“You missed a buckle, Jessup.” Rachel points at a second seatbelt that goes over my lap, not just my shoulders.
“How do you know so much about helicopters?” I ask her.
She flashes a devilish smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I want to know a lot,” I snort. “I want to know where the hell you’ve been. How the hell Ally knew about Maisie. Who the hell this dude is and when I’m going to get my damn coffee.”
“I should’ve told you sooner,” Ally says, adjusting the earphones on her head.
“Yes, you seem to say that a lot.”
“Girls, don’t fight,” Rachel says, but she’s grinning as if she’s having the time of her life.
“Wipe that crazy grin off your face,” I tell Rachel. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Hello, mental patient,” she says with a wave of her hand.
“It’s her face. She can’t help it,” Gideon’s voice filters through the earphones.
“That’s rude,” Rachel says. “I have a lovely face.”
“Prettier than a sunrise over the moors,” he says.
Rachel falls against her seat grinning as if this is the best compliment she’s ever heard. “Yes, let’s go to England. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
My phone pings in my hand and my heart leaps. I have service and a text message. Only it’s not from Lane. It’s from a fabric store that I went to once, ages ago, letting me know I have a 15% off coupon.
“I can’t go to England. I have to check on my boyfriend,” I say. “It’s occurred to me that he may not be answering my texts because Caldwell killed him and buried him in a shallow grave.”
And if he hasn’t, I will.
“He’s not your boyfriend. He dumped you,” Ally says.
I shoot her a look. “Thank you for that reminder.”
“We need to get out of the city,” Gloria adds, more gently this time.
“We can make a pass by Wacker Drive, at least,” Ally says. “We will fly over it won’t we?”
“Yes, but we can’t stop. Minutes. We have minutes before someone will shoot us out of the sky,” Gideon says.
“They won’t shoot us out of the sky,” Gloria says. “Probably.”
Rachel bounces in her seat. “Better practice making really big shields, Jessup.”
“How far until we fly over Wacker?” I ask.
“About thirty seconds,” Gloria says.
I turn on Ally who tries to look all sweet and innocent with Winston in her lap. At least his fur is starting to dry a little and he’s starting to look somewhat snug, tucked into the side of her red coat.
“You have thirty seconds to tell me everything you know that I don’t know,” I tell her.
“That’s not much time.”
“Try,” I insist.
She thinks for a moment, opens her mouth, closes it, and then spills her guts. “Brinkley left me some journals when he died. He said they were just for me. In them, he talked about how he met Gloria, their first case together, which is how I know about Maisie. She was born in the camp to Georgia and Caldwell. He smuggled her out, in that way of his, and then when he got out with Georgia about six years later, they reunited.”
Reunited. Like a big fucking happy family. Without me.
“I’m sorry, Jess,” Ally says, her eyes full of tears. “It seems like it was more of Georgia’s idea than Caldwell’s.”
“Go on,” I say. “What else?”
“It talks about how he met Gloria, their work together, how he became Rachel’s handler and how Gideon came into his life.”
“I’d like to read this journal,” Rachel says with a cocked head.
“Me as well,” Gideon says.
“Me three,” I chime in. “Where are they?”
“A couple are the things we left at Gideon’s. The others are in a lockbox in Nashville.”
“Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of right now,” she says.
“Wacker Drive,” Gloria calls into the headphones. “On your right.”
Ally and I both crane our necks out to look down over the top of the skyscrapers below. Only, I don’t really see the top of any skyscraper because of the smoke.
“It’s gone,” Ally says. “Tate Tower is gone.”
“Not gone,” Gloria says. “Burning.”
Chapter 46
Ally
The smoke clears in the whirl of the helicopter blades and I see the tower, or what is left of it. Gloria is right. It isn’t gone, not completely. What remains is half-eaten with black smoke, half-devoured by flames.
Nikki.
“We have to touch down. We have to check for survivors.”
“Uh, no.” Rachel says. “We need to get out of the city before Caldwell eats our brains like cereal.”
Jesse snorts. “You weren’t scared when you were mouthing off to him.”
“Bravado, kid.” Rachel crosses her arms over her chest. “Have I taught you nothing?”
“There could be survivors down there. We don’t know if they were able to evacuate in time,” I argue. “We can’t just fly away.”
Rachel shrugs. “Better them than us.”
“Jeremiah is a jerk, but they fought by your side,” I remind Jesse. “You have to see if they need our help. They put their lives in danger for you. More than once.”
A strange look passes over Jesse’s face. Her brow pinches and I have a feeling something is wrong.
Something happened, she had said.
“We have to go down,” she says, her voice low in the microphone.
“We are not stopping,” Gideon says.
“It isn’t safe,” Gloria adds.
Rachel folds her arms over her chest, content that she’s won the majority vote.
“How far up are we?” Jesse asks and locks eyes with mine. Immediately, I know what she’s thinking.
She is going to jump. She’s ready to jump now without even thinking.
She’ll become less stable the more power she has.
I could say no. I could refuse to jump from the helicopter because it is reckless, and hopefully that will slow her down. She looks almost excited by the idea of jumping. The alternative is to trust her and leap.
