I held up a hand. “Hey, I’m not going there. I’m saying that I went after that vision to get answers to what’s happening. To see what I could glean. And the fact that I saw Amy with Malek means something. It’s important.”
“But you don’t know why,” the Singer said. “Or what.”
“I really don’t.”
“I hear it in your voice. Confusion.”
“Yeah. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s like that fog from when we were talking before, it’s worse or something.”
Kevin rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You think the vision caused it?”
I shrugged. “How?”
“No clue. Just that it’s the only thing that happened between the first fog and the second. Stands to reason the vision is involved in the fogginess.”
“I was using it to help. It’s a seer’s power.”
“The spell Melody did is corrupting your power,” he said.
“But I have to use it if we’re gonna get through this.”
“And if you use it,” the Singer said, “you run the risk of getting bad information. Corrupted information, to use Kevin’s word.”
Not a smiley thought. A worse one came on its heels. I spit it out before I realized what I was saying. “I’m not sure I’d know how to tell the difference.”
“You’d know,” Kevin said. “Deep down.”
I wanted to believe he was right. Wanting didn’t make it true. “I’m not so sure.”
“Smart,” the Singer said.
“Not really.”
“Yes,” she said. “Smart enough to know what you don’t know. A good place to start.”
“Doesn’t change how bad this is.”
She gave me a small smile in commiseration.
I had a thought that scared me more than all the others. “Potential corruption aside, I have to know—is it gonna be like this every time I use my power? Will the confusion get worse? Does using it make things worse?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I wish I could tell you for sure, but there’s not a road map or anything, Rude.”
“Damn.”
“I know. You could try not to do your seer thing.”
I shook my head.
“Or you could ration it. Only use your power when you have to. It’s no guarantee that’ll keep your power clean.”
“If I have no guarantees, I may as well just do what I can while I can,” I said.
She took that in. My words and the emotions behind them. That was, after all, her power.
“I’ll help you any way I can,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You know better than that, Davies.”
Right. It was bad form to thank the fae. Because most humans didn’t mean thank you as in ongoing gratitude. Most humans meant thanks, now go away. Which was rude as hell.
“You know how I meant that,” I said.
She laughed. “Just this once.”
Kevin flexed his shoulders, which looked super uncomfortable bundled inside cotton and denim. “I hate this.”
“Which part?” I asked.
“All of it.”
“Why don’t you lose the jacket?”
He fidgeted.
“Seriously,” I said. “Who are you gonna freak out?”
The obvious answer? No one.
He peeled off the jacket. Then his T-shirt. He kept his wings furled close to his back, which I appreciated. If he’d stretched them out to full span, the Singer and I would’ve ended up smacked in the head. Not that she would’ve noticed. She was staring at his everything.
The Singer reached out to touch his arm. He took a step back.
“I just want to see, Kev. That’s all.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he met her gaze.
She laid her hand on his arm. Ran her fingers along his skin toward his shoulder. Brushed the feathers of the nearest wing with her fingertips.
He blew out a long breath.
“You feel that?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Tell me about it.”
“It feels…close.”
“Private?” she asked. “Intimate?”
I pushed to my feet. Zach pranced in front of me. “I think we should leave you two alone for a while.”
“No,” Kevin said. “We should go. All of us. Back to the sidewalk outside the pub, right? If we don’t waste any time, we can make it back to the house before dark. Meet up with the crew.”
Including Amy.
The Singer pulled her hand away. She tore her gaze away from Kevin and put it on me. Specifically on my hands. “Rude, your fingers.”
“What about them?” I looked down.
The burns had healed. No scars. Where they’d been blended seamlessly with the rest. No evidence the burns had ever been there.
I didn’t know how to take that. “A good thing, right?”
The Singer didn’t answer my question. She said something disturbing instead. “It has to be part of the change.”
“The change I don’t want. That’s happening to me against my will.”
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” she said.
“Even if it’s a creepy baby?”
“Maybe the burns will come back later,” she said.
“You give me hope, Singer.”
She sighed. “Let me put on my Docs. Let’s go find the bitch that started this, find out what we need to do, and get it done.”
CHAPTER SIX
The sidewalk outside Rollins Pub still smelled like sulfur. It still felt electrically charged. But it looked different in one extremely important way.
Melody sat cross-legged with her back against the pub wall, her curves swallowed by baggy overalls. She wore a black tank top underneath them. And red hi-top kicks with black laces. She held a lit cigarette in one hand. She didn’t appear to have any interest in smoking it, though.
She saw us the second we hopped out of the Explorer—or really, she saw me. She honed her gaze on me like her eyes were heat-seeking missiles. She gave Kevin and the Singer and the dog the once-over. Then she stood up, bracing against the bricks for I didn’t know what.
Maybe my friends freaked her out. They fell in behind me. Let me take point. But they stayed close enough to make a move if it came to that. Also, they had wings.
