What lay outside those crumbling doors was a place I was never meant to be. It was hard to believe that I didn’t belong in The Gone with Lux at my side, though. He made the unknown into the discoverable for me. We were safe together, and it was the most dangerous feeling.
“I need to see what’s out there,” I said finally, nodding at the doors.
Lux sighed, and a thrill ran through me that he’d been content. “My brothers know I’m back. Let’s go to them before they come to us. Their patience will be wearing thin.”
“No chance your brothers are as pleasant as you are, huh?” I chuckled, and he glared.
“They’re not as bad as you think.”
He looked at me sadly, but it was the truth. I couldn’t neglect who—what—they were because I had a connection with the Prince of Demons himself. A shockwave of fear bolted in my chest, that I was so far from home, that I’d turned on everything I knew, that nothing was safe no matter how safe it felt.
“Wha—what. You’re serious?” My laugh echoed through the empty halls. My stomach had calmed over missing the stars, but the thought of empty things made me miss Cymbeline, and it hurt again. “You do realize you guys are still demons, right?” Then the realization hit me, and I was ashamed of myself. “I can’t believe I fell for this.”
“Fell for what?” he shouted. He didn’t look like royalty anymore, just like an angry boy.
“You got me to come here so you could deliver me to the Royal Demons, that’s what! Your first idea is to bring the witch, the top-rung prison guard of The Gone, to meet your family, and you expect me to think what? You’re going to trap me here just like my mother was going to do to you in The Chains!
“If my master plan was to trick you, I could have done that the first day you saw me. I was just as vulnerable, just as scared and just as powerless as you are right now when I was in your world. You think being Seventh Son of a Seventh Son makes me all-knowing, makes me evil? I’ve got power, but I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve. I went somewhere I shouldn’t have gone just to see what would happen, no better or worse than you. I’m just like you, and you know it. Dammit, Celeste, I crossed borders to find you!”
Shame filled me and to battle it off I dug my hole deeper. “There was something in it for you too, Lux.”
He sighed heavily, and descended the stairs, footsteps like falling bricks. At the bottom he looked up at me, hands comfortably in his pockets, hair shielding one eye. “There was something in it for me. This time I thought I could have it.”
The Lust Demon left me alone, doors pounding shut in his wake, but I was the one who’d abandoned him.
Chapter 23
Well, I’d been stupid before but that time took the cake. And speaking of cake, I would have murdered someone for even a crumb; I wasn’t actually hungry, weirdly, but hideously ready for some Grade A stress eating.
What in the hell had I been thinking, going anywhere without my All Purpose Panic Pills? They were in my messenger bag, at home. Best not panic, then.
The palace felt naked without Lux in it. What would Cymbeline have filled that place with? I missed her. I missed them all, even my mom. Especially my mom. I’d never been further from home in my life. But I was certain that I was supposed to be in The Gone. This was a choice I’d made, a real step I took in getting Lux back, obtaining him for our side.
Of course he’d left me. I’d treated him like a commodity and then insulted him. He’d trusted me, too.
“He actually left me,” I said to myself. Lux wasn’t one to make impulsive choices; He left me and that meant he wouldn’t be coming back. I knew because that’s what I would have done. I was alone in what I’d been told was the most hellish place imaginable. I had a flashback of watching Silent Hill with my mom. Those nurses… I shivered and before I could stop myself, ran to the enormous doors, swinging them wide, their groan echoing around me.
I’d seen that little Barbie version of The Gone in my basement. It didn’t seem like the same place I’d felt when looking into Lux’s eyes. If I’d learned anything recently it was that nothing was ever the same all the time. Nothing was only one thing.
The deserted palace was surrounded with the city’s teeming life.
