“Oh,” she said, smiling at the ground, her bunnyish front teeth dimpling her lip. “If we survive tomorrow, sure.”
It was the most regular-girl I’d ever heard from her, and it eased me. “Right. Let’s live, then discuss slumber parties.”
She hugged me. Her tiny, cold body was the warmest thing I’d felt from anyone but my mom.
“What the hell was that?” Una said as I pulled onto the road.
“I know what you’re talking about, and I don’t give a crap if you think Cymbeline is weird. I mean, she is weird, but she’s—”
“If you say she’s your friend, you can just mentally prepare for the slap now.”
“I’ll decide who my friends are, thank you.”
Una’s music was way too loud for the quiet night. When I pulled up to her house, a large white thing on top of a hill with too many stairs, I saw a light in one window. Only one. It felt terrible.
“Um, will you be okay, Una? Because Cymbeline said the Water Ele—your mom—was there, in the woods today.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said with a forced smile. It made my eyes water. “Stop it. I’ll give you something to cry about.”
I choked back the emotion and nodded. We are not friends, I reminded myself. But it didn’t make it hurt any less to leave her where she wasn’t safe.
“Celeste, we all agreed—we need to watch the Elementals. We need to be home at least for tonight. Same shit show for me, different day.”
“It’s not, though.”
“No, it’s not.” She sighed and glanced at a shadow in the lit window, running her thumb over the link in her lip. “You’ve done this thing for me, though, where now I feel like I can handle her.”
I almost hugged her, but she ran inside, and I drove away before the tears could fall.
Lux and I never arranged a place to meet. Regular people did that, and of all things we were, regular people didn’t even make the list.
My non-driving leg wouldn’t stop tapping, my heart wouldn’t stop pounding in my ears, and the tears were so close to the surface that my throat hurt. I willed myself not to grab Link or take a Prescription Panic Pill as a precaution, but man, that Dunkin Donuts drive-thru was calling to me.
Fear for Una and Cymbeline and anticipation of seeing a demon all alone again put a raw ache in my chest.
It was late, the sky a swath of ebony dotted with stars when I pulled up in front of Brewster Gardens on the Plymouth waterfront. It was always empty down there in autumn. All the tourists went home, the ice cream shops closed early, and the wind whipped off the water, blowing jeweled leaves everywhere.
I got a plaid blanket my mom had nearly thrown away out of the trunk, and pulled on the spare hoodie I left back there, letting the sleeves cover my hands. My baseball shirt wasn’t enough to keep my teeth from chattering.
With a deep breath of the cold saltwater air, I went down the walkway lined with pumpkins and twinkle lights to the grass. I sat on my blanket, and couldn’t have been happier for the silence. I knew my quiet wouldn’t last, but my brain was cloudy and my stomach flip-flopped about meeting Lux. I needed a moment. Just a moment. I closed my eyes and relaxed my shoulders.
“I wish I had a pumpkin spice latte right now,” I said without thinking. It wasn’t a Wish, just a fleeting thought, but when my eyes snapped open, they were drawn to one star in the sky that flashed like a camera bulb.
The ceramic mug nestled between my hands, warming them through my sleeves. The steam smelled like Halloween. I laughed out loud, happier than I had a right to be.
God, my magic just swam under the surface, and I barely had to breathe for it to find its way out.
“Well, as long as I’m at it, let’s get this show on the road.” I took a good, long sip of my latte, held one hand up, eyes on the sky, and Wished for Lux to be with me.
Nothing.
Muttering under my breath with annoyance, I Wished again. But nothing.
“Sonofabitch.” I put the latte down in the leaves, threw both hands in front of me, palms to the sky, my fingers stretching for the planets. “I wish for Lux to be with me,” I said louder. Pumpkin-bright orange and red wine leaves swirled in the air, but nothing happened. The stars didn’t show any sign of paying attention, stagnant in the sky. For the hundredth time that day I felt a surge of anger that I couldn’t control, jumped to my feet, kicked over the latte, and yelled into the night, “Bring Lux to me now, I Wish it!” Curling my fingers into claws, I shouted, “I serve the power and the power serves me! I Wish for the demon!” My hair, the color of the stars, whipped my cheeks. My heart pounded as if it would burst, and when I didn’t think I could take it anymore without falling down, the stars buckled toward me, like I was seeing them in the bottom of a glass. My body pulled them, its own gravitational force.
