Burned (House of Night #7)(4)

When earth's power bleeds sacred red

The mark strikes true; Queen Tsi Sgili will devise

He shall be washed from his entombing bed

The song was seductive, and like a labyrinth, it circled on and on.

Through the hand of the dead he is free

Terrible beauty, monstrous sight

Ruled again they shall be

Women shall kneel to his dark might

The music was a whispered enticement. A promise. A blessing. A curse. The memory of what it foretold made Rephaim's sleeping body restless. He twitched and, like an abandoned child, murmured a one-word question: "Father?"

The melody concluded with the rhyme Rephaim had memorized centuries ago: Kalona's song sounds sweet

As we slaughter with cold heat

". . . slaughter with cold heat." Even sleeping, Rephaim responded to the words. He didn't awaken, but his heartbeat increased - his hands curled into fists - his body tensed. On the cusp between awake and asleep, the drumbeat stuttered to a halt, and the soft voices of women were replaced by one that was deep and all too familiar.

"Traitor . . . coward . . . betrayer . . . liar!" The male voice was a condemnation. With its litany of anger, it invaded Rephaim's dream and jolted him fully into the waking world.

"Father!" Rephaim surged upright, throwing off the old papers and scraps of cardboard he'd used to create a nest around him. "Father, are you here?"

A shimmer of movement caught at the corner of his vision, and he jerked forward, jarring his broken wing as he peered from the depths of the dark, cedar-paneled closet.

"Father?"

His heart knew Kalona wasn't there even before the vapor of light and motion took form to reveal the child.

"What are you?"

Rephaim focused his burning gaze on the girl. "Begone, apparition."

Instead of fading as she should have, the child narrowed her eyes to study him, appearing intrigued.

"You're not a bird, but you have wings. And you're not a boy, but you have arms and legs. And your eyes are like a boy's, too, only they're red. So, what are you?"

Rephaim felt a surge of anger. With a flash of movement that caused white-hot shards of pain to radiate through his body, he leaped from the closet, landing just a few feet before the ghost - predatory, dangerous, defensive.

"I am a nightmare given life, spirit! Go away and leave me in peace before you learn that there are things far worse than death to fear."

At his abrupt movement, the child ghost had taken one small step backward, so that now her shoulder brushed against the low windowpane. But there she halted, still watching him with a curious, intelligent gaze.

"You cried out for your father in your sleep. I heard you. You can't fool me. I'm smart like that, and I remember things. Plus, you don't scare me because you're really just hurt and alone."

Then the ghost of the girl child crossed her arms petulantly over her thin chest, tossed back her long blond hair, and disappeared, leaving Rephaim just as she had named him, hurt and alone.

His fisted hands loosened. His heartbeat quieted. Rephaim stumbled heavily back to his makeshift nest and rested his head against the closet wall behind him.

"Pathetic," he murmured aloud. "The favorite son of an ancient immortal reduced to hiding in refuse and talking to the ghost of a human child." He tried to laugh but failed. The echo of the music from his dream, from his past, was still too loud in the air around him. As was the other voice - the one he could have sworn was that of his father.

He couldn't sit anymore. Ignoring the pain in his arm and the sick agony that was his wing, Rephaim stood. He hated the weakness that pervaded his body. How long had he been here, wounded, exhausted from the flight from the depot, and curled into this box in a wall? He couldn't remember. Had one day passed? Two?

Where was she? She'd said she would come to him in the night. And yet here he was, where Stevie Rae had sent him. It was night, and she hadn't come.

With a sound of self-loathing, he left the closet and his nest, stalking past the windowsill in front of which the girl child had materialized to a door that led to a rooftop balcony. Instinct had driven him up to the

second floor of the abandoned mansion, just after dawn, when he'd arrived. At the end of even his great reservoir of strength, he'd thought only of safety and sleep.

But now he was all too awake.

He stared out at the empty museum grounds. The ice that had been falling for days from the sky had stopped, leaving the huge trees that surrounded the rolling hills on which sat the Gilcrease Museum and its abandoned mansion with bent and ruined branches. Rephaim's night vision was good, but he could detect no movement at all outside. The homes that filled the area between the museum and downtown Tulsa were almost as dark as they had been in his postdawn journey. Small lights dotted the landscape - not the great, blazing electricity that Rephaim had come to expect from a modern city. They were only weak, flickering candles - nothing compared to the majesty of the power this world could evoke.

There was, of course, no mystery to what had happened. The lines that carried power to the homes of modern humans had been snapped just as surely as had the ice-burdened boughs of the trees. Rephaim knew that was good for him. Except for the fallen branches and other debris left on the roadways, the streets appeared mostly passable. Had the great electric machine not been broken, people would have flooded these grounds as daily human life resumed.