I plant myself in front of him, our eyes level with each other. Fading bruises mark his face, and a cut on his lip has scabbed over. He’s thinner than he was the last time I saw him, a yellow undertone to his skin. His jaw is still strong, but his eyes are sunken, dark circles underneath.
“Nicole, are you okay?” She stares back at me blankly and a chill goes up my spine. “Nicole? What did you do to her?”
“She asked me to walk her to her car,” Jordan says. “What’s going on, why is the floor being cleared?”
“Nicole, get away from him,” I say, stepping toward her, but she moves back, closer to Jordan.
“Whoa, Lexi, you need to chill,” he says.
“Lex,” Trevor says softly. I look over at him, and he motions to Jane. She’s gone quiet, and her entire body is quivering so hard her feet start to lift from the ground.
“That—that voice,” Jane stammers, blood spilling down her neck. “I remember that voice. It’s like it was inside my head. It told me to leave my friends, to go to the alley alone. It told me not to make a sound.”
“Lexi?” Jordan asks, waving a hand in front of my face. “Hello?”
I look back at him. I will never hate anything as much as I hate the man in front of me.
“You told her to stay quiet,” I say. “You slit her throat and she couldn’t even scream.”
Jordan stares at me for a long moment, then I watch his throat move as he swallows.
“How—” He cuts himself off, taking a step back, pulling Nicole with him. “Right. Which one is it?”
“Her name is Jane,” I say. “Did you even know their names? Did you care?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he says harshly. “I had to. Whoever she is, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You’re sorry?” Jane rushes at Jordan, screaming with pent-up fury. She goes straight through him, diving into his chest and falling onto the floor behind him. The lights overhead flicker and buzz, and Jordan blinks up at them as Trevor rushes to help Jane to her feet.
“Nicole,” I try again. “Look at me.”
“She can’t hear you,” Jordan says. “Just let us go. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re not leaving this building with her,” a voice says from behind me.
“Stay out of this, Ilia,” Jordan says, stumbling back.
“Like hell,” Ilia says, his face twisted with anger. “I trusted you. Urie trusted you. How could you betray us like this?”
“I betrayed you?” Jordan says, lip curling. “No. You’ve got it backward. You betrayed me. All of you, with all your power and your gifts, none of you could save me.”
“What are you talking about?” Ilia says.
“I’m dying,” Jordan says, voice cracking. “Inoperable tumor. Just like that last girl. I’m sorry for that one; I didn’t know until it was too late. The spell only tells me the potential.”
Tumor? I suck in a breath. That isn’t how he dies; I’ve seen how he dies.
“You’re killing people to extend your own life,” another voice says as Phillip appears to our right. Jordan backs up another step, his only exit behind him.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Phillip asks, his face drawn. “Why didn’t you go to my mother? We could have helped you, we could have—”
“I did!” Jordan yells. “And you know what your mom told me? That her magic couldn’t save me. That it was my time. So I figured out what my own power could do.”
“Magic won’t save you from death,” I tell him. “Nothing escapes death.”
“Maybe not,” Jordan says, his knuckles tightening on Nicole. “But it’ll help me escape you.” He throws his hand out in a wide arc.
“Duck,” Ilia yells, but it’s too quick.
The spell hits Phillip first and he locks up, his arms clamping to his sides as his eyes roll back. His body falls hard, hitting the floor with an audible crack that’s echoed by a louder crash behind me.
The hex hits me like a punch to my chest and I double over, the smell of dirt and wormwood shoved in my face. I can feel it sliding over me, oily and necrotic, trying to find purchase. The magic in my inked wheel flutters to life, the cool tingle of Theo’s power a familiar taste. Angry as it is, the curse slips off me and dissipates into the darkness.
I look up and see Jordan’s back as he disappears through the open door, Nicole trotting along docilely.
“Shit,” I say, leaning down to shake Ilia. “Wake up.”
“Leave them!” Jane shouts at me. “We can’t let him go.”
