I nodded, mouthing the words “I have to.” Disapproval poured out of her eyes. Gently, I pulled myself free, opting not to look back again lest I lose my nerve.

  The vampire smiled as he watched me, and began to wave me down toward him. It was a gesture that caught the attention of the others. So by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, the room was quiet again. Every eye watched me, their thoughts playing in my mind like a hundred different radio stations all at once, ranging from relief to utter despair. I suppose my intentions were obvious to everyone.

  “Ana?” my grandmother spoke into the quiet. “What are you doing?”

  “Protecting the haven,” I replied softly. I turned to face the vampire. He seemed much taller now that I was up close. “I’ll go with you. But you have to swear that you won’t punish them for what I did.”

  A smug smile filled up the vampire’s face. “Admirable decision, princess. You have my word—”

  “Wait!” shouted a young girl whose voice I recognized immediately. Aspen McArthur.

  “It’s a trick!” she followed.

  I could see her now. She was coming down the stairwell toward the floor, followed closely by two guardians. “Aspen!” her father shouted out to her from the audience. “What in the world do you think you’re doing in here?”

  She ignored him, doing a good job of evading the growing number of adults who’d jumped up to stop her. That is until Guardian Dent managed to scoop her up from behind.

  “This is a trick!” she shouted from his arm. “They just wanted to get all of us into one place. We have to get out of here!”

  As if on cue, the lights began to flicker, and then cut out completely. The room was cast into total darkness.

  Small flames burst into existence across the room, in the palms of people’s hands. There was just enough light to see the vampire lunging for my neck. I didn’t have enough time to scream before his teeth had pierced my flesh.

  I’d been bitten before, but not like this. This was the bite of an animal filled with hatred. He wriggled his jaw, forcing his teeth deeper. The pain was excruciating at first, but quickly disappeared.

  I could no longer feel his teeth in my neck—I couldn’t feel anything at all.

  Shouts of “Kora Mortae” filled the room, and eventually the vampire’s grip seemed to lessen. I could only tell because I was no longer being jerked in every direction. Someone, I couldn’t tell who, pulled him off of me and I fell into the arms of someone else. This person laid me onto the floor so that I was staring up at the ceiling. My arms and legs felt numb, and I kept gasping for air that wouldn’t come. The venom was forcing itself through my veins, burning like acid with each new inch it conquered.

  I kept passing out for indeterminate periods of time, awakening to new sets of faces. Dr. Robert’s concerned face was a constant during these periods of lucidity. As was my mother’s. But where was my grandmother? She should be here. I was dying. I’d experienced it enough to know what it felt like.

  Then something strange began to happen, I could feel something start to pull me back. My fingers and toes began to tingle as they regained feeling and when my eyes opened, Aspen alone stared into my face. Everyone else stood around us. Small wings of radiant white light extended from her back. Her hands were on my chest. She was healing me.

  “Aspen, you’re a conjurer?” I asked.

  She smiled, shaking her head. As she leaned in closer, I noticed that there seemed to be a light behind her brown eyes. She put her lips next to my ear. “Aspen’s been touched,” she whispered. “This is Nadia.”

  Chapter Three

  Recovery

  The next thing I knew, I was waking up. Dr. Roberts was standing over me, staring into my eyes as he capped a syringe. “How are we feeling?” he asked.

  Everything ached. “Good,” I said, wiping my eyes.

  I took a look around and discovered that not only was I in the room where I was once held prisoner, but I was joined here by another twenty or so guardians. Beds had been pulled in here from all over the house and the room now resembled a small hospital ward. With a fair amount of panic, I searched their faces for Darren. He wasn’t here.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Aspen was right,” he answered. “We were setup for an attack. Thank God it was only a few dozen vampires. We believe they were sent ahead—a quick strike meant to kill our heir and weaken our defenses.”

  “We won, then?” I asked. “Even though they caught us off guard?”

