by Cecily White
“Luc, we need to get out of here,” I said. “Where’s Jack?”
Exhausted, Luc bobbed his head to the left somewhere, toward an empty patch of ashy ground. At first, I couldn’t see anything. It was a bit like staring at the sun then walking into a dimly lit theater. Everything started in shadows and outlines, gradually forming into shapes that were always there, even though I hadn’t seen them before. It gave the vague illusion of things appearing out of nowhere.
Within a few seconds, a Jack-shaped lump appeared in the ash field. Like me, he was coated in yuck, and a nasty bruise had already begun to form on his cheek.
“Jack.” I scrambled toward him. “Wake up. We need to go.”
He didn’t move. No matter how hard I shook him, he stayed still.
“Why isn’t he waking up?”
Luc watched me shake him for a quiet, terrifying moment. When he spoke, it, too, was quiet. “Amelie,” he said, “this is the Nether. He’s not supposed to be here. Didn’t anyone tell you?”
I kept shaking Jack, uselessly. “Tell me?”
Luc’s gaze bored into my back so powerfully I had to turn around. “Ami, Jackson is pure angelblood. He came with you as Watcher so you can drain the taint into him when you channel yourself back. But that’s all.”
He stopped there, like I was supposed to fill in the rest. Which, of course, I had no way of doing because—stop me if you’ve heard this before—nobody tells me anything. After a few seconds of silence, my patience snapped.
“What does that mean?” I yelled. “What are you talking about? And don’t sugarcoat it, because if you do, I swear I’ll kill and eat you. Just tell me the truth.”
Luc looked at the ashy ground, his eyes shadowed. The expression on his face reminded me of Jack’s a few minutes ago, when he’d talked to Lisa. It alarmed me at such a core level, my heart actually began to constrict. And, in the space of a breath, I knew with absolute certainty I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say.
“No.”
“Amelie, he’s already gone—the version of him you know, anyway. No one can survive here without some demonblood.”
“No,” I repeated more forcefully. The panic had already started setting in. No wonder he’d been so adamant about channeling myself home. He’d known all along he wouldn’t be coming back with me. Which was insane. I couldn’t breathe without Jack. I couldn’t live. How did he ever think I would be able to just continue?
“No, no, no. That’s not okay. I’ve lost my family. I’ve lost my friends. I’ve lost my future as a Guardian. I can’t lose Jack.”
“Amelie.”
“I can’t,” I insisted. “And don’t tell me there’s no hope. There has to be hope. For you. For him. I can’t lose you both—”
At the last words, my mouth clamped shut.
Prior to that moment, I hadn’t given much consideration to the first vision I’d seen in the chamber to the Book of Lies. It’s not that it was so offensive, seeing myself with Luc that way. Or that it was so unfathomable, us ending up together. In fact, there had been a time last fall when Jack had tried to convince me to just give up my relationship with him and tie myself to Luc instead. Obviously, I told him he was nutters. But still, it’s not like Luc wasn’t important to me.
He was.
Now, as I looked at a future with no Luc, no Jack, and no Guardian powers, my head got swimmy. I sank to my knees.
“I can’t do this,” I whispered.
Luc took a deep breath and sighed. “You can. Because you have to,” he said. “Amelie, you’re stronger than you think. You’re braver than you realize. And you’re capable of far more than you credit yourself.”
Was I?
It certainly didn’t feel like it. I felt like a teenage girl—overwhelmed, overstressed, and completely out of her league. Maybe everyone else saw so much more in me, but if I didn’t see it or feel it myself, how could I know it was real?
Luc stepped closer, his hands linking with mine. Soft snakes of light coiled around my wrists and twined back to his. His forehead was pressed to mine, and his lips hovered about an inch away. If Jack had been awake, I’m pretty sure he would have throttled Luc.
“We never would have worked out,” he whispered, smiling. “I’m selfish and shallow and far too vain. I would have driven you crazy in the first five years.”
