“Azrael,” I cried.
“Go!” he shouted, and his voice was like the roar of the sea.
CHAPTER
•
FIFTY-ONE
As soon as we reached the tunnel, we heard screams coming from far away.
“The house,” Peter said.
Together we ran along the underground passageway to the basement of the Abbey of Lost Souls, where the rank odor of smoke hung like a pall.
“The place is on fire,” Peter said, bolting up the stairs. I followed, remembering the smashed oil lamp in the library. At the time I’d thought it could be contained, but evidently I’d been wrong.
The house was in flames. People were running everywhere, clutching precious treasures or slapping frantically at pieces of furniture in an attempt to keep them from being destroyed. Some simply ran around in aimless panic, screaming or vomiting, despite the open front door.
“Get out!” Peter called, trying to throw the residents out bodily. But none of them seemed to want to leave. They just scurried around like squirrels, picking up picture books, china, paintings, jewelry, clothing. One of the women he tried to rescue was Annabelle, Sophie’s friend. She was bending over a glass étagère, picking over a collection of Fabergé eggs.
“For God’s sake,” Peter shouted, forcing the woman toward the exit. “Get outside! Save yourself!”
“But my things,” she wailed. “What shall we do without our beautiful things?”
He stooped to pick her up. She screamed as the priceless jeweled eggs fell from her arms.
I also tried to get the witches to evacuate the place, with equally disappointing results. Two women were trying vainly to move a harpsichord down a flight of stairs. Another was shrieking wildly, a pile of satin shoes clutched to her chest.
“I can’t believe it,” Peter said. “What’s wrong with these—”
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
The woman in Peter’s arms had shriveled almost to ash. He dropped her—or rather, it, a desiccated, long-dead body with the texture of a wasp’s nest—with a groan of revulsion.
“Are they all . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. I followed his gaze to the secret portal joining the main parlor to the ritual chamber below.
Azrael was standing there, his yellow eyes glowing, as around him flames leaped up like fiery ghosts. One by one he pointed to the witches of the Enclave, who, as if obeying his command, shriveled slowly into dust, just as if Drago had sucked the breath out of them.
“Did you believe this day would never come?” the Darkness thundered. “You, who have done nothing to warrant your privileged, worthless lives?”
A woman screamed, then fell silent as her life streamed out of her and into Azrael’s open mouth.
At that moment I spotted Fabienne tugging on her mother’s arm. Sophie was standing in front of a mirror, studying her face with morbid fascination.
The Darkness had spotted her. Now Sophie’s trembling hands ran along the deep creases and sunken flesh of her face as if she hoped they could stop the terrible damage to her once-perfect features. As I watched, one of her eyes drooped suddenly and then fell out of its socket. She screamed in horror.
“Hurry, please,” Fabby begged, her own voice rising in panic. “The place is on fire, Mother. Please, I don’t want to burn!”
“What do I care if you burn?” Sophie shrieked, her lips cracking as she spoke so that blood coursed down her chin. She tugged at her hair, which fell out in clumps that stuck out between her bony fingers. “Look at me!” she screamed, holding out her hair for her daughter to see. “Look what’s been done to me!”
“Mother—”
“It doesn’t matter to you, though, does it! You’ll still be beautiful, while I—”
At that point, Peter grabbed Fabienne and threw her over his shoulder. “Talk later,” he said.
Fabby stretched out her arms toward Sophie. “Mother!” Tears ran down her face.
But Sophie had already forgotten her. Instead, she fixed her mad eyes on me. “You!” she spat. Her voice was calm now, dripping with disdain. “Everything was fine until you came along.”
In the back of the room, a beam fell with a deafening crash. Flames shot through the arched doorway toward us. “Come outside, Sophie,” I urged, extending my hand toward her.
She lunged forward and slapped my face. Her hand felt like dry bones. Then, with another brief, bitter glance in the mirror, she backed away from me, away from the exit.
