Only that wasn’t entirely right. Collette had pulled me out of the church and gotten me across the river on her own.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Regrouping. Luther will be here with ze car soon, zen we will go back to ze hotel.”
Suddenly, I remembered. I hadn’t been able to find Helena in the chaos. Was she okay? Where were the other witches and had they been hurt? Had Collette been hurt? The questions fell out of my mouth like rushing water. Collette did her best to abate my fears, but my heart was still thundering hard against my chest, my head, in my throat.
Shit! “My leg!” I said, in full alarm. I sat up with Collette’s help, brushed the dirt from off my jeans and… and… where was it? The jeans were cut, and the stain of blood was on them. In fact, my fingers came off a little brownish red when I touched the area, but the skin was fine beneath the torn up fabric. A little pink, but otherwise fine.
I sat back against the wall and rested my head.
“It’s gone,” Collette said, “But… I saw her cut you.”
“I know,” I said. I could almost feel the searing pain from the slice, the way the blade bit into my skin and drew back with a silent rip. “But you know what the strangest part is?”
“What?”
“I know I was unconscious, but just I had the weirdest dream...”
Luther swung around in the Renault to pick us up in the minutes that followed. I was surprised to find the car devoid of other witches and also a little worried. But there was no time for questions now. Collette and I hurried into the car, shut the doors, and Luther took off down the street in the direction of Alexanderplatz—away from the Berlin Cathedral and Museum Island.
As we made a left turn and the church disappeared behind more modern buildings I wondered how much damage we had done to it.
“Where are the others?” I finally asked. “And Helena? Is she alright.”
Luther nodded. “She’s hurt, but alive. The others are alive too. We all made it out.”
I clipped the seatbelt on and rested my head on the backrest, sighing deeply. “Thank the Goddess.”
“No,” he said, “Thank you. Whatever you did sent her and her minions running. What was that, anyway?”
Moonfire.
“Just instinct.”
“Sorcerers,” he said, shaking his head.
“Listen to me very carefully, Luther,” Collette said, “I need you to find ze other witches when zis is all done and go with them. Zey will need your power, and we will need it too—when ze time calls for it.”
“I thought you might,” he said, “I suppose I’m in this now.”
“You have been in this for a long time. But now you are an active participant rather than an observer.”
“I don’t much like participation, but I can’t say I’m not delighted by the prospect that we may have put a little fear in her.”
“We may have done more zan zat.”
Collette was right. I could feel the change in the atmosphere; the air felt lighter, somehow, and the pressure I had felt from the moment we had landed in Berlin was gone. Whatever imp had been sitting on my chest wasn’t sitting there anymore, and I could breathe a little more easily as a result.
“I’ll find them,” Luther said. “I’m finished hiding.”
Back at the hotel, contact with Aaron came like a surprise kiss on the cheek from someone you hadn't expected to see.
As soon as we crossed the double doors into the lobby and my phone hooked onto the Wi-Fi, a stream of messages came through. Some from Aaron, some from Frank, some from Damien. They were all different, and yet they were all the same.
There had been a fire at the Stevenson house, no one had made it out alive, and you have to come home now.
I read the messages as we made our way through the lobby, up the elevator, and into the room, eyes glued to the screen. The details were vague, but the urgency… it was immediate and all encompassing. It was as if I could feel their collective wish for me to come home oozing off the phone in my hand.
The Stevensons, I thought, dead…
Shaking, I wrote back to Aaron asking for more details, telling him that I was alright, that we were back at the hotel, and that we would be on the next flight home; assuming we could catch it. Our open ticket let us return whenever we wanted to, a choice we had made to allow us the flexibility of coming back at a moment’s notice for just this reason.
I hit send.
Waited.
I watched little blue bar slide across the screen until the word sent, and then delivered, popped up under what I had written. I swallowed. Then a speech bubble appeared on the left of the screen, with an ellipse blinking inside of it.
“Collette,” I said, “Come look at this. Messages are coming through.”
Collette, who had been in the bathroom preparing for a shower, hunched over my right shoulder to have a look at the screen in my hand. She smiled brightly, and when Aaron’s message came through in reply she let out a little gasp of excitement and happiness.
“Do you think it’s—the demon—is gone?” I asked.
Her face pinched. “I don’t know, but it seems as though we’re able to speak to ze others… zis is a good sign.”
Aaron: Okay, I’ll let the others know. But it isn’t safe, Amber. It isn’t safe yet.
Me: The fact that I can talk to you is progress, though.
Aaron: Yeah, it is… and while I can talk to you, I want to tell you that I miss you…
Me: I miss you too.
I was in the process of writing another message to Aaron, to tell him that we may be home for Halloween after all. Because now that the demon had released its hold on us, and Acheris had been sent screaming into the night, I would be able to shift Fate to my favor a little without fear of unholy retribution. But when the phone fizzled, blinked, and went dead in my hand, the feeling of dread—which had become all too familiar to me—settled into the pit of my stomach like a dead weight.
