Stranger Danger
The light exploded over us like a star going supernova.
The pressure of the blast rang out in dizzying waves. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the light was suddenly ripped away, and all that was left was total and complete darkness.
What is this? Some kind of curse? I demanded.
What does it matter? Run!
I crawled forward through the fencing, the broken furniture, wriggling through the pyre. A second too late, I realized that hiding under the incredibly flammable pile of junk was probably not my best idea.
‘The Void – it’s the Void!’ a fiend shrieked.
‘My eyes – four of them are burning!’
‘By the realms!’
‘The Void!’
Through the tangled knot of the pyre, I watched as paws, feet and hooves fled. Somewhere behind me, there was the crack of wood as fiends stumbled into the pyre.
‘It’s not the Void!’ one of the ogres yelled. ‘Calm yourself!’
And it wasn’t. The air was already beginning to brighten as the street lamps reappeared. The unnatural blanket of darkness was lifting.
Which meant my time to escape was running out.
I still had not found the edge of the pyre when I got my first whiff of smoke. Sinstar had lit the woodpile.
‘The mortal! Catch the mortal!’ Sinstar bellowed over the shouting. The howlers were pawing through the burning wood behind me, searching.
Finally, I squeezed between a headboard and Halloween sign, and found myself back out in the square. My hands slid through the street’s grime. I swallowed a cry as a fiend’s heeled boot smashed down on my outstretched fingers. The stones bruised my knees and scuffed my skin.
Keep going, Maggot! That alleyway, ahead – there’s a ladder that leads up to the roof of the butcher’s shop!
‘Why,’ I breathed out between my clenched teeth, ‘would I ever listen to you again?’
Do you have any other choice at present?
A clawed hand swept past my face, shaving off a few strands of my bangs, and I darted right, knocking into the wheels of a cart. Ugh! Fine.
I staggered forward as quickly as my beat-up legs could take me.
‘The prisoners – seize them!’ an ogre shouted. ‘Watch out for the leeches’ teeth!’
The alleyway Alastor had pointed out was a dozen feet away. Between its narrow, crooked opening and me, however, were crates full of screaming crimson rats and a small, wide-eyed female hob clutching a sign that offered said rats for a blackpenny or the equivalent sliver of magic.
I knew the exact moment the fiend spotted me. Her little snout lifted in indignation, dripping with a wad of blue snot.
I lifted a hand, pressing a finger to my lips in desperation. It was like I could see the scream building in her belly, rising up through her like smoke.
Another fiend tripped over my back, falling to the ground with a snarl. I kept going, and going, and going, as the first note of the hob’s shriek split the air.
A hand landed on my collar and yanked – not back, or forward, but to the side. My eyes must still have been suffering from the explosion, because all I could make out in the easing darkness was a totally-black-garbed human-shaped creature.
The figure tugged at my shirt collar again, this time hard enough to rip it, and waved me forward with their other hand.
Maggot, don’t you dare—
The hob might have been a rat whisperer, but at that moment she didn’t just yell for help – she screeched. ‘The human! He’s getting away!’
No one heard her, or no one cared. The panic that had seized the fiends was starting to infect even me.
‘My younglings! Where are they?’
‘—can’t stay here!’
‘The Void! Great Ghoul, save us!’
If you looked past the snouts and the scales, all that was left was a very familiar, very human emotion: terror.
The dark figure was still waiting, their hand outstretched.
I stared at it, my heart hammering, Al shouting, Run, fool! over and over like a song caught on loop. I couldn’t see the figure’s face beneath the ski mask, but their gloves were sparkling with the last traces of magic. Still, I hesitated. After that show Alastor had put on, what fiend would actually want to help us?
I don’t know why I reached out and took that hand. I felt reckless and wild, like I’d taken a running jump off a cliff in the hope that a strong breeze would catch me. But what I did know thanks to several super-awesome years of bullying at school was this: it would be a lot easier to potentially fight off a single fiend than several hundred of them.
We ran, shoving through the fiends as they emptied out of the square through the many side streets that fed into it. I panted, breathing in lungful after lungful of vapour. I wondered if I would choke on it before we ever got away.
The dark figure seemed to know less about where to go than I did. Their shape bobbed in and out of the last of the panicked fiends, who were starting down one street only to quickly change their mind and try the next. Whatever was inside the black leather sack slung over the creature’s shoulder rattled and clanked.
Alastor suddenly jolted in me as we passed an empty lot between tilted buildings. Stop, Maggot – turn here! You may hide safely here for a time. The smell of the fertilized soil will mask your scent.
My feet slid to a reluctant stop. I stepped up to the fence surrounding it, peering over the lethal spikes that topped it. All I could make out was a shed at the back of it, and dirt ground that was dimpled with shallow holes.
‘Wait!’ I called up to the figure in black. ‘We can hide here!’
The dark figure hesitated, then walked toward me with obvious reluctance, their shoulders slumped.
I pulled back the climbing vines and black flower buds that strangled the gate’s latch, ripping them away where I could. But the hinges were so rusted over I wasn’t sure a chainsaw could get through them.
You’ve two hands and feet, yes? Climb!
