I raised a hand to the same spot on my left arm. I didn’t need to uncover it. Miguel knew it was there. He’d shown me his as proof that he was telling the truth.
“She marked us for what’s coming,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I can’t be sure even now, but I’m thinking she worked with the angels. The big ones. I’m thinking she searched out kids like us, checked us out, maybe weighed our hearts like that Egyptian god, Anubis. Lighter than a feather, ascend to Heaven. Heavier than a feather, find yourself devoured.”
I raised a brow. “Let me guess who we are in that scenario.”
He set his hands on his waist. “She didn’t visit everyone in the Order, or among the chameleons. We might be the only ones, so far as I can tell. But I’m betting we’re not the only ones out there.”
Odds were, he was right.
“We have a part to play,” he said. “Which means that where you’re concerned, the Angel of Death is supposed to be right where he is, with you.”
From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Sunday stirring where she sat. The beanbag filling whooshed as she shifted her weight. It was ridiculous. It was real.
This conversation with Miguel was real, too, even though one of us was dreaming. He’d wanted to talk to me privately, so he’d found the only way to do that.
“It’s great that you told me all of this,” I said. “It’s not every day I get to hear stories about my childhood that aren’t horror stories—even if I’m not sure exactly what side of the line Abuela Dream falls on. I get why you wanted to talk to just me and not the others. You’re trying to convince me that you’re a friend, or more like a cousin. Why, Miguel? What is it that you want?”
“I want a chance,” he said. “I’m no use to the Order, and by telling you all this, I’m no use to the chameleons, which makes me a dead man walking. If I’m going out—or if I make it through to tomorrow—I want to do it as myself. You think you can give me that chance?”
I didn’t know whether I could, or whether I wanted to. He might hold other memories from my past, other secrets that I needed to know. He might be a true friend, or he might betray me. I’d known him once upon a time, but that time was over.
Letting him in meant taking a chance, not just for myself, but for everyone.
“How can I trust you?” I asked.
“I swear by the mark,” he said.
Just words about a scar I didn’t remember getting. But all the fine hairs on my arms stood on end, and the short, fine hairs on my scalp, too. I had no idea what had happened in the space of a few seconds, but I couldn’t ignore it. More than that, I felt incapable of ignoring it, as if that mark had a resonance outside of Miguel and me.
Swearing like that—it meant something.
I filled my words with as much force as I could muster. “If you break that promise—”
“You’ll kill me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll let you. It feels that way, doesn’t it?”
It did. “Dead man walking.”
He nodded.
He’d have to earn whatever trust I gave him, and he’d have to earn it in spades. “We’ll see.”
“You won’t be sorry,” he said.
“No way to tell yet.”
“I think I understand about your family,” he said.
I blinked at him. Him saying that seemed out of the blue.
He flashed a wry grin. “Or maybe I don’t understand them, but I want to.”
Miguel the chameleon, I didn’t trust as far as I could throw him. Miguel the person might have a fighting chance. He was trying to be a person. I understood that all too well.
I’d been gone from the Order for years, but I was still trying to figure out how not to be an operative after all that time. Maybe I hadn’t been able to stay in one place long enough. I hadn’t learned how to just be. Everything the Order had taught me remained in my muscle memory, in the automatic responses that my training had instilled. I didn’t want to have to play an angle anymore, or wonder what angle someone else played against me. I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I wanted to be something else.
I’d tried to do that, to become something I barely remembered how to be: a human being.
“It might take a while,” I said.
“The voice of experience?”
I returned his wry smile.
He went still, listening.
A half-second later, I heard what he did. The roll of tires on wet pavement. The splash of footfalls. There were people outside in the middle of the night in front of our hideout.
The steps drew closer to the house, but the sound of them faded halfway between the street and the porch, as if they dared not come any closer.
I closed my eyes.
My dreaming self snapped back into my body violently, like a rubber band stretched close to the breaking point. I sat bolt upright, all the heat fleeing from my body. The chill in the air was more than winter seeping through wood and sheetrock. My skin turned to gooseflesh. A brick of ice seemed to take up all the space in my stomach.
The floor beneath me felt hard as the concrete beneath the carpet, the blanket like a lead weight. Beside me, Red twitched.
I reached to shake him, but he’d already opened his eyes.
One glance at me and he rolled to his feet. He grabbed his boxers and jeans, tossing mine over to me. “What happened?”
“Someone’s outside,” I said. “Chameleons. Order. Watchers. Don’t know which.”
He rolled of the blanket, grabbing for clothes, pulling them on. “How do you know that?”
“Miguel,” I said.
“Did he hurt anyone?”
I dressed as quickly as I could. “No. It’s not like that. We had a talk while I was dreaming.”
We hurried to the front room, racing past the closed door of the kids’ room. In the far corner, Ben and Jess stirred.
Sunday lay facedown in the center of the room. Incapacitated, but moving. Conscious. She’d covered her eyes with her hands.
Miguel hovered over her, sparks dropping from his fingertips and turning to ash before they landed on the rug.
