Edge of Seventeen (6 page)

It was the most candor with which Maggie had
ever answered any of Sunday’s questions and,
of course
, it
was one of the last things Maggie said to her. When Maggie told her
that it would happen soon, her certainty flowed through Sunday.
Sunday
knew
it would because Maggie believed it, and the nun
was never wrong. Maggie grinned wanly as she wished she could be
there to help, but that Fate deemed that she couldn’t. Sunday would
brave the suffering alone. That’s just how it had to be.

“When the time comes, you must remember all
your training. You must remember all your lessons and all the
strength you’ve developed over the years,” Maggie imparted.

The training Sister Margaret referred to was
pretty much all Sunday had ever known in her life. Since she was
six years-old, Maggie and the sisters had set about the task of
teaching Sunday to hone her talents, talents that had always hinted
just below the surface, but became evident and strong with
practice.

“You train yourself to minimize the
perceptions because it is the only way that you can retain your
sanity, but you must learn, above all else, to keep out those
others that would want to control you from within. You are as
powerful as you allow yourself to be. Your sensitivity is both your
strength and your weakness.”

Those words were etched into Sunday’s brain,
carved there by repetition. By whatever gifts the nuns had known,
they had expected that something would happen to her one day, and
they needed to prepare her for the unfortunate event.

Life, however, proved to be the greatest
practice session of all. Held captive by some nut-job sorceress,
Sunday learned that Maggie was right about Fate’s designs for her.
Worse, she learned that she
was
alone. Being alone meant
that all of the stuff that welled up inside of her could overpower
her, and she wouldn’t know how to control it. Being alone meant not
having Maggie and, without Maggie or her sisters, then Sunday
wasn’t sure that what she had was a gift rather than a curse. A
really shitty, really horrible, and, evidently, ironically enviable
curse
.

None of that was helping matters any in
Bernadette’s lair. For all her training and all the knowing better,
Sunday tore her concentration away from keeping up her walls to
protect herself from Bernadette, and let her mind wander to the
question of the Incarnate. As her shields waned, the witch’s power
bulged. It pushed its metaphysical body to the edge of Sunday’s
consciousness. Slowly, Sunday became aware of it, and she snapped
back to the task at-hand.

“The Incarnate’s a crock of shit,” Sunday
spat.

From behind the blindfold, she narrowed her
eyes and shot a hard look into the darkness and in the direction of
the witch Bernadette. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see
Sunday’s glower. Sunday shimmied her shields down just enough to
ensure that anyone standing just outside the walls would feel
it.

Turning back to face the ceiling and pushing
her shoulders back so that they rested flat against the cement bed
on which she lay tied and shackled, Sunday clenched her molars
tight and felt her jaw pulse.

“Let’s get this goddamn show on the road,”
she spat.

Shaking her head quickly, she bit down on her
lip and focused on reasserting her strong will. Nevertheless, the
first words she spoke were the last that she would have for some
time where she had any real control over herself. After that, she
was nothing more than a pet project for the strongest witch in the
Northwest, a witch who would later assert control over the entire
country.

Cyrus sat
cross-legged at his post, eyes boring into the pages of a well-worn
copy of
Heart of Darkness
. The hallway’s walls were dense
with religious tapestries. Red-blood carpeting and gold accents
spoke of rich opulence that contradicted Bernadette’s otherwise
stark presentation. If the witch wore bangles and necklaces, they
were nothing particularly handsome. The house, however, was
straight out of a Russian oligarch’s dream. The wealth Bernadette
had acquired through her organization was well catalogued in even
the dankest corner of her estate.

Rather than take off for Alaska on the
morning after the Incarnate exchanged hands, Cyrus told Stephen
that he’d be staying in Seattle for another day. When Stephen asked
why, Cyrus merely said that it was a private matter. They locked
eyes for a full minute while Stephen attempted to crack Cyrus’ ever
resilient mask of emotions, but he found nothing. Nothing but
purpose.

