Shed blue jeans and T-shirts and flip-flops lay in a pile at the foot of the bed, to one side of a laundry basket half full of dirty clothes. A painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe hung on the wall over the headboard, her bright colors muted in the dark, though I could still make out the iconography—she was bathed in golden rays of light, cloaked in starlit blue, lifted by the archangel Gabriel. Blinds covered the single window on the far wall, muted flashes seeping in along the sides when lightning arced across the sky. The faces of my prey remained smooth, untroubled.
I activated my magic with a single breath, my exhale longer than the inhale, slowing my heartbeat and shifting my consciousness and focusing on the woman. Instead of seeing her outside—her dusky skin, the thin white straps of the camisole she wore, the mussed brown hair that crowned her head—I slipped inside her dreaming mind.
She was younger than she was now in the dream, maybe twenty. She stood alone on the beach, not another human being in sight. Who came down to the beach in February? No one, really. It was too early. Too chilly. Maria—her name was Maria—had the whole place to herself. She was its queen.
Behind her, up the concrete stairs and over the seawall, another world was in motion. Cars passed on the main drag, their headlights sweeping. Streetlamps winked on. People gathered in restaurants and bars, knocking back drinks, bellies rumbling. For her, it was dark out, the fiery ball of the sun having just fallen below the waves. She’d watched it set, its reflection on the smoother water further out, her bare feet sunk into wet, shell-dotted sand. She curled her toes, enjoying the gentle sucking sensation as the sand gave way.
She breathed in the briny air, tasting the stink of seaweed on the back of her tongue, and closed her eyes as the wind gusted, whipping through her waist-length hair and the cornflower blue sweater and the bell-bottoms of her jeans and the hood of the white coat she wore, her gloved hands shoved in its pockets.
Her life was simple. She hadn’t yet met Stuart, whom she would marry. She hadn’t yet given birth to Faith. Maria never thought about having kids, in fact. She never thought she’d live a nightmare like the one she’d been drawn into.
Maria pushed the thought away. She stayed with the peace of the blustery night, the gentle whoosh and crash of the waves as they rolled in, the stars beginning to slink into the black velvet overhead.
It was a simple, peaceful matter to induce her to walk toward the water. The waves were icy at first, sending a shiver to the crown of Maria’s head, to the core of her being. The next step, however, seemed warmer, and the next almost balmy.
Maria walked into the waves, pushing gently against their force and momentum, until the water brushed against her knees. And then her hips. And her shoulders. She walked until the water lifted her feet off the sandy bottom.
She sank underneath the surface, bubbles surfacing as she exhaled. When she breathed in again, she breathed in water rather than air. She kept walking, legs spinning in slow motion, as she drowned in her dream, simply and peacefully. Her body and mind, believing she was dead, gave up the ghost.
In the king-size bed beneath the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe, her chest fell and did not rise.
I waited to confirm. Seconds ticked past. Maria didn’t breathe again.
I turned my attention to her husband, Stuart—who was no longer asleep. Somehow, he’d sensed that something was wrong, that something bad had happened to his wife. His eyes snapped open, the whites of them too bright in the dark. And then I understood: he had magic of his own. That was how he had known, though not in time to save Maria.
He leapt from the bed and rushed me. I tried to slide into his mind, but whatever power he had held me at bay. I shot him in the chest. He went down like a sack of potatoes on top of the dirty laundry.
I stepped to him and hunkered down beside him, clapping my hand over his mouth and nose. He met my gaze and held it as his life slipped away, the bright whites of his eyes fading along with his consciousness.
Two down, one to go.
I pushed to my feet and went to the end of the hall, the carpet cushioning my step. I climbed the stairs slow and steady, careful to keep to the outside of the risers to avoid creaks. There were two rooms on the second floor. A game room, which was empty—and I mean empty, as in not a speck of furniture or art. And the child’s bedroom with an en suite bathroom.
The bedroom was locked from the outside. Three deadbolts.
What the hell had Stuart and Maria done to the girl—to Faith? Why was the girl locked away? Why had the Order sent me here to kill them, with orders to kill their child as well?
No reason to kill a child unless the child witnessed a hit. Or unless the child was the target.
I’d considered those questions when I’d been given the assignment the prior morning. I’d felt a deep unease, but I hadn’t dwelled on it until this moment. There hadn’t been time. Besides, the Order had given me a place to be when no one else would have me, when I’d had nowhere else to go. They’d given me a place where I belonged. I was good at the work. I understood what the Order wanted—to consolidate its power.
To what end could a child possibly derail that goal? There were many ways to get to a child, not the least of which was to turn that child to the Order’s own ends, to bring that child into the fold.