Maybe Melody thought I’d try to hurt her. I felt the impulse. The last time I’d seen her, she’d nearly killed me. Her spell disappeared a few million people. The magic was busy turning the remaining suckers into everything we’d ever feared.
I wouldn’t hurt her. Not my nature. Not my style. Plus, she could go supernova and then where would we be?
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said.
That couldn’t be true or she’d have found me already. “Your faery seer radar broken?”
“You don’t show up anymore. It’s like you’re full of static or something. Like trying to find a radio station but never quite getting it right.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Sorry.”
I could think of only one reason Melody couldn’t sense me strong like before. I’d changed. I glanced at the Singer. She thinned her lips. Nothing to say. Probably because there was nothing to say.
I took a deep breath. “Well, we found each other. You’re not gonna heat up again, are you?”
“I feel fine,” she said. “As fine as it gets.”
“Okay.” I cocked my head to the left. “This is Kevin. Our friend is called the Singer.”
“That’s a title, not a name. Why wouldn’t you want me to know her name?” Melody’s eyes widened. “You’re fae, right?”
“At the moment,” the Singer said.
Melody looked at Kevin. “You’re not, though.”
“Not yet.”
“Is it my fault?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah.” Kevin stretched his wings to full span. Jesus—that had to be six feet across. “Which means you�
��re gonna help us fix it.”
“I don’t blame you for being mad.”
“I’m a lot more than that,” he said. “What did you do to us? To the city? What was that spell? Because it was definitely a spell.”
She nodded.
“Not an accident?” I asked.
Her mouth turned down. Her chin trembled.
It couldn’t have been an accident, what she did. Because if it had been, we would have ended up like the steering wheel and the trash can. Melted. But Melody, she’d come to me for help. She’d been over her head with her new powers. Grappling with the revelation that she was half demon. She was couch surfing at a friend’s. She’d lost the only family she’d ever known.
She wasn’t a criminal mastermind. She was a confused girl.
I walked over to her. Leaned against the wall beside her. Zach followed me. Put himself between us. Not a good sign.
“Melody, what did you do?”
“Something bad. And now it can’t be undone.”
The Singer took a step in our direction. One step that got her as far as two human steps would’ve. “Less vague. More specific.”
Melody wrapped her arms around herself. “I told you about my dad, the demon. And how my mom threw me out.”
I waited.
“I’m alone,” she said. “I don’t know how to be alone. I can’t take it, Rude.”
I couldn’t say I understood. I had my own alone issues. My parents didn’t see me most of the time. But that was worlds different than what she was going through. I didn’t have a stepfather who beat the crap out of me. I didn’t have a mom who chose an asshole like that over me. So I didn’t say something that would just ring false.
She hugged herself tighter. “I thought, if my mother doesn’t want me, maybe he would.”
“So you what—called him?”
“Pretty much. I cast the spell to do it. It’s just—that spell? It takes a while to come full circle. Like, seventy-two hours. And it has bad collateral damage.”
I couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. “I’m not collateral damage, Melody. I’m a person. Look at me.”
She glanced at me sideways. “I know that. I’m sorry. I don’t know how many times I can say that. I mean it, but it doesn’t mean anything. Or at least it doesn’t mean enough. Not with all of this.” She nodded Kevin. At the empty street. The abandoned cars.
“Seventy-two hours,” I said. “Three days.”
“One of which is already gone.” She chewed her lip.
I knew some lore about this kind of thing. Part of my training. There were demons, and then there were Demons. Anything elaborate enough to need that amount of time to summon, with a spell that had side effects like this one, had to be more of a capital D demon.
“Do you know what your father is exactly?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t think Mom knows either. It wasn’t in her diary. She would’ve written that down, wouldn’t she?”
No way to know. I didn’t have a clue about her and I didn’t want one. I’d have to trust Melody on that tip. “Did you, like, send a message when you did the casting? Does he know it’s you who called?”
“There was no way to tell him,” she said. “There were just the steps I was supposed to take.”
The Singer came another step closer. Not quite within reach, but enough that she seemed to loom over us. “You found this spell in a book?”
“Yeah. Can you believe it?”
“No, actually.”
“Well, I did. Because of Malek. You know him?”
I turned to face her. “He’s hard to miss. He did the ink on your back.”
“He told you? Isn’t there some kind of tattoo artist-client privilege?”
“Not really,” I said. “You get that tattoo as part of the spell?”
She hesitated. “The book said that if I was grounded—if I truly belonged where I called him to—it would boost the magic. Make it stronger.”
“You didn’t tell Malek about that.”
“Wasn’t any of his business.”
“Idiot,” the Singer said. “You’re in a world of hurt.”
“What’s he going to do? Come after me?”
“Actually,” I said, “he sent me after you. He wants you dead.”
She slid away from me. “No.”
“He wanted me to swear I’d make it happen. I refused.”
“No one tells him no,” the Singer said. “Just like nobody double-crosses that guy and gets away with it.”
