by Cate Tiernan
Incy was still trying to get up, and I made a note of his angle in case I needed to kick him in the balls again.
“Oh, like you could use that sword,” he sneered, but I saw fear behind his eyes.
I gave an evil smile, one that I had practiced a lot, years ago, for fun. “You’d be surprised,” I said with my best smirk, and saw him hesitate.
Then I stepped backward several feet, in case he tried to lunge, and I lowered the sword, my arms trembling as I made a momentous decision. “I am stronger than you. Because I’m… not going to kill your loser ass.” I drew in a shuddering breath, wondering how I could disable him long enough to get the hell out of here. “You deserve to die,” I said again. “And I could kill you right now, and no one on this earth would mourn you. But I’m better than that, you lousy piece of horseshit!” I ended up shouting, enraged all over again. I yanked off the ring he had given me and hurled it over the balcony.
Then the floor shook and I heard another, even louder bellow of rage. Incy looked up, his face changing to shock and anger…
… at the furious northern raider who was thundering down the balcony.
So I had died, after all. After all that, as hard as I had tried, Incy had managed to choke me to death. It was over. As if from a distance, I watched Reyn seize Incy by the coat and throw him across the floor. This was what heaven was: watching Reyn beat the crap out of Incy. I would get to do this for eternity, I imagined. It wasn’t bad.
Then several things came together for me: I was immortal; I couldn’t be choked to death. Heaven would probably smell better and be warmer. I didn’t even know if there was a heaven, and it was somewhat unlikely that I would end up there, if there was. Also, River, Asher, Solis, and Anne were running toward me.
It seemed I was still alive, after all, and it was all over.
CHAPTER 25
Not totally over.
“Nastasya!” Asher looked at my face, then carefully took the sword out of my numb hand and examined my wrists, which were bruised, cut, and scraped. River and Solis went to pull Reyn off Incy, who was putting up a fight but had no hopes of winning against someone who had been born and bred to vanquish other people. River said something and drew a sigil in the air, and Incy slumped like a beanbag, eyes staring at the ceiling. Solis took Reyn’s arm, pulling him away, as Reyn stood over Incy, breathing hard, clenching his fists.
Now that Incy was no longer a threat, I felt dizzy and ridiculously tired. I realized that Solis and Anne were with Boz and Katy. I heard them murmuring prayers, and I was gruesomely aware that I’d brought this into their lives.
They were here. During my worst moments with Innocencio, I’d longed to see River again, to have another chance of coming to terms with Reyn. Now I was profoundly relieved and grateful but also incredibly depressed that they were witnesses to the complete nadir of my life. I’d thrown the gift of their knowledge back at them, had left them and immediately gotten myself into an unbelievable amount of trouble. These people, whose opinion I actually cared about desperately, were seeing me at my moment of utter defeat. I sank to my knees.
River came and knelt by me. I remembered the first time we’d met; she’d come and knelt by me then, as I wrung frigid ditch water out of my fox stole. Now I didn’t want to look into her eyes, but I forced myself. I saw concern, worry, and love. My nose got stuffy the way it did before I started crying. She stroked my flaming magenta hair out of the way with one hand, and we turned to survey the scene. It was so much worse now, seen all at once, when I wasn’t under a spell: the warehouse, Boz’s desiccated husk, headless Katy, the circle of blood, the chains, the candles used to work evil, loathsome magick. I didn’t see how I could ever possibly get over this, and my triumph over Incy, over darkness, evaporated like smoke.
River’s clear, light brown eyes met mine. Her hand rubbed my shoulder carefully, and the pain made me want to barf again. She leaned close to my ear and spoke, her words for me alone: “This is very bad. But I’ve seen worse. You will get over this.”
I started to cry. “My face is not that expressive.”
My nose was cold. The rest of me was warm. The mattress beneath me was hard. Experimentally, I pushed a hand out and quickly found the edge of the bed. It was narrow. Slowly, holding my breath, I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was the crack in my ceiling, shaped like Brazil. I let my gaze wander and saw my small wooden wardrobe, the door to my room. The metal bedstead at my feet. My sink. The small table beside my bed. My window.