“Night?” Sunday called, louder than I expected.
A feeling of wrongness washed over me. I looked at Miguel. “What happened?”
He took a step back from Sunday. “She heard the Watchers a second after you snapped back into your body. I tried to explain what we talked about and what was going on, but she didn’t believe me. She thinks I’m in league with the Watchers.”
“What you are is a fucking dead man,” Sunday said. “Motherfucker used my own magic against me. How could he have done that? How?”
He’d blinded her. Holy shit.
“Let her go, Miguel,” I said.
Sunday sucked in a breath. “That’s all? Take him out, Night.”
When Sunday used her magic, she was the only one who could undo her work. She had to unravel it herself. Or if she was killed, the magic would dissipate. That was how magic worked. A fundamental principle. If Miguel refused to release her, that left only one option.
Miguel’s hands stopped sparking. He shook them out and moved toward the window, pushing the drapes aside to peer out. “It’ll pass in a couple of minutes. We’ve got Watchers. Half a dozen.”
Sunday gritted her teeth. “Is Shadow with them?”
“I can’t see him,” Miguel said. “Doesn’t mean he’s not there.”
He was definitely there. And there would be more Watchers around back.
Sunday gasped. “I’ve got shapes now. Edges.”
Thank God.
In the corner, Ben pushed to his feet and drew Jess up with him. “Night? What’s going on?”
“Wake Faith and Corey,” I said. “Now.”
He scrambled to his feet and ran.
“Colors,” Sunday said.
Miguel glanced at her.
A few seconds later, Sunday blinked. “I can see,” she said. “Everything�
�s just a little blurry.”
That, too, would resolve. I looked at Miguel. “You attacked her because she didn’t believe you.”
“Self-defense,” he said.
“We’re on the same side now,” I said. “You understand what that means? We don’t use our magic on each other. We use it to help each other.”
Red broke in. “You want people to be on the same page, Miguel, stop talking to people in their dreams and say what you mean out loud.”
Ben, Faith, and Corey came to stand beside him. The girls didn’t look like they’d had any sleep. They looked keyed up. Ready to fight.
Sunday let go of my hands, pushed up, and rolled back on her heels. She looked at me ruefully. “Please tell me that while you were—what’d Red say?—talking in your sleep, you two geniuses formed a plan?”
“We didn’t,” I said. “I did.”
Actually, although the first inklings of it had begun during Miguel’s and my conversation, the rest of it had come together in my head during the last few minutes.
All eyes turned to me.
“It depends on you, Miguel.”
He stared at me.
“You can’t be serious,” Sunday said.
I combed my fingers through my hair. “It’s a risk because we’re gonna be playing mind games with a bunch of Watchers. Miguel, how did you use Sunday’s magic against her?”
Sunday turned her baleful gaze on him.
“I’ve spent a little time with her over the last day and night,” he said. “It was enough to begin assimilating who she is.”
“And that includes my magic?” Sunday asked.
Miguel nodded. “It’s the last piece. I can learn a target. I can shift my physicality to look like them. I can show all their mannerisms, all their quirks. And if the target has magic, I can copy that, too. If I haven’t had enough time to really understand their magic—where it comes from, how it works—I can do something that looks and feels like it, but the effects don’t last long.”
“Damn,” she said, still mad, but impressed, too.
I could see the wheels beginning to turn behind her eyes and in her halo. The edges of the fiery red that surrounded her burnished gold.
“Miguel, you’ve had a deep line into my mind during all that time,” I said.
He cocked his head. “I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“Me, too,” Red said. “And I’ve gotta ask, to what purpose?”
A soft knock sounded at the door.
Miguel checked through the window. “Addie. She looks—” He bit back whatever he’d been about to say. “She’s a messenger,” he said.
“Not a trap?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’d stake my life on it.”
And all of ours.
Whatever Shadow had sent Addie to tell us, either she or her words would serve as a diversion. If we opened the door, we took the bait. If we didn’t, Addie couldn’t help us.
Couldn’t help us?
That thought had come unbidden, with a brush of wings inside my chest. The Angel again. What in the hell was he doing? I couldn’t risk him escaping here and now. There hadn’t been time to deal with him, and there wouldn’t be. All I could do was hold onto him as best I could—and pray.
“Night?” Red furrowed his brow.
I looked at all him, at all of them. Their faces were like my own, surprised and wary. I started toward the door.
Ben hustled to beat me to it. “I’ve got it.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“The shields that are guarding us here—the ones the Watchers are strengthening to keep the neighbors’ prying eyes and ears away? Those are mine. They’re tied to the house as a whole, but also to the doors and the windows. They’re the natural defenses of the house. They stay closed and locked, the house is safer, right?”
I nodded.
“When we open the door, we’re creating a breach in the defenses. I should be right there to strengthen them.”
“You shouldn’t be anywhere near the enemy,” I said.
“We’re counting on each other,” he said.
He was a kid. He was powerful. He had an iron will and he wasn’t going to back down. Either I trusted him, or I didn’t.
“You’ll be right behind me,” he said.
