The brutality of what she’d so easily admitted made my stomach churn, and I clutched it against the counter. My mother intended to enslave the other Elementals, and she told me as if she was saying it would be a tight Christmas that year. Like it bothered her only a little bit.
If this was the plan that she’d admit so simply, what worse plans was she hiding?
“Celeste, you’re sweating, baby.” She got me a glass of water. I stared at it as it sat in front of me, trying to focus, and stay rooted. I’d defended her to my friends—girls she said I could never trust, and I’d believed her. She spoke of demons like they were less than animals, but I knew Lux now and he was far from it. I’d hidden away my magic for years, refusing to use it so I wouldn’t hurt her. She wanted to kill me!
She searched my eyes. Lux’s face popped into my thoughts, and I felt intruded upon with her there.
I was more afraid of looking into my own mother’s eyes than I had been of looking into the heart of a demon.
“Baby, I understand how shocking this is to you. I’m your mom,” she said softly, tears glinting in her eyes. I blinked back my own. “I can’t imagine how it feels, knowing this is all to protect you, when you come down to it. The rest of the world can go to Hell, it’s you that I need to keep safe. How could I ever expect you not to feel terrible that I’d crush The Gone, betray the Elementals, do any damn thing I had to, in order to keep you with me?” She brushed hair off my cheek, and her touch made me sob. Her voice cracked when she said, “I may be the essence of spirit, but spirit isn’t always pure. And I’m also your mother.” Her voice broke again. “I didn’t get a handbook, but I got plenty of desperation when I saw your beautiful silver hair, and those eyes that knew so much more than you could ever see yourself. Since the day you came into this world you’ve been the light that keeps my spirit alive. Choices have to be made, sacrifices. I can make them.”
We both ran around the counter, throwing ourselves into the other’s arms. We cried together, and I loved her, and feared her, and knew she was telling the truth. At least her version of it.
Chapter 15
Cold rain and lack of sleep had me wrapping my hands around my cardboard coffee cup. I was too nervous to sit as I waited for the Poisons on the school steps. I couldn’t believe I’d left them the night before. It seemed like a hundred years ago, and I felt like I knew nothing anymore.
What if they didn’t all make it through the night?
I’d gotten a text from Una, but if Cymbeline or Vera even had phones I’d have been shocked. Delcine wouldn’t bother to tell me she was okay; it would imply she gave a crap about my feelings.
Did I even have feelings anymore? The only thing I felt was a need for coffee. I was totally numb after finding the Elementals in the basement, the near-murder of The Gone, my mother revealing how heartless she could be and how protective at the same time, and after seeing what Lux had to show me. I’d been up all night, not a wink of sleep, staring at the stars painted on my ceiling, too afraid to go outside and see the real thing. I feared what I might have asked them for.
When one, then the other, and eventually all the Poisons came into the parking lot, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was a collective meeting of eyes when we came together that said we’d all felt the same.
“Good to see you guys,” I said.
Delcine stomped a cigarette out next to the no smoking sign and blew a final puff in Una’s direction. Una raised a hand, turning the smoke green, blowing it back in Delcine’s face.
So, not that friendly then.
Vera stared at me and Cymbeline stared at Vera, and I was too unnerved to prolong our before-school coffee date. “All right, we made it through the night.” Now what? “Anything….unusual…happen at your houses last night?” I should have told them exactly what I’d seen, that their mothers had been tricked by the Spirit Elemental, that The Gone was almost—gone. I should have, but I didn’t.
“I thought my mom was home,” Una said. I already knew it from her text. “But she left like a, like a, water dummy or something to trick me. I don’t know. Looked like her, but when I spoke to her she just rippled like waves. I think she must have made it quick, had to leave in a hurry for some reason. Anyway, it was weird and I never heard her come in.”
And she didn’t wake you up with a punch in the face, I thought.
“My mom wasn’t home either,” Delcine said.
Cymbeline shook her head, and Vera only said, “Gone.”
