The Kovrov leaned back in his chair like a throne. “Magic always has a cost.”
“You must know I do not have money, sir.” She lifted her chin in pride just short of defiance, a gesture Jeremy recognized as his own. “But I am prepared to pay.”
The vision skidded forward in dreamlike bounces, and Maeve said, “In the stories there are ways to end these spells. A secret to guess. Or a kiss.”
“This is not a story,” barked one of the sons, but the Kovrov waved a hand without looking.
“We are generous. Young lady, at what price your boy’s freedom?” His face in the dim light was not generous.
“True love. If he meets his true love, he should be free to be with her.”
The word her was a needle prick. The Kovrov smiled, all teeth like a wolf or Alexei, and brought the nib of his pen to the page. “Of course he should. True love.” The Kovrov found that funny and repeated the words as he wrote: “True love. True. Love.” He did not say first or only or kiss, though he must have written them down, laying a trap instead of an exit.
They watched the Kovrov cut his own thumb and Maeve’s, dropping their blood into an inkwell. He signed his name, and Maeve, holding the pen in an awkward fist, drew her quivering X.
They followed the girl out into the street, which Jeremy sensed as a stench, animal and rotten and revolting.
Maeve stopped on the street and pressed herself against a wall. She clutched her injured thumb inside a fist at her chest and with her other hand, she wiped at her face. Tears fell faster than she could stop them, sliding down her cheeks in sheets and soaking the high collar of her dress. She murmured Hail Marys through her tears.
“Let him be brave,” she said against her hand. In the space of the ritual, something surrounded her that felt like magic. It was like a light Jeremy could hear or a note he could see—something high and clear. “Let my boy be happy with them. With the Kovrovs, ugh—” She stopped and shook her head. “Let him make them better. Stop this madness. Let him”—she choked on her tears—“matter.”
There wasn’t room for her to stay standing against the wall. She latched onto the words, repeating them like a mantra as she scurried home. Let him matter, let him matter.
The prayer could have wrapped itself around his contract, made a trigger like Luke said. But it wasn’t a spell, or a plan, or a curse. She was just a desperate girl.
“Do you think that was real?” Jeremy thought.
“Yes.” Luke sounded too sure to truly be sure, filling in a gap with swagger. Or maybe that was projecting. Jeremy wished he could see Luke’s face.
“I was expecting a spell.”
“No, it was just like one of your prayers. It even felt the same.”
Jeremy tried to fit the pieces together the way Luke did—no Jeremy until there were Kovrovs he could be happy with, or Kovrovs he could make better, or a tide he could turn. “Alexei asked for help. Did I tell you that? At the end of the ritual he messed up.”
“We have to find the rest of them,” Luke said. “See if we can find Annabel next. Should we focus on Alexei?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, but as soon as he thought, Alexei, Alexei, Alexei’s pulse stopped against his fingers. Something was gone, either Alexei’s pulse or his own hand.
“Luke, wait—” Jeremy’s mind scattered, and he slipped off the focus he needed. “Luke? Luke, are you there?”
Chapter Fifty
Luke found the rest of them, the sense of an unsteady circle turning around him, over a scene he recognized from Jeremy’s story. Alexei, around Luke’s age, with shorter hair and a softer jaw, sat on the floor in front of a triangle of candles. “I love you,” he said, kissing the side of a red candle.
Luke had gotten used to speaking inside this ritual, thinking words and making them heard, but he felt a wriggle of too much intimacy trying to reach out that way to someone besides Jeremy. “What’s happening?”
Alexei’s voice: “We undershot. Or overshot. Or she’s gone.”
“I love you,” said the boy on the floor.
“This can’t be it,” Malcolm said. “She has to be somewhere.” Images flickered too fast for Luke to keep up with—smears of red hair and giggles, a little girl across a dining room table, a grown girl whirling back on him in fury, tears in her eyes. They had to be Malcolm’s memories, because Luke recognized the way he thought of his sister as someone he needed to take care of until he’d discovered this mysterious young woman sharing his house.
“I love you,” said the boy on the floor.
