by Helena Maeve
She felt the world fall away, like the bottom of a cheap knockoff handbag dropping under too heavy a load.
Chapter Nine
St. Louis, twelve days before
Felix blinked in the sight of them, but the expression that twisted up his features clearly said that he wasn’t getting it. “But you just left a minute ago—”
“It’s a long story,” Eve gritted out. “Be a good boy and help me before I drop him.” Neil had managed to stay upright until the rift had closed behind them, but no farther. It was a good effort.
They had woken up in the bread factory, what must have been seconds before they’d left. The gears and pulleys were still grinding away with screechy noises, but the man who had switched them on had been nowhere to be seen. Eve didn’t believe he’d vanished, but she had more immediate concerns. The ghostly miscreant wasn’t going to need her help getting home.
Lucky him. Between the two of them, they got Neil past the threshold and into the living room where Eve had only just spent the night. Her body’s imprint was likely still embedded in the couch cushions and yet it felt as though a lifetime had passed since she’d lain there.
“You’re tracking mud,” Felix observed with a frown.
“Yeah? Try not to faint.”
Felix rolled his eyes. “What happened, did you fall into the hedgerow?” He seemed to appreciate the possibility, because he offered it with the twist of a mean smile playing across his lips.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so wait until Neil’s in better shape. Pretty sure he’ll be needing someone to talk to.”
“Because you think I’m so gullible when it comes to my brother— Wait. You’re not staying?” He actually looked surprised. True, as far as he knew it had only been a day since Eve had threatened to break a man’s neck if he didn’t point her to Neil’s door. She must have seemed like a flighty sort from where he was standing. Perhaps she was.
Then again, Neil was out cold, his head lolling against the back of the couch. This was the best time to cut and run, to put behind her whatever possible future lay ahead. If she wasn’t around, then they couldn’t hurt each other anymore—not now, not ever. She didn’t think she could run out on him when he was awake enough to notice.
“He hurt his ankle. We gave him something for the pain, but he’s done a lot of walking since… If you know a good healer, I suggest you get in touch before A-Day.” She was already backing away, keenly aware that she didn’t belong here.
Maybe that was why future-Neil was trying so hard to erase her out of existence.
Eve drew her shoulders back, folded her hands into fists. She knew how to make herself stone. “Tell him I’m sorry.”
“What for? And who’s we?” Felix asked, confused. “There are ghostlings popping up all over the city like mushrooms after rain—”
“He’ll know what to do to fix it.” Neil always seemed to know more than he should. Perks of being magically inclined. Eve hefted her backpack and focused on putting one foot in front of the other. If she didn’t acknowledge Felix’s calls, his invectives, it was as though they weren’t there at all.
The storm had calmed to a sullen drizzle. The path leading away from the Riccards’ front door was wet with puddles and a few intrepid worms, both of which Eve tried to avoid on her way out. She shivered as she hit the rain-spattered street. This was for the best. Had she breezed out of their lives the moment Felix had given her back her cash, none of this would’ve happened. Neil would have escaped unscathed. There would be no oracle poisoning whatever seeds of friendship had grown between them.
She was going to call it friendship, but it was so much more.
I love him. It was because she loved him that she had to leave. Whatever was written in the cards for them, it was nothing good. The only way to spare them both was to walk away. Eve had done it before, but not for herself or Neil.
She hadn’t known, when she was just nineteen, that loyalty had to be earned.
She rounded a bend in the road, considered chancing the subway. After too many days spent traipsing underground, she chose to stick with the drenched sidewalks. Splashes of runoff sprayed her ankles when she hit loose pavement and she thought of the Parisian metro and the oracle who was waiting for the end to come find her in the catacombs.
No, Eve thought, not the end. The oracle had mentioned her lord and master—whoever that was.
Something teased at the edges of Eve’s memory, a fragment of something she’d heard way back in her youth, when she and Neil had first ventured into the oracle’s den for a reading. It was one of those incidents that in retrospect seemed funnier than it had been as it was happening to them. And memory was not impervious to the rot of time.
She had to consider the full picture, knowing what she knew now.
Sure enough, a blind palm reader would’ve had a hard time turning a profit in a city suffused with all kinds of supernatural beings. She should have been driven out by covens like the Riccards or packs of shifters, gangs of fae and other creatures that ran the soothsaying racket. There was little enough chance that she hadn’t encroached on someone’s territory and St. Louis wasn’t known to be tolerant of trespassers.
By necessity, the oracle must have had someone to stand for her—her so-called lord and master.
Eve slowed her steps.
Why had the oracle known exactly what level of pain Neil could endure, or how he was to go about opening the rift? She had said it herself—she wasn’t a proper witch, she knew only fragments. She calculated odds. She offered no certainties.
“You know.”
Two words, spoken in a familiar voice but not through a familiar mouth. Eve knew it before she spun around, claws snapping from the meat of her fingers like switch blades opening at the press of a button.
“There’s no need for that,” the gray man said. “I’m not here to hurt you.” He looked just like Neil—just as pale and blue-eyed, his high cheekbones and wide mouth leaving Eve scrabbling to hang onto her dread.
