by Jen Klein
I reached a corner and peered out over the edge. I wasn’t sure of the hospital’s exact location, but in the direction I was looking—which I thought was north—I could see the Santa Monica Freeway. I had to be in Baldwin Hills or nearby. When I looked straight down (which made me dizzy), I could see the entrance to an underground parking garage and a busy street. Lots of pedestrians, even at this hour. Lights at every intersection.
I didn’t see a gleaming blond ponytail. I didn’t see anyone running away. I didn’t—
“Looking for this?”
I flinched. Corabelle stood right beside me, holding up my boot. I made a reflexive grab for it, but Corabelle chucked it over the railing. It fell to an unoccupied patch of pavement.
“Hey, that’s a real Doc Marten!”
She laughed. Her laughter was easy, relaxed, almost musical. “And I’m a real succubus,” she said. “Boo!”
I tried to back up, but I was already pressed against the railing. “Are you trying to scare me?” I asked. A lame question, yes, but also an effort to buy time while I struggled through the information I’d received that day: Sky’s role in my obituary, Uncle Edmund’s knowledge of my sister, now Corabelle claiming to be a succubus.
“Honestly, you scare me,” she said with a disappointed sigh. “You’re rude, and gross, and you never say anything interesting. It’s like you’ve never even seen good makeup or a push-up bra. Being stuck babysitting you has been the assignment from hell.”
I stole a peek at the street below. My lone boot sat there in a pale circle of lamplight. “Does ‘from hell’ mean that you’re giving me a compliment? Seeing as you’re . . . you know.”
“Ugh, you’re not even funny,” she said. “You should drop the attempts at humor. And seriously, a little mascara would really open up your eyes.”
“Look, I’d love to trade beauty tips with you, but I think we can come up with a better topic of conversation.” Inside my head, a bulb brightened. “Like how you can’t be a succubus because I’ve seen you in sunlight.”
Corabelle threw back her head and laughed again. Clear and loud and pretty, like a church bell. “Yeah, well, I’ve seen you in geometry class. Doesn’t mean you like it.”
“So you’re saying succubi don’t burn in the sun?”
“Shit, Jillian.” Corabelle rolled her huge blue eyes. “You of all people should know how rumors work. Once one gets started, people will believe all kinds of crazy things. Now imagine a rumor mill that’s been around for an eternity.”
I jabbed a finger at her. “Fine, but I’ve seen your tongue. It’s totally pink and totally normal and totally human. So that proves it.”
“You’re clueless.”
“You’re a poser.”
Corabelle’s smile shifted. Her gaze hardened even as her mouth very slowly turned up at the corners.
She took a step toward me. I swear the shadows around us deepened. Corabelle couldn’t have possibly grown because my eyes stayed at the same level with hers as they had been, but it felt like she got bigger. It seemed like I was looking up at her now. But maybe I was cowering. She leaned close to me and spoke in a gentle whisper. “I know that you are tremendously stupid. But surely you have enough brains to realize that you, like most of humanity, don’t believe in us because that’s the way we want it. The more legends that swirl around us, the less real we become.”
Cold sweat broke out along my hairline. My mind flashed back to Sky’s words about Santa Claus. Someone, somewhere, in the past had been real. But the eternal rumor mill had turned that real, charitable person into a jolly myth.
“You’ve said it yourself: we don’t exist.” Corabelle’s voice was too deep, her eyes too intense, her stare too menacing for her to be the girl I thought I’d known.
I put up my hands in what I thought was a pacifying gesture. “Hey, I’m not saying you don’t exist—”
“Shh,” she whispered. Her fingers encircled my wrists. Her grip was strong. Stronger than Uncle Edmund’s. Inhumanly strong. Corabelle was still smiling as she moved her face even closer to mine. “Here’s the thing. You’re making an assumption about me. About us. About how we are.”
She parted her glossy, plump lips and stuck her tongue out at me again. For a second, all was okay in the world. The hot, popular girl from high school was just an immature bitch, trying to freak me out. She was not a man-sucking demon. Life still made a tiny bit of sense.
But then, from underneath that tongue—one that would have sent any straight high-school boy into a hormonal frenzy—another shape darted out.
It was long and thin and black.
And it ended in a fork.
Corabelle had a second tongue.
Twenty-Six
I’m not sure how much time passed after the worst version of show-and-tell I’d ever experienced. I do know that I briefly considered throwing myself after my boot.
“You really don’t know, do you?” Corabelle asked.
I shook my head. She was right, whatever she meant. I knew now that I knew almost nothing. I had stumbled into one of those nightmares where you’re being chased but you can’t run fast enough because the whole world has turned to mud. Except this wasn’t a nightmare. I was awake, on the edge of a roof, face-to-face with . . . Corabelle. Maybe that’s why I said what I said. What came out of my mouth in a burst of whispered honesty was this: “I thought none of it was real.”
“You’re the worst.” Corabelle mimicked my head shake. “I have to spend two years of my life watching you when you’ve never even heard of the Abomination, and now you’re trying to engage my services as a tutor? Please. I’m a valuable commodity. I didn’t awaken for this.”