“I swore something else,” I said. “I promised to do justice.”
Melody studied my face. She glanced at the Singer. At Kevin. “That’s good, right?”
“Depends,” Kevin said. “What does justice look like here? You lied to Malek.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t tell him everything. Not the same thing.”
“A lie of omission is the same as any other kind of lie,” the Singer said.
Melody waved her hands in surrender. “Fine. Okay. So what do we do now?”
“We have to reverse the spell,” I said.
“I already told you, Rude. It can’t be undone.”
“Because the book says so?”
“Yeah.”
The Singer took a third step toward us. And landed in Melody’s face. “What’s the name of the book?”
Melody flinched from her. “Rude, tell her to get away.”
The Singer grabbed her by the arms and held on. “Not gonna happen. You tell us what we need to know.”
Melody’s voice rose with every word. “A Compendium of Demonic Magic.”
The dog growled low in his throat.
I remembered seeing that book in Oscar’s bookcase. I remembered touching it. It was smaller than most of the others. Bound with leather. Pages old and wrinkled.
I met Melody’s gaze. “You stole the book.”
“You’re telling me what I did. You’re not even asking?”
“Don’t lie to me, too.”
She nodded. “I got it from the other seer’s house.”
“Was he home when you took it?” I asked.
“If he was, he didn’t come in the room or say anything. The house felt empty to me.”
“Because he’s gone,” I said. “He didn’t tell anybody where he was going or when or why. If you did something to him—”
She interrupted. “What could I do to somebody like that? He’s mad powerful.”
The Singer squeezed her arms. “In case you didn’t notice, so are you.”
“I’m not that smart. He is.”
“How’d you get in?” I asked.
“Through the back window.”
I hadn’t seen one open, but maybe she’d closed it behind her when she left. “Where’s the book now?”
“At home.”
“Beth Barrett’s house?”
“Yes, okay? Will you please let go of me?”
The Singer looked over her shoulder at me. I nodded.
She turned back to Melody. “Don’t even think about running.”
Melody gazed at her sneakers. “There’s nowhere to go anyway.”
“There’s Malek,” the Singer said.
Melody’s head snapped back.
“That’s right,” the Singer said. “I won’t hesitate to take you to him if you refuse to help us fix everything.”
“Would you let her do that, Rude?”
I wouldn’t wish that fate on my worst enemy. I didn’t want Melody to think that was what we were. Enemies. But she had to understand we meant business. “I wouldn’t stop her.”
“That’s hard.”
A nerve-shredding caw sounded overhead. From the throat of a single grackle perched on the pub’s roof. It looked me in the eye. Interested. Yeah, definitely interested.
I glanced at Kevin. Pointed at the bird.
Before Kev could open his mouth, it flew away, the flap of its wings in the air louder than they should’ve been.
“That’s the way it is,” I said. “So are you going with us to Beth’s house or not?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“There’s always a choice,” I said.
A single tear rolled down her cheek. “She’s home, just so you know.”
“She normal?” Kevin asked.
“So far.”
I pointed to the Explorer. “Let’s go.”
We sat her in the back between the Singer and Kevin. Less chance she’d try to bolt that way. Zachariah rode shotgun. The sun set as we drove. The sky turned pink and orange and gold before the darkness took over completely.
Beth lived in one of the new houses behind the high school. Swankier neighborhood than mine, where the houses were big enough—these came with stuff like servant’s quarters. Crazy. Beth’s place was blue with white trim, and two stories with one of those balconies upstairs that some people called a veranda, complete with flowery outdoor furniture and wide-blade ceiling fans. The fans spun slow, lazy circles as we drove up, in fact. Year-old oaks had been planted in the yard. Yellow blooms dotted a flower bed that ran the length of the house.
Melody had a key, but she knocked anyway.
“Weird much?” Kevin asked.
“You know what would be weird? Showing up with you people and just barging in like, hey, no big deal.”
Beth answered the door in a Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan T-shirt and a pair of holey jeans. Scuffed, white sneakers with no socks. Her brown hair hung in six thick braids down to her shoulders. Her tortoiseshell glass had slid halfway down her nose. She pushed them back into place with her index finger.
She narrowed her eyes at Melody. “No more explodey shenanigans?”
“Not today.”
“But you brought company?”
“From school. Well, two out of three.”
Beth did a double-take at me. “Rude? Is that you? And Kevin? And a dog? And who’s that?”
Meaning the Singer. “A friend.”
“Wow. Nice halter. I’m a fan of peacocks. Except when they sing. Have you ever heard one of them sing? Crazy fingernails on a chalkboard craziness. Oh, and hey, nice dog.”
Zach wagged his tail.
I started to say something about the way we looked. How we mostly couldn’t help it.
She waved me off. “No worries. As long as you’re not fixin’ to put any hurt on me, you can come in.”
Demon (The Faery Chronicles Book 2) Page 8