I held his gaze. “We know she’s here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Where else would she be?”
Red moved to stand beside me. “At the gym, with me. That’s where she should be. And you should be at school.”
“We had something more important to do, so we skipped out,” Ben said.
“You want to step out of the way?” Red asked.
“Not really,” Ben said. “Like I said, we’re doing something important right now and we need—” he pushed up his sleeve to reveal a silver watch on a black leather band, and checked the time “—another twenty seconds.”
I pushed into the doorway, forcing him back.
He hadn’t expected that. He backpedaled to avoid being knocked on his ass, but he maneuvered to a stop in front of me, reaching out with his left hand to grab the edge of a table—maple legs, granite top. It held a brass bowl for keys and a stack of bills still in their white envelopes. On the far side of the table, a coat rack held a colorful mountain of fleece and down coats. Ben’s white ten-speed bike leaned against the wall, a white helmet perched on top of the seat.
The stairs were behind him. He looked at them in panic. Faith—and the important work—must be happening on the second floor.
He noticed that I noticed. “Wait,” he said.
I leaned in with my shoulder and he moved again, falling into the table, scattering envelopes to the floor.
I took the wooden steps two at a time, up the first flight and onto the landing, pivoting left and up the second flight. Behind me, Ben and Red pushed and shoved, scrambling up the steps. I didn’t look back, only forward. Beads of sweat popped at the small of my back. The heat in the house had been turned up. It wrapped me in suffocating arms.
There was an open space with a window that showed a view of the park and a plant stand beneath it filled with small clay pots of herbs, some for cooking, some for magic. To the left, a bathroom still steamy from someone’s shower. To the right, Ben’s bedroom. The door was closed. The narrow space between the bottom of the door and the floor leaked thick, resiny smoke that reeked of patchouli.
A hand grabbed a fistful of my hoodie from behind. Ben’s.
“Wait another second,” he said.
I slapped his hand away and opened the door to his room, eyes stinging from the incense smoke. An altar had been set up in the center of the room on a black cloth—a grouping of six white seven-day candles in glass jars, wicks burning merrily, and one black candle with its flame snuffed. The altar included the incense burner, too, still smoking, and a single Tarot card with the image of the Grim Reaper swinging his scythe: Death.
Three surprised faces stared at me, wide eyes and open mouths and palpable relief. Whatever they’d been doing, they’d barely finished. Ben had managed to delay me just enough.
Faith sat on the floor in front of the altar, a shine of perspiration on her forehead, her dark eyes not quite focused. She’d stripped off her sweater, and the white camisole she’d worn underneath it was damp with sweat, too. The heat came from inside her. Warm as she appeared at first glance, goose bumps laced her arms. She looked at me with a combination of gratitude and terror.
I tore my gaze away from hers to give the side-eye to Corey and Jess.
Corey sat cross-legged in the seat of the swivel chair at Ben’s glass-and-steel desk on the far side of the room, underneath a window that hid behind a pull-down, khaki blackout shade. She was dressed in the same skeletal cameo jewelry and dark blue, pleated plaid dress with matching tights that she had been wearing this morning, though she’d kicked off her boots.
On the west side of the room, Jess perched on the edge of Ben’s impeccably made bed crowned with a white down comforter. Her short, muscled frame was wrapped in a duster-length, chocolate-brown sweater with big, speckled matching buttons. She wore plum-colored cords and matching toe socks. There was another window right behind her, guarded by a second blackout shade.
She narrowed her eyes, taking in parts of me that could only be seen by the magical eye. “You went to my house, talked with my aunt,” she said. “I can see her all over you. She made you a promise.”
“We’re working together for now,” I said.
She shook her head, the ghost of a grin taking over her mouth. “Don’t know how you managed that, but it’s a load off my conscience.”
I was in no mood to talk about anything except what I’d narrowly missed. “What have y’all been doing in here?”
Ben stepped into the room, weaving a path around me, coming to stand near the bed, closest to Jess. “I asked you to wait.”
“You tried to keep me from my kid,” I said. “I need an answer to my question.”
The three of them glanced at each other, heaping the spokesperson job on Ben.
“Summoning,” he said, finally.
A finger of fear touched my heart. “Summoning who?”
“Whom,” he said.
“Not in the mood for grammar games, Ben.”
“Him,” he said. “The Angel.”
I kept my voice even, although I felt anything but even inside. “Why in holy hell would you do such a thing?”
“According to Jess, he’s coming anyway,” Ben said.
“So you figured, why wait?”
He shrugged. “We had some questions for him.”
Questions? “What could you possibly ask him before he turns all of you to dust or worse? Not that I know what the Angel of Death would do to a bunch of kids who had the balls to summon him for an interrogation session.”
“We can protect ourselves,” Ben said.
I shook my head. “You have no idea what you’re getting into.”
“Neither do you, Night,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “The difference is, I have a healthy amount of respect for things I don’t understand.”
He came back quickly. “Fear’s not the same thing as respect.”