“You see?” Alexei asked. “We’re stuck in the loop.”
The parade of images slipped faster than Luke could keep up with. “Have you tried not being stuck?”
He felt Alexei’s disdain as if it were one of his own emotions, crowding out his own thoughts. But there had to be a way through. Jeremy had done this, taken charge and found what he was looking for. Someone had to do the same thing here. But what had Jeremy done?
This was all wrong—rushing and remote, like a movie, with none of the immediacy of Maeve’s much older memory.
“This isn’t it. Jeremy and I—Jeremy?” There was an absence next to Luke, and the steady tapping pulse under his fingers was gone.
Luke’s own surprise and wonder were blurred in shades of everyone else’s confusion and fear. He was tossed in the waves, no up or down, and he couldn’t anchor himself without Jeremy, so steadiness kept slipping away. He couldn’t even take a deep breath in this space, all mind.
But he could ask a question.
“Where are you?” he thought, looking for Jeremy. The question turned, slid into place. He’d been asking it for weeks. “Where is she?”
He saw the cards disappearing from Alexei’s hand, but next, he thought of the card he’d drawn reappearing. Annabel’s room had come back like it had never left—the paper in her notebooks fresh, the air still sweet with her perfume.
They’d been asking how and why and what they might do to fix it, but this question had been murmuring underneath. Where?
He centered the question in his mind, focusing. Gentle nudges of curiosity from around the circle settled it into place. The shape of the ritual spun out around him, a perfect silken web. This was something he could do—a new stage, but an old song.
He said, “Where is she?” and then, holding her yearbook photo in his mind, “Where are you?”
A gray mist bloomed over the bright candles of Alexei’s memory. It cleared the vision like a movie screen, and Luke waited with a shuddering thrill for the next sight that would fill it.
The bottom fell out, and Luke felt the sick drop of a missed step—and another. One gasping silence stretched open, and gravity let go, dropping him into a flat gray that filled his eyes and mouth and nose. A vise clamped his chest.
He was alone—
There was nothing but gray—
His heart stopped—
He was falling—
He thudded back into his body, the web of the ritual pulling away from him. “I’ve got you,” Alexei said. “It’s okay. I’ve got everyone.”
“I love you,” said the boy on the floor.
Chapter Fifty-One
Jeremy woke up gasping, his lungs burning like they’d been empty for too long. The room was oppressively hot, the air gone thick as a clay, and he was so sweaty he’d slipped out of the circle, dropping Alexei’s hand and sliding free of Luke’s.
Everybody around the table was still asleep, chests rising and falling as one. He touched Luke’s cheek and found it cool. “Luke?”
Nothing. He turned and pushed Alexei’s shoulder. He moved with the pressure, elastic, but didn’t wake.
He saw the pile slumped on the floor with an electric jolt. “Camille!”
Jeremy scrambled out of his chair. She was unconscious and had fallen off her perch on the hutch, landing with her limbs splayed. Her forehead was bleeding. Carefully, Jeremy turned her over. Her pulse was strong, and exhales tickled unde
r her nose, but she didn’t wake as he moved her. She still clutched the truce bag tight in one of her hands. He tried patting her cheeks and saying her name, but she was out as hard as the magicians around the table.
Jeremy straightened her skirt and pushed her hair away from the bruise on her forehead. She wasn’t bleeding heavily, but she should have a bandage. He was caught in a decision, whether to run to the kitchen for a first aid kit or start ripping the ritual apart, when something in the room changed.
He followed the feeling, as if he’d finally caught one of the vibes Luke had tried to explain, but it was nothing so strange. It was only a noise—a new, jaggedly shaped breath.
Jeremy froze with his hand on Camille’s forehead. She was flushed. She was real. She was a person, like Jeremy. It felt very important to notice that.
Skin squeaked on the wood table. Limbs and clothes rustled. His own pulse slammed in his ears.
Let him be brave. Jeremy stood up.
The girl on the table was as real as he was—as much as his heart wanted to protest, his eyes told his brain something else. Her shoulders were made of the wrong angles and her strawberry hair hung in lank strings, hiding her face. She crouched in the middle of the table, knees pushing up the hem of an old-fashioned white dress, and deliberately rubbed out bits of the soap runes around Alexei’s bowl.