“Sophie—” Whatever I was going to say was lost as the windows all imploded. I flattened myself on the floor as a whoosh of broken glass went flying through the room at the speed of a tornado. Ahead, I watched in horror as the razor-sharp glass shards shot into Sophie with so much force that her body twitched and bucked with their impact. Still, she never turned away. Her single remaining eye, staring now from the ruined face that had once been so beautiful, held no expression whatever. It was as if she knew—or believed—that without that beauty, she no longer existed. Like a wraith, she glided to the floor. With one final spasm, she lay still, her terrible staring eye open as her flesh grayed and sank into itself.
“Oh, Azrael,” I whispered. “Look what you’ve become.”
He was near me now, standing on a low step as if he were an orchestra conductor directing the music that obeyed the unspoken commands of his hands. Behind him was a wall of flames.
I wanted to ask him to stop, to beg him to spare the lives of these helpless women, but the kindly old man I had known was no longer inside that body. He was purely the Darkness now, his flesh merely a container for the evil within. And more than that, I’d seen him—It—too many times to hope for anything resembling compassion.
The yellow eyes glowered at me. I expected It to point at me next, to signal that my turn to die had come. But oddly, what I felt wasn’t fear. I’d lived with the fear of meeting the Darkness again for so long that it was beginning to take over my life. Well, here It was. Again. It had been in Belmondo, and now It was in Azrael. And maybe this was going to be the day when my worst fear would come true and It would be in me.
But I was tired of running from It. That was what I felt. Not fear, but impatience. I’d had enough. If the Darkness was so determined to have my life, then okay, we’d have a showdown right here, in the flames that led to Hell.
“Am I next?” I asked. I stood up amid the rubble that had once been the palatial Abbaye des mes Perdues. “Because I don’t care what you do to me. I’m sick of running from you. If you want me so badly, then here I am.” I spread my arms. “You hear me, good buddy? Take your best shot.”
The ancient face clouded. Nearby, another beam crashed to the floor, sending up a fizzing display of sparks. The heat of the fire around me was suffocating.
The creature who had been Azrael struggled to speak. His mouth opened and closed. His hands stretched open, then curled into fists. Finally It managed to utter one tortured sentence:
“Life . . . is . . . precious,” he croaked, each word a monumental effort, “if you . . . make . . . it . . . so.”
That was Azrael speaking. He had somehow managed to fight his way through the Darkness that had taken over his body to give me his message.
I sank to my knees. “I see you,” I whispered.
His eyes met mine. They were not yellow. They were not glowing. They were my friend Azrael’s eyes, and they were filled with the heartache of a hundred lifetimes. Then he nodded once, in benediction, and walked backward into the flames.
The old man’s hair caught fire. He was destroying his body because he would rather be dead than a carrier of the Darkness. I understood. Some things are worth dying for.
He never spoke another word until his skin blistered and charred, and he staggered to stand upright.
“Oh, Azrael,” I said with a sigh, but he didn’t hear me. He was listening to some other music, beholding some other face beyond mine. His eyes lit up at the sight. I twisted around to see who it was
, but there was no one.
“Veronique,” he whispered, and I knew.
Some things were forever.
Then he moved farther back into the flames.
• • •
I fell down and crawled like a crab over a lot of bodies and broken objects. I cut my hand on something, but I was aware of that only because I saw the blood; I didn’t feel anything. A blanket of smoke was descending over me, covering me with numbness and forgetting.
It doesn’t hurt, I thought, remembering Azrael. Maybe he hadn’t hurt either. Had he sent the Darkness into me? I’d been the closest person to him. I should have been the chosen one. But I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything.
Well, there was at least that. Feelings were a crapshoot. Too many bad ones. But Peter . . . I didn’t want to die without seeing him, without telling him how much I loved him.
Peter . . .
It was the last thing I remember thinking before giving in to the nothingness.
• • •
I felt something pulling at me.
