Chapter 19

19

I’d grown accustomed to leaning on Wild sometimes, and him on me. In this moment, we weren’t of any use to one another. I was a nervous wreck, and Wild was in full guilt mode that was only strengthened by my nerves and reluctance to go back to my past.

Yep, I was reluctant. Watching your family get murdered again could have that effect on a person.

We were a mess.

Everything was a mess.

“Ready?” Rooke murmured.

She held one of my hands and one of Wild’s. Wild and I held hands too. Though Corentin no longer had a divination affinity, he had ample knowledge about journeys and Rooke had wanted him here in case she had a question on the way. He sat cross-legged atop a moss-covered boulder.

“Tell me of your grandmother,” Rooke said to me, her hypnotic tone telling me she was deep in her divination affinity already.

I closed my eyes. “My grandmother didn’t fit well in the human world. She was too other. But she was old, so humans explained her behavior away as an age thing.” I smirked. “She got away with a lot.”

“Hold to your memory of her while you hold to us, and step inside your divination affinity,” Rooke instructed.

I seized onto memories of my grandmother and wrapped an imaginary hand around my bonds with Wild and Rooke. I heard Wild grunt as I drifted up my divination affinity to where my demon used to be. Passing through her uninhabited black smoke to continue further into my magic was strange to say the least. Who would’ve thought I’d miss her hisses and glowing red glares?

I really did.

I blinked as black smoke rose ahead to form a wrought-iron gate. “High school.”

“You have mixed memories of high school.”

“Yes,” I murmured to the voice in my head. “I wanted to know more of humans. I wanted friends. But I could never have real friends with what I hid from them. Syera made school bearable, and I enjoyed learning humans’ ways, though some of their teachings are ridiculous.”

I walked out the school gates toward Grandmother, who stood leaning against our car of the week. She couldn’t drive, but she could use her magic to move the metal box where she liked.

The voice asked, “How did Syera find school?”

“She liked to think of humans as little pets. She doted on those who displayed good behavior. Was admonishing to any who stepped out of line. She ruled the school openly.”

“Openly?”

“I ruled it, really,” I said, my lips curving. “But no one knew. I didn’t want them to know.”

“It must’ve been hard to never grow close to anyone.”

My heart panged. “Secrets have a way of keeping people apart.” My current life was further reinforcement of that life lesson.

My grandmother snapped at me, “About time.”

“I always finish at the same time, Grandmother.” I kissed her cheek. “Good afternoon.”

“Yeah, yeah. Where’s the other one?”

“With her human chauffeur of the day.”

Grandmother cocked a white-gray brow. “Too cool for her grandmother, is she?”

“She has a reputation to uphold.”

“You don’t?”

“No, I just need her to uphold hers in order for my plans to go ahead.”

She cracked a grin, and the wrinkles beside her mouth deepened. Her gaze shifted over my shoulder. “You part of those plans, boy?”

Wild answered from behind me. “I’d like to be.”

“You are or you’re not,” she spat. “Decide.”

“I am,” he said firmly.

She glared. “Next time lead with honesty instead of wasting my time.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Grandmother maintained her glare, then was in the car in the next instant. I was on the middle seat, and Wild sat to my left. Though… I couldn’t recall climbing in nor opening the car door.

“Where are we off to?” asked my mother from the front seat.

I shook my head. Had she been here the whole time?

My mother turned in the driver’s seat to stare at Wild. “Who’s this? He’s magus.”

“This is Wild, Mother. He’s part of my plans.”

“Is he?” she mused, and I could see the gears shifting in her mind. She plastered a welcoming smile across her face. “Welcome, Wild. How great to meet you. I look forward to knowing you better.”

I look forward to finding your weaknesses to drive wedges into them.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he replied.

The car was moving in the next second. When did we start driving? And these roads weren’t anywhere close to the high school. I shook my head again.

Grandmother yelled at someone out the window, and Mother shushed her.

Syera linked our pinkies, and I gaped at her in the seat to my right. “Syera.”

“I need to tell you something, T.” She peered past me to Wild.

I could feel Wild’s focus on her too.

“He’s with me, S,” I told her. “He’s family.”

She dragged her attention to me again, and though part of me was aware that I’d come here for a reason, and that Wild wasn’t usually here—and that this car was driving to somewhere I hated and feared—the majority of me was a teenager in this car next to my twin sister.

I waggled my brows, and my mouth moved of its own accord. “Is this about why you’ve been sneaking out?”