  He made an odd face. “Yes, we did. Well, Aspen did. She scared them off, singlehandedly. No civilians were hurt.”

  “Aspen?”

  “She was—I… I’ve never seen magick performed on a scale like that. Not by one person. If she’d have been able to sneak out sooner, half of these men wouldn’t be here right now. There’s been no explanation as to how she was able to do what she did. We did the tests, she’s not a conjurer.”

  The memory of what she’d said to me before I ended up here ran through my head. “I need to talk to her. Like right now.”

  “You need to stay in bed. There is a small amount of venom still in your system. You need to take it easy until Aspen’s spell kills it off completely. Besides, I don’t think Aspen’s up for speaking with anyone right now. She’s saying that she can’t remember what happened. She’s locked herself up in your room.

  I nodded that I understood and made a show of staying put. The second Dr. Roberts turned his back to attend to another patient; I made a break for it.

  I’d barely sat up for a few seconds before the dizziness kicked in, sending me retreating back to the safety of my pillow. Dr. Roberts glanced over with a look that had “I told you so” written all over it. He came back to my bedside and picked up my arm. He rolled back the sleeve and held the arm in front of me. Faint streaks of black were webbed across it.

  Point made. Still, it was imperative that I speak to Aspen. “Please ask Aspen to come down here. Tell her that I know why she doesn’t remember what happened. That it’s an “English” promise.” It was our way of swearing on her sister’s life, London’s, without actually swearing. We’d developed it one morning while she was doing my makeup.

  Dr. Roberts gave me a puzzled stare for a moment, but didn’t question me. He waved in one of the guardians near the door and spoke into his ear. The guardian nodded and left immediately.

  “I told them all you needed was a few Tylenol and you’d be fine,” came Darren’s voice from the other side of the bed. Hearing him speak caused my heart to thump in my chest and filled my face with a smile. This was the first time we’d been together since yesterday and a lot had happened in that short amount of time, namely in the memory department. It was a bit of a relief to find that I reacted to him the same as I always had.

  I turned to face him and felt his arms slip around me, his lips gliding down to meet my own. Dr. Roberts cleared his throat loudly, and Darren eased away from the bed, smiling that handsome smile of his.

  “I didn’t see you earlier,” I said to him.

  His face sobered. “Newer guardians get stuck outside patrolling the grounds whenever there’s a Council Meeting. All of us were out there,” he said, gesturing to the room full of ailing guardians. “Only, I was called inside before the vampires attacked. Otherwise, I’d be in here too—”

  “Dr. Roberts!” called a woman’s panicked voice from the other side of the room. “Something’s happening!”

  Dr. Roberts turned and rushed over to the bed the woman and a young boy were standing next to. The guardian in the bed was convulsing, as though some invisible force was attempting to shake the life out of him. Dr. Roberts called over an older guardian from just beyond the door and the two of them managed to hold the young guardian down long enough for Dr. Roberts to examine his neck.

  Dr. Roberts looked up at the older guardian and shook his head. The woman screamed as he retrieved a long needle from his lab coat and pushed it into the young man’s arm. After a few seconds, he stopped moving.

  The woman pushed Dr. Roberts aside, and threw herself on top of the young guardian. Her cries echoed throughout the room, and several from outside poked their heads in for a moment to see what was going on.

  I felt sick. Another tragedy—another family suffering for my weakness. “He died of a vampire bite. With the venom in his system, he can’t truly die. I can heal him,” I said to myself. “I can bring him back.”

  As I attempted to push myself up from my bed, Darren’s arm reached over me, forcing me back down. “Hey, hey,” he said. “I know what you’re trying to do. You’re not strong enough yet.”

  “I have to try,” I told him. “Please, let me try.”

  Darren’s resolve seemed to be wavering until I heard Dr. Roberts’s definitive “No” from across the room. I couldn’t accept that answer. If I was able to help, why wouldn’t they give me the chance? They didn’t understand. They weren’t aware that that boy’s death, like so many others, was my fault—I had to do something.

