He pushes himself onto his knees, and I sit up. “Mary Elizabeth,” he says. “I know we’re not ready yet, but if the world should finally stop shuddering and decide to dim its light once and for all, I would want to be with you. When those buildings fell, before Miracle Lake came, all I could think was how lucky I was to be watching the end of the world with you. When we do marry it’s not going to be a prison,” he says. “You won’t wish you’re somewhere else and you won’t feel like you want to escape me. We’ll both get to do everything we want, because we’ll be together and that will make everything possible. Life will be the greatest adventure.”
“I don’t understand why this is coming up now.” Did he do something illegal? Is he in danger? Something about this doesn’t feel right.
It’s not like we haven’t had this conversation before, or some version of it, but he seems even more intense than usual. “Is anything the mat—”
“I won’t leave you ever,” he cuts me off. “And I need you to promise you won’t leave me.” He buries his lips against my neck and I arc toward him in spite of my misgivings. His lips are too much of a distraction.
“If I promise you,” I say, struggling to keep hold of my thoughts. “Will you tell me the secret?”
“Promise,” he insists.
“James.” I’m frightened now, all the safety of the Ever Garden burned off. “We’re supposed to trust each other. We should be able to tell each other anything. So what is it?”
“I have always supported you,” he says.
“I know.”
“Even though your internship puts me in a bad place on the streets, and even though it might put us at odds if I end up in the same spot as my dad.”
“You won’t.”
“I might.” His face darkens under the moonlight as irises lean toward us to comfort him. “We don’t know what’s coming for the Scar next and we don’t know who will be in power. If it’s not the Scar on the winning side, who knows what could happen? You know I’m not going to let the Narrows bully the Scar.” He sits across from me. “Well, what if I’ve found a way to take precautions?”
This, this right here is what I was feeling brewing. This is what’s been running under the surface between us. I know it.
“Precautions? Against what?”
“Against weakness,” he says. He looks at me searchingly for a reaction, but I don’t know what he’s saying. “What if I could show you something better than running this town from Midcity, being a cop?”
“James.” The word slides off my tongue, a request. I want him to stop as much as I want him to show me, to tell me everything. “I want to be a cop. I want to run Midcity.”
“I’m going to make all our dreams come true, Mary Elizabeth,” he says, like he hasn’t heard my words. “Do you believe me?”
I don’t answer as he opens his palm and lays it flat, then raises it up between us. My skin starts to sing, my Legacy mark throbbing like a pulse.
A blue light curls upward from his hand, between our chests, which are both rising and falling to the beat of a flapping wing as though we might take flight. We nearly stop breathing as the ball of light hangs in the space between us. James looks unearthly, alien, and brighter and happier than I’ve ever seen him.
And then I’m remembering the shock of blue light during the Fall, the tearing at my head, reaching up from the center of the earth like lightning traveling backward, like angry veins. This looks similar, but is softer, friendlier. It doesn’t hurt and it isn’t separate from me. It’s like a beckoning friend. It’s a part of me, even as it hovers, and it’s warm, exciting, and has a spirit all its own that it’s sharing with us.
“Where did you get it?” I ask him.
“I can’t tell you.”
“I thought we don’t keep secrets from each other.”
“Soon,” he says. “Trust me.”
“Trust,” I say.
Trust, a whisper echoes. Trust us.
“But, James,” I say as the ball of blue light dances around us. “It’s…”
“Magic.” He is staring at the blue light with the kind of focus he usually reserves for me.
“Yeah,” I say.
There is a soft and tingly whir as the light morphs itself into tendrils, spreading to the size of a small watermelon, and the light around it is getting bluer, brighter.
“It wants you to take it,” James says.
Sometimes I don’t see bad things coming around the corner. I didn’t know the Fall was coming. That one took me totally by surprise. Sometimes I don’t see the good things, either, and they can be just as surprising as the bad. Like, I couldn’t have guessed after my family died that James and I would meet each other and fill in all our broken places. Life is always happening, sometimes too fast to catch. But right now, looking at this blue light in front of me, my stomach flipping all around like an eel in a waterless bowl, I can see this blue light is the beginning and the end of everything. And I know I should ask James about it. I should force him to tell me where he got it, what it is and what it means, but I don’t want to because I have a feeling it’s going to be an answer I don’t want, something that will demand further action. And the thing is, James and I trust each other enough to make mistakes. We trust each other so much we don’t have to tell each other everything. There’s freedom in that, and it’s freedom I don’t want to lose.
So I keep looking at this light until I’m a part of it, until I am the swirl and I can see it isn’t just a flat blue. It’s got little tendrils of purple and green and threads of gold at its center. It’s alive and beckoning, its fingers reaching for me. Half a second later, the light shoots into my chest.
James, I whisper, and just like that I know it’s the end of whatever came before it.
This, right now, is the beginning.
James takes hold of me and every memory we’ve ever shared flashes through my mind and between us.
He’s throwing an arm around me for the first time.
He’s telling me about his father.
I’m telling him about what happened to my family.
