Taking Back Sunday (30 page)

As Sunday staggered to where Cyrus and Marcus lay, Neal’s wolf followed her with monstrous determination. If she did nothing, he would pounce on her and end her as he’d ended Constance. The knowledge of Neal’s impending wrath bore a terrible weight on her back. Sunday knelt beside them and placed a bloody hand on Cyrus’ face trying in vain to wipe away his tears. Cyrus, the man who had hated her, had hunted her, and had come to love her, would have to make a choice that she didn’t want him to make. His every thought was a prayer, pleading and desperate, and Sunday knew it meant everything to him to have the choice that only she could offer him. There was something she could do, a secret gift of the Incarnate, a gift that she had discovered when she’d been only a girl and the knowledge of which had lain dormant up until this moment. She couldn’t remember when or what had happened, but she’d known that it was real and that it was true.

“There might be something…,” she whispered, her eyes turned entirely to Cyrus waiting for him to respond. She brushed the back of her palm against her cheek, drew it away filthy with dirt, and smeared with her own blood. When no sound came from him but his ragged breathing, she continued.

“The Incarnate can’t make things or erase them,” she began, “but she can challenge them and move them and put them into place.” She looked at the wolf and laid a soft hand on his belly by his wound. The bleeding would stop any second, and as soon as that, the wolf would be dead. “I can give you a choice, Cyrus, but goddammit, I don’t want you to make it. You have life to give, Cyrus, and his is draining from him so quickly…. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Yes,” Cyrus answered, gasping for air as he opened his lips. “Yes. Do it.”

“Cyrus, you can’t know–”

“Do it!” he growled. “Do it now!”

In spite of every desire in her body to go against his wishes and disappear into the woods, Sunday laid one hand on the bleeding wound and held her other hand around Cyrus’ splayed out on the wolf’s back.

Please don’t let this be your choice, Cyrus,
she begged
. I need you here in this life.

Cyrus shook his head at Sunday’s voice in his mind and fed into hers his demand. His life didn’t matter. Not anymore, not if Marcus wasn’t in it. Images of death flashed in her mind,
Cyrus’ memories.
Sitting at the bedside of loved ones. Watching their eyes flutter momentarily, then freeze with lifelessness. Coffins lowering into graves. All the while Cyrus watched helplessly, unable to affect the outcome, and stewing with guilt over having been the one left behind. No, for Cyrus, there was no choice to be made. Had he been able, he’d have given his life a dozen times to save the ones he loved. After nearly a century of impotence, this was Cyrus’ moment to shine.

I can do something,
he told her.
Take everything I have, and save Marcus.

Closing her eyes as they welled over with tears, Sunday let the energies of the night take her. She filled her belly with the ache of the reservoir to be set in motion, she drew in the ghosts of the dead, and she forced them to do her bidding. She let herself grow powerful with the agony of the wolves for their fallen friend and she poured into Marcus’ wolf the will to heal, to live, and to take from Cyrus the spark of wellness and life. She worked between them, taking the life from the one and the death from the other, and sat there for minutes focused entirely on the task until she collapsed onto the pillow of the wolf’s fur as Marcus drew a deep, reinvigorated breath into his lungs.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It wasn’t her fault that Constance had decided to conjure a demon and had used the coven to outsource the requisite energy for her spell, but Sunday felt responsible nonetheless. As much as she believed that all things happen for a reason, and that things happen as they’re meant, she couldn’t help but think that the reason for it had been that she was there, the Incarnate, walking and living among the mundanes. As though the mere fact that she had taken up residency there had been enough to spurn a witch to summon demons and kill countless animals and people to do it. The truth is that, even though Constance had been in Columbia far longer than Sunday, no one could really tell when she’d made that tragic, complicated, and fateful leap to the dark side. And no one could guess what she would have done had she not felt the surge of power that the Incarnate brought with her to the warehouse that night.

It had been a week since she’d last seen Kayla and Sammy, but the girls hadn’t stopped calling. Each one took a turn every day to leave a voicemail that Sunday would never listen to, or send a text that Sunday would read and then ignore. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it: Sunday didn’t belong,
the Incarnate
didn’t belong, in Kayla and Sammy’s world. They had given her a new hope for a life of normalcy that she could lead, but it was just as audacious and fickle a hope as had it come from a dream. A normal life was a far cry from what Sunday had experienced in South Carolina.

