Taking Back Sunday (31 page)

“Do you want to know why it’s so hard for me to be with you? Because I work so hard to push all of it aside that I can’t afford the effort it takes to hold what you’ve got inside of you from spilling over. You have so much guilt about what you’ve done to me—things that I can’t possibly know, that I’ll never learn—that it sparks up memories of my past and memories of my future. It’s fucking
torture
that I can’t rip myself away from. All of that heaped on top of everything else that I’m trying to ignore makes it impossible for me to keep myself in check. Bernadette told me I had a role to play.
A role.
In what? I don’t know. I don’t know anything! And I don’t care. I don’t want it and I’m not going to have it. I’m not going to let it catch up to me no matter how badly I want to stand still for just a moment and let the good things happen to me.”

The tension was thick in the room and Cyrus stood helpless against it. Sunday was expressing her every fear, her every insecurity. She was running because it made her feel safe from what being the Incarnate meant. She had probably read all the stories about the Incarnates of the past. She knew that they all either suffered or rose to impossible power. It was being a god, and she was turning away from all of it. Despite his intentions to keep her safe, Cyrus knew that he could never truly do so. In the end, it was all inside of her. Her past—known and unknown. Her future. She was a monster fighting with every breath to transcend her nature.

“Then I’ll come with you,” he determined. “You run and take me with you. You don’t want to be the Incarnate? Fine. I don’t want that for you either. You’re not saving a civilization from a drought. You’re not taking over the world’s covens. You’re not sitting at the right hand of vampire royalty. I don’t care. I’ll come with you. Wherever you go.”

Cyrus paused, extending a hand to Sunday that she wouldn’t take.

“You said things happen for a reason. It’s the truth of the universe,
your
truth. This… us… there’s a reason, Sunday. There’s a reason you were set in my path over a decade ago, and there’s a reason that I couldn’t let go of you for that long. There’s a reason that, after all this time, I find you, and when I do, I fall fucking in love with you. You, the Incarnate that I’ve hated for so long that my hate
defined me
. We’re meant to find each other, Sunday. We’re meant to be with each other. You said it yourself. We just have to let it happen. We just have to go along for the fucking ride.”

Cyrus threw his hands in the air and brought them down into fists that slammed at his thighs. For the first time in so long that he couldn’t remember, Cyrus was fighting tears. He just admitted everything to Sunday,
everything
, and she stood apart from him, her arms crossed, pulling her further and further away from Cyrus.

“This is our chance, Sunday,” Cyrus said. “We have to take this chance. I want to take it, with you. This is
our
Fate. It’s not
Incarnate
shit. It’s
ours
, yours and mine.”

For a while, the couple stood quietly, Sunday with her arms crossed and Cyrus beckoning to her with every expression and gesture. Before he even started talking, Sunday had known what he would say. Of course, Cyrus would want to come with her. Of course, he’d want to stay at her side. She had seen it all inside of him. When she’d toyed with his mind to find out why he’d been after her, and when she’d shifted his life from Cyrus to Marcus, she’d been privy to his innermost thoughts. He felt responsible for her. More than wanting to be with her because she was cute and funny and all the things he’d have wanted to find in a woman, Cyrus felt obligated to correct his past mistakes.

The way that he’d harped on hating her for as long as he had to justify the shame at putting her into the hands of Bernadette and her minions had shaped his feelings for her now. He was a broken man. The fissures ran so deep that even he didn’t know where they ended. Between those cracks, emotions for Sunday had poured. All the years of all those feelings for her had been the marrow in his bones. It had held him together with purpose and fueled his will to live. His feelings for her might have changed, but little else had. Sunday was still the reason for his tomorrow. She was the core of his existence. Holding her in the palm of his hand now meant never letting go or he’d lose himself. He’d lose everything.

Before he would get an opportunity to gauge her reaction to his offer to run away with her, Sunday had already made the decision that, no matter what, Cyrus had to be taken down or she wouldn’t be able to make her escape. As soon as he stopped talking, Sunday raised her hand to him, and with nothing more than the desire to see it happen, Cyrus dropped to the floor, unconscious.

