by Chloe Neill
“Right up the middle to the box,” Liam said, talking to the spot where Burke probably was. “We’re right behind you.”
“On my way!” Burke said, and the only things that remained of him were the impressions he left in the grass.
We followed at a run, Liam at my side, gun drawn and shooting at operatives, as he kept an arm around me. I was, I thought, supposed to be saving my magic for whatever awaited me in that box. So I didn’t try to rip the weapon out of anyone’s hand, although I would have enjoyed seeing the look of magic-induced panic on their gun-wielding faces.
“I’ve got Nix,” Liam said, and I could hear that little revengy thread in his voice. He wasn’t just fighting for humans; he was fighting for his brother.
She met Liam with a bansheelike scream, thrusting her staff at him. He dodged it with a kick, aimed a punch at her side, which missed.
Burke came back into focus on his knees in front of the box. “Focus, Claire,” he said, snapping my gaze back to him and the terrified Sensitives.
“Phaedra. Tom. Good to see you again. Rutledge brought you here?”
The guy, who must have been Tom, nodded. “He wants to open the Veil. He threatened to kill our families—to hurt them. He’s already turned so many into wraiths.”
“We know,” Burke said, inspecting the box. It was made of pale gray marble. There were seven golden dials that looked like watch gears scattered across the top, golden hinges along the edges, golden keyholes along the front. Six of the gears were popped up. One was still nestled in its slot in the marble.
“He’s unlocked six so far,” Phaedra said. “He’s been bringing them here, one at a time, making them work the encryption. And when they don’t do it, or can’t do it, he lets the Veil break them.”
“I already gave him my key. I’m so sorry. So sorry.” Tom was sweating, crying, nearly feverish with magic that poured off him. I knew the feeling. Understood it well.
“Don’t sweat it, Tom. We’re going to get you some help, okay?”
“Just hers,” he said. “It’s the only one left.”
“It may not matter,” Phaedra said. “It may not take unlocking the last one. The Veil is wild.”
Burke put his hand on one of the locks, blew out a breath, and concentrated. His image flickered like an old, broken television, but nothing on the box changed.
Phaedra screamed. I looked back. Nix had grabbed her arm; Liam was on the ground a few feet away.
I guessed it was down to me and the treacherous bitch. “Let go of her,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Claire. You know I can’t do that,” Nix said.
“I know you lied to me, and Liam, and Gavin. Were you using us the entire time? Getting information about Sensitives, or just trying to keep us preoccupied so we wouldn’t interfere with your little plan to use Rutledge to get home?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a pariah. To live in hiding.”
“You’re right,” I said, voice dry. “Sensitives have no clue about that, because we’re welcomed with open arms. You’re Consularis. You’re not supposed to be our enemy—you’re supposed to be our friend. And that’s what you’ve been telling us. But here you are, trying to unleash hell all over again.”
I’d had just about enough of bad behavior today. I reached out, wrenched the spear from her hands. I’d surprised her, which was good, but the weapon was so heavy I could barely hold it upright. But at least it was out of her hands.
Nix’s lip curled. “You cannot handle that weapon, Sensitive.”
I caught the sound of fluttering wings, realized I had a plan. “Don’t need to,” I said. “Malachi!” I called out, and using all my strength, and a good bounce on my toes, tossed it above my head into Malachi’s hands.
He landed a few feet away, Nix’s weapon at the ready, and faced her.
I ran back to Liam. A cut on his forehead was bleeding. I patted his cheeks. “Liam? Liam! Wake up, lazy. There’s a near war going on here.”
“How badly do you need me?”
“Pretty bad,” I admitted, relief flooding me when he opened one eye and winced. I managed to pull him into an upright position.
“She beaned me on the head,” he said.
“I got her spear. Gave it to Malachi.”
“Good girl. Gotta get up.” He stood up, blinked, shook his head. “Headache tomorrow. War today.”
There was a scream behind us. Rutledge, bleeding from a cut on his arm, was up and running.
