by Scott Tracey
“Like I said, I can take your power if that’s what you would prefer.” I walked over to her, and leaned against the edge of the table, looking down on her. “Do you think I won’t? You’d deserve it. I can ruin you.”
Catherine gaped at me, and it took everything in me that I didn’t just end her life there. To see the light in her eyes die the same way she’d made John’s light disappear. “You’ll beg, but I won’t kill you,” I said finally. “Because every day, I’ll have something so much worse in store for you.”
It was a fine line. I couldn’t know with any certainty which actions would lead me down the path of Grace’s prophecy. I didn’t even know for sure that our bargain could have stopped it. What if I fell faster than expected? Could I still wake up a boy, and be a monster before the setting of the sun?
No. I released the crystal spell and waited until the look of recognition and relief settled across Catherine’s face. I wouldn’t take her power now. That I could was enough.
“It’s after midnight,” I said, looking to the wall clock. “Two days left.”
Catherine swallowed, but wisely held her tongue.
“This is all the mercy you get. Step out of line and I will tear your life apart, piece by piece.” I glanced over my shoulder towards Jason. “Either of you. I mean it.”
“Braden,” Jason said, stepping forward. “You need—”
“The feud ends here,” I said, talking over him. “Belle Dam’s out of the demon-dealing business. You brought this war to us. Trey bargained his life for power, just as I did with Grace. When they come to collect, who’s going to pay? You? Her?” I shook my head. “Kids always suffer for the sins of their parents,” I muttered.
Before I could listen to any more of their defenses, their complaints, or their arguments, I focused on the magic churning a hole inside of me, and concentrated on the magic inside of them. Catherine’s magic was crystal and yet fluid like blown glass, eschewing function for appearance. It was lavender and rain, chiming and the music of flutes. It smelled of baking bread and tasted like spice.
Jason’s was a thing of function, straight, sharp lines and segments. It was bits of black and white woven together in interlocking pieces, built up over time like the bricks in a wall. Every edge was sharp as razors, dull polished steel and hot ashes. It smelled like the incense they burned at church, and the way clean smelled in a hospital. Trumpets blared and drums beat in a perfect steady rhythm.
Their powers were so different, it should have been impossible to bind them together in the way that I’d wanted, but three weeks of training with Grace had taught me new definitions of what was both possible and what was wise. It was possible that there would be some damage left in my aftermath, and at least this way I was giving Catherine and Jason the opportunity to fix it once I was gone.
Actually binding their powers together was easy when it came down to the practice of it. I braided the power together, drawing it tight down the line like it was rope. There were benefits to what I was doing—collectively, they’d be even stronger than the two of them had been on their own. If something bad did happen in Belle Dam, they might be better prepared for it.
If I’d had time, I might have tried to work out a way so that the connection would pass down the family line, so that the two families would always have to work together if they wanted to accomplish anything. But I still had a sinking feeling that the Thorpe line was going to end with me.
It didn’t take as long as I feared it would. Their individual strengths bound together until they were not two separate sources of power, but one split right down the middle.
After the cloud of magic had left my eyes and the room started to come back into focus, I realized my hands were on the table, and I wasn’t so much standing as I was being held up. Trey was at my side, his arms wrapped around my waist, keeping me vertical. Fatigue washed through my body like it’d been there for years and I’d only just noticed, but I managed to regain my own balance. Trey didn’t pull away.
“Is it done, then?” Catherine demanded frostily. Her skin was flushed red, as was Jason’s. I’d been so focused on what I was doing that I hadn’t stopped to wonder what the binding must have been like for them. Or how they even felt about it. I’d basically just crippled something that had sustained them both for the majority of their lives. It was almost worse than what Grace had done to me, in a way, because even though Grace had taken my power from me, she hadn’t left me with the illusion of independence I’d fostered onto them.
But I couldn’t worry about that right now. “I need your sister,” I said softly to Trey. “And there’s still a lot to do tonight.” We walked around the table and out of the room before Trey looked back and stopped us. “Hey,” he said, nodding back the way we’d come. I turned, still seeing the glowing sigils in the carpet that bound Catherine to her spot.
“Oh, right,” I said, waving my hand. The binding circle evaporated, and some of my innate power swept back into my body. It alleviated some of the fatigue I was feeling, even though I was still so tired. If only I had time to sleep for a week, I might actually feel rested. But I only had so many hours left to my life.
Every one counted.
thirty-one
Trey didn’t ask any questions when I directed him to get in his truck and start driving. We picked Jade up on the way, and she’d dressed for something more clandestine than I had planned. A black turtleneck, black skinny jeans, and knee-high leather boots. I let the siblings take the seats in the front, and I squeezed myself into the space in the back. I needed to focus on other things anyway.
“Okay, now that Jade’s here, will you please tell me what we’re doing? I’ve only got half a tank. At least tell me if I need to fill it up,” Trey asked, having clamped down on his curiosity for an admirable twenty minutes.
