Promises to Keep - By Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Page 0,63

to their gods for explanations and help.

The humans were not alone.

Some of Leona’s bonds had succumbed to the siphoning away of their power, or to human ailments such as pneumonia, or to physical frailties such as heart attack and stroke. Some of the other elementals that had come to fight Shantel were trying to support Leona’s damaged bonds, but they could do only so much.

Jay stirred with a moan, and then pushed himself up, groping for the car door handle so groggily that they both nearly fell when it opened.

“We need a blade,” Brina said. She remembered everything the powers in the forest had told them, and she did not intend to hesitate.

She saw Jay seeking out specific faces in the crowd, but neither delayed their task. They both snapped commands to nurses and secretaries. Shouting over the protests, they had the ill in the gymnasium moved, until the group could form a rough circle around the outside of the room.

“Take hands,” Jay said to those surrounding him—sick and well, human, witch, and shapeshifter alike. “If the person you are next to cannot grip, then hold on to them as tightly as you can. We cannot break the circle. Is that understood?”

Jeremy looked up with bleary eyes as he took the hands of those beside him. “Jay … what are we doing?”

“Saving us all,” Jay answered.

“Possibly dooming us all,” Brina added more honestly.

There was no choice, and no time to explain the danger. The ritual could drain the power from every creature in your circle, or grant them immortal life … or grant them immortal hunger.

Jay quashed the protest from his conscience that there was enough time to say a few words of warning. With so much at stake, he couldn’t afford to give people a chance to refuse. He kept silent.

Brina and Jay walked to the circle’s center carrying their tools.

Each element required a different form of sacrifice to call it. Water asked for tears. Air was called through breath and voice. Fire answered only to blood. Earth, like the power of the Shantel, was bound in flesh.

Brina needed only to remember what she had recently seen, and the tears ran down her face. She further recalled her brother’s destruction, and well before that, the blackening bodies of each of her family. The end of safety in her world. She did not know what memories Jay pulled upon, but she did not need to. When their eyes met, the witch’s were glistening.

She felt the world shift around them, wavering as power responded to their wordless command for attention.

Invoking air at that moment was more challenging, because Brina’s throat was still tight with tears. She choked on her first attempt to draw breath, and so it was Jay who began with a traditional folk tune. It didn’t matter what the words were, though Jay had chosen a tune of longing and loss. It mattered only that their voices mingled in the air.

Jay passed Brina his blade, clenching his jaw as Shantel’s power within him fought against Leona’s power embedded in the silver. He held up his arm, and Brina drew a line of blood across the palm of his hand; he took the knife and did the same for her.

Normally, a sorcerer willing to risk life and soul might have summoned one elemental, in an attempt to dominate it and win incredible power. But no trained sorcerer was foolish enough to invite this many forces into their circle at once. They would tear each other—and the mortal arrogant enough to summon them—to shreds.

In this case, that was the point. The other elementals were the weapons Jay and Brina needed to wield.

“Only one guest left to invite,” Jay muttered to Brina, his voice wavering with nerves.

The name the elemental had spoken to her, Brina uttered now, not with breath but with the power gathered within the circle. She whispered it as a prayer and screamed it as a demand simultaneously, and as she did so, she reached for Jay, drew him close, and kissed him.

Their bloody hands twined, pressure stopping the blood’s flow, and the kiss cut both of their voices off, leaving only the original mortal power: the touch of flesh to flesh.

It was the power that passed between mother and infant when she held her child for the first time. It was the power of a gentle touch to the cheek, a reassuring pat on the shoulder, a sympathetic hug—or an angry slap. Every human being knew the power