The Last Life of Prince Alastor

by Alexandra Bracken

  But the real problem was that Prue wasn’t the only human who saw them.

  When the tide of crimson rats swept up through the fiends’ feet, writhing and squirming as they raced toward the town square, the residents of Redhood opened their mouths and let out a soul-chilling collective scream.

  Nell and I spun toward each other. I couldn’t even get the question out.

  “I don’t know!” she said. “That must have been what we felt before—the glamour’s been removed!”

  The who and why of it fell away, trampled by the terror of the moment. With only one exit and entrance into the square, the residents of Redhood charged forward blindly, desperate to find an escape. They crushed their ornately carved pumpkins into pulp underfoot, slid through the wet leaves on the ground, and shoved each other to get away. The musicians clung to the railings of the elevated gazebo as if they were on the bridge of a sinking ship.

  Every muscle in my body clenched at the horrible sounds of their terror. Kids—little babies—began to cry. I couldn’t tell where one scream stopped and another began.

  “No. No! I hate this stupid town!” Harry, the chestnut cart guy, ripped off his hat and threw it to the ground. “No one even says thank you! You can all save yourselves!”

  He ran up the opposite end of Main Street but didn’t get far. The rats and a pack of crocodile-sized lizards quickly swept up the street after him, knocking him off his feet and carrying him away. A moment later, his cart toppled over, too.

  The fiends broke ranks, scattering with booming shouts. The ogres thundered toward the shops and homes on Main Street, waving axes, clubs, and staffs. The goblins scampered toward the town square, linking arms to block the exit. Though they only reached a little past the humans’ knees, they snarled and clacked their teeth, flicking and flapping their fine robes. The few residents that had escaped the bottleneck in the park were dragged back by the scruffs of their necks.

  The sight of my teacher Mr. Wickworth hyperventilating as two lycans clamped down on his jacket and carried him toward where the others were imprisoned kicked me square in the ribs. The few people who tried beating the goblins blocking the exit with purses and backpacks were immediately tackled to the ground.

  Prue hooked her arms through mine and Nell’s, dragging us out of sight behind the fallen chestnut cart. She was panting hard, but her face was set with determination. “Well, they’re not eating them, at least?”

  That was the thing I’d truly been afraid of. The fiends scratched and nipped at their prey, but only to contain them. It was almost like they knew that making the residents of Redhood watch as their world was destroyed would be a far worse punishment than death.

  Or they were planning on using these people for something else.

  Lycans leaped up to snap the wooden street signs into pieces. Down came the walls of wood, of brick, of stone. The ogres lowered their heads like bulls and charged through all the rubble. Goblins smashed through the glass of the Fair Lady, Grandmother’s favorite clothing shop, emerging a few minutes later modeling their finest dresses and vests.

  Hobs climbed the gazebo, tearing the pristine white wood apart plank by plank. The demonic rats ate the roses and other flowers, vomiting them back up on the shoes of the terrified residents around them.

  Within minutes, Main Street was unrecognizable.

  I stood there, watching it all. Unable to stop them. Unable to even move.

  What do I do?

  Glass exploded a few feet to the left of me as fiends tore through a storefront. Pain seared my left shoulder, making me fall back from where I’d been standing. The girls both darted to the left, moving to the better shelter of a nearby car.

  Maggot! How many times must I tell you to flee destruction before it destroys you! Alastor fumed. Now look what you’ve done to yourself!

  I wasn’t suffering any more delusions that Alastor had ever cared about me beyond needing to keep my body alive. The vibrations of anger that fanned through my blood confirmed as much.

  Biting my lip, I forced myself to look back over my shoulder. A shard of glass as long as my hand protruded from where it had stabbed into the muscle and skin, stopped only by my shoulder blade. The area around the wound was gushing blood. It soaked through my undershirt and cloak in seconds.

  You’re lucky it missed your lung, you mortal fool! Alastor ranted.

  Carefully, to avoid cutting myself on its jagged edges, I pulled out the shard. It made a horrible sucking noise. My vision went hazy.