I seized the top of the fence, carefully avoiding the spikes capping it. I tumbled over on to the other side. My saviour didn’t follow.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’re the one who caused that big distraction, right? At least rest here for a few minutes so I can thank you.’
The masked figure didn’t respond, but did finally grip the top of the fence to haul themselves over it. They landed with a soft thud on the hard-packed dirt.
I turned around to survey the lot. Its small shed was made of the same stone bricks and roof tiles as the rest of the city, but its surface had been dulled by dust and soot from a nearby chimney. It didn’t look like a fiend had occupied it in some time, but I couldn’t see through the matted spiderwebbing that covered the windows to be sure.
The lizard-shaped doorknob refused to budge – I had to shoulder my way inside. The door burst open with a cloud of dust and splinters. I stumbled forward, waving my hand to clear my path of webs.
Inside, three of the four walls were lined with shelves, most containing the mummified remains of what might once have been toads and spiders.
The fourth wall had a built-in workbench, one stacked high with wire baskets and large lamps still fizzling with a few embers of magic. I tapped one of them, sparking a little more life back into it. The waves of heat it emitted instantly made me wish I hadn’t. I leaned down to study the strangely familiar fragments in one of the baskets. Their white shell-like surfaces were shot through with crimson veins. A bad feeling churned in the pit of my stomach.
‘Al … what is this place?’ I asked.
It’s where I used to breed my prizewinning blood vipers.
I closed my eyes, breathing in deeply through my nose. ‘I hate you so much.’
It’s been centuries since I used this nesting ground, Al said with a small sniff. I suppose I was hoping that someone might have tended to it.
Sorry, but I wasn’t about to shed tears over monster snakes.
No matter. Once I am restored to my form and my rightful place in the kingdom, I shall name the runt of the first nest after you. It will bear that name for as long as its siblings refrain from eating it.
A faint snap drew my attention away from the malefactor and back to the doorway of the shed. The stranger hovered there, as if clinging to the last shadows it provided.
‘Come in and shut the door,’ I said, taking a seat on the ground. ‘We might be here a little while.’
Nothing.
‘Come on, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid. I just want to know who I’m thanking.’
Silence.
Maybe it was another human lost Downstairs, one who’d forgotten how to speak human language?
Impossible. The realm’s magic ensures we all hear one another speaking the same language.
They had been quiet for so long, I actually jumped when the stranger finally spoke. ‘I don’t think you’ll be thanking me in a second …’
Wait. That voice.
Is it? Can it be?
My saviour stepped away from the shed’s door, pulling the ski mask off their face and hair. And then it wasn’t just the voice that was familiar. It was the face. The glitter glasses.
It wasn’t a saviour.
It wasn’t even a friend.
It was Nell.
Toil and Trouble
‘Why are you here?’ The words burst out of me.
‘Why does it look like?’ Nell asked, running her hand over her tight black curls where she’d gathered them into a bun at the nape of her neck. A few strands had already escaped. They bobbed as she tilted her head, giving me a narrow look. ‘Why are you covered in … that?’
We stared at each other.
‘I’m … in disguise,’ I said. ‘Why do you even care?’
Her nose wrinkled. ‘Okay. Definitely had nothing to do with the outhouse I tracked you guys to. Definitely.’
‘If you knew, why did you even ask?’ I muttered, crossing my arms over my chest. I squinted at her through the shadows. ‘And why are you dressed like a spy?’
That was the only way I could think of to describe what she was wearing: head-to-toe black. Black jeans, black boots, black sweater and creepy black ski mask. Nell was usually an explosion of colour and pattern. Now she just seemed … muted.
‘Did you decide to participate in Norton’s art project?’ I couldn’t push back against the tide of anger flowing through me. ‘Let me guess, you’re in a black mood after your dad’s plans were foiled.’
Nell straightened, crossing her own arms over her chest. ‘I was the one who helped you foil them, remember?’
‘You’re the reason Prue was taken – that we’re even in this mess!’
Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t totally true. But the words just kept boiling over, and I couldn’t stop seeing that last moment before the mirror had swallowed my sister whole.
Nell had thrown me her mother’s grimoire, knowing it was enchanted so that it burned in the hands of a fiend. She had tried to turn the ogres and Pyra back. And she certainly hadn’t finished the spell that would have taken Alastor’s powers and left us both dead. But:
1. Nell had kept the real plan secret from me.
2. Nell had set up all the ingredients for the ritual.
3. Nell had pretended to be my friend.
‘Me?’ Nell snapped. ‘Your family is the one that started all this by going after the Bellegraves. Their greed is—’
‘Oh, here we go again,’ I said. ‘Did you come all this way to have the same argument with me that we’ve already had five times? You know what? If that’s the case, why don’t you just leave. Go back to the human realm. No one wants you or needs you here.’
‘Oh yeah, I noticed how little you needed my help back there,’ Nell said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘You’d be ashes in the wind without me.’
No. I would have figured a way out of that mess. I was going to figure a way out of this bigger mess, too. ‘Just go.’
