Nightfall (Grim Gate 1)

Though I don’t have a choice.

“I’m fine,” he presses, putting on a brave face that would turn me on if circumstances weren’t so dire. Blood trickles down his arm, streaming past his elbow and down his fingers, dripping onto the ground. The wound is deep. Fear for his wellbeing makes me sick. I unzip my fleece jacket and use the dagger to cut off the sleeve to use as a tourniquet. I tie it around his arm, and it quickly becomes stained with blood.

“Fuck. You’re losing too much blood.” I swallow hard, feeling like I might pass out, though what good would that do? I squeeze my eyes shut.

“I’m fine,” Ethan presses and pulls me to him. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” I say, though it seems crazy even to me that I got out of this unscathed. I put my hand around Ethan’s arm, trying to stop the bleeding. “I need to get you to a hospital. You need stitches.”

“It’s nothing Julia can’t patch up,” he tells me and looks out at the forest around us. There were three bird-demons, weren’t there? I burned two into nothing but ash, but the third? Did it run away? If it did, will it come back now that it knows we’re injured?

Not wanting to find out, I pick up the dagger and hook my arm around Ethan.

“You…” he starts. “You’re pyrokinetic.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I say, though the very word jolts something inside of me again, and I’m suddenly back in that room. The smell of sage and lavender surrounds me, and I’m sitting on the cobblestone floor, petting a white fox.

“We both know fire magic can be unpredictable,” the pretty woman with black hair tells Aunt Estelle. “It would be in her best interest to attend the Academy. We can teach her how to control her powers. She’ll excel here, which is another thing we both know.”

“The cards don’t lie,” Aunt Estelle presses.

“The cards are just—” A sharp knock on the door causes the woman to stop. She moves around her desk, robes swirling around her feet, and opens her office doors. Two girls, who look to be about my age are ushered in by another adult, who for some reason, I know to be a professor.

“Callie and Kristy,” the dark-haired woman sighs. “I’m not surprised. What is it now?”

I gasp, pulling myself back into the here and now. Blinking several times, I feel sparks flickering around my fingertips, and I know Ethan is right, though I don’t fully understand it.

I am pyrokinetic. I can create and manipulate fire.

And Aunt Estelle knew it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Sit,” Julia tells Ethan, pointing to a kitchen chair. We just got back to his house, and thankfully, Julia was home from running her errands. She brings a first-aid kit to the table, quickly opening it up and pulling out supplies.

I help Ethan take off his jacket, and I pull his t-shirt over his head. The three claw marks on his chest have stopped bleeding, and a sticky scab is starting to form. Julia is going to have to scrub them open to clean. I’m sure hand-hygiene isn’t at the top of the demon’s priorities.

She sets a bottle of whiskey on the table and sticks her hands in latex gloves. Ethan unscrews the lid from the alcohol and takes a swig. Sighing, he sets the bottle back on the table, looking more annoyed than anything, like taking the time to get patched up is more of an annoyance than anything else, because we both know he’d rather be back out there, hunting down the one bird-demon that got away. Fuck, he’s out of my league.

“You’re lucky,” Julia says, inspecting the wounds on Ethan’s arm. “This almost went to the muscle, which is out of my realm of care. I don’t have professional medical training and know you don’t want to lose any sort of function of your arm.”

I do know someone with more training. A lot more training. But asking my mom for help is the last thing we can do. She’d think I’d gone insane—again—and would most likely get the police involved. I don’t know how we’d explain this. An animal attack? There hasn’t been a sighting of anything bigger than coyotes in this area for decades.

“I’ll be fine,” Ethan insists again and reaches for the whiskey with his uninjured arm. Julia cleans the cuts and then takes a sewing needle and thread from the box. Blood doesn’t bother me, but the sight of Julia piercing Ethan’s skin over and over with that big-ass needle makes me lightheaded. I look away, concentrating on my breathing. A minute later, I’m feeling better, and the next time I look up, Julia is wrapping gauze around Ethan’s arm.

“Change this bandage tonight,” she tells Ethan, who brushes her off. Julia flicks her eyes to me. “Maybe you’ll have better luck. Wounds like this tend to have a certain amount of drainage and easily get infected.”