Night Awakens: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 1)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  I shook my head. “Not by herself. Someone should go with her. She’s a target.”

  “Possession?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  Jess’s eyes went wide. She spoke into the phone. “Stay inside the house. Better yet, inside a protective circle inside the house. I’ll come get you.”

  Red lifted me up so he could slide off the sofa. “One of us should go with you. Since it can’t be Night, it’ll be me.”

  “No,” I said. “She should take Ben.”

  Red tensed. “It goes against my gut.”

  “Because he’s young,” I said.

  Red nodded. “But I see your point.”

  “Because he’s a shield.” Of all of us at the moment, Ben was best suited to protect Jess and Addie.

  Ben rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and stood up. “I’ll drive,” he said.

  “Let Jess,” I said. “In case you need to use your magic. Stay close to her.”

  Jess headed for the table in the entry where the bowl of keys sat on the table. Ben followed. A few seconds later, they were out the door and in the car, rolling out of the driveway at warp speed, judging by the distressed growl of the engine as Jess gunned it.

  Red went to the window, watching them race down the street. “I hope they’re careful. Last thing they need is to crack up the car or get pulled over.”

  I swung my legs off the sofa and tried to sit like a person who hadn’t been partially possessed. I mostly succeeded. “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?” He turned from the window. “I couldn’t do a damned thing to help you.”

  “You helped me already. You reminded me who I am. I used that to fight him off.”

  “You’re welcome, then. Next question is what to do with Dave, here.”

  I’d seen and heard his body hit the floor through Ben’s senses. “Is he dead?”

  “No, but he’s unconscious. Who knows whether he’ll wake up or if he’ll be all there when he does. He doesn’t have any magic. That means there’s a limit to what I can see when I look at him. And it means he might be…damaged…when he wakes up.”

  I stood up slowly and carefully. My legs thought about ditching me for a minute, but decided to stick around after all. “I’ll look.”

  “You don’t have any gas in the tank, Night.”

  “I’m what there is, so how much fuel I’ve got doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” he said.

  “Fair enough.” I worked my way to the spot where Dave had blacked out. He lay curled in the fetal position behind the leather chair. I lowered myself into the seat. Best to be very close to my intended target, and better not to chance trying to stand through what I was about to do, not in my current state.

  “What about the Angel of Death?” Red asked.

  I looked at him. “It was close. I got a glimpse of his plans.”

  “Jess’s aunt?” Red asked.

  I nodded. “He’s looking to kill her outright. Otherwise, he’s looking for a body to possess on a permanent basis, and he wanted to try mine on for size.”

  “This is bad,” Red said. “Very bad.”

  “Could be worse. I don’t think I saw everything he had in mind.”

  Red held my gaze.

  “He almost found a way in, Red. There’s exactly one crack in my armor. The one thing I can’t remember.”

  Red crossed toward me and hunkered down in front of me. “In that case, I don’t understand why he left.”

  “I hurt him. I don’t know how. I don’t know enough about him to understand that part. But here’s what I do know: he’ll be back because he didn’t get what he wanted.”

  Faith interrupted whatever Red would’ve said. “Are you sure she’s okay?”

  I glanced at her. She stood at the threshold of the living room with Corey by her side. They had the altar items from upstairs in their hands, but they didn’t look like they’d been sneaking away to try something on their own. They’d brought those items down to us with a purpose. More summoning, no doubt.

  “You get lost on your way to the kitchen?” Red asked.

  “Sorry,” Corey said.

  “Set that stuff down on the coffee table and get that water for Night,” Red said.

  They did what he wanted.

  I focused the tired threads of my magic on Dave the Pizza Guy and sent a single tendril into his mind. It took a hot minute to find Dave, dreaming that he was sleeping in on a rainy winter morning, snuggled under the covers with his Boston Terrier, Buster. There was a girlfriend in the picture, very cute, with wavy blue hair, so I felt okay not worrying about who would take Buster for his afternoon walk.