Cosmic design notwithstanding, it was the only thing Sunday could do. Cyrus led her back on the path of the Incarnate, no matter that his intentions might have been to steer her clear from it. As she stepped over his body in making her final exit, Sunday felt her heart breaking. Cyrus was right. He was absolutely right. She wanted to be with him. She wanted to love him. She wanted to run away, Cyrus and Sunday against the world. Fuck the Incarnate, leave the whole mess behind, and keep running forever as long as it meant that they could be with one another. Unfortunately for them, however, she had been right, too. There was no way being with Cyrus would do anything other than force her to be the Incarnate every minute of every day because being
with
him meant feeling everything he felt and thinking everything he thought. It was a guarantee that Sunday would never be at peace and that Cyrus would never be safe from her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Upon leaving the motel, Sunday’s first stop was Eunice’s house. There she found the elder witch tending her garden of mandrake root and belladonna. Even out of season, a witch’s garden could flourish and grow. The right kind of spell could ensure a green thumb in even the sparsest of terrain, and a witch, especially one as gifted as Eunice, required a full luscious garden of herbs and flowers. Eunice looked up from beneath the rim of her floppy garden hat and smiled generous, kind eyes to Sunday as she made her way to Eunice’s gate.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Sunday asked. She was hesitant in spite of Eunice’s expression of welcome. Rather than verbally admit her, Eunice stood up and walked to the gate where she took Sunday into her grateful arms and hugged her, swaying in an embrace that drew Sunday into the warmth of her caretaker aura.

“Sister,” Eunice spoke softly into Sunday’s shoulder, “you are always welcome in this home.”

Tea was prepared and shared as the women spoke. Never breaking her own confidence, Sunday kept the word “Incarnate” safely outside the realm of their conversation. Instead, when Eunice asked how Sunday had known about Constance’s dark designs, Sunday had suggested that she had been tipped off by the news of Ryan Sanders’ murder at Bearers, and though she didn’t know who he was to Constance, she surmised a connection based on some preternatural hunch, or so she’d described.

“I still don’t know who that witch was,” Sunday confessed. In truth, it had been bothering her. It was true that the visions of Constance hacking the man to death had been the thing that assured Sunday and the wolves that Constance had been the source of the undercurrent of malevolence in the coven’s circle energy. But neither Sunday nor the wolves could make out anything more than a coincidence of the murder occurring so closely to the demon raising. Cyrus had implied that Sunday had known more about the Sanders connection than she was letting on, but that had been erroneous. Sunday had picked up nothing at the shop from either Sanders’ fading spirit or from any intel she’d learned since.

Checking up on Eunice had only been a part of the reason why Sunday had stopped by for a visit. The other part was figuring out what angle Constance had been playing with Sanders and why she’d seen the need to end their involvement in such a violent way.

“Ryan was a friend to the community in this region,” Eunice explained. “He was a gifted witch and a gifted entrepreneur. He bought and sold properties through the real estate market that he would procure for… a selective clientele.”

“What relation could Constance have possibly had with Mr. Sanders? What kind of business would they have been in that would have made her kill him? Was he a warlock like she was?” Sunday asked innocently enough to seem like she didn’t know anything about selective clienteles in the magical community and genuinely as she didn’t know what Eunice was getting at exactly.

“Not at all!” the elder witch exclaimed. “Constance had some trouble with her neighbors in the past who had been speculating on her magical character and she asked if there were any properties that she could acquire for housing and storage for her family heirlooms where she could find little intrusion from suspicious neighbors. What we do is often suspect to people who think that witchcraft is something devilish or evil.”

Eunice shook her head. Little had she known that, in Constance’s case, any rumors of her black magic craft were more than substantiated by her practices. The neighbors that she’d complained about had been right on the ball with their suspicions. When she put Constance in contact with Sanders, she hadn’t dreamed that it might eventually lead to his death. She thought that Sanders could secure a property for Constance where she could be safe of her neighbors’ suspicions and be free to practice her craft. Unfortunately, neither Eunice nor Saunders figured out that Constance was a warlock.