“First, we need to get a big group of people together. Do you think we can throw together some sort of benefit at the Harbor Club by tomorrow night?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Jade tapped the clock on the console. “It’s almost one in the morning. And you want to throw a dinner party in eighteen hours? It’s not possible.” Even though the radio was on the lowest volume it could be on and still be considered “on,” Jade kept fiddling with the station. “What do you need a big group for, anyway?”
“The next part of the plan. The more people we can get together, the better.”
“Well,” she said, pursing her lips in the mirror. “There’s always the dance. Winter formal’s tomorrow night. That work? Or do you need adult-type people?”
The winter formal? Seriously? It was like a sign from the deities behind every high school rom-com I’d watched growing up. “No, that’ll work.”
“Braden!” Trey’s voice was sharp. “Explaining. Now.”
I huffed. Of course Trey would run right over talk about the dance. “Riley told me about a weakness of Lucien’s that I can exploit,” I said, because it was as simple as I could boil it down.
“Aren’t you scared that he’s going to see what you’re planning?” Trey asked, watching me from the rearview mirror.
I shook my head. “And that brings me to what Grace told me. The more people that know about her, the more likely it is that Lucien finds out. So she’s been hiding all of us from his abilities.” I nodded towards Jade. “That was how Lucien knew about us leaving together. He read it in your future. But she fixed her oversight after that.”
Jade turned around in her seat. “What do you mean ‘her oversight’?”
I shifted in my seat, and smoothed out the creases in my pants. “That thing you wanted to talk to Drew about,” I said evenly, despite the fact that I had no business knowing about it. “Lucien had something else in mind for you.” And that’s probably the reason that Drew had to die, because there was going to be an Armstrong to replace him. The thought made the bile churn in my stomach.
“Oh,” Jade said quietly, sitting back in her seat.
The hurt in her voic
e got Trey’s attention, and he wouldn’t let it go. “What’s he talking about? What thing? You and Drew were talking? You promised me that was over.”
“And you promised Mom that you wouldn’t see Braden anymore,” Jade said, sounding exhausted. “We tell people what they want to hear. It’s what we do.”
“Wait, you told your mom you wouldn’t see me anymore?” I asked, forgetting anything about concentration or focus. I leaned forward in my seat, like proximity to Trey would somehow make this clearer.
“It was a while ago,” he said, evading an honest answer. “Before anything seriously started to happen with us. She was just worried that you were going to screw up her timeline of my life.”
“You could have always told her no,” Jade said. “She got used to controlling you because you let her. It’s not her fault you flipped the script once Braden came to town.”
“Are you seriously defending her?” he demanded. “Do we really need to go over this again?”
“I’m not defending her,” Jade said, raising her voice. “I’m just saying you were the perfect son until one day you weren’t. No wonder she went over the top.”
“I can’t believe you’re seriously doing this right now.” The car started to accelerate as Trey took his worsening mood out on the roads. I’d been in a car with him once before when he’d lost his temper. It hadn’t ended well. I hoped we could avoid a repeat performance. “Unbelievable.” Trey’s seething frustration was a tangible thing, it pressed into every inch of space inside the truck, stinking like ashtrays and muddy water.
“Stop here,” I said calmly. When Trey didn’t stop fast enough, I reached out with my magic and cut the feed of gas to the engine and eased the brake pedal down. Trey spun around in his seat, fixing me with a dark look. I didn’t say anything, just pushed him towards the door. Reluctantly, he got out, and I climbed out over his seat and followed.
We were in the middle of town, equidistant from the Lansing and Thorpe homes that marked the western- and easternmost points of Belle Dam. It was a residential street like any other, only this one was important. At least for tonight.
I knew I needed a big gesture, but there were also things I could set into motion tonight that would play out almost immediately. When Jade got out, I held out my hand and she gave me the blank greeting card and a pen. I scrawled a quick message (“She knows about the money”), shoved it in the envelope, and tucked it into the first mailbox on the left side of the street.
The Lansing siblings looked at me with a mixture of annoyance and expectation. Their fight might have ended unceremoniously, but it was clear they’d both turn on me if I didn’t start explaining myself.
“Lucien sees futures, which are shaped like tree branches. They all split off from somewhere. If you can get down to the root of something, though, and cut it out completely, it wipes out a whole line of futures.”
I nodded towards the darkened house. “He forgot the mail last night. He’ll wake up in the morning, remember, and see my note. He’ll confess the gambling to his wife, she’ll force him to get help, and he’ll never end up going to Jason for help paying the mortgage. Because he doesn’t get indebted to Jason, he doesn’t take the promotion that Jason gets him, which means he doesn’t move. And if he doesn’t move, his grandson never inherits the house where something integral happens when he’s sixteen.” I shrugged. “A lot of futures change based on what happens in that house. Now they don’t.”
Both of them stared at me blankly.
“Come on,” I said. “Three more things to do before we can stop for the night. Next I need a St. Christopher medallion, two dollars in quarters, and a pocketknife. Then we can go to the preschool.”
Their blank looks got even blanker.
“I’m kidding,” I said with an annoyed sigh. “Seriously, you guys are no fun.”
thirty-two
Three more stops took the rest of the night and well into the next morning. We stumbled into Jason’s house a few hours before noon and down the hallway to my room. Jade walked right into one of the guest rooms, while Trey hesitated outside my door.
