In his white hands, he toyed with a book.
Volunin’s true Black Book.
“You’ve come to free me.” His voice was strange, grating and at the same time harmonious, like someone had rung the wrong set of bells at once.
“No,” Liss said. “We came for Johnny. It’s time for him to go home. Where is he?”
“Free me, and he goes free too,” Kasyan said.
Johnny and Mora emerged from the darkness of the cave. This time, Mora was wearing a heavily beaded dress, like she’d prepared for company, and her long and ropey neck was unwound and ranging toward them. She was perched on Johnny’s shoulders, her clawlike feet pinching his flesh, as she had been the last time they’d seen her. Then, Johnny’s posture had been rigid, his eyes blank and unseeing. Now, he was awake.
Johnny was rail-thin and ashen. His black hair no longer fell in slashes across his forehead but was greasy and long enough to touch his shoulders. His face was grooved like he’d aged ten years in as many months, and half-moons of purple smeared under his eyes. She’d expected him to be terrified, but instead he just looked exhausted.
When he saw them, he stumbled under Mora’s weight. She dug her heels in deeper and he flinched. “No, no—get out of here! Go, while you can!”
Kasyan gave them a smile cruel enough to blunt a scalpel. “And if you don’t free me, Mora will kill him.”
Mora screeched with glee, her pointed features pinching closer together. She inched a talonlike fingernail toward Johnny’s ear.
“No!” all three of them cried.
Kasyan lifted a hand and Mora froze.
“You were using Johnny to talk to Keith,” Dan stammered. “You don’t need that anymore—let him go.”
Kasyan’s pale lip twitched as he considered her. “I don’t need him for that? He’s already been unreliable for months. Communication like that just consumes a person’s vitality.” Kasyan shifted his weight under the chains into a languid pose. His eyes flashed as a sliver of a smile crept across his face. “He did quite a lot of wishing to go home. All the time. Not a lot of imagination, but he was just desperate. I want to go home!” Kasyan said it in Johnny’s voice—or what Dan imagined Johnny would sound like when he cried. Kasyan sighed, although breathing did not seem strictly necessary to him. “There were times he thought he found his way to escape, only to be disappointed. Just. Like. That.” Kasyan snapped his fingers and something rumbled deep in the cavern, out of range of their headlamps, and the sound of falling rock followed. Johnny flinched.
“You tortured him,” Liss growled.
“Desire is a complicated thing. It leaves you open. I merely explored his desires. Exactly as you did, Liss.” Liss flinched. She was for the first time in her life at a loss for words. “Perhaps Johnny would not be here if he had wanted the right thing. The right girl.” Kasyan’s black eyes flitted to Dan. “Don’t you think so, Dan? If only he’d chosen you instead. He hurt you so badly, you sent him to me.”
He was obviously trying to upset them, but why did Kasyan think that at a time like this, she’d care if Johnny liked her or not? There was no love triangle among them—there never had been, as far as Dan was concerned. All she had really wanted was Liss’s friendship. As for Johnny, she realized, she’d never really wanted anything from him at all. Kasyan was supposed to be able to see their desires; why had he gotten hers wrong? “Let Johnny go and he can make that choice for himself.”
“I promised Keith a wish for his assistance in my liberation. He thinks that together we’re going to make the world a better place.” Kasyan grinned, the pallid flesh of his lips pulling back to expose a mouth like a black abyss. “You three aren’t so foolish. I’ll extend that offer to any of you. Just a little spilled blood.”
“We don’t want your wishes,” Liss cut in.
“Really?” Kasyan set the Black Book on the rock beside him. And suddenly Kasyan was gone, folding in on his own inky darkness and then opening himself into a new form.
A sandy-haired man in a suit rattled the chains as he strained them to lean toward Liss. “Now, Liss, you know how important getting into the right college is for your future. Let’s get you accepted to Columbia, or maybe Princeton? Harvard?”
“Is that your dad?” Alexa said.
“That’s a pretty insulting offer,” Liss answered. “I’m already a straight-A student, and I’m not a fucking cheater.”
