by Cecily White
“So she’s like a power parasite or something?”
“More or less,” Lisa said. “It was the only way I could think of to get to you. Besides, Lyle’s a decent guy, so he can handle more evil than most.”
I purposely ignored the injustice of the nice-guy-handling-evil bit.
If Lyle had been supporting an almost constant low-level energy draw—pure evil or not—it would make sense why he was hungry all the time. And why they had to keep him away from any more exposure to the Crossworlds. His body was probably buzzing with taint.
“But he’s not dying, right?”
“Not yet. Though no guarantees on Luc. Or you,” Lisa added.
The three of them did that annoying shared-glance thing, which, had I been sucking down carbs like the rest of them, probably would have gone unnoticed.
I waited patiently while Dominic and Petra finished their dinner, then Lisa cleared the dishes. As she and Petra lined up at the sink to start washing, I almost commented on the irony. They were Graymasons, for crying out loud. Soul swallowers. They could cross world boundaries in an instant and power an entire Nether haven. But they couldn’t manage an automatic dishwasher?
Weirdsville.
While they got to work, I followed Dominic to the front porch. It made a strange contrast—the utterly normal clanging and giggling of a dinner party propped against this dismal, hellacious wasteland. In the distance, the sun had dropped low on the horizon, and purple shadows moved in the sky.
I kept an eye on them as I settled myself on the wood-slatted rocking chair. “Creepy place you’ve got here.”
“It’s home.” Dominic sat back until his head tapped the edge of the chair, dark hair flopping over his perfectly carved brow line. It was odd to see such familiar features on a man who so closely resembled Luc, yet was not him. Like stranger danger and guy-next-door comfort, all in one wiggy, little package.
“I must confess, it was I who requested Lisa bring you here,” he said, eyes still closed. “My son has a good heart, but I fear he trusts the wrong people.”
“I don’t get the impression he trusts much of anyone.”
Dominic shrugged. “He trusts you. Perhaps the best decision he’s made.”
It occurred to me I should thank him for the vote of confidence, though I wasn’t entirely sure if he was being serious.
“If Luc trusted me, he would have explained everything to me by now,” I said. “I’m still only sort of clear on what the Society is about. And I’m not at all clear on what I’m doing here.”
Dominic smiled. “I expect you’ll understand soon enough.”
I had to shut up then, not because I got what he’d said, but because Dominic lifted his hand and held it, palm down, over mine. Before I could say another word, he stroked a fingertip along the length of my wrist, drawing an odd purple light to the surface of my skin.
Like a channel.
My first instinct was to pull away. It didn’t feel dangerous or painful. The opposite, actually. It comforted me, like when Bud hugged me at the Society’s fight club. Still, the calm wash of relief that flooded my bones alarmed me.
“Luc is bound to you,” he said, “by blood, power, and prophecy. Whether you decide to honor that is your choice. But I can promise you this—if you deny your birthright, all of humanity will pay the price. And doing the right thing is rarely the same as doing the easy thing.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Now I understand everything.”
Dominic laughed. “Clearly not everything.”
Along the horizon, the sky’s color had deepened to a reddish hue, the sun nearly touching the horizon. Long shadows cast a chill over the earth, making me shiver.
“You should leave,” he said once he’d released my hand. “You mustn’t be here when the sun goes down. Mortal rules.”
I started to ask what mortal rules were, but stopped.
Semper noctis… Always night. That was the locus code Lisa had dropped when we entered. It wasn’t explicitly sinister, but it did kind of make me want to flee before darkness hit.
“One last thing,” I said before he could stand. “What do you mean Luc and I are linked by the prophecy? That was Jack’s prophecy. He’s the last of Gabriel’s line.”
“Is he?” Dominic gazed at the sky, drawing my attention back to his eyes—those hypnotic violet eyes so much like Luc’s. “Who told you that?”
“Jack,” I said. “The Great Books. I don’t know, everyone?”
“Well, if everyone says it, then it must be true.”