“What,” I said stupidly, not knowing what it was I was asking. The word came out in a sandpapery rasp. My tongue felt like some gigantic thing that was too big to fit in my mouth. I opened my eyes with an effort. They were crusted closed, and I realized I must have been unconscious. The room seemed to be moving now, what I could see of it through the thick smoke that swirled around like a whirlpool.
I tried to lift my head. All I could see were flames and fallen timber. All I could smell was the acrid stench of burning bones.
Oh, my God, I thought, am I in Hell? Had I become the Darkness at last?
Then I saw a face come into focus above me. Peter’s face. Or at least his jaw and above it, his nose, crusted with blood. That was all I could see of him. He was sweating. There were black streaks on his skin. He was carrying something disgusting-looking. A body covered with blood and soot.
Oh, yeah. It’s me, I realized. Peter was carrying me out of Hell. “Hey, thanks,” I said. Or thought I did. I wasn’t sure I could speak anymore.
I began to cough, so deeply that it sounded like a bullhorn, so long that I started to choke.
“Just hold on,” Peter said. He was coughing himself, but he pressed me tighter against him. I nestled my head against his chest, where I heard his heart beating. And with each beat, I could hear what he was thinking.
I will never . . . let you go . . . I will never . . . let you go . . .
“I know,” I said, just as we burst out the door into the clean outdoor air. Peter placed me gently on the grass, out of harm’s way.
A fire truck pulled up nearby, its blaring siren winding down in a low wail as the firefighters unwound the big hose.
I sat up, and Peter threw his arms around me. I coughed some more. I wanted to tell him how much I loved him, but I couldn’t talk very well. So I touched him instead. It was just a brush across the top of his mangled hand, but I knew he understood everything because of the way he looked at me. At that moment I knew absolutely that even though I was bloody and dirty and my hair was probably burned off, he still thought I was the most beautiful thing in the world. In that instant I understood what Azrael had meant with his dying words:
Life is precious, if you make it so.
It really wasn’t about how long you lived. It was about how much love you could squeeze into the time you had. That was the real meaning of forever.
Azrael had been with Veronique for only a fraction of his unnaturally long life, yet his love for her was strong enough to defeat even the Darkness. In the end he had called her name, and though I hadn’t been able to see her, I believe her spirit came to take him to the Summer Country, where they would always be together.
I kissed Peter. “Forever,” I said.
He understood. “Forever.”
EPILOGUE
When I was finally able to stand up after picking out the glass shards that had shot into my skin when the windows burst, I saw Fabienne. She was kneeling on the ground with her face buried in her hands. There wasn’t much I could say, I knew, to make her feel better, so I just sat down beside her.
She raised her tear-stained face. “They’re all gone,” she said. “All of them.”
Fabienne, Peter, and I were the only ones who’d made it out of the house. Her mother was gone. The man she’d thought of as her uncle was dead. The place that was the only home she’d known was a smoldering ruin.
Peter came over and hunkered down beside us.
“Did you find Jeremiah?” I asked.
“He wasn’t in.”
I sat up. “So what happened to him?”
Peter shook his head and blew air out of his nose. “I don’t know.”
“Is he still alive?”
Peter shrugged.
“Well, did he just disappear, or—”
“For goodness’ sake, I told you, I don’t know!”
“All right,” I said with a sniff. “I was just asking.”
He sighed. “Are we fighting again?”
“Is that bad?”
He smiled. “No.” He rubbed a handkerchief across my face. “It’s normal.” Gently, he put his arm on Fabienne’s shoulder. “The main thing we have to do right now is find our way home,” he said softly. “Are you up for that, Fabby?”
“It would probably be best if we didn’t stick around to talk to the police,” I added.
Peter shushed me, gesturing with his eyes toward Fabienne, who was facing a lot of loss at the moment.
But she was stronger than she looked. “Katy’s right,” she said. “We should leave now, before anyone questions us.”
