“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “If it’s not the curse, it has to be an enchantment. I’ll prove it. You’ll see.”
I stood on trembling legs and waved my hand, just as I’d done in the puzzle room in the basement.
I reject this false reality.
Nothing changed. The bodies, the blood, all of it was still there.
I tried three more times, and when that didn’t work, tried a spell like the one I’d done with Serena to get Cooper out of the puzzle.
The puzzle broke, and Cooper was free. The puzzle broke, and Cooper was alive.
Arabella and Harry were both tugging at me, whispering urgently, but I ignored them.
Three. You have to do it three times. That’s the most powerful number.
“…help me…” Harry was saying.
“…isn’t going to work, you need to come away…” That was Arabella.
I didn’t care.
The puzzle broke, and Cooper was alive.
The puzzle broke, and Cooper was alive.
The puzzle broke, and Cooper was alive.
Nothing happened.
And then another voice carried across the maze. Singing.
“…she cut off their tails and then licked the knife…”
I turned away from the bodies, snarling in the direction of the song like some feral animal, thinking only of attacking the man who’d killed Cooper.
Except he’s not really dead. It’s a trick.
Was Jeeves inside the maze? Or was that coming from the garden? Sound carried so strangely, so inconsistently here. How quickly could I get to him? I would no doubt die in the attempt to kill him, but that might be okay, as long as I could carry him off with me.
“Phineas is going to die!”
Arabella’s fierce voice finally broke through my delirium.
Phineas. I can’t let anyone else die for me.
“We have to go,” Arabella said. “Now. We can’t stop to fight or grieve. Phineas is hurt. Bad.”
And then we’ll find the real Cooper, and take him home.
I nodded and turned to follow Harry. But the boy was bent over the bodies now, tugging on the strap of a messenger bag gripped in Cooper’s lifeless hand. It wouldn’t give at first.
The singing came closer. Jeeves was definitely inside the maze now.
Finally Harry unclipped the strap and left it behind, clutching the bag to his chest.
This is a dream. It has to be a dream.
Harrier Wick did not just pull a bag off Cooper’s corpse, while a singing butler stalks us through a hedge maze. That is not a thing that can happen.
It’s a nightmare. I’m cursed. I have a fever.
Harry hurried away. Arabella grabbed my arm. And even though this wasn’t real, could not be real, I went with her, to hide from the butler and save Phineas.
We exited the maze through a small, half-hidden hole in the hedge, one Harry must have made himself. He led us at a run across the grounds, past the house and garden, until we came to the outer wall. No one tried to stop us, and I didn’t see any security guards. I wondered if Cooper had killed them all.
“Where… we… going?” I wheezed.
Harry seemed equally out of breath, from exertion or shock or fear. “Zoo… he’s by the zoo…” He wiped his face, and when he spoke again, his voice was calmer. “This way. We have to walk. Not run.”
With that instruction, he led us to a section of the property I had not yet seen, a little cul-de-sac with four neat brick houses clustered together at the end, and a road that stretched out to meet, I assumed, the main driveway.
I took all of this in with calm eyes. I walked normally, as I’d been told to do. But I had a feeling that scream I couldn’t let out before was coming.
We walked behind the houses, close to the wall, and came across two small boys making a snowman in one of the backyards.
“Harry,” one of them shouted. “Want to come help us?”
“Can’t.” Harry jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at us. “Busy.”
A middle-aged woman opened her back door and called to the boys. It was starting to snow harder, and didn’t they want to come in for some hot chocolate? Then she waved to Harry, and asked where he was off to.
Harry lied easily and without hesitation. “One of the alpacas is sick.” He pointed at us again. “I have to take the vets back to the zoo.”
Arabella shifted the duffel bag she carried a little higher, bringing it into clear view, as if carrying a bag was somehow proof of veterinary credentials.
“Oh, well then I won’t keep you!”
We waved to the woman—the feeder, the Wick—as we started walking again.
