Promises to Keep (19 page)

“How’s this?” he asked, offering Xeke the repacked backpack, which was now significantly
heavier than a human would be able to carry for any length of time.

The vampire tested the pack, and then nodded.

Want rabbit for dinner?
Lynx asked as he returned.
That or chipmunk. Also smells of deer and coyote
.

Let me know if you scent anything else
, Jay said.
Especially anything big enough to eat us
.

He had almost finished setting up the pulk, when he was startled by another thought,
just as clear as Lynx’s but from an entirely different mind.

See the way the branches sparkle where they’re encased in ice
, Brina thought to him.

To both of them, Jay realized only when Lynx replied,
Slippery to walk on. And sometimes it drops on your head when you sleep
.

Brina looked around, as if almost aware of Lynx’s reply but unable to place the sound.

“It is lovely,” Jay agreed.

“I could do a beautiful portrait of the lynx,” Brina remarked. Did she realize she
hadn’t started the conversation out loud?

She talks like you do
, Lynx replied to Jay’s contemplation.
Half in voice-yips, half in mind. And she expects people to hear both, just like you
do
.

Was that the result of having been telepathic for years, as a vampire? Or just another
one of Brina’s quirks?

“We should get going,” Rikai said, staring at the mouth of the path with frustration.
After the second time Jay had repacked her bag, she had taken half the items out to
accommodate her ritual paraphernalia.

Jay glanced down at the clunky watchlike GPS thing he never would have touched if
he had been spending his own money or wandering familiar forests. Xeke had given the
device coordinates based on Brina’s best guess as she’d looked at a series of maps,
and it currently claimed that their destination was about thirty-five miles to the
northeast. With fair weather, good trails, and experienced hikers, that distance could
easily be traveled in a couple days, but Jay doubted they would have any of those
luxuries.

They didn’t even have a straight path to their destination. Instead, they headed first
to the base of the original Midnight, from which Brina believed it was only a short
journey to Shantel territory—assuming that her estimate of Midnight’s location was
correct, that they could find Midnight without getting trapped in its magical gravity
well, and that the magic in the Shantel land didn’t throw them back out.

Rikai believed that the Shantel power would draw them in, because Jay and Brina were
now bonded to it, but even she admitted that was just a theory.

Yes, if all went well, they should be able to confront a homicidal immortal very soon.

J
AY BECAME INCREASINGLY
grateful for Brina’s odd conversational style as they began their hike. The more
out of breath Brina became, the more she communicated in mental images instead of
speaking aloud, and the clearer it became why she was an artist. A simple s’mores
granola bar triggered a deep, meditative analysis of the various tastes and textures.

Her mental energy gave him hope. Her joy at the way the sun sparkled on the snow made
the impressions he received from Rikai and Xeke easier to bear.

The comfort Xeke had experienced as a result of Rikai’s work was now fading, and was
being replaced by hunger and restlessness. Her rewiring made it possible for him to
keep control, but he couldn’t ignore the spicy heat of the witch’s blood,
or the coppery tang of Brina’s human blood, or even the syrupy sweet lure of Rikai’s
blood—though the last would be poison to him.

Rikai was still shielding her mind, but Jay suspected she was keeping pace with the
rest of them out of sheer stubbornness. The only thought she let slip through to him
was that she considered Brina’s presence a boon because she could be used as a human
sacrifice. She expected him to be reasonable if it came to that.

Jay chose not to comment.

Unlike the woods behind Xeke’s and Kendra’s homes, this forest was vast, teeming with
the life one would expect in untouched wilderness. As the group moved farther away
from human civilization, Lynx pointed out territorial markers left behind by cougars,
bobcats, and other lynxes. He caught a snowshoe rabbit, and lorded it over the rest
of them that he had hot, fresh meat while they settled in for a night of dried, packaged
foods.

The tent was snug with the four of them, even though Rikai sat cross-legged in a trance
instead of sleeping, and Jay had decided that it would take less energy to keep people
warm with his power than it would to lug bulky subzero sleeping bags.

