Taking Back Sunday (21 page)

“For years, I couldn’t get you out of my head. I hated you. The minute I saw you, my heart exploded in my chest. My blood boiled. My fucking mind collapsed.”

He made of a fist of his hand and punched his chest. He pounded it again harder, and Sunday winced imagining the pain. Cyrus quickly glanced at her. His eyes were glassy as if he couldn’t contain the emotion bubbling up inside of him.

“I didn’t understand what was happening. I’d never felt that way before. I’m a fucking
monster,
and I’ve never felt so much fucking
hate
in my life. You were just a kid, but looking at you seeming so innocent and knowing you were this… this
thing
… No one should be that powerful. No one should be capable of the things they said you could do. Right when I saw you, I knew it was true. The way you made me feel–”

Cyrus’ voice caught in his throat, and he shut his mouth. He grabbed at his long hair and yanked on it, scowling.

“After we dropped you off at Bernadette’s, I couldn’t let you go. My feet were planted into the ground, and I couldn’t move. All I knew is that you brought out all this rage and all this anger in me, and I should have been running as far as I could fucking get from you, but I couldn’t. I had to see it through. Whatever happened to you, I needed to be a part of it. I needed someone to tell me what was going on. When I told her, Bernadette said it was in your nature. It was your gift to bring out the curse in me, the werewolf in me.”

“That was a lie, Cyrus. Bernadette was a liar,” Sunday said, raising her voice and gritting her teeth. Face red and fuming, Sunday threw her head back against the seat.

“I was only a little girl, Cyrus! I didn’t make you a werewolf. What you felt back then wasn’t my fault. Whatever Bernadette claimed I was or what I could do, I didn’t deserve what
she
did to
me.
I didn’t deserve that.
Any
of it. I didn’t deserve you fucking hating me. I didn’t
want
to be the Incarnate. Bernadette probably just found a kid with some rumored ability and had you all kidnap her. Then she slapped the label of Incarnate on me, and voila, suddenly I was some purported god-kin she could use like a puppet.”

“I didn’t hate you because of what you were,” Cyrus cut in quickly. He faced her sharply and his eyebrows rose. “You’re not the Incarnate
to me
. I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t understand it for a really long time. But I know now. I don’t
hate
you, Sunday. I could
never
hate you.”

His breaths were ragged, and his chest trembled as he breathed. When Cyrus reached out his hand to touch her, she recoiled from it. She scooted as far away from him as she could until her back pushed up completely against the cold car door. She pulled her knees closer to her chest and propped her chin on her knees.

“But you and your friends were looking for me again, weren’t you?”

“We were.
I
was,” Cyrus answered.

“Sunday, you need to know that, however it’s been, it’s not going to be like that anymore. I’m not going to keep hunting you and no one’s going to get in your way but…” his voice trailed off. He pictured the long road ahead of her back on the lam, running away from the phantoms of potential recapture. It was the cult, not Bernadette, who sought this time. All the same, he couldn’t turn her over to a similar fate again.

“Are you saying that that’s it? I’m done running?” she snapped. “What are you going to do now, Cyrus? Offer me some kind of deal: I go with you willingly or I keep on running and eventually you find me and it will be so much worse?”

It was hard to believe that, in the midst of all the worries about her friends, Constance, and the vampires, Sunday was engaging with Cyrus in a discussion about what would happen
after
their battle was fought. The life that she’d etched out for herself was slipping from her grasp, and she suffered for the eventual loss of it. The idea that she would have to live the rest of her life in a car, driving, fleeing, moving from one place to another without setting roots into the ground was overwhelming. She would have to start using aliases. She would have to practice defensive tactics, even
offensive
tactics.

Everything…
everything
… was crumbling. She didn’t know what the werewolves wanted from her, and she didn’t care. Maybe they wanted to exalt her as a goddess among their society. Maybe they needed to become more profitable. Maybe they needed protection from some other group of preternatural creatures. All that she was sure of was that they, and Cyrus among them, had looked long and hard for her. Now that they finally found her, they had plans of their own. Of that, Cyrus wasn’t sharing. He could make all the promises in the world, but she didn’t trust that he would keep them.