“They were together,” Una said with certainty.
“Was your mom home, Celeste?” Delcine asked, and there was such openness in the way she said it that I felt bad not blurting out the truth to her.
“Um, yeah. She was.”
Everyone went quiet, some looking at the ground, all of them more confused than they were before from the look of it. But Vera watched me, and my blood ran cold.
Delcine swung the front door open and we all went inside silently, turning to each other once before we went to our classes.
“We go to Cymbeline’s spot in the woods,” I said.
Del nodded once. “Together.”
My throat constricted with the feeling that I’d betrayed them.
Lux walked by suavely in his same suit, pristine despite the craziness of his hair and the demons behind his eyes. He waved at me, winked at Vera, and never slowed.
Lux showed up pretty regularly to Albrecht’s class, so that’s where we agreed to confront him. Not confront, just ask. Just ask him if he’d meet with us in the woods. You know, five against one, perfectly amicable.
And if he didn’t agree, we’d summon him there with magic.
It had taken some doing, but I convinced the Poisons to let me talk to Lux first in class, then all of us together afterwards. Delcine wasn’t happy about it, but anytime there was a boy present where she wasn’t, it posed a problem.
Albrecht was out, and the sub spent more time shuffling around in his hand-me-down lesson plans than “teaching,” so talking to Lux was easy.
The demon sat next to me, kicking Reggie Parker out of his seat with one look. The suit and the hair were intimidating, even if he was slim and feverish-looking, not to mention not so tall. Lux turned to me like he sensed my calculated speech coming, but he seemed so much more in control of himself than usual that I found myself at a loss for words.
“You seem… better today,” I said. I hoped way too hard that I was the reason he felt better, that the night before had softened him, helped him. Made him want to be near me.
His eyes had shine, and no shadows. He smiled, wide, like I offered him one of those cookies with the nuts you can’t name inside.
“You cast my stones, witchy girl,” he said with a confident smirk. “You took the heap of dirty rocks in me and separated them into bright and glowing pebbles.”
Head shaking, but grinning, I said, “You’re still super-riddly, though. Just say what you’re trying to say.”
He brushed the sharp point of hair from his forehead and leaned forward, his scent of nothing like drinking a cold glass of water. “My six brothers are all inside here,” he said, tapping his temple. “Along with my own terrible thoughts—by your standard—and the sounds of The Chains. Speaking to me. Doing what’s right and doing what I know, it’s all there in one heap for me to climb over and sift through without falling in.” He put his hand on my knee and my heart raced. “You looked inside and laid it all flat, picked through it and turned the boulders to pebbles that I can step over like a giant. You let me look up and see stars.”
I swallowed so hard it hurt and wished I had a glass of water.
Lux’s eyes tore from mine for only a second to look at my desk, then right back to me. A clear glass of water sat waiting for me. I wasn’t at all surprised. I drank it in one gulp, then Wished it away. It gave me courage. Nobody saw the chain links flash in the room, itching to become more solid.
I straightened my back and didn’t shy away from his hand on me
. “I wanted to look inside you for more than one reason. It’s not just that I want to know why you’re here. The truth is I think you must be pretty amazing to have gotten here to begin with. You were right; I want to know more. I’m starting to believe things I never thought could be true, and I’m scared. But I want to know more about you, too, even though there are so many other things that need my attention. I’m sick of doing what I’m supposed to. Still scared, though.”
He blinked rapidly, and I saw that he was fighting back his brothers’ words in his head. Anyone would think he was schizophrenic, but those voices were real. I could feel how much that hurt.
“Celeste, I’m not here to scare anyone. How painfully superficial. I’m here to change things. Change is a lot scarier than I am.”
“I’m not afraid of change,” I said before I could take it back. His hand moved from my knee to take the fist in my lap. Link buzzed in my pocket furiously but I couldn’t even bother to try to calm it.
He was holding my hand. I hoped he didn’t notice my bitten-raw cuticles as he ran a thumb over my fingers.