I stuck out a foot, which he caught with his ankle. He went flying, landed five feet away on his face in the dirt. And damn, was that satisfying.
Suddenly energized, Liam climbed to his feet, stalked toward Rutledge, kicked him hard in the side. “That’s for my sister, you asshole, and for all the other lives you’ve taken. Destroyed.”
“Claire!” Burke yelled, a warning. “I need you!”
I glanced back, but before I could run, something hot and heavy lapped at my back, making me instantly dizzy. I lurched forward, had to put my hands on the wing to stop from hitting it.
Tom screamed, hit the ground, clawing at his clothes. Sweat was pouring off his body.
“Burke,” I said, forcing myself to get up, to move to Tom. I dropped beside him, trying to grab his hands before he ripped through fabric and skin. “What the hell was that?”
“The Veil waving closer,” Burke said. “That was the magical equivalent of water lapping at your toes.” Which meant the real thing would take us down altogether. “We’ve got to get Tom and Phaedra out of here.”
He whistled, an earsplitting sound that had me covering over my ears. Within seconds, an angel descended, his dark skin a gorgeous contrast to ivory wings. He glanced curiously at me, then Burke.
“These are the Sensitives,” Burke said. “They need to get to safety, away from Rutledge.”
The angel nodded, and without hesitation plucked Phaedra from the ground and spirited her into the air, wings flapping to keep them aloft.
“Damn,” I said quietly, watching them fly away. I’d seen angels in combat. But I’d never actually seen an angel fly. It was beautiful and haunting, for all that it was still completely terrifying.
Another angel descended, grabbed Tom.
“They’ll be safe?”
“They’re Consularis,” Burke said. “I called with a war whistle, something we worked out during the last go-round. We don’t command angels, but we can ask for their help to keep people safe. That’s how we do it.”
I nodded, and movement caught my eye, and I glanced back across the field, where a woman slipped toward the woods.
She was tall and slender beneath the ComTac fatigues, with long straight hair that fell nearly to her waist. And it was vibrantly red. She turned back, looked in my direction. Her skin was pale, and her eyes, just like mine, were green. The tilt of the nose, the curve of her lips, the long almond shape of her eyes—also like mine.
I hadn’t known my mother. Didn’t have a single memory of her, red hair or otherwise, because she’d died when I was two, the victim of a flu strain that had swept southern Louisiana.
Or so I’d been told.
“Claire!”
My mind racing, I looked back at Burke, who frowned at me, hands on his knees. “Are you all right?”
I nodded vaguely, switched my gaze back to the woman, but she was gone, probably disappeared into the bayou. “I’m fine. There was a woman with red hair. Did you see her?”
Burke’s eyes widened. “No. You’re the only redhead I’ve seen around. Get down here with me, Claire.”
I wanted to follow her, to obsess, to work through who she was. But I didn’t have time to think about it, or her, right now. That was for later. I dropped to my knees beside him.
“Put your hands here and here. We need to cast magic into the box, okay? I think that will reinforce it enough to keep the Veil from splitting. And we need to do this now, because I don’t think it’s going to hold.”
I heard the soft pop before the zing of sound reached me. Burke froze, then looked down at the spreading blossom on his chest. He’d been shot.
“Oh, damn. Oh, damn.” I pressed a hand to the wound, which was warm and wet with blood. A lot of blood. I pushed harder, applying pressure and trying to stanch the bleeding. But there was so much blood.
“Malachi!” I called.
Flutters, the movement of air, and then he was on his knees beside me, eyes wide and lips parted as he looked at Burke.
“I think this is my last battle,” Burke said, coughing.
“Not today,” Malachi said, a promise, and lifted the man into his arms without so much as a wince. He rose into the air, hovering, wings beating against gravity, and looked back at me.
“You have to do it, Claire. You have to close the locks. We don’t have much time.”
“Okay,” I said, wiping sweaty hands on my jeans. “Okay,” I said again, and blew out a breath.
