He also felt agony through the link and realized he was being pulled upward.
"No!" he yelled, fighting the upward pull. "NO!"
The link snapped.
No longer tied to the power Saetan was channeling, he became an empty vessel that the power in the abyss rushed to fill. Too much. Too fast. Too strong.
He screamed as his mind ripped, tore, shattered.
Shattering and shattering, he fell, screaming, and disappeared into the lightning-streaked black mist.
Surreal put the finishing touches on the spell she was weaving across a corridor that led to the inner rooms and toyed with the idea of shoving Cassandra into it just to see what would happen. She didn't have anything against the woman personally, but that sulky temper and the dagger glances Cassandra kept throwing back toward the Altar room were fraying nerves already stretched a little too thin.
She stepped back and rubbed her hands against her trouser seat. Calling in a black cigarette, she lit it with a little tongue of witchfire, took a puff, and then offered it to Cassandra, who just shook her head and glared.
"What are they trying to do that it has to be private?" Cassandra said for the tenth time in the past few minutes.
"Back off, sugar," Surreal snapped. "That smart-ass remark about her trusting you more than him was enough reason for him to toss you out the door."
"It's true," Cassandra said angrily. "A Sister—"
"Sister, shit. And I don't hear you bitching about the other one I caught a whiff of."
"I trust the Priest."
Surreal puffed on the cigarette. So that was the Priest. Not a male she'd care to tangle with. Then again, Sadi wasn't a male she cared to tangle with either.
She snubbed out the cigarette and vanished it. "Come on, sugar. Let's create a few more surprises for Briarwood's darling uncles."
Cassandra eyed the corridor. "What is it?"
"A death spell." A vicious gleam filled Surreal's eyes. "First one who walks through that—it'll burst his heart, burst his balls, and finish the kill with a blast of the Gray. The spell gets sucked into the body so there's nothing anyone can trace. I usually add a timing spell to it, but we want to hit them fast and dirty."
Cassandra looked shocked. "Where did you learn to build something like that?"
Surreal shook her head and headed for another corridor to set another trap. This wasn't the time to tell Cassandra that Sadi had taught her that particular little spell. Especially when she kept wishing he'd taught it to Jaenelle.
Daemon slowly opened his eyes.
He knew he was lying on his back. He knew he couldn't move. He also knew he was naked. Why was he naked?
Mist swirled around him, teasing him, offering him no landmarks. Not that he expected to find anything familiar, but even the mind had landmarks. Except this was Jaenelle's mind, not his, in a place too deep for the rest of the Blood to reach.
He remembered feeling a hint of her as he probed the abyss, remembered diving, falling. Shattering.
Something moved in the mist. He heard a quiet clink clink, like glass tapping glass.
He turned his head toward the sound, feeling as if it took all of his strength to do so little.
"Don't move," said a lilting, lyrical voice that also contained caverns and midnight skies.
The mist drew back enough for him to see her standing next to slabs of stone piled up to form a makeshift altar.
Shock rippled through him. The crystal shards on the altar rattled in response.
"Don't move," she said, sounding testy as she carefully fitted another shard of the shattered chalice into place.
It was Jaenelle's voice, but . . .
She was medium height, slender, and fair-skinned. Her gold mane—not quite hair and not quite fur—was brushed up and back from her exotic face and didn't hide the delicately pointed ears. In the center of her forehead was a tiny, spiral horn. A narrow strip of gold fur traced her spine, ending in a small gold and white fawn tail that flicked over her bare buttocks. The legs were human and shapely but changed below the calf. Instead of feet, she had dainty horse's hooves. Her human hands had sheathed claws like a cat's. As she shifted position to slip another shard into place, he saw the small, round breasts, the feminine curve of waist and hips, the dark-gold triangle of hair between her legs.
Who . . . ?
But he knew. Even before she walked over and looked at him, even before he saw the feral intelligence in those ancient, haunted sapphire eyes, he knew.
Terrifying and beautiful. Human and Other. Gentle and violent. Innocent and wise.
"I am Witch," she said, a small, defiant quiver in her voice.
"I know." His voice had a seductive throb in it, a hunger he couldn't control or mask.
She looked at him curiously, then shrugged and returned to the altar. "You shattered the chalice. That's why you can't move yet."
He tried to raise his head and blacked out. By the time he could focus again, she had enough of the chalice pieced together for him to realize it wasn't the same one Tersa had shown him.