  A knock sounded on the door. It threw me out of Dave’s mind, but I’d seen what I needed to. Dave was in there. He would be fine eventually, and for now our best bet was to put him to bed and let him sleep off his possession hangover.

  I shook my head to clear it and looked at Red. “Pretty sure the Angel of Death wouldn’t bother knocking.”

  Most likely, that also meant it wasn’t the Order. Not their style. Which narrowed the possibilities considerably.

  “Well, it ain’t a Girl Scout selling cookies in November,” Red said.

  I reached out a hand. “Help me up.”

  He pulled me to my feet. “I should get it,” he said. “It could be trouble. Or a next-door neighbor.”

  “Don’t think it’s a neighbor.”

  He followed me to the entry to provided moral support and muscled backup in case I needed it. I opened the door to the scent of amber and vanilla perfume.

  Sunday stood on the porch. She wore the same black rain slicker as she had this morning, which felt like a lifetime ago. Her shoulder-length blond curls had gone extra curly in the mist. She narrowed her dark blue eyes as she got a good look at my face.

  “What happened?”

  “We had a visit from that Angel you’re after,” I said.

  “What? Are you all right?”

  “I will be,” I said.

  Red elbowed me in the side. “You gonna tell me who this is?”

  “Someone from that part of my life I didn’t get a chance to tell you all about over pizza. Red, this is Sunday. Sunday, Red.”

  She looked him up and down. “You with her?”

  It took Red a second to realize Sunday was asking whether he and I were an item. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You should be,” Sunday said. “Are you going to ask me in or should we have this conversation outside?”

  Red and I stepped out of the way. She marched past us into the living room, getting a gander at Dave and a look at Corey and Faith, who’d brought the water and taken a seat on the sofa.

  Sunday glanced over her shoulder. “Really, Night? Kids?”

  “They come with the territory,” I said.

  “Because of the gym.”

  I nodded.

  Her face lit up as though she remembered something important. She turned to look at the girls again. “Which one of you is it? Oh, you, with the dark hair.”

  I froze. I’d convinced myself that because Sunday hadn’t said a word about Faith back at the gym, she hadn’t known about her. How could I have been so wrong? Because I’d been inundated with magical enemies all day, in a constant state of fight or flight. Because I’d loved Sunday and trusted her with my life at one point, and even if that time was long gone, I still wanted to believe that she wouldn’t break my trust.

  And now, my former lover, the best killer I’d ever known, stood only a few feet away from the most important person in my life, the girl I’d stolen from the teeth of death, the girl who I loved more than life itself. What would she do? If it came down to brass tacks and blood, could I stop Sunday? Could I stop someone who could blind any one of us just by looking us in the eye? Who could psychically anticipate any move I might make?

  Faith’s eyes were full of fear, and I realized that must be because I’d for
gotten to hide my fear from her. Of all the dangerous beings we’d faced today, this one was the most terrifying to me—and now, to Faith.

  “Who’s this?” she asked.

  “Sunday was my friend,” I said.

  “That’s the bare minimum truth,” Sunday said. She unzipped her jacket, revealing her long-sleeved black T-shirt and the black brocade vest she wore over it. The hems of her black jeans had dried stiff. They brushed the tops of her steel-toe black boots. Her halo held a tint of rose red.

  Faith rose to her feet. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You were so small the last time I saw you,” Sunday said. “I sometimes wondered over the years whether Night had kept you or given you away. Now I know.”

  I stepped into the living room, sidling up to Sunday. “The last time you saw her?”

  “The night you took her and ran. I knew something was wrong the night before. You wouldn’t answer my questions. You rolled over and went to sleep—or pretended to. I was afraid you were going to bollix the mission parameters and that you’d run, and you did. I saw all that in my mind’s eye just like it went down. I just didn’t see the girl coming with you in that picture, not until you ducked out of the house with her.”

  Sunday met my gaze. “I wasn’t the only one who knew what you were up to. There were two others sent to check your work.”