It wasn’t hard to do. The oracle had seen to that with her parting volley.
“Who are you?” Eve growled. “What do you want from me?”
He canted his head, something indulgent and sad entering his gaze. “Have I changed that much? You know who I am, Evey… You’ve always known.”
He was Neil’s future, just like the woman who’d been hiding inside the Briars facility was Eve, in another life.
“I know Neil wouldn’t have left me locked in a cage while my pack was massacred,” she shot back, defiance being just about the only weapon she had against a seasoned warlock. “He wouldn’t have killed them—”
The man who wasn’t Neil winced and flickered in and out of sight before Eve’s very eyes. He didn’t deny the charge. “I didn’t mean to kill them, but they wouldn’t let me see you… What was I supposed to do? I heard your summons.”
“No, you didn’t. Neil never came for me.”
“Perhaps not immediately. I scried for you. I opened every mirror and looked in on you so often I could retrace your every step.” Was that tenderness in his gaze or guilt? Eve honestly couldn’t say and he went on before she could make up her mind. “But it was too late. I saw them wheeling out the bodies and I knew something terrible had happened. I knew I had to go back and get you out of that hellhole. I learned how to open the rifts so I could save you—”
“From what?”
“From them! Your pack— They would’ve led you to your death if it wasn’t for me!” His eyes were pleading with her to believe what his mouth was saying. And, shamefully, Eve had to admit that a part of her did desperately want him to be in earnest. It would make things so much simpler.
“You visited the oracle.”
“Yes. And I transported her away— Eve, it can be done! I’ve proven that—”
“I know you have,” she said. “I was at the Briars.” She saw it in his eyes, the moment her answer registered. “You didn’t see that coming, did you?
”
“How—?”
“You did it. The old you.” The one who wouldn’t have massacred my people with impunity, Eve wanted to add, but she held back her venom. She needed to be careful, to strike like a cobra when the moment was right.
That there was a blood debt to be paid never paled from her thoughts, however much she might have wished that the settling of accounts could be avoided.
The man who wasn’t Neil took a step closer to her, his hands outstretched. They were veined, scarred, ugly things, though he didn’t look all that old. “I’ve spent two decades looking for you. Losing you.”
“I’m alive and well,” Eve countered. “So I guess that’s your cue to go back to wherever it is you came from.”
“Go back?” Neil-who-wasn’t frowned. “Yes, I suppose I will… But not without you.” He didn’t grab her with his hands—that would’ve been too easy, too human of him and Eve might’ve dodged his long reach. Instead, he gave a sharp jerk of the chin and forces well outside her control propelled Eve into his arms. He clasped her tighter than Neil would’ve done. “Don’t fight me.”
“Don’t bet on it,” she growled around razor-sharp fangs.
She could feel the pull of the rift around her, digging its fishhook teeth into her flesh. It didn’t immobilize her, but it made movement more difficult, like slogging through mud. She didn’t have much time.
“Let me go, Neil! Please!”
“I can’t!” He just about sobbed saying it.
I’m his prize. But she couldn’t go with him, couldn’t save him.
The street wrapped around them, space and time folding like the turning of a page. The stars themselves seemed to be blinking out one by one, realigning to suit a different place, a different time. A smell of sulfur and dead things rose in her lungs.
The Briars had been Eve’s mistake—hers to fix and suffer the consequences as best she could. But she didn’t need saving. Not by Neil, at least. There was only one way out of this and it began with her teeth pulling out his jugular.
Blood sprayed her in a fine, crimson mist, still warm from the open vein. It tasted of ichor and copper, and something much stranger than that—wild grass, maybe, or wild game. She bit deep, sinking her teeth into his flesh with intent to kill. Her animal instincts had always been far stronger than her self-restraint. By the time she realized what she’d done, it was already too late to stop.
The warm light of the rift died like a candle flame abruptly snuffed out, releasing them both. Gradually, the world around them resolved into shadow and shape, but all Eve could see was the betrayal in Neil’s eyes as his knees gave out.
She caught him before he hit the concrete, cradling him as best she could while he flickered in and out of being, one moment physical and whole, and the next little more than white noise. He kept staring up at her, though, his gaze liquid and gray, like two pools of light in the darkness.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—” Her regret was meaningless.
He tried to answer, but there was blood in his mouth, just like there was blood in her mouth, and he was choking on it, drowning. You have to help him. It wasn’t the shaking of her hands that stopped her from following through.
She felt Neil expire in her arms. It didn’t leave her cold.
* * * *
To his credit, Felix said nothing when he opened the door to find her on the porch, bloodstained and tear-streaked. He gestured her inside with a jerk of the head and helped her set down her battered backpack. Her own hands were shaking too badly to manage the task on their own.
“If you could take your boots off, I’d appreciate it,” he said after a long pause. “The carpet is very temperamental.”
For a stuck-up little shit, he proved accommodating. Eve toed off her boots. They were pretty mangled, anyway, subject to her claws pressing repeatedly through the leather until they had finally punched through.