Mother and Grandmother were arguing in the front. Without heat. That was their love language, or so Mother said. Grandmother said it was because her daughter was a pain in her vagina at birth, and a pain in the ass since.

“Yeah,” Syera said. She was nervous.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s something happening to me, T. Something… I thought my magic was coming in more. Finally. But?—”

Bang.

Metal screeched as the roof was ripped off in one sheet. My head crashed against the seat belt holder, then against something else hard. Syera’s head?

I heard a distant roar. Wild.

White-gold power erupted. Grandmother’s. Attack.

Periwinkle blue. Mother’s magic. Defense.

Black power. Liquid black. Unknown. Enemy.

“Fight, fight,” I slurred, gripping my head. “Syera?”

“Tempest!”

Something didn’t feel right. I was hurt. Power was pouring into me. Mother’s.

“Take from me,” Syera screamed. “Mother, take from me.” Grandmother was fighting someone outside. I must be in bad shape for Mother not to be fighting with her.

I stared at the blood on my lap and coating my hands. I lifted my head and glimpsed the frozen, terrified expressions of Syera and Mother.

I looked out the car window in a daze. “Why is it dark outside?” Where had the sunlight gone?

The power outside hit me then. The foreign power. Demon. There was a distinct flavor to the magic that I could identify now. This magic belonged to a demon, one stronger than the red-scaled woman I’d killed.

Mother’s blue eyes were filled with pain. Pain for me. Pain for what might happen. Fear. So much fear.

“No,” I whispered as Grandmother’s white-gold power began to fade. From outside the car, she stared directly at me. Her hard, gray gaze then shifted to where Mother’s magic was fading as she gave too much to me. What little Syera possessed was fading too.

Black magic shattered the windows and poured into the car, covering Syera.

I screamed her name.

There was no answer.

Grandmother whisked her power back from her attack on the demon outside and redirected her magic into me. Every bit of it. Directly into my chest.

Mother was gripped by the dark power outside. She clawed at the frame of the car door, losing the fight to remain by my side.

“Goodbye.” I moved my lips as she moved hers, speaking her silent farewell to me. Why was she protecting me from the blackness when Syera was covered in the stuff?

“Why not Syera?” I sobbed.

Why not? Because Syera was already gone. I could feel the emptiness within already.

“Tempest!” Wild roared.

Wild. I sucked in air. He wasn’t in the car. Where was he? I had to get to him. He was the only one left.

Mother was screaming outside. “You won’t have them!”

I dragged myself over shattered glass, but my crawl stopped as abruptly as my mother’s scream as I was seized around the throat and lifted.

I stared into a face edged with red scales, scales that seemed ten different hues of red the color was so rich. This supernatural was powerful.

The demon king.

Why?I thought at him.

His magic poured into my throat, and I couldn’t think or say or do anything then. His scalding magic squeezed around my heart, poison to me, but something else demanded my attention.

Within me, deep inside a channel of magic I’d never noticed before, swirled a fury of black smoke. A woman stood in the midst, and she and I locked gazes. I knew so much about this woman, and nothing too, as though someone close to me had spoken about her for years, but we were only just meeting.

I gasped as the woman shoved a dagger under her ribs, and an unfathomable sorrow filled me at the loss of knowing her. Her blood spilled into the new channel of magic, filling it.

She bent her knees and jumped.

The demon king’s magic was forced out of my body and throat. His hand was loosened, and I fell through the air, powerless to stop my descent. Looking up as I hurtled downward, I saw the demon king’s hand was now wrapped around the throat of another.

Around the throat of the woman who’d been inside me. Now she was outside of my body, and I could see that she was a demon too. Her black scales were a stark contrast to his scales of myriad red.

Strong arms caught me, and Wild’s soothing magic filled me.

“You’re safe, my love,” he whispered.

We looked up at the demon king, who seemed distracted beyond reason. He looked at the demon woman in his grip, then down at us, and then to the swirl of black magic surrounding the car where my family had been minutes before.

The demon king regarded us again, and then his lips curled.

Inclining his head to us, he dragged my limp demon through a dark doorway I hadn’t noticed. As he went, he yanked every bit of his black magic, car and all, through it and into his evil realm after him.

I jerked, my eyes opening wide. A scream built inside my lips.

“You’re in the moss forest at the Buried Knolls coven,” Rooke said rapidly. “You’re safe. You just journeyed to your past. The past is where it should be, and you’re in the present.”

I sought Wild as he opened his eyes. There wasn’t any trace of panic, just contemplation.

“I’m here,” I blurted.

Wild squeezed my hand. “You’re here, my love.”

