by Gabi Moore
Lester nodded, biting his lips together, and clutched both of Madame Moreau’s hands. Above the bed, the room lights flickered.
“What was that?” Aurora asked in a whisper. She wasn’t sure why she was whispering; it seemed appropriate.
“Shh,” Milo nodded his head toward the bed.
Madame Estelle Moreau was lying flat against the raised back of her bed, breathing deeply. Her white, white skin had turned almost pearly, translucent. Her face turned to Lucian and Milo.
“Stay… out of trouble… you two…”
“We’ll try, Ma’am.”
She made an unconvinced sound in her throat, and for a moment seemed like her old self. Then she turned to Aurora, who stiffened.
“There’s… much more to tell…” Moreau sighed. “Cheng will have to do it. We’re… both getting too old. You… young people… have to take over…” She smiled slightly. “You’re an excellent… employee… I’ll give… you that.”
Lastly, she turned to Cheng. They didn’t exchange words. Mr. Cheng just took both her hands in his, and kissed each. On his face was a profound sadness, deep as the sky in winter, but he didn’t make a sound. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. Moreau murmured something in French, and he smiled and nodded.
And then, with the lights flickering again, Moreau returned her hands to Lester’s grasp, and closed her eyes.
“You’ll have… to try your best… to set a new ward…” Moreau murmured, eyes still closed.
Lester nodded, too fast. “I’ll do my best, Miss Estelle.”
“Good, good. Now, let’s go…”
Now Lester was turning a glimmery off-shade, as if his reddish skin were beginning to glow. Aurora blinked; were they glowing? The lights in the room flickered yet again, and the answer was yes, they were. Faintly, the strongest light shining up their arms, at their conjoined hands.
“What’s happening?” she asked, standing. The lights blinked out finally, and did not return.
“Madame Moreau is passing her office on to Lester,” Lucian replied quietly. He hadn’t moved at all since Lester had arrived, leaning against the wall in the far corner without a word.
Aurora glanced at him, then back at the glowing spectacle. “Her office? What does that mean?”
“She was the witch in our circle. Now, Lester will be.”
Aurora watched with wide eyes as Moreau’s glow dimmed, dimmed, and Lester’s grew stronger. It was over in less than a minute, and the lights in the room snapped back on as if someone had flipped the switch. And in the large hospital bed, gray and cold, lay the body of Estelle Moreau.
“Oh my God,” Aurora breathed.
“So passes the Witch, Estelle Moreau,” Milo murmured, bowing his head.
“We should go,” Lester coughed. He looked up at them all. “Her ward is totally gone now; I’ll have to build a new one, but I can’t do it here. I’ll need time—we need to all get somewhere safe.”
“Safe from what?” Aurora asked, her hazel eyes still locked on Madame Moreau’s still face.
Out in the hall, someone shrieked.
Chapter 7
Mr. Cheng turned to Lucian. He’d never looked so grim, never, and at that moment Aurora wouldn’t have wanted to be in his way.
“Take them to your home,” Cheng instructed. “Get them to safety. I’ll buy you time.”
Lucian nodded and stepped away from the wall. “I’m on it.”
Mr. Cheng opened the door of the hospital room; outside, there was chaos. It sounded like a high wind had begun ripping through the hall, and the lights were flashing like a series of electrical surges.
As she watched his back, Mr. Cheng began to change. It began as a rippled through his thin shoulders. At first, Aurora thought it was the flashing lights, but then he began to grow, madly, like an accelerated film. His spine lengthened and fur sprouted from his skin. In a matter of seconds, a Bengal tiger stood in the door where Mr. Cheng had been, its shoulders only a little shorter than he’d been upright.
Aurora’s legs folded under her and she was suddenly sitting on the couch again.
“He’ll can only give us a few minutes head start,” Milo told her, holding out a hand. “We gotta go!”