There was no way to turn the clock back and start anew. The only right thing to do now was leave it all behind and hope that Kayla and Sammy could forget her sooner rather than later. Sunday had never been herself in Columbia, and she felt no small amount of remorse about it. Every day she had lived among them, calling herself their friend, Sunday had been perpetuating a lie. She’d never
really
been their friend, however authentic their end of the friendship had been. They didn’t even know her at all. It was cruel. It was awful. And they didn’t deserve to get strung further along with her lies.

Through the days and nights that she’d sat around the motel room while Cyrus recovered, Sunday was never tempted to return a call or answer a text from the only two people who had felt like family to her in the last six years. She would be leaving the only place she had ever chosen to call her home, and she would be getting back on the road to no place in particular, knowing full well this time that someone was on her tail, and sniffing every breadcrumb she would drop along the way. Like the stuff that dreams are made of, Sunday had to learn to let go of the life she’d made for herself: her home, her hobbies, and most of all, her friends. She was returning to the road better for it, but more certain than ever that whatever doom she was fated to face wouldn’t take place anywhere near the people that she loved.

Sunday spent her final days in Columbia doing little more than curling up beside Cyrus as he healed. The first day had been the most difficult. Neal and Angel had dragged Marcus, Cyrus, and Sunday back to their motel rooms. Even without the added trauma of having her head bashed by Constance, it would have been difficult for Sunday, for anyone, to maintain consciousness after using herself as a channel for Cyrus’ self-sacrifice, and she had found it impossible to stay awake.

The day after the battle, Sunday woke in a sea of darkness but for the cracks of light between the thick, dark drapes over the window. The room was empty. Surely, the werewolves were all in another room where both Angel and Neal could watch over their priority patients. Her mind raced recalling the fight in the woods. Flashes of Eunice’s face tense with terror as the scarred familiar raised a silver knife over her chest, Constance writhing under Angel’s steel rod arms as he held her down, Cyrus hunched over the bleeding brown and white wolf, eyes red and swollen with tears, hair stuck to his face, and Cyrus throwing back his head and howling at the sky, the sound of his agony tearing from the deepest abyss of his body. Sunday watched all of it through a curtain of traumatic haze and confusion. Blood seeped into her eyes from the wound at her crown where the rock in Constance’s fist had met her skull. The injury still throbbed and Sunday touched it to find it still open.

She wasn’t sure if she had succeeded at doing anything other than getting the process moving, and she certainly didn’t know if she’d been able to maintain control enough to keep from draining Cyrus bone dry. The risk to him had been great. Giving life to another so close to death meant taking as much from the source. Even as she’d laid her hands on him and begun the transference of life force, she doubted whether she could keep Cyrus alive no matter how hard she tried.

Nausea rising, she rolled onto her side and fell onto the carpeted floor, crawling to the bathroom. There she found the toilet and became sick into it, crying as she heaved, praying to nothing and to no one in particular that Cyrus had survived and that she hadn’t failed to keep him alive. Though a memory from her youth had been triggered by the werewolves’ pleas for Sunday to do something, anything to save their fallen compatriot, it had since been swallowed back into the recesses of her mind with nothing but the scar of it remaining.

Not Cyrus. Not Cyrus.
It was a mantra that she prayed silently.
Not Cyrus. Not Cyrus.

After what seemed like an eternity in the darkness, Neal found her in a state of mental obliteration recalling the nightmare of the previous night. He wrapped her into his thick arms and carried her into the adjoining room where she found Marcus sitting up against the pillows on one bed with Angel at his side. Cyrus lay asleep on the other bed. The men were silent as she’d been carried in and was set beside Cyrus. She curled her body around him and set her head on the pillow. She nuzzled into his matted, tangled hair. Sunday sobbed, grateful that her prayers had been answered. Cyrus exhaled deeply then and brought a hand over her thigh to pull her in closer.

“Whatever you did,” Angel said, “it worked.”

Despite knowing that her future lay, unequivocally, on the road and far away from any dream of white picket fence mundane life, Sunday stayed in Columbia for the duration of Cyrus’ recovery, hunkering down at the motel with the wolves until they had each left but for Cyrus. Evidently, saving one of the wolves, even if it had meant almost killing another one of them, was enough to earn her a reprieve while they determined what the pack would do about the clients that sought her retrieval.