I pulled him into my room. Not that it mattered much, because less than a minute later he’d fallen asleep on my side of the bed, his shoes and jacket still on. I huffed out a breath, sat down next to him, and finished what he should have, pulling the shoes off his feet, and his arms out of the jacket. Then I pulled the comforter out from under him and wrapped him up in it.
I left him there and wandered down to the library. Even though my body was exhausted (when was the last time I’d actually slept?) my mind still charged ahead like business as usual. I couldn’t waste any time with sleep. Not when I didn’t know how things would turn out.
Jason had left the chess sets where I’d abandoned them weeks before, but the pieces had all been shifted. Games that I’d been playing had their fortunes reversed, and now the losers were winning and the winners were in retreat. Was it his way of telling me that things would be okay? Or maybe his hope that life would follow the chess analogy closer than usual?
The dance was ideal for what I wanted to do next. Luring Lucien out into public was integral, and thinning the future pool would help with that. When thousands of threads disappeared, leaving gaps in the mosaic, Lucien would notice. Be curious. And at the dance, I was going to make him have a full-blown panic attack.
Or I’d die trying.
Before I knew it, it was time to get ready for the dance. I wasn’t sure where the afternoon went, but I had a sneaking suspicion that my exhaustion was a bandit hiding in the blind spots in my vision, snatching out bites of time for moments of total blackout. More than once, I started working my mind through something only to suddenly realize my thoughts had been disrupted and my neck muscles were unusually stiff.
It was impressive with how little effort Jade put into the formal. She’d brought a dress along at some point, and I meant to ask if she’d just moved into the house entirely, but I figured it was best if I didn’t raise the subject. Trey was gone when I went back to my room, the bed made and no sign of him.
“You should talk to your brother,” I said, after coming back from a shower that had seared the skin right off my body.
“About?” Jade lay on my bed, her hair tossed casually above her.
“You know what,” I said. Just because we kept skirting the issue didn’t mean I wouldn’t force it. If Jade really was pregnant, she was going to need someone to look out for her.
I headed into the closet, grumbling at the size. It was bigger than the bedroom I’d had growing up. Maybe even bigger than my room and John’s combined.
“What are you going to wear?” Jade asked, which was code for We’re not talking about it. Which was fine. I probably wasn’t the best sounding board at the moment anyway.
I slogged my way to the back of the closets where the suits were. Jason really must have assumed I would be the junior version of him, because there were a dozen identical black suits lined up one next to the other. But I didn’t want black. Black was Jason’s color, the same way that white was Catherine’s. I was somewhere in between, and so it was fitting that I pulled the only gray suit off the rack. It wasn’t one solid color, but made up of slightly different shades of gray.
Jade sat up in surprise when I walked out of the closet with a suit in one hand, as well as some of the sunglasses she was always pressing me to wear.
“Shirt?” she asked, eyeing me critically.
I handed her the suit, then walked back into the closet, emerging a few seconds later with a button-up that was a slightly brighter shade of gray. Jade frowned until I reached inside the suit and pulled a dark burgundy tie out that matched the suit’s material perfectly. Setting the shirt inside, and putting the tie on top showed the ensemble and the way the patterns played off each other.
She raised an eyebrow slowly. “After all this time, you suddenly have a keener fashion sense than me?” She looked annoyed. Jade looked down at her phone, sitting on th
e edge of the bed, her frown intensifying. “I texted my brother almost an hour ago, and he hasn’t responded yet.”
Panic start scurrying up my spine until I saw the smirk that she was trying desperately to hide. “What did you text him?” I asked, putting a clamp down on my emotions.
“I just asked him what color his dress was going to be,” she said innocently. “You have to get a corsage that matches, right?”
Jade raised, and then summarily dismissed, the problem of tickets. “You were supposed to buy them weeks ago. They collect them at the door.” Jade tapped her nails against the hood of her car. “But they’ll probably let us in anyway,” she mused, ducking down to check her makeup. “I can’t think of anyone that would want to piss my mom off. Jason either.”
But to her credit, riding in the car with Jade wasn’t the white-knuckled nightmare it had been in the past. If anything, it was making a case that Jade had been replaced by a body snatcher. She obeyed the speed limit, barely talked, and focused on the road.
I think it was the closest that either one of us had come to acknowledging the baby elephant in the room. Jade herself looked amazing. Her honey-colored hair was pinned back in a way that I still couldn’t figure out. It didn’t look like hair product, it was too short for a tie or a clip, but all the same it swept up and back, and looked fantastic on her. She wore a sapphire-blue dress, darker than the aura I’d learned to channel recently, but easily just as beautiful. She’d even paired them with real sapphires in her ears and around her neck.
If there was any sort of “Best Dressed” award at this thing and we didn’t win, then the city deserved whatever it got in the future.
The hall was on the south side of town, far from the shore and downtown. It wasn’t anything special, just a flat, rectangular building with some hedges for landscaping. Colorful dresses abounded as many of the other kids attending straggled in as well. The weather was warmer than it had been, the leftover snow and ice melting overnight while we’d been busy driving all over Belle Dam.