I expected Gotham. I got Diagon Alley with an apocalyptic twist. It seethed of decadence and charisma, sweetness, sexuality. A Charles Dickens Sin City. Jewel-tone lights shone from inside Victorian shop windows, their ethereal hot brilliance muted by snow drifts on the panes. Cobblestones and smoking chimneys, turrets and worn wood, glowing street lamps and gilded cupolas. And the people…. Women in long dresses and actual bonnets, hands in muffs, walking with men in black leather and top hats. A girl younger than I was, dressed like an eighties CEO rushed past a cluster of ragged men warming their hands on a trash can fire. They smiled at her.
Christmas music played from inside the glowing shops, and the urge to go in and touch all the little trinkets filled me with Christmas cheer. It was weird to me that it was Christmas in The Gone, but then again, why not? People wanted it. People ate like fiends, lounged around, wanted things they felt they deserved to have and got angry when they didn’t get them. All the sins, right there for the taking. People crowded the windows and peered in, laughing and pointing wistfully. Others stood alone, glaring. Crying. The air around them shivered with their solitude.
In The Chains, it was October. And I was never meant to see Christmas that year.
The noise was the quiet kind, the busy chatter of people with places to go. Nothing matched, and everything went together.
The evil wasn’t what I expected; I guess that was its danger. What horrors could be hidden in those Candyland towers? How terrible were the tortures performed in those quaint alleyways? When I looked closer I saw a woman at a warmly lit store window, nose pressed against it. There was a pair of shoes inside, nothing spectacular, but her feet were bare. Her fingernails left bloody streaks as she clawed the glass.
I went to her like I was approaching a lion at the zoo. She didn’t acknowledge me as I stood within inches of her, streaks of crimson blocking her vision of the shoes on the pedestal inside. Entranced. Facing her, I noted the tatters of her coat, the condition of her skin—lots of acne—the drawn look to her. She’d been there for a very long time.
“What do you see?” I whispered to her, not expecting an answer.
I turned to the window and looked harder, deeper, past the regular shoes to see the works of art: glorious, bejeweled and satiny shoes, brocaded stilettos, and soft slippers trimmed in gold, and purple velvet boots embellished with amethysts. But looking back at this woman, I saw not just that she didn’t have any shoes, but that it wasn’t that she was searching for.
“What is it you see?” I asked, shaking my head.
“Ghosts,” she murmured, too low for me to think she was talking to me.
And between the elegant shoes twinkling under the fairy lights, I saw wisps of things that were other. Ghosts. I pressed my nose to the glass, and saw not arms and legs, no Christmas Past or Christmas Present, but small moving pictures of ghosts, snapshots and moments, alive in a near-invisible mist. Ghosts of memories.
I shook as I put a hand on her shoulder, and she jerked away like she’d been punched. “I won’t hurt you. Please, come away from here,” I said. “Those things are gone now, but you can still make new memories.”
The snow had covered her toes, she’d been there so long, and it swished around her ankles as she turned to me. She’d become little more than a ghost herself. There was nothing of a person behind her eyes, only what she’d lost and what she’d give anything to have.
“I’ll never have so much,” she croaked. Who knows when the last time she spoke was. “Here I can walk miles in others’ shoes.” She turned back to the window, and raised her nubby nails back to their work.
I left her there, but not before I took her hand from the glass and squeezed it, hoping she’d find something that brought her away and back to herself.
My footsteps were silent in the snow, and everything was so quietly beautiful that it almost gave me the illusion I was safe. I wanted to smile. When I couldn’t hold back anymore, I let it happen. I even stuck my tongue out to catch snowflakes. The perfection was so present, it was easy to ignore the perversion of it, the small sufferings.
I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face; my teeth were cold from the snow even though there was no wind. It was comfortable, and I felt community. These people were all so different, they had nothing in common, but they were all in The Gone together, missing something together.
Missing something so much that it took over their souls. How could such a thing make me happy? I should have been disgusted with myself. I should have been afraid, wandering in Demon Land alone. Instead it fed my imagination, put things together that didn’t belong, didn’t pull any punches with its wrongness. For the first time since I’d found out I was the Witch of Stars, I didn’t feel the overwhelming pressure to quiet myself, to color within the lines.
I felt free.