‘Fine!’ she huffed. ‘I was getting bored with watching you almost get yourself killed. Good luck.’ Nell turned toward the door, only to spin back again. ‘I guess you don’t even need that, considering all the lives your family destroyed to get a supernatural dose of it.’
My breath steamed out of me. Did she really think I wasn’t already torturing myself over what my family had done? What was it going to take for her to see that I wasn’t like them – I never had been, and I never would be?
The truth was, Nell had never wanted to be my friend. She had never really believed in me.
I’d show her, too.
Delicious. Alastor sighed happily as he watched Nell go. The beats of history never fail to repeat. You both think yourselves above it, and yet you are caught in the same minuet as all the Reddings and Bellegraves who came before you.
That was …
I stilled. That couldn’t be true. We were fighting because we had a valid, epic betrayal kind of reason to fight. Nell and her father had tricked me, lying to my face over and over again about how they were my family and how they were going to help me.
Come on, she tried to help you escape in Salem, a small voice whispered in my mind, before Prue came, before you were hurt, before she ever summoned Pyra …
I shook my head, but once the memory was there, it took root.
Maybe you should go, Nell had said. Leave. Go back to your family.
And if I had, the story might have ended in Redhood. My family would have finished the spell to remove Alastor from my body and destroy him, and Prue would be at home, safe. The thought made me miss my parents and our house so much that my chest actually hurt with it.
What are you doing? I asked myself.
What were we doing? Nell and I weren’t fiends. We were better than that – we had the capability to forgive. Alastor was always going on about how weak human hearts were, how easily mouldable they were to all his careful manipulations and contortions. But that same quality was the very reason the past didn’t have to haunt us.
Nell had helped her father with his plan, but only because she’d been told that doing so would bring her mom back to life. And let’s be honest, I could have been a lot more careful in vetting their identities and accepting their word.
Dad always said that you couldn’t tell who a person was by their words alone, you had to look at their actions for what was really in their heart. Here was a perfect example. Nell had come here to help me, and now I was sending her away because she hurt my feelings?
I rushed out of the shed, hoping I could still catch her before she disappeared into Downstairs’s darkness. ‘Wait—!’
My feet slid to a stop.
Nell was leaning against the side of the shed, her eyes screwed shut. Her throat bobbed with each hard swallow.
She didn’t leave, I thought, relief bursting through me. There was still a chance to fix this …
Oh, la-di-da and hurrah, Alastor said, sounding bored. Try not to make this disgustingly sentimental, will you?
Nell opened her eyes, and I saw my own misery reflected back at me in them. Her lips parted with something unspoken, only to close again. Over and over, she did the same thing –searching for the right words, then changing her mind.
‘Are you sorry?’ I asked her. The vapour moved silently over the fence, spreading its long pale fingers along the ground. Somewhere above us, a crow began to cackle. ‘Are you sorry for what you did, or do you just feel sorry for me?’
Nell’s face was a collage of pain, even as she tried to keep it neutral. I knew exactly how I would draw it – the deepened parenthesis around her mouth, the wrinkle between her brows, the way her eyes skimmed back and forth across the ground.
‘You have to know …’ she began, her voice unusually soft. ‘I didn’t know that it would hurt you, and I didn’t know he had offered Pyra our lives if we failed. He – Henry – he told me that you would be happy to have the fi
end out, and then we could go back to normal. He also told me that the malefactor could bring Mom back.’
The deal that had staked her life, and her father’s life, on helping Pyra get Alastor’s powers. In exchange, Pyra would grant them all the fortune and luck that the Reddings had enjoyed for centuries. But Alastor’s sister had lied about her ability to return the mother that Nell had known; her shade would have come back darker, twisted.
My chest squeezed tight, making it hard to get my next words out. ‘Then why keep it secret? You didn’t have to sneak around or pretend to like me. My family may have the moral compass of a rabid, starving zombie, but they’re at least honest about how much they hate me.’
Finally, there was a flare in her eyes – that was the Nell I knew. ‘We had to keep it secret. If Alastor knew what we were planning, he would have done anything and everything to stop it. And when we found out that he was taking your body for joyrides at night, that only proved to me that Henry was right.’
Accept her help, Maggot. Her repulsive sparkle dust and flimsy spells may be enough to distract the other fiends long enough for us to escape. A witch is a rare catch.
Could you stop thinking about yourself for one second? Just one. Try it.
Done. Done again. And again. Shall I continue this game? There was another second—
I tuned him out. Nell must have thought my dark look was meant for her, because she hugged her arms closer to her body and looked away again. ‘I’ve never hated you. I don’t know what else to say except that I’m sorry. And I don’t know how to make it up to you, except helping you get your sister back and doing whatever I can to break the deals our families made with the malefactors. There has to be some way to do it. I know you won’t be my friend again, but … we could at least work together to stop Pyra?’
Relief coursed through me.
‘Yeah,’ I said with a smile. ‘I’d like that.’
You will never succeed, Alastor hissed. Only a malefactor can break a malefactor contract. It’s our unique power, along with opening mirror portals – wait a dark, forsaken moment … how did the witchling arrive Downstairs?
Prosper Redding: The Last Life of Prince Alastor Page 5