Burned

Chapter Eighteen

Rephaim
When Rephaim opened his eyes, he saw Stevie Rae squatting in front of his closet nest, studying him so intently that there was a deep furrow on her brow between her eyes, making her red crescent tattoo look oddly wavy. Her blond curls spilled around her face, and she seemed so girl-like that he was suddenly taken aback by remembering how young she really was. And, no matter the vastness of her elemental powers, how vulnerable her youth made her. The thought of her vulnerability had fear knifing his heart.
"Hey there. You awake?" she said.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" he asked in a purposefully gruff voice, annoyed that just the sight of her could make him worry about her safety.
"Well, I'm tryin' to figure out how close you've come to dyin' this time."
"My father's an immortal. I'm hard to kill." He made himself sit up without grimacing.
"Yeah, I know about your daddy and your immortal blood and all, but Darkness fed from you. A lot.
That can't be good. Plus, to be honest, you look really bad."
"You don't," he said. "And Darkness fed from you, too."
"I'm not as hurt as you because you swooped in like Batman and saved the day before that dang nasty bull could mess me up too much. Then I got a shot in the arm from Light, which was totally cool, by the way. And that immortal blood of yours is like the Energizer Bunny inside me."
"I am not a bat," was all he could think to say, as that was the only thing she'd said he vaguely understood.
"I didn't compare you to a bat, I said you were like Batman. He's a superhero."
"I'm not a hero, either."
"Well, you've been my hero. Twice."
Rephaim didn't know what to say to that. All he knew was that Stevie Rae calling him her hero made something twist deep inside him, and that something suddenly made the pain in his body and his worry for her easier to bear.
"So, come on. Let's see if I can return the favor. Again." She stood and held her hand out to him.
"I don't think I could eat right now. Some water would be good, though. I drank all that we'd brought up here before."
"I'm not takin' you to the kitchen. At least not this second. I'm takin' you outside. To the trees. Well, okay, to that really big tree by the old gazebo in the front yard to be specific."
"Why?"
"I already told you. You helped me. I think I can help you, but I gotta be closer to the earth than we are up here, and I've been thinkin' 'bout it, and I know trees have major power in them. I've kinda used it before. Actually, that may have been part of the reason I was able to call up that thing ." She shuddered, clearly remembering her invocation of Darkness, which Rephaim completely understood. Had his body not ached so badly, he would have shuddered, too.
But his body did ache. More than that. His blood felt too hot. With every beat of his heart, searing pain pumped through him, and at the spot where his wings met his spine, where the bull of Darkness had fed from him, violated him, his back was blazing agony.
And she thought a tree would fix what Darkness had wrought?
"I think I'll stay here. Rest will help. So will water. If you want to do something for me, get the water I asked for."
"Nope." Stevie Rae reached down and, with that strength that always surprised him, grabbed both of his hands and pulled him to his feet. She kept her supporting hold on him while the room pitched and rolled around him, and he thought, for one terrible moment, that he was going to collapse like a fainting girl.
Thankfully, the moment passed, and he was able to open his eyes without fear of making an even bigger
fool of himself. He looked down at Stevie Rae. She was still holding his hands. She doesn't shrink away from me in disgust. She hasn't from the first day.
"Why do you touch me with no fear?" he heard himself asking before he could stop the words.
She gave a little laugh. "Rephaim, I don't think you could swat a fly right now. Besides that - you've saved my life twice, and we're Imprinted. I'm definitely not scared of you."
"Perhaps the question should have been why do you touch me with no repulsion?" Again, the words came almost without his permission. Almost.
Her brow furrowed like before, and he decided he liked to watch her think.
Finally, she shrugged, and said, "I don't imagine it's possible for a vampyre to be repulsed by someone they're Imprinted with. I mean, I was Imprinted with Aphrodite before I drank your blood, and there was a time when she seriously grossed me out - she just wasn't very nice. At all. Actually, she's still not very nice. But she kinda grew on me after we Imprinted. Not in a sexual way, but I wasn't grossed out by her anymore."
Then Stevie Rae's eyes widened like she realized all of what she'd said, and the word "sexual" seemed to be a tangible presence in the room.
She let loose of his hands as if they burned her.
"Can you walk downstairs by yourself?" Her voice sounded strange and abrupt.