She didn’t need Felix to tell her where to go. Even banned from setting foot inside this house by pack order and witchy disapproval, the evenings she had spent scaling the annex roof and letting herself in through Neil’s bedroom window were some of the happiest in memory. She clung to them now as she eased his door open and collapsed, still fully dressed, into his bed.
Not much had changed since her last visit. The single bed had been replaced by a modest queen and the glossy posters on his walls were gone, but otherwise his bedroom was the same as she remembered it—dark walls, cobwebs on the ceiling, and a faint hum, like a woman warbling a single, soft, discordant note through the woodwork. Once upon a time, it had freaked her out. Then it had made her jealous.
It was comfort now, to know that this was sanctuary for Neil.
He cracked an eye open when he felt the mattress dip. “What happened?” His words were slurred. Felix must have given him something to help him sleep.
“I’ll tell you in the morning,” Eve said and this time, she meant it. “Go back to sleep.” She was planning to be right here when he awoke.
She had no memory of closing her eyes and she had told herself that she wasn’t tired. Then again, she hadn’t slept more than a handful of hours in the past forty-eight and watching a man who bore her lover’s face die in her arms—die because of her—was too much for her addled mind to handle.
* * * *
When Eve blinked her eyes open again, a thin blade of sunlight was just creeping timidly over the edge of the horizon.
She thought of Paris after the asteroid shower they were due for in a little over a week and she thought of the sad little bedroom they had commandeered for their own while they were there, living on borrowed time. There was no mistaking one for the other. She knew where she was. She could feel Neil’s body heat beside her.
This time, she was the one to get up before Neil, who still slumbered as she peeled off her clothes and helped herself to his shower. There was only cold water left in the pipes—or maybe the boiler just didn’t like her very much, anything was possible around here—and the mirror above the sink distorted her features like a circus freak show. After the evening she’d had, a little pettiness did nothing to unsettle her.
She emerged from the shower damp but clean, the blood under her fingernails scraped away until the skin was pink and tender, and curiously sensitive when Neil reached for her hand.
“I thought you came back… Felix said you’d gone. He’s a filthy liar.”
“He’s not,” Eve said. “What are you doing?”
Neil had jolted out of bed and opened the windows. “Making sure the sky didn’t fall. Did I hear you right? You defended my brother?”
Despite herself, Eve found a small smile tugging up the corners of her lips. “I did.”
“Why?”
“I had a run-in with our favorite doppelganger. He, uh, he won’t bother us anymore.” There was never going to be a good time to bring it up, so Eve bit the bullet and gave Neil the condensed but unedited version of what she had done. She told him what the oracle had said—her cryptic warnings and the way they seemed designed to make her fear the man who had once been Neil. It wasn’t an excuse, but it had made a difference in how she had handled their unfortunate run-in.
She told Neil that she had summoned him, once, back in the days when she had realized she didn’t really want to be a prisoner for white coats to poke and prod at with scalpels. The price to pay for becoming better just hadn’t seemed worth it anymore. “I knew I made a mistake letting you go, but it was too late.”
She also told him about what his other self had said, about seeing the body bags and thinking that meant Eve was going to die—about going to the Briars out of some misguided desire to save her. “He killed everyone else because they wouldn’t let him near me— Is that even possible?”
“You’d be surprised what anger can do to heighten a sorcerer’s gifts,” Neil said balefully.
After the rifts he’d opened and the way they had moved, not just across continents, but across time, Eve couldn’t imagine
finding anything about his preternatural agility surprising. She kept the thought to herself. “None of the rifts were accidental, you know… It turns out your future self was opening them. They probably happened around me because I was constantly on your mind.”
“Sounds like very modern stalking.”
Eve choked out a mirthless bark of laughter, rolling her shoulders against the headboard. “I suppose it was.” She hadn’t perceived it like that when it was happening and by the time she understood the whole picture, the onus of responsibility was fully on her shoulders. She had to break free of Neil’s heartache. She hadn’t meant to kill him in the attempt.
“I had no other choice,” she said, apologizing without knowing why. Neil hadn’t accused her of premeditating the attack.
He didn’t seem to doubt her word about anything so far. But he was brooding, his lips pursed into a tight, hard line. It can’t have been easy to hear—she had just confessed to taking his life as he had tried to save her own. And she didn’t think that given the opportunity to do it again she’d do it differently.
“Which I suppose leaves crazy oracle lady stuck in a French subway station, waiting for Godot…” Eve finished, looking down at her hands. A killer’s hands. At least I didn’t kill my pack. It was easier than meeting Neil’s eyes, if not half as productive. Her calloused palms couldn’t tell her if he was horrified, angry or simply scared. She didn’t know much about his recent romantic history, but she felt confident that he didn’t become involved with many women who would murder him if given the opportunity—any version of him.
The mattress dipped as he sat down. “Well. Shit.”
“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah…”
“So I’m destined to become a mass murdering lunatic and you’re the one who gets to put me out of my misery, so to speak?” Neil sighed, the sound muffled by the press of his palms against his face. “We make some pair…”
