by Scott Tracey
“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.” And because I felt like I had to give him something I added, “I’ll let you know if I need help.”
Jason eyed me gravely. “Do you promise?”
I nodded, forcing a smile. “Sure.”
It was one of my best lies ever.
nineteen
There was another chess set in the library, identical to the one from my room. I brought mine with me and set it up so that the boards were less than a foot from each other. Then I set up the pieces, dark cherry red and ivory, and stared at the two boards.
There wasn’t just one feud in Belle Dam. There were two. The Lansings versus the Thorpes. And Lucien versus Grace. But then there was also a third feud. Lucien and Catherine versus me versus Grace. But that was a feud that was, for now, contained only in my head. The minute Grace made a move, Lucien was going to be there to strike. And I was going to be there to … well, I didn’t know what I was going to do yet.
I knew there were journals and other books about the feud tucked away on the shelves, but right now reading about the past didn’t seem like it would do much good. I couldn’t learn anything about Lucien or Grace that I didn’t already know—I knew more about their weaknesses than anyone else in town.
The office desk in the center of the room was swallowed up in paperwork, as Jason worked diligently from his computer tablet. He would flip the stacks from time to time, searching out a particular file. I was surprised that most of his work was done on the computer. He seemed the type to stick to old-fashioned mediums.
I don’t know if it was our morning conversation or some other pressing need, but Jason had come in a few minutes after me, and neither one of us said a word to the other. He worked behind the desk, and I studied the chess sets.
Lucien had told me once that all demons were adept at contracts. That it was they who taught humans the concept of a binding document. I let my fingers run along the edge of the board until they brushed up against the red/black bishop. That would be the most important part. Without him, I wouldn’t be able to build to anything.
I kept trying to figure out what else I would need—what other pieces were still critical if I was going to do this. Plot a revolution. But something that wasn’t discomfort kept surging up through my chest, distracting me. At first I thought maybe I was nauseous, having skipped breakfast, but it wasn’t that. It was a melody without music. Inside me, where I felt an aching hole all the time now, it was like … a resonance. Yes, the emptiness inside me seemed to say, I know you. I still remember.
“Do you feel that? I—” I broke off in the middle of what I’d been saying. It was like in physics, when we’d learned about sound waves and resonant frequency. How an opera singer could shatter glass if she hit the right pitch.
“Braden? What is it?” Jason stood up immediately.
The feeling was getting stronger. No. The feeling was getting closer.
I didn’t expect the sharp inhale that followed. I looked over at Jason, whose eyes weren’t trained on me. They were trained on the door. His mouth was open, the little crinkle appearing between his eyebrows the same way John’s did when he was confused. He was rigid, like someone had forgotten to wind him up.
At first, the girl was a shade of black out of the corner of my eye. But as she sauntered into the library, as carefree as a bird, I had to blink twice. She wore all black like she’d gotten lost on the way to the funeral—black dress, black heels, black clutch, black sunglasses, black gloves, the whole nine yards. Even her thick, black ringlets were pinned up with a pair of raven-colored sticks.
I knew her, but Jason beat me to the punch. “Elle?” he whispered, but he didn’t say her name like he saw the girl. Or the witch.
He said her name like he’d seen a ghost.
“Hello, Jason,” she said. To me, she just nodded.
I looked between them. “You know her?”
Jason finally broke his gaze, looking from her to me and then back again. “Braden, this is … ”
He trailed off, and Elle bit her lower lip. “Adele,” she said gently. “I used to work for your father.”
Adele. I knew that name. “But that’s not possible,” I said. Elle was only a few years older than me, but the girl who’d worked for Jason had disappeared almost a decade ago. Unless he hired her when she was still in middle school, there had to be some kind of mistake.
“I took a new position,” Elle continued to Jason. “Which is why I’m here.” Elle worked for Grace—hell, I already knew that Grace was the reason she and the other witch had come here in the first place.
“Are you dead?” I demanded. “Another ghost like the others? Are you here to try killing me, too?”
“What is he talking about?” Jason demanded. “Adele?” Maybe I wasn’t the only one getting better at reading him, because his nose wrinkled up, and he heard something in my tone. Because he realized this was something more than just the feud. “She’s not working for Catherine.”
“No,” I agreed. “She’s not.” But that didn’t mean I had the slightest idea of why she was here.
“I’m not a ghost, hot stuff,” she said, but there was no fire in her voice today. Normally, Elle was flirty and fun. This Elle seemed more like someone who’d just come off a week-long bender. “And I work for—”
I cut her off, my voice harsh. “I know who you work for. I’m not an idiot. You’re the reason she got involved at all. I’d be fine if it wasn’t for you.”
“Dead is a kind of fine, I suppose,” she said evenly. Outside, the sun must have emerged from the cloudbank because the light coming in from all the windows suddenly intensified. Behind her sunglasses, I noticed Elle’s twitch, and the way her head dropped down.