That’s when I saw, in the black screen’s reflection, the dark figure standing over my left shoulder, reaching for me. I jerked bolt-upright, and the phone jumped out of my hand to land somewhere on the carpeted floor. Collette turned too, alarmed by my sudden movement. But when I reached into the Nether in my mind, to feel for the presence I had only barely caught a glimpse of, it was gone.
My heart was pounding for all the wrong reasons now, and my shivering had returned. I was sure I had a fever now, but I had to push through. I had to go home.
“Fuck,” I said, and then I said it over repeatedly. "It's still here. The thing is still here with us.”
Collette licked her lips. “We have to get out of Berlin and go back home. Demon or not, zis is not where ze real danger is.”
“I can feel it too,” I said, “I wanted to believe it was over… but it isn’t, is it?”
She turned around to look at me and shook her head, her expression grave and heavy on her face, hanging like storm clouds.
I nodded. “Let’s just pack our things and get out of here. You work on protecting us; I’ll make sure we have a flight home to get to.”
And if I can’t do that, then we’re stuck here.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Aaron hadn’t said a word since Frank and Damien arrived in the house. They had been considerably slower than he had on the run back, but that just meant they were in time to see green flames rising from the Stevenson’s place, licking at the night sky and chucking out plumes of thick smoke. There wasn’t even a house when they had gotten there; only an inferno of swirling, spinning, dizzying green fire.
Dark Fire.
The small wall-clock by Amber’s bookshelf was ticking away the seconds and outside the sounds the night had been replaced with an eerie, dead silence. It was as if the very world itself had been quietened, shocked by the atrocity that had been committed just next door. But the worst part was the smell of charred wood, singed earth and… burnt flesh. Damien tried to tune it ou
t, but the smell had embedded itself into his nostrils; a sick, deathly smell.
“There was nothing we could have done,” Damien finally said.
Aaron didn’t look up. Frank didn’t move either.
“The magick surrounding that house was strong; stronger than you, stronger than all of us.”
“I couldn’t get near it,” Aaron said in a low voice. “The fire was…”
“Alive,” Frank said, picking up Aaron’s sentence and finishing it like a relay runner. “I know. The Dark Fire isn’t a fire at all. It’s a beast, and one normal humans can’t see. They just see it as a normal fire.”
Damien nodded, remembering all too clearly his last encounter with the Dark Fire at the hands of his uncle. It had nearly killed Natalie, his ex-girlfriend, but he had managed to save her life and had thought that chapter of his history closed. But here it was again, calling out from the recesses of the past, like the serial killer in the movies that refuses to die.
Or it seems to die but then gets back up at the end for one last hurrah.
Aaron stood up, suddenly. “We find whoever is responsible for this,” he said.
Frank stood too. He went to touch Aaron’s shoulder, but Aaron jerked away from him. “Listen,” Frank said, “I want to go after them too, but we need to be careful right now. Do you really think the person who started the fire left breadcrumbs for us to follow? Do you think they were that stupid?”
Aaron swallowed. Damien also got to his feet, tugged on his shirt to stretch it out, and walked to the window. Outside, the flashing lights of Fire Engine 3 were still going silently. The fire had been put out, but the men had started to dig through the rubble, searching for the cause of the fire. It was Magick, he wanted to say, you won’t find anything there. But he couldn’t say anything, so instead he watched on.
“The town is going to be on high alert,” Frank said, “So if we start skulking around, looking suspicious, we’re only going to draw attention to ourselves.”
“So, what, we’re supposed to sit here and wait?”
“I’m not saying that—”
“Then what the hell are you saying? Because I’m fucking done with waiting.”
Damien’s eyes went over to where Aaron and Frank were standing. Aaron’s fists were flexing, open and closed, open and closed, and his shoulders were heaving with the rhythm of his deep breaths. He wanted an answer; he wanted something to do, someone to hurt. Damien could relate to that. He had his own brand of hurt to dish out, too. Only he was better at keeping his emotions locked up inside than Aaron was, and at this moment, it was better to hold one’s cards than to act because—
“It was a message,” Damien said.
Aaron whipped around. “What?” he asked.
“That’s why they didn’t hit our house.”
“They couldn’t have hit our house even if they had wanted to,” Frank said, “Do you know how much protection this place has?”
“I don’t think they wanted to,” Damien said, “They would have known this house was protected from the Dark Fire, but that’s not the reason why they didn’t hit us. They wanted to get our attention by hurting someone else, and they waited until we were all gone to do it.”
“Wait a minute,” Aaron said, “That means they’re watching the house.”
“Were watching the house,” Damien said, correcting, “I doubt they would be here right now. They would know we would figure this out and go looking for them. They also know we have a werewolf with us. Their attack on the Stevenson place was planned all along.”
Aaron didn’t move. “What’s the message?” he asked.
“Don’t you see?” Frank said before Damien could speak, “We’ve protected ourselves from them, but we haven’t protected anyone else. Until now, we hadn’t even considered they would go for anyone else, but… we were wrong. We were so fucking wrong.”
“They went for the hamstring instead of the throat,” Aaron said.
“Huh?” Damien asked.
