by Alys Arden
I went through the parlors, and just as I stepped into the blue room, one of the pocket doors on the opposite side wavered, like someone had knocked into it. I froze.
“Isaac? Annabelle?”
Perfect silence, but I had a weird feeling.
I crept to the coffee table, lowered my hand into a jar of salt, and threw it at the gap between the doors. The salt sprinkled to the floor.
Nothing.
Chill out, Adele.
I ran through the hallway, through the kitchen to the sunrooms. The back door was open a few inches. I don’t care what state of mind he was in: Isaac would never have left the house unsecure. We’d have to have a talk with Annabelle.
I locked it and headed back out the front, wondering if he’d just gone straight home—if you could call the navy ship home. He’d only go there if he really didn’t want to be found; the only person who’d be able to find him there was his father.
As I walked down the street, ignoring the cramp in my side, another one of my calls went directly to his voice mail. Ugh. Answer your phone. I picked up my pace, heading toward the river, getting more worried with each passing block.
By the time I got to the dock, dark rain clouds were collecting overhead, making it seem later than it was. For some reason, the gloom made me feel like Isaac was definitely here.
As I drew near, the huge white letters painted on the side of the ship seemed to glow in the dull light: SS HOPE.
Kind of ironic.
The makeshift first-responder living quarters might have been a retired navy vessel, but the dock had been commercial pre-Storm, used for loading and unloading container ships, which meant there was security, but not military-base-level security.
I casually sat on a bench overlooking the river and listened to the waves splashing against the ship as I scoped out the entrance. A chain-link fence topped with looping barbed wire surrounded most of the dock. All metal. Might not be a total impossibility to sneak through with a little magic assist.
At the end of the fence, where the entry road ended at a barricade, an overhead halogen lamp illuminated an old security booth. Great.
I craned my neck to see if anyone was inside. Dammit. A security guard was wildly waving his arms in a way that could only mean he was listening to a football game on a radio. I’d never get past him without military ID or an escort.
There was a metal trash can about thirty yards to my right—an idea crept into my head—a totally Isaac kind of thing to do. I focused on it.
I can’t believe I’m doing this.
The scent of burning garbage wafted over, and then burning rubber. Twists of black smoke billowed out, spilling onto the dock. I threw a little more energy its way, and flames danced out of the top.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as the security guard jumped up and grabbed his walkie-talkie. He ran out and past my bench, calling for backup.
Moving lightly, I slipped past his booth.
I descended a narrow stairway, following a sign that said BERTHS. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but the other options seemed more wrong. Belowdeck, a maze of dark corridors unfolded—dozens and dozens of gray metal doors lit only by the tiny emergency lights every few feet on the floor.
I’m never going to find him before I get caught.
I checked my phone. No signal.
Two guys in camo pants and white T-shirts turned into the corridor, blocking my path.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you by any chance know Isaac Thompson? Where his room is? I went above deck to try to connect a call, and now I’m totally turned around.”
“Way to go, Thompson,” said the taller guy on the left, looking me up and down from beneath his cap. He smugly elbowed his blond-haired friend.
Gross.
I turned to the blond, who I hoped wasn’t such an overt douche.
“It’s 2-86-5-L, give or take a couple doors,” he said. “Starboard edge.”
When I still looked confused, he gave me directions.
“Merci beaucoup!” I hustled past them as they nudged each other, continuing to bro out.
“Thompson’s got that hero thing down,” the tall guy snickered.
“Shut up, dude. He deserves it.”
Cringing, I moved faster.
A few more turns, another set of stairs, another turn, and I was standing in front of number 5.
I knocked lightly.
No answer.
I turned the handle slowly, fearing it might be the wrong room, and opened the door. The room was cold, dark, and smelled a little of cedar. It was sparsely furnished with only bunk beds and two metal lockers. A slip of light from the hallway shone on the figure lying in the bottom bunk, his back to me, but I recognized Isaac’s shoulders.
His skateboard poked out from under the bed, and his sketch pad was on the floor, underneath his wallet and chain. I slipped in and gently let go of the door, and everything went dark. It hit me that Isaac had been living in this little metal cell for five months so he could stay in New Orleans and help people.
“Are you sleeping?” I asked in a soft voice.
“No.” His response was neither inviting nor uninviting.
I didn’t know what to say, how to get him to tell me what was going on inside his head.
I curled my fingers into a fist and then popped my hand open, gingerly throwing up a handful of dim fireballs into the air. They floated closer to him, shedding just enough light for me to see.
I slipped off my shoes and climbed into the bed next to him. He didn’t turn around to face me, so I curled myself around his back, slipping my arm underneath his, and over his chest, wishing I could protect him from whatever this was.
I didn’t push him to talk, and he didn’t push me away.
Then he pulled my hand tighter against his chest. I buried my face into his shoulder blades and let the silence take over. We lay there, completely still, listening to each other’s breath.
I could feel when his pulse slowed, and I worried that he’d calm down completely and fall asleep without saying anything—that he was never going to tell me what was wrong, and then just explode one day.