He licked his lips quickly, eyes darting, and it felt like we were on the run together from someone, Bonnie and Clyde, but moving nowhere. “The kind of change we need… it scares even me.”
I thought of my mother forcing the Elementals to destroy his home, and knew he was right to be scared. She’d tried to take Lux’s home from him. He’d be trapped in The Chains forever, tortured by too many voices—unless his brothers were all obliterated. Alone, except for me and whatever other witches survived. I somehow had no question that I would be one of them, and my body buzzed with the feeling it gave me. I squeezed his hand, and his shoulders relaxed.
“We’re strong. We can be afraid all we want, but it doesn’t change that we’re strong. You’re a Royal Demon, the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and I am the Witch of Stars. Imagine what we could do together. Nobody will be able to touch us.” The words kept falling out of my mouth, and I had no idea where they were coming from, but the power of them bubbled within me. “I feel better saying it.”
“It’s not ours, not yet. The stars can’t save the glittering girl.” Shadows flashed in his eyes, and he clutched his head with a moan.
At that moment I wondered if I’d done a good thing stopping the Elementals from destroying The Gone. Maybe he could have been free of this pain.
“Lux. Lux.” He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking with focus when he opened them, biting his lip, moaning still. Nobody was looking, and I was so glad that the power served me at that moment. It shielded us—until I screamed.
Tiny hands framing a tiny, tortured face smashed against Lux’s eyeball, bulging it out. Lux gritted his teeth and another miniature figure appeared in the other eye, one that resembled him so much I knew it was his brother. But Lux couldn’t look so cruel, even when he held his knife in his hand. The demon stared across the bridge of Lux’s nose, as though it were a window into the other eye, and he laughed with a wide, cartoonish mouth.
Tears ran down Lux’s face. The whole class was staring at us. The sub came over, old man shoe sound clacking on the tile, reminding me that I was in class, not in what looked very much like Hell in Lux’s eyes.
“Do you need to see the nurse or get some air, young lady?” the sub asked me quietly. The genuine niceness of it made me start crying. I nodded, tipped my chair getting up, and ran from class. In seconds Lux caught up to me.
“Celeste,” he said. It was a shout in my head, but he’d barely whispered it. I slowed to a stop and turned to him. I couldn’t let my fear or shock disrupt the Poisons’ plan, but I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t see or hear clearly. Panic swelled in my chest like a tick.
He looked so funny, in a suit, holding my messenger bag with pumpkins painted all over it, a swirl of Hell in his eyes, that I just busted out laughing. Like, bent over, loud-ass laughing. His shoes were so shiny that I laughed even harder. He bent down to take my arm and pulled me to standing.
“You must be crazy,” he said without a hint of a smile.
Shocking, but I laughed. “I’m crazy? You have people in your eyes and you wear a suit to school and you’re from Hell.”
“Not. Hell,” he said with teeth gritted so tight I thought they might crack. “The Gone. And it’s a better place than this one. At least we’re honest about what happens there.”
“Lux, I’m sorry. That was a really nasty thing to say to you. It’s your home.”
The beings in his eyes screamed; he squeezed his lids shut, but his head shook with the pressure. The whites were bloodshot when he opened them, flickering like basement lights, as bare as a bulb with a rusty chain.
“You can’t Wish away the bad in The Gone, little witch. It hides in plain sight, and no magic can touch it. It’s not your vapid world where horror stories are endcapped with feel-good absurdity, masking the ugliness. The souls in The Gone wanted goodness and help and were given nothing. The Chains gave them nothing good to believe in, and it has ripped their hearts out. We took them in, when they had nowhere else to go, and now they feel the dark so deeply that they’ve become part of it. Gone. The Chains don’t help people; they hide magic because the Elementals don’t think it belongs to everyone. It’s selfish and good-natured, and partly wrong and partly right. Magic can’t be everyone’s because it could lead to decimation as easily as peace, so it can’t be celebrated, least of all by those who have it. Like you. It can’t fix every problem, so it fixes none. It sucks hope out of the world—and The Gone is where the hopeless go.”