I took a step forward. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
Elle brushed by me to address Jason directly. “I really am sorry about Jonathan. I wish there was something I could have done.” As an afterthought, she added, “You know I always liked him.”
“Really?” I snorted. “I think your boss made sure everything happened just the way she intended.”
“Braden,” Jason warned. It was hard to say if he wanted me to stop being a dick or if he thought I was picking a fight I couldn’t win.
Elle shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“Take. Off. Your. Sunglasses.” I said, because I wanted to see. I wanted Jason to see, too.
There’s nothing more annoying than a standoff with someone when you can’t see their eyes. I understood why people always hated getting into them with me, because thirty seconds of it was almost all that I could take. I came really close to just lunging forward and ripping them off of her when an eyebrow flexed upward and the windows all went dark.
Jason didn’t flinch, but I did. I still had a long road to go towards being a badass. Once the light in the room was dimmed—the windows didn’t all have curtains so some were simply darkened until the light couldn’t get through—Elle slowly, and reluctantly, pulled the sunglasses off her face.
“Oh my god,” I whispered.
I thought that when Elle took off her sunglasses, we’d see the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of colors that I’d always grown up with. The witch eyes, ripped out of my head and put into hers. She was the one that Grace had walking around the town, trying to unlock the wellsprings. It made sense.
What I didn’t expect to find was the damage.
Her eyelids were both red and crusted, like scabs that had never been allowed to heal properly. There wasn’t any white left to her eyes: now they were either blood-red or ravaged pink. Her eyelashes were completely gone, and the skin around her eyes was puffy, cracked, and still oozing in places.
And I didn’t feel a moment of pity for her.
“She’s been trying to use my powers,” I said, answering Jason’s unasked question. I could feel his shock from behind me, but he saw the girl he’d nurtured, the girl he’d thought dead these last ten years. All I saw was Gra
ce’s pawn.
“Are you satisfied?” Elle asked, the challenge returning to her voice.
I managed a smile. “Almost. Tell me about her offer.”
“My lady doesn’t have an offer. She just wants to talk.”
“Bullshit.” I sat down on the edge of Jason’s desk and looked towards him. “Grace Lansing is alive,” I said simply to him. I don’t know who was more surprised, Elle or him. But Jason apparently trusted me enough not to argue, and I continued. “And because she’s a control freak, I’m betting that everything we say here is off the record. Can’t let Lucien know that someone’s been manipulating him all these years.”
Elle didn’t exactly nod, but I knew I was right even before the slight jerk of her chin. She sank down into one of the chairs across from the desk and put her sunglasses back on.
“You can’t open them by yourself. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. So Grace realized she screwed up, and now she has to give me back what she stole. Or she’s never getting out of there again.”
“She didn’t ‘screw up,’” Elle returned hotly. “If she’d wanted you out of the way, she would have killed you.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m more useful to everyone alive, I know. No one will shut up about it.”
“Then you’ll come,” she asked, not entirely convinced that I would.
“Tell me what happened to you,” I said, “and I’ll think about it.”
She sighed, throwing her hands up in the air a little. “What happened to me is a very boring story about a very naive girl. And then I learned better.”
“Girls,” I corrected, because I hadn’t forgotten that for all the talk that there were two girls who had come to Belle Dam in search of Grace’s secrets, only one had apparently made it back out.
“We came because of the Widow,” Elle said as she looked out the windows.
I read between the lines. “You came for power,” I clarified. “Either you wanted what she had, or you wanted to find out how to get it for yourself.” I thought about it for a moment, remembering what Grace had told me about her own origins. About how she’d come to found Belle Dam in the first place. “Did you come for the lighthouse, too?”
Elle shuddered. “Oh, gods no. We wanted power, sure, but we didn’t want anything to do with the lighthouse. That’s eight kinds of stupid right there.” Her expression was haunted. “Had I known I was going to spend the next ten years of my life inside of it, I might have made a different choice.”
No, she wouldn’t have. People who were only after power always made the same choices when it came down to it. The power was more important than anything else. “So the two of you came to town, and you planned to divide and conquer. You went to work for Jason, and your friend went to Catherine.”
“Carmen,” Elle said quietly. “Her name was Carmen.”
“What happened to her? As far as everyone knows you both died on the beach that night.”
“We found a way to slip between the worlds. Carmen … didn’t make it. I did.” Each sentence was like another nail into her guilt. I could see the changes coming over her, the gnawing darkness that was eating her up from the inside.
“And you’ve been doing Grace’s bidding ever since.”
Her eyes flashed sudden fire, a contempt washing over her face that was more Grace than girl. “Watch your tone,” she snapped. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be a lot worse off. Hannah tried to kill you when you first came to town. A bus, right? I stopped her before she finished the job. I even tried to warn you about what Lucien was planning, and I’ve been doing everything I can to put out all the fires you started while you’ve been sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Then where the hell were you when Trey struck a bargain with Lucien?” I demanded. “Because from where I’m standing, that wipes out any good will you might have earned.”