However clear the determination was in Cyrus,
the direction was not. When Cyrus approached Bernadette the next
morning, he had nothing to ask and nothing to say. Not anything he
could put into words, anyway. For whatever magical or mundane
reason, Cyrus just couldn’t pull himself away from the girl he’d
dropped into Bernadette’s hands. He couldn’t get on a plane to
Alaska, and he couldn’t put one step in front of the other in any
direction that didn’t lead him straight back to the fourteen
year-old.

“I won’t lie to you, Cyrus Barrow,”
Bernadette said with a gleam in her eye. She leaned forward onto
her elbows and gave Cyrus another once-over.

“Your employment would be a boon to my
business. You’re a well-regarded hunter and a
much-
feared
werewolf.” She paused for a moment, but only to crack a sinister
smile. “What I’d like to know is, in all honesty, why you would
want
to stay on with me. You have an exceptional commitment
with the Alaska contingent. You are a soldier and a field agent.
The only occupation I could provide you is my protection detail
and, depending on the outcome, the protection detail for the child.
I don’t suppose that would be suitable to a man of your particular
temperament.”

Cyrus’ lips pressed into a tight, impassive
line as he considered what Bernadette offered. All of what she had
said was true. Cyrus had a great gig in Alaska. If he had to return
to pack life, he wouldn’t blink before going back to Stephen. He
didn’t particularly want to leave his current situation or
employment, but he
couldn’t
leave the Incarnate. It didn’t
seem that he could do both. He was chained to her, and he was
committed to staying close to her until he could figure out what
was happening to him.

Before Cyrus could option a response,
Bernadette sucked in a hard breath. Leaning back in her chair with
that satisfied smirk, she drummed her fingers on the tabletop and
shot a finger in the air that she wiggled from side-to-side in the
international sign language for ‘no.’

“I
see
,” she said, playfully, voice
light with song. “You find yourself affected by the child. Perhaps
even
bound—“

“
No.”
Cyrus slapped the table so
unexpectedly that Bernadette hopped in her seat and clapped her
hands over her beat-skipping heart. As soon as the shock wore off,
however, she was back with her smile. She shook her head and
puckered her lips to keep from flashing too-bright a smile.

Bound.
That’s exactly what Cyrus was:
bound to the Incarnate. And he wanted no part of it. There was no
room for any of that in Cyrus’ cursed life. He hardly committed
himself to a pack, and he was ready to leave them at this moment.
There was no way he could commit himself to some god-kin child.
What would he do for her anyway? Protect her? Even the thought of
that was a joke.

“Then it’s her magic,” the witch assessed.
“She must truly be the Incarnate if her magnetism is such that it
draws your wolf out when otherwise unbidden. Do you see the danger
a creature like that poses to our kind? Can you imagine the wide
scale devastation of a child like that unleashed to walk among
us?”

“Can you make it stop? Can you fix what’s
happening to me?”

“I’ll make you a deal, Moonchild.”

Cyrus hated when witches called his kind
‘moonchildren.’ It was a way of putting them in their place. It
lowered their rank to something akin to peons of nature, beasts of
lunar circumstance and nothing else. But they were so much more
than that. Witches thought that they could call down the moon and
had authority over his kind, over everyone’s kind. But they were
wrong. They were dead wrong. Cyrus’ lip curled into a snarl and
Bernadette sighed exasperatingly and rolled her eyes not unlike the
petulant teenager she’d just acquired.

“I’ll tell you what,” the witch continued.
“You should stay in town for a few days. I’ll keep you abreast of
the situation with the Incarnate. If it turns out that she is the
one we’ve been looking for, then I’ll likely need to staff around
her. She is
very
powerful. Even if that child is
not
the Incarnate, she is extremely gifted.”

“Is there a chance that she isn’t what you’re
looking for?”

“In my opinion,
no.
She is the
Incarnate. The genuine article. And she needs to be restrained. It
can only be done the way that I have envisioned it though not all
agree. She will be regarded highly among us and she’ll be tutored
in my ways and grow to be a very successful woman. Ultimately, she
will inherit my enterprises.