  I pushed myself up anyway, taking advantage of a momentary lapse in Darren’s concentration. In one motion I had slid onto my feet and managed to take a full step before the dizziness took over.

  I was tilting over sideways when I felt Darren’s arms close around me.

  “Take me over to him,” I told Darren.

  He shook his head.

  “Darren, please. I can save him. You know I can.”

  “You’re not strong enough, Ana. I’m sorry.”

  Darren placed me down in the bed and I felt something sharp in my right shoulder. I looked to Dr. Roberts in alarm, seeing the empty syringe in his hands being recapped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you’re going to hurt yourself if you keep trying to get out of bed.”

  As drowsiness washed over me, Aspen stepped into the room timidly. Her face was pale and her legs were shaking as she searched the room with her eyes.

  “You!” the woman shouted. Aspen jumped.

  “You can bring him back,” she followed. “You brought our heir back. Help him. Please! I’m begging you!”

  She was coming toward Aspen, and Aspen was taking steps backwards. “I don’t know how I did any of that stuff…I don’t remember. Le—Leave me alone!” Aspen turned and darted back through the door.

  I tried calling to her, but couldn’t tell if I’d actually said the words. The medicine was making it more and more difficult to stay awake, until I couldn’t…

  The room I found myself in was dark. The floor was concrete and so were the walls; it felt like someone’s basement. This wasn’t a memory, I had no recollection of ever being here. This was something else entirely.

  Something was moving in the darkness around me. I couldn’t see what it was, but I could feel it.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “I’ve glimpsed the future, Ana. I no longer fear you.”

  The voice stopped my heart in my chest and shook my arms. It had been so long since I’d heard it and yet it was unmistakable. That voice belonged Daemon.

  “Would you like to see it?” he asked next.

  He didn’t give me a chance to respond. In the next instant I felt him behind me, his hands grabbing my arms. His touch triggered a change in our location: My family’s estate came first; the mansion was burnt to the ground. Next came images of my family, my friends… all dead. The very last image was of Tristan and I, here in this room. He was telling me something and then his hands were around my neck. For the second time, I was seeing an image of Tristan choking the life out of me. What’s worse was that I was letting him.

  The room faded back into the shadowy basement with the concrete floor. I turned around but Daemon wasn’t there anymore.

  His voice found me from wherever it was he was hiding. “We’re coming for you.”

  Chapter Four

  Touched

  I sat straight up out of my sleep. Much to the concern of the people gathered around my bed. Gasps echoed throughout the room, followed by whispers.

  My mother was seated in a folding chair next to the bed, with what seemed like the entire witching community behind her.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, staring out at the sea of awestruck faces. Combined with the awful images replaying in my head, I felt completely out of sorts.

  “We know what you are—who you are,” said some woman I hadn’t met before. “She told us.”

  Their eyes shifted downward. That’s when I noticed Aspen curled up in the bed behind me.

  Please tell me she didn’t say what she could have said. “What did she say?”

  “That you’re an angel, both of you. That you’re Merline come back to life.”

  I scanned the faces of the people gathered around us, listening to their thoughts as I went. These people were terrified, for themselves and their families. They had always considered themselves safely out of the reach of vampires here in Brighton, and though that no longer proved to be true, it still felt safer than the world outside. In us they saw a way to protect their home.

  “Is it true?” someone else asked. “Are you really her?”

  It was then that I noticed Darren’s face amongst a group of guardians. He was watching me intently. I couldn’t gauge his reaction to all this. It was so hard to read him when he was being serious about something. If I did decide to be honest with them, it would probably be news to him too. He’d seen my wings when I’d healed Tristan last night, but I doubted that he’d let his mind seriously consider that I might be an angel. He’d no doubt chalked it up “conjurer” weirdness. Which, technically, it was.