  What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?

  “Two for me!”

  “Five for me—hit the old bag of bones and it’ll be six!”

  Shingles smacked into the back of Mr. Davenport’s head, knocking the elderly man forward as he tried to flee down Main Street. The goblins on the roof of the restaurant still had a stack of the shingles, and were already taking aim at their next human victim.

  A dog yelped nearby—the McKillip family Lab ran at top speed, leaping over the rats still clogging the street. I recognized the howls that followed; the sound sank through my skin, rattling my bones.

  Howlers.

  A pack of the massive black dogs barreled after the Lab, yipping and snarling at each other to get to their prey first. The screams from the town square started again as townsfolk caught sight of them.

  Pray that Pyra did not summon the warrior ghouls to attend to her in her victorious march into the human world, Alastor said. Or else no one will make it out alive.

  I pressed my hand to the cut on my shoulder, reminding myself to breathe in, breathe out. A grendel passed me, pushing one of the abandoned baby strollers. A silver-skinned goblin sat inside, a child’s costume crown draped over its ears. It waved to the terrified humans they passed, like a queen.

  Another goblin followed, its stroller filled with all the pumpkins it could find. A few of the hobs stood on each other’s shoulders to tip the chestnut cart back up, descending on the sweetened nuts—only to spit them back out in disgust. Within seconds, a horde of sugar-drunk fairies descended on them, bobbing in the air as they carried off armfuls.

  “No—you can’t, Toad,” Nell whispered. “You can’t! There are too many of them!”

  The changeling struggled in the prison of her arms, trying to wriggle his way out.

  Even he was trying to do something. All I was doing was just sitting there, watching the dream that was Redhood come crashing down around me.

  I couldn’t make another deal with Alastor in order to call off the fiends. The malefactor already had everything he wanted from me. I had nothing left to use as leverage.

  There was his true name . . . but somehow, using it felt like it would be taking that last step across a bridge that was slowly crumbling behind me. If I went any farther, I would never be able to get back to a place that made me feel good about myself.

  Even to save your friends? a small voice whispered. Your family? The whole realm?

  No. I couldn’t force someone to do something against their will. Even Alastor.

  I’d told myself Downstairs that I was doing everything for the right reason, but in the process, I’d compromised who I was. I wouldn’t do it again.

  I pressed my hands to my face, trying to block out the sounds of the people of Redhood screaming, the cracks and smashing of nearby homes and businesses as they were reduced to smoldering rubble.

  The truth set in, heavy and unforgiving. Even if I compelled Alastor to order the fiends back Downstairs, it wouldn’t do any good. They didn’t consider him their leader. They would answer only to Pyra.

  “Is there a phone I could use somewhere nearby? I’m hoping Eleanor reached her, but if not, I can at least get the word out to Missy,” I heard Nell say. “She and the Salem coven are only a few hours away—they could banish some of the fiends back Downstairs.”

  Prue sounded as defeated as I felt. “There won’t be anything left in Redhood in a few hours. By then, the fiends will have spread out to all the near
by towns, too.”

  Meaning even more people would be in danger. Would lose their homes. Maybe even their lives.

  I did this.

  If I had kept better control of Alastor in Salem and figured out his plan . . . if Prue had never been kidnapped . . . if I hadn’t ordered Alastor to open the mirror . . .

  Yes, Maggot. It is your fault. You have truly lived up to your Redding name. Look at the heartache, the destruction you have brought to those people you claim to love.

  All I had wanted to do was the right thing—to save my family—and I’d managed to destroy everything in the process.

  Where were my parents? At the Cottage or traveling? Did it matter as long as they weren’t here?

  I gazed out over the town I had grown up in. The uncomfortable, stiff, perfect place that had always made me feel like I was wearing shoes that were two sizes too small. The people who had called me names and told me I wasn’t worth anything—that I didn’t deserve the family I’d been born into, and the name I had never asked for.

