by Cynthia Hand
“Web!” I call, even though he obviously can’t answer me. “Web, where are you?”
Over to the other side of the stage I go, to another dressing room, but it’s empty. The fire is on this side, and I can literally feel its heat growing. There’s a snapping sound above me, and one of the lenses from a stage light crashes to the floor, making me scream. It’s dark back here, too freaking dark to see anything.
“Cry, Web, cry,” I call. I hear Christian shout out in pain from somewhere above me, near the door to the lobby. I have to do something.
I stagger into the middle of the stage. I don’t see the bright arc of Christian’s sword or the shadows of the twins anymore. The lobby is completely engulfed in flames. There’s not much time left before I won’t be able to breathe or see or fight my way out of here.
But I can’t leave here without Web.
And then I remember the trapdoor. Angela showed it to us once, when we were bored during Angel Club. It’s a space under the stage only big enough for a person to fit, meant for moments in a play when the character should magically disappear.
trp dr
Angela was trying to tell me where he was.
I dash over to the spot and start tearing at the floorboards, then reach deep down into the dark beneath, coughing on account of the growing smoke, and my fingers touch something soft and warm and alive.
I pull out a bundle wrapped in a blanket.
Web.
I don’t take time to get reacquainted. I snug his body into my shoulder and turn and head straight for the back door, which lets out into the alley behind the building.
Christian, I think. I have him. I’m getting out.
But before I make it three steps, I find my path blocked by the twins.
I take a stumbling step back.
They’re my brother’s girlfriend. At least, one of them is.
“Lucy,” I say, blinking at them in confusion.
“Clara Gardner,” says the one with the jangling bracelets, her dark eyes widening in astonishment. “Oh my God.” She smiles. “What a coincidence, me stumbling upon you here, of all places. Clara, I’d like to introduce you to my sister, Olivia,” she says, like we’ve bumped into each other at the country club.
She killed Anna, I think. That girl just killed my friend’s mother.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” says Olivia, although she’s clearly not charmed. “Give us the baby,” she says. “It’s over.”
I glance over my shoulder, back at the auditorium. Where is Christian?
“Oh, we took care of your friend, although he did put up a pretty good fight,” Lucy says offhandedly. “Now hand us the baby. If you give it to us right now, I promise it’ll be quick when I kill you.”
My throat closes in despair at the idea that Christian is lying in the dark below us somewhere, dead or dying, his soul laid bare. I clutch Web to my chest. He’s being so quiet—too quiet, I think—but I can’t worry about that at the moment.
“Give me the baby,” Lucy says.
I shake my head.
She sighs like I am really wrecking her day. “I’m going to enjoy gutting you.” The black dagger appears in her hand. I sense a kind of humming noise from it, a vibration that resonates all through me. She steps closer to me. “I just adore your brother, you know.” She laughs. “He’s the best boyfriend I’ve ever had. So attentive. So sexy. It’s going to be terrible when he finds out his sister died. So tragically too—a fire. He’s going to need so much TLC to get him through it.”
She’s trying to goad me, I realize dully, but nothing in me rises to fight her. I don’t have long now. Out of the corner of my eye I see Olivia start to move in on me from the side. They’re backing me to the edge of the stage. Even if I could fight them, I’d never be able to keep them both at bay. Not with Web in my arms.
They’re closing in for the kill.
I need to summon glory, I think. I don’t know if it will keep them back the way it will for Black Wings, but I need to try. It’s my only shot.
I close my eyes.
I try to empty myself.
Focus.
Every other time I’ve asked it, truly asked it, the light has come to me—that day in the forest with my mother, when I fought Samjeeza; the night of the car accident after prom; any time I’ve truly needed it, it’s been there like it was waiting for the moment to literally shine. But there’s no glory anywhere inside me right now, or if there is, I can’t feel it. I can’t access it.
All I feel is dark. Because I’m going to lose this battle. Christian’s seen it.
I am going to die.
No, comes Christian’s voice in my mind. No, you aren’t.
Tears spring to my eyes. You’re not dead, I say stupidly.
I need you to do what I tell you, exactly when I tell you to. Okay?
Okay.
I hear the sound of sirens in the distance.
“Give. Us. The baby.” Olivia is close enough now that she could easily stab me. She lifts the dagger.
“Go. To. Hell,” I say between clenched teeth. Maybe there is some fire left in me, after all.
Lift Web up over your head! Now! Christian shouts in my mind, and I don’t think, I just do as he asks, I lift the baby, and Christian leaps up from the orchestra pit onto the stage, and his glory sword is a blinding spray of light as it passes through me from shoulder to hip. I can feel it slicing through my clothes, but when it touches my skin, there’s only warmth.
“No!” someone calls out.
Dazed, I lower Web back to my shoulder, and that’s when I see Lucy—the one with the bracelets—standing a few feet away, her face a mask of rage and disbelief, screaming in this ragged, animal-like agony.
And Olivia falls at my feet, dead.
Cut almost in half by Christian’s glory sword.
“I will kill you!” Lucy screams, staring at me with bulging, grief-filled eyes, the black dagger clutched in her fist.