"Yes. I'll follow you. If you really think a tree can help."
"Well, it won't be long before we find out if what I think means anything." Stevie Rae turned her back on him and headed for the stairs. "Oh," she said, without looking at him, "thank you for saving me. Again.
You - you didn't have to this time." Her words were hesitant, like she was having trouble picking exactly what she wanted to say to him. "He said he wasn't going to kill me."
"There are things worse than death," Rephaim said. "What Darkness can take from someone who walks with Light can change your soul."
"And what about you? What did Darkness take from you?" she asked, still not looking at him, as they reached the bottom floor of the old mansion, but she slowed down so that he could keep up with her more easily.
"He didn't take anything from me. He just filled me with pain and then fed on that pain mixed with my blood."
They'd reached the front door, and Stevie Rae paused, looking up at him. "Because Darkness feeds on pain and Light feeds on love."
Her words tripped a mental switch inside him, and he studied her more closely. Yes, he decided, she is keeping something from me. "What price did Light demand from you for saving me?"
Stevie Rae was unable to meet his eyes again, which gave him an odd, panicky feeling. He thought she wasn't going to answer him at all, but finally, in a voice that sounded almost angry, "Do you want to tell
me about everything that bull demanded from you when he was feeding from you, and standing over you, and basically molesting you?"
"No," Rephaim answered without hesitated. "But the other bull - "
"No," Stevie Rae echoed him. "I don't want to talk about it, either. So let's just forget it and go on from here. Well, and let's hope I can fix some of this pain Darkness left inside you."
Rephaim walked with her out onto the icy front lawn, which was pathetic in its dilapidation and a sad, broken reflection of its opulent past. As Rephaim followed her, moving slowly to try to compensate for the terrible pain that was making him so weak, he wondered about the payment Light could have demanded from Stevie Rae. Clearly, it was something unnerving - something that made Stevie Rae reluctant to speak of it.
He kept stealing glances at her when he thought she wouldn't notice. She appeared healthy and totally recovered from her brush with Darkness. Actually, she looked strong and whole and completely normal.
But, as he was all too aware, appearances could easily deceive.
Something was wrong - or at the very least, something about the debt she'd paid Light made her uncomfortable.
Rephaim was so busy trying to be stealthy about studying her that he almost ran into the tree she'd stopped beside.
She looked at him and shook her head. "You're not foolin' me. You feel too crappy to be sneaky, so stop gawking at me. I'm fine. Jeeze, you're worse than my mama."
"Have you talked to her?"
Stevie Rae's frown deepened. "I haven't exactly had a lot of free time the past couple days. So, no, I haven't talked to my mama."
"You should."
"I'm not gonna talk about my mama right now."
"As you wish."
"And you don't need to use that tone with me."
"What tone?"
Instead of answering him, she said, "Just sit down and be quiet for a change and let me think about how I'm supposed to help you." Like she was demonstrating, Stevie Rae sat down, cross-legged, with her back against the old cedar tree that wept ice and fragrant needles all around them. When he still didn't move, she made an impatient noise and motioned to the space in front of her. "Sit," she ordered.
He sat.
"And now?" he asked.
"Well, give me a minute. I'm not real sure how to do this."
He watched her twirl one of her soft blond curls around her finger and scrunch up her forehead for a while, and then he offered, "Would it help to think about what you did when you tripped that annoying fledgling who thought he could challenge me?"
"Dallas isn't annoying, and he thought you were attacking me."
"Good thing I wasn't."
"And why is that?"
Even through the pain in his body, her tone amused him. She knew very well that puny fledgling had been no threat to him, even in his weakened condition. Had Rephaim been attacking her, or anyone else, the impotent youth couldn't have stopped him. Still, the boy had been Marked by a red crescent, which meant he was one of her subjects, and his Stevie Rae was nothing if not fiercely loyal. So Rephaim bowed his head in acquiescence, and said only, "Because it would have been inconvenient if I'd had to defend myself."
Stevie Rae's lips curved up in the hint of a smile. "Dallas really did think he was protecting me from you."
"You don't need him." Rephaim spoke the words without thinking. Stevie Rae's gaze met his and held.