She made a face, shifting uncomfortably. “I’ve been … recovering.”
Right. The witch eyes. Elle couldn’t handle the power any better than I could. And if her eyes proved anything, it was that she was even worse off than I was. But Grace still kept pushing her to try. “If I were you,” I said softly, “I’d figure out that Grace is not the hero in this story.”
“Of course she is,” Elle said, back on familiar ground again. “She contained the demon and has guarded the lighthouse ever since. You have her to thank that nothing else has come through to this world.”
“She trapped the demon in a town full of innocent victims,” I returned. “Everyone he’s fed off of for the last one hundred years is her responsibility. She didn’t trap him here out of some self-sacrificing need to protect the world. She did it because she was pissed and wanted him to suffer. So she took what was essentially a god and made him human. And she probably hoped to claim his power for herself, but she screwed up and found herself trapped in the lighthouse instead.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She threw me out of the lighthouse and ripped out my magic,” I returned hotly. “Because she passed judgment on me way back when she was still human herself.”
“She still is human.”
“She’s a phantom in a tower,” I snapped. “She’s a ghost that can’t get it up for reality.”
“She won’t be for long.”
I snorted. “With whose help? Because the two of you can’t seem to do anything but screw it up. She’s no closer to being free than she was ten years ago.”
“You’re wrong,” Elle said, still looking troubled. “When you restored that part of Lucien’s power to him, the bindings on my lady were loosened. The stronger he gets, the more freedoms are returned to her. Soon, she’ll be able to cross over and restore herself.”
“In all things, balance,” I quoted back to her. It was as close to a law of the supernatural as anything I’d ever seen. “She bound him, and she got trapped. That was the price.” But what if she’d paid a different price, I wondered. Why that one?
I shook my head, clearing my thoughts. Jason stepped up to my shoulder, put his hand on me. “Is there anything else? You’ve given my son a lot to think about.”
Elle looked nervous. Then again, I would too if I had to go back to Grace and report that things hadn’t gone according to plan. “Tomorrow,” she said, licking her lips. “She’ll meet with you tomorrow. You can figure out where.”
“If you were smart, Elle? You’d get as far away from Grace Lansing as you could,” I said. “You’re her handmaiden or whatever, now, but what happens when she gets free? Because you can be naive and think that this has all been about Grace trapping Lucien, but there’s more to it than that. This has always been about something more to her. But as far as I’m concerned? You’re just as much to blame for this mess as she is. And that’s one hell of a target to have on your back.”
I turned away, shaking my head. Grace was a sociopath, so she’d probably want to meet in the church again. That much was easy. “And you might want to invest in some eye drops,” I called out as she strode from the room.
Once I was sure she’d left, I turned to Jason, who had a deep frown on his face.
“I need a favor.” There was a long pause. “Jason? Are you listening?”
“Hmm?” He looked down at me surprised, like he’d forgotten I was in the room with him.
“You know how Grace had a monument in the cemetery? And how it kind of got blown up?” I waited for his nod before I continued. “Do you think you could pay someone to replace it?”
His forehead broke out into lines of confusion. “Why?”
I gave him a small smile. “Because I want to leave her a little message.”
twenty
I spent a day and a half staring at the chessboards.
Sometimes I spun them around. Sometimes I switched from red to white. Sometimes I took pieces off the board or rearranged the ones that were already there. It wasn’t enough to play one game, or both games. I had to play all of them. And I couldn’t affo
rd a single mistake.
There had to be a way to balance all of the games at once. To keep Jason and Catherine occupied, to manipulate Lucien, and to outsmart Grace. To keep one, or any of them, from teaming up with one another. Riley had said that if I tried, they would overpower me. But they could only overpower me if I gave them the chance.
He showed up about an hour before sunset. I’d changed into jeans and a black turtleneck, thrown something into my hair so it didn’t puff up in every direction, and grabbed the most ostentatious pair of sunglasses in my room. They weren’t the comfortable, plastic kinds I was used to. They were high-end, black-and-gold monstrosities, and they were perfection.
“I almost feel like a real boy,” Matthias crowed as he walked into the library. “Being summoned up to the manor by the little master. It’s like a Dickens novel come to life.”
I waited a beat and then remembered that Drew wasn’t here to jump in and make a crack about Dickens. Matthias glanced down at the boards, his fingers brushing up against one of the white rooks. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow as if to say, well?
Rather than answering, I shifted a red pawn diagonally into the space held by the rook and knocked it over. “You’ll have better luck with a bishop,” I said. I snagged the piece in question and rolled it between my fingers.
“So why am I here, little Thorpeling? I’ve already told you that I’m not going to be able to help you in this little endeavor.” Matthias was an old demon, not quite as powerful as a Rider, but probably close. He was trapped here just like Lucien, only the difference was that his chains were a little easier to unlock. He’d been bound to protect the first church in Belle Dam, and only two bricks remained from that structure. Destroy them, and Matthias would be free.