Chapter sixteen
An hour later, I’ve become a student, with the book as my teacher.
Equipped with a pad and pen that Micah supplied, I’ve meticulously listed out as many of the different types of demons as time has allowed, and, most importantly, how to kill them.
I’m presently studying “Wallows,” some sort of monster that possesses a human for no reason other than its insatiable love of human food.
The problem is that the possessed human does nothing but eat, at the expense of all other parts of life.
The Wallow also considers Seers a tasty delicacy.
They are so lesser that gold is a simple death for them, unlike the far more complex killing of many other species, it seems.
I flip the page as a phone on the wall by the fridge rings. I hesitate but walk in that direction and answer the line. “Hello,” I say cautiously. Caution, I vow, is my new motto.
“I sent someone to bring you to the training facility,” Micah says without a greeting.
“Don’t give her a hard time. None of this is her fault.
” He hangs up, and I grind my teeth. Does he think I am so difficult that I would just give a random person trouble?
And why is it okay for me to leave the room without him now, and it wasn’t before?
I hang up the receiver, and already there’s a knock on the door. “Please do not let this be Celine,” I murmur to the empty room, because if she tries to kill me, I’m pretty sure those “assets” of mine will find a way to be useful.
I walk to the door and open it, finding a teenage girl with a pop of wavy red hair and a splatter of freckles across her nose waiting on the other side. She lifts a tentative hand. “Hi,” she greets. “I’m Ariella.”
I guess Ariella to be about fifteen and already, at such a tender age, donned in leather, too young by my standards to require protection from a demon bite.
“Ariella,” I repeat, and when she thrusts her small hand at me, I shake it, her grip surprisingly firm, her eyes a hazel brownish color that, thankfully, remain a hazel brownish color.
Our hands part, and she shoves hers inside her back pockets.
“You really do have his eyes.” Her voice is filled with awe and amazement, which tells me I’ve forgotten a very important question: How many Crystal Seers are there?
At least partially, she’s given me that answer, or rather, confirmed what I’ve surmised from my conversations with Micah.
Not many. For my new visitor, there is apparently only one other, and that one is Micah—Crystal Seer and Overseer.
“Everyone is talking about you,” she says softly. “That’s why they sent me.”
I tilt my head. “Why would they send you?”
“I’m a Sensory Seer. I feel good and evil within the ranks of the Seers.”
“I thought Micah said only a Crystal Seer could read a Crystal Seer.”
“We have a limited ability with your kind, but it still works. You feel like Micah.”
Instinctively, I breathe out relief, shocked when Ariella casts me a curious look. “Why did you just feel relief?”
“Because demons are obsessed with me. I want to be like him. I want to kill them. And, for the record, the strangest thing about that admission is everything. Only weeks ago, I thought I was human. I thought demons were fiction. I thought…a lot of wrong things. It’s all so, as I said, strange.”
She smiles a beaming smile. “Strange but true. And you’ll kill your share of demons. I feel that in you, too. Actually, you’ll kill many. You’ll make them hurt.”
She’s still smiling as she delivers news of the killings in my future, and it’s kind of creepy. “Ah, well…Where are we going?”
“To Micah,” she says, opening her leather jacket, the hilt of a blade on display. “And I’m under instruction to kill anyone who comes near you until you’re able to fully appreciate your assets.”
Good Lord, she’s a teenager under orders to kill for me. I don’t like it. A kid is not a killer, should not have to be a killer, and Micah will soon hear from me on this. I join her in the hallway, and the door snaps shut, buzzing at my exit and telling me I’m now locked out.
We start walking. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen. Over halfway to Seer maturity.”
“What is Seer maturity?”
“When our aging process slows and our assets are in their prime.”
When the aging process slows, I think incredulously. I’m still trying to remember that this is not a Harry Potter novel. This is my life. I file the age issue away for later retrieval. “Have you lived under Micah’s rule your entire life?”
“Yes. I was born under his rule.”
“And he’s a good leader? He’s hard to read.”
She snorts. “Micah? He trusts you, you live. Otherwise, you’re dead. We all love that about him.”
“You love that about him?”
“Of course we do. It keeps us all alive. He keeps us all alive.” She glances over at me. “Now you will, too.”