I put a hand on the box, closed my eyes, tried to ignore the screams, the crashes, the pops of gunfire around me.
Sweat rose on my back as the magic in the air grew fiercer, hotter, but I forced myself to concentrate.
It’s a box, I thought. It’s just a box with parts and bits. I know how to move parts and bits. I can even do it with my mind.
So, technically, it was the perfect task for me. If I could make my magic work.
I closed my eyes, felt my magical way through the box. Each of the seven locks was different. There were springs held by tension, and pins that weren’t physical—not really. They were magical. Each tensioned for the Sensitive’s magic, so that only their magic could be used to slip the pins into place, to let the top gear turn into the appropriate slot.
I opened my eyes, concentrated. I didn’t have their magic. But I had mine. And maybe that would be enough.
Instead of large handfuls, I imagined gathering tendrils of magic, thin and gossamer, filament-fine. I pulled them from the air, and, ignoring the sounds of battle, worked to slide them into the locks. It took two tries, my remembering to imagine that the locks were enormous and the magic was small, and fitting them together.
Once it was inside, I concentrated on the movement of the pins, the snap of each spring. One lifted, paused. I offered a jog of magic to the right, and the pin slid home. One of the locks reengaged.
I was getting it, I thought.
I managed two more before the Veil moved again.
Magic flashed over me with blinding light and heat. For a moment, in that blaze of power, I could see the Veil. It shimmered with iridescent color like a soap bubble as it rippled across the ground, back and forth like the line Darby had drawn on the floor of the refinery.
And then I could see through it. I looked through to the other side, past the shimmer, and into the Beyond . . . where they waited. Thousands of them in long columns, battalions of Paranormals prepared for war. They wore the same gleaming armor as the Paras we’d fought before, and that was enough to send my heart racing.
A woman on a black destrier, her skin lustrously pale, her long black hair tied into a tail wrapped with gold that wound across her shoulders, stood in front of her army. Both woman and horse wore golden armor, and she sat like a queen as the horse moved impatiently beneath her.
She froze, snapped her head to mine like she could tell she was being watched. She snapped the reins, moved the horse forward, one shaggy hoof at a time, toward the Veil, her eyes on mine.
She could see me, too. She grinned horribly, shouted something to her troops that I couldn’t hear, and raised her golden spear into the air.
The thousands of troops behind her did the same, sunlight spearing off their golden weapons and leaving spots in front of my eyes.
And then the barrier passed over me again, releasing me to the ground.
I hit my knees, sucked in air, tried to steady myself in the world. It hadn’t killed me, but it certainly didn’t feel very good. The Veil had coated me in magic, and my body had sucked it up like a tempest on desert sand. My hands were shaking with exhaustion, with magic that boiled beneath my skin. I could feel the anger growing, my skin burning with irritation. I’d have to cast it, bind it, if I had any hope of avoiding the agony Tom had suffered, much less getting the rest of the locks engaged.
Or did I?
Maybe I didn’t have to cast it off. Or not the usual way. Maybe there was a way to use the power . . . like a magical locksmith. If I could do one pin at a time with a little bit of magic, couldn’t I do all the remaining pins with all the remaining magic?
I put a hand on the box. It was hot as an oven, and I yanked my fingers back, stuck my fingertips into my mouth to cool them. But I was hot and parched, too, and it didn’t do much good.
Human bodies were not made for magic.
I pulled my sleeves down to protect my fingertips. It hardly helped, but there wasn’t much else to do. This had to get done. That meant I had to do it.
When I was little, I’d fallen down a staircase, and I’d been horribly afraid to climb one again. But the size of the staircase didn’t matter, my dad had told me once. You took one step at a time either way, so you focused on each step.
That’s why I made plans. Because he’d taught me to take fear and break it into tiny little parts. It was easier to beat back the parts when they were small. So that’s what I did.
Step one: Gather the magic.
