Walking up to her slowly and not making a sound, Cyrus motioned for Sunday to be quiet. He came up to her with a hand extended that she grabbed and squeezed into her own. He leaned into her and whispered.
“The vampires know we’re here. There are two of them and one of their familiars. Angel is on the other side of the fire. Constance is set up in the middle there with the familiar beside her, holding your friend.”
Sunday nodded. She didn’t know what to expect from the wolves or from the vampires, but she knew what Constance was doing. She was using Eunice and the reservoir to draw from them the amount of energy she needed to summon the demon. Constance wasn’t like Sunday. She couldn’t just use any aura to enhance her spell. If the spell was such that it required the specific, magical energy of a strong practicing witch, then she needed Eunice, and she needed her alive until she could drain Eunice to strengthen herself. With the added boost of the tightly wound reservoir eager to break free, she could quantify her own efforts. It was the same tactic that Bernadette had used in culling the power of the Incarnate, harnessing it, and orchestrating its use.
It was brilliant, really, if Constance had thought of it sooner. But it was unlikely that she would have been able to pull it off had she not gotten the surge of Sunday’s gifts when Sunday tapped into the demon at the warehouse. The way things stood, Constance was on the precipice of her great summoning. Demon or damned spirit, it didn’t matter either way. Constance had enough juice behind her to make her darkest ambitions come to pass.
“I’m going to kill Constance,” Sunday whispered. “You and the boys have to keep the vampires from getting to me. It’s essential that you save Eunice. Pull her out of here,
please
. I’m not strong enough to get her out on my own.” Sunday put a trembling hand to Cyrus’ cheek and brushed his beard with her thumb. Her expression was taut with pleading. “Don’t let me down.”
Cyrus put a firm hand on Sunday’s arm. It was the place that he’d grabbed her as she’d walked out of the Lair, and remembering the first time she’d looked into his eyes, she smiled. Cyrus’ gaze wasn’t as kind.
“You’re not doing a thing,” he stated plainly. “You go out there unchecked and without a reasonable strategy, and you put us all at risk.”
“If you think you’re going to stop me, Cyrus, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Hearing the voice challenging the dominant wolf, both wolves braced themselves onto their haunches and pulled up the lips of their muzzles reminding Sunday of the size of their teeth and the grave promise of their curse. Cyrus glared at them threateningly and drew his attention back to Sunday when they finally relaxed their grins again.
Before Cyrus could say another word, Eunice’s petrified scream tore out from the forest ahead of them, and Sunday broke his grasp and ran ahead toward the sound. The two wolves flew out from behind her, landing at the foot of the fire pit as Sunday cut her way through the edge of the trees that lined Constance’s ritual spot. They had been forced into action and they weren’t pleased. Sunday could sense their aggravation for defying a direct order. She wasn’t one of their pack, and her rashness threatened their unit.
Ignoring their rage, Sunday ran toward Eunice who was being dragged by the hair toward the warlock by a man twice her size and half her age, the familiar. His throat was long and white and cut with ghastly scars that were freshly healing over with puffy pink flesh. The older woman was fighting her much stronger tormentor in vain, struggling sluggishly through the still-present drugs that they’d used to knock her out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Constance and the familiar were startled and both looked up to see Sunday barreling at them. Eunice’s eyes flew up when she took note that her tormentor had become frazzled. Catching sight of Sunday careening toward them through the massive wolves who stood open-mouthed and foaming, growling threats to the warlock, Eunice wailed an agonizing plea for help.
“You have to stop her!” Eunice cried. “Constance is a warlock! She’s killed another witch, and she’s using my power to raise a demon!”
Hands bound together by rope, she could hardly raise her arms to fight off the familiar that was straddling her with a knife thrust upward into the sky and the blade pointing down at her. Seeing that he was going to kill her, Constance screamed to make him stop.
“You can’t!” Constance yelled, her dainty voice turning guttural and vicious as it broke into the night. “She’s my conduit! You can’t kill her!”
The familiar turned his blade back and kicked Eunice in the ribs, causing the elder woman to howl in pain. With a flick of the wrist, Constance raised her palm and sent a searing gust of wind at Sunday, knocking Sunday onto the ground.
“I know everything, Eunice, and I’m going to get you out of here!” Sunday said as she raised herself onto her knees in an effort to stand.