I stifle an image of the old woman and her predictions for fear Ariella will somehow feel that in me.
Somehow read my thoughts, though she hasn’t proclaimed that to be her skill.
She simply feels me and then reads me, not my thoughts.
Whatever the case, that woman has no place in my present company.
For now, I focus on trying to memorize a complex maze of hallways that finally ends at a crimson door. The blood door, I think, even before Ariella announces, “The blood door.”
It’s almost as if I’ve plucked the name from her mind, which is ridiculous. I can do no such thing. She fingers a buzzer. The door jerks open and reveals Micah standing on the other side, big, broad, and powerful in this moment in a way that literally steals the breath of those around him.
His eyes find mine, and the hum of his magic is mesmerizing and addictive. It’s the only way to describe the pull I feel toward him. “Thank you, Ariella,” he says without looking at her. “You can go now.”
“Yes, Overseer.” Her footsteps patter away, obedience in her departure.
I tug away from the hold he has on me, wondering if he expects the same from me. “Never,” he says, clearly reading my mind.
My attention rockets back to him, crystal fire in the depths of his stare, anger between us that is inescapable, unexplainable. Well, aside from the fact that he keeps jumping in my head. “How do you know what I was thinking?”
He backs up, inviting me to join him in the next room—a message in the actions. My answers lie beyond the blood door. I don’t hesitate. I step forward, uncertain of what awaits me or what he has planned for me next, but ready to find out. Nonetheless, I’m relieved at what I find.
The room is no dungeon or torture chamber but rather a giant gym of some sort with mats spread across the majority of the floor. The door slams behind me, locks bolting into place—magic, I think—but I do not jump or turn.
“They worship you,” I say, certain he understands I mean Ariella and his people.
“They respect me,” he corrects.
“And yet, you allow a teenager to fight demons and protect me?”
“She’s had a lifetime of training. You’ve had no training.
” Suddenly, his hands press to my shoulders, when a moment before, he wasn’t this near.
I’m shoved backward, he’s shoving me, and then I hit the wall so hard my bones rattle and the air gushes from my lungs.
I recover with a rush of adrenaline to realize my hands are over my head, shackled by his bigger, stronger ones. “What are you doing?” I demand.
“What do you want?”
“To hit you,” I say.
“Do it,” he orders, his crystal eyes cutting through me.
“Let me go, and I will.”
“Make me,” he challenges.
“Is a knee your preference?”
“Make me,” he repeats. “Or maybe you’re too afraid or too weak. Maybe you’re too human and too selfish to be a Seer. Maybe you are the enemy.” He leans in closer, his body molded to mine. His hand slides over my backside, branding me, claiming me when I am not his to claim.
Something sparks in the air. Magic. My magic, I think, but it does nothing against his or against him. “Stop.”
But he isn’t done. “I could take you, just like Ryker would have taken you if I hadn’t saved you for me. You’re so weak that I could do anything to you, and you wouldn’t be able to stop me.”
I have no idea what happens, but there is this strange shadow in my mind, and then I snap.
Panic merges with white-hot fury, and in my mind’s eye, there is a cobra, a snake, that strikes, and then it’s like it crawls inside me and takes over.
I shove Micah away and keep shoving. A blur of spots fills my vision until I’m slamming him against the opposite wall several feet away.
“You will never take anything from me I do not want to give,” I hiss. “Do you understand?”
He smiles—actually smiles—his approval. “As it should be, Ember,” he says. “As I expect it to be, but I had to make you find that part of you. You’re strong. You’ll get stronger.”
My hand falls from the hot branding on his chest, and I step back, my body tingling, my spine pricking with some sort of energy. The snake. It’s like the damn thing is inside me. “What…what just happened?”
“What animal did you see?”
I blanch. “What?”
“Every Crystal Seer has a familiar that fights with them. What animal did you see?”
Animal. I’m supposed to have an animal? A snake is not an animal. A snake destroyed Eden. The fortune teller is back in my head: You will end the world. Anger fills me at her prediction, at the unknowns—at Micah for doing that to me and not warning me. “What did you just do?”
“Forced you to become your destiny. You have to learn to fight with your familiar. You need to know your body. Remember that you don’t have physical limitations you’ve assumed in the past. You can’t break a bone.