Her head swung slowly around, and she snatched Jeremy with round blue eyes. “I take it you weren’t expecting me.” She twisted her mouth around like a smile or a sneer or a scar. “This is the worst party I’ve ever been invited to.”
Pinpricks of white light swam in Jeremy’s vision. He fumbled for his phone, but it was dead. The clock on the wall said 12:49. Alexei and his midnights—every time Jeremy turned around, it was midnight, and he was a helpless prisoner.
He made his hand press forward, into Corey Malcolm’s back, tugging his shirt, but Malcolm didn’t move.
Jeremy managed to whisper, “Help.”
She crawled a step closer over the table, moving a leg and an arm and the other leg, but none of the sleeping magicians moved. “I’ll do what I can, little man.” She grimaced again and added heavily, “Because I think it’s just you and me here.”
Jeremy backed up until he hit the wall and then turned to the window, a single square. Katya’s back was to the house, eyes on the street; Malcolm’s man was out of sight, around back. Jeremy slammed his palm against the glass—“Katya! Katya, help!”
But the house was sealed closed around him, and she didn’t move. His palm burned where he’d come too close to the outside. He pounded the glass with a fist, but it sent only a jangling ache up to his elbow.
Jeremy turned slowly. The girl was watching him, disdainful but amused.
He stepped closer, reaching for Alexei, and the girl tracked him, smearing the runes as she moved. He got Alexei’s arm in his hand, squeezing, but Alexei didn’t even twitch. Sweat stung Jeremy’s eyes.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked.
Jeremy’s throat scratched with thirst, but he swallowed hard so that when he answered, his voice was sure. “Jeremy. And you’re Annabel.”
She made a sound like a laugh or a snarl or an ache. “Not for a long time.”
She stood in the center of the table, looking down at the bowl of blood and the bread and milk. Standing, she was less wrong. Her angles were fine. Her strange dress was a plain nightgown. Her hair was only mussed, like she had been sleeping on it. She could have gone to bed a minute ago, not eighteen years in the past. She lifted her hand toward the chandelier, but her fingers couldn’t connect with the brass. They drifted through, dreamlike.
“Are you a ghost?” Jeremy asked.
Annabel turned to him. The wrong thing wasn’t her body, it was what was left inside it. Her eyes glittered, and her toes worked the runes.
She wasn’t the enemy—they’d done this to find her, and here she was. But Jeremy hadn’t expected it to be like this. His head ached with thirst and heat.
“I don’t think so.” She tried the chandelier again, head turning curiously as she watched her hand dissolve through metal.
Jeremy shook his head, and again, but the fuzzy, fevered feeling wouldn’t clear. He pressed his hands to his temples, squeezing his brain back into place. “Something’s wrong.”
Annabel looked evenly into Jeremy’s eyes, parted her lips, and took a big, deep breath. Her chest lifted, and Jeremy’s burned, a fresh spear of pain slicing past his heart. He doubled over, clutching his chest, and tried to pant but couldn’t find the breath.
When he could lift his head, Annabel was still staring at him. She stood with her arm over her head, fingers hooked firmly over one arm of the chandelier. She swung it slowly back and forth, plaster dust falling like snow.
“No.” Jeremy’s voice eked out of his throat in a harsh whisper, though he hadn’t meant to hold it back. He was disappearing out from under himself as Annabel grew solid.
“Any port in a storm, baby,” she said sweetly. “No hard feelings, I hope.”
“I didn’t—” Jeremy lurched forward, steadying himself on the back of Alexei’s chair. “It wasn’t my—”
“It wasn’t my fault, either,” Annabel said.
Jeremy walked around the table, hands on the chairs to hold himself up, until he got to Luke. He tugged on Luke’s hair, Wake up, help me, please wake up. The candlelight hurt his eyes, and he pressed his face into Luke’s neck. It was still cool.