He wished he could read her expressions more easily. He thought he saw surprise in her eyes, and maybe a faint glint of hope, but he also saw fear - of that he was sure. Fear of him? No, she'd already proven she wasn't afraid of him. So the fear had to be within, of something that wasn't him but that he'd triggered. Not knowing what else to say, he added, "As you said before, I could not swat a fly. I was certainly no threat to you."
Stevie Rae blinked a couple of times, as if clearing away too many thoughts, and then she shrugged, and said, "Yeah, well, I've had one heck of a time convincing everybody back at the House of Night that it was just a weird coincidence that you dropped from the sky at the same time Darkness manifested, and that you weren't attacking me. Them knowing there's a Raven Mocker still in Tulsa has made it super hard for me to get away from school alone."
"I should leave." The words made him feel strangely empty inside.
"Where would you go?"
"East," he said without hesitation.
"East? You mean like all the way east to Venice? Rephaim, your daddy's not in his body. You can't help him by goin' there right now. I think you can help him more by stayin' here and working with me to bring both Zoey and him back."
"You don't want me to leave?"
Stevie Rae looked down as if studying the earth they sat on. "It's hard for a vampyre to have the person she's Imprinted with too far away from her."
"I'm not a person."
"Yeah, but that didn't stop us from Imprinting, so I'm thinkin' the rules still apply to you and me."
"Then I'll stay until you tell me to go."
She closed her eyes as if the words had hurt her, and he had to force himself to remain still and not reach out to comfort her, to touch her.
Touch her? I want to touch her?
He crossed his arms over his chest in a physical denial of the shocking thought.
"Earth," he said, his voice sounding too loud in the silence that had fallen between them. She looked up at him then with a question in her eyes. "You called it before, when you tripped the red fledgling. You called it to open so that you could escape from the sunlight on the rooftop. You called it to close the tunnel behind me at the abbey. Can you not simply call it now and make your request of it?"
Her gentle blue eyes widened. "You're right! Why am I makin' it so hard? I've done it like a zillion times for other stuff. There's no reason why I can't do it for this." She held her hands out, palms up. "Here, grab hold."
It was too easy for him to unfold his arms and press his palms to hers. He looked down at their joined hands, and he suddenly realized that, except for Stevie Rae, he'd never touched a human for any reason except violence. Yet there he was, touching her again - gently - calmly.
Her skin felt good against his. She was warm. And soft. Her words came to him then, and what she was saying moved inside him, nesting there in a distant place that had never before been touched.
"Earth, I have a big favor to ask you. Rephaim here is special to me. He's in pain, and he's havin'
trouble gettin' well. Earth, I've borrowed your strength before - to save myself - to save those I care about. This time I'm asking to borrow your strength to help Rephaim. It's only right." She paused and looked up at him. Their eyes met as she echoed the words he'd spoken to Darkness when he thought she'd been unable to hear him. "You see, he's hurt because of me. Heal him. Please."
The ground beneath them quivered. Rephaim was thinking it was strangely like the skin of a twitching animal when Stevie Rae gasped, and her body jerked. Rephaim started to pull away, wanting to stop whatever was happening to her, but she held tightly to his hands, saying "No! Don't let go. It's fine."
Then heat radiated from her palms into his. For an instant it reminded him of the last time he'd called on what he believed to be the immortal power of his father's blood, and Darkness had answered instead - pulsing through his body and healing his shattered arm and wing. But quickly Rephaim understood that there was an essential difference between being touched by Darkness and being touched by the earth. Where before the power had been raw and consuming, swelling him with energy and shooting through his body, now what filled him was like a summer's wind beneath his wings. Its presence in his body was no less commanding than Darkness had been, but it was power tempered with compassion - its infilling was living and healthy and growing instead of cold and violent and consuming. It was balm to his overheated blood, soothing the pain that pulsed through his body. When the earth's warmth reached his back - that raw, unhealed place where his great wings grew - the relief was so instantaneous that Rephaim closed his eyes, breathing a long sigh as the agony evaporated.
And, throughout the healing, the air around Rephaim was filled with the heady, comforting scent of cedar needles and the sweetness of summer grass.
"Think about sending the energy back into the earth." Stevie Rae's voice was gentle, but insistent. He started to open his eyes and let loose her hands, but again she held tight to him, saying, "No, keep your eyes shut. Just stay like you are, but imagine the power from the earth as a glowing green light that's coming from the ground under me, up through my body and hands, to you. When you feel like it's done its job, envision it pouring from your body back into the earth."
