B00AO57VOY EBOK (38 page)

“And I also know who
shot
her, you creep!” I snapped, taking a step back. 

It was like baiting a wild
tiger, but it was the only way.  His anger had made him what he was, and I was
going to use his anger to destroy him.  If I could keep him talking, keep him
pissed off, I could lead him right where I wanted him. 

 “Why would any woman choose
you
over Nathan?” I asked letting him hear the loathing in my voice as I
gave him a supremely unimpressed once-over and took another step back, watching
as he took one forward.  He was so close to where I needed him to be.  So damn
close…  “You disgust me.  I’d rather die than be with you.”

 “And you have. 
Repeatedly,” Bastian said with a dark laugh.  “But this time, I
will
win,
Ember.  Nate will know what it’s like, the pain of watching his one true love
in the arms of another man.  You will submit to me because it is the only way
to save him.”

“Yeah?  I think not,” I told
him, taking the last step back to put me at the point of the pentagram where I
would place the crystal.  “At least Gabriella had the right idea.  Better to
die in the arms of the man you love than live in the arms of a disgusting
little maggot like you!”

“You
bitch
!” Bastian
roared, furious, taking the last step toward me I needed him to take.

“Temper, temper,” I said,
smiling and hitting the power button on the remote in my hand even as I dropped
to my knees and placed the final crystal.  The black light blinked on and
activated the circles and the crystals began to glow bright blue.

Now, Nathan,
I cried
out, giving him the signal that I was ready for the others to join me.  I had
summoned the demon, I had trapped the demon.  Now all that was left was to
banish the demon. 

“You can’t banish me,
Ember,” Bastian growled, smiling nastily.  “You don’t have the power to banish
a demon as old as I am on your own.  If you did, you would have finished the
job the first time.  So, what’s next?  You know this little trap of yours will
only hold me for a short time.”

“You know what?  You’re
probably right,” I told him, smirking, as the flicker of candlelight came
through the open door.  “I may not have the power to banish your sorry ass by
myself, Bastian.  Lucky for me, though, I don’t have to try.”

 Ms. Cantrell entered the
room first, her talon-like fingers wrapped tightly around a black candle that
was meant to banish evil.  Cradled in her other arm was a small wooden urn
containing the remains of one Cal Angstrom, who had died for a crime he hadn’t
committed.  After more than a century, true justice would be served. 

Following her was Mrs.
Amelia, carrying a silver candle meant to neutralize negative energy.  She also
carried an unadorned clay jar that held the ashes of Alexei Maksimov, a man
whose only crime had been to love a woman who didn’t love him back.  For the
life and sanity taken from that poor soul, Bastian would finally pay the price.

Blake came next, a pale
yellow candle to represent air burning brightly in his hand.  It had fallen to
him to carry the jewel-encrusted urn that held the remains of the first of my
assassins, Jean Luc de Grie.  A man who, like Bastian, had killed his one true
love.  Another man who’d died for Bastian’s revenge.

Kim was the next to join us,
carrying a blue candle to represent water.  She looked sadly down at the dull
silver urn she carried as she entered that contained all that was left of one
Emily Bowden, a girl who hadn’t been afraid of anything or anyone.  Of all my
past selves, she had been my favorite. 

Grams entered the room next,
the green candle in her hand to represent earth sending dancing shadows along
the walls and ceiling.  With her, she carried a small frosted-glass urn etched
with flowers containing the ashes of my second incarnation, Elena Bogdanov.  I
winced as I remembered the feeling of the flames licking at my skin while Bastian
laughed.  Soon, we would see who would get the last laugh.

Nathan entered after Grams,
a red candle to represent my element, fire, in one long-fingered hand and a
solid gold urn with the remains of Evangelique de Benet held close to his
chest.  He walked straight to me, placing the candle in my hands and the urn at
my feet, and then touched my cheek before stepping back and turning to leave
the room again, his part in the battle to come at an end.

“Not staying for the party,
Nate?” Bastian purred from his makeshift prison.  “Leaving another of your
women alone to die?  Gabby would be disappointed in you.”

Nathan stopped and turned
around slowly.  Rather than anger, I was surprised to see that he looked sad. 
For a long moment, he just looked at the demon who’d spent the last four
centuries making his life a living hell, all that remained of his best friend.

“You are a fool, Bastian,”
he said quietly, the pain in his eyes causing a lump to rise in my throat. 
“You were a fool then, and you are a fool now.  If only your aim had been
better that night, you would have had your heart’s desire.  She was going to
marry you, Bastian.  She would have been yours.”

“What makes you think I
missed?” Bastian asked, his lips turned up in an evil smirk.

Nathan’s expression hardened
to stone in less time than it took for me to take a breath.  The pain in his
eyes disappeared to be replaced with the kind of hate I hoped never to see
again.  In a voice so deadly quiet that I shivered at the sound of it he asked,
“You shot her on purpose?”

“If I wasn’t going to have
her, nobody was,” Bastian said, his smirk growing wider.  “Watching you take
her life?  That was just a bonus.”

“Go to hell, Bastian,”
Nathan said coldly.  Turning to look at me, he smiled tightly.  “Baby?  Make
sure he enjoys the trip, would you?”

“It will be my pleasure,” I
told him, smiling at Bastian—who suddenly didn’t look so damn smug.  “I’ll make
sure it’s a trip he will never forget.”

I watched Nathan go, wishing
I could ask him to stay.  But he couldn’t.  Because of what he was, we had
decided he would be safer during the ritual if he stayed away—just in case the
entities we were summoning got confused about which member of the undead they
were supposed to take and took him, as well.  I knew it was killing him,
though.  His shoulders were rigid with tension and he seemed to be
making
his
feet take him away from me. 

