by Eva Chase
Jin got up. “I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs too.”
Ky looked around at us, his eyes a little dazed from all that time staring at screens. “You don’t need me, right? I think I might have found something that’ll help with Seth’s idea…” He made a grabbing motion toward Gabriel with a smile. “Pass me that coffee if you’re not going to drink it?”
Gabriel chuckled and set the mug on the desk beside Ky as he made his way to meet me at the door. I looked down at myself, at the dress that was a little wrinkled from my hasty packing when the Assembly had summoned us. Oh, it wasn’t as if my family was going to decide how they felt about my situation based on the neatness of my clothing.
The three of us headed down on the elevator. Jin rubbed my back soothingly, and Gabriel squeezed my hand. “Nothing has really changed, Sprout,” he said. “They’ll see that.”
I swallowed hard. “I hope so.”
We reached the lobby just as Naomi and the others were coming through the front doors. “Rose!” Naomi cried, and hustled over to give me a hug. Lesley trailed behind her shyly, and my aunts headed for the lobby desk. Ginny shot me a warm smile. Irene gave me an unreadable look.
I hugged my cousin back, choking up just to have her here. “We managed to book a couple rooms over the phone on the way over,” Naomi said as she pulled back. “Fastest travel arrangements ever!” She grinned. “When they let us in, we’ll lug our suitcases up there, and then I need to hear the full story about why the Assembly people are being such asses. Hey, Gabriel, Jin!” She offered my consorts a little wave.
I wasn’t sure if it’d have felt better to spill this secret right there in the lobby, versus having to hold it in the whole way back up to the floor they were staying on, but I couldn’t start talking about magic and demons in front of all the hotel’s unsparked clientele. After dropping off their suitcases, my aunts came with the rest of us into the room Naomi and Lesley were sharing. Naomi dropped down onto the edge of one of the beds and motioned for me to sit in the armchair near the TV.
“All right,” she said with a swish of her chestnut ponytail. “Let’s hear it. I want to know who to direct my righteous fury at.”
I tried to smile, but my control over my mouth wavered. Gabriel and Jin came up to flank me, Gabriel resting a hand on my shoulder. I could have asked them to do the explaining, but that didn’t feel right.
“I guess if you’re going to direct fury at anyone,” I said, “it should probably be my dad. There was more than we knew going on after he and my mom got married. He—” I paused to collect myself, glancing at my aunts. “Naomi told you about the Frankfords, and the demons, and how they were using the witches?”
Aunt Ginny’s expression darkened. “We got the gist of it. Bastards.”
Her anger bolstered my courage, but only a little. “Well, in case you didn’t know about this part, the whole arrangement with the demons, it was so the men in that faction could take some of the power from that plane of existence into themselves. So that they could use it, like we use our spark, to change things. It doesn’t last the same way, so they had to keep going back. But that’s not the point. The point is— When my parents were trying to get pregnant— I don’t really know why he did it—”
My voice caught in my throat, trying to get to the heart of the matter. The choked-up feeling I’d had before overwhelmed me. My eyes went hot. Before I could catch them, tears started leaking out.
“Rose!” Aunt Ginny said, sounding so concerned her voice only made me sob.
I pressed my hand to my mouth, fighting for composure. Jin knelt next to me, threading his arm around mine. Gabriel squeezed my shoulder. They were here with me. No matter what happened with my mother’s family, I wasn’t alone.
Aunt Ginny was here with me too. She crouched down in front of me, taking my free hand in hers. “You don’t have to talk about it,” she said gently. “Not now. Not ever if you don’t want to. It’s all right.”
A laugh sputtered out of me. “No, it’s not. And you’ll find out anyway if I don’t. So…” I dragged in a breath and forced myself to start telling the revised account of my conception.
Ginny stayed where she was as my explanation came out, the others frozen where they were poised on the two beds, Naomi’s eyes growing wider by the minute. By the time I finished, my body was trembling. I gritted my teeth and willed myself steady.
“So, that’s why I’m here and not with the Assembly,” I said. “That power must have affected me. I’ve got some kind of connection to the demons, including the one they’re trying to push back. They don’t want it using me or me helping it somehow. I guess that makes sense.”
I looked up cautiously. Naomi pushed herself to her feet, her jaw set and her eyes narrowed.
“It doesn’t,” she snapped. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. If you do have that connection, which obviously doesn’t endear those monsters to you anyway, you might be the key to figuring this whole mess out.”
Her words echoed my father’s comment the other day. My gut twisted, but hearing that sentiment coming from her didn’t hold the same pressure. From my cousin, it was a statement that she believed in me.
Aunt Ginny was shaking her head. “I can’t imagine— If we’d had any idea he was going to those lengths— Oh, Spark help us, poor Alora. Poor you.” She tugged on my hand, and I let her pull me into her arms. Like the mother I should have had, I thought, and almost started bawling all over again.
They were horrified, but for me, not by me.
At least, some of them were. My gaze found Aunt Irene, sitting stiffly on the bed. When our eyes met, I was surprised to see hers were watery.
She lowered her head. “Virginia’s right,” she said, sounding weary. “We should have done more.”