“Watching me? Awaken from what?” The questions fell from my mouth in the order they sprung from my stupefied brain.
“From sleep, stupid.” She looked me up and down. “I should throw you off this roof right now. I’m not falling apart anymore. I’m back on my game. You can be dead along with Todd.”
I pushed aside my guilt and sadness and remorse over Todd (who would now be forever falsely known as a dead meth addict, not as the naïve pre-med student who got caught up in something he’d never imagined). I scrambled for ideas that might possibly save me. “But what if someone steals your next guy? That happens all the time to succubi, right? I can help get that guy back. I can be like your safety net.”
Too bad Dad wasn’t there. Or Norbert. Or even Sky. I was having a conversation, in English, on a rooftop, with someone who killed people and had a venomous second tongue. This was now my life.
“Imprinted energy is more satisfying,” Corabelle informed me with a shrug. “Imagine eating salad all the time. Sure, there are decent salads, and you’d be fine and alive, but at some point, you’d be sick to death of leafy greens. All you’d want would be a piece of freaking chocolate.”
“So Todd was your chocolate?”
She turned away and slumped against the railing, resting her forearms on its top and gazing out over the city lights. “Yeah, he was my chocolate. I’ll kinda miss him.”
I stared at her. “But we found him alive. You could have kept him.”
Corabelle sighed. “He was a liability. He made me weak. Which was not good, since I was awakened to watch you.”
“In school?” I whispered, baffled.
“Yeah, and it was crap. No other succubus got stuck in stupid high school for two years. I ended up being a part of it. I hated you all, but I got used to being one of you. I started to feel like one of you.”
Sadly, I knew what Corabelle meant. It wasn’t much different than what Sky had been saying about Santa Claus. I had spent so much time cultivating “Jillian Cade,” unfeeling badass, that the image had started to become real. I believed in my own myth too.
“Ugh, it’s such a weakness,” said Corabelle. “All that love crap and the thing wh
ere you want to be nice to someone else and pretend to listen to them about their boring day.”
An image flashed into my mind. It was the photo that I’d seen in Todd’s room, the one of Corabelle hiking. The one where she had looked happy . . .
Then Corabelle’s fingers tightened around the railing, and she snapped off the top bar like it was a popsicle stick. I jerked backward as she whirled to me, holding what was now essentially a rusted metal club. “My gifts were being squandered,” she informed me. “Sure, I went against regulations, and sure, I engaged the Abomination—”
That word again. It made it through to my brain despite the loud beating in my ears.
“—but it’s not like I had a choice! It’s not like I volunteered to be on guard duty. He made me!” Corabelle was becoming more agitated. Frenzied, really. She bore down on me. “This is all your fault. You don’t deserve to be here! You were never supposed to be here!”
I tripped on something behind me and fell backward, landing on the pavement by the edge of the roof. Loose pieces of concrete dug into my palms. I tried to scuttle away from her like a crab. Corabelle raised the metal bar over my head, and the sound of my pulse turned into a rushing stream, a river, a waterfall. It was deafening, thunderous, way too loud to make any sense, and Corabelle had to hear it because it was booming out of me, over us both.
Corabelle froze, except for her golden-fire hair whipping in the wind. The wind that had suddenly erupted around us. We looked skyward at the same moment—the moment we were bathed in a blinding glare of light.
It wasn’t my pulse, after all. It was a helicopter. A sleek, black helicopter. It settled atop the H painted in the roof’s center. Blades still whirring, its door opened and stairs descended.
A dark angel stepped out.
At least that’s what I thought in that moment.
Corabelle LaCaze was a succubus. So calling this guy a “dark angel” (in my brain) made sense, given the circumstances, which didn’t. Besides, he wasn’t a doctor; this wasn’t a medevac chopper. He was a tall, slender guy in black, loose-fitting clothing. He could have been in high school, or he could have been ten years older; it was impossible to tell. His face was unlined, blemish-free, framed with dark, straight, chin-length hair. His cheekbones alone screamed “angel.” Or the world’s most terrifying GQ model. He started toward us.
“Hide me,” Corabelle yelped.
Now I had to process that she was scared. Corabelle: a fiend, who just a second ago was about to kill me. I stared at the guy as he drew close enough for me to see his gray, almond-shaped eyes. I scrambled to my feet, making an attempt to smooth my hair. After all, I had a pretty good guess at who was now looming over us, all dark and chiseled and intimidating. I stuck one hand out toward him.
“I’m Jillian Cade,” I said. “But you probably already knew that.”
He didn’t take my hand, so I dropped it. He shot a glance at Corabelle before turning back to me. In a smooth, melodious voice, he asked, “And who do you think I am?”
“The Abomination?” It came out like a question.
Corabelle flinched. “I did not tell her that,” she said. “I swear I never said that—”
“No,” he interrupted in that soft voice. “I am not the Abomination.”
I couldn’t stop myself from saying it: “You’re not?”
“No,” he said again. He took a step closer and peered down into my eyes. “Jillian Cade, you are the Abomination.”