  But if I cleared away those feelings, what was left was something very different. Something that might have been love. I rubbed the back of my hand across my forehead, swallowing the thickness in my throat.

  It was like the hidden da Vinci painting they had found in that castle in Italy, masked by twenty layers of whitewash. The dark truth of Redhood and the Reddings had been hidden by time, covered up for so long that a different kind of ugliness had been allowed to grow in its place.

  The only way to save it was to start over. There was nothing to be proud of in Redhood’s past, but there was something that could be made of its future. If it survived.

  If I wasn’t going to use Alastor’s name, I could only see one other option to save this realm from being torn apart.

  Toad finally freed himself from Nell’s arms, popping into his bigger, meaner form. His growl sent a few of the nearby goblins scattering. A bundle of hobs began to throw raw food at him from inside the broken window of Pilgrim’s Plate. He swiveled his head around, eyes narrowing.

  “Toad!” I whispered. Crouched behind one of the last benches still standing along Main Street, I waved him over. The changeling darted to my side, lowering a wing to shield me from the sight of the fiends in the park.

  “Can you get the girls to the Cottage?” I asked him. “Prue knows the way. They and anyone there can go into one of the panic rooms.”

  While those rooms featured top-of-the-line safety equipment, they were meant to protect against very human burglars, murderers, and kidnappers. Not monsters from another dimension. Still, it was worth a try.

  The girls had their heads bent together—most likely discussing a plan. Toad’s nose wrinkled in a rare show of uncertainty, but he didn’t try to stop me.

  I took a slow step back from Nell and Prue, then another, until I had ducked around the last standing wall of Pilgrim’s Plate.

  What are you doing, Maggot? Alastor asked.

  By the time they noticed I was gone, it would be too late to stop me.

  I’m looking for my parents, I said, keeping my thoughts even. Cool.

  The trick was not to think about it, or show my hand to Alastor. This would only work if I could keep him from surging forward to take control of my body.

  One step, and then another, and then I began to run. A second after I passed one of the oldest mansions on Main Street, an ogre burst onto its porch, tearing out the door and its whole frame with a swing of its spiked club.

  “Again!” an ogre called from inside. She leaped up onto the centuries-old crystal chandelier and brought it down in a rain of glittering glass.

  Nell and Prue rushed forward from behind the car, hollering like warriors. They ran toward the place where hobs had encircled several families, spraying their babies with blue slobber.

  The youngest meat is always the tenderest.

  Toad swept out after them, soaring into the air. He scooped the girls up with his paws and used his tail to whip the hobs away.

  I didn’t want to see any more of this. I forced myself into an all-out sprint. Before long, I’d turned down Apple Lane, and was facing down my own house at the end of the street.

  I’d always liked that we lived at the end of a small cul-de-sac. It meant that I could look out onto Main Street, which crossed ours, from my bedroom window. It had felt like a seat at the top of the world.

  The houses on Apple Lane had wide lots, their yards broken up by trees and wild blueberry bushes. Their white, perfectly symmetrical colonial faces were differentiated only by the color of their shutters—some green, some red, some blue. Ours were black.

  Those shutters, along with the rest of the front of the house, had been completely torn off.

  My footsteps slowed to a stop as I looked up. I pressed a hand to my aching shoulder and the sticky, fresh blood.

  It was like looking at Prue’s old dollhouse. Somehow, Pyra and the other fiends had blown out the wood, the brick, and the windows, shaving the front of it clear off. The few neighbors who had risked becoming social outcasts by staying home from the concert stood on their front porches, hands clapped over their mouths.

  “Prosper, is that you?” Mr. Featherton called. “Don’t go down there, son, it’s too dangerous!”

  I almost laughed. But I already looked like I’d come climbing down a filthy chimney dressed like a wizard, so I thought it was probably best to not seem any more deranged than I had to.

  “Gas leak,” I told him weakly.

  Shoving my hands into the pockets of my ruined cloak, I shielded my thoughts from Alastor as best I could as I continued down the cobblestoned street. One of the lamps flickered weakly, sparking as I passed beneath it. The fragments of siding and glass were scattered across the front yard, curtains and blankets tossed out into the nearby trees.