For Nathan, almost four
centuries’ worth of heartache would end with the conclusion of the ritual.  He
would finally be able to wake up from the nightmare he had been living in for
so long.  For Nathan, happiness waited at the end of the dangerous road our
coven was about to travel.  But only if we were successful.  If we
weren’t…well, Nathan’s nightmare was about to get a whole lot worse.

I felt a noticeable spike in
the tension of the room when the last member of our group joined us.  Bastian’s
eyes narrowed to slits as Tyler walked into the light of the flickering
candles.  In one hand, he carried a pure white candle meant to symbolize the
element spirit.  In the other arm, he cradled a large, ornate urn made of solid
iron.  He looked neither right nor left as he made his way to the point
directly across from me. I saw Bastian’s smirk return and felt a cold sense of
dread wash through me at the maliciousness I saw in it.

“Well, well, well,” he
murmured as Tyler took his place.  “It looks like the gang’s all here.  Very
good, Ember.  I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Rather than respond, Tyler
knelt down and placed his candle at the point of the pentagram where he was
standing.  Then, every movement calm and unhurried, he placed the urn just
inside the outer circle and slowly rose to his feet to watch as the rest of us
copied his actions and added our own morbid offerings to the circle.  Only then
did he look at Bastian.  His expression was completely blank, but his eyes were
so cold that it felt like the temperature in the room dropped by ten
degrees.   

“So, what did you bring to
the party?” Bastian asked, his smirk turning smug.  Walking over to Tyler, he
bent down and studied the urn before taking a deep breath.  “Hmm…smells like
dust.”

“Not exactly,” Tyler said
softly, the chill in his eyes becoming even more pronounced as he smiled at the
demon smirking up at him.  “Let’s just say it’s a little gift from Gabriella. 
Actually, it
is
Gabriella.”

The smile on Bastian’s lips
died like roses in the arctic and I saw the first shadow of fear cross his
face.  Fastening his eyes on the urn at Tyler’s feet, he started to back away
like he was afraid of it. 

“What’s the matter?” Tyler
asked mockingly when Bastian swallowed hard, his eyes still glued to the urn.

“No, you can’t have found
them,” Bastian muttered, shaking his head.  “No one knows where they were
hidden.  I made sure of that centuries ago.”

“And yet, here they are.” 
When Bastian’s head snapped up to glare at him, Tyler smiled and shrugged. 
“What can I say?  I’ve got skills.”

Without another word, Tyler
held his hands out to Grams and Blake, who were on either side of him, giving
the signal that the fun and games were over and the real work was about to
begin.  Our eyes met across the circle and I found myself unable to look away
from him.  There was something different about him in that moment, something
strong and powerful and…totally frigging amazing.

As he started to chant the
first part of the incantation, in Latin, I joined in without thinking about
it.  Rather than think about the words, I let his voice lead me through the
parts I had consistently messed up in practice as we called on our elements.

Elementum
spiritum
vitae essentia
,

inquisitio
perducere
nos
in hac
nocte.

Elementa
aqua
et
terra
,

eaque
operamur
ut
protegat
.

Elementa
aeris
et
ignis
,

accendunt
modum
et
refrigeret
iras
.

I translated the words of
the incantation in my head as we went, loving the more poetic notes it had in
English.

Element of spirit, essence
of life

guide us in our quest this
night.

Elements of water and earth

protect us as this spell we
work.

Elements of air and fire

light our way and cool our
ire.

Give it a slow,
dark-sounding beat with some guy with a gravelly, yet sexy, voice singing it
and it could have been the next great Goth album.

Before we could begin the
second part of the incantation, though, Bastian finally made his move.  He
threw back his head and let out a roar that nearly punctured my eardrums and
the floor began to quake.  The black light suddenly flickered and then blinked
before going out altogether.  The circles immediately disappeared, leaving us
with nothing but the flickering candles to light the room.  Laughing
triumphantly, he headed straight for…Kim.

“No!” I screamed, unable to
break the circle and too afraid not to.

The sound that came out of
my mouth was definitely not my voice.  It echoed eerily around us and suddenly
the room was filled with bright golden light.  Just as Bastian reached for my
friend, an invisible string seemed to pull him back.  He frowned and tried to
step forward again, but that string just tugged harder in the opposite
direction. 

I looked down to see what
was stopping him and found that the light around me was racing along the paint
the circles had been drawn with, lighting them up again.  It was beautiful to
watch as those little licks of golden heat raced along, recreating every single
letter, every sigil and rune, with flickering light.

“It doesn’t burn,” Kim said,
distracting me for about half a second.  She was staring down at her hand—that
I had only just remembered my dumb self was still holding—with a smile of
relief.  “It doesn’t burn, Em.  It feels…wonderful.”

I followed her gaze to find
that my hand looked like it was actually
made
of fire of fire.  And so
was my arm.  And so was the rest of me. 

I had actually
become
fire.

“What the hell?” Bastian
muttered, looking around at the fiery trap that held him bound.

“Funny you should mention
Hell,” I told him.  “It’s fitting, seeing as that’s exactly where we’re about
to send your sorry ass.”

Concentrating every bit of
power I could come up with on the words I was speaking and what I needed them
to do, I began to recite the second part of the incantation.

Sacra
cinis
,
sanctificetur
pulverem
,

animas
nunc
ad
te
committere
.

Bastian
,
malum
quod
praedas
in
amantis
spes
.

Sacred ashes, hallowed dust,

This soul we now to you
entrust.

Bastian, evil that preys on
the lover's hope.

Immediately a hurricane
force wind began to blow around our circle.  I stopped long enough to see that
the ashes from the urns were rising into the air and beginning to form a
swirling, tornado-like cloud over our heads.  Looking up, I saw faces in the
dark, dense cloud and realized I was seeing the faces of my own past, the lives
I had never gotten to have.