Go? Oh, boy. That was a lot to ask. But Aurora’s hand took Milo’s without her telling it to, and he pulled her to her feet. The tiger was gone, and the chaos in the hall was reaching a fevered pitch. Lucian helped Lester to his feet and herded them all out.
In the hall, a series of sharp growls and hisses welcomed them from the right, where the elevators were. Aurora looked, and felt quite crazy to see what she did; the tiger, surely bigger than a real one, was locked in combat with a pair of creatures that defied description. They seemed part shadow, not fully physical, and with the lights going mad it was impossible to get a look at them.
A second later, she was being rushed to the left. “The emergency stairs,” Milo told her. “I think this counts as an emergency.”
They burst into the stairwell, to find the lights flashing here, too. The going was treacherous in her heels, but Aurora had been wearing heels a long time and managed to keep up with the boys in their flat-soled shoes. Their steps clattered and echoed around them, and when they were turning the bend between the second and first floor, the door upstairs slammed open.
“Go!” Lucian bellowed, and they blasted through the door on the first floor.
“The parking garage! We can all fit in my car!”
“What about Mr. Cheng?” Aurora asked, her voice much higher than she’d meant it to be.
“Believe me, he can take care of himself,” Lucian replied as they rushed through the ground floor of the hospital. “He’ll be trying to hold them back and keep them from following. They haven’t hurt him, and he knows where to meet us.”
Aurora had to take his word for it, because they were already in the parking garage and booking it towards Milo’s car.
“Where are we going?” she panted, swinging into the front seat without asking.
“My apartment,” Lucian answered from the backseat. “It’s well-hidden. Lester will have time to build a new ward once we get there.”
Milo started the car and screeched out of the parking spot the second Lester—the last one in the car—had his door shut. He wheeled on out of the parking structure like a bat out of hell, still wearing his gun and police badge under his jacket, which Aurora found oddly amusing.
“What if you get pulled over?” she asked, smiling like a lunatic. “What’ll we tell them, we’re running from shadow monsters?”
Milo glanced at her. “Keep with us, Aurora. I know this is a lot all at once, but we were hoping… well we were hoping we’d be able to wait as long as possible before having this conversation.”
“What, that my father is here in the city? That he’s been looking for me all this time?” Aurora asked, suddenly angry. “My mother has been wasting away waiting for him to come back, and you tell me you all kept him from finding us?”
“We were protecting you,” Lester piped up from the back. “Your father doesn’t want to claim you—”
“He wants to kill you,” Lucian finished, leaning back in the shadows of the rear seat. “Or turn you to his side. Either way, he’s not looking out for your best interests.”
“His side?” Aurora spun in her seat to face him, careful to brace herself against Milo’s mad driving. “What side is that?”
Lucian stared at her intensely, angrily. “The side that only cares about him. He’s looking out for his interests now.”
“Why would he need to kill me?” Aurora asked, half hysterical, half furious. “He’s ignored me long enough—”
“This isn’t about custody or child support,” Lucian interrupted. “It’s about succession. You just saw what succession means in this group. One day, I’ll take Cheng’s place, just like Lester and Moreau. Most of the time, we can choose our own successor, but when you bring a child into the world, you make a successor. Whether
he likes it or not, his power is going to you, whenever you can claim it.”
“Power?” Aurora squeaked as Milo took a turn at thirty miles an hour. The car wheels skidded on some ice before righting. “What power? What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Protect the city,” Lucian answered patiently. “We told you already. That’s what we do. It’s why we’re grouped together like this. And your father is screwing things up by looking out for himself only.”
“So he thinks I want to kill him?” Aurora was dumbfounded.
“You will kill him,” Lucian insisted. “Either all at once or over time, the longer you live, the more of his strength you take. As your star rises, his is falling. If he kills you, he can stop it forever.”