I couldn’t help feeling like a clueless child. The words he’d said were reassuring, but the tone was anything but. It made me wonder what he knew that I didn’t.
“You’re kind of an asshole,” I noted.
He nodded pleasantly. “I do wonder if you’ve been reading the right books. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Agree?”
“That perhaps you should pay more attention to what you see and less to what people tell you,” he said. “Your choices define you, Amelie. Make thoughtful ones.”
And with that bit of useless advice, he stood and walked away.
Like I said. Asshole.
I shivered as Lisa and I hurried back through the now-chilly bowels of Nether Missouri toward the dried-up pond where we’d entered.
“You okay?”
“Not even close.”
“That’s normal,” she said. “I wasn’t okay, either, the first time I came here.”
“As opposed to now?”
Honestly, the whole thing with Dominic and Petra had been such a whacked-out bucket of weird, it made me want to do something hyper-normal. Like go to the mall or style my hair with ribbons. Were ribbons normal? I didn’t even know anymore.
By the time we reached the portal, the sun was dangerously low. I could barely make out a sliver of orange brilliance on the horizon.
“Hang on,” she said and took my hand. “This is going to be close.”
It wasn’t as disorienting this time, landing back on the mortal plane. I suppose the homing impulse was expectable, that being my first trip to, you know…hell. When I opened my eyes, there was still a sliver of orange light in the same place on the horizon, only this time it was getting bigger.
“Sunrise?” I asked.
Lisa nodded. “It’s an opposite pole. Night here is day there. But you can’t cross when it’s night there, which is why we needed to go,” she explained. “Not exactly a dream retirement, but it’s a decent place to hide—if you have the right bloodline.”
I caught her eye in the rising light.
“Lucifer,” she said. “That’s how Petra and Dominic can live down there. He’s part demonblood and she’s Lucifer’s bloodline, like us. Also, they’re bonded.”
“I gathered.”
An inexplicable chill crawled down my neck as I remembered the purplish light Dominic had drawn off my skin. It obviously was a genuine blood bond they had between them. Still, something inside me balked at thinking of Petra as Luc’s stepmom.
Ugh, this was getting weirder by the second.
My fingers felt as stiff as dried twigs, and my eyelids were starting to droop. I had to wonder if my brain might go into meltdown soon and stop functioning altogether.
I stumbled back to the cabin behind Lisa, my feet plodding against the damp ground. There was a brief adrenaline spike when we entered the cabin, and I noticed the indentations on the cushions where Luc used to be.
Before I could slip into freak mode, Alec stepped in.
“I didn’t kill him, don’t worry,” he assured me. “I couldn’t take the snoring, so I put him upstairs. You’re welcome to join him.”
“Shut up, Alec,” I said but didn’t have the heart to defend further.
Did it really matter if Alec thought I was with Luc? I mean, half the Crossworlds believed I was engaged to him. And given my conversation with Dominic, it seemed obvious there was something very important that I had missed. Not that anyone
had bothered to inform me.
At the moment, I truly didn’t care. All I wanted was to collapse somewhere soft with a pillow and the scarf Jack had made for me and not wake up until everything stressful went away.
When I got up to the loft, I saw Luc crashed out at the foot of the bed. His clothes were in rumpled disarray, and his hair flopped in messy strands over his face. Alec must have taken off his shoes and given him a blanket. But the brotherly love ended there. The same dirty pants still clung to his legs, and his socks had shreds of broken leaf stuck to them. At least he’d stopped shivering.
“Luc,” I whispered from a safe four-foot distance away. “Luc.”
He didn’t stir.
“I’m auctioning all your underpants on eBay,” I tried, slightly louder. “There’s a massive bidding war, and I’ve invited all your ex-girlfriends to participate. If you’re cool with this, stay silent.”
He stayed silent.
Good to know, since if I ever needed income in a pinch, Luc’s designer knickers probably could fetch a few hundred quid. I decided not to think too hard about the fact that the words “knickers” and “quid” leaped to mind instead of “boxers” and “dollars,” since it kind of made me want to stab myself. I already had his blood. I definitely did not need his vocabulary.