“First five minutes,” I whispered, trying not to cry. “Luc, I can’t do this alone.”
“Have a little faith,” he said, releasing my hand for a second. I barely registered what he was doing until he had plucked out the letter opener I’d stashed earlier in my belt loop and pressed it into my fingers. “Anyway, love—what makes you think you’re alone?”
With that, he wrapped his hand tightly around mine, forcing me to grip the letter opener, and shoved it into his solar plexus.
And it was done.
The end of the world happened quicker than I’d expected. Rohm after rohm of Crossworlds taint flowed into me as the cracks started to seal, pieces of sky fragmenting into cut-glass shapes around me. I barely had time to breathe, let alone speak. My bones began to dissolve, and my skin flaked off like being washed in an acid storm. At least, that’s what it felt like.
No, no, no. I pulled back on the drain, my head fogging with poison. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.
Tyrannus’s voice slid through my head. Pax paritur bello… Don’t forget who you are.
Yes.
Without thinking too hard about consequences, I checked that Jack’s soul was still connected to his body and then switched the flow into Luc, now hunched on the ground. The drain kicked up again.
Not nearly enough.
It was like trying to climb out of a mile-deep well while the sides caved in like an avalanche. At this rate, Jack and I would be dead in about fifteen seconds—buried alive under the collapse—and I’d never draw enough power to get us out. No way would we make it to a portal exit.
Jack’s grip tightened around me as the taint hit him again, and his arms began to stiffen and shake. His body wasn’t built for this.
For a second, it paralyzed me—his body in my arms, the thought of his soul fading. It sent an ache so powerful through me, I actually began to shake. Since he’d been in my life, it had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t always be there. He’d become such a deep part of my narrative, I couldn’t extricate myself from him. I didn’t want to. It was like trying to imagine life without water or air. Completely unfathomable. The drive against it was violent and intense.
I had to save him.
My eyes fell shut and every sense inside me opened, searching—not for Crossworlds energy, but for souls. Above me, angels and demons scurried and flew, desperate for a haven. There was none. In the distance, I could feel the edge of something familiar. Several somethings, actually—orange and soft, green and glowy, purple and pearly.
Yes.
I grabbed on to them, draining the Crossworlds taint, pulling myself and Jack out of the deluge. My body wrapped around him as the channel took over, tugging us into a portal. It was so odd, this feeling of floating and falling simultaneously—how I imagine riding a hot air balloon into the eye of a tornado might be. All around me, reality cracked and exploded.
“Pax paritur bello!”
It was too soon for the exit command.
Unfortunately, the channel shifted around us, angry and vengeful.
Already, my head swam with black spots and my bones ached. If Jack made it through this, he would be human. So would I, assuming I survived.
The prophecy had been activated. Which meant the Crossworlds links were shutting down. Arianna would lose her immortality. Akira would be stripped of her power. The world would be safe.
Well, for a while, at least—until humanity screwed it up.
I held on to that thought as I shoved Jack through the opening, his soul fully intact, and kicked another shielding spell after him. Then I let the chill take me.
Let me
just say, I’m not one of those people who wanders through life assuming everything is going to be okay. If anything, those people annoy me. More often than not, I find myself assuming that if something can go wrong, it probably will. This is partly because life is like that, and mostly because God hates me.
This is why, when I found myself falling into oblivion with my bond ties to Jack completely severed and my channeling powers utterly depleted, I wasn’t surprised at all. The cracks had sealed—my job was done. What did surprise me, however, was when I stopped falling.
And hovered.
At least, I thought I was hovering.
Sight and sound had taken a backseat to pure pain, so I couldn’t really be sure whether my body was in pieces or vaporized, or whatever. All I could be sure of was that someone—something—wasn’t letting me go.
Jack?
I thought the word rather than said it. I wasn’t sure if I had lips. The answer came back in a wash of kaleidoscopic pain, centered in the tiniest shard of living sunlight, stitched through every inch of my genetic code.
Not quite.