My room at River’s.
That was when I knew I was dreaming. I stayed very still so I wouldn’t wake up. I would give anything for this to be true, to be reality. Instead I knew that soon I would really wake up in a fabulous hotel room in Boston, in a thick, cushy bed with down pillows. Someone would come in, talking loudly, ordering room service. I would feel awful until I had four cups of coffee. Then it would be a day of shopping, eating, hanging out, followed by a night at the theater or a snobby new club or an important restaurant. In short, a vapid, purposeless, stupid existence—a nightmare.
I closed my eyes again. But not as much of a nightmare as the dream I’d had about Incy killing Boz and Katy in that warehouse. It had seemed so real…. Why did I keep having these dreams, these visions?
I heard a knock on my door and ignored it. It was housekeeping, possibly room service. If I opened my eyes again, I would truly wake up, and the thought of waking up in Boston with Incy filled me with despair.
The door opened. I pretended to be asleep. I smelled…herbs?
“I know you’re not asleep,” said River, and my eyes sprang open.
It was really her. I was actually here. I frowned, thinking back. My last memory was… oh my God, had that all happened? The unspeakable atrocity in the warehouse? Had that been real? Oh goddess.
“Sit up and drink this,” said River.
I saw my wrists then, mottled with deep, dark purple bruises, covered with punctures from the splinters of the post. My throat was sore. One hand flew to my neck; someone had wrapped a thin scarf around it. I was touched by this thoughtfulness and felt my eyes fill with tears. I took the mug from River and sipped.
Fresh horror washed over me as I remembered more and more of what had happened. River sat down on my bed. I couldn’t look at her, just drank the herbal tisane and let the tears well out of my eyes.
“I’m… so sorry,” I whispered, looking down at my comforter.
“I know,” River said.
“Innocencio—is he dead?”
“No. Poor Incy will have to endure the healing talents of my aunt Louisette,” she answered. “Nell has moved back to England, to another place of recovery. But I think Incy will be with Louisette for quite a while.”
“He can’t be helped, surely?” I heard the skepticism in my voice.
“I think so, yes,” said River.
Good Lord, if Incy could be helped… then I was a freaking picnic.
There was another tap on my door, and Anne came in with a tray. The bowl of soup and hunk of bread made me recoil as I remembered the night I had left this place, only a few days ago? Incy’s darkness, masquerading as my own, had ruined a meal.
Anne set the tray down on my lap and I edged up against my headboard. “I keep forgetting about your hair,” she said drily. “What possessed you?”
I fingered the magenta strands. “Actually—I think Incy possessed me,” I said slowly, trying to recall the words he’d spit at me… when? Last night? “What day is it? How long was I out?”
“About eighteen hours,” said River. “What do you mean, Incy possessed you?”
“Last night, when we were fighting, I was saying everything bad I could think of, how much I hated him, how he was horrible and pathetic and I was so much stronger than he was…” I trailed off, embarrassed. I certainly hadn’t demonstrated my wondrous ability by doing anything correctly here. I picked up the bread and broke off a piece, dipped it in the deep orange soup. I hadn’t expected t
o ever be able to eat again, after how sickened I was by everything that had happened. But I realized I was starving.
“You are so much stronger than he is,” River said matter-of-factly. “Then what?”
“He said that I wasn’t strong enough to keep him out. He said that he was why everything had started to go wrong for me here. He’d made all the bad stuff happen: my spells blowing up, arguing with people, getting fired. He said it was all him—he was sending bad spells at me and it wrecked everything around me.”
River and Anne looked at each other.
“I’ll get Solis and Daisuke to do a sweep,” Anne said, and left the room.
“If that’s true, then there’s something here he was using to get to you,” River explained. “If there was, they’ll find it and destroy it. But I can’t believe that Incy would be strong enough to work that kind of magick.”
