Balls, Verity, conviction!
No spider could bite her.
I began to pass bodies—whether dead or wounded, real or imaginary, I didn’t stop to check—and followed them like ghastly breadcrumbs until, finally, I found Phineas and Cooper. They were cornered down a dead end, making their stand against a crowd of armed men that I was too far gone to count. Cooper took the bullets. Phineas kept disappearing, helping to take out the opposition, or at least confuse them. But his teleportation wasn’t instantaneous; there was always a gap of a few seconds, maybe half a minute, before he reappeared, and the men seemed to be learning his patterns. He would get himself shot before long.
I brought three more men behind me, and a herd of spiders, to boot.
“Verity!” Cooper barked, and ran to meet me, taking two bullets that were no doubt meant for me.
Verity and Cooper and Phineas were shielded from harm.
It was no good. Concentration was impossible. My thoughts ran wild, and so did my heart, its beats spiraling out of control. I moved toward Cooper. He shot a man over my shoulder.
I kept trying.
Verity and Cooper and Phineas were shielded from harm. Shielded from harm. Shielded from harm.
The world was getting soft at the edges. My skin was crawling.
Phineas appeared beside me. “Where’s Serena?”
Only when I spoke did I realize I was also sobbing. “Dead!”
And then she was there, laughing beside me, with that horrible bullet wound in her eyeless face. Serena pointed at me, reached for me.
Just a hallucination, just the curse.
I tried to maintain control, to weather this attack like any other, but it was worse here in the maze. I shook my head, too hard, and in the rush of dizziness that followed I stumbled and started to fall. Someone caught me.
It was her. Serena tugged me closer. I saw nothing but her, heard nothing but her deep, mad laugh.
Just a hallucination, just the curse.
Her face, bleeding, rushing at mine. And then all was dark.
“As you are now, so once was I,” I said. “As I am now, so you shall be.”
I didn’t know what the words meant, or where they came from, but I knew one thing for certain: that wasn’t my voice.
It’s dark because I’m blind.
I reached for my face, my single hand scrabbling over skin that was dry and papery and not my own, searching frantically for eyes that weren’t there.
Instead, my fingers found a fresh and gaping wound.
I’m her.
Something gripped my collarbone, and suddenly I could see again. The sunlight was too bright; pain shot through my eyes and into my head. I glimpsed a tower, and a tree with purple leaves.
home
There was a warm breeze on my face, carrying the smell of a freshly mowed lawn.
Then without warning I was plunged back into darkness, and my chest locked tight around my heart. I went rigid. My lungs were collapsing. Had collapsed. I couldn’t breathe.
As she is now, so also am I.
Fortunately, I was wrong; I was not dead.
It could have gone the other way. My heart might indeed have stopped, and my lungs right along with it, if not for a rush of strength that seemed to come from nowhere, nudging my ragged heart into motion, giving me just enough power to draw a few weak breaths, then a few more.
My sight was back, now that that last nightmarish hallucination was over, but I was still in the dark. I found myself prone and shaking on a stretch of asphalt. A road? No. I could see tires, but they weren’t moving. A parking lot, then.
A parking lot with no snow covering it.
It was still nighttime, still cold, but not nearly as cold as it had been. With an effort, I rolled onto my side and saw a car with a North Carolina plate.
I’m home.
And then I understood that rush of strength. It was my own. The piece of my soul I’d bound to the Mount Phearson, reuniting with the rest of me in that instant. It had saved me.
How did I get home?
And why am I alone out here?
“Cooper? Phineas?” My voice sounded dead. Too much like Serena’s. “Cooper?”
There was no one.
It took three tries to get to my feet, but eventually I managed it, leaning heavily on the nearest car. I was just trying to gather enough strength to walk when I saw a figure running through the darkness.
For a moment I was afraid it was the ghost of Serena, coming for me. Then she passed through the light cast by one of the lamp posts. “Arabella.”
“There you are.” As soon as she reached me, Arabella put her hand on my forehead, then checked my pulse.
“You seem okay. Heart’s beating a mile a minute, though.”
“Did I have an attack?”
“Looks like it. Phineas is inside with Cooper, but he sent me out to get you. Come on, I’ll help you.”
Even with her to lean on, I could only move slowly, and my whole body ached as though I’d fallen onto the pavement from several stories high. “How did I get here?”
“Phineas will have to explain that one.”
“But why…” None of this made sense. Phineas never would have left me alone outside in that condition.
Not unless he needed to attend to someone in even worse condition.
“No.” I stopped, obliging Arabella to stop with me. “Cooper?”
“Come on,” she said. “I think he’ll be okay.”
“You think?”
“You can see him for yourself in a minute. Let’s just get you inside.”
She took me through a back door, down a deserted hallway to a staff elevator. The walk down the third floor hallway to my suite was possibly the longest of my life.
“In here,” Phineas called when we walked in.
I followed his voice into the bedroom, where I found Cooper unconscious and looking every bit like a corpse.
But he’s not a corpse. He’s not.
“He’s alive,” Phineas said before I could ask. “This isn’t as bad as it looks, I promise.”