“I’ll stay with them,” Trevor says. “You go.”
I start to run just as Ilia stirs.
“Jordan’s going out the back,” I yell over my shoulder at him, not knowing if he’s even conscious yet. “Check on Phillip; I’m going after him.”
I put my head down and explode into the darkening air, streetlights just switching on.
“Lexi, come on,” Jane snaps.
I blink, adjusting to the gloom after the brightness of the hallway, and try to follow her voice, stumbling over the asphalt of the parking lot. My eyes begin to adapt, but not soon enough to keep me from slamming into a group of warm bodies.
Deaths wash over me and I jerk away, hugging my arms to my sides to make myself smaller.
“We’re losing them,” Jane yells again, desperation making her voice high.
“I’m coming.” I grit my teeth and plunge through the crowd.
After a moment I can’t separate them; the deaths all start to bleed together, images of failed hearts and blackened lungs mixing with mangled steel and empty pill bottles. My stomach heaves and my throat burns, but I don’t fight it, instead letting the tide of acid sweep me under and along until I break through to the other side.
Gasping and retching, I sprawl out at the end of the lot and try to catch my breath.
“Lexi?” Jane asks, grabbing my arm and helping me stand.
“Which way?” I ask, my eyes darting around the empty street.
“Alley,” Jane says, her voice darkening.
She doesn’t need to tell me which one. I meet her cloudy eyes, and I think anger is too weak a word for what’s in them.
“He’s not getting away,” I promise her.
“Just save Nicole. Don’t let her end up like me.”
We turn the corner, splashing through oil slicks and pools of black water and duck behind Xanadu. It feels like it was always meant to end here, where I found her, where it all began.
The alley looks bleaker in the fading light, the stains darker, the bricks discolored and crumbling.
“Jordan,” I yell, and he spins around wildly, his face pale and clammy. I step forward and he holds up a hand.
“Stay where you are,” he says.
“Your spells won’t work on me,” I say.
“True,” he says. “But they’ll work on her.” He thrusts Nicole in front of him and fear uncurls in my chest, cold and corrosive. I’ve never touched her; I don’t know how she dies. This can’t be how she dies. Please don’t let this be how she dies.
“She’s your friend, Jordan,” I say. “Leave her alone.”
“I can’t. I didn’t get as much as I should have from your friend. And next to nothing at all from the last one. I won’t last past tonight,” he says, his breathing strained. “The spell picks out the brightest spots closest to me. I didn’t know it would be Nicole.”
“You mean you don’t care,” I say. “Is it worth it? To kill so many people, just to live an extra few days?”
Sweat shines on his forehead and his shoulders shake as he coughs. He’s getting paler by the minute, the life fading from his body.
“Just let me go, Lexi,” he says softly. “I’ll run. I won’t be a problem for you all anymore, and you won’t ever hear from me again. I’ll go far, as far from here as I can get.”
“And you’ll keep killing,” I say, sliding one foot forward. “I can’t let you do that.”
Jordan’s face twists
and his lips pull back.
“Fine,” he says harshly. “I tried to be reasonable.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a folding knife. He opens it carefully, the blade long and bright.
Jane hisses at him, throwing out a hand in front of me like she can protect me. I can taste the edge of her rage, like smoke in the air.
But past her, past Jordan, at the other end of the alley, I can just make out the sheen of blond hair, and something else, something that’s glinting in the streetlight. And I finally understand what I saw when I touched Jordan that night. Newton’s third law of motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A gun exerts force on a bullet when it fires, and the bullet exerts an equal force in the opposite direction on the gun. Nothing is ever created or destroyed, only transferred.
“When I tell you, kill the light,” I whisper to Jane, my fist curling into a fig for luck.
“Lexi,” she says, and when I meet her eyes it isn’t anger I find, but fear. “He’s not worth it. He’s not worth you dying over.”
“Trust me,” I say.