I held his gaze. “Fear is a normal, sane response to beings who are higher on the food chain than you. For instance, sharks, tigers, and angels who kick off the end of the world.”
Ben opened his mouth to respond, but Faith interrupted. “Ben’s covering for me.”
We turned to look at her.
“It’s not covering,” Ben said. “We have your back.”
Faith had smudges beneath her eyes—not black eyes, and not quite the luggage usually acquired through lack of sleep. She’d not only used her power, she’d over-used it. Her halo had reverted to its usual color since this morning, though it still held a hint of the spark and flame with which she’d marched into the gym. Instead of shimmering, though, her halo had a dull edge to it, as if the glow had been rubbed off.
I squatted down to be on her level, to look her in the eye. “This summoning was your idea?”
She nodded. “After what Jess said outside the gym this morning, I needed to know whether the Angel was coming here because of you—or me.”
Jess drew her brows into a V. “Never said anything about this being your fault.”
“Most of the bad things that happen are,” Faith said. “Like my parents.”
“You lived. They didn’t. That doesn’t make them dying your fault,” Jess said.
Faith went on as if she hadn’t heard Jess. “We have to watch our backs, and that’s because of me. The couple of times I used my magic before we came here, I almost got us killed. Then I did it here, and we can’t run now even if we wanted to because it won’t matter. So if Death is coming for me and there’s nothing I can do about it this time, I wanted to at least know why.”
Jess bent forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Still not your fault.”
Faith looked at me—no, past me, over my shoulder. “What do you think, Red?”
He’d climbed the steps after me, and that meant he had to be behind me, listening. Paying quiet, focused attention.
Red had magic, and he used it to help the kids who found a way to his gym, but the kind of st
uff we were talking about was way over his head. I glanced over my shoulder.
He leaned against the doorjamb, hands in the front pockets of his jeans. His face was a map of emotions: concern, sadness, care. I didn’t read any fear there, nor did it show in his halo. “I have a lot of questions myself,” he said. “Mostly what I want to know right now is whether the summoning worked.”
Corey swiveled in the desk chair to face him. “I believe it did, just not the way we planned.”
“What’s that mean, exactly?” Red asked.
Corey tucked her hair behind her ears, her cheeks flushing nearly as red as her locks. “We thought we were bringing him here, but he didn’t show. Normally, that would mean what we tried didn’t work.”
“You’ve got experience in that department?” Red asked.
“You don’t learn anything new if you don’t try,” she said.
Red pushed off the wall and took a step into the room. “But?”
“But the black candle went out. That was supposed to be our clue that the summoning had worked. The candle would go out and then the Angel would appear.”
“We got one, but not the other,” Faith said.
“You did the summoning wrong,” Red said.
Corey sighed. “Or we did it right and we summoned the Angel, but he decided to show up close by instead of in this room.”
I looked at Corey. “How close?”
“The radius of the summoning spell is ten miles,” she said.
“Ten square miles,” I said.
“Yes. Any direction from here.”
I shook my head. So much ground to cover—no, there was no use trying. “You expected the Angel to answer your questions and then what?”
“To do what Death does,” Faith said.
“Kill you all, like I brought up with Ben before?”
“No,” Faith said. “Just me.”
I cocked my head. “You were willing to sacrifice yourself?”
She nodded.
Ben’s hands curled into fists. “Hell, no.”
Clearly Faith hadn’t shared her plan with her friends, and they hadn’t thought things through enough to know there’d be a price at the end of the game.
I held up a hand. “Did any of you know that the Angel of Death doesn’t have his own body? That he has to possess a body in order to act here in this world?”
For imparting this revelation, I received four looks filled with horror and a lot of stunned silence.
Faith slowly pushed to her feet. “You’re telling us that if we successfully summoned the Angel, he’s busy possessing some poor unsuspecting bastard, somewhere out there?”
I nodded. “Most people don’t like that too much. Most people fight it. It may take a while for the Angel to take complete control.”
“How long?” Faith asked.
“Usually a day, maybe a little bit less.”
“How do you know all of this?” Ben asked.
“I studied.” I’d done the kind of investigating I imagine anyone who’d had an attempted exorcism performed on them might do. I’d tried to understand. Of course, the Order had more complete, available information on possession than I was ever likely to squeeze out of a priest.
“You’re right,” Faith said. “We’re in over our heads.”
Ben tensed up even further, but he kept his lip zipped.
“We need help,” Faith said.
“All right,” I said. I’d be whatever help I could, and I had no doubt that Red would do the same, and Addie, too. But would we be enough?
“What should we do?” Corey asked.
“We stay here and pool information,” I said. “Y’all have been working on this for a while, and I need to know what you do. I’ve talked to Jess’s aunt, and I have a bit of information she told me, but it might be best to have her here.”
Jess pulled out her phone and dialed, moving from the bed out into the open area outside the room.
“Corey and Ben, can y’all order pizzas? Something to eat, some drinks. We’re gonna need all the sustenance we can get right now.”