“What I want from
you
, however, Cyrus
Barrow, is the assurance that you will tame your beast. I cannot
and I
will not
place that very special package in hands that
tremble from failing restraints to keep from harming her. She is an
exceptionally gifted girl and, as Incarnate, we will have to be
very careful about what power is made accessible to her. Do you
understand?”

“Truthfully, no,” Cyrus answered flatly. “But
I don’t care. I’ll take it.” He pushed up to his legs and shoved
his seat out from behind him. As he walked away, Cyrus called out
over his shoulder, “Keep in touch, witch.”

True to her word, Bernadette kept in touch. A
couple of days later, she called with the word that she was
certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Sunday was the Incarnate.
He’d been given the spiel that all the other bodyguards had been
given in anticipation of the Incarnate’s induction ceremony into
Bernadette’s bloated coven. There were policies to follow and
unbreakable rules that could cost lives as penalty for failure to
adhere to.

On the first night that Bernadette held
Sunday’s head and dropped the wool of forgetting over the child’s
eyes, she and Cyrus had an understanding. Cyrus was to head
Bernadette’s protection team and coordinate security for the
mansion built like a military compound. He was to plan for
attempted kidnappings of the Incarnate and assassination attempts
against Bernadette. He was to plug up any gaps in security that
would let villains in.

Because of the child’s particular effect on
Cyrus, however, he was never allowed to make contact with her. The
witch promised to help remedy his ailment under that single strict
condition.

For two weeks, Cyrus took store of
Bernadette’s compound and pored over blueprints. He identified
areas of lax security and wrote up plans to ensure that all
vulnerabilities were covered. Bernadette wasn’t kidding when she
said that hers was a burgeoning empire. The Seattle storefront for
the tele-psychic enterprise was jelly beans compared to the base of
operations. On the grounds resided a coven of thirteen men and
women, seasoned witches subordinate to Bernadette. She was ‘Mother
Bernadette’ and her children were as committed to the cause of the
Incarnate as she was.

Since they’d arrived, the estate was abuzz
with activity. Every second of every day, someone was dashing down
the hallway to and from the dungeon where they held the child for
the ritual. Cyrus never saw inside, but he could hear the chanting
echo down the hall. He could also hear the screams… until they
stopped.

This was the Incarnate’s first night outside
of the coven’s torture chamber. Cyrus stood guard outside the room
he’d placed her in to ensure that was the case. According to
Bernadette, she was no longer a threat to anyone under her service.
Bernadette requested that, on this one occasion, Cyrus make contact
with the girl, if only to prove that she was no longer a threat. He
was to transfer her from the ritual area to her new room.

Crumbled into a ball of oozing, broken, and
tender flesh, the girl he’d carried in his arms was nothing Cyrus
couldn’t handle. Yet what her survival signified created a panic in
him. When she looked up through thin slits to his face as her head
lolled on his shoulder, he caught himself wondering if he shouldn’t
just drop her and run, get the Hell away from her before she
destroyed him. The witch seemed to sense it, too. As soon as Cyrus
stepped out of the room where he deposited Sunday, Bernadette met
him in the hall.

“You see now that she is fixed,” she said,
grinning and with a glint in her dark eyes. “Yet, you, Mr. Barrow,
are
not
fixed. Let this be a lesson to you about the
magnitude of her ability. Be it the strength of her magnetism or
some unshakeable consequence of your curse, you will do well to
sever yourself from her entirely.
As obligated.
”

Cyrus nodded sharply with stone-like
expression before pulling the book from his back pocket and
settling into the chair across the hall.

“I’ll watch her for the night and then I’ll
assign one of the others to take over.”

Just as Bernadette reached the doorknob of
Sunday’s room with her thin hand, Cyrus added.

“A part of our agreement was to rid me of
this. You’re beholden to your end of that too.”

She looked over her shoulder and locked eyes
with him for a moment, assaulting him with unspoken intimidation.
Her narrow speculation would have chilled a lesser man to the bone.
. To Bernadette, she had all the power and Cyrus was nothing but an
employee.