Raintree: Oracle (Raintree 4)

Again, Gideon looked into an empty space and listened for a moment, and then he mumbled, “Great. That’s just great.” He turned eyes a brilliant green, so much like Echo’s, to Rye and said, “Nothing. According to your mother, without the curse you have no special abilities at all.”

Chapter 23

“Do we dare to wait?” Echo asked. The word still echoed in her head. Nothing. All the talismans had done,

for the past eleven years, was keep the curse in check. She’d been so sure she’d sensed his own... But no, not if the ghost was telling the truth. The abilities Ryder had called upon since Cassidy’s birth were bits and pieces of his mother’s curse seeping through.

Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think we can afford to wait. How long do we have?”

“An hour, maybe two.” The invaders were coming. They were moving closer and closer. She felt them coming, in a strange rush in her blood, in the small hairs on her arms standing up. She felt the shifting energies, and still she could not predict the outcome.

“If I don’t do it now,” Gideon said, “I might not get another chance.”

Winning was almost a given, with Ryder at top form. If he were mortal? Without any power at all? Not so much. Echo said as much, mumbling under her breath as she weighed the pros and cons.

“Hey,” Hope snapped. “Not having a woowoo power doesn’t make a person helpless, you know. Jeez.” Well rested after a nice, long nap in Echo’s bed, she looked pumped and ready to fight. “I’ll give him one of my guns.”

Echo looked at Hope. “You brought more than one?”

“You said the A-word. Ansara. I would have brought an arsenal if I’d thought I could get away with it.”

“I’ve never handled a firearm,” Ryder said. “I don’t think I have time to learn...”

His head was thrown back, his entire body tensed. Dark Ryder was fighting to the surface. The duct tape would not contain him much longer.

No matter what, her Ryder had to survive. To allow the dark into the world, to let the curse kill the man she loved and free the other...

Echo looked at Gideon. “Do it,” she whispered. “Do it now. We won’t have another chance.”

Her track record as a prophet was less than stellar, but Gideon trusted her. He trusted her now.

Hope stood behind her husband, her gun drawn as he placed a glowing hand on Ryder’s forehead. Echo wondered if it hurt, if there was heat in that hand, but Ryder didn’t pull back or even flinch.

After a long moment Gideon looked at Echo. “She says you need to say the words. Because you love him, it has to be you.” She saw the puzzlement in his eyes. He probably wondered if Ryder was another one of her crushes, a fling, an infatuation. Now was not the time to explain that this was so much more.

She had been prepared to watch, to step back and let Gideon fix what was broken, but that was not to be. Echo nodded, and in a low and soft voice she repeated the strange words her cousin directed her to say.

That’s when Ryder screamed. He jerked his head around to look directly at her, to glare at her. She could see the pain in his eyes; she could feel it. Those dark eyes she had come to love were touched with Gideon’s electricity as if the lightning lived there, inside him. Did it burn? Was it terrible?

“Help me,” he whispered.

Instinctively, Echo stuttered, the strange words uncomfortable on her tongue. She hesitated, choked on the words. She hadn’t realized that removing the curse would hurt him so. The pain was too much! There had to be another way! But Hope said in her no-nonsense voice, “It’s a trick, Echo. I can see it from here.”

Ryder snapped his head around and growled at Hope, who only adjusted her aim a bit.

The words Gideon whispered, words Echo repeated carefully, were Romany. Carpathian Romany. She didn’t know the language, didn’t even realize there were different variations, but listening, speaking each word carefully...she simply knew. This was Ryder’s mother’s language, a language of power. The language she had used to cast the curse and the one required to remove it.

Ryder truly was in pain, but it wasn’t her Ryder, it was the other. It was the darkness created by a curse which had been cast to instill powers that never should have been. As she spoke the strange words, the darkness and the curse died. A little at a time. Her Ryder hurt, too, as something that had been a part of him for almost his entire life was ripped away.

Would he love her after? Would he be so changed that there was nothing left of the man she loved? He had warned her that removing her own powers would damage her forever. They had damaged his wife, Cassidy’s mother, beyond repair. Was this the same?

No, the powers now being removed were not a part of him. They had been added, forced, poured into a soul unprepared for such magic.

He screamed, an unnatural scream that made every glass in the pub ring. One bottle of whiskey exploded. Then another. The chairs shook slightly, as if Cloughban were experiencing a minor earthquake.

Echo stuttered again and then she whispered, “I love you.” Her words were too soft for anyone to hear over the screams, but Ryder heard somehow. He looked at her. Into her.

Save me.