I climbed over him and settled into the space between him and the wall. The fireballs followed as I settled back in next to him. He looked at me, finally, and his golden-brown eyes were glossy but not teary, his gaze deep and dark with his secret pains.
My hand found his palm, and my fingers threaded through his. I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but saying that something was wrong just seemed like it would make things worse. “What are you thinking about?”
He just continued to stare until two words finally came out of his mouth: “It’s stupid.”
“I doubt it.”
He fell silent, but I didn’t urge him to speak—just listened to the rain outside pitter-pattering down on the ship and waited.
“Sometimes . . .” His eyes went from glossy to teary. “Sometimes I just wish my mom was here.”
That was the last thing I expected him to say. All of a sudden, I felt like I was holding his heart in my hands. “If she was here . . . what would you say to her?”
Another long pause went by. His lips pinched together, fighting the tears.
“I’d tell her that I tried. I tried so hard, but—” His voice cracked.
I didn’t so much as blink.
“I’d tell her how I thought I was going to drown. How I can still feel that little girl’s hand slipping away. Her hand. It was so tiny. I thought I had a grip, but then the water came and just . . . ripped her away.”
I held his gaze through the tears forming in my eyes.
“If I could have just held on, I’d have rescued—” He became so choked up he had to stop.
“Isaac, you did rescue her. You saved her.”
He stayed perfectly still as the tears poured out of his eyes in long streams. “No, I didn’t,” he said softly. “I didn’t save Jade.”
“Rosalyn, you mean?”
The tears blinked out of my eyes.
“Jesus, Isaac,” I whispered, quickly wiping the tears away and propping myself up. I slipped my hand under the sleeve of his T-shirt and squeezed his shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it is. I had her. I had them both. But then the water came . . . so much fucking water. Something—a sheet of tin roofing or something—hit us and sliced into my arm, and I let go. I let go. Rosalyn screamed as a wave swept Jade away. I tried to reach her, but the current jerked me under. All I could do was hold on to Rosalyn and fight the water.”
I didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t stop my tears anymore, so I just ignored them.
“I let go. I let go of Jade.”
“Isaac, it’s not your fault.” Those were the only words that came to me.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“It’s not. It’s not your fault.”
He’d clamped his arms together across his chest, but I wedged them open and squeezed myself against him, hugging him as tightly as I could. I wished I knew what his mom would say. I don’t know how many times I repeated those four little words, but it felt like hundreds. “It’s not your fault.”
When his arms finally circled around me, I felt like I could breathe again. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”
He began to cry. Not silent streams of dripping tears, but choking tears, and the sound made my heart crack into a million glass pieces.
I hugged him harder, and he crushed me against his chest, and we lay there until eventually he stopped shaking.
No more talking.
Just blackness and breathing and heartbeats, and my head on his shoulder and his arms around me, and silence for a while.
“Isaac?”
“Yeah?”
“Your mom would be so proud of you.”
He sucked in a deep breath, his chest rising underneath me.
He gently stroked my arm. I imagined the photo of him and Rosalyn from the paper, and now I saw what he saw when he looked at it, and it was so much more horrifying. I also saw what he refused to see—that he was a hero.
He was the Hero. My Hero. He’d saved me too, on Halloween night.
“Isaac?”
“Hmph?”
“I love you.”
His fingers paused on my arm. He kind of laughed, and he pulled me up from his chest. “I don’t want your pity-I-love-you!”
“It’s not a pity-I-love-you!” Suddenly I was trying not to laugh.
“It’s totally a pity-I-love-you.”
My voice softened. “It’s an I-think-you’re-the-most-amazing-person-in-the-world-I-love-you.”
He didn’t argue or say anything at all. He just looked at me and pulled me closer until my lips reached his.
His arms encircled me, and when we kissed, everything felt different. Everything felt more. Like we’d taken the heightening elixir. He wasn’t like any other boy I’d ever kissed. As his hands slid up my back and into my hair, it felt like tiny bolts of static were emitting from his fingertips. Magic. I knew he felt it too when I touched him, because my mouth could hardly keep up with his.
Without breaking the kiss, he rolled over on top of me.
I fumbled at his shirt and pulled it over his head, his lips coming back to my neck. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like things might actually get better one day.
His hands swept underneath the silky fabric of my dress and over my stomach, and then so did his mouth, soft kisses, trailing up, pushing my dress all the way over my head. I arched so he could unhook my bra, and as more clothing slipped off and his lips met mine, I promised myself I’d tell him everything tomorrow.
Everything.
His warmth and kindness seeped out with every touch as his hands and lips found all their favorite places. My legs twisted into his, pulling him closer, and when my fingers traced up his back, he shivered. With our kisses, and limbs, and magic lacing together, I knew we were right together. I knew it more than anything. I slid my hand back down the curve of his spine, just so I could feel his body react to my touch, this time my fingers dipping into the waistband of his jeans.