The snow fell harder. The dark sky was like the inside of a box—no clouds, no moon, no stars, Jesus, there were no stars, just snow appearing from an unknown place high above. I didn’t question it. It felt good not to question things. Easy. I needed it to be easy because not having the stars in sight was too hard to comprehend.
That twinge of pain was numbed by Link buzzing in my pocket like a phone on vibrate. I’d nearly forgotten it was in there, but Link always picked up on my pain, my worry. It connected to it.
Then it hit me. It wasn’t something new that was filling my heart with happiness. It was something gone, but not missing.
There were no Chains.
I had no Chains to protect.
That was all my life had been about, protecting The Chains and ensuring our magic’s secrecy. But there, in the nothing of The Gone, I wondered why. What would happen if regular people knew about magic? What would happen if they knew that a few girls and the embodiment of the Elements held the world together, prevented demons from overtaking it? Would any of that be so bad? Why were we so afraid to change?
Change means mistakes, Mom told me. Witches have no room for error.
But the opposite was true, too. I’d been making an awful lot of mistakes lately, and it was changing things. Things that needed changing.
I hadn’t known where I was going until I saw it. A stark, Moby Dick-white building looming on a black hill. Bright white light poured out from between towering pillars and a pair of glass doors. Nobody milled around it, not like down below in the town. But there was an energy to it. It had presence beyond its size.
I could picture Lux inside.
Like in a cartoon or a painting, the hill looked far away but was oddly close, or the other way around. There was a confusion between the town and the black hill that I couldn’t put my finger on. Reality didn’t seem so solid in The Gone. Like a big joke, or a poorly told story.
I suddenly needed to rush away from that bustling, vacant city and get to Lux, tell him I’d seen what lust could be in The Gone. How needful and lovely all at once. How damaged and exotic.
And how all I could think of was him, wanting it all.
Chapter 24
It took all my strength to climb the black hill. The snow didn’t fall there, so I wasn’t given even that bit of refreshment. I was dying of thirst and sweating like a pig by the time I’d trudged to the top. There were no stairs, no signs of anyone else having come before me.
A pair of great glass doors with gold handles loomed ahead, and when I approached them I found myself looking in a mirror. I was a trash mess. My dark metallic silver dress was streaked with filth and had a couple of holes in it. More dirt streaked my bare legs. Twigs stuck out of my hair. My hoodie pull-string had gotten yanked through and was frayed at the visible end. That pissed me off. I looked like I’d been dragged through the earth, through an abandoned castle in a demon world and left to my own devices, all while being dressed like the prom queen runner-up. Oh, right. Staring, I said the same thing to myself that I always did:
What the hell are you thinking?
I could almost hear Una telling me to shut the hell up and open the damn door. I was there, and I needed to be there, not thinking of anything else. Not wanting anything else. To let go of the possibility of total failure. Mistakes didn’t matter now.
Without another second’s hesitation, I swung open both doors, squaring my shoulders as if I wasn’t just a speck in the huge space. I jutted my chin, ready to face it, battle it, fall into it, or whatever it called for.
Black and gold assaulted me, everything and everyone was black and gold. And there were a lot of everyones. People cattle-crowded into the massive marble… marketplace? I saw nothing being sold, but had the feeling that everything had a price. It was a place where royalty brushed elbows with drudgery. Gold bounced off the onyx everywhere that I could see over the mass of lustrous, dusky bodies. It was a treasure chest of activity and dark design.
I pushed my way in.
So short, I felt so short, I couldn’t see a thing through the dark crowd, couldn’t hear but for the rustling of black silk, the clanking of gold medals and jewels and chains—I reached out to touch a gold chain-mail belt on someone’s waist but pulled my hand back fast in case he’d think I was trying to steal from him.
The reality was I just didn’t want to touch anything that resembled a chain, no matter how much I was drawn. Ironically, it was the thought of The Chains that made me suck down panic, and not the overwhelming crowd.