Rain started falling as they turned onto the industrial street where Constance’s warehouse lay. The rain wouldn’t last very long, but it was an omen if she’d ever seen one. Though Sunday knew that Constance was currently being watched on the other side of town at her house, she asked Cyrus to wait for a while before they went in. She wanted to make sure that no one else was around. In the event of an outburst, she wanted limit any collateral damage. Constance showing up was just the tip of the potential iceberg. If there were other people around, they could get hurt, too. She didn’t want any more innocents slaughtered on her conscience. She already had enough for a lifetime of guilt and remorse.

Cyrus shut off the engine and rested back in his seat. It was almost eleven, and Cyrus didn’t know what they would find in that warehouse, or if they were even safe to investigate for long. Sunday dug into her purse and found a cigarette. She cracked her window and lit it, puffing the smoke into the light rain.

“Those things will kill you,” Cyrus said in attempts to break the ice that had built up between them.

“What if I told you,” Sunday began after exhaling a long, white breath out into the night air, “that I am certain, beyond a doubt in the world, that
this
won’t be the thing that takes me out?”

“I’d ask you if you were serious.”

Sunday didn’t respond. Instead, she shook her head, and through a furrowed brow and with a crinkled forehead, turned to Cyrus. Using the cigarette between her fingers, she pointed ahead to the warehouse they were about to enter without an invitation.

“Do you know that whatever’s in there can probably kill us?” she asked. “What am I thinking? You didn’t even know how to conjure a location spell. You probably have no idea the kind of audacity it takes to cross the line between asking yourself if magic could possibly exist, and slaughtering animals to put illness curses on people.”

“So why don’t you tell me what you think is going on here, Sunday?”

“I’m not sure,” she confessed. “All I know is that Constance has been deriving power from my friends and their friends. She’s probably been doing it for a while. The rest of it is stuff you already know. Now I find out that she’s working with vampires. That can’t possibly be good. Unless she’s working contracts for them, she shouldn’t be cavorting with them.”

“Is there any reason you can think of to explain the vampire connection?” Cyrus asked.

It concerned them that Constance was communing with vampires. It was a source of much speculation among the wolves, and lately with Sunday, that Constance had gone out of her way to meet with the vamps at this critical juncture in their investigations. It suggested there was a link between whatever she was plotting, and the vampires residing in the area. These particular vampires were well established in the community, and likely, a strong sect if they were so brazenly entrenched in the mundane world. Taking down a single witch was one thing, but taking on a whole nest of vampires was an entirely different matter. Incarnate or not, the small team of wolves who were well out of their territorial jurisdiction were in no place to wage preternatural war.

“I can’t figure it out, Cyrus, any of it. I know that something wicked this way comes and all that. I know that I’m going to have to deal with a witch and whatever vampires in the area she’s connected to. But…” Sunday hesitated. She threw out her cigarette and fixed her attention to Cyrus, releasing her legs and turning to face him entirely.

“There’s this belief that I have, and it’s not just my belief. It’s this organic truth of existence or something. It’s that things happen like they’re supposed to, and that we, you and I and everyone else on this planet, just kind of have to go along with it and take the punches as they come. We get to fight back sometimes, but not against the bigger picture. Right now, with all this going on: Sammy and Kayla finally getting me out to the coven, Constance being an evil witch or something, some ancient Malaysian black magic charm floating around there, vampires running funeral parlors, werewolves flying in from Alaska to find me, and all this stuff about
you
… I can’t really see how all those things fit into the bigger picture. And I just want to get it over with.”

Sunday had never been so completely honest with Cyrus let alone with anyone else in the last six years, and Cyrus appreciated every word that she trusted him enough to say. Even now, when Cyrus couldn’t help but pick apart every beautiful thing about her, he noted the dark circles under her eyes and heard the ragged ends of her breaths. She was suffering at the hands of whatever the greater design of Fate had painted for her.

“What do you know about the witch she murdered that you’re not telling me?” Cyrus asked.

