I hovered my arms to my sides, my elbow grazing the garage door. “Freir.” My atern ticked down three. Eighteen more clicks of magic. Seventeen if I wanted to live.
An icy blue fog touched down my arms and circled my wrists. The fog blasted outward toward the walls and clung to the bricks, climbing and stretching to four solid walls of ice except the garage door my elbow touched. The ice popped and cracked but effectively froze the house’s shrinking momentum.
Kason ducked in behind me and yanked on the doorknob. It didn’t budge.
“Adole,” Claudia growled from the kitchen’s entryway.
He tried again with both hands, but this time the knob blazed red as his fingers curled around it. He leaped back with a pained shout, but the door swung open into the garage.
I pushed him through while my ice walls melted in a rush to splash around my ankles. One side of the jeep slanted toward us, the opposite wall already shoving against the other side so it would soon sit on two wheels.
Kason cried out as he attempted to lift the handle on the jeep door with stiff, blistered hands. The door clicked open, but he swayed on his feet as if the pain was shutting down his consciousness.
“Stay with me, Kason!” Without thinking, I sprang into the sloped front seat and slid upward behind the wheel. My gaze bounced at the buttons and dials with no idea how the hell anything worked. But we didn’t have time to switch places. I didn’t have time to learn how to drive either. “What do I do?”
Claudia appeared in the garage doorway and crossed her arms while she casually observed our attempted escape.
Kason dragged himself in behind me, his chest heaving, blinking hard, and jabbed the button clipped above my head with his knuckle. Nothing happened. He tried again, then pulled the visor down until keys dropped into my lap.
“Go. Stop.” He pointed vaguely at the floor in front of my feet at some pedals.
And that was the conclusion of my driving lesson.
The doorway where Claudia stood buckled with the force of the shifting walls, and she backed away into the house. She was letting us go that easily?
I stomped on a pedal, but we didn’t move. “What else?”
The table with the carved sun that Kason had made snapped over the hood of the jeep. The now jagged half of a sun turned in a wild circle, spinning its broken rays toward me, before sliding off the other side of the car. Warmth within reach, a promise of what was to come. Now gone.
With his swollen hand, Kason plugged in a key next to the wheel.
The jeep tilted higher, sliding me down the seat toward him. If the jeep tipped over completely before we got out of here, then we wouldn’t be driving anywhere without any wheels underneath us. But the garage door wasn’t opening behind us.
He shoved at a lever between us, his teeth bared. “Go,” he hissed.
I stomped down on a random pedal. Rubber squealed. Then we jolted backward at top speed, ramming through the buckled garage door, with what was left of Kason’s wooden creations dribbling across the front of the jeep.
As soon as the side of the jeep cleared the house’s warped, splintered, and much smaller foundation, we dropped onto all four wheels in the snow-covered driveway and kept hauling backward across the street.
“Stop,” Kason breathed.
A neighbor’s house loomed closer in the mirror above my head until I had enough sense to lift my foot from one pedal and smash it into the other. We slid to a stop.
Our heavy breaths misted the air as we stared straight ahead at what had once been an oasis of happiness and now was only a shrinking pile of wood and bricks. Oasis or not, Kason was now finally free of it.
I didn’t see the Diamond Dogs anywhere. Hopefully I’d hit them when I barreled through the garage door, and they were buried underneath a snow drift in the driveway.
Kason sagged against his door, his red, swollen hands crossed in front of his chest in an X, his eyes shut tight. “Drive, Hadley. Turn the wheel where you want to go. D for drive. P for park.”
I slowly lifted my hands onto the wheel. Pain rolled up my fingers to my blackened nails, but I gritted my teeth through it. “D for drive. P for park.” I settled my hand on the lever between our seats and shifted into drive, every bending knuckle absolute torture.
When I looked out the window again, my heartbeat stuttered. Claudia stood directly in front of the jeep. But it wasn’t just her that stalled my next breath in my lungs. It was the vial of blackened poke root she held between her thumb and forefinger. The vial I hadn’t been able to find. The vial that could end fae power and eternal winter, could restore witches’ rights across all factions to control their own power supply, and kill the man I was falling in love with if he swallowed it.