  Being honest also meant that once again Darren would have to adjust to me being much more than just the girl he was in love with. And once more, he’d have first learned it from someone else.

  My mother placed her hand over mine. “You can tell them the truth, Ana. It’s okay.”

  I stared into her eyes and she gave me a small smile in return. I didn’t have to connect with her mind to know that she knew I’d gotten my memories back. But I hadn’t even told her this. Not even as Lexy.

  I couldn’t do what she was asking me to do. I needed to lie. This was a hopeless fight—I’d seen that in my vision. We’d been wiped out.

  But these people were pleading in their silence, their eyes begging for me to be real—for hope. I wondered if my denial would even make a difference—they’d already seen Aspen perform miracles twice already.

  I took a deep breath and spread my wings out behind me. The light brightened the windowless room, shimmering in the eyes of the people gathered around me, as smiles helped to light up their faces. It was as if the entire room had exhaled all at once; their fear was fading and determination was settling in. There was something to believe in now. They weren’t alone in this.

  Darren was beaming at me. High fiving some of the other guardians. He, like they, believed they actually could win. Sadly, I knew better.

  **********

  They were all too willing to fulfill my request for privacy after that. My mother offered to stay, in case I needed someone to talk to, but I told her that it was Aspen and I who needed to have a conversation.

  Followed by me and Darren. I sighed. How could this situation get any worse?

  Once everyone had left, I realized that there weren’t any injured guardians in here anymore. No doubt Aspen’s doing. I rolled back my sleeves to find that the black streaks were now completely gone from my arms. I owed her for the rest of my own recovery too, it seemed.

  I put my hand on Aspen’s arm and gave her small shake. Her lips parted, and she started to wipe at her eyes. “Ana?” she spoke quietly.

  “It’s me,” I said giving her a smile. Her eyes were absent of the light that comes with being touched, so for the moment, I was speaking only to Aspen.

  “How did I end up in here?” she asked. “The last thing I remember is being up in your room—wait, you said you know what’s happening to me? Everyone keeps saying that I’ve done all these fantastic things but I don’t remember any of it.”

  I stood up from the bed, searching for the most delicate way to tell someone they’ve been possessed. “Aspen you’ve been touched…by an angel. It means that you two are sharing the same soul for a little while.”

  Aspen’s eyes got big. “Sharing a soul? With an angel?”

  I nodded.

  “But…I…why me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t want this, Ana. I mean, I know I’ve been helping people, but I don’t like waking up and not knowing where I’ve been or what’s happened. It’s really scary—how do you know about this stuff?”

  My eyes dropped. I still felt extremely uncomfortable with telling people what I was. “Because we’re kinda the same,” I replied. Again, I stretched my wings out behind me and watched as Aspen’s jaw plummeted.

  “Unreal,” she muttered.

  I forced a smile. “When angels only need to come to earth for a very short time, like say an hour or so, they can appear as they are. But angelic souls are much more fragile than that of humans, they can’t stand to be away from heaven but for so long. So, if an angel needed to come for longer than that, they’d have to “touch” a human soul, temporarily binding with it. If angel needed a lifetime to fulfill their purpose for coming to earth, then they’d be permanently bonded with a human soul. You know them as conjurers.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for Aspen to look more shocked than when she’d witnessed me spreading my wings, but once I explained to her what a conjurer actually was, she’d nearly fell backwards out of the bed.

  “Then my sister, she was an angel too?”

  “She was.”

  “Do you know what her purpose was? Why she was here?”

  “She was here to help me fulfill my purpose.” Please don’t ask what it is.

  “And what was that?”

  I sighed. “To get rid of the vampires. For good.”

  Aspen thought on this for a moment. “Do you think it was her that touched me?”

  I shook my head. “Conjurer’s have been permanently bonded with a human soul. She wouldn’t be able to bind with yours too. Being permanently bonded allows us to be born whenever we have to, and allows us to return to heaven when we die.”