“Wolves always go for the vulnerable spot on their prey. Normally, that’s the throat. But when they can’t get to that they’ll go for the hamstring. Slow them down, tire them out, and kill them that way.”
Frank paced around the living room and ran his hands through his dyed white-blonde hair. “Holy shit,” he said. “Ho-ly shit!”
“What is it?” Damien asked.
“The Halloween party! That’s what the fucking message was!”
Damien’s chest tightened and Aaron’s lips pressed into a thin line, both men in agreement of what Frank had just said. It became clear what the message had been, and what the purpose for the break in communication with Amber had been about. It wasn’t to keep them from helping her; it was to keep her from finding out what was going on at home. Because the Red Witch would surely be able to throw a monkey wrench into Acheris’s unknowable agenda for Raven’s Glen; plans that included the Dark Fire and mass murder.
But that realization raised another set of alarming questions, which would nibble at the back of Damien’s mind like rats fighting over a piece of cheese. What if it had been Acheris’s plan all along for Amber to go to Berlin? And if so, why separate her from her friends now? Why not do it sooner? Part of him couldn’t believe this had anything to do with the Halloween party. There was something else here, something she knew that no one else did. The Halloween party may only have been a target of convenience, if it indeed was a target at all, but if her goal had been to throw up a smokescreen for her unknowable plan she had succeeded.
Damien Colt didn’t sleep that night. Instead, he stayed up watching that big silver plate in the night sky sail silently across the length of his window.
Chapter Twenty Eight
The thing about demons is this: they don’t like being in the spotlight.
Once you’re on to it, it slinks back into the shadows and disappears like the feral cat you’ve just caught trying to sneak in through your doggy door for a quick snack. And, sure, it makes you wonder why it made itself known to you in the first place. But the other thing about demons is that they’re embodiments of vice, and one of the biggest vices is vanity. So they live within a constant state of contrast and conflict: one side of them wants people to feel their hands at work, while the other hides its identity with vicious passion. And once you know this about a demon it becomes easy to keep them at bay. At least for a while.
Through our combined workings of Magick, we could secure an outbound flight to London the day after the incident at the Berlin Cathedral, with a connecting flight to the US three hours after landing in the UK. It was easy enough to nudge Fate into triggering a couple of last-minute cancellations for us, but swinging it so that the flight was on the same night was a much harder thing to do.
So we waited. We ate. Slept—or didn’t. And the next day we left Luther, Helena and her witches, and Berlin behind us as we made the long journey back to American soil, back to Aaron and Damien and Frank, back to Raven’s Glen, and back to the place that existed only a stone’s-throw away from Acheris’s base of operations in Seattle. Seattle, of all places. It was still a little unbelievable, but it was also fortunate. All I had to do was keep a clear image of the skyline in my mind and try to figure out where that penthouse was in relation to the Space Needle. Then I could just show up one day, without the use of a trans-location ritual, and blow it away.
“Amber?” Collette asked, nudging me.
I opened my eyes and looked at her. “Hmm?” I asked.
“Are you alright? You were speaking in your sleep.”
“Oh… I wasn’t sleeping.” I might have been.
“But you… just said blow it away.”
“Did I? I guess I was sleeping then. Where are we?”
“Final descent into San Francisco.”
A yawn spilled out of me, and I stretched into it. “That’s awesome,” I said, “I had a feeling I’d sleep on the way home.”
Collette nodded. “I did also, I think.”
I sighed. “Aaron won’t be there to pick us up. He has no idea we’re even landing today. I hated that I couldn’t get a message out to him.”
“Don’t worry about zat,” she said, “We will make it home with time to spare.”
“Time to spare?”
Collette drew in a breath, paused, and said, “To make ze party, of course.”
For the first time since we met, I was sure Collette had just lied. Or, well, maybe it wasn’t a lie per se, but it was a hesitation. She hadn’t meant to say that we would make it home with time to spare. Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe she couldn’t find the right words—you know, what with being French and all—and had confused herself. But it didn’t feel like confusion; it felt like a hesitation. Like an omission.
I chose not to make a big deal out of it, though, and we continued on our trip until our plane touched down at SFO International.
There, we went through the usual baggage reclaim scenario, and I tried—in vain—to get through to Aaron on his cell. But Collette stopped at a courier desk and started to make arrangements to have our bags forwarded on to my home address. Before I could protest, she was grabbing our suitcases, signing paperwork, and paying the woman behind the counter. Just like that, our bags were swallowed up by the FedEx conveyor belt, not to be seen—I hoped—until later.
“Why did we just do that?” I asked, “We could’ve just gotten a rent-a-car.”
“It is 19:37. Ze drive back to Raven’s Glen would add another hour or so to our travel time, and we do not have zat luxury.”
My brows furrowed again all on their own.
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned… time,” I said. “Are you going to tell me why you’re so concerned with time?”
She shook her head, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the ladies' toilets just by the airport main exit. It was clean, shiny, and smelt vaguely of disinfectant, but it was also empty, and I gathered that was what Collette needed. We clearly hadn’t come in here in such a hurry because she needed to pee.