“You didn’t know,” I said quietly. “I didn’t even know until yesterday. I doubt Mom had much of any idea.”
“Yes, but—” She grimaced and met my gaze again. “I’m sorry. You’ve been a stranger to me, one I assumed followed your father’s path since he was the one who raised you. I let my anger with him and my fears for my family determine my actions. You didn’t deserve that. You’re a victim of his schemes just as much as my little sister ever was. I should have defended you as much as I would have her.”
I stared at her, not sure what to say. I’d never expected an apology. Did I even believe it?
Did it matter? She wasn’t condemning me. I wasn’t going to trust her any time soon, but I didn’t have to shun her if she wasn’t shunning me.
“Well, now what?” Naomi said. “There’s a demon on the loose and the Assembly is acting like a bunch of idiots. We didn’t come all this way just to sit around.”
Aunt Ginny stood up, resolve hardening her expression. “We go to the Assembly right now and bring every bit of influence we have as the Levesques. And we do have some, even if we aren’t in the Portland crowd. We know enough to make life very difficult for the Northcotts and their associates if we wanted to.”
I looked up at her, my spirits lifting. “You think that’ll work?”
She smiled tightly. “Nothing gained without trying. But yes. You can’t do better than a united front. Come on. Let’s set them straight before they bungle this catastrophe any more than they already have.”
Chapter Eleven
Seth
The smell of soldered metal filled the air in the abandoned parking lot the Assembly had given over to our use. Somewhere behind me, tools were hissing and bars clanking against each other. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and inspected the massive wall of twisted copper and steel that was standing mostly upright in front of me.
The steel sections were just there to bolster the softer metal. Kyler had found a reference to the demons’ dislike to copper in the Frankfords’ records, so I’d wanted to incorporate as much as possible into the structure. We were fixing the bars in the shapes of glyphs intended to strengthen the walls and to contain and subdue whatever lay inside them.<
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If this plan worked, the demon on the loose would be caged by tomorrow.
Jin came up beside me. After all the work he’d done incorporating glyphs into paintings for practical use—and he had done some metal work for sculptures in the past too—I’d appreciated having him consult on the designs. He looked the wall over, cocking his head.
“If you don’t think it’d hurt the structural integrity or whatever to add them, we could work in a few more of the binding glyphs,” he said, pointing. “Fit them around this corner here, and the curve in the shielding one there.”
With the movement of his finger, I could picture it. I nodded. “Good thinking. I’ll add those in right away.”
Right away wasn’t all that fast when I was doing this right. I sketched out the addition to be sure of it and worked the metal into shape slowly and methodically. Soldering it into the existing structure required the most care. I didn’t want to jar any of the seams that were already secured.
When I’d finished that enhancement, I ambled across the lot to check on the handful of workers the Assembly had brought in to help get this project done. The basic framework for the other five sections of the cage was in place and the larger details coming together well. I made a couple of suggestions—“Add a little more steel here.” “Make sure you support that bend.”—but mostly all I needed to offer was praise. I’d put a lot of time into the plans I’d written up to make sure every aspect was covered before we even got started.
I checked my phone. It was mid-afternoon now. I still had to take care of the more intricate glyphs on three of the walls. We’d better be ready to cage that demon tomorrow. The main—and maybe the only—reason the Assembly had approved this plan and Rose’s involvement was that since the confrontation a couple of days ago, the creature had picked up its speed. And its ferocity. In the last two days, it had killed a dozen people who’d crossed its path.
If we didn’t stop it soon, it’d reach way more inhabited areas. The thought of what might happen then made me wince inwardly. We’d just been lucky so far that the towns near it now were few and far between.
I’d just fixed a few more strips of copper onto what would become the cage’s floor and was reaching for another when the gleam of familiar black hair caught my eye. Rose came up on the other side of the work table that held my tools, her cousin and two of the other young witches in tow.
“Jin said at least a couple of the walls are ready for us to get to work doing the magicking for them?” she said.
The plan was for the witches to spread out the work—some enforcers were due to show up to lend a hand too—but Rose needed to add her touch to every spell. We were hoping that imbuing each glyph with a little demon-influenced power would make them more effective than the past spells the enforcers had tried.
“That one’s finished,” I said, pointing to the wall I’d added the final elements to earlier. “And this one almost is.”
“Wow,” Naomi said, taking in the propped up metal square I was working on. It was more than twice as tall as I was and equally wide. I’d been standing on a step ladder a lot of the time. “So how is this all going to come together? Is there some kind of bait we can use, like a mouse trap?”
Rose shook her head. “We don’t want the demon to realize it’s a cage at all,” she said. “Seth has it figured out so we can have all the sections spread out, with a base we can easily attach to a truck once we’re ready. We know we could move the demon a little in a direction we wanted before. We shove it onto the base, and then we push the walls and ceiling up around it magically.”
“There’ll be glyphs on the locking mechanisms too,” I said. “That thing is going to be completely surrounded by magic.”
Caroline, the posh-looking young woman whose blouse and dress pants looked pretty out of place in this construction yard, clapped her hands. “Well, let’s get to work on that spell-casting, then. The more magic we can pour into these walls, the better they’ll hold.”