We are trying so hard not to touch, the space between us, electric. I always know where he is in the room and he always knows where I am, too, like every atom that occupies the space between us knows we should always be touching.
And then we are. Our first kiss nearly ends the world.
This doesn’t make either of us run away.
We run toward each other instead.
This is trust, the blue light says. Open.
We do. I open. When James and I kiss again, lips that have touched thousands of times, it’s as though we have millions of new nerves, as though we understand each other, can predict the other’s movement, until it feels like we don’t have bodies at all and we are nothing but all this light.
All the flowers brighten around us in an iridescent cascade of color. They sway, dancing for us.
“Mary,” James manages, his voice hoarse and ragged. “This is perfect. You are perfect.”
This is what the truth feels like.
It feels like love.
MALLY SAINT IS IN MY BED. HER MOUTH MOVES around the letters of my name. Her skin is tinged green, yellow lizard eyes covered in a milky film, and she is being consumed by flames. She’s crawling closer. She’ll burn my bed. She’ll burn everything. If she comes closer we’ll both die.
But she does come closer and we don’t die. My temperature only rises a little. Mally edges in so her breath is hot on my cheeks. Flames all around her lick at me.
“They’re going to take everything for themselves and there will be nothing left of you,” she says. “There will be nothing left of anyone.”
She pushes through my skin, each layer of muscle and then bone parting to make way for her burning pointer finger. Something comes loose inside me. When she pulls her arm back, she is holding a thumping lump in her hand, and blood drips down her arm in black rivulets.
I clutch at my chest, trying to close the
gaping hole, looking around for something to stop the wound.
“Mary Elizabeth,” she says, holding my heart in her hand. “You’re going to have to decide between your head and your heart. We all do.”
My breath is slipping away and I take her by the wrists. This is what it is to die. There is so much unfinished, so much I’ll never do. I want to call for James, for Ursula, but I don’t have the strength to make a sound. The closer she gets, the more I struggle to breathe. Her perfume is sweet with decay.
“Are you dead?” I ask her, but I don’t think I use my voice when I do.
She places a finger on her chin and looks upward as though the answer is in the ceiling. Then she brings her face close to mine.
“I miss my bird.” She cocks her head to the side. “Have you seen Hellion, Mary Elizabeth?
“Mary Elizabeth, do you hear me?
“Do you hear?
“Mary Elizabeth?
“Mary Elizabeth?
“Mary Elizabeth! Wake up.”
I open my eyes to a blinding light that is white and harsh, and a pounding headache, and for a second I think I’ve been kidnapped and am about to be questioned under a single lightbulb. Then I realize I’m in my room and the backlit creature responsible for the torture is Bella. Who is in my house.
I reach for the bedside table, run my fingers past the half-filled glass of water and the book on forensics I’ve been trying to read, and I try to bring the screen on my phone into focus.
“Six thirty? What the hell?” I don’t even know what time I got home last night…this morning. Probably a couple of hours ago at most. The light. James.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Bella says. “Welcome back to the Scar. It’s another beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky.”
“Bella, how did you even find my house?”
“Elementary, my dear.”
I squint up at her, phone in hand, trying to unblur my room.
She sighs. “I got it from the database.”
“Invasion of privacy.”
“Your aunt let me in. She’s still awake.”
There are texts from James all across my screen.
I love you.
Then: I have to do something today. I’ll see you after.
Then: Have a magical day, with three laughing emojis and a couple of wands.
The smell of Mally Saint still cloys, so waves of nausea roll over me, and I feel my chest, then sink back against the pillow when I find I’m not an open wound; not missing a heart and not filled up with blue light, either. Just regular me: achy, disgruntled, possibly haunted.
Bella, on the other hand, is a ray of sunshine.
“Wow,” she says, flinging the blinds all the way open. “This is some view. Do you realize how lucky you are? You look right out onto Miracle Lake. I can’t see anything from my window except the people next door, and trust me when I tell you that’s not anything you would want to see.”
“Shut the blinds, monstrous human!”
Bella totally ignores me. It’s like I’m not even talking. She’s too busy at the window, gawping at Miracle Lake in an adorable outfit of a T-shirt and high-waisted trousers held up by suspenders. Her makeup is flawlessly neutral and her hair is in a sloppy bun. I bet it took her an hour to get dressed and here she is, crisp and delightful in my bedroom and it’s not even seven a.m.
“Were you in here during the Fall? It must have been right outside your window.” She’s all curiosity and enthusiasm. I must have done something very bad to deserve this fate. “Did you see it?” she says.
“I saw,” I say, and then have to shake off the memory. “Bella, again I ask you. What are you doing in my apartment?”
“Well.” She seems to be thinking. “We’re partners. We have a case. You have not responded to any of my texts. Hence and therefore I had no choice but to come to you. And according to your file, you are free most of the day, which is excellent news because we’ve got no time to waste. We need to find Mally, preferably today, so come on! Let’s get going!”
“Right,” I say. “But I thought we were going to meet after school. At the station.”