But Christian is with me now, beside me, sword in hand, and the sirens are getting closer. Any minute and this place will be crawling with firefighters.
Lucy glances toward the exit. “I swear I will kill you, Clara Gardner.” A tear makes its way down her face, dangling on her chin for a few seconds before it drops. “And I’ll make sure you suffer first,” she says, then turns and runs up the aisle of the theater, bursting through the smoke and flame and out onto the street.
I can hear her sobbing as she runs.
I don’t look at Olivia. I can’t. I turn away, bile rising in my throat as I realize that I’m covered in her blood, my shirt soaked with it, my shoulders and arms splattered.
I used to think of this place as being so safe, I think. A place for all of us to talk and be ourselves. A magic place.
Now it’s burning down around us. It’s gone.
Angela is gone.
Slowly I become aware of Christian standing in front of me, panting, pressing his shirt to his ribs.
“Are you okay?” he asks, squeezing my shoulder. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I answer to both questions, then see that he’s bleeding. “You’re cut.”
“I’ll survive,” he says. At the same moment, we hear shouted voices in the lobby. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
We hurry toward the back exit and into the alley behind the theater. Cool night air hits my skin, my lungs, and I can breathe again.
“We have to fly,” Christian says. He unfolds his wings, the black speckles standing out on his white feathers like ink spilled on paper in the dark.
My heart is so heavy with dread and shock, with sadness for Anna, with fear for Angela, with Olivia’s death, that I know flight isn’t possible. I shake my head at Christian. “I can’t.”
He looks down at the ground for a minute, thinking, then nods solemnly and retracts his wings. “Okay. We’ll circle around and get my truck. It’s a better plan, anyway. All right?”
I nod.
“You’ve got him?�
� Christian asks.
I gaze down into Web’s round little face. He looks up at me with wide amber eyes. Angela’s eyes. He coughs. I pull him tighter to me.
“I’ve got him,” I say, and then we’re running, running, through the smoky streets of Jackson.
Christian’s hand trembles as he puts the keys in the ignition. Then his jaw tightens and the truck rumbles to life and we peel away from the curb. Neither of us says anything for a while, the only sound the gunning of the engine. I want to tell him that he’s driving too fast, that the last thing we need is to get pulled over, what with us all bloody and a baby in the front seat, but I don’t have the heart. He’s doing the best he can.
“Where are we going?” I ask as he turns onto the road that will lead us out of town.
“I don’t know,” he says. “The girl, the one who I didn’t—” He stops talking for a minute and takes a shallow breath, like he’s trying not to puke. “She’ll probably call for reinforcements. I don’t know how long it will take her to get to hell and back.”
“Lucy,” I murmur.
He glances over at me sharply. “How do you know her name?”
“She’s Jeffrey’s girlfriend.”
If it’s possible for his face to go any stonier, it does. “And she knows who you are? She knows your name?”
“Yes.”
“Then we can’t go home,” he says, as if that settles it.
I fight down a wave of panic. “Why? It’s hallowed ground; your place and mine both are. It’d be safe there.”
He shakes his head. “The hallowed-ground thing works on Black Wings, not Triplare.” He takes a deep breath. “We have to go,” he says slowly, deliberately, because he knows this is going to upset me. “They’ll be hunting you. They’ll be after the baby, too. We have to get far away from here.”
“But Angela—”
“Angela would want us to keep Web safe,” he says.
I know he’s right, but there’s a finality I feel in this moment, like if we go now, if I leave this place, we’ll never come back. We’ll always be running. We’ll always be scared.
“Clara, please,” he says softly. We’ll figure something out. But right now I need you to trust me. I need you safe.
I swallow, hard, and nod. Christian lowers his head for a second, relieved, then reaches under his seat and pulls out a faded road atlas. He opens it to a map of the United States and lays it across the dashboard.
“Close your eyes and put your finger down on a spot,” he says. “And that’s where we’ll go.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and touch my finger to the page.
I wonder if I will ever see Tucker again.
We drive through the night. In the morning we pull over at a rest stop to clean up and then Christian goes into Walmart for some new clothes, a car seat, and baby supplies. He surprises me by unlocking the silver box in the bed of his truck to reveal an escape kit straight out of an action movie: a bunch of documents, birth certificates, fake driver’s licenses, something that looks like insurance paperwork, and the biggest pile of cash I’ve ever seen.
“My uncle,” he says by way of explanation. “He could see into the future—not just his own, sometimes, but for others. He always said someday I’d have to run.”
His uncle was a bit extreme. But then, here we are. Running.
I try to fix Web a bottle of formula, but he won’t drink it. He takes one good look at me now that it’s light and starts crying. Hard. Nothing I do seems to help. I am not his mother. Where is my mother? I can practically feel him wondering. My grandmother? What have you done with them?
“You should try to get some rest,” Christian says after we pull back out onto the highway and Web, lulled by the vibrations of the road, finally goes back to sleep.
There’s no possibility of that. Whenever I close my eyes, I’m back in that stairwell listening to somebody kill my friend’s mother. I’m in the dark room waiting to be killed myself. I’m watching someone die right in front of me. Instead I reach into my pocket and take out my cell and call Billy for like the tenth time since we fled Jackson.