  It is beautiful, is it not? Imagine what we shall do to your world once the rest of the fiends arrive.

  I wouldn’t.

  The blood key was back in the tower, unfinished. If I returned through the open portal, I could destroy the mirror, and its passage, from the other side. I would be trapped in the fiend world, but so would the blood key as it and the other magic nearby burnt itself out.

  When the Void did fall over Skullcrush, it wouldn’t just take out me and the key, it would save the human realm from a worse fate.

  Maggot . . . what are you truly doing here? Alastor asked, his voice deepening with suspicion. I’ve been inside your head long enough to know that a foolhardy plan is bound to be brewing by now.

  I ignored him, passing through the front hall, past the door to the kitchen. The fiends had ripped through there, throwing pots around and splitting bags of dried pasta and flour. The table where we’d all sat together for so many meals, laughing, catching up, had been cleaved in half and tossed into the living room’s bookshelves. Priceless paintings were smeared with spaghetti sauce or ripped from their frames. Someone had drawn a smiley face with horns in the dust on the TV.

  All the family pictures that had lined our staircase—something Grandmother had always deemed “unsightly” and “plebeian”—were in shreds. I brushed the broken frames off each step with my foot, continuing the climb upstairs. My heart banged in my ears.

  This was . . . This was the right thing to do.

  It was the only thing to do.

  Prue hadn’t needed me to save her, and never would. My parents would still have one kid. The rest of my family would be glad if I were gone.

  Prosperity . . . ? What are these thoughts? What is it that you mean to do?

  I shook my head, clearing my mind. At the top landing, I stopped long enough to glance toward my room, but the door was shut and had stayed that way. Turning right brought me back into Prue’s bedroom, to the wreckage, to the mirror.

  To the person who had beaten me there.

  She rose from where she had been sitting on the only spot on the mattress that hadn’t been gutted. Its stuffing, as well as the feathers from Pr
ue’s pillows, still drifted through the air like snow. Small flecks had caught in her steel-colored hair, dusting her ever-tight bun. Behind her, the far wall gaped open, revealing the destruction from above.

  Instinctively, I attempted to smooth down my hair and wipe my dirty cheeks against my shoulders. It seemed pointless to straighten what was left of my scorched cloak, but my hands still tried.

  The room reeked of flowers and vanilla, mingling with the sulfuric stench of the fiends themselves. The smashed perfume bottles crunched under my feet as I bent down to pick up a picture of our family from under the fragments of its glass and frame.

  I was exhausted, but when Grandmother turned to me, I met her unflinching gaze head-on.

  “Now, Prosperity,” she said, folding her hands together in front of her. “I must have a word with you.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  My grandmother was standing in front of me—right there. In full color. Breathing. Speaking. But it was like my brain couldn’t grasp that reality. It felt like I was stuck somewhere inside the mirror’s portal, between destinations, turning and turning in a hopeless tumble. Right-side up was suddenly upside down.

  My grandmother was standing right there. In the remains of what had been Prue’s bedroom. Not in the Cottage’s safe room. Not locked away with all of her jewels, furs, and family heirlooms. Right there, dusted with wreckage.

  “What do you think I’m doing here?” she said, her voice as icy and refined as it always was. “I am looking after the family. I may not have been born a Redding, but I always understood I would become a guardian of it. I felt the portal open, and I came to retrieve you and Prudence to take you to safety.”

  The cut she’d made on my left arm using a cursed blade throbbed. I fought the urge to cover it with my right hand.

  “The real question is, what are you doing here?” she pressed. “I think I might have a guess; however, I’d like it to be confirmed.”

  Yes, Maggot. What are you doing here?

  “I’m taking responsibility,” I said. The wound in my shoulder stung. For a moment I couldn’t speak. “For the mistakes I made, and for what our family did three hundred years ago. I’m ending it the only way I can think of.”