I was stunned. The explanation came out of nowhere, and felt so much more real than what I had known about The Gone. It made sense, even in his mess of riddles.
“I didn’t know,” I said, getting closer to him. “That’s not how The Gone was… My mother didn’t tell me that was what The Gone was. Obviously.”
“Your whole life is a secret, Celeste. It’s not your fault, but it is your problem.”
Deep breath. “Look, we were going to ask you after Albrecht’s class, all of us, but I want to just do it myself. Will you please meet me and the other witches after school out in the woods? It’s important that we talk.”
“Or that you corner me?”
I shook my head so fast my brain hurt. “No, no. I promise I won’t let them do that.”
Head cocked, a smile brightened his lips, showing me sparkly teeth. “So you protect me now, Stars?” he crooned.
I tried not to let his weirdness and vulnerability make me swoon. “I won’t let anyone do what I know is wrong. You included.”
“How about your mother?” he said, and my swoony moment was over.
I ripped my bag out of his hands. “You aren’t going to touch her,” I spat, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was ashamed, but my heart wasn’t in it.
My breath caught when he reached out and took a strand of my hair between his fingers and whispered to me like we were still under the stars, seeing each other laid bare. “You can’t protect everyone, my darling. There’s no saving some of us.”
The bell rang and the thought of anyone being in this moment with us twisted my stomach. My eyes darted, waiting for the hordes of students, but his remained on mine. I anchored him there. I wouldn’t let go.
“The witches are coming,” he said solemnly.
I grabbed his hands and Wished us away.
Chapter 16
I put us in the woods, the empty frames surrounding us, his empty scent overpowering the wet leaves and cold air.
“God, that was exhausting.” I fell back on the forest floor, squeezing my eyes tight against a bout of dizziness.
The leaves crunched and squished as he lied down next to me on the wet ground. His voice was so smooth out there, I felt warm all over. “You took me away.”
Wet moss smell wafted across us, wrapped us up, as I turned on my side to look at him, lying there in his suit on the dirty ground. “I wasn’t ready to have people around us yet.”
�
�It was more than that. You knew I was afraid of the witches finding us.”
“Maybe.” I pulled a leaf out of the stubbly part of his hair. “Maybe I can’t save you, but I can protect you sometimes.”
“Do I need protecting from them?”
I wanted to tell him he didn’t. I wanted to trust my coven. “They all want this closeness with you for their own reasons.”
“They can’t have it,” he said simply. My heart stopped. His pale coldness and warm words had my head spinning.
“You can see what they lust after. They all want you.”
He smiled. “You’re jealous.”
I had so much to say to that but didn’t manage a word of it.
I stood and paced the forest floor. “The Poisons will be here soon.” I felt like it was Lux and I against them, but it wasn’t that way, couldn’t be that way. I’d only just started to create an alliance with the Poisons, I couldn’t treat this meeting like it was a fight. I was no good at confrontation, and winning this non-fight would take more than Una’s and Del’s in-your-faceness. Vera and Cym’s silent intimidation wouldn’t work. It hit me that I actually offered something in the coven: the voice of reason, and maybe even a little normalcy, as hilarious as that was to me.
It wasn’t a fight, but they all wanted Lux—we all wanted Lux, the Elementals included. That put him both in the position of being very powerful and probably very overwhelmed. He needed someone to be on his side, too. Demon or not.
Lux looked around, eyes falling on the empty frames that were just that—empty. Cymbeline wasn’t there to fill them with the Air Elemental’s eavesdropping wind, or to protect us from any of the other elements. We weren’t safe without her.
Unless I Wished for us to be.
The weight of that realization had me falling into Cymbeline’s empty chair. I could Wish that the Elementals wouldn’t overhear us, that they wouldn’t look for us, and it would come true. The thought of it sent shockwaves of adrenaline through me, urging me to try.
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