I take a deep breath and unbuckle the strap across my chest. I put Winston on the floor inside a box that I’m sure was meant to hold parachutes or something useful. He looks up at me reproachfully.
“We’re about 450 meters high,” Gideon says. “Why?”
“No,” Gloria yells into the headset, but she’s too late.
Jesse snaps off her last buckle just as I undo mine and she grabs me. One yank and we’re out of the helicopter.
Through the black smoke, we fall.
Chapter 47
Jesse
“This is going to hurt.”
“Protect your head.” Ally screams over the wind tearing at our hair and clothes.
Now that I’m far enough away from Rachel, another partis like me, Gabriel decides to show his pretty face. Well, not his face exactly.
Her or you, he says into my ears. I can’t see much because of the smoke-thick air, but I get the distinct impression of wings extending, black feathers enveloping us.
Her. Always.
The shield glimmers around us, growing bigger and brighter than I’ve ever seen it. We hit something and I scream like a girl. Surprised. I also think I shake Ally a little, wrenching a yelp from her. But whatever we’ve hit, it only knocked us off course a little. I get the sense I’m in a giant hamster ball, tumbling into the ruins of Chicago below.
“You’ll heal. You’ll heal. It’s okay, you’ll heal.” Ally keeps saying this over and over again and I’m pretty sure she is trying to reassure herself as much as me.
I just keep waiting for it. The hit, the moment when my body slams into the pavement and I feel the terrible explosion of pain like I felt before.
One breath. Two. My heart is pounding as loud as a marching
band in my ears.
We hit—something. We shudder, the protective field rippling as a fresh pillar of smoke billows up around us, blocking out our view of everything else. The sound of rock and steel cascades down, clanking against the pavement.
We slam into the ground. I cry out, waiting for another bone-crushing impact, but I don’t feel it. Instead, ash and pavement explodes around us.
I scream and scream as Ally runs her hands up and down my body looking for injuries.
“Stop screaming,” she pleads. “You’re fine. Oh my god, you’re fine.”
I gulp down the last of my scream and open both of my eyes. The purple field shimmers around us, giving us a good foot of clearance on all sides.
“It wasn’t this big before, was it?” Ally asks.
“Caldwell said that all of my partis powers would get more awesome as I picked up other gifts.”
Beyond us, a sheen of smoke and ash dances, blocking out our view of the city.
“Oh—” Ally says, frowning. She kneels down in front of me and wipes her thumb across my cheek. “You have a cut here.”
Her eyes widen in surprise. “Uh, no you don’t.”
I grab her hand. It’s soft in mine. A sudden desperate urge to hold her washes over me. To kiss her. I catch myself staring at her lips. I look away. “Is it weird seeing me heal?”
“No weirder than anything else,” she grins. She brushes off her knees.
You missed your chance, I think. I can’t tell Ally that I love her now. She’s got a girlfriend and the world is falling apart. That’s just stupid. I swallow everything I should’ve said ages ago and search the area.
The dust and dirt from our impact starts to clear, and I expect to see Wacker Drive come into view. It doesn’t. Instead, I see only busted up black concrete everywhere.
We are in a giant hole. A crater. I place one hand over my chest and try to breathe.
“We’re buried,” I tell her. My throat goes tight.
“No, no, this is different.” Ally pushes the hair away from my face. “We aren’t buried alive. We’re in a hole. We can climb out, okay? Jess? Take a breath.”
I suck in a ragged breath. But I can’t get the images of the coffin out of my head, of the dirt falling into my eyes and nose, while I lay there trapped several feet under the ground. Caldwell did that to me—buried me alive. I jumped. This is different. It’s different.
I take another breath with Ally’s hands on my back, rubbing it encouragingly.
“Good,” she says. “Another big breath.”
I take another.
She points up. “See. That’s the sky. We just have to get out of this hole. We’re not closed in at all.”
We start climbing. At first, the shield surrounding us rubs away the busted up pavement and we can’t get anywhere. I have to drop the shield so we can use our hands, knees, and feet to get ourselves out.
My palms are smooth and covered by a film of white chalk, by the time I pull myself out of the crater and reach down to pull Ally out after me.
An irritating cold sweat collects under my clothes. My hands and face are still freezing but my body is hot.
I glance around. My eyes fall on Tate Tower. It looks mostly unharmed, the building whole and windows unbroken, even if the glass is coated with ash.
“Come on,” I tell her. “Let’s go see if Sasquatch survived.”
She doesn’t complain about my nickname for Nikki. She doesn’t even look annoyed.
“She’s probably okay,” I tell her. “She’s…sturdy.”
It’s not a great compliment. I guess I can’t really pretend to care about people that I don’t care about. But I do care about Ally and I hate that she’s so worried.
Gabriel appears beside me in all his winged glory. His suit looks like he just pulled it off the dry cleaner’s rack, but I’m not fooled.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“Be careful.” He starts to flicker as if he can’t hold onto his form.
I jog to catch up to Ally, who is stepping through the busted entrance and into the half buried foyer.
