19. Black Moon Rising
19
BLACK MOON RISING
I was going to die in Jasper Wilcox’s basement…and there wasn’t a single damn thing I could do about it.
Right after he’d delivered that hideous revelation about me being his dark moon sacrifice, he must have put some kind of sleep spell on me, because I couldn’t remember a single thing about what happened next, only that the entire world had gone black.
But then I awoke in darkness and realized I couldn’t move. Sometime during those intervening hours, he’d moved me down to the basement and laid me on top of the long table Seth and I had noticed earlier, the one draped all in black.
Well, I supposed the dark fabric would hide a lot of bloodstains.
It seemed Jasper wasn’t content to rely on only his magic to hold me in place, since my ankles were bound together and more ropes encircled my wrists, ensuring that I wasn’t going anywhere. Already my arms were tired from being held down in such an unnatural position, flung as wide as they could go with my hands almost off the edge of the tabletop, but I had a feeling that aching muscles would soon be the least of my problems.
Utter silence down here. In my dreams, I’d seen figures in hooded robes, but it seemed the partygoers hadn’t yet shown up, because as far as I could tell, no one else currently occupied the basement.
Maybe they were all upstairs having cocktails and canapés before they headed down here to watch Jasper Wilcox sacrifice me to whatever gods he thought might be listening.
I swallowed and realized how dry my throat was. Somehow I doubted that whenever Jasper and his flock appeared, they’d worry too much about giving me something to drink.
After all, why would they care if their victim was thirsty when she was about to be very, very dead?
My entire body was chilled, although I didn’t know for sure whether the icy sensations in my limbs and my core were because of dread over my approaching doom, or simply that the basement was freezing.
I remembered that it had snowed earlier. Not a heavy snow, nothing to cause massive drifts or even leave much accumulation on the sidewalks and the roads, but it still would have been enough to make the temperature outside positively icy.
But again, it didn’t matter if I was cold, did it? Soon I’d be dead, and then I’d have a lot more to worry about.
Or maybe nothing at all. Most of witch-kind believed in an afterlife — it was the sort of thing that was kind of hard to ignore when there were those among your clan who could talk to ghosts — but lying there on that hard table, I wasn’t sure what I believed.
Coming back as a ghost might not be a bad bargain, though. With any luck, I could hang around the house and break things and moan in the middle of the night and use my otherworldly anger to seize all the furniture and throw it out onto the lawn, or bundle up all the table linens and use them as fuel in the fireplace. Whatever little supernatural tricks I could think of to let Jasper Wilcox know that sacrificing me had been a spectacularly bad idea.
Although it made me feel a little better to imagine all the ways I could wreak my ghostly revenge on the Wilcox primus, that still couldn’t rid me entirely of the gnawing dread in my belly.
Or the regret. I was going to die here without being able to say goodbye to Seth or give him one last kiss. Did he even have any idea of what had happened to me?
Well, he must have some inkling, even if he wouldn’t have been able to return to Wilcox territory to come in search of me, not when I wouldn’t be there to conceal him from all those hostile witches and warlocks.
As to why he hadn’t come to my rescue….
He would have tried, I knew, even as irrational anger rose in me that there hadn’t been a single attempt to break me out of here. But I had a feeling everyone in the McAllister clan had done their damnedest to convince him there was nothing he could do, and that even if his talent was a strong one, it still would never be enough to give him even the smallest chance of defeating Jasper Wilcox.
Especially when Seth knew as well as I did that he would get absolutely no backup from the elders or his fragile prima.
Voices began to drift down from upstairs, telling me someone must have opened the door to the basement. As far as I could tell, all those voices were male, which meant Jasper apparently wasn’t comfortable having any of the women in his clan witness what he was about to do.
I supposed that made sense. While they might have understood the need to put themselves at risk so the lineage of the Wilcox primuses could carry on, they may have drawn the line at actual human sacrifice.
And if those men were coming down here now, then the fateful hour had probably arrived.
The ropes holding me down were far too tight for me to even think about wriggling out of them. But I didn’t have to physically move to get out of here. A blink to send me into the future — in that awful moment, I didn’t much care when — and then I’d be past all this ugliness, and Jasper would find that his prize had slipped through his fingers.
Except when I focused on sending myself forward, nothing happened.
Shit.
Well, my gift had never been the most reliable thing in the world, but it would have been nice if it could have behaved itself just this once.
I wasn’t about to give up. Past, future — it didn’t much matter when I was, as long as it wasn’t this awful time with the seconds ticking down to the dark of the moon, when all sorts of black deeds could be done with no betraying light to reveal them to a watching world.
But still I lay there, heart pounding in my chest, my entire body weak with rushing adrenaline that had nowhere to go.
One of the hooded figures paused by the table.
“I suppose you’re wondering why your gift has betrayed you,” came Jasper’s voice from within the hood. For some reason, I thought I would have heard triumph in his tone, but instead he sounded preternaturally calm. “Simple enough. I knew you would try to slip into the future or the past, so I made sure to ward this place so you wouldn’t be able to use your particular brand of magic.”
Dammit. I’d already begun to suspect that might have been what was going on, but it didn’t feel any better to have the Wilcox primus confirm those suspicions in that gloating tone.