“You should consider it,” he pressed. “The fact is, I’ve never really been proud to be your father. If you were admitted to the right school, I’d finally have a real reason to love you. I’d even go through with leaving your mother if you wanted me to. You’d never have to see her again. How about that?”
Dan looked at Liss. She wasn’t moving, not even blinking. For a second, Dan worried, what if—
Liss spoke through clenched teeth. “Leave me and my family alone, you manipulative piece of shit.”
But Kasyan was already unraveling himself again, re-forming himself into an olive-skinned woman with long chestnut hair, the fine crinkle of laugh lines around her eyes. She gave Alexa a smile so full of love that Dan’s throat grew tight.
“Hey, kid. How’s our little family-thing holding up without me?”
“Lore?” Alexa whimpered.
“Stop!” Dan shouted. “You can’t do that to her!”
Alexa turned to her. “It’s okay. I can handle it.”
“I don’t know about that, kid,” Lorelei-Kasyan said. “Kasyan’s pretty powerful. He’s the only reason I’m still alive, you know. He granted your wish once—remember, you asked to let me live?”
“He didn’t grant my wish,” Alexa said. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
“Things turned out pretty badly, right? Let him fix it now, that’s all. Me and you could move back to LA like we talked about, and it’ll be like none of this ever happened. Just help me get out of these chains, huh?”
“I cursed her!” Keith suddenly cried, falling on his knees before Alexa. His eyes were bulging and manic. “It was my idea—with my Lord’s assistance! I needed to kill her. Spill my blood for it! You know you want to. Get your revenge on me and Kasyan will give her back to you.”
“Alexa . . .” Dan began, but Alexa shot her a look so hard it silenced her.
“Why did you do it?” Alexa asked Keith. “Why try to kill her?”
“I had to. She was going to ruin the plan.” The words spilled out of Keith. “She was sneaking around. She couldn’t be trusted. And then she saw the girl—Zephyr. She wanted me to let her go. But I needed Zephyr—Kasyan told me I needed someone young. They have the best energy. I tried to get her to bring you to me! I wanted it to be you.” Dan thought she smelled something burning. There was a ghastly, beatific look on Keith’s face. “Punish me. Spill my blood to make me pay.”
“No,” Alexa finally said. “Lorelei’s gone. You took her from me and you don’t even understand why. You’ve just been Kasyan’s pawn all along. Sending you to prison is going to have to be enough.”
“Just ask him to heal me, Alexa. Don’t you think I deserve that much?” Lorelei-Kasyan was crying now. “I’m in so much pain. After everything I’ve done for you, just do this one thing for me. How can you let me rot, when I’m the only person who ever loved you?”
Alexa stared Lorelei-Kasyan down. “You’re not Lorelei, and I won’t talk to you like you are. I don’t believe you can fix what you’ve done to her. And you’re wrong: she’s not the only person who loves me.”
For a second, Lorelei-Kasyan’s face contorted into a howl of rage, and then the face and body melted away. He was transforming, blackening and folding in on himself again. A sick dread rose in Dan’s gut. Who would he choose for her? What did he think she really wanted? He had been wrong a minute ago about Johnny, but that was nothing compared to what he was doing now.
What did she
really want?
Pulling against the chains, Kasyan’s unsettled form seemed to be growing bigger, coming closer to Dan.
“I’ve got a wish!” someone screamed from behind them.
Dan turned to see Zephyr, her hair loose and wild and her white dress caked in grime. She was holding a fireplace poker she must have found among Mora’s scavengings.
“You were supposed to run!” Liss cried.
“Not while he’s still out there,” she said, swinging the iron poker.
The girls lunged for her, but Zephyr had four years on St. Ignatius’s softball team behind her swing, and it landed true: directly on Keith’s temple with a nightmarish crunch and he fell, unmoving, at the foot of Kasyan’s throne.
“I wish you’d rot in hell!” Zephyr cried as the poker clattered to the ground.