“Not by himself,” I said, remembering. I told River everything Incy had said about the mysterious Miss Edna, not that he’d said much. The story of Miss Edna’s bar hit me with a new shudder, and I dropped my head into my hands. “I brought all this here,” I mumbled, my cheeks heating.
“Yep,” said River. She took a piece of my bread and ate it. “But don’t flatter yourself that you’re the worst, or this is the worst, or that you’ve set new low records for screwups.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better,” I said, and ate some soup. It was curried butternut squash, fan-freaking-tastic, the first real food I’d had in days.
River smiled briefly. “Yes. I’m not trying to minimize what happened. It was incredibly bad. Very dark, very evil. Incy is a dangerously dark person and will likely remain so for some time. I’m very sorry for the two deaths he caused. I’m sorry about whatever part you played in this whole fiasco.”
Now I felt terrible again. I put down my spoon.
“But you didn’t make Incy go dark; you didn’t kill those people,” River said. “And this, while tragic, is still not as bad as what other people have brought here through the years.”
I was dying to know what and who, but figured it would be tacky to ask. “Like what, and who?” I picked up my spoon again.
River gave a small smile. “I won’t betray any confidences. But I bet in the coming days, people will feel compelled to share their stories. Some of them will make your hair stand on end. And some of them have had unfortunate, even disastrous, consequences for us here.”
Oh, thank God.
You know what I mean.
All the same, I was still ashamed by how badly I had used my time here. And everyone, all the other students, would obviously know what had happened. No, that wouldn’t be at all embarrassing, to face everyone again. That would be fabulous. Ugh.
I ate slowly. River took each of my hands and smoothed some kind of ointiment into the bruises and splinter cuts. It smelled like borage, tea-tree oil, and paraffin and felt immediately soothing. There was still a lot I wanted to know: How had they known I needed help? How had they known where to find me? What happened to Boz’s and Katy’s bodies? Where was Reyn? Why had he been there?
Suddenly I was exhausted, crushed by the weight of what had happened. Despite what River had said, this was an awful, wretched situation, and I felt tainted.
Except—
“At the end, I had Incy on the ground,” I said slowly. “I picked up his sword, the one he’d used to—anyway, I hated him so much, and he’d tried to kill me, and he’d killed my friends, and he’d sent bad stuff at me here. And I wanted to kill him. I pictured myself killing him, pictured him being dead forever.”
River sat quietly, listening in that way that made you want to tell her everything. I looked up. “I decided not to kill him. I mean, I wasn’t scared of killing him. I really wanted him dead right then. But… I had a choice. And I chose not to kill him.” I marveled at this for a moment.
I met River’s eyes and she nodded, then held up her hand. “Excellent. High five for not killing him.” The corners of her mouth widened, and I felt a sudden lightness in my heart. I reached out and patted a high five, for not killing Incy.
I’d been gone a big four days. I’d managed to pack an amazing amount of destruction into that time. But also a lot of understanding and even… growing up, I daresay.
River stood and took the tray. “Go to sleep. I’ll see you when you wake up.”
She turned off my lamp and left quietly, and for a minute I lay on my bed, trying to start processing everything and failing miserably. And then I slept.
CHAPTER 26
It was almost a week before I manned up enough to go downstairs. In and ideal world, I would have stayed in my room forever, a hermit, and people would have had to push food into my room through a slot in the door.
This is not an ideal world. But then you know that.
For days I listened to people passing my door, speaking quietly. Brynne came to see me and was warmly sympathetic. I was hoping she would tell me about something truly heinous she had done—besides trying to set someone on fire, which I already knew about—but she just commiserated and told me to change my hair back, for God’s sake.
I realized she was a friend of mine. I hadn’t known that before. She spoke the truth to me. She was generous and caring. When I thought back to my old friends, I couldn’t remember any of them actually caring about me, my feelings, what I was doing, what decisions I was making. Except in how it would affect them. That was the difference. One of the differences.