“That’s the idea,” Rose said. She wet her lips. “And there’s the other aspect too…”
Lesley, the reserved witch who’d lived with us on Rose’s estate for a few weeks, tucked her mousy brown hair behind her ears. “We’re adding blood to the mix,” she said in a soft even voice. “We know. We all agreed to that part too.”
“I just—I wouldn’t blame you if it seemed a bit too much now that we’re faced with actually doing it.” Rose gave a nervous laugh. “The Northcotts wanted the bloodletting to only happen with enforcer supervision, so I guess we don’t have to worry about it just yet.”
“From what we’ve heard from the witches the Frankfords’ faction used and from their records, it could make a big difference,” I said. From what my brother had said, the faction members hadn’t been completely clear on how the whole bodily sacrifice thing worked. But it had seemed as if sacrifices made with the intention of pushing them back worked more powerfully than any magic on its own.
But when it came to blood spilled not in purposeful sacrifice but random violence, it seemed the demons could use it to their own purposes. That death at the Cliff, the Frankford guard fallen onto the rocks, had given them power. A thought that made me even more unsettled by the idea of the demon reaching an actual town. How much more powerful would it get if it was murdering hundreds or thousands instead of a handful of people each day?
Rose leaned in to give me a peck on the cheek before moving with the others to the finished wall. I threw myself back into my own job. I noticed distantly when a couple squads of enforcers showed up a half hour later to lend their own magical energy to the cause, but for the most part I wasn’t paying attention to anything except the pieces of metal in front of me. That was the closest thing to magic I knew how to work.
A pink tint was creeping across the horizon with the coming evening when I straightened up from the structure that would form the cage’s roof. I had one more wall to put the final touches on, and we’d need to test out the hinges before we sent everything off with the truck tomorrow, but we were almost there. A prickling burn spread through my muscles as I stretched my arms up and then in front of me.
Rose was leaning against one of the cars, her cheeks wan. Frowning, I went to join her.
“Is everything all right?” I asked. I’d been so lost in the metalworking I’d barely talked to her since she’d arrived—but then, she’d seemed busy with the magic-working every time I’d looked her way. Rose was every bit as dedicated to getting this done as I was.
She nodded and gave me a tight smile. “Just taking a bit of a breather.”
“You’re not straining your spark, are you, putting so much magic into this?” In spite of how tired I was too, a quiver of lust shot to my groin at the thought of the ways we could stoke that flame.
My consort squeezed my arm reassuringly. “No, I’ve got plenty of energy to draw on. It’s just that drawing out the demonic aspect within it…” She looked at the ground, her voice lowering too. “I can feel it, when I delve deeply enough, now that I know to look for it. There’s a hint of that impression I get when I’m near the demons, like a faint aftertaste—but I can condense it if I try hard enough. But doing that takes more out of me than regular magicking.”
I wrapped my arms around her and tugged her to me, taking her weight for as long as she’d let me. “If this works, you shouldn’t ever have to draw on it again.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself.” She nestled her head against my chest for just a few seconds, and then she eased back with a sigh. “I should get back to it. We’ve got a couple more to finish.”
I let her go with a pang in my chest. After everything she’d done to escape her father, his machinations had tied her to the demons anyway. Maybe we should be grateful that her powers might be the answer to stopping this menace… but no one person should have that much responsibility on her shoulders. If I could have taken more of the burden from her, I would have.
As I headed over to the last
section that needed detailing, a new car pulled into the lot. Mr. Northcott stepped out with a couple of enforcers. His tall form looked tense as he scanned the yard. His pale eyes came to rest on me. He headed over with brisk strides, running a hand through his gray hair.
“Mr. Lennox,” the co-head of the Witching Assembly said, taking in the wall I’d been about to work on. “Since the day is almost over, I was hoping to get an in-person progress report. Where are we at?”
“We should have the last wall fully constructed by early tomorrow morning at the latest,” I said. “And then of course the final spells will need to be added, and there’ll be some testing to conduct. I can’t see any reason we shouldn’t be ready to put the plan into action by the afternoon, though.”
Northcott’s lips pursed. “There’s no way you could speed along that process? We want to get this cage out there and in action as early as we can.”
The guy had only been on the lot for five minutes, and already he was trying to call the shots. “If you want it done right, we need to take the time to make sure everything will work the way we want,” I said. “And the witches doing the casting will need rest to recover overnight, won’t they?”
His mouth stayed tight, but he couldn’t deny that. “Just see it’s done as quickly as you can manage,” he said. “The demon claimed two more victims an hour ago. The longer that menace is on the loose…”
“I know,” I said, a little sharply than was maybe completely polite. But the Assembly officials had managed to miss the conspiracy under their noses, all the women who’d been hurt by the faction and their demons, for so long before now. Decades upon decades. It was a little much for him to complain about the difference of a few hours.
Mr. Northcott gave me a measured look. “My consort and I don’t take our leadership of the witching community lightly, young man. Every death that happens due to the actions of those under our rule—every death that comes to those under our rule—we must shoulder. We couldn’t have imagined facing a catastrophe like this when we were striving for the position we hold, you know.”