“What the hell are you doing here? You’re nothing! You’re nobody! Leave this to me!” Constance screamed.
Turning her attention back to the spell at-hand, Constance closed her eyes and started chanting to summon her demon’s power so that she could keep Sunday down. As she spoke, she lifted her arms in front of her. Another zephyr crashed into Sunday, and she fell back again. Sunday yelled upon impact, and the intensity of her shout fueled the fire in the pit. For a moment, it pulsed, bathing the scene in an orange glow. Constance looked at the fire and smiled sure it had been the potency of her own magic that caused that reaction.
“None of you can stop me!” Constance bellowed through a hearty, graveled voice. Her features, once petite and darling, were drunk with arrogance and twisted by wickedness. “I’ve taken down powerful witches and I’ve touched great power and some little weekend witch and her dog friends aren’t going to stop me when I’m at my strongest.”
Sunday didn’t know what the werewolves were thinking. Between Angel and Cyrus hiding in the shadows somewhere behind her, and Marcus and Neal standing like guard dogs at either side of her doing little more than growl and look threatening, Sunday didn’t perceive them making a move. If only she could hear what they were planning among themselves, she could know if they were gearing up to attack Constance and the familiar or if they were concerned with the two vampires that had come to oversee and end Constance’s little charade of a demon raising. But Sunday was having enough of it, and as much as she didn’t want to go all Incarnate with vampire and witch witnesses, and potentially, victims of her wrath, she couldn’t keep standing by without making a move of her own.
Before Sunday could even consider what she would do for another second, Angel ran out from the shadows behind Constance and tackled her to the ground. They were grappling hard, Constance fighting Angel’s massive weight, and kicking behind him raising a dust cloud with the wake of her struggle.
Simultaneously, stalking from behind Eunice and the familiar, Cyrus grabbed the man’s head between his hands and snapped his neck with a single motion as smooth as if he was combing out the man’s hair. The familiar collapsed on Eunice, and Cyrus reached down to pick her up and throw the older woman over his shoulder. Not knowing who he was or what he was doing, the witch fought back, kicking as she flailed around trying to get loose.
“Eunice, no!” Sunday cried. “Let him take you!”
“It happens tonight,” Constance screamed as Angel wrestled against her flailing arms and her jutting knees. “He will rise! He will rise!”
In the blink of an eye, two vampires clad in dark pants and jackets manifested at the foot of the pit and pulled Angel from Constance. Constance was feverishly grabbing at the ground, trying to pick up whatever amulets she had been using for her casting when Sunday ran up to her and threw herself on her body. The massive black wolf leaped over the pair of women struggling with one another on the ground and landed on the back of the vampire that was holding Angel to his chest, landing all three of them beside Constance and Sunday.
Taking the chance to wriggle herself from under Sunday, Constance grabbed a rock from the ground and balled it up in her fist, landing a punch with it to the side of Sunday’s head. Immediately, Constance took up after Cyrus and threw herself onto his back, pulling Eunice by the waist as well as she could from such a disadvantaged height. The brown and white wolf came upon Constance, trapping her under its legs and snapping its jaw in her face to get her to stop running.
Sunday was still reeling from the bash against her head as she watched Marcus’ wolf get in Constance’s way. Blood dripped down Sunday’s temple, the warmth of it oozing its way to her jaw. Sunday grabbed her head and pulled herself into a fetal position, rubbing herself into the dirt as she shook her head trying to get herself through the pain.
Behind Sunday, the werewolves, one human and one wolf, fought the vampires. Angel grabbed at the hair of a vampire he was sitting on and pulled his head back, breaking the neck of the monster who could heal from it. The werewolf took the moment that the vampire would need to reconstruct his fractured bones to reach over to the wood that fueled the warlock’s fire and pick out a stake. Turning back in a swift movement, Angel dug the burning stake into the vampire’s back where he had just sat, and turned it into his body until Sunday could hear the bones of his chest cracking above the sound of the crackling fire. Sunday groaned through the pain on the side of her head as more angry unleashed spirits sought an entry into the fractured Incarnate.