With a wicked smile, she tilted her head back and dropped the whole thing into her mouth.
Air leaked between my clenched teeth with a loud hiss. So focused was my hatred at Claudia that I didn’t immediately see the other Diamond Dog or the gun she carried.
Kason’s gun from the closet. Pointed right at him.
And before I could crush my foot to the go pedal, she fired.
13
I blinked at the large cracks snaking across the glass, twisting away from a small hole on the right side. Beyond it, the Diamond Dogs appeared bent and distorted. And red. The whole snowscape had turned red, the bright, sticky kind I tasted at the back of my throat.
Something scraped there, from my burning lungs and across my tongue and out my open mouth that wouldn’t shut. A scream, so loud inside the confines of this jeep. Outside, too. Because the Diamond Dogs were screaming, as well, their bones snapping, their bodies folding in on themselves into the stained red snow. My magic, the dark, killing kind, shoved them deep into the ground, like three boxes made of flesh and diamonds now buried and forgotten. I didn’t even remember making the conscious choice to kill them since the moment the hole appeared in the windshield.
It wasn’t until they were gone, flattened into bloody slush, that I realized someone was still screaming, and suddenly my chest pinched with the need for air. I took in a ragged inhale, and the screaming stopped.
“Hadley.” An unsteady whisper to my right.
I turned, my body jerking and twitching, as if it knew something the rest of me didn’t dare process, as if it wanted to prepare me for the worst.
Kason. Sagging against the door. Blood cascading from a hole in his chest down the front of his once white flannel shirt. The one that was always so warm, but now looked frozen in time.
“No.” I threw myself across the seat at him, my hands flying to stop the rush of blood. “No, Kason, you can’t. You can’t leave me like this!”
They’d shot him in the chest, on the left side near his heart. The heart I wanted so desperately to be mine.
“Curare.” Warm, buttery light slipped off my tongue. I bent to his lips and kissed him. I didn’t know if the healing spell would even work if a bullet was still lodged inside him. It could still cut up his insides. He needed someone with more magic than me, but I only had nine clicks left. Eight if I wanted to live. I held my hands to his chest, the only place I could that wouldn’t physically hurt me. “Come on, Kason. Stay with me.”
He kept his eyes closed tight as sweat dripped over them and down his pained face. His dark hair was plastered to his head with his body’s effort to keep himself alive. I wanted to brush it away from his face, feel his skin sliding against my palms like I’d dreamed about, but I didn’t dare lift my hands away from his chest that still pumped rivulets between my fingers.
Leaning my forehead against his, I whispered, “Talk to me. Don’t go to sleep. Does it hurt any less?”
“Well,” he said on a groan. “It feels like I’ve been shot. So not really.”
I laughed even though I shouldn’t have at a time like this. The guy had more magical ability than he’d let on.
“We need to go,” he said, his voice creaking. “We need to find more poke root.”
“No.” I shook my head as tears burned the backs of my eyes. “No, we don’t.”
“Let me do this, Hadley. This is no way to live, not for you. Not for anyone. You deserve so much more than this frozen world.” He gazed at me for a long moment, as if to let that sink in. “If I’m the Legacy, then let me do this.”
I shook my head. What the hell was he saying? That he wanted to die? If he was the Legacy and swallowed poke root, then he would die. If he wasn’t the Legacy, how could I risk his life in the first place by finding that out? I would rather continue eternal winter under fae rule.
“Why do you want to?” I asked.
“Because, Hadley…” He blinked down at my hands pressing against his heart, and when he looked up again, a smile twitched his mouth. “You deserve to be happy. You, more than anyone. With sunshine and freedom.”
“I won’t be happy without you.” Unable to meet his gaze after that bout of extreme honesty, I lifted my head from his and kissed his temple. “I’m going to take my hands away now.”
He nodded. When I lifted my hands, blood still drained down his shirt with long, black fingers toward his swollen hands resting on his lap. He needed more healing, but I was running out of magic fast. I prayed to whoever would listen not to let him bleed out.