Rephaim kept his eyes closed, but asked, "Why? Why let it leave me?"
He could hear the smile in her voice. "Because it's not yours, silly. You can't own this power. It belongs to the earth. You can only borrow it, and then send it back with a 'thank you very much.' "
Rephaim almost told her that was ridiculous - that when you've been given power, you don't let it go.
You keep it and use it and own it. He almost said it, but he couldn't. Those words seemed wrong while he was getting filled with earth energy.
So instead, he did what felt right. Rephaim imagined the energy that filled him as a glowing green shaft of light, and envisioned it pouring down his spine and back into the earth from which it had come. And as the rich warmth of earth drained from him, he spoke two words very softly, "Thank you."
Then he was himself again. Sitting under a big cedar tree on damp, cold ground, holding Stevie Rae's hands.
Rephaim opened his eyes.
"Better now?" she asked.
"Yes. Much better." Rephaim opened his hands, and this time, she, too, pulled away.
"Really? I mean, I felt the earth and thought I was channeling it through me into you, and you seemed to be feelin' it." She cocked her head, studying him. "You do look better. There isn't any pain in your eyes anymore."
He stood up, eager to show her, and opened his arms, unfurling his massive wings as if he were flexing a muscle. "See! I can do this with no pain."
She was sitting on the ground staring up at him, wide-eyed. The look on her face was so odd that he automatically lowered his arms and folded his wings against his back.
"What is it?" he asked. "What's wrong?"
"I - I'd forgotten that you flew to the park. Well, and from the park, too." She made a sound that could have been a laugh had it not sounded so choked. "That's stupid, isn't? How could I have forgotten somethin' like that?"
"I suppose you got used to seeing me broken," he said, trying to understand why she suddenly seemed so withdrawn from him.
"What fixed your wing?"
"The earth," he said.
"No, not now. It wasn't broken when we came out here. The pain you were filled with didn't have anything to do with that."
"Oh, no. I've been healed since last night. The pain was caused by the remnants of Darkness and what he did to my body."
"So how did your wing and your arm get fixed last night?"
Rephaim didn't want to answer her. As she stared at him with those wide, accusing eyes, he found himself wanting to lie - to tell her it had been a miracle wrought by the immortality in his blood. But he couldn't lie to her. He wouldn't lie to her.
"I called on powers that are mine to command through my father's blood. I had to. I heard you scream my name."
She blinked, and he saw realization flash through her gaze. "But the bull said you'd been filled with his power and not your daddy's."
Rephaim nodded. "I knew it was different. I didn't know why. Nor did I understand I was getting power directly from Darkness himself."
"So Darkness healed you."
"Yes, and then the earth healed me from the wound Darkness left inside me."
"Okay, well, good." She stood abruptly and brushed off her jeans. "You're better now, and I gotta go.
Like I said, it's tough for me to get away now that the House of Night is all freaked about a Raven Mocker bein' in town."
She started to walk quickly past him, and he reached out to grab her wrist.
Stevie Rae flinched away from him.
Rephaim's hand dropped instantly to his side, and he took a step away from her.
They stared at each other.
"I gotta go," she repeated.
"Will you return?"
"I have to! I promised!" She yelled the words at him, and he felt them as if she'd slapped him.
"I release you from your promise!" he yelled back at her, angry that this small female could cause such turmoil within him.
Her eyes were suspiciously bright when she said, "It's not you I promised - so you can't release me."
Then she swept past him, her head turned away so he couldn't see her face.
"Do not return because you have to. Return only because you want to," he called after her.
Stevie Rae didn't pause and didn't look back at him. She simply left.
Rephaim stood there a long time. When the sound of her car faded away, he finally moved. With a cry of frustration, the Raven Mocker ran and then launched himself into the night sky, beating the cold wind with his massive wings and heading up, up to find the warmer thermals that would lift him, hold him, carry him anywhere - everywhere.
Just away! Take me away from here!
The Raven Mocker swooped to the east, away from the direction Stevie Rae's car had taken - away from Tulsa and the confusion that had entered his life since she'd entered his life. Then he closed his mind to everything except the familiar joy of the sky, and flew.