“Don’t get too far away from me,” I tell her. “Something’s up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gabriel is all glitchy like when a partis is around. It could be Caldwell or someone as charming as Jason. Just stay close to me, okay?”
“Okay.” She searches the rubble. “Nikki?”
No answer.
Louder. “Nick?”
Her voice echoes in all that space.
“Hey, Sasquatch, can you hear me?”
Still no answer. Nothing moves.
Ally’s face screws up with concern. “I never asked where the new location was. I don’t see any bodies though. We should check the bunker downstairs and then we’ll go. I can just run down alone?”
A little red flag goes off in my mind. I can’t quite recall why, but something about this idea strikes me as bad. “No, we should stay together.”
Relief washes over her face. Have I really been such an ass that she expects me to take off and leave her at every chance. My chest hurts.
“I’m sorry,” I say, as she pushes open the door to the stairwell.
“For what?” She holds it open for me.
“That I went with Caldwell. It was dumb and unproductive.”
“He had Winston.” She pushes her hair behind her ears. “I just wish you would’ve talked to me first.”
My chest constricts again. “I’m sorry. I won’t take off again without you knowing about it.”
She snorts. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“Really,” I insist. “People are always going to go after you to get to me. Getting far away from you doesn’t work. Instead of chasing me, they grab you and make me come back.”
“Warfare for the lazy,” Ally says, descending the steps. Emergency lights flood the stairwell, but after a certain point, it’s only darkness. “Go for the easy target.”
“You’re not weak.” I sound pissy even to me. “You’re smarter than me. And prettier.”
She spares me a smile. “All right, Casanova. Do you have your phone?”
“Yes, why?”
“I think I dropped mine in the helicopter or on the way down. And I need a flashlight.”
I punch the correct application on my phone and a light shines from the camera’s flash. “I’ve only got a little battery. Sorry.”
Ally points it down into the void. There is a door, but it’s blocked by debris. My phone dies. Ally frowns at it before handing it over.
“If they’re in there, we aren’t going to be able to get them out,” I say. “Aren’t there firefighters for that kind of thing?”
“If they are inside, they should be safe, assuming no one was hurt in the initial blast and they were able to get down to the bunker okay. If not, maybe they’re safe in their new building. The lack of bodies is a good sign, right?”
“Right.” I agree though I’m not sure we’d see a handful of bodies under all this debris.
I let her frown at the abyss for a moment longer before we trudge back up the stairwell. I’m about to ask her about Gideon, but I hear Ally’s sharp intake of breath. I turn. “What?”
Caldwell has her from behind. His hand on the back of her neck.
The world stops. Caldwell’s hands, on a neck. I can’t think. All I can see is his hands wrapping around Brinkley’s neck and snap.
“Don’t.” My body ignites in blue flame. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
His hold on her throat relaxes and I can’t let go of the fact that one of his hands can almost entirely encircle her delicate throat. I try to run through my options. I can’t actually explode now. Maybe if I can hold a shield around Ally at the same time I firebomb, but Caldwell already has ahold of her, so won’t that protect him too?
“What do you want?” I hear the trembling fury in my own voice.
“We aren’t finished and it’s time we settle matt
ers,” he says. “Come to the cathedral on State Street, and we’ll finish what we started.”
My body ices at the mention of the cathedral. The last time I was there, I had to listen to Liza being murdered and I barely escaped with my life.
“No,” Ally says. “Jesse, no.”
“Don’t take her. I’ll come with you now.”
Ally talks over me. “Don’t be stupid.”
“—I will if you leave her here.”
Caldwell releases her and the second he does, I erect a shield around her, leaving myself unprotected. Ally jerks forward, trying to strike him but he disappears, only to reappear on the landing above.
“No, Jess, you promised. You said you’d never leave me alone again.”
It’s hard to look at the tears in her eyes. I’m an asshole, I know it. And an idiot. Have I really learned nothing? I was just here with Winston.
“I know. I’m sorry. But I don’t want you in that cathedral.”
I don’t want you there when I die.
I feel Caldwell grab on to me, and Ally’s eyes double, more desperate.
“I love you.” I don’t know if she heard it, because Caldwell chooses that moment to pull me through the nothing.
Chapter 48
Jesse
Caldwell pushes me away from him and I stumble into a large room. Columns run from the marble floor up to the cathedral ceiling. A huge mural of Mary hangs overhead, one hand over her heart, her other palm out as if in blessing. I remember the last time I was in this room—surrounded by the sound of Liza screaming like her skin was being sliced from her bones.
Caldwell grabs my arm, wrenching me around to face him.
“Hey,” I say. I try to pull my arm away, but he doesn’t let go. Instead, he spins me toward the center of the room: Cindy, Georgia, Jeremiah, a black man, an Asian woman, and Rachel, holding Winston, stand in a circle.
I lock eyes with Rachel. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh you know, one minute I’m in a helicopter trying to comfort a pug that just watched its mother jump, and the next, that asshole is kidnapping me.” She nods at Caldwell.
I try to picture it—Rachel holding Winston, soothing him, and Caldwell popping in and out with both of them in tow.
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