The dark became a little darker. I spun around.
“I would have come,” Lux said. He was sitting on my blanket, knees up, arms resting on them in a loose circle.
“You’re wearing jeans,” I said, and was instantly annoyed with myself.
“You didn’t have to Wish for me. I would have come,” he repeated. I was pleased that he ignored my stupid comment.
“Why was it so hard to get you here, then?”
He looked up at me, that one thick lock of hair hanging over his face as usual. His blue eyes shone in the darkness as brightly as my starlight hair did. “I wasn’t close to you. I was in The Gone.”
I blinked a couple of hundred times. “I pulled you all the way from The Gone?”
“I would have come anyway,” he growled.
“That’s not the point.” I plopped down beside him. So close to him, his scent of nothing overtook the scents of fall, and wrapped around me with a clean coldness. I didn’t hate it. Like jumping into the middle of the freezing ocean; anything could be lurking down there in that endless cold, creatures or treasures.
Anything could be lurking, but definitely not more nothing. Not the nothing that haunted Delcine, that hellish lack of feeling that I burned in her eyes. The same nothing of Cym’s heart, afraid to be anything but empty. The nothing that Una was sure was her future. The nothing that had taken Vera’s innocence.
I didn’t want that nothing to come for me. But I would have taken nothing just to sit quietly with him. A demon. My mother would have quietly, sweetly, in the most heartbreaking way, lost her mind.
“How would you have found me if I hadn’t Wished you here?”
His back straightened up, his arms still around his knees. He lifted his chin, his one visible eyebrow quirked; I felt like I’d walked into his trap. “Want is the most powerful force there is,” he said, his voice low and sultry. “You can tell that to your Elementals.” He sneered, and it was colder than his scent.
“The Elementals are the strongest force in the world, even stronger than The Chains, and you’ll never bring them down. Not even if the Witch of Wicked Words makes you.”
He clenched his fists, and I tried to see if his chain link was in his hand. My Link was burning hot in my hoodie pocket, warming a small spot against my stomach. It was overcome with the energy of having a demon so close.
Lux stared at me, moods changing in his face so fast I couldn’t keep up or stay on guard. And I knew they didn’t all quite belong to him. Condescending and arrogant, to afraid, to hurt, to sad, to inquisitive. Sometimes just watchful. Wondering. I was wondering, too.
“Lux, you said you can hear The Chains? What do they tell you?” A chill went through me with a flashback of the chain link-fingers gripping Delcine’s ankle. I pulled my sleeves completely over my hands and leaned closer, determined not to be afraid of his answer.
Darkness deeper than anything I’d ever seen overtook his eyes fast, as if trying to block someone from hearing. “It’s why I’m here.” He clutched a tuft of his insane asylum hair. “I am not making a mistake,” he spat.
I wanted to know who he was talking to, if he spoke back to The Chains, but his
attention span was zero.
“Lux,” I said softly, tentatively putting my hand on his shoulder. He snapped to attention, eyes on me like freezing fire, and I removed my hand, holding it to me as if I’d been bitten. “Did The Chains tell you to come? Or are you here because you want to—kill—the Elementals and take over? Or is it the Poisons you want dead, or enslaved, or…?” He was shaking, mumbling. “Sorry, Lux. Take your time. My head….isn’t all that right either. Panic attacks make me—” Shut up, Celeste.
His body vibrated more than moved, fast and angrily. It looked like he got up to his feet and paced, all in a split second, but he was still sitting there, arms circling his knees. I shook my head of the illusion.
“The want of it all made me come. More want than any world should contain, more than The Gone, all of it underneath other things, Want Worms tunneling out.”
He put his head down on his arms. I touched his shoulder again, not caring if he hated me for touching him. He hurt more than I could stand to watch, and I just wanted to understand. Evil or not, my mom wouldn’t want me to leave him in pain, regardless of where he came from. I’d help when help was needed. Helping when a heart wants to is never wrong.