That was for sure. Once we started to explain anything about the Abbey of Lost Souls, we’d be opening a can of worms that might never get closed again.
“Okay.” Peter stood up. “I’ve got a car waiting—”
“No car,” Fabienne said. “Come with me.”
Peter and I exchanged worried glances, but we followed as Fabby walked toward the river, where it was a lot quieter.
She wiped her eyes as she turned back to look at the charred ruins of the abbey, shimmering in waves of heat and spray from the fire hoses. From the pocket of her hoodie she took out the photograph she’d taken from her room. It was an old sepia-tinted picture of Jeremiah Shaw, wearing a tuxedo. There was a woman on his arm, a flapper from the Twenties, judging from her spangled dress. Sophie.
“I didn’t even get to say good-bye,” she said.
We rarely do, I thought. We’d all had to leave so many people, or had been left by them. But the greatest losses were the ones who might have loved us but couldn’t. I would never know my mother, who’d died before I could imprint her face on my memory. Peter, too, had missed out by being orphaned at six. His great-uncle Jeremiah had come into his life too late to have given him a real sense of family.
And Fabby . . . well, her mom hadn’t been very good to her, but maybe that’s what made her death so painful for Fabienne. There was nothing left for her but a lot of “might have beens.”
Maybe, in time, Sophie might have come around to realizing that her daughter was a greater gift to her than being a siren, and that the bond between them had been more powerful than a spell to keep them beautiful. But there hadn’t been enough time for that.
Funny thing: No matter how much time we have, it never seems to be enough. I guess we are all lost souls, in a way, with only this moment to live.
“There’s just one thing,” I confessed reluctantly.
Peter looked annoyed. “We’ve got to get out of here, Katy.”
“Yeah, well, you might not want to take me along after I tell you.”
He blew hair out of his eyes. “Go ahead,” he said. “What’d you do now?”
“Well, I—er . . .”
“Yes?” His hands were on his hips.
“I might be infected with the Darkness,” I said.
Peter threw up his hands and turned his back to me. “Great,” he mut
tered.
“But this doesn’t seem possible,” Fabienne said, frowning. “You do not seem to be evil.”
“I don’t feel evil either. But I was the closest person to Azrael when he . . .” Thinking of him made me choke up. “When he died. That’s how it spreads, through death.”
“Are you sure he died?” Fabby asked. “At that moment when you were close to him? Did you see him—”
I held up my hand to stop her. The memory of my friend walking willingly into the fire was more than I could bear.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I only thought . . . that maybe . . . he waited . . .” Her voice faded away. She was squinting at something in the sky. “Katy . . .”
“He did wait,” Peter said, pointing toward the house.
Above the smoldering wreckage of the ancient abbey, in the rolling clouds of soot and black smoke, an image was appearing. As I peered more closely, I could begin to make it out: a face, ferocious and depraved, covered in scales, with yellow slitted eyes that glowed through the black clouds like jewels.
“The Darkness.” There It was again. It. Feeling nauseous, I staggered backward, but Peter caught me.
“It went up in smoke because there was no one close enough to infect when the old man died,” he said. “He must have stayed alive until he knew you were safe from him.”
My eyes welled with tears. Azrael had done that for me, stayed alive for me, even though his burned body had been in agony. How hard that must have been for him, I thought. How badly he must have suffered during those last minutes of life.
Thank you, I said silently. Thank you for giving those minutes to me.
Fabby squeezed my hand. Then she placed my other hand in Peter’s. “Hang on tight,” she said. “We’re leaving now.”
“Where are we going?” Peter asked, puzzled.
“Whitfield.” She looked at me and smiled. “You’re—we’re—going home.”
Then, with a sensation that was sort of like how it feels when a flashbulb goes off in your face, the whole world instantly whited out while Peter, Fabienne, and I hung suspended in space with nothing to hang on to except one another. It felt like going down a roller coaster at top speed, with no gravity and no time.
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