If the Order hadn’t assigned this killing of its own volition, someone had hired the job done.
Someone. Or a group of someones.
Who would do such a thing? What kind of organization would approve of it? If I didn’t want to be part of it anymore, if I wanted something else for my life, where could I go? Leaving was impossible. Wasn’t it?
I shook my head to clear it, the memory of that night dissolving, the spicy scent of the posole and Jess’s aunt Addie’s face taking its place.
I held her gaze. “The Watchers hired the job that night, didn’t they?”
Addie nodded. “At the time, we thought that Faith would be our enemy. We thought she would come down squarely on the side of an organization like the Order—or worse, on the side of those who are fomenting the apocalypse. It was thought that the best thing to do was to take her out of the equation. Nip all of the terrible possibilities in the bud.”
“She was a child.”
“So were you,” Addie said.
“She was innocent.”
“No one born with magic is innocent. We’re born to choose. Good or evil. If you don’t decide, you’re choosing the bad guys by default. You ought to know, Night. You might’ve been a sweet little thing once upon a time, but your parents saw to it that whatever trust you had in the world, in people, was burnt to the ground along with their little frame house.”
I remembered the fire. The way the burning had smelled—like the campfire my father had built in the backyard before he decided I was the Devil, the one we’d sat around and toasted marshmallows for s’mores over—only punctuated with the stench of melting plastic and sheetrock and furniture and human flesh.
My parents had burned in that fire.
“I’m not that little girl anymore,” I said. “Why order the hit to include Faith’s parents?”
“No loose ends,” she said.
“That’s way colder than I expect from someone who considers themselves one of the good guys.”
“They knew what she was. If the wrong person came along and asked the right questions, knowing what Faith was, they could bring her back,” Addie said.
“Back to life?”
She nodded.
“Who could do that?” I didn’t know of anyone who could do such a thing.
“There are a handful of magical beings who could do it,” she said. “We couldn’t take the chance.”
“Name one,” I said.
Addie pursed her lips. “The Angel of Death.”
“I thought he was here because of me.”
She held my gaze and said nothing.
“You don’t know which of us the Angel is after,” I said. “I’m just convenien
t to hang him on because you want me gone anyway.”
She folded her arms across her chest.
“Goddamn you,” I said.
She answered quietly, “Already happened a long time ago.”
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself about it,” I said. “We’ve got more pressing things to worry about right now. For instance, are you aware that the kids are working on tracking the Angel of Death?”
Addie’s eyebrows climbed to her hairline.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said. “So, Jess didn’t tell you.”
“If she had, I’d have tanned her hide.”
“Faith has been using her magic to help with tracking. I haven’t yet had a chance to ask her which god she’s been talking to.”
Addie blanched. “There’s only one God.”
“No,” I said. “There’s yours, who would prefer that human beings have no other gods before him, and then there’s the rest of them. Very powerful ones, worshipped by whole cultures; less powerful ones, worshipped by smaller tribes; and the local gods who walk the earth in human form and set down roots. It’s a wide world. You know any of the local gods here, Addie?”
She pressed her lips together until they disappeared, preparing to argue with me. Maybe she saw in my face that arguing would be futile.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Hear tell of any of them?”
“No,” she said.
I pushed. “Anyone else?”
“One,” she said grudgingly. “There’s the Awakened.”
“Sounds like a god,” I said.
She snorted. “Supposedly, he—she, it they, whatever—lurks inside someone in this city like a parasite, waiting for the right time to wake up and take over. The poor person doesn’t even know there’s something inside them. It’s terrible. I couldn’t imagine a more terrible thing to happen to a living, breathing human being than to have their agency taken away like that.”
“That’s all you know about it?”
“I’ve heard gossip about it only recently—the last few months. The thing is supposed to have infiltrated someone with magic already, so in addition to taking over that person’s will, it’ll have their magic to boot.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” Addie asked.
“Why would a god need a human being like that?”
“Maybe it lost its own body a long time ago. Maybe it can’t act here in this plane, this dimension, without a body—like the Angel. I don’t know. The only other thing I’ve heard is that the Awakened is supposed to be showing up now because of the coming war. It’s a player.”
“Who’d you hear it from?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” she said. “I’m not giving you a single name of anybody I know just so you can go torture and kill them for information.”
“If I was going to torture and kill someone, I could’ve started with you,” I said.
“We have a deal. Guest rights.”
“Which, if I was as awful as you say I am, I’d have agreed to and then broken as soon as I didn’t feel like keeping my worthless word.” I stood up. “I’m gonna work the Angel of Death angle with Faith and see if I can get out of her and her friends exactly what they’ve done so far and how close they’ve gotten. I might get distracted if the Order shows, since odds are they’ve found us or will any minute, so we’ll see how far I get. I’ll report back to you what I find. In return, you rescind whatever hit you put out on me.”