The tone of Cyrus’ question was accusing or, at least, incisive. Sunday inspected Cyrus’ expression to figure out where he was going with this line of questioning.

“I don’t know a damn thing more than what I already told you,” she answered sharply. “I didn’t even know his name until you showed me that police report.” Her gaze was sharp on Cyrus now, wondering at the sudden distrust suggested by his question and tone. “Is there something you know that you’re not telling me?”

Cyrus shrugged, staring back to the warehouse beyond them.

“Our recon suggests that the witch, Ryan Sanders, was a major real estate holder, and that he’s been collecting properties in the Carolinas and Tennessee and selling them off to people that we think are witches or, at least, non-mundane. We don’t know what that means, and other than the incident of his murder, there’s no direct link between him and Constance or any of the other witches in the coven. The only other link between them is you. Your being there and your finding his corpse.”

“What are you trying to say, Cyrus? I told you that I followed her there, and you
know
that because you all followed me, right? That’s how your boy found me there. If I hadn’t been following her that day, I might never have known who Ryan Sanders was at all.”

Sunday resented the implication that she had anything to do with Sanders or Constance. They knew that Constance had killed Sanders and they knew that Sunday was nothing more than a witness after the fact. Where did Cyrus think his questions were going to get him other than on Sunday’s bad side?

“And you’re positive that you didn’t pick up any other information about Sanders when you found him?” Cyrus nudged. “You didn’t meet his ghost or something? You didn’t rifle through his papers? Nothing?”

Sunday stayed quiet, setting aside her exasperation. All she’d wanted to do was figure out the threat to her friends, a threat she wouldn’t have even known about had they not dragged her along to their innocent, little playgroup. Now, she was wrapped up in a murder mystery that was laced with the telltale signs of dark magic, and it did nothing but goad her into diving in and getting involved with werewolves, vampires, and who knows what else.

For an Incarnate on the run, this was the worst possible situation to find herself in. Add to that, Sunday had been so ready to leave it all behind and join the mass of mundanes. That world of magic and power and awful glory was in her past, and that’s where she’d wanted it to stay hidden forever.

“Let’s get this over and done with,” Sunday sighed. She was tired and he knew it. They had to get this out of the way so that they could move on to the next thing and then the next and then the next until there was nothing left of Constance or whatever sinister plot she was fixing to take shape.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sunday stepped back from the door after she’d picked the lock. Instinctively stepping forward and taking a protective stance between Sunday and whatever lay within the warehouse, Cyrus pushed the door in gently. He signaled for Sunday to stay put until he could look around and make sure there were no alarms or traps ready to spring at them. After a couple of minutes, Cyrus emerged from the warehouse and grabbed Sunday’s hand, pulling her into step behind him.

The air in the warehouse was stagnant and humid, drawing a sharp contrast between the fresh, crisp autumn air outside. The stink of sulfur and rotten flesh crashed into her as soon as the door fully closed behind them. Her stomach cramped. Uncontrollably, Sunday gagged, heaving from the pit of her stomach. Cyrus held her in the crook of his arm and tried to pull her close to his body, but she refused him. She braced her hands on her knees and bent over, coughing until her lungs burned. Cyrus stood by her, doing his best to ease her by rubbing her back while she was sick.

“It’s death, Sunday,” he said in a hushed voice. “It reeks, but you’ll get you get used to it. Just breathe.”

Slowly, the sickness subsided. Just as Cyrus promised, the stench started to fade. It was awful, but it was bearable for the moment. Sunday stood upright and wiped the sweat from her brow. They were only a few feet into the warehouse and Sunday didn’t know if she’d be able to go in any further if this was just the start of it.

“Just breathe.” Cyrus reminded her, curling his hand over her shoulder. His warmth bled in through her pores and Sunday’s tense muscles eased. She drew in a long, shaky breath through her nose and coughed it out. As she did, her skin pricked and she became aware of something altogether magical. Her shoulders pulled back again, and feeling the tension returning, Cyrus’ face hardened. He squeezed her shoulder tightly.