Thoroughly zonked, I peeled off my coat and flopped sideways onto the bed. The pillows made a nice wall between me and Luc, and I made sure there were no gaps in the barrier.
“Sweet dreams, Romeo. And don’t get any ideas,” I warned softly, my head peeking over the fluff wall. “The world may be a little weird right now, but it’ll be—”
A chilly day on the Nether didn’t seem to pack the same punch, since I’d just come from one of those.
“—a flying pig parade before I let you kiss me again,” I finished.
Yeah, that made more sense.
Honestly, it wasn’t that the experience of kissing him had been so awful. But this was Jack’s cousin, for crying out loud. Whom I’d accidentally gotten myself bonded to. That added a whole other layer of guilt I didn’t even want to pick apart.
Jack. Yeah, I needed to tell him about this. He would know what to do.
Comforted by the decision, I nestled into the covers and sifted through the day. Or the night. Whatever.
It was strange hanging out with Dominic and Petra, but not at all scary. Obviously, their bond blew the whole theory about angelbloods only bonding with other angelbloods.
The thing that kept freaking me out was that, when I thought about the past few days, I had to admit that Luc and I had completed several of the tasks that were required for a bonding. Granted, I was still underage, so nothing would be recognized by the Council, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel it—that strand linking us. Definitely in the woods when I healed him. Even now, over the mountain range of pillows on this bed, it pulsed through me in silent waves of warmth, like my bones had been magnetized.
I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around my torso. How was I supposed to explain this to Jack? The whole bonding thing—that was only supposed to happen once, right? That’s how it went in fairy tales. One guy, one girl, one happily ever after.
A tiny electric shock went through me as Luc shifted, his foot bumping against mine under a pillow.
Grr.
I forced my eyes shut tighter and let sleep wash over me. It came in fits and starts, and I wasn’t entirely sure when reality ended and the dream began.
When the sleep fuzz cleared, I found myself standing in the middle of a room, alone except for a ring of statues. They were similar to the statues of angels in the hall, except instead of the seven archangels, they depicted the seven princes of hell: Lucifer, Mammon, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Beelzebub, Amon, and Belphegor. I’d never seen these depictions before, though I recognized them from the drawings in my Demonology text. Beyond them, an endless haze drifted into nothingness, the way a memory looks in your mind when it’s vague and unformed.
I dropped a glance at myself, at what I was wearing.
At first, it looked like a wedding dress, except it lacked crystals or lace—nothing like the fancy brocades in bridal magazines. Creamy linen flowed in a shapeless drape from my shoulders, with long sleeves and a wide neck. The fabric was coarse and the design simple, more like a nun’s habit than an actual gown.
“Care to explain?” I asked into the nothing.
“You’re dreaming,” the nothing answered in a voice that sounded suspiciously like my mother’s. I couldn’t help being annoyed.
“I gathered,” I said. “Gonna need a little more explanation, though. And don’t bother being cryptic. I know you’re not my mom.”
The mist shifted, but no one emerged.
“If you’re not going to talk to me, I’d appreciate it if you left me alone. It’s been kind of rough day, and I could use some nonaccursed downtime.”
“Turn around,” the voice ordered, “and look.”
I wanted to tell it to go suck a booger, except I had no idea if the Prince of Lies even had boogers. Or a nose. At least I managed to make myself spin slowly, so I didn’t look too eager.
“What am I looking for?”
No sooner had I finished the sentence than the air began to quiver. It was weird how quickly it happened. Not like a portal, exactly, but similar. First there was nothing, then suddenly Luc was there, huddled on the floor in a fetal position.
At least I thought it was Luc.
He looked thinner than usual, and his head lay cradled in the crook of his elbow. Even the bare slope of his back seemed foreign and bony, with jagged scars digging into his rib cage, like lashes from a horsewhip.
“Okay, is this past, future, or are you making stuff up?”