“She had a warehouse in the old district,” Sunday informed Eunice.

“Yes, that’s likely one of Sanders’ acquisitions. He had many dealings with me and my friends in the past trying to find us locations where we would be well protected from prying eyes or suspicious minds. I suspect that he learned, in some way, that Constance was practicing the dark arts and that he confronted her.”

Her expression became dark, and she lowered her chin to look at her lap. Eunice was a caretaker. The idea that she had done something to adversely affect her friend’s wellness was devastating and she was so sorry for it that her deep sigh sang of grief and guilt.

“I can think of no other reason for Constance to have hurt him. You have to believe me that he was a friend to us all. This house was procured through Ryan. He was a proper witch and a good friend. There are many kinds of people out there, Sunday, and many of them need a safe place to be themselves and practice at their wont. Not many communities are friendly to our kind and many places have a history of, let’s say, handling what they deem to be unsavory sorts in horrific fashion.”

It was difficult for Sunday to leave Eunice’s house that evening, and although she hadn’t said she would never see her again, Eunice said goodbye to Sunday as though it was the last time that they would ever meet. She offered Sunday an open invitation to her home, to Columbia, if she ever saw fit to return.

From Eunice’s house, Sunday drove to Sammy’s. Any minute now, Cyrus would come to and realize that Sunday wasn’t coming back. For the moment though, with the road ahead of her and the warlock behind her, Sunday found herself returning to the reason for her involvement in the entire event in the first place, her friends. She’d spent enough time making her goodbyes with Eunice that she didn’t have much time to spare on anything else before getting the hell out of Dodge. Regardless of his condition and lack of transportation, Cyrus would come calling as soon as he awoke, and the first place he would try would be Sammy’s house.

Sunday left this as her last stop before hitting the road to nowhere special. She knew she wouldn’t be able to set aside enough time to reconcile her ‘need to go’ with her ‘want to stay’. Moreover, she knew that nothing Kayla or Sammy could offer would get her to stay. They would see right through her, and they would beg, manipulate, and make it impossible for her to sever their ties cleanly.

Watching them from afar was deceiving. Kayla with her bleached blonde hair and Sammy with her neat bun talked in the living room of Sammy’s house. Sunday watched them through the window that Sammy never quite managed to cover with the drapes. Her friends, she realized, weren’t the cookie cutter caricatures that would play themselves in the television movie of her life. They were real people with dynamic, unique personalities. The long nights of staying up with Kayla to watch reruns of Elvira’s monster movie classics. The days of catching rays with Sammy in the backyard while her kids were at camp. She’d never experienced these types of things before this year.

Having them meant having everything, and at the risk of putting them in more danger, she couldn’t stay and relive those memories or make new ones. When the phone rang for the first time since she’d left Cyrus, Sunday took her cue to start the car back up and make her way to the nearest highway that would take her far west of Columbia—of Kayla, of Sammy, and of everything else she’d leave behind. Where she was going, she didn’t know, and it didn’t matter, so long as wherever she ended up, she didn’t find a reason to stay.

EPILOGUE

At a bar on the wharf in San Francisco, Cyrus loomed as the bartender rubbed his stubbly chin, forcing himself to inspect the photograph again, raking his memory to appease what looked like a biker with a bad attitude and an axe to grind. The call had come in just as Cyrus and Angel walked into the bar: The Pastophori contacted Stephen, the Alaska Pack Alpha, to schedule an in-person conference. The pack’s failure to recapture the Incarnate no doubt weighed heavily on their minds. They’d want notes on what Cyrus and Angel had discovered in the last few months, and Cyrus wasn’t keen on providing them with
anything
.

Cyrus’ hazel eyes snapped up to the barkeep. Every second that the man lingered on that photograph was a second that Cyrus didn’t have to waste. Stephen had already flown out from Anchorage to meet with Blake Proctor, the Pastophori of Iset’s lead crony. San Francisco was Cyrus’ last stop before he headed to Alaska to get a recap of the meet. The bartender needed to get his shit together
pronto.

“Is there a problem?” Cyrus barked. He drummed his fingers on the glass of his half-drunk whiskey.