  Either I’d done as I was told with, as Sunday called them, mission parameters, or I’d come out of the mission with a strike against me. I would get only the one strike, the one warning. Second time, I’d be a corpse. For the Order to have a reason to check my work, they’d had to have seen a change in my demeanor reflecting dissatisfaction or disobedience. I’d always thought I’d camouflaged the emptiness I’d begun to feel the final weeks I’d been there, but clearly I hadn’t done nearly as well as I’d figured.

  The last job—the mission to kill Faith and her family—had been a test, then. My mentor had to have known that there was a chance I wouldn’t go through with the job. That was a rabbit hole I couldn’t afford to dive into. I would never know what was in anyone else’s mind, and I’d done what I needed to do.

  I wanted to move this conversation to another room, to leave the kids—Faith—out of this. Any second now, Sunday would say something she couldn’t take back.

  I glanced at Faith and Corey. “Can you two stay right here for a few minutes? I’d like to talk with Sunday out back.”

  Faith shook her head.

  I tried again. “Please.”

  “No,” Faith said. “This is about me.”

  I took a deep breath, using the time that took to think of an argument Faith would accept. I came up only one, a long-shot Hail Mary. “Then Sunday can wait, and you and I can go out back and talk, Faith.”

  “No,” Faith said again. “She knows something, and I want to hear it.”

  Which meant that the good intentions I’d had were all for nothing. This was going to play out and I wouldn’t have a shred of control as to how. I’d waited too long for the right moment, and now that moment had passed.

  I looked at Sunday, willing her to read my mind, understanding the futility, but that was my magic, not hers. “You saw them come into the house after we left?” I asked.

  “I did. Maybe I wouldn’t have done something so…drastic…if I’d known they would be there. I only meant to cover your tracks.”

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “I torched the house,” she said. “There may have been a gas stove involved.”

  “You blew it up?”

  “All of the evidence, including the two assholes the Order sent after you,” she said.

  Faith stared at Sunday, her mouth open.

  “I see now why you didn’t want to get involved when I asked you about going after the Angel this morning,” Sunday said. “I’m glad you kept her, even if I never pegged you for the motherly type. She looks good.”

  “Standing right here,” Faith said. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not.”

  “Sorry,” Sunday said.

  I looked back at Red, who met my gaze with eyes that’d gone stormy. “That’s what happened to you? You joined some kind of assassin squad?” he asked.

  “Joined is a harsh word,” Sunday said before I could answer. “They found us, not the other way around. They gave us homes when we had none, and people when we had nobody. They trained us and gave us a purpose.”

  “Killing people,” Red said. “You did say you had a lot of experience, Night.”

  The way he said those words—they hit me like a slap to the face.

  I rounded on him. “Until you’ve walked in my shoes, you have no right to judge.”

  “I just thought—”

  I interrupted him. “You thought what—that I ran away from my dead family and from you, and I magically found a way to support myself by legal means at the age of twelve? That some Good Samaritan took me in? That I had a normal life?”

  He backpedaled a step. “No.”

  “Then what did you think?” I asked.

  “I was sixteen, for Chrissakes. I knew the world wasn’t exactly a benevolent place, even at that age. So, actually, I didn’t think. I hoped.”

  “Hope is a lie,” Sunday said.

  Red met her gaze. “I guess you’re not here to kill us all or you’d have done it by now?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you don’t need me here right now.” He turned on his heel and walked upstairs.

  Chapter 8

  THE THUD OF RED’S footfalls on the steps matched the thud of my heart in my chest. Flames crackled in the hearth. Soot, ash, and sparks rose in a cloud as the log on top of the burning pile fell to the side. The girls sat close together on the sofa, the firelight playing on their faces. Dave the Pizza guy lay in a fetal ball in the corner, beneath the brown leather chair. The pies he’d brought inside remained in the thermal carrier he’d set on the coffee table. As the sound of Red’s steps faded, the silence in the room took on electric proportions.

  Sunday broke it first. She laid a hand on my arm. “You should go after him.”