He didn’t flinch when I touched him then, so I squeezed his shoulder. My breath got stuck when he reached across his chest and covered my hand with his, head still hanging.
“Lux,” I said, my voice shaking. “I want to understand what you’re trying to tell me, but I feel like there’s so much in your head that can’t come out.”
“They see pieces of themselves in all of you,” he mumbled, barely loud enough for me to hear.
“Who? The Chains?”
“No, my brothers.”
God, this was headache-worthy.
“Your brothers? From The Gone?”
He lifted his head with painful slowness. Blinking hard, he looked at me, eyes blue again. Not a welcoming blue. A blue that dared me to fall in and promised I’d never get out. But as he concentrated on me, it was all him there, nobody else. With a swallow that made his Adam’s apple bob, he said, “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“I’m trying to see.” He was the most difficult thing to keep my eyes on, a terribly real illusion.
He smiled, a dangerous and deadly thing, teeth flashing in the night. “I am the Royal Demon, Luxuria Asmodeus, incarnation of Lust and Lechery, the Sin that Seethes. The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and the prophecy come to life.” His grin widened, threatening to consume me as he leaned closer. “The lust here gripped me all the way to The Gone, and I knew my time had come.”
I pulled my hair back in a ponytail with the elastic on my wrist, let out a long, trembling breath and took him by the shoulders, turning his body to face mine. He let me move him with no resistance, and it sent a pang of sadness through me. Was any part of him under his own control? This boy that claimed to be all of these titles, and he was so small-feeling. His head was bowed, avoiding my eyes, and I lifted his chin like it was my job to do it.
“Lux, I want to help. I’m going to use magic on you, and you’re going to let me.”
Slowly, I touched my fingertips to his, and I Wished for the threads that wove him together to show themselves, for the clouds in his mind to part so I could only see him. I Wished from under my skin that I knew what it meant, how we were all connected but apart. I Wished from a place that the stars couldn’t reach to know what was inside this lost boy, brimming with possibility and pain and brightness and heat.
A twinkling mix of liquid stars and links of chain snaked through me, trickled through my fingerprints, and poured into Lux, igniting cold metal sparks between us. I cried out from the burning, but willed his flickering eyes to meet mine. When they did, it was my will, not his.
I pulled the stars out of him. “Tell me what you need,” I said. The night swept between us like a chasm, both of us desperate to cross it for the sake of the other.
Everyone has stars in their souls, waiting for someone to see them. The blackness between those stars is the wind between your worlds. It can carry you to each other.
The blackness between Lux’s wind and mine pulsed, longing to become a storm.
“I Wish to see,” I whispered, and Lux’s demon heart captured the Wish, and made it come true.
It didn’t hit me hard the way I expected, but fell upon me in a slow, syrupy dream. First, the feeling of pure desire, black and green on the inside, smelling of earth and cinder, hurting like needs I could never quite fill. When the darkness set it burned with the heat of lust, but it wasn’t his. It was tinged with murder, power. With the weight of The Chains on all of our backs.
“Lux,” I whispered, moving my hands to his cheeks. “What are you trying to show me?”
“Wish for me to give it to you,” he said.
“Luxuria. I Wish for you to tell me, in your own voice, from your own heart, why you’ve come here.” With a flicker of butterflies in my gut, “And why you’re here with me.”
Like fog drifting to expose the moon, his eyes cleared and he spoke to me with such absolute clarity that I wanted to Wish that I’d never asked.
“I am the incarnation of lust. The desires of those who cannot obtain squeeze my heart the hardest. I tasted the lust of the Elementals like vomit and tar, so much that I could no longer stay away. Their lust for control screams louder than my own voices. It gouged into me, dragged me from The Gone, through The Chains. But you made me want to stay.”
My breath caught. “And the chain link you carry?”
“A gift from my brothers. A gift they shouldn’t be able to give.”
“Who are they?” But I knew the answer. The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Lust…the Seven Deadly Sins. The Royal Demons of The Gone.
“You know the answer, but I’ll tell you anyway. Pride, Greed, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath and Sloth.”