Mom’s voice rang through my head as my body started to re-form. Piece by piece, it came back online—atoms and molecules crashing into each other in a chorus of baleful screams. I was distantly aware of creatures scratching at my feet, tugging me down to a purple-tinged hell of the Crossworlds. It hurt in ways mortal bodies weren’t supposed to hurt.
I prayed for death.
It was like playing a game of tug-of-war with a rubber band, except the gamers were invisible blobs of evil, and the rubber band was my large intestine.
Let me die, I begged.
Not a chance, Mom said. Tell your father I love him. And your sister…tell her I never stopped thinking about her.
Then the rubber band pulled tighter, and tighter, and tighter, until it shot me up and out of the channel.
Good-bye, my baby girl. Live courageously.
At some point, I must have passed out. Or maybe my brain snapped. All at once, the world went—
Chapter Eighteen:
The Ugly Good-Night
—dark.
Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “Hell is other people.” I’m not sure what he based the statement on, but at that moment, I had to disagree. At least other people are something. Suffering is something. This—whatever I had become—this was hell.
Silence filled the space around me. Darkness bled through me. I had the vague sensation of being watched, though there was no one nearby.
I was lost.
I was shadow.
I was nothing.
It might have been hours or days or millennia, I couldn’t tell you. Time fuzzed the edges of my brain, memories and events clicking around like fractured pieces of bone, scattered and fleeting, until they, too, disappeared.
“Amelie,” a voice whispered from far away.
But I couldn’t answer.
Never in my life had I felt so tired and empty. It was like a giant troll had squeezed me until all that remained was the skin my body used to live in. No shape. No form.
“Ami?” it said again, closer this time. “Matt, she’s waking up.”
I wanted to tell the voice it was wrong. I couldn’t be waking up. There was nothing left of me to be awake. Or asleep. Or anything, for that matter.
“Go away,” I mumbled.
“She talked,” the voice squeaked. “Go get Lisa.”
I swear, the four horsemen of the apocalypse couldn’t have made more noise if they’d been riding through a field of firecrackers. After a God-awful scuffle that might have otherwise passed for footsteps, a boulder crashed to the ground beside me. Then something warm touched my forehead.
“She’s alive. You guys, can we have a sec?”
“Take all the time you need.” A couple of the horsemen beat an apocalyptic retreat as my brain chugged back to life. Not happily, I might add.
Once the noise had stopped and the warmth touched my head again, I allowed myself to breathe. It was odd, like the breath had been held captive inside me forever and was just waking up.
“Welcome back, sweetheart,” Dad whispered. “You had us worried there.”
“No kidding.” Another voice spoke. “I seriously thought you were going to kick it and take me with you.”
Okay, that voice I recognized. Granted, the last time I’d heard it, it had been on a phone, saying annoying things to my boyfriend.
“I hate you,” I whispered.
“You and the rest of the world.” Lisa laughed softly as her fingers brushed over my forehead, dragging me back to awareness. Awareness of what, I wasn’t sure. Nondeath?
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“Week and a half,” Dad said. “Give or take. You missed Christmas.”
That figured. “Luc?”
“Otherwise occupied,” Lisa said. “Traditionalists like Bud here call him dead. I prefer to think of him as existing somewhere fabulous, surrounded by supermodels and drinking martinis.”
“Evil martinis?” I mumbled.
“Well, obviously.”
It was funny how, even though I hadn’t opened my eyes, I could feel her smiling. Her relief poured into me like a faucet, all light and energy. It totally reminded me of how things used to feel with—
Jack.
I sat up, my body screaming in agony. My eyelids made a sound like tape peeling off as they ripped open for the first time in over a week. Yeah, the whole waking-up thing seemed like an exceptionally misguided decision.
“Owwww,” I groaned, and my head flopped forward on to my hands. “Lisa, why do you keep doing this?”
“What, saving your life?” Lisa shrugged. “Self-preservation, mostly. Also, nobody else likes me.”