A scoffing laugh sounded in my mind, but it wasn’t mine. “You serve the power and the power serves you,” the voice said. “Those chain links, those—representations—you’re all forced to carry. They do nothing but bind you together in slavery, ignorance, fear and guilt.”
I swallowed back a surge of vomit and bent at the waist, staring at the floor, the shuffling feet all around me, the humans nipping like dogs at their masters’ heels. I didn’t know that voice, and I didn’t want to. It wasn’t Lux. It couldn’t be Lux. I picked up my head, bubble breathe, bubble breathe, and went on, pushing through the haze in my head. I had to keep moving.
Like Russian nesting dolls, there was a replica of this building a few dozen feet away, with stretching pillars and walls made of glass to show me the lounging people inside. A bar or something, made to look just like this place but smaller. There was bound to be someone important in there, escaping the rushing crowds below.
I elbowed my way through more forcefully, hoping nobody would lose their temper at me; the chubby girl and the only one not in the black and gold dress code would be easy to chase down. Still too curious to feel lost, I rushed to see where everyone was going. Nobody even looked at me. I tried not to be insulted. I was the Witch of Stars, dammit. I stood out even more in The Gone than at home, and I was still invisible.
A sudden pang for Lux rippled through me. And my curiosity wasn’t what propelled me onward, it was that I felt half without him. That place, The Gone, it amplified my need.
What could a Wish do here?
The demon bar was up on a platform. I had to kick and push to get up there, but I think that crowd was used to getting kicked. My arm around a pillar, teetering on the edge of the platform with the elitist club to my back, I looked down at the crowd. I felt both chilled and warmed like I’d drank too much from Delcine’s flask. It was more like an impending prison riot than it was a marketplace.
These were demons, and the souls that served them, side by side. None was better than the other. For as subservient as the humans were, the demons reveled in their own lowliness. They wore it like mink stoles. The demons were tall and dark, many showing bare chests, male and female alike. They walked with heads high, sneering, pack animals all looking to be lone wolves. The humans were at their elbows like good little dogs, all with superior looks on their faces as if they knew something the demons didn’t.
I couldn’t pict
ure Lux ruling over a place like that. He was noble not only in name, but in his heart.
The way they were all moving, they had a routine, these demons and humans. Work to do. Lux wouldn’t be in their ranks, he was royalty. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.
I shuddered, but smiled as I did.
I crouched down and peered inside the smoky glass wall at the demons inside the club. Elevated and on display. This was the crowd I should be searching through for Lux.
What an ass I was, chest and stomach pressed against the glass, sweat making the back of my neck itch, the zipper on my hoodie making scratching noises only I could hear, in full view of everyone, inching my way toward a door I couldn’t see.
Everything I’ve ever done was working toward an end I couldn’t see, blinded by things I didn’t have the courage to understand.
I crept faster, every pane of glass feeling the same, meeting the eyes of the snickering demons on the other side. But I kept going, wouldn’t do anything else. I’d follow that blind trail until its end, even though I was afraid that Lux would turn me away. I had to accept that I might be fighting alone again.
I thought of my mom and how little I ever really asked her about The Chains. I’d taken what she told me as truth. I thought of Una and how she’d try anything. I thought of Delcine and how she’d question anything. I thought of Cymbeline and how she could create anything. I thought of Vera and how she could survive anything.
I thought of me. How I could be anything. I could be anything.
I growled when I realized I’d made it around the entire platform and never found a way in. Everyone on the inside was laughing now, pointing, smoking and tipping back shimmering drinks as they watched the show. The Chunky Girl Crawls Around a Glass Wall Show.
At the bar in the back, illuminated like a black velvet painting against mirrors and red lights, one man didn’t laugh. He leaned against the bar like he was in an armchair, leather-clad leg propped up on a stool, black shirt unbuttoned to his navel to reveal smooth dark skin, muscles, tattoos. He was gorgeous, highlighted by the smoky room, and I was glad he was looking at me from behind his sunglasses.
The Wind Between Worlds Page 18