I moved the lever to D for drive with my elbows and forearms, then stepped on the go pedal, slowly at first so I wouldn’t jar him. I settled my wrists on the wheel and turned awkwardly in the direction of my house. “You okay? How are your hands? Can you put them over your chest?”
“They’re great. Everything’s great,” Kason rasped, his face draining color as fast as the blood down his front. He glanced at my hands. “How are you?”
Leave it to him to be more concerned about me.
Every spell could be broken, so maybe the Legacy spell had an alternative loophole I hadn’t yet thought of. If it meant Kason didn’t have to die, I would find it. Maybe it was selfish to think I deserved a sliver of happiness more than these last few days with Kason, and if so, then fuck yeah I was selfish. I wanted an eternity with him. But I also wanted witches’ freedom from the fae, for that girl and her two younger brothers I’d seen at The Witch’s Tit to not have to choose between warmth and food. I wanted all of it.
I ticked my gaze from the plowed road ahead to him. “When we get to my house, you can’t come in. The less moving you, the better, okay? I’ll just be in and out.”
His gaze narrowed underneath sweaty strands of hair. “Why?”
“I don’t want you to see it,” I said, turning onto my street in a slow, wide arc. “My curse on my hands accumulated outward to the inside of my house. It turned everything black and barb-wired everything else shut. I equated it to my heart so I could forget and cope and… I don’t want you to see where I came from.”
After a long pause, he said, “But your heart’s not like that.”
I shook my head, glancing at him with a small smile. I pulled in front of my house with too much force on the stop pedal.
“I’ll just be in and out,” I reminded him.
“I’ll be here,” he said, but the doubt clouding his eyes unnerved me.
I crawled out of the jeep and stepped into red-splattered snow. The Diamond Dogs’ blood had sprayed up over the tires and smeared across most of the rest of the black paint. I shouldn’t have killed them today. I should’ve killed them a lot sooner.
The front door stood wide open and dangled precariously from the Diamond Dogs’ dramatic entrance, which seemed like months ago. Snow drifted in onto the entryway tile, and as I stepped through into the blackened house, I could hear Mom’s voice calling to me through my memories.
Hadley, if you track in any more snow, I will whip you with a wet noodle!
It had been so long since I’d allowed myself to hear her that I wheezed a chuckle. It sounded so foreign coming from inside this cold, empty hell, and a shiver skated goosebumps up my arms. I didn’t belong here anymore, not after living inside Kason’s bright, loving home with him. The person who had lived here all alone for two years was someone entirely different. A strange stranger.
I shouldered open the unlocked barbed wire gate and quickly strode down the hallway toward my parents’ bedroom. Green firelight still lit the way on the wall sconces, each flame reduced to a speck with the wind coming in through the front door and the broken window in the kitchen. The gusts whistled across the ceiling and screeched through the cracks in the walls.
Just outside my parents’ bedroom door, I stared down several rows of wire hung tight across it. Carefully, I braced my forearms between the barbs on two wires and wrenched them apart as hard as I could. They bent outward, a small hole I might be able to slide through without killing myself. Eyes and toes crossed that I wouldn’t.
I hit the button on the wall to open the door, and a wave of musty cold air filtered out, followed by a surge of memories—planting myself between Mom and Dad while they slept when I was a scared six-year-old, how we would all congregate on their bed in the mornings so we could start the day with laughter and pillow fights, watching Mom sit in front of her herb garden while she delicately pruned and fussed over her plants. I missed that. I missed Jake’s energy and Talamond’s quiet intelligence. I missed how Dad used to cover his mouth while staring at his computer screen as if holding in some larger-than-life secret. And he was. The contributor, maybe even the director, of the underground movement to protect a human Legacy had never once let his secret slip.
Slowly, I climbed through the wire and into these memories, leaving the blackened, wire-guarded hallway behind. The bedroom smelled like the rest of the house, not like it once did, but I’d forgotten what it had smelled like. Like warmth, I guessed. Like life. Similar to how Kason’s house had smelled.
