Chapter 21
Marta
I sat at the breakfast table, nursing my coffee and my hangover, wondering where I’d gone wrong.
The guys hadn’t woken up yet, but I was thankful for the time alone to think.
Memories from the night before drifted to the forefront.
Atlas’s voice, deep, demonic, commanding.
Wes’s eyes, dark and endless. The untenable rapture coursing my body, insatiable and reckless and terrifying.
I’d known flesh binding was going to be intense.
I’d read stories about it before. But not like that.
It should have drained me, the way the first ritual did.
Instead, I was invigorated, like my skin was on fire and my blood was full of adrenaline and my nerves were firing faster than the rest of me could keep up.
I could run a marathon if I needed to. I could scale entire buildings with one leap.
More than that, a flickering alarm kept blaring in the back of my mind, reminding me to pay more attention.
I registered Atlas and Wes outside of me, their combined potency nearly overwhelming.
The ritual had completed its intended effect, and if we kept going, it would work.
I’d bet we were close enough now that I could draw on one of them if needed.
But I sensed something else, too. A shadow in the bond.
A lingering coldness that shouldn’t be there.
It flickered like a lone candle at the end of a long tunnel, barely there, almost invisible, but undoubtedly present.
What is that? Where is it coming from?
This wasn’t right, and the more I ruminated on it, the more I feared Atlas might have had a point.
Maybe we should have taken it slower. Perhaps I should have been more cautious.
Something had been unleashed in us last night, something I should have seen coming.
I thought we were prepared. I’d made sure we had every protection possible.
What am I missing?
I dug my palms into my eyes and bit back the sting of pain. I had no idea what I was doing anymore. Maybe we should stop this. Perhaps we should just accept that our lives were here now. Stuck together for eternity.
Words echoed in my mind, advice that seemed like it had been given to me centuries ago.
“The time has come when you must fight. You must forsake your rage at what isn’t, and focus on what is. You must channel your anger into faith, and faith into action.”
Rage into faith, and faith into action. Was it God? Was I supposed to fall to my knees and pray for help? How could I do that when I was still so angry at Him? He’d taken my parents from me and put me here, in some impossible situation.
“You will want to give up. You must not do this. You were given many gifts, mi hija. Do not let them go to waste.”
What gifts? After last night, I didn’t feel very gifted at all. No, I felt like a naive little girl playing with magic for the first time with no clue as to the consequences of my actions.
I thought about Tita’s advice again.
“You must pray.”
Would that really help? God and I hadn’t had a relationship in years, but what could it hurt? I crossed my hands in front of me and bowed my head, reciting old words that hadn’t fallen from my lips in over a decade.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” I finished the prayer and waited for some kind of response, some energetic exchange to tell me it was working. But nothing came, and I shook my head as that familiar resentment settled in my stomach like cement.
Día de Muertos would start at midnight. There was no turning back now.
We needed to stick to the plan: finish the soul-binding ritual, open the veil, and push while my sisters pulled.
I hoped they pulled. I was banking on Tita giving them my message.
And if not, if we were truly on our own, we’d go down swinging.
Would it be enough? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
“Hey,” came a grumbled voice from behind me. Wes ran his hand back through his hair and limped to the cabinet with the glasses before going to the fridge to pour himself water.
“Hey.” I quickly wiped away my tears. “How are you feeling?”
He straightened and shifted his shoulders. “Suspiciously great. Despite the muscle aches. How about you?”
“Okay,” I said out loud. “It seems like the flesh binding is still holding up.”
“Uh-huh,” he agreed as he took a seat next to me, bouncing his knee under the table. “I’m not sure how I feel about you and my brother being in my head all the time.”
I laughed and shook my head. “Same here.”
“So…uh…about last night.” Wes cleared his throat and sipped his water, shifting uncomfortably like he couldn’t stay still.
“It was intense,” I said. “But nothing we can’t handle.”
“Right,” he said. “Do you feel any different?”