She doesn’t answer, which makes me all kinds of paranoid that somehow Lucy has gotten back to hell by now and rallied some evil army of the undead and has already been to my house looking for me, possibly stumbling over an unsuspecting Billy. I keep imagining it like a scene out of a horror film, where Lucy is standing in front of the answering machine, laughing wickedly as she hears my voice trying to warn Billy.
“Hi, Billy, this is Clara,” I say into the phone, my voice cracking on my own name. “Call me. It’s important.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Christian says after I hang up. “Billy can take care of herself.”
I think about the blood. The sound of Olivia’s body hitting the stage.
“It’s okay, Clara,” Christian murmurs. “We’re safe.”
I turn to look out the window. We’re passing a ridge full of wind turbines: tall white windmills, their propellers whirling round and round, cutting the air. The clouds leave shadows as they move between the sun and the earth, like dark creatures roaming the land.
Will we ever be safe again? I wonder.
Christian takes one hand off the wheel and reaches for mine. He rubs his thumb across my knuckles, and it’s supposed to comfort me the way it always does. It’s supposed to fill me with his strength.
But all I feel is weak.
15
PLAYING HOUSE
The place I pointed to on the map ends up being Lincoln, Nebraska. When we get there, we find a hotel. The clerk at the front desk, a round, kind-looking woman in her late fifties, smiles at us like we’re a married couple and leans over the desk to get a peek at Web.
“Oh my, he’s a tiny one,” she says. “How old?”
“Nine days,” I answer, suddenly nervous, and her expression clearly reflects that she thinks nine days is too soon for me to be traveling with a baby, but that’s not her business.
“We’re visiting the in-laws,” Christian says, putting his arm around my waist and pulling me to him like he can’t stand for us to be six inches apart. “It’s not the best arrangement, staying in a hotel, but what can we do? She doesn’t get along with my mother.”
How easily he jumps into this role: devoted husband, sleep-deprived father.
“Believe me, I understand,” says the lady almost slyly. “We have those rolling port-a-cribs. Do you need one?”
“Yes, thank you. You’re a lifesaver,” he answers, and I swear she blushes when he turns on that high-wattage smile of his. He keeps his arm around me as we walk out of the lobby, but as we wait for the elevator, his face goes grim again.
We get Web settled in the port-a-crib next to the bed, and he goes right back to sleep. I guess babies sleep a lot at his age. I 411 the number for the pizza place in Mountain View, hoping to talk to Jeffrey, although who knows what I would say to him. How do you break it to your brother that his girlfriend’s a homicidal black-winged Triplare and she’s just vowed to kill me?
“He’s not here,” Jake says when I ask for Jeffrey. “It’s his day off.”
“Well, can you tell him to call me?” I say, and he makes a noncommittal noise and hangs up.
I don’t know what else to do.
Christian insists that I take the first shower. I stand under the scalding spray and scrub my skin until it’s raw, getting off the last of Olivia’s blood. As I stand in front of the steam-wiped mirror combing out my hair, my own face seems to accuse me.
Weak.
You didn’t try to save Anna, or to stop them from taking Angela. You didn’t even try.
Coward.
You spent all these hours training to use a glory sword, because your father told you that you’d need it, but when the moment came, you couldn’t even draw it.
Gutless.
I grip the comb so hard my knuckles turn white. I don’t meet my eyes again until my hair is done.
When I open the d
oor, Christian is sitting cross-legged on the single queen bed, staring at the painting on the wall, a picture of a large white bird with long legs and a stripe of red on the top of its head, spreading its wings, its toes touching the water, although I can’t be sure whether it’s taking off or touching down.
Failure, I think, remembering my inability to so much as conjure my wings at the Garter. Even at something as simple as flying. I’ve failed.
Christian looks at me. I clear my throat and gesture that it’s his turn to use the bathroom. He nods and gets up and brushes past me, his movements stiff and jerky, like his muscles have only now caught up with all the hell he’s put them through in the last twenty-four hours.
I sit on the bed and listen to the shower running, to Web’s breathing, to the clock ticking on the nightstand, to my own stomach growling. After about five minutes the water stops abruptly, the shower curtain rips aside, hurried footsteps cross the bathroom floor, running, and then there’s the sound of the toilet lid banging and of Christian throwing up. I jump to my feet and go to the door, but I’m afraid to open it. He won’t want me to see this. I lay my hand on the smooth painted wood of the door frame and close my eyes as I hear him retch again, then groan.
I knock, lightly.
I’m okay, he says, but he is not okay. I’ve never felt him less okay.
I’m coming in, I say.
Give me a minute. The toilet flushes.
When I go in exactly sixty seconds later, he’s standing at the sink with a towel wrapped around his waist, brushing his teeth. He unwraps a glass from the tray on the counter and fills it with water, takes a swig and swishes it, spits.
His eyes when they meet mine in the mirror are ashamed.
Failure. He feels it, too.
I look away, inadvertently gazing down at his body, and that’s when I see the jagged wound in his side.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says as I gasp. “But I probably shouldn’t have showered without tending to it first, because it’s opened up again.”