“Yes, however…” She bounces onto my bed and crosses her legs in front of her. “I’m going to see if I can speak to those three girls while you’re in your math class. Which reminds me…” She goes into her leather satchel and pulls out some papers. “I did your math homework. That way you don’t have to worry about it and we can really focus.”
“You did my…”
“I’m a whiz on the computer, you know. I found it with the school portal. This math is a breeze. It was no problem.”
“Thank you?”
“Well?” She gives me an expectant smile. “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure having been missing for three days means Mally isn’t going to find herself, and every minute counts.”
“I want to interview Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather with you.”
Bella shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’re a peer. With me they won’t have any preconceptions.
“I already checked and Mally hasn’t used her credit cards anywhere,” Bella goes on. “Not even her city transport card. Obviously she hasn’t showed up anywhere she’s supposed to be, nor is she visiting relatives out of town. So I guess what I’m saying is considering a life hangs in the balance, we should get cracking! We need to discuss all the possibilities and our strategy. And then of course if she’s deceased—”
“She’s alive.”
Bella’s nose twitches slightly as she stops her rant long enough to look my way. “I never said she wasn’t, but we have to consider it’s a possibility. We both know how the numbers work after the first forty-eight hours, and they aren’t in our favor.”
“I had a dream,” I say.
“Dream?”
“Yes, I had a dream about Mally. Dreams are my Trace. So she’s alive and I know it because she told me.”
“Huh.” Bella plops down beside me. “So you’re a Magicalist?”
I’m taken aback by the audacity of her question and the plain way she asked it. There isn’t anything more personal than asking a Legacy her views on magic, and any association cuts close to the bone. Magicalists are extremists, Amagicalists are amoral magic deniers, also extremist, and Naturalists are seen as befuddled, ridiculous, and irrelevant middle-aged house mothers. Any way you look at it, assuming an affiliation is something you just don’t do. But here she is, open-faced and innocent, asking me the most personal of questions.
“I don’t like labels,” I snap. “And I think the Magicalist methods are a little obvious.” They riot, cause public mischief, undermine the city because they think the city council is hiding magic from the rest of us, that they were somehow responsible for the Great Death. “What about you?” If we’re going to have this conversation, it’s going to be tit for tat.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I believe what I see. I don’t see any point in being an Amagicalist. We know it was here once. It does seem like a little bit of a joke that all we get as a reminder of what we once were is West Coast weather and suggestion-responsive cumulus clouds.”
But that’s not true, is it? We also have whatever it is that James was wielding last night. I think of the blue light, the whirring, the feeling like I was finally alive. I can understand why people who had experienced it once would want it again and again, especially if they felt it was their birthright. It makes sense that the Magicalists are so upset. “Well, whether you believe in Traces or not, I had one last night. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I get a dream that isn’t really a dream, and even if most of it doesn’t make sense, there’s always a kernel of something to pay attention to.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Supposing your dream was real or sending you a message of some kind. Did she tell you anything else?” Bella has one eyebrow raised in what I’m beginning to recognize as her most active facial expression. So far I’ve seen it mean she’s being naughty, confusing, o
r saying something she doesn’t quite believe. “Anything?”
“No.” I hear the sickening sound of my heart being dislodged and have to bring myself back to my room so I don’t go into a panic. “She told me she misses her bird.”
You’re going to have to choose between your head and your heart, Mary Elizabeth. I shudder.
“Well, that doesn’t seem like a very useful dream, does it?”
“You know what, Bella? You can just—”
Bella lays her head on the pillow next to mine like we’re at a sleepover. It’s like she has no boundaries at all whatsoever. “Anything else, then? Ideas?”
I watch her profile and consider how easy it would be to smother her. Other than that, I’m not sure there’s a cure for her delirious optimism. I sigh and give in. After all, we’re in this together whether I like it or not. I’ll learn to withstand the twinkle in her eye eventually.
With effort.
“I talked to Dally Star last night,” I say. “You know, the owner of Wonderland?”
“I know who he is. Can’t say I’ve ever been in Wonderland before. Not really my thing.”
I try to imagine Bella thrashing to alt rock on a Friday night or playing pinball croquet, and come up absolutely empty. “No, I bet it’s not.”
“So what did he say?”
“He told me Mally left Wonderland alone Monday night.”
“Well, let’s get that camera footage and prove it, then.”
“Yes, I was going to ask—”
“I’ll do it today!” she says, bouncing off the bed. “Well, come on!”
The smell of the coffee Gia always makes in the morning drifts into my room. I slip a black T-shirt over my head, and Bella looks away, reddening. I grab my badge and tuck it where it can’t be seen, and slide into some jeans, then drag on my boots as my alarm goes off. I guess it’s not so bad. I would be waking up at this time anyway, and actually, today is the first day I really feel like a cop. Yes, I’ll have to get through stupid math and stupid history, but then I’ll have my first afternoon as a real, actual detective on a real, actual case.
At Bella’s eyeline is a picture of me, my parents, and Mirana visiting what was once the enchanted forest.
City of Villains Page 6