“You think I do?”
I held still while Dad dipped a washcloth in warm liquid and ran it over my eyes. Whatever it was smelled like rose hips and cucumber, and my brain seemed to settle under its heaviness. Gradually, I was able to pry open my eyelids the rest of the way without losing too many lashes.
Holy crapola, my head hurt. And the surroundings certainly didn’t help.
What had once seemed an impossibly bright sun, I could now see was actually a dirty monkey-shaped lamp set in the corner of a rather dark room. Around me, candles and apothecary jars lined the shelves, brimming with toxic potions, and a collection of stuffed bears and battered-by-love dolls stood guard.
Bertle’s attic.
“Am I in hell?”
“Still Louisiana,” Dad said.
“Same difference,” Lisa added.
While Dad wiped down my face, Lisa sat cross-legged on the quilted blanket beside me and put a hand over mine. Strange how normal it felt. This was the same hand I’d held a million times before, through scuffed knees and broken hearts and failed final exams. It felt so familiar, yet at the same time, alien.
“You’re human,” I noted.
“So are you. Is that bad?”
Honestly, I didn’t know if it was good, or bad, or a sign of the coming apocalypse. What I did know was that the dread in my chest that had been there since the first moment I read the prophecy had vanished, and a nugget of uncertainty had taken up residence in its place.
“You guys,” I said. “I saw Mom. She saved me.”
Lisa got quiet, and Bud’s brows drew together. “Honey, are you sure? That seems impossible.”
“It is,” I agreed. “But it was her. She said she loves you both. Even you.” I met Lisa’s gaze. “She said she never stopped loving you. Then she told me to live courageously.”
Dad let out a sharp breath, his eyes widening. “That was her,” he said. “She always used to say that. Our duty was to live courageously and die honorably. Not too bad, as goals go.”
Lisa nodded, her gaze still down. “So,” she said, “are you ready to start?”
“Start what?”
“Living courageously,” she said. “It’s not as simple as it sounds, trust me. I’ve been screwin
g it up for years.”
“Baby, you need to understand,” Dad interrupted, “there’s a lot of strange things happening right now. It may be hard to accept.”
“Meaning?”
“When the Crossworlds closed, anyone who couldn’t cut ties quickly enough was taken. We lost some good people.”
I frowned. “Lost? What are you talking about?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Lisa cut in. “We tried to protect everyone. The important ones, anyway.”
Panic started to rise in my throat. “Is Jack—”
“He’s alive,” Dad assured me. “But there were a few we couldn’t get to.”
“Dominic and Petra were in the Nether when it closed,” Lisa said. “They knew what would happen, but they stayed. Petra couldn’t survive on the mortal plane, and Dominic wouldn’t leave without her. So they decided to stay and try to help you out.”
The purple pearly souls I had grabbed on the journey out—that was them.
“And Blake,” Dad added. “He took a few days to fade, but demonblood needs connection to the Crossworlds to survive. He said to thank you, though. The best way you can pay him back is to go be happy.”
I exhaled sharply. So Blake had been right—demonblood didn’t make you evil. I guess sometimes it made you kind of awesome.
As much as his sacrifice brought me to tears, I held it back. The look in Dad’s eyes was so sad, I knew there had to be something else.
“Who else?” I asked.
“Ami—”
“Who?” I repeated, louder.
“Lyle,” Lisa whispered.
Dad paused for a moment, then sighed. “Yeah. That took a while for me to understand. We had him secured to this plane. Petra knew it was coming, so she closed the conduit in time. Matt was with him, to make sure he stayed safe.”
As he trailed off, shaking his head, I remembered the green and glowy shape I’d latched on to trying to pull myself out of the channel. No wonder it had seemed so familiar. I had dragged it back from death at the wharf just a few days ago. “What happened? Why’d he die?”
“The only thing we can figure is he must have done it on purpose—gone in to help pull you and Jack out,” Lisa said. “Ami, I’m so sorry.”