  I shook my head. Red had left Sunday and me alone with Faith and Corey because he hadn’t wanted to hear any more about the killer I’d become after I left him. Because my nightmare past hurt his feelings or his sense of ethics. Was I supposed to apologize to him?

  “He needs a minute,” I said. “So do I.”

  Looking at Sunday, I wrestled to reconcile my instinctive distrust about what she might do with what she’d actually done. As much as I’d saved Faith, Sunday had saved me—both of us—by giving us the head start we’d needed to run from the Order. At one time, Sunday had been the only person I’d trusted. I’d been afraid to fall back on that trust, but no longer. I laid my confusion on that score to rest.

  I couldn’t say the same about Corey, who looked more confused than the rest of us put together. Her cheeks had mottled to resemble the bright red of her hair, the rest of her face paler than usual, emphasized by the dark blue of her plaid dress. She fisted her hands in the pleats of the skirt, her blue eyes cartoon-wide. “An assassin?”

  “Not the knife- or gun-wielding kind,” I said. “Well, I’ve used them, but they weren’t my preferred weapons.”

  “Magic?” Corey asked.

  I nodded.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “And her, too?”

  Meaning Sunday. “Yes.”

  Corey took in that information, the struggle to make sense of it written all over her face. “That’s how you met Faith?”

  I took a deep breath. “Yes. How…and why.”

  Faith turned away, walking toward the fireplace, putting a few more feet of distance between us. She combed her long, dark hair with her fingers over and over again. She spoke so softly, the words came out as a whisper. “Please tell me what that means.”

  “It means that I was there, at your house, for a job,” I said.

  She drew her arms close to her chest and
hugged herself. “My parents?”

  Sunday glanced at me from the corner of her eye. She was trying to telegraph something to me now, as I had tried with her earlier. I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off of Faith.

  “Not just your parents,” I said.

  Faith placed a hand over her heart. “Me?”

  I started to tell her yes, but that word hurt too much to say. I nodded instead.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I was ordered to,” I said.

  Faith shook her head. “That’s not an answer.”

  “Because someone wanted you dead. They hired the Order to do it. The Order sent me.” That still wasn’t the answer she wanted—that she needed. “Someone was afraid of your magic.”

  Corey sucked in a breath. “Oh, God.”

  “What’s her magic?” Sunday asked.

  Faith looked at Sunday. “I talk to gods.”

  Sunday set her hands on her hips. “Jesus.”

  “Sometimes,” Faith said.

  “No wonder the Watchers didn’t want you around,” Sunday said.

  I closed my eyes tight enough to see stars, only for a second. Sunday hadn’t blown my secret, but she’d blown Addie’s—and by extension, Jess’s.

  “What?” Faith and Corey asked simultaneously.

  “Eventually, I figured out who’d hired the Order,” Sunday said, “but I never figured out why.”

  “Well, I didn’t know any of it,” I said. “Not until this morning, that is.”

  Faith knelt, legs shaking. “So that’s what Jess said this morning was all about.”

  “She was trying to protect you,” I said.

  Faith’s voice trembled, too. “She said her aunt wanted you dead. I don’t understand.”

  I took a step toward her. “I can explain.”

  She looked at the floor, avoiding my gaze, and shook her head.

  “Then let me,” Sunday said. “Night did everything she was supposed to do—everything she was trained to do—until the second she laid eyes on you. Don’t think that all that bullshit I said earlier about the Order giving us homes when we didn’t have them and taking care of us meant that they did it for free. They did it in exchange for our obedience. They did it so that they could maintain a stable of slaves with the kind of magic their targets had no defense against. And if we screwed up, well, there were always a whole lot more where we came from—throwaways, runaways, children who were abused, children no one loved and no one wanted. Disobedience meant death. There was no leaving, either. No quitting. No saying I’m done here. Try to leave, they’d kill you, too. Night was the first one to do that and stay alive. They hunted her—trust me on that. They’re still hunting her.”