That logic had seemed sound, right up until the moment when he had Xeke spooned against
his back, Brina snuggled against his chest, and Lynx keeping his feet warm. He had
been worried that Brina’s ladylike manners might make her balk at the sleeping arrangements,
but she accepted them as part of the ongoing quest.

Jay was the one who had some qualms, mostly about the vampire nuzzling at his neck
and not-so-idly recalling their first conversation.

Was it was safer to give a little blood and risk being weaker in the morning, or to
leave the vampire hungry?
This is only the first night. What about tomorrow?

“Fire is bound in blood, but earth is bound in flesh,” Rikai said, making Jay jump.
“I can’t entirely block the blood-hunger, because that comes from Leona’s seeking
power, but all he needs to be able to sustain himself is to be able to touch you,
as he is now.” That was … unsettling. Rikai added, “He should not be able to draw
enough power from you to be a danger, but I will keep watch just in case.”

And you care so much about my well-being
. Rikai kept Jay with them for the same reason she tolerated Brina: she thought he
would be useful. Knowing that wasn’t the same as actually trusting her.

A restless night led into an even longer day in which their off-trail hike became
increasingly challenging. Jay’s irritation only grew as his foot skidded on an ice-slicked
rock and he fell into a winter-stripped thornbush.

As he extracted himself, he felt a burst of triumph from Brina. Throwing herself down
to look more closely at the bush, she exclaimed, “Look!”

She frowned up at them all when they failed to respond, and then touched a reddish
bulb growing at the end of one branch. “Rose hips,” she said, as if that should have
been sufficient explanation.

“Are you craving tea?” Rikai snapped. Rose hips were the fruit left behind after a
rose’s blooms fell.

Brina stood up and announced, with what sounded like genuine disappointment, “It took
Rhok nearly a century to breed a rose that blooms so dark it appears black to human
eyes, and you look at it like it’s a dead bush.”

“It isn’t blooming at the moment,” Xeke pointed out.

“And it hasn’t been eaten,” Jay replied as he examined the bush more closely. Long-stemmed
formal roses generally couldn’t survive in darkly canopied forests. This one not only
had, but the rose’s fruit hadn’t been touched by any of the numerous animals who should
have enjoyed it as a delicious snack.

“Silver’s line is the one known for black roses,” Xeke said.

“When Silver’s line took over after Midnight’s fall, they made the symbol their own,”
Brina replied. “I know this place. See these stones, here, and here?” It took a great
deal of imagination to see anything more than random rocks strewn amidst trees and
brush, but Brina recognized something, and through her Jay could see the plaza that
had once been in that place.

“This was a freeblood market,” Brina said, one gloved hand lingering on a stone with
faint vestiges of etched letters, its message long lost to lichen and moss. “All the
shapeshifter nations traded their best goods here. We should be less than a day from
Midnight proper.” With a slight pout, she added, “There used to be a road.”

“Well, there’s no road now,” Jay replied, more sharply than he’d intended. He glanced
down at the stupid GPS, which informed him that they had overshot their destination … suggesting
that the coordinates they were using hadn’t been correct in the first place.

“Let’s try that path,” Xeke suggested, pointing.

“That’s a deer trail,” Rikai replied.

Jay turned toward the unremarkable break in the woods. He wouldn’t have noticed it
if the vampire hadn’t pointed it out first, and it still didn’t seem a likely prospect.
It wasn’t even going in the right direction.

Lynx gave him a mental poke, saying,
You don’t know where you are or where you’re going. How can a direction be wrong?

Pondering that insight, Jay stepped closer, and realized the path was wider than he
had first thought. The closer he moved to it, the more he realized his eyes were playing
tricks on him. This
wasn’t
a deer trail.

“I think we’ve found your road,” Jay said to Brina. “Xeke, I’m going to need you to
tell me if you see forks … or anything dangerous, come to think of it. I don’t think
it’s a coincidence that you saw this and I didn’t.”

“Where—” Rikai paused, closed her eyes, and tilted her head as if listening. At last
she said, “The spells here are old but still powerful. And very discreet, designed
not to be noticed even by a witch.”