I’d always ended up at the north mountains looking like a mad woman. “Why am I still here?”

My stomach dropped in the next instant. Because my demon hadn’t returned.

“Any trace of her?” Rooke asked in a soft voice.

I sighed. “She’s still not here.” I frowned. “I wonder if that’s why the journey back was different. I’ve never gone that far through the memory. It was as if Wild and I changed the past somehow. I always black out when the darkness pours down my throat because that’s what happened. This time, I crawled out of the car and interacted with the demon king and witnessed what happened after.”

Corentin startled. “The demon king killed your family?”

Perhaps I’d put that together on some level already, because the knowledge didn’t shock me as it should. Or maybe I was in a state of shock and couldn’t feel anything. “He didn’t kill me because my demon sacrificed herself so he’d leave me alive. He took her into the demon realm, but she left some of her heart blood within me before leaving.”

“So she’s been in you from the day your family were killed?” Rooke asked.

Something niggled at me. “Longer. I knew her, and didn’t too. As though we’d just met, but I knew everything about her somehow.”

Wild looked at me. “Since you’d turned sixteen or younger?”

“I’d guess my entire life, but I can’t recall if I felt any different at sixteen. Why’s that?”

Corentin answered, “Because demon power awakens at sixteen. In a full-blooded demon anyway.”

Wild spoke low, “Syera was trying to tell you something before we were hit with his magic. She said something was happening to her. She’d thought her magic was coming in finally, but it wasn’t that.”

My mouth dried. He was right. I could hear her words as clearly as if she was speaking in my ear, and yet with everything else that happened that day, I’d never paused to reflect on what she’d been trying to tell me. “She felt different. And the change happened recently. We turned sixteen a few months prior.”

“You’ve said that she had less magus magic than you,” Rooke said. “What if her demon power was more evident because of that?”

I had a theory that the force of my magus power had kept my demon locked away in my affinity. “It’s possible. But apparently my demon hasn’t truly been present in me because the demon king took her to his realm that day, so that theory could be out.”

“We have confirmation that she’s in the demon realm and has been for some time,” Wild said grimly.

I felt his despair. “Exactly, so what happened to pull her all the way there?” I answered myself in the next beat. “She used up her reserves of blood in me to help us survive the recent attack.”

Without repeating the same process of stabbing herself in the chest, she couldn’t return.

Dread filled me, only heightened by Wild’s determination to keep his reaction together for my sake. What would happen to him? To us?

“I hate putting you through that,” Rooke admitted.

I hated going through it. “This time was different. I feel like I’ve seen the whole thing. I blacked out on the day, and each time I visited the past, there were so many questions left over. Why did the murderer leave me alive? Who attacked us and why? Having those answers means a lot.”

He left me alive because my demon sacrificed herself to become a slave in his realm. Without her in me, maybe I wasn’t a threat to his rule. Why hadn’t he killed her afterward, though? I wasn’t sure, but perhaps the blood in me had acted as a safeguard for her somehow.

He’d killed my family because Syera and I held the blood of the previous king. Because my mother had fallen in love with his enemy.

“I guess I have another reason to kill him,” I said mildly.

Wild said, “At the end, he looked at us and seemed to see us. Did you notice that?”

I shivered. “Yeah. Do you think he was there?”

“Seemed that way to me.”

“Impossible,” Rooke said.

“Not for a magus,” Corey chimed in. “Tempest took Wild into her memory, after all. What’s to say the demon king couldn’t have joined, especially now the gates are open?”

I released my exhale in a rush. “He’s powerful, guys. Red caste and the most powerful of that caste if the depth of color in his scales is an indication. I guess he must be the most powerful demon to be king.”

My grandmother, mother, and sister were obliterated by him in minutes.

And I was meant to fight this guy and win. Rooke wanted to talk of impossible? That was the impossible part.

“Thank you,” I said to her. “That’s a lot for you to witness as well.”

“I’m glad you gained something from going back other than pain.” She leaned forward to hug me. “Just so you know, it took everything I had to stop the echoes of Rowaness, Hazeluna, and Syera from attacking Wild. They were not happy to have him in the car.”

I chuckled. “I know.”

“I received their messages loud and clear,” Wild said, a trace of humor finding him despite everything. “They only let me tag along because of their love for Tempest.”

My vision blurred, and I blinked the tears back. “I didn’t have that day in mind when I suggested you could meet them in a memory. Let’s visit a happier one next time.” Even then, their acceptance of him as mere memories meant something.

“I look forward to it, my love.” Wild pulled me from Rooke and kissed the top of my head.