“This isn’t going to solve anything,” I told him. My voice shook slightly, and I hated myself for that betraying moment of weakness…even though I guessed most people probably would have excused me for not being at my best right then.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Jasper replied. “I think it’s going to solve a great many things.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said. Tears had begun to leak from my eyes, and while it might have been a silly thing to worry about, I really hated how I couldn’t even reach up to wipe them away, not with my arms strapped down to the table like that. “I can travel in time, you clueless asshole. I know how all this is going to turn out — and that future doesn’t happen just because you gathered your pack of hyenas here with you to slit an innocent woman’s throat.”
If that was even how he planned to sacrifice me. Maybe it would be a dagger in the heart instead…or something even worse, something my mind couldn’t quite manufacture.
For a second or two, I thought my words might have gotten through to him. He paused, holding himself very still as he gazed down at my face.
But then he laughed, dark eyes glinting with malicious amusement.
“I suppose you think that you’re being clever in trying to delay me,” he said.
“‘Clever’ has nothing to do with it,” I replied, even though I knew it would be wonderful if I could keep him talking until the fateful moment had passed.
Fat chance of that happening.
“I just thought you should know that you’re going to commit murder and get absolutely nothing out of it.”
An unpleasant smile still played around his lips. Although it was too dim in there for me to tell exactly how many goons Jasper had brought with him, I thought it had to be at least three or four, maybe even more than that if some of them were hanging back in the shadows.
Even unbound, there was no way I could have taken on a bunch of grown men, all of whom must have some sort of powerful magical gifts…even if I couldn’t say for sure what those talents might be.
And although I had no idea how Jasper had done it, I guessed whatever spells he’d put in place to block my magic were narrowly focused on me and my particular talent. After all, if he was planning to use my blood to fuel some sort of unholy ritual, then he couldn’t have blocked all magic and its users, or the ceremony would have been nothing more than show, with no teeth to it.
“This is not murder,” he said. “This is necessary.”
“No, it isn’t,” I protested. “That’s what I keep trying to tell you, but you can’t seem to get it through your thick head that none of this is going to help you the slightest bit.”
His mouth compressed at the “thick head” slur, but I was beyond caring at that point whether I offended him or not. I was just doing my best to avoid dying in the next five minutes.
“I am not going to waste any more time on this,” he said, and his head lifted, almost as though he’d heard or sensed something in the heavens far above this gloomy basement.
The moon sliding into those few moments of absolute darkness?
I hadn’t felt a single thing, so I couldn’t say for sure.
All I knew was that my entire body had gone tense, knowing the time was here.
I was going to die.
A flash at the corner of my vision, and I shifted as best I could on the tabletop, once again pulling at the ropes that held me in place, fully knowing I wouldn’t be able to get free…and also knowing I was still going to struggle as much as I could.
No way was I going to let Jasper Wilcox slit my throat without a fight.
Except, miraculously, one of my hands was now free.
Another flash, this one at my feet. My eyes focused for a single second, and I realized it was Seth standing there. He held a short knife, one that must have been very sharp, because it cut through the rope binding my ankles without slowing down a bit.
Astonishment and hope and sheer relief flooded through me. Before I could react, though, Jasper shouted, “He’s trying to free her. Grab him!”
Easier said than done. While I’d watched Seth as he teleported several times during our journeys together, I’d never seen him like this, blinking in and out of existence so fast, it almost seemed as if he was The Flash rather than an ordinary warlock.
No, scratch that.
There was absolutely nothing ordinary about Seth McAllister.
He appeared behind Jasper next, grabbing him by the arm and yanking him backward just as he was about to reach out and seize my free hand. But before Jasper could summon some kind of spell to blast him away, Seth disappeared again, this time reappearing on the other side of the table, where he grabbed the two warlocks who’d been standing there and knocked their heads together.
They didn’t exactly go down in a heap, but they both staggered, clearly put off balance by the unexpected attack. The warlock standing nearest me tried to take hold of my feet, but I kicked out, catching him right in the groin.
He let out a whoof of air and bent over double, doing his best to catch his breath. Jasper hadn’t taken off my shoes when he bound me to the table, so I was still wearing the same pumps with the low, blocky heels I’d had on when he caught me trying to escape.
Turns out they weren’t half-bad in a fight.
Now Seth appeared on the other side of the table, knife flashing again as he freed the one remaining limb that had been bound by those damn ropes. At once, his arm went around my waist, and he held me close.
“You will not have her!” Jasper growled, and his hands lifted as though he was preparing to fling some kind of awful magic at us.
Except whatever he’d thought would happen…didn’t. I knew I’d tensed and clung to Seth that much tighter, but the primus might as well have been hurling only insults, since we both seemed completely untouched.
“Protection spell,” Seth said with a grin, then looked down at me. “You ready to get out of here?”
“Absolutely,” I replied.
But then I looked over at Jasper, whose face was suffused with anger, his ineffectual fists clenched at his sides. I had no idea who had cast the protection spell on Seth, but right then, I was very, very glad of its help, because the primus looked as though he was ready to murder us with his bare hands.
“And Jasper?” I added, staring right into his furious black eyes.
He didn’t bother to respond, but that was all right.
I already knew what I needed to say.
“This girl from the future just wanted to let you know that you’re going to die alone.”
Seth’s arms tightened on me, and then Jasper and the shadowy basement and his cloaked lackeys were gone.