Yes, I would. “Got your back.”
He turned the deadbolts and folded back the hinged lock. He pulled open the door.
Chapter 7
THE SILVER FRAMES of Addie’s glasses glinted under the tiny colored light strings that hung over the door. Her hair had come loose from the bun she’d worn it in earlier. It fanned out from her head, stiff and coal-dark. She wore a pair of brown sheepskin house boots, waterlogged around the edges. She frowned, pressing her lips together as if by doing so, she could hold herself together.
Her gaze slid past Ben and met mine. I saw terror in it.
“You want to come in?” I asked.
“I can’t,” she said. “Can I see Jess?”
The wind roared, sending a gust into the house. A wave of rain fell, striking the ground like pellets rather than drops. Not rain, then, but ice. I could smell the snow behind it, the frost and hush to come.
Jess edged her way toward us from the corner of the living room. I stepped out of the path between her and her aunt. Ben did not. The shield wasn’t the only thing he needed to protect.
“You all right?” Addie asked.
Jess nodded. “What did Shadow do to you?”
Addie waved away the concern. “I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. I needed to see you, girl. I need you to know that I love you. Do you hear me?”
Jess went so still and quiet, when she blinked I imagined I could hear the flutter of her eyelashes. “You sound like you’re saying goodbye. Please tell me that’s not what this is.”
Addie didn’t answer that question. “You stay with Night. Whatever Night tells you to do, you do it.”
Jess swallowed hard. Her aunt could no more promise this wasn’t goodbye than I could promise we’d be safe. Too much was beyond our control. Addie had lied about being fine, but she couldn’t lie about the bigger picture.
The idea that Addie had trusted me with Jess’s well-being back at her house and that she’d just doubled down on it—that was as much a statement as to how Addie thought things would go as anything. She wanted Jess with me, and not with the Watchers. With an enemy rather than with her own people.
Addie had been loyal to them her whole life. To go against them—to prevent them from training Jess into her full power—the Watchers must have become something Addie could no longer countenance. Or they’d always been that, and Addie has only just figured it out.
“I need to deliver a message to you from Shadow,” Addie said. “That’s why he sent me up here.”
Jess’s jaw dropped. “You’re still working with him?”
“Not with him,” Addie said. “I’m doing what I have to.”
“You were going to make me go with him,” Jess said.
Addie looked at Jess as if she were a hundred kinds of fool. “Listen to me, Jess. You’re learning early and hard that your elders are people. I’ve always tried to do the right thing, even if I haven’t always done everything right. Sometimes I trusted my own elders when I shouldn’t have. I walked a fine line doing that, and if you have to walk a line like that, whatever you’re doing, it’s not right. You understand?”
Jess shook her head.
Addie opened her mouth again, but seemed to think better of whatever she’d been about to say. She squared her shoulders and turned to speak to me.
“You know what Shadow wants?”
“The Angel,” I said.
“You know how they want to take him?” she asked.
If what Miguel said about how and why I could hold the Angel, then chances were that the Watchers had the same problem Miguel had—not enough juice, or the wrong kind of juice, to get the job done. If I had the blood of one of the two
archangels he’d mentioned, who had the blood of the other? Shadow? One of his minions?
“Does Shadow have the power to take me over? To put me under a spell?”
“You’ve been talking to the chameleon,” she said. “No, he can’t do that. He’ll tear you apart.”
Of course it came down to that. Neither the Watchers nor the chameleons could get their hands on the Angel without destroying me, whether that meant subjugating my mind, magic, and will, or taking my life. I’d imprisoned the Angel in my mind as an act of survival. I’d known there would be consequences, just not what they’d turn out to be.
What Addie described sounded like a fine way to kill me—but also like something else, something specific to Watchers’ magic. “Tear me apart?”
“At a cellular level. He’s close enough in lineage to the ones who made us to do that, or to get close enough to it that there’d be nothing left of you, Night. You been wondering what the Watchers really are, haven’t you? What we can do?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The Nephilim—those angels who created us—they hold the fabric of the universe together. All the worlds. Every one. The most powerful of us have power close to that level. I’ve got plenty of juice, but next to Shadow?”
Next to his supernova, she was only a ray of light, but one who’d just given me invaluable information about who and what we faced.
She leaned in close. “I’m the bait. He’ll threaten to kill me, and you should let him do it.”
I shook my head.
“If you come out there for me,” she said, “he’ll use the distraction to get to Faith. If he has her, he can control you. You know it’s true.”
I did. Faith was my greatest vulnerability. She was always going to be Shadow’s play.
“Promise me you’ll take care of Jess,” she said. “Promise me you’ll keep her safe. Make sure she gets an education. Make sure she grows up like she should.”
I didn’t say any of the trite bullshit that came to mind, like You’ll do that yourself after we find a way out of this mess. Addie didn’t apologize for not trusting me. I wasn’t sure she did even now, but I was the best and only option.
“You have my word,” I said. “And although I can’t speak for Red, I know he feels the same.”
Night Rises: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 2) Page 12
