by Hudson, Tara
Then I realized: I’d hurt her. The handprint on my arm wasn’t a scald—it was the spot where something icy cold had touched something fiery hot.
I peered back at the female demon and saw that she cradled her burned hand in the uninjured one. Her male companion cast a scornful glance in her direction and sighed.
“Stop cowering and take her,” he commanded.
“You take her,” she spat, “if you think it looks so easy.”
He sighed again and shook Alex off his feet. The movement roused Alex from the thankful prayers he was still mumbling, and he stared reverently up at his new master.
“I assume you can touch her now, child?” the demon asked him. When Alex nodded, the demon gave him a stern look. “Then if you truly want to serve us, you’ll take her.”
Alex glanced back over his shoulder and flashed me an eager smile. In response, my glow flared brighter. Although Alex winced, his smile didn’t falter.
Unlike the female demon—unlike Eli—Alex obviously wasn’t afraid of me. He stared me down like prey, rising from his knees and stalking over to me with clenched fists.
I clenched my fists too, trying to think of how I would fight him. My pulse began to race as I came up blank. Could I burn him as I’d burned the demon? Could I hurt him as I’d once hurt Eli? Could I still act as a poltergeist and make this place quake?
Alex was stalking even closer, and I still hadn’t come up with a reasonable solution. I raised my fists to the sides of my head and groaned in frustration. Abruptly, Alex froze in place and mimicked me, clutching his head and groaning even louder.
At first I thought he was trying to mock me, but the longer he moaned, the more I doubted it. His groans turned into yowls, and his face contorted in pain. Something or someone was hurting Alexander Etienne.
I peered past him to his would-be masters, who were staring at us in disbelief and confusion. A few of them even started to hiss defensively. Over the sounds of their hissing and Alex’s groaning, however, I heard another sound. A sound I’d forgotten to track since the demons arrived.
I spun back around to find that the young Seers still held hands, still chanted. Their murmurs had lost that initial edge of reluctance and were now coursing through the air with urgency. With strength.
Even better, the darkness around them had abated. Through the purple shadows of the netherworld, I could see a faint, ghostlike outline of the footbridge. And in the sand beneath the Seers, I could see traces of concrete, shifting like seaweed underwater.
Whatever spell the Seers wove, it hadn’t just brought Alex to his knees—it had also torn through the veil of the netherworld. Maybe even weakened the magic that held this place together.
My head whipped back around to Alex and his masters, and I grinned in triumph. Although Alex continued to moan and whimper, the demons unfortunately looked far more composed now. They still hissed and spat in my direction, but one by one their glinting smiles returned. Watching me intently, they began to cluster together. Gathering … for something.
“Gaby,” I murmured, despite the fact that I held their full attention, regardless of my volume. “You need to get over here. Now.”
Still lying on her back where Alex had left her, Gaby rolled to one side, coughed, and then began to crawl slowly toward me. Without taking my eyes off the congregating demons, I crouched low and stretched out one arm to her.
“Just a little bit farther,” I urged her. “Come on....”
She’d crawled several feet, with only a few more to go, when the demons began to screech again. In a flash they shifted back into indeterminate shapes and launched up in the air like startled ravens. But as they climbed higher in the sky, I realized that they were anything but startled: they were arcing, curving back around for a swift, final descent.
“Gaby!” I cried, far past the point of urgency now. “Hurry, please.”
I took my eyes off of her for a moment, casting a panicked glance over my shoulder at the Seers. They still chanted in their circle, unaware of the shrieking army above them. Thankfully, even more elements of the living world had grown stronger around them. By now the footbridge was fully visible, and I could see the vague outline of several buildings in the French Quarter.
The netherworld was thinning all around the Seers.
But not around me. Here it was as dark and bleak as ever.
I turned back to Gaby and then leaned forward to close the gap between us. She reached out to me and I grabbed her hand, pulling her close. We huddled together a few feet from Alex—who still gasped and moaned—and stared up in fear at the wounded sky.
After a heavy silence, Gaby cleared her throat.
“Hey, Amelia,” she whispered hoarsely. “Do you know you’re on fire?”
Despite everything, I laughed. “Yeah. I don’t think it’ll be much help right now, though.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw her grin. She wrapped one arm around me and gave me a tight half hug. I read the gesture well enough: if we were going to be swept into the darkness, at least we would go together.
“Friends till the end,” I whispered with a wry smile.
Gaby snorted. “God, you’re corny.”
I laughed again and moved to give her my own half hug. But suddenly, she slipped from my arm and began crawling backward across the dark sand like a crab.
Except … she wasn’t crawling. She was being pulled.
Alex must have fought through the pain of his exorcism, because he now had his arms wrapped around Gaby’s shoulders as he dragged her across the sand. I scrambled to grab her legs, but she was struggling so hard against Alex that I couldn’t hold on to her.
The three of us were a tangle of flailing limbs and shouted threats, but no matter how hard I fought, Alex appeared to be winning. Perhaps he felt emboldened by his masters since they were only seconds away from attack.
Everything seemed lost: Gaby, Joshua, the young Seers, my own afterlife.