Especially a witch who normally carries a hunter’s blade, I’d bet
, Jay thought, lamenting the loss of his usual weapon.

“Once we get to Midnight proper,” Brina said as she led the way up the old road, “there
is another path, traveling nearly due east, that should take us into Shantel land.
Then it is simply a matter of—”

Blackness
.

Pain
.

Jay opened his eyes to find himself sprawled in the snow, with Brina kneeling next
to him. Xeke looked concerned, but Rikai’s face simply held contempt.

Flames, like the fires of hell. Flesh scalding—

“Guard your mind,” Rikai suggested belatedly.

Jay turned his head, trying to see the mind he could feel so clearly. Brina gripped
his hand, crushing his fingers, and he knew she saw it too: a semitransparent shape,
almost humanoid, but—

“Ghosts, nothing more,” Rikai said. “Unless you invite them into your brain, they
are harmless.”

What most people called ghosts were just impressions left behind by strong emotions.
Jay had encountered them before, but never this powerfully. The pain this ghost was
radiating was beyond Jay’s comprehension. It made his bones ache as he forced himself
to stand and keep moving.

The farther they traveled up the road, the thicker the impressions became.

When Jay was a boy, his history lessons had included stories of Midnight. As for its
fall, that had been described in simple terms: on September 22, 1804, Midnight burned
to the ground. No one knew who was responsible, though everyone had celebrated the
destruction, which had been so complete that the slave trainers had not been able
to gather their power fast enough to re-subjugate the witches and shapeshifters before
they could raise arms to defend themselves.

Those lessons were made real in the early twilight as the forest spat them onto the
carcass of what had once been an empire’s terrible heart.

Nature should have taken over in the last two centuries, but it hadn’t been allowed.
Magic had salted the ground in this clearing, leaving it a dead zone inhabited by
nothing more than what might have once been stone—now twisted and melted as if torn
from a volcano—and the ghostly impressions of those who had once lived in this place.
Sheets of ice, gritty and black from ash, ringed the area, but the ruins themselves
glowed hot like coals under the darkening sky.

Jay could hear the memories wail in fury, and pain, and helplessness, and—more than
anything else—confusion.
Why?
they asked.

Rikai crept close, even though that meant crawling on the ice, until she could hold
her hands above the glistening coals and say in a voice that sounded half hypnotized,
“They say every major power in the world was involved in bringing Midnight down. They
poured their magic into this spot. I can feel them.…”

“Jay, I do not wish to camp here for the night,” Brina said, her voice seeming oh-so-distant
as Jay struggled not to hear the screams of the dead.

“Agreed,” Xeke said.

Lynx hissed, and Jay realized that he couldn’t hear his longtime companion over all
the other voices pressing against him. Brina reached down and stroked Lynx between
the ears, while looking up at Jay with concern.

“East, you said?” he asked her. Was he shouting?

She nodded, and caught his shoulders to physically turn him until his back was to
the setting sun. They all wanted to get as far away as possible.

Almost all.

“Rikai?”

“Come here!” Rikai called, her voice breathy. “This is incredible. I think—”

Jay heard Xeke trying to reason with the Triste, but he didn’t wait for her response.
He needed to get away from this place. The others would have to catch up.

T
HE MEMORY OF
blood and fire pressed in around Brina as she ran from Midnight and every gruesome
recollection the sight had brought to mind. She followed Jay, who led them at a frantic
pace well past sunset, until clouds obscured any hint of stars or the nearly full
moon and it was too dark to see one foot in front of the other.

Preparing food and setting up their camp in the inky black was challenging, as was
trying to find enough privacy to take care of awkward human bodily functions without
becoming totally lost. She was grateful that Lynx stayed near, sweetly compassionate
in the way he called to her in the darkness when she strayed the wrong way.

Though they made camp late, they started early the next
morning. Brina struggled to keep up with Jay’s pace, refusing to be the weak member
of their party. Exequías and Rikai lumbered behind her, and she kept her eyes firmly
on the wide-eyed witch. Eventually, it was Lynx who set teeth into Jay’s calf with
a snarl.