Corey nodded and walked out, but Ben stayed behind. His halo darkened to the gray that reminded me of the Texas sky, holding its breath before a thunderstorm.
“Why are you helping?” he asked.
From the set of his shoulders, which were busy climbing toward his ears, he wasn’t really curious about the food. Or why I was helping, which should’ve been easy to see.
“I’m not trying to take over here,” I said.
Red stepped between Ben and me. “Why not?” he asked.
It seemed like the obvious question. Red and I were the adults here. Adults being in charge was the normal thing to expect, the thing to do. “Because we all need to be on the same page or this isn’t gonna work. I don’t want anyone pissed off, rolling on their own. That’s how people get hurt. That’s how they get dead.”
Red took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Okay.”
I raised a brow at Ben. He didn’t seem one-hundred-percent convinced. “I have a lot more experience in this area than you,” I said.
“Summoning angels or fighting them?” he asked.
“Neither,” I said. “Going into deadly situations and fighting my way out of them? Yes. Using my magic offensively and making it work when everything is on the line? That, too.”
He blinked at me. “You’re a gym coach.”
“No,” I said. “Well, yes, for the last few months, but before that, no.”
“What are you, then?” he asked.
“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” I said.
He laughed, but the laughter faded when I didn’t join him. “You were kidding.”
“Better you don’t know.” If he knew who I was, what I was, then he’d become someone the Order could use to help find me and Faith.
I showed him a rueful grin. I couldn’t help noting the irony in the words that had just rolled off my tongue given what I’d said to Addie about tying up loose ends, about how cold it was to have included Faith’s folks in the hit she ordered only for that reason. The truth was, I understood exactly where she was coming from. I just didn’t claim to be on the side of the angels like she did.
How many jobs had the Order sent me on with multiple targets? More than I could count on two hands. How many of those were like my last job, where one person was the target and everyone else amounted to collateral damage—tying up loose ends? No witnesses, no problems after the fact.
But there was always fallout, whether it was among any remaining loved ones of the people I’d taken out or in my own heart. What about the children who might grow up without their parents? Or the husband or wife or lover who would never be the same again? What about the important things my targets had begun that they would never finish? Or vital things they would have done that they’d never get a chance to start? When did it end?
It didn’t. It couldn’t.
Ben shook his head. “That’s not going to work for me, Night. Two minutes ago, you said that we had to pool information, share everything we know. You said you weren’t trying to take charge. You want us to be in this together. And now you’re doing the opposite of that. Now you’re keeping secrets.”
I looked at Red, hoping that he’d back me up. He met my gaze, but didn’t say a word.
I closed my eyes. I had no right to expect anything from Red. After all, I’d lied to him about who I was, and he knew it. Keeping the pertinent details of my past from Ben and the others might keep Faith and me safe—whatever that meant with several flavors of hell bearing down on us—but it wouldn’t do the same for the rest of us. In fact, not knowing about Sunday—about the Order—could put them in serious danger. It could very well get them killed. They would be a very different kind of loose end: the kind who ended up exploited, the kind who ended up sacrificed without even knowing why.
“You won’t like it,” I said.
“Good,” Ben said. “I mean, good if it
means you’re some kind of ninja. You pushed me out of the way downstairs.”
“That was nothing. And if you don’t want to be pushed out of the way, you need to learn to stand your ground.”
“You’re a girl. I didn’t want to hit you.”
“You don’t have to use your fists,” I said. “And you’re gonna have to get over the girl thing. That rule is great for regular interactions, for relationships. It doesn’t work so well if someone who means you harm is coming after you. Ninjas aren’t gonna be impressed by your chivalry. They’re gonna break your neck.”
He stared at me.
I smiled at him again, this time gently. “Go help Corey. I’ll talk while we eat.”
A visible weight lifted from him, his halo lightening three shades. He did what I asked.
I let go of a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I turned my focus to Faith. “We should talk, too,” I said. “Just the two of us.”
She nodded. “Can we do that a little later? I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”
That made two of us. “Sure.”
“You’re not mad?” she asked.
“I’m definitely mad, but mostly I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Am I grounded?”
What a question. “I think we’re past that, Faith.”
“Just don’t leave me,” she said. “Or make me leave.”
I took her hands in mine. “Not gonna happen.”
She wiped her forehead—and her eyes—with her sleeve. I pretended not to notice.
“Are you really gonna tell them all of that?” she asked. “About your magic?”
“I think I have to,” I said. “But I’m not gonna tell them anything about you. You want to do that, it’s up to you.”
“Now I really think I’m gonna throw up,” she said.
That made two of us. If I told everyone about my magic, there would be questions about the ways in which I’d used it, how I’d honed my skills, where I’d received my training. Those were things no one in this house knew except me. Things I’d never told Faith because to tell her meant that she would know for certain, if she hadn’t already guessed, how I came to be in her family’s home the night her parents died.
“I’d like to step outside. Get a little fresh air,” I said.
Night Awakens: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 1) Page 7