The unfairness of it all—the eternal unfairness of this existence—seared me to my core. I threw back my head and screamed up at the night.
And at that moment my fiery glow literally exploded.
The fire was uncontrollable. Inescapable.
I wrenched my eyes closed, shutting out the impossibly bright light until I could sense through my eyelids that it had dimmed—at least, enough for me to reopen my eyes.
The dark beach looked as though an atom bomb had gone off on it. Sand flew back in waves, showering against the pavilion, which rocked in the gale from the explosion. In an instant, the night seemed to turn to day, glowing brightly like a real beach in the sunshine.
The explosion had done another amazing thing too. Something I smelled, before I saw its source; it was a nasty chemical scent, like burning tar and singed hair.
Or singed feathers.
That’s what the black bits of ash looked like as they fell around me: burned feathers, crisping and flaking all over the slate-colored sand. I looked up to the sky for their source and gasped.
Where a hundred bird-shaped demons had been, there were now less than twenty … and most of them had flown higher in the sky, away from this beach.
Away from me.
Their screeching sounded different now, more plaintive and wounded. The remaining demons gathered together in the sky and then shifted course, toward the black waters of the river.
To go home?
Was that possible? Were they actually retreating?
Another look around me suggested that the answer was yes. All along the beach and across the pavilion, images of the living world were filtering through the purples and reds. Even when my glow began to dim, I could still see the real Toulouse Street Wharf fighting its way through the veneer of the netherworld pavilion. I could see the concrete reappearing beneath me and the lights of the Mississippi River boardwalk shining through the darkness.
Gaby saw them too. She grinned up at me from Alex’s arms, her blue eyes radiant in the gloom that still
surrounded her.
“It’s closing again,” she breathed happily.
“Yeah,” I agreed as the boardwalk became more solid around me. “And you’re in what looks like the very last patch of netherworld. So—”
“So let’s speed this up,” she finished, before digging one sharp elbow into Alex’s ribs. He grunted from the blow and immediately released her so that he could clutch at his chest. Gaby took advantage of his moment of weakness to wrench away from him and scramble toward me.
She reached out one hand, ready for me to tug her to safety, when a shout made both of us pause.
“Gabrielle!”
Both of our heads whipped around toward the voice. From the corner of my eye, I saw Gaby’s smile blossom when her brother crested the top of the footbridge, which was now fully visible.
Almost involuntarily, she swung her arm around, reaching for Felix instead of me.
And in that moment Alex pounced.
He wrapped one arm around her shoulders and tangled the other in her hair. With vicious force, he yanked her back into a diminishing shadow, which was folding in on itself so rapidly that they almost didn’t fit into it.
Felix and I screamed at the same time, and I could hear his feet pounding the pavement as I dove forward.
But we were both too late.
As the murky portal constricted, I caught one last glimpse of Alex’s twisted smile and Gaby’s bright, horrified eyes. Then the dark patch closed entirely, lingering as a shadow for just a heartbeat before disappearing in the wind.
After that, everything was silent.
Only one sound disturbed the wharf: the ring of a nearby church bell, chiming twelve times and then echoing hollowly across the water.
Even when the bell stopped ringing, my hand still hung in the air, clawing at nothing.
After who knows how long, I slowly turned my head. Felix crouched beside me, his hand also grasping the void. He dropped his arm first, letting his palm smack loudly on the concrete. When I lowered my hand and placed it next to his, he kept his eyes downcast.
“How much did you see?” I whispered.
Felix shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “Just the end. Just the part where she …”
He trailed off, and I nodded. “So … you do know.”
“I know.”
We fell silent again. Like him, I turned to stare at the ground, where I absently studied the cracks and imperfections in the concrete. Finally, I stirred.
“How did you know?” I asked him. “Where to find us, I mean?”
“Joshua,” he stated flatly.
That answer surprised me. I frowned and glanced back up at Felix. He looked up, too; and when his electric blue eyes met mine, I felt a pang in my stomach. His eyes were so much like Gaby’s.
“Joshua?” I repeated.
Felix sighed and ran one hand over his face before explaining.
“His family was eating at Antoine’s when Gaby called him about … his grandmother, I think? After he got the call, Joshua freaked. He got up to leave and accidentally ran into me on his way out. I guess I look—looked—enough like Gaby to send up a red flag, because he confronted me. I convinced him that Gaby and I hadn’t exorcised you, and then we decided to go find his cousins—apparently they’d gotten permission to skip dinner to go to some ‘party,’ which turned out to be … this. I guess we’re lucky his sister told him where they were really going, even if she didn’t tell him what they were really doing. Anyway, we saw his cousins first, on the other side of the bridge. Joshua had just made it across when he disappeared into this weird shadow. And then … well, you know the rest.”
He finished weakly, hanging his head again. I didn’t press him to tell me more, and he didn’t ask me to detail the things he’d missed while waiting for us to reappear.
Which is why his next question surprised me so much.
“It was Kade, wasn’t it?”
Gnawing on my lip, I nodded again, albeit more hesitantly this time. “His real name was Alexander Etienne. He was a Seer. And insane.”
