Heir of Night (The Thorne Hill)

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Kristy spits out. “It can’t.”

“I don’t want it to.” I dip my pancake-taco in syrup. “We need to be real. I ran the risk of death by demon long before I knew I was a Nephilim. Add my made-to-be-murdered pedigree in with some serious bad guys…” I don’t finish my sentence. “I need to know Elena will be taken care of. And that someone will check in on Lucas too. If I die, I…I don’t know what it would do to him.”

“He’d find a way to keep going. For your daughter. It’s not going to come to that, Callie. Okay? Don’t tell me otherwise.” She blinks away tears. “I don’t want to live without you, either. None of us do. You know we need you way more than we like to admit.”

“Yeah.” I chuckle, forcing back my own emotions. “You guys would totally be lost without me.”

She inhales, taking a minute to compose herself. “So, since you potentially have like a month left, we really need to get this nursery together. What do you have left to buy?”

“We have pretty much everything on the list, I think. I didn’t want to put things together too soon and jinx anything.” I tap the screen of my phone to pull up my list and remember I never texted my sister or Melinda back. I fire off a quick “I’m home, baby and I are fine, I’ll explain more later because I’m tired” text to them both and then show Kristy my list. We plan out how to set up the nursery while we finish eating. It’s fun, reminding me about our talks as kids, planning out elaborate weddings that would result in perfect families.

I lean back in the barstool right when the energy shifts again. This time, it’s a stronger shift, and my heart skips a beat right before Julian and my father appear in front of us.

“Dad!” I can’t get out of the stool fast enough. Michael smiles broadly and wraps his arms around me. “What are you doing here?” I pull back. “Family reunions tend to only happen when someone died.”

“No one died.” Michael smooths back my hair and looks into my eyes. “You are the spitting image of your mother.”

Lucas, having heard our conversation, speeds back into the room and looks just as concerned as I was.

“No one died,” I tell him.

“I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to come see you,” Michael tells me. “I wish I could have come sooner, but it wasn’t safe.”

“Julian told me. I’m glad you’re here now. Please tell me you can stay a while.”

“Just a while.”

“I’ll take it.”

Michael sweeps his hand out to the island. “Were you eating?”

I shake my head. “I’m done. For now. Do you want anything? You don’t need to eat, but you can, right?”

“Right, and no, thank you, though.” He turns his attention to the broken amulet.

“Is that thing going to work?” Lucas asks, not hiding how doubtful he is.

“It may contain one Horseman long enough to trap it in Hell,” Michael says, holding his hand over the pieces. “Or keep one imprisoned for just enough time for us to figure out how to kill it.”

“I like option number two,” I note and feel both Kristy and Lucas giving me don’t even think about it looks. “How do I fuse it back together? I mean, I don’t have to now that you’re here, but I want to try.”

Michael looks at me like a proud father. “I can show you.” Eagerly, I nod and step around the counter. “Hold out your hands and close your eyes. Then tell me what you feel.”

I extend my hands and let my eyes fall shut. At first I feel nothing, like this thing wouldn’t even register as a magical artifact. But then the air around it shifts, just like it does before an angel appears on our plane.

“Energy. Like teeny-tiny particles of…of everything, and they’re vibrating fast like hummingbird wings.”

“Yes. Now, pull that energy out. The amulet was broken by a spell rooted in divine magic. Take the energy back, and the amulet will return to its previous state.”

I inhale, imagining bright light coming out of the amulet. Kristy gasps, and when I open my eyes, I see the white light I imagined has manifested and is being pulled out of the amulet. A rush goes through me, awakening the angelic part of me that’s been rather repressed lately.

The pieces of the amulet start to fuse back together, and Michael smiles again. “Holy shit, it’s working,” I whisper to myself.

“Concentrate,” Michael instructs. “You’ve almost got it all.”

The final piece of the amulet melds seamlessly in with the rest, and I close my fists, taking in the rest of the energy. It gives me another rush…a rush that quickly makes me feel like I’m going to throw up from the intense pain it brings on. I pitch forward, hands landing on the counter. The same burning-hot pain is back in my stomach, and this time it’s worse than ever before.