His back stiffened. “Wait,” he said, despite continuing to kiss me harder.
I didn’t.
Then his hand cupped my face, and he pulled away. “Stop.”
I yanked my hands away, face flushing with embarrassment. “I’m sorry! I thought you wanted to. I’m sorry.”
“No. No! I want to. I just . . .” He kissed me again. “I have to give you something first.”
My cheeks still burned as he leaned over to the floor. He grabbed the chain and swung his wallet up into his hand; then he lay back by my side, propped on his elbow.
I mirrored him, nearly naked and feeling kind of silly.
“This might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
Oh God.
“But I can’t keep this anymore. I can’t kiss you anymore not knowing . . .”
“W-what are you talking about?”
He fished through his wallet, and a condom dropped out.
“Oh.”
“Not that,” he said quickly.
“Then what?”
He placed a piece of metal between us on the bed. “This.” It wasn’t quite a square but a more complicated shape, like origami.
“What is tha . . . ?” My words drowned out as the memories trickled back.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I—I don’t know.”
But I did know, kind of. He knew too. It was a note, folded in a way that required vampire strength, or powers of the metal-witch variety.
I closed my fingers around it—Nicco had pressed it into my hand right after he asked me if I trusted him . . . right before he spun me around and threw me out the window. The next thing I remembered was being on the roof, Isaac removing it from my hand in my state of hysteria.
As I blinked away the memory, I saw the fear in Isaac’s eyes, and I hated it.
“You’ve had it this whole time?”
His head bobbed up and down. “I’m sorry, Adele.”
I leaned over to reach my coat on the floor.
His arms slipped around my waist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
I dropped the metal note into my coat pocket and turned back to him. I knew why he’d kept it. To protect me from Nicco, because I was too blind to see him for what he was.
A monster.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” he asked.
“Not now.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . it’s not going to change how I feel about you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oui.”
It hurt my heart that he would even ask me that. “It’s not going to change us. It’s not going to change that I think you’re the most amazing person in the world. But if I open that note, it will change this moment. If I open it, Nicco is going to be in the room with us, and I don’t want him to be. I want to be with you.”
His eyes held mine for a second before he pulled me close, and his lips smiled against mine as he kissed me. “I love you, Adele.”
CHAPTER 40
Time
I huddled into my coat as raindrops shook from the oak-tree canopy. It was dark but not after curfew when I slipped off the ship, careful not to wake Isaac, because I knew he needed sleep.
Thank God I hadn’t slept through the night—one day after being ungrounded.
Even now I wanted to go back. Thinking about turning around made a butterfly hatch. Suddenly I felt like I was floating down the street, smiling too much as I dodged the puddles down Esplanade Avenue.
In an effort to ground myself, I opened the string of messages that had accumulated over the last few hours. Most of them were from my father, first asking me where I was and whether I’d found Isaac; then, assuming I had, asking if Isaac was all right and letting me know that
he was going to work. His emotional range was sometimes difficult to gauge over text, so I headed to the bar to settle his nerves in person. My phone buzzed again before I could put it away.
Désirée 7:06 p.m. So, has Isaac totally lost it or what?
Adele 7:06 p.m. He’ll be fine. I think he has some kind of Storm-related PTSD.
Désirée 7:06 p.m. Ya think?
I sucked in a huge breath and switched to the group chat, hoping it wouldn’t wake him up. Surely his lack of sleep was exacerbating his anxiety.
Adele 7:07 p.m. We should all huddle tonight. We need to talk about the new coven in town.
Désirée 7:07 p.m. I can get to HQ after nine. I have to keep the shop open until curfew.
Isaac 7:07 p.m. Should we invite Annabelle?
So much for not waking him up.
Adele 7:07 p.m. If Callis really is serious about destroying all the Medici, one of her relatives IS at risk.
Isaac 7:07 p.m. He seemed pretty serious to me. Plus, her invisibility could come in handy.
Désirée 7:07 p.m. I’ve always been abt maximizing the coven’s strength.
Désirée 7:07 p.m. BTW, something tells me we’re about to be swept into a supernatural shitstorm.
Isaac 7:08 p.m. Why? What happened?
Désirée 7:08 p.m. Tell you later. So it’s settled. We’ll re-bind the circle tonight.
Adele 7:09 p.m. I’m glaaaaaaaad u guys feel that way abt Annabelle. Because I kinda might have already told her. That is, if she remembers anything from last night.
Désirée 7:09 p.m. Little Miss Adele Le Moyne. Breaking her own rules. What exactly did u tell her?
Adele 7:09 p.m. Everything? I think? It’s kind of a blur. I suffered for it greatly, if it makes u feel better. Never. Drinking. Again.
Désirée 7:09 p.m. Whatever. I’ll prep some spells so we can test the extent of our collective powers.
I breathed a sigh of relief that Dee didn’t seem to care about my slipup.
Isaac 7:10 p.m. Callis’s coven is probably way bigger than ours. Do u think they’re all weak like him, magically? And all Fire witches?