The mist shifted again, and this time I felt a presence crystallize behind me.
“You’re a fool,” my mother’s voice said, an inch from my ear, “if you think they’ll let you live.”
I didn’t turn around. If this was anything like the last time I’d been in touch with Lucifer, he’d probably taken my mother’s form as well as her voice. Given how stressful my life had been lately, I didn’t think I could resist getting weepy if I saw her.
Instead, I kept my gaze on the center of the room.
The guy’s body kept changing, like Benjamin Button moving backward and forward through time. Or maybe like one of those freakish creatures from a monster movie. His skin rippled and puckered—his bones buckling and shrinking under the muscles. If I hadn’t been certain this was a dream, I might have wigged out.
“They were never meant to exist,” the mom thing continued, stepping into my peripheral vision. “Their kind was an abomination. We considered ending them—the whole species—but none of us could stomach it. Angelblood spilling angelblood. How could we not be punished for that?”
I registered briefly that she was wearing the same robe as me, except hers was stained with ash and dirt and stuck out over her torso in a smooth lump. It took me a second to realize it was a pregnant belly under there, not just layers of fabric.
In front of me, the clock kept turning.
The man’s body quaked and shivered, the scars over his spine darkening to purple, then to red as they unhealed, finally congealing into scarlet slashes of blood.
“I’d never seen one of them bleed before,” she said impassively. “Vampires, yes, but not an Immortal. Very strange.”
This whole thing was strange. Too strange. It felt unsafe.
“I think I want to wake up now,” I said.
“Soon.”
In a blink, the scene shifted, and a whip crack shocked the air. As if I’d been hit, my body lurched backward, and I fell to the floor. All around me, bricks and mortar clattered together in pixelated sheets of wall, like watching a demolition film backward. In front of the brick, the statues disappeared, replaced by people in robes. Seven of them stood in the circle with a few scattered outside, all different heights and builds—obviously a collection of both men an
d women. Their faces were hidden, but I could make out one of the shorter ones holding a whip. He threaded it through glyph-inked hands with sinister precision.
I paused, transfixed by his hands. I’d seen those glyphs before. They were gold, not the usual Guardian black. The same markings Petra had.
“Abomination,” he said, though it was more of a murmur than actual speech. “This cannot be allowed to exist.”
“But it does,” Mom replied. “Angelblood and demonblood combined. They are born of God’s will.”
“Children of evil.”
“Children of heaven.”
It took me a moment to refocus my gaze to the edge of the room where she stood, her hand cupped around the shoulder of a little boy. His eyes were pale violet against the darkness of his hair, his nose the perfect upturned button of childhood innocence.
I dropped a glance at the child beside her, then at the man chained in the center of the room. That’s when it registered.
Dominic.
It was Dominic being tortured. He looked different than the last time I’d seen him—no gardening hat, no ripped jeans. He kicked at the air violently, his mouth opening and closing in quiet rage. But the screams and chain rattles were swallowed by whatever ward they’d put on the circle. Nothing got through. Curses shaped his lips as he lurched at where the little boy stood, but with no effect.
“They must die,” another voice said from the circle—Elder Akira. “All of them. They will pollute our legacy.”
“Genocide? You think that will save us?” It was Elder Horowitz who spoke this time. He, too, looked young and impassive.
“Nothing will save us,” Petra’s voice answered. “You’ve read the final prophecy. We’re already doomed. We have been for centuries.”
“Then let us be doomed with dignity.” The first Elder gathered himself up, preparing the whip for another attack.
But Petra held up a hand. Even in the dream state, I could feel her Crossworlds channel activate, freezing him in his tracks.
“Petra, what are you doing?” Akira snapped.
“She’s following orders,” Elder Horowitz replied. “Charlotte?”
In the corner, Mom bowed her head and started sketching out wards—north, south, east, and west. My heart picked up speed as she stripped off her robes then turned to the child and scooped him into her arms. His arms and legs twined around her as one of the robed figures broke ranks from behind her—Robert Thibault, her bondmate.