Like I could run from here to the moon and back? Like unsure about what to do next, combined with debilitating insecurity different?
“Exactly,” he said. I froze for a moment before I remembered Wes was inside my head. I was inside his. He’d heard my thoughts.
Wes licked his lips, and my focus dropped to the movement. I remembered that tongue doing wicked things to my skin, making me ache and plead and beg for more. “What do you mean you’re unsure about what to do next?”
“I don’t think we did it right,” I said.
“I mean, we’re hearing each other’s thoughts and the energy in my veins…
It’s intoxicating. I think I could maybe draw from one of you now, and that must mean we’re getting closer to the warrior bond.
But…I sense something else. Something sinister.
Something we shouldn’t have messed with. ”
Wes swallowed and glanced down, avoiding my gaze. “Something sinister. Do you know what it is?”
“No. I just…I think Atlas might have been right,” I said. “I’m not sure we should—”
“Right about what?” Atlas said, suddenly walking into the kitchen to take his spot across from me. He stretched his arms over his head and yawned before grabbing the carafe of coffee between us to pour himself a mug.
“How are you feeling about last night?” I asked, pretending not to notice the apparent tension between them. Wes wouldn’t look at him, and Atlas had barely glanced at his brother.
“Fine,” Atlas said. “Great. Spectacular.”
“No lingering side effects?” I raised my eyebrows, surprised that he hadn’t had the same terrifying release as Wes and me.
Atlas straightened and finally looked at his brother. “What? What am I missing?”
“Something’s wrong,” I added. “There’s something we missed. It’s like…” I struggled to put it into words. It twisted in my gut like food poisoning, like I might heave and wretch and still not purge it.
Wes tilted his head to one side, cracking his neck before doing the same on the other.
“What happens in the liminal stays in the liminal, right?” Atlas raised his eyebrows. “We said we wouldn’t make more of it than it needed to be, and honestly, you both were fucking hot. I’ve never come so hard in my life.”
Heat rushed into my cheeks, and I tried to hide my smile. I could say the same thing, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. Atlas was almost unhinged last night, drunk with dominance and magic. And Wes had begged his brother to fuck him like his literal life depended on it.
“Then what did you mean?” Atlas asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s something else there. Another presence, maybe.”
It wanted, it clawed, and it wriggled around in my soul like a maggot in a vat of rotten meat.
“Another presence? That sounds ominous,” he said. “Are you saying you fucked up the spell you didn’t know anything about in the first place?”
“Oh, fuck off, Atlas.” I groaned. “I’m tired, and fighting about it isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
He scoffed and rolled his eyes, but dropped the issue.
“I’ve never felt like that before in a ritual,” I said. “You might have been right about holding off for a bit. Maybe we should—”
“I’m sorry, what?” Atlas barked, shifting his glare to his brother. “We get this far, we swap blood and flesh and cum, and now you want to hold off?”
Deafening silence fell between us. I didn’t have a response to his outburst. I didn’t know what to say.
“We’re running out of time. You said so yourself. Día de Muertos starts tonight,” Atlas snarled. “It’s too late to turn back.”
“Atlas,” Wes cut in.
“I want to get out of here,” Atlas snapped. “I don’t care what the fuck we awakened in that damned library. You convinced me this was what we had to do, so we’re doing it.”
He was panting by the time he was done, and his frustration echoed straight down the bond into my soul. But there was more to it, a fury he might not have even been aware of. Whatever strange presence I felt, it was in him, too. It was in all of us.
“What’s next?” Atlas rubbed a hand over his face and back into his hair.
I sighed. “The soul binding. Tonight. I’m still not sure how we’ll react to it.” I glanced at the table between us. “But we’re out of time. If we plan to do this when the veil is thinnest, that’s at midnight.”
“Are we ready?” Wes bounced his knee under the table harder, twitching and blinking, biting his fingernails. Had he always done that? I was about to ask him what was wrong, but I never got it out.