You can die, but not easily. We aren’t exactly counting cholesterol, but we do count bullets.
Too many of them can end badly, but a cut or minor injury will heal quickly. ” He throws a punch at my face.
My arm lifts and my wrist blocks his, and that shadow slithers in my mind. “Are you crazy? What if you would have hit me?”
“You’d get over it,” he assures me, and throws another punch. I block it again.
“Stop doing that,” I order.
“Make me,” he grinds out again, with yet another thrust of his fist.
From there, we begin a vicious exchange of him punching, me punching, and I forget objecting.
I forget everything but the battle and how fast and strong his every action and move is.
I don’t want him to be faster and stronger, and I see the snake again, or rather, feel it there, inside me.
I heave back and charge him with a force that sends him flying backward, with me coming down on top of him.
I straddle him and flatten my hands on his chest. He catches my wrists. “Now what, Seer?”
“I kill you?”
“Interesting,” he replies.
“What’s interesting?”
“You’re thinking about killing me, and I’m thinking that you turned down my bed, and now you’re on top of me. But then Seers are known for liking things rough.”
“You’re trying to get in my head again. You’re trying to rattle me. It won’t work. And that’s not funny, anyway.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“No,” I say, feeling the recoil of the snake, the calmness overcoming me. “No, it’s not, and I didn’t turn down your bed. You weren’t in it.”
“Would that have made a difference?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly, confused in all kinds of ways about him.
He studies me a long beat before he says, “I wasn’t with Celine, if that’s what you think. There’s nothing left between me and Celine.”
“Does she know that?”
“She has an unhealthy obsession with me.” He tugs the wrist he still holds and pulls me down against him.
I gasp with the shock of the intimacy, our mouths so very close, my hands settling on the warm, hard wall of his chest. I don’t push away. I don’t even think about distance. “Micah,” I murmur, his name a whisper on my tongue while my body roars with the feel of him pressed to me.
“She also believes I have an unhealthy obsession with you.”
I can barely breathe. I shouldn’t want this to be true. I shouldn’t. And yet, I find myself asking, “Because of Jeremy?”
“No. Not because of Jeremy. You and I, we’re alike. She and I are not.”
My emotions are pinging all over the place, and I don’t know what is real and what is part of the combat game he’s playing with me. My fingers curl roughly around the cotton of his shirt. “No. Stop. Just stop.”
“Stop what, Ember?”
“You just said you saved me to do anything to me you want to do.”
He rolls me over, and his big body settles on top of me. “To piss you off. To make you fight. To make you use your powers.”
“Do it a different way.”
“No. I will not be gentle, Ember.”
“I’m not asking you to be gentle.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Good. It wouldn’t matter if you did. I’d still push. I have to push. Because next time there’s a demon like Ryker on top of you, like I am now, you need to know you have the power. He does not. Make him pay. Kill him. I won’t always be there to save you.”
“Stop saying that. I don’t want you to save me. I can save myself.”
“Exactly. Good. Then we train, and we train some more. What animal did you see?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. It does. Each animal has a different meaning, and the sooner you understand that meaning, the more readily you can embrace your familiar.”
He called us descendants of angels, and I know the history of Adam, Eve, and the snake. I push against him. “Let me up. And don’t say ‘make me.’ I just need some air.”
He doesn’t budge, his magic reaching for me, tugging at my mind. I point at him. “Stop digging around in my mind. I don’t like it.”
“What did you see, Ember? If you want my trust and my help, you have to tell me.”
“What is yours?”
“Panther.”
It fits him. His grace, speed, and agility.
“Your turn,” he presses. “What did you see?”
“Micah—”
“Ember,” he bites out, irritation clear and present.
“A snake,” I blurt. “I saw a snake.”
His gaze sharpens, his eyes almost glowing, before he pushes off me and sits up. I sit up with him. A moment later, he’s on his feet and pulling me around to face him. “Are you sure?”
I nod roughly. “Yes, I’m sure.” And hoping for some new meaning, I dare to ask, “What does it mean?”
“A snake is a demon, Ember.”
My hand grips my throat. “That means I’m evil. That’s why I was hidden away. That’s why Jeremy wants me.”
“What it means is that you and I are leaving this place now.”