of blood, pieces of misshapen lost lives, and severed heads stuck in odd places like headstones looking up at the sky.
This place was a graveyard for the lost-
My father laying crumpled in a dead heap with my mother’s blood still stuck to his lips. Knight, pale white and shaking, holding Kendra Little in his arms, sobbing quietly until both were silent again-
and the found.
My shirt was wet with tears and warm from two little girls holding on tightly to the only person still standing. Against their paled, golden skin, mine looked burnt and blotched with faded stars.
Still, I pulled them closer.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It will be okay.”
And then, as I remembered the place where I began and the people that once lived, I closed my eyes and whispered a simple melody into the air; a slow, sad song for a sad day; a few words to remember:
When the moon’s away
And our tears fall down
And our fears fall down
And our hopes fall down-
Our hearts beat on,
Our hearts beat on,
Our hearts beat on.
When the sun comes up