A loud blast burst my eardrums, and the windows shattered, shooting glass fragments across the room.
I ducked and curled my hands over my head to protect myself, and when I glanced up again, dark obsidian swirls spiraled in thick, angry clouds outside.
They beat against the side of the estate, thundering for entry, wailing on the wards.
“Fuck, we have to move.” Atlas stood and rushed around the table, grabbing Wes’s hand before latching onto mine to drag us into the hallway. We raced past the library into the parlor, coming to an abrupt stop when we realized the magic surrounding us had faltered.
Wisps of smoke poured in from the broken windows as the energy that was supposed to protect the house splintered. It cracked as the cloud invaded it, sizzling and electrifying, sending terror through my bloodstream.
I could fight it. I was amped up on adrenaline from our bond, but my tools were upstairs in my room. I hadn’t been as diligent about keeping them on me since we’d been stuck here. We hadn’t had any reason to.
“Wes, go get my tools. My satchel and the holy water.”
He turned and raced upstairs without argument, leaving Atlas and me to fight off the monster.
I didn’t know how much good that would do, seeing as it was bigger than any demon I’d ever had to fight.
And if it had gotten through the wards at the estate, it was more powerful, too.
Fighting back the urge to run, I stood firm and held up my hand, pulling on the remaining energy from the grounds, sucking it up through my feet and into my chest.
“I expel you, demon,” I said. “By the ancestors and the great will of my coven, be gone from my sight. You are not welcome here.”
Deep, horrifying laughter echoed from all around us, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere.
“You cannot exorcise me here, witch,” it said. “This is my realm. You made it for me.”
I took a step back and grabbed Atlas’s hand as his vitality coursed through my veins. It was weak, nowhere near as strong as it was before we lost our bond, but it was undeniably there.
“Take it,” Atlas said. “Use it.”
I yanked on the tiny sliver of thread tying us together and drew as much of him into me as I could, reciprocating that energy with my own.
Then, I chanted in Latin. I said the right words and I channeled the right energy, but the demon only seemed to grow in size.
It towered over us, pitch-black mist swirling around us, its beady red eyes glaring down at me.
My spell did nothing. The demon laughed harder.
“I have enjoyed your attempts to defeat fate,” it snarled. “Your magic is exhilarating.”
I ignored its goading and kept going, kept focusing on my connection to Atlas, on the small trickle of magic I could pull from him, sending it out of my hand in a bright white light. But I was waning fast, and without my tools, I couldn’t hold it off much longer.
“Wes!” I reached out to him mentally, sensing his approaching presence. He was coming back, descending the stairs, storming toward us. He shoved the leather satchel in my hands, and I reached inside to get my holy water, but the distraction cost us.
The demon pulled on the ancient magic in the earth, tugging it from me as quickly as I could gather it. It fed its maelstrom, which grew to cover the entire lower level as it broke apart the walls and swirled furniture over our heads.
Wes handed Atlas his gun, and the two of them fired salt-loaded bullets into the fray. But it did nothing except piss the demon off more.
I realized three things in a matter of seconds.
One: Holy water wasn’t going to cut it. Nothing I could do would defeat this magnitude of chaos.
Two: The estate was finished. If it had consumed the wards and the ancestral magic, it would have pulled this place down with us in it.
And three: We couldn’t stay here. We had to flee.
We had to get to safety. But in the liminal, I didn’t know where that could be.
“Marta!” Atlas screamed in my mind, backing up so he stood at my left while he fired into the tornado of evil. “Do something.”
“We need to leave,” I said.
They didn’t wait to argue. The ceiling ripped apart, wood and cement crumbling around us as we took off through the front door.
My heart pounded as my feet raced toward Leander’s truck.
I hopped in the passenger seat while Atlas climbed in the driver’s and Wes took the back.
He brought the vehicle to life just as the roof collapsed on the century-old building and, as we sped down the driveway, I watched my second home, my sanctuary, crumble into dust and ashes.