I touched Cooper’s waxen face, needing to feel it for myself. It was warm. I moved my fingers down to his neck and felt a pulse. Faint, and nearly as erratic as mine, but it was there. His clothes were soaked in blood from bullet wounds that had already healed.
See? He’s alive. He’ll be okay. He’s always okay.
Please let him be okay.
Please please dear God please.
“What’s wrong with him?” I sounded like I was choking. Maybe I was.
“He’s not built for traveling,” said Phineas. “I teleported you both out of there.”
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“I can’t. I shouldn’t. It… it was a big risk, but I had no choice.”
I looked to Arabella for a vital’s opinion. “Can’t he heal himself?”
“Maybe, eventually, but whatever just happened to him when he crossed the planes isn’t a regular injury. It’s more like an illness, and illness is a lot more complicated.”
“And that applies a hundredfold to magical illness,” Phineas added. “Listen, I’ll explain everything later, but right now I have to go. I need to get some things from my parents’ place, to help him, and with the time disparity I’ll be gone too long as it is.”
He handed Arabella a piece of paper. “I need you to go to Wendy’s and ask her to brew these herbs into a tea.”
“At two in the morning?” Arabella asked. “This is that bad? Because if he might die, you should just tell us.”
No. Do not use that word.
“He is not going to die,” Phineas said. “I can heal him. But yes, go now. When you’ve got the tea, find a way to get him to swallow it, at least a little every hour. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
When they were both gone, I got into bed beside Cooper and pressed my palm to his chest, taking comfort from feeling him breathe.
“Phineas says you�
��re going to be okay. Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”
Nothing is all right.
I kissed his scruffy cheek, then buried my face in the curve of his shoulder. “You know what I think? I think when you wake up, we should take a couple of days off. I know this great hotel in the mountains.”
I stayed in that position, numb in both mind and body, until Arabella came back with Wendy in tow.
Wendy gave me a quick hug, then took a flask from her purse.
“Sorry to wake you,” I told her. “You didn’t have to bring that here personally.”
Arabella gently nudged me aside, then took Cooper’s wrist to check his pulse. “That’s what I said, but she insisted.”
“I wanted to see you guys for myself.” Wendy tipped a little tea into Cooper’s mouth, and he swallowed automatically. I took that to be a good sign.
I thanked them both, but neither appeared to have any intention of leaving. We kept our vigil in the living room, where there was space for us all to sit, although I went to check on Cooper at regular intervals.
“What about you?” Wendy asked me. “You okay?”
I honestly had no idea how to answer that. I was drained and weak and my chest still felt like it was being squeezed by a constrictor, but at least being on the verge of collapse kept me from thinking too much.
When I didn’t answer right away, Wendy stood. “Thought as much. I brought some herbs for you, too. Let me just brew them up.”
“I take it from the state I found you in that you weren’t able to break the curse,” Arabella said.
“No.” I met her eye. “Serena’s dead.”
Arabella’s face didn’t change. “How?”
“Shot by Wick security while we were trying to escape.” I closed my eyes and shook my head. “We were so close. We were almost out.”
“What happened?”
“Cooper left us. To go look for the seeds. And then I guess he got caught.”
Images flitted through my mind: the locked gate, the keys in the snow, the spiders in the maze. For a moment I could hear Serena’s cold voice.
I won’t go back to the basement.
I looked at Arabella, who looked steadily back at me. She was a little pale, but otherwise showed no signs of grief.
“You said he would choose me.” The words came unbidden, without having first been a conscious thought.
“What do you mean?”
“Last fall. You said you could tell. That if it ever came down to a choice between his duty and me, Cooper would choose me.” I swallowed. “You were wrong.”
“Hang on.” Wendy pressed a mug into my hands. “Drink it all. Then start at the beginning.”
The tea did nothing to soothe my raging nerves or my racing heart, but I dutifully drank it anyway. Then I started from the beginning, as Wendy had asked, and told them everything.
“Listen,” said Wendy when I finished. “Phineas did his traveling thing with me and Lydia once, to save our lives.”
“Really?”
“Yep. It was to get us away from your father’s killer birds, as a matter of fact. And I survived it fine. Lydia survived it fine. You just survived it fine. Cooper might take a little longer, but he’ll be fine too.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Arabella sat in silence, looking at the floor. She hadn’t interrupted the entire time I was talking, which was not especially like her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted to save her.”
“I know you did.” She looked up at me, a hard look. “And so did Cooper.”
Not enough.
As if reading my thoughts, she added, “He thought he could have both.”
“Well, he can’t.” I pushed up my sleeve to expose my bruise, still that same poisonous green. “Maybe he can’t have either.”
“We’ll just have to find another way to break the curse,” Arabella said.
“And we will,” said Wendy.
But we all knew we’d already tried all the ways.
They sat with me until just after dawn, when Phineas came back looking grave and exhausted. He gave us a perfunctory greeting without breaking stride, and went directly to Cooper. I noted that he closed the bedroom door behind him.
“Well, I guess that’s the changing of the guard.” Arabella got to her feet. “I’ll be back to check on you after I’ve gotten a few hours of sleep.”