“I didn’t want it to be like this,” Jordan says, the knife trembling in his grip. He takes a labored breath and rushes me, lamplight glinting off the knife that’s aiming for my heart.
“Now,” I say, and Jane opens her mouth and screams. Only I can hear it, but the streetlight explodes into sparks above us.
Jordan flinches and the arc of his knife goes wide. A line of fire scores across my collarbone and shoulder as I drop to the ground and roll. Jordan spins to find me, and that’s when he sees Ilia at the other end of the alley.
Jordan grunts when the first shot hits him. The second makes him fall. Then there are the long, awful seconds where he’s across from me and our eyes meet over the filthy concrete. He looks surprised; even when his face goes slack he looks surprised. I thought it would be satisfying, to watch him die, but I only feel a kind of numbness.
“Lexi?” Jane kneels beside me and tries to pull at my sweatshirt to see the damage, but her hands just slip through the clothing.
“I’m okay,” I say, and my voice sounds muffled to my ringing ears. “It’s not deep.”
“Good,” Ilia says, limping over to me. He holds out a hand to help me up before remembering he shouldn’t. He starts to pull back but I grab it, let the acid wash over me and let him haul me up.
I release it as soon as I’m standing, but he still grins.
“How’d you know I was there?” he asks.
“All that oil in your hair caught the light,” I say. “You made me touch him, remember? I saw how he dies, and you’re the only idiot I know with a gun.”
His grin widens.
“Is Phillip okay?” I ask.
Ilia nods. “He’s still a little out of it, but he’s going to be fine.”
“Excuse me, why am I in an alley? What is—is that Jordan? What the fuck is going on?”
I look over at Nicole and breathe a sigh of relief.
“Ask Ilia,” I tell her, the numbness refusing to leave me.
Ilia glares at me, but he jerks his head at Nicole.
“Come on, one of our cops should be here soon,” Ilia says. “We need to deal with him; I’ll explain on the way. You coming?” he asks me.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just give me a minute. I’ll be right behind you.”
Jane is sitting on the ground of the alley, staring at Jordan’s body. His blood is pooling out around him, and she moves her feet a fraction to keep them out of the stain, like she doesn’t want any part of him to touch her.
I wait until Ilia leaves with Nicole, then sit next to Jane, my leg pressing against hers.
“He’s dead,” I tell her. “However long you look at him, he’ll still be dead.”
She swallows, the long line of her throat moving.
“I thought I’d feel different,” she says. “I thought I’d feel . . . I don’t know, at peace. I thought that’s why I stayed, so I could have vengeance. But looking at him . . . he just looks sick. And young. And I don’t feel any different.”
“Well,” I say, “maybe that wasn’t why you stayed.”
Jane finally looks away from the body. “Then why?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re not finished yet.”
She looks back at Jordan. “What if he comes back?”
“I don’t think he will. But if he does, then he’s all yours.”
She almost smiles then, and I nudge her with my knee.
“Come on, let’s go find Trevor,” I say. “You’ve spent enough time in this alley.”
I stand up and hold out my hand. When she takes it I can’t help but compare it to Ilia’s, how it doesn’t hurt me, how warm her fingers are in mine.
“I was wrong about where we met,” she says quietly.
“Hmm?” I ask, trying to step around the blood on the ground.
“We didn’t meet at the club,” she says. “We met here. This you and this me, we met here.”
I glance back, remember how she looked when I first met her, like rage barely contained in flesh.
“I guess we did.”
“Lexi,” she says, her voice solemn. “Thank you. For helping me, for finding him. For making sure he won’t hurt anyone else.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” I tell her. “I would rather have saved you.”
Her lips tilt up in a sad smile.
“So what now?” she asks.
I don’t answer, and the silence stretches between us, something new and painful and tasting of an ending.
21
“ARE YOU READY?” I ASK.
Jane smooths trembling hands down a simple gray dress; I’m still not used to seeing her in different clothes, but when Jordan died whatever he stole from her came rushing back.