“I can’t believe you thought milk was a gift. You could have brought wine, you asshole.” Annabel’s voice had moved closer, and Jeremy opened his eyes as she upended the glass over Alexei, milk splattering down his face. Her head was cocked to the side, eyes flat and distant. “You didn’t know anything about me at all.”
“It was a mistake,” Jeremy said. “He didn’t—they didn’t mean—”
“I don’t care.” She threw the glass against the wall, shattering it, and cut a sideways glance at Jeremy.
“Please.” He turned it to a prayer when his voice gave out, Please, please. I don’t know what I did wrong.
“No.” She crouched down again, close. She smelled like candy perfume and rot, choking in the heavy air. Each of her exhales touched his face and burned in his chest.
Jeremy shook his head, but his voice was gone. A shudder racked deep through his body and the floor swerved again. No one was awake to hear if he said goodbye. He lifted his face, pressed Luke’s jaw with his fingers to turn him, and put one more kiss on Luke’s slack mouth.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Luke woke up with Jeremy’s stuttering breath filling his chest. Vision bleary and limbs slow, he understood nothing about the room—the icy crackle in the air, the warmth slumping over his shoulder—but his bones knew first that Jeremy had fallen against him. Luke’s body was moving before his mind, jumping up and gathering Jeremy into his arms. The temperature had dropped to a painful, bone-deep freeze while he was out, but Jeremy burned, sweaty like he’d been trudging through the desert. Adrenaline tasted acrid in Luke’s mouth.
And there was another person in the room, hopping down from the soap-smeared table to investigate the lights dotted into the plants along the wall. A girl, with long red hair. Is that Annabel Malcolm did we make her real did we bring her here how is that even—
No one else was awake. Jeremy had been alone with her, and he was sick or hurt. Luke moved back, pulling Jeremy away without taking his eyes off the girl. She played her fingers between the light and the leaves, as casually as plucking a flower in a garden. Luke hooked his hands under Jeremy’s arms to pull him back—he was hot as a stove to the touch, and his breath rattled high and shallow and way too slow in his chest.
Stepping back, Luke saw Camille’s body on the floor and clenched his hands instinctively around Jeremy’s ribs. A pounding like war drums rushed through Luke—this was the vision in Alexei’s apartment. Jeremy’s body, hot in the cold, his chest rattling. Fear and blood heavy in the cold air. The vi
sion had been a chance to stop this, and Luke had missed it.
He let Jeremy rest against the wall and stood. Keeping his eyes on Annabel, he grabbed for the doorknob behind his back. He rattled it—locked, though Luke had been the last one in the room and hadn’t locked the door. He rattled harder, turned a fist and banged it against the wood. He couldn’t find his way out of the room and negotiate with the girl inside—he had to pick one and do it right.
Reaching deep, deep down for the first and truest lessons his mother had taught him, he put a courteous smile on his face. “Good evening, miss.”
He spoke loudly, so someone outside might hear, too, but the girl—Annabel—ignored him. She cupped her hand around an orb of light and made it grow, sputtering into flame. Her eyes on it were hungry, and she licked her teeth.
Luke knew his way around that witchlight, how it burst in his hands or dissolved when he played his fingers in it. He focused, listening for the high note, and imagined the flame in her hand snuffing.
It went out.
Annabel clutched her fingers closed and eyed him, annoyed.
“Looks like we’ve had a disagreement here.” Luke gestured to Jeremy and Camille with a calmness he didn’t feel. His hand shook as he opened it in the air—he couldn’t lose either of them, no wake up wake up. “Maybe I can help.”
She walked sideways around the table. Luke mirrored her.
“No, I don’t think so. Everyone has been very accommodating.” She glanced at Jeremy, who wasn’t breathing he wasn’t breathing he wasn’t—he took another thin, rattling inhale. In the quiet, Luke caught Camille’s exhale, slow and steady, only sleep.
Luke let go of the breath he’d been holding to listen and opened his hands, a helpless gesture that fell out before he could stop it. “I can make this right if you help me. Don’t hurt him.”
“Charming.” Another orb of light, next to Annabel’s shoulder, flickered into flame. Luke concentrated and put it out, but she’d gotten already a second and third.
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