To this, Aurora had nothing to say. What could she possibly say? She flopped back down in her seat, facing forward. This was unreal. She’d always thought her father must be a Class-A jackass to leave her mother, but this…
No one spoke for the rest of the drive, except the occasional sob from Lester. Aurora wished she knew what to say; someone should say something to the poor kid. Madame Moreau had been Aurora’s employer and nothing more, whether or not she had been some kind of secret guardian. All Aurora had known was that she better show up to work on time, and that if she and Moreau ever passed on the street, the old woman probably wouldn’t even look at her.
Obviously, to Lester, the lady had been much more dear. He was as quiet as could be, but every now and then, a sharp cry that was almost a cough would slip out. Aurora had spent all her adult life comforting her mother, and bizarrely, she found that she didn’t have even one scrap of comfort to give at the moment. Her own life was nothing to be envied, if half of what these people said was true. And after she had seen Mr. Cheng transform into a tiger, right before her eyes, she was inclined to believe more than half of it.
They crossed a bridge, although Aurora wasn’t sure which one, and soon found themselves in a river of slow-moving cars. In the middle of the night, they were stuck in traffic. Milo tapped his foot nervously.
“You should get out and walk from here,” he told Lucian. “The two of you—you can move faster with just two. The sooner we get her warded, the better. We’ll park and be up there as soon as we can.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Lucian opened his door and leapt out as Milo was coming to a stop. Aurora’s door opened a moment later, and Lucian’s large hand was offered to help her stand.
It had been one of the longest days of her life, but Aurora took Lucian’s hand and let him lever her up to her feet. They were in the middle of traffic, so the two of them had to fast-walk out of the road, over the snowbank and onto the sidewalk. Aurora had ever been thankful for her heeled boots before, but at least she wasn’t running around February New York in pumps.
It occurred to her as they moved up the street that she should have grabbed sneakers from her apartment. She had only one good pair (the other pair was full of holes) but even the old pair in her closet would have been better than spending all night in heels.
Luckily, Lucian’s building wasn’t far away. He punched in the entry code to a respectable-looking tenement building that stretched upward towards the high moon, and they climbed into an elevator up to the seventeenth floor. Here was a hall with several doors, the last of which Lucian unlocked and ushered Aurora inside.
At first it was almost completely dark, and Aurora put her hands out to avoid bumping into a table or a couch or some such incident; when Lucian closed the door, the darkness was like pitch, endless and thick.
Thankfully, he hit the lights a moment later. When he did, Aurora stared around, uncertain all over again.
It was a nice apartment, sure enough. And in a decent part of town, too, which didn’t come cheap in New York. But in the soft light of several lamps were thousands of charms. The lined the walls. They rustled from the ceiling. Strings and ribbons and lengths of twine, binding together beads and feathers and notes and bits of metal, hung in ropes. Under the charms, the walls were papered in handwritten wards, one taped over the other, like the scales of a fish, almost fully obscuring the paint behind them.
“You’ll be safe here,” Lucian said, taking off his jacket. In the living room, as if unaware of the mad-looking oddments strung around his house, Lucian had a very modern leather couch set around a simple entertainment center. He tossed his jacket across the back of the couch and headed into a back room.
“I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home.”
Home. As Lucian disappeared into his bedroom, Aurora felt the word echo into her chest like a shout down a cave. Home. She felt sharply that she had lost hers tonight, that her old life was fully gone. Her mother was missing, her apartment destroyed, her jobs as good as lost. What was going to become of her now?
And what about her father? Was that the real reason that he had left her and Ramona—because the others made him? Because they were afraid he might try to hurt Aurora in the attempt to keep his power? She didn’t feel powerful; nothing strange or unusual had ever happened to Aurora, nor had she ever done anything remarkable. Maybe they had it wrong. Surely, they did. She sat down on the couch, determined to tell Lucian exactly this when he returned.
But when Lucian can back into his living room, it was to find that Aurora was asleep on his couch, laying sideways with her feet on the floor as if she’d simply tipped over.
Chapter 8
The dream was different.