Wendy followed her to the door, but she hesitated once Arabella was gone. “I’m sorry to add to your worries right now, I really am. But you need to come see me as soon as you can. We have to talk.”
“About what?” I asked.
“Bristol. Let’s just leave it at that for now. Rest first. Keep me posted on Cooper.” And on that ominous note, she left.
Having no intention of letting a closed door get in my way, I headed for the bedroom, but Phineas came out before I could go in.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. “You should be in bed yourself.”
I shrugged. “I had an attack. It’s over now. End of story. What’s going on with him?”
“Still unconscious, but his color is a little better already.”
“What happened to him? I know you said he wasn’t built for travel, but what does that mean, exactly?”
Phineas sighed and sat down, gesturing for me to do the same. I was happy to oblige. However tough I’d tried to sound a moment ago, the only thing keeping me on my feet was sheer will, and that was fading fast.
“We aren’t supposed to travel with anything that’s not a phantasm,” Phineas said. “Their systems aren’t designed for it. Humans especially. It can kill them. But I did it once before, with Lydia and Wendy, when it was the only way out of a life-threatening situation.”
“Wendy told me. And they came through it okay.”
“They came through it better than I had any right to expect. Which I guess left me optimistic. With you being half phantasm, and Cooper’s healing properties, I’d already decided going into this that if there was a serious emergency, like the kind where we were all about to die, I might try it.”
“And this was the kind where we were all about to die.” I shook my head, remembering what it had been like, toward the end. “There were so many of them.”
“Well, yes and no,” said Phineas. “I don’t think they were all real. Once we got into the maze, they just seemed to multiply. But some of them, when I touched them, they felt wrong. I could just tell.”
I nodded, remembering the snake in the basement, how it had felt like a child’s toy. “I guess if Cillian Wick can make illusory spiders and illusory snakes, illusory people aren’t too much of a stretch.”
“Even so, I had no way of knowing which bullets would turn out to be real. You were having an attack. Cooper had a gun to his head. I was out of options. And frankly, it’s a miracle I was able to grab both of you before one of you was killed.”
“Well then, thank you, and don’t feel like you have to justify saving our lives to me.”
He gave me a grateful smile that did nothing to dispel the tension in his face. “When we got back here, Cooper’s heart had stopped. He wasn’t breathing.”
Which basically means he died.
I looked down and closed my eyes, so Phineas wouldn’t see the sudden influx of tears there. “You were able to revive him, obviously.”
“Yes, but now he’s in a sort of… oblivion.”
“Like a coma?”
“Sort of. Not the kind a human hospital could help with. But I can. I need some time to work on it, that’s all. Hey.” He waited until I looked up at him again. “I will get him back on his feet, I promise. And then we’ll figure out the curse. We’ll find another way.”
The same words Arabella had used. They didn’t make me feel any better the second time around. Meeting the curse’s demand—Serena’s demand—was, as far as any of us knew, the only way. And now that could never happen.
I’m going to die.
Of course, I
didn’t say that out loud. Phineas was only trying to help, and he’d already done enough. So instead I put on a false smile and asked, “Out of curiosity, what was that tower I saw before my chest was crushed and my heart and lungs almost exploded?”
“That was home.” He returned my smile, even though we both knew we were faking it. “I can’t just pop from place to place within this plane, you know, it’s not meant for it. I can only travel between this world and another.”
“So you’re actually teleporting twice, home and back again. That’s why it takes so long.”
“Takes so long?” Phineas puffed in exaggerated indignation. “I’ll have you know it takes most phantasms at least an hour.”
“Then how do you do it in less than a minute?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve worked at it, since I came to live in this world full time. Still took hours, though, to get the two of you back here. I haven’t had so much practice with passengers.”
“It looks pretty there, in your world.” His world. And yet for a split second, when I’d seen it, the word home had flickered in my mind.
“It is. You’ll like it.”
I smiled again. “But not any time soon. I guess now we know the answer about whether I can travel like you. It doesn’t seem to have agreed with me. Guess I’ll have to wait until Halloween, after all.”
If I live that long.
But Phineas shook his head. “I wouldn’t assume that. The first time is bound to take a toll, and you weren’t prepared. But look how fast you’ve recovered. I think what you suffered tonight is as much due to the curse and soulsickness as to traveling. I’ve told you before, I think the soulsickness affects you in ways you can’t necessarily feel. I think it makes things a lot worse on your heart. And your body has been pushed to the limit.”
I sighed. “Cursed and soulsick is a nasty combination, I’ll give you that.”
“Too nasty. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how much more your heart can take. I think it’s a very bad idea for you to leave Bristol again until we figure out a way to break the curse.”
“I can assure you, staying in Bristol is just fine with me.”
Phineas stayed in Bristol too, while he tended to Cooper. Lydia, who had a number of freelance jobs that could be done from anywhere with an internet connection, came to join him the next day. I showed her to their room, by turns thanking her for coming and apologizing for the trouble.
Witch Bound (Devilborn Book 3) Page 9