The whole thing was so surreal that it only solidified my conviction that I would wake any second, to find myself back at the Mount Phearson, in Cooper’s arms.
But that happy delusion fell apart when we came to a narrow space between two barns, where Phineas was slumped against the wall, bleeding.
“Phineas!”
I crouched beside him. He was conscious, but barely. “Shot. Harry saved my life… sent them the wrong direction.”
His entire torso was dark with blood. I ran my hands over his chest and belly, along his sides, and then around as much of his back as I could get to, but I didn’t find a wound. There was no time to examine him more thoroughly.
The canvas bag Harry had taken from Cooper bounced off my back as he threw it at me. “You have to take him out of here. Jeeves will find us. If he catches me with you, I’ll be punished.”
“Cooper… split up,” Phineas muttered, his own voice sounding as feverish as my own. “Harry warned… ambush. Shot. Where’s Cooper?”
Dead.
He is not dead.
“I don’t know,” I said. “They must have him somewhere, there’s an illusion in the maze—”
“It’s not an illusion!” said Harry. “I saw it.”
Arabella was already on the other side of Phineas, hoisting his arm over her shoulder. “Verity, we have to move. Before he bleeds out.”
Bleeds out, that horrifying phrase, was all I needed to hear. We had to get Phineas to safety first, and then worry about Cooper.
Phineas cried out in pain as we lifted him, and I struggled to stay upright under his weight. There was no question of him teleporting. I thought he might even have fainted.
“Harry, can you get us to the gate?” I asked. “We need you to get through it. He can’t cross iron without an invitation, and this is your house.”
His face resolute, Harry picked up the bag again and gestured for us to follow. Arabella and I labored behind him, Phineas getting paler and heavier between us, until we came to a gate beyond a small paddock.
“Not this one,” I said. “This isn’t the one they left open.”
Harry ignored me and pulled out a false brick in the wall, just as he had at Cillian’s entrance to the house, this time to reveal a button instead of a keypad. When he pressed it, the gate unlocked with a buzz and a click. Arabella leaned over—tilting Phineas dangerously—and held it open before it could lock again.
I felt sick, looking at that damn button.
Does the other gate have one of those? I bet it does.
If we had found it last time, none of this would have happened.
“Go!” Harry whispered urgently. “I invite you, or whatever. Take this.” He thrust the bag up under my arm, trapping it against my side.
“Will you be punished?” I asked.
“I’ll tell them you had a gun and you made me.”
“Thank you, Harry.”
We dragged Phineas out, and the gate slammed shut behind us.
You left Cooper there. Just like you left Serena.
No. Cooper isn’t dead. I’ll be back for him.
Aiming for the cover of some trees to our right, we began to make our slow way back to the car. The snow was coming down thick now. Maybe it would hide our footprints.
A few seconds la
ter I heard Harry shout, more distantly than I’d have thought, “They went back into the maze! Guys! They went back into the maze!”
Good boy.
“Wonder… why… helped us,” I puffed as we reached the trees. “Doesn’t even… like Cooper.”
“But he likes Phineas,” said Arabella. “And he feels guilty over Serena, even though he hated her. I asked him why I should trust him, before we followed him out of the maze.”
I can’t describe what the next few minutes were like. They passed in a haze of chest pain and numbness and cold sweat. I kept up a steady stream of chatter to Phineas, offering empty assurances to deaf ears. Finally, as we neared the road, I heard a sweet sound: the baying of a bloodhound.
Wulf rushed at us through the snow and the trees, practically dragging Lydia behind him. We set Phineas down at her feet.
“How bad is it?” she asked tightly as she dropped to her knees and tore off his jacket.
“I don’t know,” Arabella said. “We haven’t had a chance to look him over. We know he was shot, but we don’t know—”
“It’s here.” Lydia moved aside for a second so we could see where she’d pulled open his shirt. There was a bullet wound in his upper left shoulder, right where it met his neck. “Shit. He’s lost too much blood.” She turned to Wulf and said, “Eric. Hurry.”