As he said it, I saw inside him, knowledge that existed before he did. The Seven Deadly Sins were demons only in name; in truth they were perversions of good things. Not evil, not like I’d been told. Demons were the oldest and easiest scapegoat for bad choices. Lux and his brothers were the royal family of The Gone. Just like the Poisons, they had no father either. Or mother. They were born of all humanity, and had only each other.
The silver thread that connected me to Lux thickened, and as it did, sped up the time I was watching.
The Seven Deadly Sins were the underside of the Five Poisons. They weren’t so different from us, and in many ways they were us. We belonged to each other.
Lux saw that I was beginning to understand in fits and bursts, something that could barely be put into words, and he helped me. “Your Witch of Sweets is a goddess of gluttony, isn’t she? Envy is an empty emotion—”
“The Witch of Empty Things,” I whispered.
“Sloth and Pride exist in self-importance, masking their feelings of inadequacy. Much like your Witch of Shades.”
I felt sick as I said, “Vera. The Witch of Wicked Words. She’s Wrath.” Lux nodded once. “And Greed?”
He smiled wide. “Well, you’re all guilty of that, aren’t you?” I smiled back.
Learning all this from the inside out was exhilarating—there was no other way to describe it. But I wouldn’t get veered off track. I was learning, but I didn’t have all the answers. I was happy I wouldn’t ever be able to learn all I needed to know in one night.
It meant more Lux.
“You know where you fit in, don’t you?” he asked, a tired smirk alight on his lips. He rested his forehead on mine, exhausted. I’d always wanted a boy to do that to me, and then kiss me, his hands in my hair. Instead I was learning how dark and deep my world could go. “What more is a wish, Celeste, than wanting something so badly that you’d move reality itself to make it happen?”
“Lust,” I choked out.
“Exactly,” he said, and touched my nose with his fingertip as he pulled away.
“What do you think I lust after?” I breathed, and couldn’t belie
ve I said it.
He put his bone-white hand on my heart, stealing my breath. “You want to be whole. To thrive on your magic rather than run from it. You lust for a life without fear of yourself.” His smile was too sudden to feel good. “And you want to know The Gone.”
I sat in the dark autumn night with Lux, at ease with my arch enemy. Sometimes he’d reach for my hand, and when they touched I would know things; things that came too fast for me to decipher, and when Lux tried to explain, it would come out in riddles. But he let me talk, and it meant more to me than anything I could ever Wish for.
“I don’t have a father either,” I said in one of the silent moments where I felt him thinking, saw the feelings like Una saw colors. His head was so jumbled, he’d start to tell me a story and then switch without warning to something totally different mid-sentence. It was a tossed salad of words, but I could feel what he meant.
“No parents. No need. I live, and lust nurtures me just fine.” The knife appeared in his hand every once in a while, when his heart hurt. It should have scared me.
“I miss my dad a lot,” I said.
“He doesn’t exist.”
“I’ve made him so perfect in my head that I want him to be real.”
“You could. You could do it. All you have to do—”
“Don’t say it. If I Wished for that… I could never.”
He blinked so rapidly that I don’t know how he could see me, but he did. He saw me more than anyone. It gave me strength to keep telling him what I really felt, the thoughts that ran around my head like the demons did in his.
“If my dad were here, tomorrow he’d wake me up early, insisting I skip school for a Dad Day.” I was grinning already. “We’d sit on the porch, him in one of those fisherman’s sweaters and me in my sweats and my mom’s flannel, and we’d drink tons of coffee. We crush up Pop Rocks in it. That’s our thing. Then we’d drive around to yard sales all day—they’re still happening, even in October—and laugh at people’s crazy old stuff, but we’d buy so much of it. He loves tiny histories like I do, the stories in people’s stuff that even they’d forgotten. We’d end the day in the same spot on the porch, covered up in a big blanket, reading books—he reads mysteries—surrounded by all our garage sale stuff. He always wanted one of those giant antique propeller fans that could chop your finger off, but we never find one. Then we’d watch all the Marvel movies back to back until I was up so late that I had to skip school the next day, too.”
The Wind Between Worlds Page 9