I made my way toward the large herb garden box on a shelf underneath the window that once had a magical light blazing across the inside of the lid. I elbowed the lid off the side and stared down at the herbs inside the box. Dead, of course. In the corner was a wrinkled cluster of deep purple berries. Poke root. Also dead. I heaved a sigh. I shouldn’t have expected anything else in this house.
Once I took Kason somewhere safe, I would need to figure out how to get more magic clicks for my atern. With Nasty somewhere inside Kason’s crushed house, getting more magic or money would be near impossible if I couldn’t do more hacking jobs for my clients. Without Nasty, I might not be able to find a loophole that would ensure Kason lived and fae power would end.
A creak floated from somewhere down the hallway. I paused, swallowing thickly.
The front door wouldn’t close since the Diamond Dogs had demolished it when they’d come to check up on me. Was that Kason, even though I’d told him to stay put? Surely not. He was still hurt. I held my breath, listening. The creaking had stopped. Just the wind, then. The hair bristling up and down my arms suggested otherwise, though.
Where else would I find poke root? It wasn’t like it grew wild outside in the summer sun. I reached a hand into the box, and as my knuckle bones rattled against every nerve in my hand, I plucked the dead cluster of poke root berries, most of which crumbled to dust between my fingers. I pocketed most of it anyway, wincing.
A low whistle, trailed by an upsweep of more musical notes, scraped icy barbs up my back. Not the wind. The wind couldn’t carry a tune, so familiar, so haunting, that it undid my bladder within seconds. Warmth seeped between my legs and puddled to the floor as slow footsteps beat into the whistled song. I stared down at myself in shock, fearing that when I’d stepped into my parents’ bedroom, I’d cursed myself to relive my nightmare. Unless this wasn’t a dream. Unless I wasn’t losing my mind.
Footsteps thudded closer down the hallway, heavy and sure as if whoever it was wore black, pointed shoes with gold-plated toes while whistling a jaunty, yet eerie tune.
I’d led my family’s killer right to me. Here, now, to finish the job. Because now I knew what Dad had known all along—the Legacy was real. And th
is fae knew I knew.
Terror cracked through my body, splintering my resolve, shattering what I’d become and morphing me into what I used to be—a scared seventeen-year-old girl whose family had just been slaughtered. Out in the living room two years ago. The residual screams that I heard in my nightmares now chased tears down my cheeks.
I had nine clicks of magic left. Eight if I wanted to live. Less than that if I planned to save Kason and free the witches from fae rule. Not enough to summon dark magic and kill a killer, too. So, I did what I did before and slid myself under my parents’ bed. Hiding, shivering, and weak.
A pair of black shoes appeared in the barb-wired doorway. The happy whistled song gusted across the room, filling it with fishy, sour breath. I thinned my lips to keep from inhaling the fae smell and gagging.
One shoe lifted itself, then the other, until the fae had climbed through the wires into the room with me. My heart banged into the floorboards as I peered underneath the blanket that hung over the end of the bed. The boots stepped forward toward the puddle on the floor then toward the open herb box against the wall.
Maybe he would leave me alive and alone like he had before. Maybe he’d think I’d already gone. Except Kason was out front.
Oh shit, Kason! Desperation hooked my fingernails into the wood floor, and it took all I had not to launch myself out of here. If the fae had seen him before coming inside… How could the fae not see him? Damn it, I didn’t have enough magic to even protect him. He could be dead. The man I loved and swore I’d never hurt could be dead because of me.
A strange sound ticked at the back of my throat, the start of a scream or a snarl or a roar. The shoes stepped closer as if they’d heard it over the continuous whistling, and I no longer cared.
Just like I’d faced the memories of my past—the painful and the good, of which there were a lot more—it was time to face my family’s killer.
I took a breath, a big shaky one that trembled out the last of my tears. “You can stop fucking whistling now.”
The jaunty, eerie tune trailed off, then silence.
Legacy: Faction 11: The Isa Fae Collection Page 14