I had more spinning magic inside me than I needed. But I still didn’t think it would be enough for this. Fortunately, with so many Paranormals in battle, the air was alive with it, and the Veil was right behind me. Great strands of power hung in the air like party streamers—millions of them, waiting to be plucked. And that’s just what I’d do . . . and I’d hope it didn’t kill me in the process.
I grabbed them by the imaginary handful, pulling one swath of thread after another toward me, braiding them together as I pulled.
Step two: Use the magic.
Slowly, gently, I moved the magic toward the box, let the tendrils slink inside like water, gently searching, gently questing for the pins that would pop the remaining locks back into place. I imagined it was like playing the piano with one hand—each finger had to press a certain key at a certain time, then another key a moment later. Or, perhaps, two or three keys at once. It was the order, the tune, that mattered.
Heat washed against my back as the Veil moved again. Sweat dripped into my eyes, had dampened my shirt as the sun bore down. I’d never been so hot, not even in the bayou, with Phaedra Dupre’s accidental magic running through me. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be cool again. But if that army came through because I hadn’t locked the Veil, it wouldn’t matter.
“Lock,” I said, and felt springs engage, pins move. I pulled them toward me, all five fingers pushing keys with more speed, with more finesse, as the song rose to its ultimate crescendo. The tumblers clicked, and there were soft whispers of metal against stone as the gears popped into place.
One more tumbler, then two, then three.
And then the Veil was locked again.
The tension in my shoulders eased. And since I didn’t need the magic back, and didn’t want it spilling and releasing the locks again, I ordered it to stay. The box seemed to sigh as magic settled in.
But I didn’t have long to relax.
Now locked and reencrypted, the Veil snapped back along its meridian. But all that kinetic magic had to go somewhere. The earth began to shake, to rumble, and then it began to split. The pavers between the wings began to draw apart as a fissure split the earth down the middle, drawing a gap between the wings.
“Claire!”
I heard Liam’s voice behind me, watched in horror as the earth began to disappear beneath my feet. I turned onto my belly, grabbed at grass and pavers as I scrambled away from the edge, as my feet kicked at air. I finally got purchase, scurried to my feet just in time to watch the fracture reach the box, which began to tumble into the maw in the earth that all that exces
s magic had wrought.
“No!” I screamed out. I was nearly empty of magic, but I used what tendrils I could find to grab the box, pull it one sweating inch at a time back into the air. It flew ten feet above my head, set down with a thud ten feet away.
The locks still perfectly in place.
“Jesus! Claire! Claire!” Liam fell to his knees beside me, rolled me gently onto my back. And then his hands—so gentle compared to the panic in his voice—were on my head, my shoulders, my abdomen, checking me for injuries.
His hands settled on my face, cool against hot and flushed skin. “Claire. Come back to me, Claire. Come back to me, baby.”
I opened my eyes, stared into seas of roiling blue water. “I’m all right.”
His lips were parted, his breath rushed, and his eyes tortured. The moment stretched, filled to encompass us both, staring at each other from a magical battleground.
“The Veil? Did it reopen?”
He smiled. “It’s closed. You locked the Veil. And you split the earth. You were amazing.”
I nodded. I lifted my gaze to the impossibly blue sky, watched a pelican drift across it, completely oblivious to what had happened here on earth.
Fixing that damn owl was going to be a cakewalk after this.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Malachi escorted Darby into Bogue Chitto to keep her away from the Containment troops who’d nearly reached us.
We ran back to the van, drove a few hundred yards away, close enough to watch Containment troops arrive on the scene. They’d dragged out the few remaining ComTac operatives—and Rutledge’s body. Malachi had taken Nix as well, and there’d been a look of grim determination on his face when he’d carried her away. I didn’t ask what he’d do with her; I didn’t think I wanted to know.
Gunnar, Gavin, Liam, and I reconvened at the store. We were still in muddy clothes, still tired from battle. And since we all either had magic or were magical sympathizers, we were fugitives at worst, in legal limbo at best. I still had the redheaded woman on my mind, and I hadn’t looked into my father’s magic yet. But I’d have to deal with both later.
