His thoughts laughed again. He was too hot to be in water. He was on fire, and fire can’t survive in water. More likely he had fallen asleep in a volcano or was shoved into the oven by some evil children like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Was he a witch in a gingerbread house like in some fairy tale? Gingerbread, his stomach rumbled.
Beneath him, he barely noticed the rough stone floor cooling his naked body. He’d never felt so weak, so empty. His insides were a melted mess, his skin a thin layer of plastic barely holding them back. Without his skin holding it all in, he would be a pond, a lake, a river.
River. Water.
If only his skin would release the raging fire and flood within, he would drink and drink and drink until there was nothing left. Nothing. Not one drop.
So thirsty.
“Shhhh.” Moisture trickled into his mouth, and he stuck out his tongue to catch each drop. A cool hand stroked his cheek, nurturing, loving. His body relaxed, the water reviving a tiny piece of his sanity.
There was something important he needed to do. A girl with blond hair, he had to protect her, to warn her. Who was she? Warn her about what?
Aaron!
A hot poker lanced through the back of his skull, a fire of his psychic gifts in the back of his brain.
Tell me where he is!
Quinn. Her name thrummed through Aaron. A slim thread connected them. A familiar magnetic pull yanked him as she reached out with her mind. The river, he had jumped in to save her. Panic filled him. He had to get back to her, save himself, but his body had no fight left.
“Sleep now, and forget about her,” a woman’s voice cooed. His mother’s maybe, its soft, familiar cadence lulling him like a drug. Gentle fingers ran through his hair. “You must forget to remember.”
Quinn’s energy ebbed, and he felt her moving farther away, her voice in his mind growing fainter. As quickly as it came, his shimmer of clarity faded, the girl with the blond hair nothing but a ghost in his unconscious.
“Shhhh. That’s right.”
His breath slowed along with his heartbeat, and within seconds, he found himself in a raging river. Relentless tides dragged at his limbs, forcing him down, down, down beneath the surface. He fought his body’s need to breathe as pressure squeezed against his chest, a thousand ropes pulling tighter and tighter. The more he struggled, the tighter the ropes pulled. Left, right, down, up? No matter which way he turned, nothing but brackish water surrounded him. Ate his strength. Crushed his resistance. Then the currents dragged him deeper.
As Aaron slipped farther and farther beneath the inky waves, a girl’s hand appeared. Small and pale, it reached out to him. Tendrils of red hair glowed in a shaft of moonlight, floating like a luminescent halo around her smooth, heart-shaped face. Ruth. She was the only bright spot in the rolling dark. Fitting that his baby sister would come to take him home. They should have drowned together long ago. Fate had finally gotten around to correcting its mistake.
Ruth smiled, suspended above him like a water angel.
He smiled and tried to take her hand, but it remained just out of reach.
The box. What did you do with it?
What box? What was she talking about?
I need it. Please, it’s important. Aaron frowned. Something wasn’t right. Ruth’s lips spoke with someone else’s voice. The vision of her rippled, red hair turned to black, green eyes to silver. Ruth but not Ruth.
Aaron felt a tug at his leg and looked down to see a swirling vortex open beneath him. The current sucked at his limbs, trapping him in its grip as Ruth floated away, her face twisting in anger before disappearing all together.
A maniacal laugh bubbled to Aaron’s lips. You’re dying. Can’t you feel it? Your organs are shutting down, your neurotransmitters going on the blink as your brain turns off. Soon there won’t be anything left of you but a lifeless body. Aaron’s mind laughed at him again. You’re literally circling the drain, dude.
No use fighting anymore, Ruth was gone, and he was alone. Sinking, sinking, sinking, his heart a weight dragging him into an abyss of hopelessness. Hope was nothing more than a lie. Ruth couldn’t save him. Nobody could. He was already dead.
3
“Quinn! Wake up!” Azrael’s stern voice pierced through the dream, his face swimming before her as the nightmare faded. She was home, safe in her own bed, her two-week recovery in the hospital nothing but an extracted memory used to torture her. The sulfurous fragrance of dead demon permeated the room, clung to her hair and pajamas. Azrael’s handy work, no doubt. He had dispatched the demons feeding off her while she slept. No matter, there were plenty more where they came from.
“Quinn.” Light spilled across her bedroom floor. Her Sentinel burned brighter than any sun, and she wished she could turn him off. “How many times must I tell you? Keep your shield up at all times, even when you sleep.” Azrael’s steely tone matched the look on his face. If frowns could kill, she would be dead.
A curved, runed sword hung on each hip—one blade etched with electric blue symbols, the Qeres blade, poison to any immortal soul; the other etched by golden sun, a blade with the power to separate an essence from a mortal body. Black leather vambraces protected his forearms and a red sash adorned the waist of his loose-fitting pants, carefully tucked into a pair of knee-high, black combat boots. “It is a dangerous game you play, Quinn, and I am not always around to clean up your messes.”
“Go away, Azrael.” She pulled the covers over her head. “I command you.”
Muscles tensed as the mattress squeaked beneath the weight of her guardian angel.
“Why are you still here? I commanded you to leave. You said my powers would compel you to obey.”
Azrael pulled the duvet from her face and sighed. Quinn still didn’t understand how an ethereal being, which moved between dimensions and was invisible to everyone but her, could interact with everyday objects.
“Your power does not lie within a word itself. Words are like the wind, ever changing and unpredictable.” Quinn rolled her eyes with the start of yet another of Azrael’s lectures. “It stems from the core of your essence, from your thought. Be clear and true in your intent and confident in your execution. It must be felt as well as spoken. Know what you want and command it to happen.”
“I really wanted you to leave, believe me.”
Azrael shrugged. “You will get the hang of it soon, I’m sure.”
“Soon? You said I would have all this power when I turned eighteen, that I would be able to banish them or whatever. That was weeks ago, and I can barely block them, let alone kill them. Teach me. Show me what to do.”
“It is your gift, not mine. Only you know how to use it.”
Azrael claimed she was the reincarnation of Eve, Keeper of the Garden of Eden, born to be some sort of savior and restore the balance of good and evil in the human realm. But how could she be expected to save humanity when her own life was such a mess? Or maybe she wasn’t really the essence of Eve. Maybe Azrael made a mistake.
“Eve’s blood does indeed flow through you. No mistake.”
“I told you to stay out of my thoughts.” Quinn loathed the idea of Azrael tapping into every secret tucked away inside her.
“That’s rather hard to do when your mind is nothing but chaos, and your thoughts are spewing out like bits of shrapnel, hitting anyone passing by. You lack focus, even after all these weeks. Even now, the demons confuse and distract you with thoughts of that boy.”