Blood poured from the crack in Keith’s skull.
* * *
—
Everything moved at once.
Kasyan’s chains burst and fell to the floor. As they did, he shifted back into true form.
Dan didn’t know why she’d assumed the human form he’d first taken was his natural shape. It made a lot more sense for him to be what he was.
Darkness.
He hovered in the air: a shifting, wind-hounded vortex of tendrils of black smoke, crackling with white lightning.
The instant that Mora leapt from Johnny’s back, Liss grabbed for him. He fell into her, sinking his face into her shoulder.
But Dan barely paused to look at Johnny. She was searching the cave, looking for Kasyan, but all around was darkness.
“What do we do?” Alexa cried.
“I have an idea,” Dan said. She grabbed the true Black Book from where it lay on the rocks by Kasyan’s broken chains, and thrust it at Liss. “Get back to the beach. Find the spell to seal the cave and get ready. Now!”
Liss grabbed the book in one hand and Johnny’s arm in the other and ran for the passage to the beach. Alexa was beside her, pulling Zephyr along.
Behind them, Dan was left alone in the cave, hoping the blackness that was Kasyan wouldn’t beat them there.
She was a witch.
Witches were magic, and magic was power.
Dan focused on that power now—the heavy, skin-prickling rush of it, its wildness. She imagined it wakening something in her veins and arteries, making the hair of her arms stand up. She called magic to her, to fortify her, and when she felt it come, she imagined seizing it in her fists.
“Kasyan!” Dan pushed everything into that scream: all the fear and horror, how fiercely she wanted for them all to be safe again. She needed to sound desperate. Luckily, she was. “Kasyan, wait! You promised me a wish!”
Across the cave, Liss and Alexa’s headlamps were no longer visible; they’d entered the tunnel to the beach. Panic thrummed in her chest—she was all alone down here, with Keith, who was making a terrible gurgling sound and clutching his head—but instead of fighting it, she let the panic into her voice too. She called Kasyan again and again, her voice pitching high and shaky. “Kasyan, please! You’re my last chance.”
And then he was there.
Or not a him, exactly. Now Kasyan was a kind of black airborne jellyfish, throbbing with that purplish luminescence. A voice emanated from it. “The other girl freed me.” It was strange that something without a face or even a human form could be so overwhelmingly smug.
“But you didn’t grant her wish. I would have done it. I didn’t have the chance.” Dan allowed her voice to waver. “It’s hard for me to stand up to them. Liss especially. That’s why I didn’t do it sooner. You wouldn’t be free now without Johnny, and you know Johnny wouldn’t have been down here without me.”
Kasyan’s ghostly form floated nearer. The way it shifted was transfixing, as if stirred by a wind Dan couldn’t feel. “What is it you want?”
“Don’t you know?”
“You’re unusually difficult to read.”
“Maybe that’s because . . . sometimes I feel like I don’t want anything. It scares me. Sometimes it’s like there’s nothing in the world that can make me feel anything but miserable. And I’m just so tired of that.” There were tears in her eyes. She really was tired, and they were so close to the end of it all.
“You want happiness.”
“But how do I get there? It’s like happiness just exists on a whole different planet from the one I’m on. I thought you could see people’s desires. I was hoping you could tell me what would . . . fix me. Tell me what I should be wishing for.”
Kasyan drifted still closer to her, and now his inky tendrils were twisting in on themselves, weaving together until his black mass was something like a human form.
It snatched the breath from Dan’s chest.
The kohl-rimmed eyes and pouty lips and cheekbones as sharp as North Coast’s cliffs, limbs thin as a wire.
He was playing with a rose, pressing the pad of his finger against a thorn—exactly like in the IronWeaks poster she had taped over her bed.
Rickey.
Dan couldn’t speak or breathe or blink, not when Rickey-Kasyan was looking right at her with his heavy-lidded eyes. In all her favorite pictures of him, even when his eyes were looking at the camera, they were really focused elsewhere, on that bleak and tortured place inside. Now those eyes were turned on her, like they could see right into her own closely guarded version of that place. Rickey had made that seem beautiful and poetic and tragic and inescapable all at once. Rickey bit his lip, just a little, and Dan couldn’t help it: her body flushed with heat.