“No surprise there,” Felix muttered.
The corner of my mouth lifted into what was probably a harsh smile.
“Well, you’ll be happy to know that she killed him. Even if he did take her, she at least got the chance to exact some revenge.”
Felix continued to stare at the ground. “Was it … a painful death? For Kade?”
“Looked like it, yeah.”
“Good,” Felix growled.
It was the first real emotion he’d shown. But his fierce expression disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived—replaced once more by a blank mask. As I watched him recompose himself, I heard murmurs behind us coming from the direction of the Seers. I craned my head, looking over Felix’s shoulder at the base of the footbridge.
The first pair of eyes I caught were Joshua’s. Before I could read the thoughts in them, they darted away, toward Jillian. I followed his gaze and saw her struggling to help Annabel to her feet. Although Annabel looked rough, Jillian looked rougher—dirty and exhausted and bloody. Next to them, Hayley and Drew helped each other stand. Once all of them were upright, they turned unsteadily to face me.
I stared back at them blankly, until I realized: they were looking to me for instruction. For guidance.
I shook my head, mystified. Could these people make any decisions without a leader?
“Go home,” I told them softly, knowing that they could probably hear me across this short distance. “Go home now.”
Accepting my command without question, Annabel nodded. Then she pulled away from Jillian to join Hayley and Drew in propping up one another. Without a second glance at me, Annabel wrapped her arms around the other two Seers and they hobbled off together, disappearing over the footbridge and back into the Quarter.
Jillian waited until they’d vanished to stumble over to her brother. She kept her head bowed—either exhausted or contrite, I couldn’t tell.
At first Joshua gave her a cold glare as she approached. But once she’d made it within arm’s length, he pulled her in for a brief but fierce hug. After that, the two of them looked back at Felix and me.
“What do you want to do, Amelia?” Joshua asked quietly.
I glanced at Felix, then at Jillian, and then, finally, at Joshua. So softly I almost couldn’t hear myself, I said:
“I want to go home.”
Chapter
THIRTY-ONE
The four of us moved quickly down Decatur, trying to avoid the large crowds pouring out of midnight mass at the cathedral by Jackson Square. Once we reached the Lower Pontalba, Joshua and Jillian waited outside while Felix led me into the building.
Together, Felix and I walked in silence up the dark stairwell, down the narrow hallway leading to the apartment, and into the living room. There he clicked on a few lamps and then wordlessly signaled me to follow him out of the room.
When we passed the slipcovered couch—the place where Gaby had told me what I’d become—a hard lump formed in my throat. I tried to swallow it away as we moved toward Gaby’s bedroom.
Inside, the room already felt colder. Emptier. I flipped on the overhead light and leaned against one of the bedposts while Felix crossed over to the closet. He opened the doors and, even from here, I could see the top of the clothing pile on the floor. It was disorienting. To think that I’d stood here with Gaby only this morning—it felt like an entire lifetime ago.
After a few minutes the closet light went dark and Felix stepped out of it, carrying a brown-and-gold-checked overnight bag.
“Here,” he said roughly, handing it to me. “Gaby would want you to stay fashionable. Besides, I don’t think a few items of clothing and some shoes are going to make much difference.”
I took the bag from him without protest, but in the few seconds when it touched both our hands, I hesitated.
“I can stay,” I said softly, “if you want.”
For a moment, emotion glimmered in Fe
lix’s eyes: sadness, regret, assent, uncertainty. Too much for someone to handle all at once. He closed his eyes, shutting those thoughts off from me, and shook his head.
“I’m not staying here, either. I only lived in this place to make Gaby happy. Now that she’s really … Now I think I’ll take my buddies up on their offer to be their fourth roommate. Anyway, it’s safer to just get out of this apartment, right?”
“Right,” I said with a humorless laugh. “Getting arrested for squatting would be—”
“The perfect end to a great couple of years,” he finished, giving me a smile that seemed far more broken than bitter. We fell silent again, neither of us sure how to follow that statement.
Finally, I nodded in the direction of the disastrous closet. “So, should we clean this place up?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ll pick everything up before I leave. You should just go ahead and get back to the Mayhews.”
“But, Felix, this is a lot for one person to clean—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he interrupted quickly, shaking his head. “Besides, I think I just need some … time. Alone.”
I didn’t imagine the crack in his voice when he said the word “alone.” I didn’t want to think about why that word had a particular significance to him now. I tucked my bottom lip between my teeth, nodded, and said, “I understand.”
Without thinking, I reached out to give Felix’s hand a comforting squeeze. But I withdrew before we made that numb noncontact again. After all, he didn’t need a reminder of the barrier between us—a barrier that existed because of his sister’s magic.
Magic that didn’t exist anymore. Not in this world.
Shouldering the overnight bag, I stepped aside so that Felix could lead me into the hallway. I tossed one last glance at the bedroom before he shut off the light, plunging it into darkness and out of my life forever.
Again, Felix and I remained silent as he walked me to the entrance of the apartment; but when we reached the front door, I paused.