That had never happened before in her life, so Aurora didn’t recognize it begin. It felt more like a memory than a dream, a very old memory from when she was small. She was coloring, drawing something in huge, clumsy strokes. It felt like summer, with bright white sun glowing in through the windows. Her mother was humming somewhere nearby. The world was small and safe.
And then it started changing. The sun was setting, and the dusk outside moved into the apartment. Ramona’s humming quieted and vanished as night drew on, but no lights were turned on, and outside the world was black. By the time Aurora realized how dark it had become, it was complete, no moon, no stars. Not even street lights. She looked down at the picture she’d been drawing.
It had been a picture of her father’s face, but of course, she couldn’t see it, now. Lost again.
The table disappeared. The chair disappeared. And though she tried to hold on to it, the picture, too, vanished straight from her hand as if it had turned to smoke. Aurora was floating in the dark, and recognized at last the dream she’d known so well for far too long.
She twisted and thrashed in the dark; it felt more alive than ever. It felt like a real palpable thing, and it terrified her. Like the coils of a great snake that could constrict around her, suffocate her, any moment. She had to get out.
And then, there it was. The hand, as always. More felt than seen, it filled Aurora with dread. So much dread, in fact, that normally she shocked herself awake at this point. But this time, the dream persisted, and Aurora was carried along with it, towards the hand, and she had a choice before her. Should she take it?
Meanwhile, in the dream, Aurora put out her hands hesitantly. If she took the offered help, she would be pulled out of the darkness, that much was clear to her. But to where? To somewhere better? Or somewhere much worse?
She wasn’t able to make the choice. Long before a decision was reached, Aurora found herself being shaken by the shoulders, shaken back into the world of the living.
“Aurora. Hey! Wake up!”
She blinked awake, surprised to find herself not in her bed, and in fact, not even on furniture. She was on someone’s floor, someone leaning over her now, worried.
It was Lucien. She was in his apartment. Her own apartment was destroyed, besieged by the shadow creatures. Mr. Cheng. Madame Moreau. Her mother. Her father.
Aurora’s breathing grew shallow.
“Hey, calm down,” Lucien told her, helping her stand. She was still in her clothes from yesterday. She might have been out partying all night, comp
lete with the outfit; Aurora had never been out partying all night, but she guessed this was what it felt like. Long before she managed to get back on her feet, she realized the boots were still on.
“Ahrrgh,” she moaned, sitting back on the couch. Time to take off these boots, since she’d already made herself comfortable. What had she been thinking? She was acting like someone who was dying to get raped and murdered. Since when did she fall asleep alone in a total stranger’s house? Her mother had taught her better than that.
Of course, Ramona Potier was gone. Aurora pulled off her boots as tears crept into her eyes. Gone, without a trace.
“Hey, do you have a bathroom?” Aurora asked.
Lucien was kind enough not to point out the redundancy of that question, and instead directed her down the hall at the other end of the living room. Aurora shut herself in the, and looked in the mirror.
Her hair was bent like a deflated basketball. Her S&M clothes were creased and dull and had left red lines on her skin where they’d folded together. Her make-up from yesterday night was a disaster. She looked like a coked-up hooker, and she only felt a little better.
Aurora thought about asking to take a shower, but she didn’t have anything for her hair, or any clean clothes, so she contented herself with scrubbing her face and neck the best she could. For a guy, Lucien kept his bathroom pretty clean, with fresh towels and a laundry basket. Impressive.
She had her make-up in her purse, if she wanted to apply more, but by the time she scoured last night’s mask off, Aurora wasn’t in the mood to slather more on. She was barely able to tame her hair into an agreeable plait. Barely. Not much to look at, and less to smell, but at least she didn’t look like someone’s drunken mistake.
By the time she left the bathroom, Lucien was in the kitchen. Smelled like coffee, which was fine with Aurora. She walked over to the window, which was covered in blinds, drapes, and yet more charms, and started to push them aside to look out.
“Don’t do that,” Lucien called from the kitchen. “It’s about noon. We have to leave the windows covered, though, or else the wards on them won’t work.”