The bloodhound bayed again and ran off, disappearing into the trees.
Lydia started to clean the wound with fresh snow. “Phantasms have some kind of important artery there. You might have the same one, Verity, I don’t know. I mean, it’s not jugular important, but it’s important. Is the jugular an artery or a vein?”
While she babbled—as Lydia tended to do in times of high stress—she rifled through her purse, pulling out gauze, bandages, tape, and several small jars and vials, setting everything down in the snow, where new flakes quickly started to cover it all. Arabella and I knelt down to help her.
“If we can stop the bleeding, I think he’ll be okay,” Lydia said. “But he needs blood. Not human blood. A regular hospital can’t help him. We’re going to need his father to come and get him. Eric doesn’t travel, except for emergencies, but I would say this qualifies, don’t you think? Hold his other shoulder down, this might make him jump a little.”
Despite her obvious terror, her hand was perfectly steady as she poured a few drops of some kind of oil into the wound. Sure enough, Phineas jerked and moaned, although he didn’t open his eyes. I was glad to hear his voice, even in pain.
“I know, honey, but I can’t help it.” Lydia spread ointment over the hole, thickly enough that the blood didn’t flow through. I hoped these things were of Phineas’s own making, and that his talent for supernatural healing extended to more mundane injuries, too. Could gunshot wounds be healed with magic?
“Can someone hand me the gauze?” Lydia glanced around, as if taking a headcount for the first time. “Where’s Cooper?”
I gave her the gauze. “He’s… missing.”
“He’s dead,” Arabella said flatly.
He is not dead!
I meant to shout the words, but I wasn’t sure they came out at all. I put my hands on either side of my head, squeezing, trying to silence a sudden buzzing inside.
Something was wrong with me. It didn’t come on gradually, as my attacks usually did. Instead it was as if Arabella’s words had triggered it, the proverbial last straw that broke me. Everything felt like it was shutting down. My head. My heart.
He is not dead.
A little rest, that was the thing. When I woke up, Cooper would be there, and we would laugh at this crazy dream.
I lay down in the snow, while Lydia and Arabella bent over Phineas.
“Phineas will be okay,” I murmured. “Because this is a curse dream. He’s at home right now, really.”
Time passed. I had no idea how much. Arabella stood over me and said something. Lydia answered. Their voices sounded funny, like they were talking through water.
And then I must have passed out for a while. The next thing I knew, Arabella was lifting me. “And now you’re half frozen, on top of everything else. We need to get you back to the car.”
“The car?” I sounded drunk. “No. No, we have to go back for Cooper!”
“Shhh, it’ll be okay,” she said. “Can you try to walk a little?”
I leaned heavily against her, as Phineas had leaned against us. “Phineas?”
“We’ve at least slowed down the bleeding. I don’t know if it’s stopped completely. His father will come get him and patch him up.”
“Should wait with Lydia. Can’t just leave her out here in a snowstorm by herself. How will they keep warm?”
“They have coats, and we can’t wait. Come on. Just a little farther.”
“No, it’s a lot farther,” I corrected. “We have to go down there. To the basement, where the puzzles are. We have to find where they’re keeping Cooper.”
“Verity, Cooper is gone,” Arabella said in an exhausted voice. “And I need to get you out of here.”
Panic surged through me, which woke me up, at least. I couldn’t collapse yet. This was too important. I had to focus. I had to make her understand.
“He’s not dead, I’m telling you. You don’t know about that maze. The things it can do.” I took a deep breath, trying to sound sane, trying to be sane. “I’m not hallucinating. You don’t know what these illusions are like.”
“I know Phineas saw fake people in the maze,” she said. “But this isn’t the same. Harry saw the whole thing.”
The boy with the red glasses is nice.
Fuck the boy with the red glasses.
“Harry could have been tricked,” I said.
“Harry knows the enchantments in this place better than we do.”
“He could be in on it, for all we know, he’s a Wick!”