“What I want is . . . Rickey?” Dan managed to ask.
There was a tender, sad smile on Rickey-Kasyan’s face as he slowly shook his head, which should not have come off as so diabolically sexy. “Rickey’s dead,” he said softly. His voice was like rich chocolate, like a candle flame, like getting lost in the in the woods at night.
His voice was still so familiar and velvety, part of Dan wanted to crawl inside it. She had spent hours with that voice. It had sung to her while she cried, when she cut, and it had sung to her until she was brought to do those things. It had kept her company at her darkest moments, and it had led her to those moments, too. She had let it.
The hair on the back of Dan’s neck stood on end.
“He killed himself,” she said slowly.
Rickey-Kasyan took a slouchy step closer to her, but the closer he got, the more his glamour dulled. His beautiful eyes looked sunken, his sad smile more like a sneer. His torso was bare and scattered with moles Dan had never noticed before, and the thinness of his chest and the jutting angles of his hip bones above his jeans were almost painful to see. He was near enough that she could touch him, but the possibility revolted her. Rickey wasn’t someone she wanted to touch or kiss. He wasn’t, she realized, a person at all to her. He was an indefinable, romantic sadness, and that made him a dangerous thing.
Dan shoved her hands into the pockets of her windbreaker.
“You don’t need to fight it, Dan,” Rickey-Kasyan said. “That sadness is part of you. It’s who you really are. We’re the same that way.”
“I can’t keep going like this,” she made herself say. “I don’t want to be miserable anymore.”
“There is another way,” Rickey-Kasyan said. He arched his eyebrow invitingly at her, his lips a little bit pouty.
Dan’s heart fluttered as she inched forward, closing what little distance remained between them. “What other way?”
“Do what I did.”
This, Dan understood now, was the idea Rickey’s music had always danced around the edges of, long before he killed himself. It was an idea she carried inside herself too, and now she was going to face it.
Slowly, Dan pulled Keith’s knife from her pocket.
“There’s nothing wrong with giving up.” Rickey-Kasyan�
�s long lashes reflected in the knife’s blade. He was always so tragically beautiful, even before he’d made himself a tragedy. “You can disappear forever, just like I did.”
Dan’s palm sweat against the handle of the knife. She tightened her grip. Last night’s cuts were stinging and sore on her arm.
“Rickey gave up,” Dan said. “But I’m choosing to fight.”
She plunged the knife between Kasyan’s ribs as hard as she could, then wrenched the knife up to the side. The pupils of his gorgeous, dead eyes blew out wide and his mouth fell open, black vapor pouring from his throat.
Dan didn’t wait to see if Kasyan was dead.
She knew he wasn’t.
She ran.
Alexa
On the beach, Alexa shivered against the wind. A few feet away, sheltered by some rocks, Zephyr and Johnny were devouring the granola bars from Liss’s backpack, though Johnny was gagging on his. Liss paced in the sand, staring at the mouth of the cave.
“What’s taking so long?” Liss said.
Alexa tried to sound confident. “She’ll make it out.”
At least they had enough time to find Volunin’s spell to seal the cave in his original Black Book. It turned out the real Book was a lot easier to use than Kasyan’s knockoff.
A light flickered in the passage.
“That’s her headlamp!” Alexa said. “Get ready.”
Dan
Dan plunged through the dark cave as fast as she could, thankful for all those horrible runs she had made herself go on. She concentrated on keeping her footing on the slick rocks. She couldn’t fall, she couldn’t stumble, she couldn’t slow.
He had to be behind her. A knife wound wasn’t enough to kill Kasyan, that much was obvious, but she’d gambled on the guess that if he took a human form, he might be injured enough to buy her a little time.
She trusted Liss and Alexa would be ready.
Because if Kasyan was behind her, he was furious.
A Wicked Magic Page 32