The vampire with the black wolf saw that his comrade had been slain and fought his way out of the werewolf’s jaw tearing into his thigh. As soon as he was free, he turned to flee, instantly disappearing into the darkness of the trees. Sunday watched in horror through blurred uneven vision and braced herself up on her hands pushing herself onto her knees. She had been so caught up with getting herself together that she failed to realize the frenzy behind her. She turned to find Constance bearing down all of her body’s strength behind the blade of the fallen knife into the chest of the brown werewolf that fought her. The werewolf toppled over. The knife had been silver—the one weapon that she could have used to register more than a tickle to the wolf’s hide.
“No!” Angel shouted. “You bitch, you evil bitch!”
Both he and the black wolf darted ahead of Sunday, Angel falling upon his fallen friend who was writhing in agony and bleeding profusely. The black wolf lunged himself onto Constance and closed his powerful jaw around her throat, pulling at it until her head fell limply, nearly decapitated, and her body seized beneath his large paws. In the seconds after she had stabbed their packmate, Constance lay dead on the ground, her body crushed under the weight of the black wolf.
Angel turned to look at Sunday through tear-filled angry eyes. He was pressing his hands with all his weight over the gaping wound into the brown wolf’s chest. The wolf’s white fur was dark red with the blood that poured out of the gash.
“Why didn’t you do anything?!” he yelled, his voice so garbled and broken that it sounded like he’d called upon the suffering of all the souls burning in the pits of Hell. “You’re the
Incarnate
?! Is everything about you
a lie
?!” Feral eyes boiled over with fury as they pored over Marcus’ wolf. “You killed him. This is all your fault!”
“I w-w-was…” Sunday stammered, placing her hand on the oozing wound at her temple. She looked wildly around at the dead bodies. It was a gruesome, blood-soaked scene that she had hardly participated in creating. Woozy and concussed, her eyes darted between her remaining companions seeking Cyrus.
Standing atop Constance’s lifeless body, the black wolf howled. It’s tone cracked any will Sunday had to do anything other than all she could do to save the wolf that was Marcus.
Cyrus ran out of the forest racing to meet the body of his best friend bleeding out, whimpering with the last gasps of life. He had heard their screams and the wolf’s howl. In his mind was every thought and emotion of his fellow man. Cyrus and his pack felt every bit of Marcus’ desperation as he grabbed for the life that was fast pouring from his wounds. The silver infection burned through their bodies as if it had been their own that had been stabbed. Marcus convulsed violently as the poisoned blood coursed through his veins. Everything inside of Sunday fell apart as she watched Cyrus fall to his knees, push Angel out of the way, and hold Marcus’ seizing body in his arms. The wolf’s eyes were open and staring into the dark wood, his open mouth released his long pink tongue, and his nostrils flared grasping for air that would very soon stop coming. He was fighting to breathe, to live, and he was bleeding into his lungs in the process.
“Do something!” Cyrus yelled at Sunday through a tear-streaked red face and heaving sobs. “Do something!”
Sunday didn’t know what she could do. She thought of everything she had learned, anything she had read about. There was lore, there were stories, but they were little more than fairy tales and myths. Instead of offering any consolation or making a move to action, Sunday sat frozen, watching Cyrus cradle the wolf in his arms and rock back and forth, hoping that the next breath wouldn’t be the last. The black wolf howled again, and Angel tore into the woods unable to contain his anger and his grief. All the while, Cyrus mumbled into the wolf’s fur how sorry he was and how much Marcus had meant to him.
The grief and the atrocity of the night’s events poured into Sunday, her shields unable to withstand the fury of the wolves’ pain, and the violent loss of the familiar’s and Constance’s lives. It bled through her, filling her with the agony of defeat, of death, of loss, and abandonment of all hope. Within her, a grave knowledge rumbled waiting to be shared, a great power waiting to be released that had been given life by the wealth of emotions she was absorbing. She looked at Cyrus and considered what she could say… or what she could do, if she allowed herself to do it.
The wealth of the reservoir’s power and the spirits of the slain humans lying beside her fused with the aura of the wolves. Above them, a single streak of white lightning cracked against the sky, and Sunday’s palms tickled. Both Cyrus and the black wolf stared at Sunday. They could feel the energy swarming around her. It buzzed and cracked in the air. The wind whistled as it broke through the trees, extinguishing the once raging fire. The black wolf backed away from Constance’s body and circled Sunday, growling again with his teeth bared. Cyrus’ eyes were glassy, his spirit broken. He was asking her without saying a thing.
Is there something you can do? Is there a way to save Marcus?