"That's not your chalice," he shouted happily, too relieved to care that he'd startled her until she bared her teeth and snarled at him.
"No, you silly stubborn male, it's yours."
That sobered him a little, but her response sounded so much like Jaenelle the child, he didn't care about that either.
Taking it slow, he propped himself up on one elbow. "Then your chalice didn't shatter."
She selected another piece, fit it into place. Her eyes filled with desperation and her voice became too quiet. "It shattered."
Daemon lay down and closed his eyes. It took him a long moment to gather the courage to ask, "Can you repair it?"
She didn't answer.
He drifted after that. Minutes, years, what did it matter? Images swirled behind his closed eyes. Bodies of flesh and bone and blood. Webs that marked the inner boundaries. Crystal chalices that held the mind. Jewels for power. The images swirled and shifted, over and over. When they finally came to rest, they formed the Blood's four-sided triangle. Three sides—body, chalice, and Jewels—surrounding the fourth side, the Self, the spirit that binds the other three.
The images swirled again, became mist. He felt something settle into place inside him as the mist reformed into a crystal chalice, its shattered pieces carefully fitted together. Black mist filled in the cracks between each piece, as well as the places where tiny pieces were missing.
He felt brittle, fragile.
A finger tapped his chest.
A thin skin of black mist coated the chalice, inside and out, forming a delicate shield around it.
The finger tapped again. Harder.
He ignored it.
The next tap had an unsheathed nail at the end of it.
Cursing, he shot up onto his elbows. He forgot what he'd intended to say because she was straddling his thighs and he could have sworn he saw little flashes of lightning deep in her sapphire eyes.
"Snarly male," she said, tapping his chest again. "The chalice is back together, but it's very fragile. It will be strong again if you keep it protected long enough for it to mend. You must take your body to a safe place until the chalice heals."
"I'm not leaving without you."
She shook her head. "The misty place is too dark, too deep for you. You can't stay here."
Daemon bared his teeth. "I'm not leaving without you."
"Stubborn snarly male!"
"I can be as stubborn and as snarly as you."
She stuck her tongue out at him.
He responded in kind.
She blinked, huffed, and then began to laugh.
That silvery, velvet-coated laugh made his heart ache and tremble.
Before, he'd seen Witch beneath the child Jaenelle. Now he saw Jaenelle beneath Witch. Now he saw the difference—and no difference.
She looked at him, her eyes full of gentle sadness. "You have to go back, Daemon."
"So do you," he said quietly.
She shook her head. "The body's dying."
"You could heal it."
She shook her head more violently. "Let it die. Let them have the body. I don't want the body. This is my place now. I can see them all when I stand in this place. All the dreams."
"What dreams?"
"The dreams in the Light. The dreams in the Darkness and the Shadow. All the dreams." She hesitated, looked confused. "You're one of the dreams in the Light. A good dream."
Daemon swallowed hard. Was that how she saw them? As dreams? She was the living myth, dreams made flesh.
Made flesh.
"I'm not a dream, Lady. I'm real."
Her eyes flashed. "What is real?" she demanded. "I see beautiful things, I hear them, I touch them with the body's hand, and they say bad girl to make up stories, those things are not real. I see bad things, cruel things, a twisted darkness that taints the land, a darkness that isn't the Darkness, and they say bad girl to make up stories, bad girl to tell lies. The uncles say no one will believe a sick-mind girl and they laugh and hurt the body so I go away to the misty place to see the gentle ones, the beautiful ones and leave them ice that hurts them when they touch it." She hugged herself and rocked back and forth. "They don't want me. They don't want me. They don't love me."
Daemon wrapped his arms around her and held her close, rocking with her as words kept tumbling out. He listened to the loneliness and confusion. He listened to the horrors of Briarwood. He listened to bits of stories about friends who seemed real but weren't real. He listened and understood what she didn't, what she couldn't.
If she didn't repair her shattered mind, if she didn't link with the body again, if she didn't re-form the four-sided triangle, she would be trapped here, becoming lost and entangled in the shards of herself until she could never find a way to reach what she loved most.
"No," he said gently when her words finally stopped, "they don't want you. They don't love you, can't love you. But I do love you. The Priest loves you. The beautiful ones, the gentle ones—they love you. We've waited so long for you to come. We need you with us. We need you to walk among us."