Corabelle took this opportunity to bargain with whoever this guy was. He was not the Abomination, because that delightful moniker apparently belonged to me. Now that I heard it, it was a perfect summation of the image I’d created at school. The fake/real me.
“I know I broke the rules, but I had a really good reason,” Corabelle was saying. “You have to hear me out—”
“The job you were given was a simple one,” he interrupted. “Keep quiet. Watch the Abomination. Report any signs of self-awareness.”
I was self-aware enough to know I needed to get out of there. If Corabelle LaCaze was afraid of Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Terrifying, then it only made sense for me to be too. My gaze slid over to the emergency door where I had emerged onto the roof. Surely someone else would come up here. A freaking helicopter had landed. All I had to do was live long enough for backup to arrive, right?
“I was smart to engage the Abomination,” Corabelle argued. “We don’t know what using her powers could lead to.”
He turned to me. “Have you heard the call of our kind? Are you pulled in the direction of the bridge?”
The bridge.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out memories of my mother writhing on the floor, a corkscrew of screaming insanity.
“Jillian Cade,” Dark Angel said.
My eyes popped open.
“You have never been educated about your heritage—”
“Allow me,” Corabelle interrupted. “Jillian Cade, you’re the daughter of a traitor and should have been killed at birth.”
I let the words sink in. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “traitor” (Dad was a run-of-the-mill con man), but the second part felt overly harsh, even for someone who wanted me dead. I couldn’t help who’d given birth to me. I hadn’t asked for my family, not by a long shot.
“Quiet,” Dark Angel said. “Killing the Abomination could destroy the bridge.”
“We don’t need armies to cross over,” Corabelle retorted. “Enough of us have awakened to be the army. Let’s take control for once and—”
“You don’t make decisions,” he told her. “You receive instructions.”
Corabelle trembled. “You are wasting my innumerable talents,” she said through gritted teeth before whirling in my direction. “I told you. This is your fault.” Her fingers whitened around the rusted metal railing she was still holding.
I glanced between the two of them. “I don’t even know what’s going on,” I whispered. “How can anything be my fault?”
“Your mother betrayed the Pact,” said Corabelle. The way she pronounced it, the word definitely had a capital P. “She was one of the seven traitors.”
Wait. Mom was the traitor Corabelle was talking about?
Corabelle glared at me. “She stayed awake and hidden when all else slept. She was the breaker of laws and the destroyer of worlds. She coupled with a human.”
“Enough!” thundered Dark Angel.
But Corabelle’s anger issues were stronger than her ability to censor herself. “You were the disgusting result,” she finished.
Not that her words were necessary. No, it was all clear: I’d had the pieces wrong before. I had missed this entire puzzle. So had Norbert. So had . . .
Actually, I had no idea what Sky had missed or what he knew. But at least now I knew a few things.
My mother: not a human.
My father: the human she had coupled with.
Me: the result.
The Abomination.
Corabelle lunged forward and jabbed my cheekbone with the metal. The jab was hard enough to snap my head back, hard enough to snap my brain back to my present danger. “We’re all supposed to be thankful for the awakenings, but . . .”
The guy—Dark Angel or whatever he was—stepped in. He plucked the railing out of Corabelle’s hands as easily as if it were a rattle and she were a crabby toddler. She gasped and leapt backward, but he was faster. In a single step, he’d seized her. Behind us, the helicopter’s blades gained speed. Dark Angel lifted Corabelle in his arms and carried her to the railing.
She twisted her neck to look back at me. “He’s going to kill me,” she said. “He wants you to watch.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. She was right: it definitely seemed that way.
“Are you?” I asked Dark Angel, mopping at the blood I felt trickling from my cheekbone.
He nodded.
Against all odds, I felt a surge of indignation. Even . . . yes, sympathy. I knew what Corabelle was feeling, because she’d made me feel the same way. No one deserves to be murdered in cold blood. Not even a horrible, life-sucking succubus.
“Maybe you don’t have to do that,” I said. “We can all work this out, right, Corabelle?”
Corabelle shook her head. “God, you’re such a human.” It was definitely not a compliment.
“I’m trying to help you here.”
“Well, don’t,” she snapped. “I didn’t get awakened just so my last moments could be spent accepting help from the half-human Abomination.”
Dark Angel looked at me. I kept my eyes on Corabelle.
“You loved Todd,” I said, taking a step toward her and ignoring him. “I saw a picture he took of you. It was the only time I’ve ever seen you look happy.”
“Yeah, well, you people are contagious. Hanging out with you all the time, your humanity rubs off. That was the part of me that loved him. The part that was human. The part that was weak.”
“We can’t help being weak,” I said, coming closer. “We can’t help that we’re not as strong as you.”
“It’s not your bodies that are weak.” Corabelle’s nostrils flared. She zeroed in on the wound on my cheek. The one she had given me. “Blood of the seventh,” she hissed. She bared her teeth, and her black tongue darted out between them. “I will kill you.”
“Please don’t,” I whispered.
“She won’t,” Dark Angel said. And with that, he threw Corabelle off the roof.
For as long as I live—whether it’s the threatened six months or another eighty years—I will never forget the sound of Corabelle’s final scream. It was high and loud and terrified.
