Page 67 of Cold Sacrifice

My phantom wings. I wondered if maybe someday, they wouldn’t be phantom at all.

“Do you all see that?” Sam murmured.

“Are those wings?” Remy looked around somewhat wildly, as though he expected to see the owner of those wings lurking behind us.

“It’s okay,” I told them. “They’re mine.”

Sam stared at me, something in his eyes. “You always have to give up something to gain something,” he said. “What did you have to give up, Kait?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”

“Wings from what?” Remy asked.

I didn’t reply. It wasn’t the right time to have that conversation. So all I said was, “I’m not sure of anything yet.” Then I pulled Zach to me, wrapped my left arm around him while holding my demon blade in my right hand, and stepped into the circle.

I closed my eyes and imagined the ground opening up beneath my boots.

And it did.

I lost my breath as we fell, abruptly worried because when would we stop? The necromancer could be anywhere. How could I possibly stop where she’d stopped?

Finally, though, Zach murmured, “Follow the magic, Kait.” He was not afraid, and his voice calmed me. He was right. I’d found the subtle thread of magic. All I had to do was follow it.

There was no time inside the darkness of the ground. Somehow, though, our bodies displaced that darkness and my blade cut a path that we followed. And somehow, we breathed. I didn’t inhale dirt or mustiness or dampness. I inhaled…nature. Late spring flowers preparing to burst through to the surface. The scent of grass and freshly turned earth. Warmth. Softness. Comfort.

But below that was something bad. Something burning and wicked and screaming.

Hell.

The place where the demons lived.

How easy it would be for me to drop farther down, to leave the path of the necromancer’s magic and find the path that led to a world of demons.

To my horror, I found myself drawn to it.

My blade had begun to heat in my grip, but I didn’t sheathe it. It burned my palm and my fingers, but I’d felt that heat before, and I knew what came after. The fire of it traveled up my arm and into my neck and my head, and it traveled through my chest, my back, my legs. Every part of me was on fire, and when I inhaled, I pulled in only heat.

And it was so good.

It was inside me, though, because Zach was not burning. I didn’t doubt that I could have sent that heat out to engulf him, though, had I wanted to.

“Steady,” he said. “Focus, Kait.”

He was teaching me how to be in the ground.

I couldn’t see anything but darkness beyond the light cast by my blade, and I couldn’t feel the magical trail Jolene had left. Not anymore. The deeper I went, the closer I got to the thing below. The world of the demons.

I wasn’t on the path to the necromancer. I was on the path to the world that part of me might have belonged to—and I wasn’t taking Zach to Jolene’s resting place. I was taking him to hell.

The heat intensified, and with it, the pleasure. I was abruptly euphoric, floating in an invisible world inside the ground, but there was also something else. Something…wrong. I knew that no matter how good I felt right then, I’d feel even better if I were to slide my glowing, pulsating blade inside Zach’s body and suck everything he was into the knife, because that would not only power the magic of it but would also feel so very good. I could take his life and oh, what a nice thing that would be, to take someone so pure and powerful and wrap myself in his essence.

The closer I sank to the portal into the demons’ world, the stronger that need became. I didn’t want to go back up. I didn’t want to be the emotional, needy, imperfect, weak wolf who lived in the other realm. I wanted to be a demon queen, a demon boss…

A demon.

The horror of that finally broke through to me, and with a sound halfway between a wolf’s growl and a human’s scream, I shoved the blade away and I propelled us to the surface. With the blade not drawing a path to the hellish place I’d not only felt, but heard, and very nearly seen, we were simply once again in the ground.

And then we were out of it, lying on the dirty, cracked pavement, and Sam, Remy, and Rick were crouched around us, worried looks on their faces.