“He just saved Phineas’s life. At least I hope he did. Probably our lives, too,” Arabella said. “And if it was an illusion, you would have been able to break it.”
“Look at me.” I gestured at myself, and even that was weak. “This is the least amount of power I’ve ever had in my life.”
She didn’t answer, only shifted me over to dig in her pocket. I heard the rattle of keys.
“No! We have to go back.”
We were at the car now. She opened the door. “Verity, you touched his body. I touched his body.”
I remembered the snake in the basement, and what Phineas had said about those illusory people, that they felt wrong, they didn’t feel real.
Cooper felt real.
He can’t have been real.
For Cooper’s sake, I put every ounce of strength I had into one last effort to convince Arabella that I was lucid and reasonable. “Are you telling me you don’t even think it’s worth checking? What if I’m right? Are you willing to risk leaving him behind?”
She shoved me inside the car, and not gently.
“I’m telling you that you are at death’s goddamn door, and I am not about to let you die when Cooper just gave his life to save you.”
I woke with no memory of falling asleep, curled up in the front seat of Arabella’s car. Utterly disoriented.
“Where are we?”
“Still in Pennsylvania, but coming up on New Jersey now.” There was something wrong with Arabella’s voice. I looked blearily up at her.
Why is she crying?
Phineas was hurt. I remember that.
“How is Phineas?”
“I don’t know. We probably won’t get any word for days yet, with the way time works in his world.” Despite the undried tears on her face, Arabella sounded steady now. “Once his father comes to get him—or maybe he already has by now, I don’t know—Lydia is heading back to Charlotte to do a ritual, to go join them.”
Lydia. Right. She was there too. Where were we?
“Join them?” My sluggish mind was having trouble keeping up. “I thought humans couldn’t do travel between worlds. Except on
Halloween.”
Halloween. Something happened to me on Halloween. What was it?
“Apparently some of them can,” said Arabella. “As long as they’re willing to risk death and a hell of a headache. She says it’s safer with a ritual.”
A hell of a headache. I have one of those.
I shouldn’t have left Bristol. I always get a headache when I’m not in Bristol.
But I had to leave. Cooper…
“Cooper!”
I bolted upright as it all came rushing in, and turned to the back seat, as if I might find him there.
“Don’t worry, I got the bag,” Arabella said.
“The bag? You think I care about a bag?”
“You should, seeing as Serena’s ashes are in it. In a neatly labeled box, by the way. I wonder if Wick catalogs all his kills in a ledger, then files the ashes away in his archives. I wonder if my cousin Crawford is there.”
She said all of this in a musing, dreamy sort of way, as if she was on the verge of sleep herself. Which was only natural, considering the number of hours of acute stress she’d been under. At least I’d had the benefit of passing out a few times.
But that didn’t mean I was going to go easy on her. She had to turn the car around. We had to get Cooper. “I don’t give a damn about Serena’s ashes. Throw them out the window, for all I care. We have to go back—”
“REALLY?” Nor was Arabella prepared to go easy on me; she shouted loud enough to make me jump. “You’re okay with Cooper dying to make you well again, DYING STANDING OVER THOSE ASHES, just so you can throw that gift back in his face?”
“No,” I answered simply. “No, I’m not okay with any of that. Especially the dying part.”
And so it began. The same fight we’d had in the snow, the same arguments for and against Cooper lying dead in a hedge maze. Except this time it lasted at least an hour.
It led nowhere. Arabella refused to turn around, or even stop. “Pee in that water bottle in the back if you have to, because our next stop is Fenwick Street.”
“I can’t believe you won’t try to save him!” I raged.
“I have to save you,” she shot back. “And believe me, you’re closer to the edge than you think. I’d peg that fever at a hundred and five, at least, if I had to guess. Your pulse is so erratic it’s ridiculous. And can you not hear yourself breathing? You sound like a teakettle.”
Witch Bound (Devilborn Book 3) Page 13