“You’ll stay next to me?” she asks.
“The whole time.”
The morning is overcast, the marine layer heavy and clinging. It’ll burn off by the afternoon, but it’s fitting for today, the sky sour gray and grieving.
The cemetery is in Mid City, a disordered and crowded stretch of graves. I drive slowly along the curb, pyramid tombs rising next to flat headstones and weeping angels. The grass is dry and brittle and palm trees loom overhead, shadows slicing thin lines across the rows.
“They’re so close,” Jane says, her face pressed to the window. “The graves. They’re so close. This place has no room to breathe.”
I nod, my chest tight as the stones fly past. I drive slower, toward a short line of cars parked along the curb. I pull in behind the last one, but Jane makes no move to get out when I cut the engine. Her hands are clenched together in her lap, and when I look at her face her eyes are shut tight.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I just . . . need a minute.”
The gray dress ripples, and for a moment I see a bloody shirt. I blink and it’s gone, and Jane finally opens her eyes.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s go.”
We walk toward the small group in the distance, a blur of black that slowly comes into focus. Jane’s mother is wearing a wrinkled navy blue dress and sunglasses large enough to cover half her face. An older woman walks next to her, strong-jawed and petite, her shoulders stiff in a perfectly fitted dress suit.
“God, my grandma and my mom haven’t spoken in years,” Jane says. “I guess death is funny like that.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Funerals will heal grudges quicker than apologies.”
Jane didn’t want to go to the funeral service; she said it didn’t feel right, like eavesdropping on someone’s private conversation. Funerals are for the living, not the dead. But she still wanted to say good-bye.
The police found her body buried in a remote section of Topanga. They got a tip about someone matching Jordan’s description hiking around the area. It was easy enough for the psychics to trace the bodies from the blood Jordan left in the alley. There were six
others buried near Jane, young women and men who were missing, all of their wounds matching the knife Jordan had when he died. Marcus had no family to claim him, but he was one of us; we cremated him and Ilia spread his ashes in the ocean.
I see Isaac, dressed like me in dark jeans and a black shirt, and Macy and Delilah standing together. Macy gives me a small wave that I return; we’re having coffee next week and I’m taking her to meet Priscilla. Deda is there, his oxygen tank rolling beside him, Ilia and Phillip helping him walk. They said they wanted to pay their respects. Deda looks past me to Jane and gives her a solemn nod.
“A funeral procession brings good luck,” he tells us. “As long as you do not cross its path.”
“Luck for the dead or for the living?” Jane asks.
“In this case, perhaps both,” Deda answers, and Jane gives him a slight smile.
“That’s going to get old real fast,” Ilia mutters, and I elbow him in the ribs.
A bright green tarp is tucked around an open grave, a gleaming wood casket held up with metal pulleys. Jane sucks in a breath and I know she’s seen what I’ve seen, her name etched deep in the gravestone. Jane Morris, it reads. Beloved daughter and friend.
“Nice headstone,” someone says, and it takes everything in me to keep from jumping. I shoot a glare at Trevor as he comes to stand on Jane’s other side, completely overdressed in a tuxedo.
“You came,” Jane says, smiling at him.
“Wouldn’t miss it, kid,” he says, slinging one arm around her shoulders.
A man in a dark suit starts to talk, spouting the usual lines about committing a body to the earth, and my mind tunes out. There’s a groaning sound, and then the casket shudders and begins to move. It sinks slowly into the earth, the mechanical buzz loud and ugly in the silence of this place.
Jane’s mom begins to cry, the kind of awful, choking crying of someone trying to hide their tears. It sounds like her sobs are tearing her open, ripping her skin until her insides are on display. Her bruised, broken heart, split in half for us all to see. I can’t handle this much grief; it’s too small, too close, too personal. Pull back, I need to pull back, until I see everything from far away, until humans crawl like ants, until the earth is a blue marble in inky space.
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