There was no small amount of disappointment leveled at her, however. The Incarnate had failed them. The purported conduit and master of all forces mystical and mundane had been little more than a nuisance during the whole scene. Ultimately, Cyrus didn’t hold it against her. He encouraged his packmates to leave him in the care of the Incarnate. Though they hadn’t wanted to, they relented when their Alpha, Stephen, had summoned them back home.

“What you did for Marcus, Sunday,” Cyrus began. “…
thank you
.”

Sunday shrugged into the mattress and patted Cyrus’ chest without any more acknowledgement of what he’d said. They had been alone two days, and though Cyrus had recovered enough to move about the room with little trouble, he wasn’t yet ready to embark on the trip home. The pair stayed about the motel room in those days, pretending that they weren’t both thinking about the moment that Cyrus felt well enough to leave. They basked in their unspoken truce, however temporary, that neither had exhibited any ambition to address.

Cyrus turned his head to look at Sunday, lying beside him with her head pressed gently into his side. His arm held her close, and his fingers nestled between the hem of her pants and her hip. Her attentions were turned to the television, and though seemingly intent on whatever was on, he doubted that she wasn’t thinking about the night in the forest when she had almost killed him so that Marcus could live.

“Sunday,” Cyrus started, grabbing her chin and tipping it up to meet his gaze.

“Don’t. Don’t you talk about it. You’re welcome. Marcus is alive. You’re alive.
You’re welcome.
We don’t need to talk about it.” Quickly, she shook her face free of his hand and returned to her place at his side with her eyes fixed to the screen.

“We need to talk about what happens next,” Cyrus insisted. He pushed himself upright and grabbed Sunday’s arm, pulling her with him. They faced one another, Sunday’s expression unyielding, and Cyrus’ eager for conversation.

“What do you think happens next, Cyrus?” Sunday challenged, slapping the bed. “I can’t stay here.”

They both knew that Sunday wouldn’t stay in Columbia. She wasn’t answering her friends’ calls. She wasn’t offering to take Cyrus back to her house to keep recovering. What she was really saying was that she couldn’t stay with Cyrus. The acknowledgement of it burned in his chest.

“I’m not staying here either,” Cyrus countered. “There’s pack business that I have to attend in Alaska, and I want you to come with me so we can settle it with Stephen.”

Sunday huffed and shot up from the bed, grabbing at her belongings stashed around the room. In a second, Cyrus leaped to her side and stopped her. As she pushed him aside to get around him, he blocked her, virtually pinning her to a tight corner of the room.

“I need to know that, now that this is over, you won’t get away from me. You want me. You want to be with me. And before you can tell me that it’s all my imagination, I’m telling you that I know it’s true. I saw it in you.” Cyrus held Sunday’s face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers. Rather than give into his kiss, Sunday shoved him away.

“What’s true and what’s not true doesn’t matter! Don’t you get it, Cyrus? There is absolutely no place for me, here or anywhere else. Not with you. Not with friends. Not with family. With no one. Don’t you get what’s going on? All of this,” she continued, fanning her hands around her, “this is all part of some great plan that I have been trying desperately to avoid. The minute I settle down, all Hell breaks loose. It happened when I was a kid. It happened when I figured out the truth about Bernadette. It happened here, now, when I thought I had finally outrun it. There’s no gaming Fate, Cyrus. Not for an Incarnate, and certainly not because some werewolf falls for her and thinks he can make it so.”

“You don’t know.”

“I do, Cyrus.
I do
. That’s what you don’t understand.” She began shaking as she made her great revelation. Sunday stumbled and grabbed hold of the wall to steady herself. When she looked up at Cyrus, her eyes were filled with tears.

“I might not remember a lot of things about my past, but I remember enough. Worse still, I remember the dreams I have every night. The nightmares of the past I wake from, the visions of the future that’s ahead of me. Every awful thing I’ve ever done: the killing, the reaping, the slaughter. I live it again and again. I close my eyes, and I all I see is the blood and the destruction I’ve left behind. I can’t remember what I
want
to remember, but I remember everything else.
Absolutely everything
else. Like everything else I feel, it’s not just surface-level, it’s deep. It’s not a vision of what I’ve done and what I’ve been through, it’s feeling it all over again as if it’s happening for the first time. Except now… now I know what I’ve done. I really know. The visions of the future that can be mine if I just take the smallest step in the wrong direction. It’s just as bad as what I’ve been through.