River and Asher came in one afternoon. “We found what Incy was using,” Asher said baldly. “You know the big mirror in the dining room? With the gilt frame? It was spelled. We don’t know how he did it. Usually you have to physically touch something to do what he did, but anyway. He was using the mirror as a conduit, and he was sending dark spells aimed at you. We do believe that those spells are why you had such a bad time here the last several weeks.”
“The first several weeks were your fault,” River said solemnly, and startled me into a smile.
“The mirror has been ritually destroyed,” Asher went on. “The room and the house have been smudged and cleansed. Everything should be much better now.”
I nodded, hoping he was right.
One day I woke up and there were two suitcases in my room, with some of the clothes I’d bought in Boston.
Later River told me they’d found them in the trunk of Incy’s car. He’d brought them with us that night so that if I “disappeared,” it would look like I had packed and left on purpose. I went through them and got rid of anything I had worn with Incy and the others. Then I crammed what was left into my wardrobe, next to my flannel shirts and wool sweaters. I wasn’t the punk/goth party girl I’d been when I first came here, but I wasn’t entirely Hilda the goathered either. I was a little of both.
River fixed my hair with the same spell as last time. I hadn’t gotten used to the magenta, even a little bit, and it was a relief to see my white-blond hair again. At least the cut still looked cute, when I remembered to actually comb it while it was still wet.
The bruises and cuts on my wrists healed. The purple finger marks around my throat healed. My emotions were still battered.
It wasn’t long before I had the sudden idea to crawl under my bed, pull out the loose piece of molding, and reach inside my hidey-hole. My heart thumped wildly as I felt the scarf, felt the warm metal within. I unwrapped it, looked at it to make sure: It was half of my mother’s amulet, my family’s tarak-sin. River had put it back, and that made tears start to my eyes again—she trusted me with it. She didn’t think I was dark or would use it for dark purposes. And… she’d thought I’d be back to claim it.
Every day I felt Reyn in front of my door, but he never knocked, never asked to come in. I was nowhere near brave enough to actually go over to the door to see him, like a normal person. I longed to talk to him, pictured his face over and over. But I’d been a coward for so long that it was hard to stop.
Finally the powers th
at be quit bringing me food, to force me to come out. I lasted eight hours. Some bastard started making cookies in the kitchen, and the smell wafted up the stairs and beneath my door. They were probably aiming a fan in my direction to make it worse. I was almost delirious by the time I slunk downstairs to follow the scent.
In the kitchen, Amy and Lorenz were dropping lumps of cookie dough onto baking sheets. Or at least Amy was while Lorenz sat on a stool looking gorgeous.
“Ha!” Amy said to Lorenz when she saw me. “I told you this would work!” She grinned, picked up a still-warm cookie, and tossed it to me. It was Anne’s favorite, a cookie made with tofu and almonds and sesame seeds, but it actually tasted really good, and since it was “healthy” I ate about twelve of them for linner.
Lorenz came and kissed both my cheeks, Italian-style.
“Very nice haircut,” he said approvingly. “Very chic.”
“Thank you.” And that was that. These folks were so damn evolved and generous and forgiving, they just took me back into the fold as if I hadn’t oh-so-recently been involved in a horrible, deadly, self-induced tragedy. It was hard to bear.
But I couldn’t stay here eating cookies forever. In an ideal world, yada yada yada…. So I left the kitchen and saw River in the hallway, in front of the job chart.
“Hi,” she said cheerfully. “I’m just adding your name back in. You’re up for egg-gathering tomorrow morning!”
“Oh jeezum,” I murmured, and she laughed. “Um… do you maybe know where… uh, Reyn is?” I said the last three words really fast, because that would make it totally impossible for her to put two and two together.
“Let’s see.” River, completely unfazed, checked the accursed chore chart. “He should be in the barn about now.”
Yes, because the barn is my favorite freaking place, where I feel the most comfortable, where I’m not tormented by a hundred memories of horses I’ve loved and lost. Or didn’t save.
I sighed.