“We didn’t do that,” she said.
“No?”
“I planned to do my own killing this time.”
“While I’m a guest in your home,” I said. “Yeah, who’s the monster again?”
She had the good grace to flush with shame. “I’ll talk with Jess.”
“Great idea. Let me know what she tells you.”
Addie signed. “There are a lot of moving parts here, Night.”
“Too many. We have to start somewhere.”
“We,” she said.
“Never thought you’d work with a reformed killer, did you?”
“If I don’t? If I stick to the plan as it stood before you rang my doorbell?”
“I’ll kill you,” I said. “I won’t want to. And you might beat the hell out of me physically or magically, but you won’t stop me. You don’t stand a chance. I’m better at it than you. I have a lot more practice. And I’ll be doing it to protect me and mine, not some ideal—I’m not out to save the world, Addie. Don’t cross me.”
She mulled over my words. After a moment, she pulled a phone from her back pocket. “What’s your number?”
I gave it to her. A few seconds later, my phone buzzed with an incoming text.
“Now you have mine,” she said. “Let me know what you find. I’ll work on Jess separately and do the same.”
“So we have a deal?” I asked.
“We have a truce. Temporarily.”
“Think carefully before you break it,” I said.
I walked out of the kitchen, with all the memories it stirred, slipped on my sneakers, and stepped out of her house into the misty world. I zipped my hoodie and drew the hood into place, the perfume of lavender and rosemary filling my nose and mouth with every breath. Fine drops of moisture collected on my clothes and skin as I made my way down the steps to my car. I sat inside for a good minute, my heart beating a little too fast and my breath fogging the windshield.
I’d meant every single world I’d said to Addie. I would kill her if I had to. The fact that I wasn’t an Order operative anymore didn’t matter at all. My regrets didn’t count on that score either. Faith did.
I turned over the rest of Addie’s and my conversation in my mind, examining all its facets like a jeweler would a diamond’s, and comparing it with what Sunday had told me. My thoughts came to rest on the end of everything as I understood it: Watchers. The Angel of Death. The gathering of powers and the choosing of sides.
The world had come close to ending before. Disaster had been averted. Was this time different? Could the apocalypse be stopped? If not, could its trajectory be altered?
Could a single person even begin to try?
It seemed worth trying. The one thing I couldn’t abide was the idea of inevitability, of a fate that couldn’t be changed, that my choices didn’t matter. It might’ve felt true that, for a great part of my life, I’d had no choice about what I’d become and what I’d done. But I knew better now. I refused to pretend otherwise.
The ringing of harp strings filled the car. It took me a second to understand that the sound came from my phone and to dig the thing out of my pocket. I saw Red’s number on the caller ID.
He’d want answers. What could I possibly tell him?
I answered the call just before it went to voice mail.
Red’s voice filled my ear, too loud, too frantic.
“Wait,” I said. “What? Slow down.”
“Faith’s gone,” he said. “She must’ve slipped out while I was in the back.”
She could’ve sneaked out while Red wasn’t looking. Or Jess could’ve circled back around for her on Watcher business, implementing a plan to get Faith away from me with or without her aunt’s approval. Or Sunday could’ve taken Faith. Or someone with the Order. Or the Angel of Freaking Death.
Red had her number, and she had his, just in case there was any kind of problem. He was the only person in the city I really knew. I asked him the next logical question despite already knowing the answer. “Did you try to call her?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She didn’t pick up. Didn’t answer a text either.”
I sucked in a breath. “I’ll be right there.”
“No,” he said. “If you know where she might have gone, I’ll meet you there.”
I focused down, clearing my thoughts. “The place where Faith went last night. Ben’s house.”
“See you in ten,” Red said, and hung up.
I pulled away from the curb, tires skidding and sliding before the
y caught traction, leaving rubber on the road.
Chapter 5
I PULLED TO A SCREECHING STOP behind Red’s dark blue Ford pickup. He’d parked along the right-side curb in front of Ben’s house and leaned against the driver’s side door in the mist, hands shoved into the pockets of a black jean jacket that he’d shrugged on over his hoodie. His halo shone grass green and dark earth colors, but darker than usual from worry. He opened my door as I cut the engine. I stepped out to join him, the chill seeping straight through my clothes and into my bones.
The street was supernaturally quiet except for the thin sound of the falling mist and the slow tick of the Honda’s engine. To our left, a neighborhood park filled with play equipment sat lonely and vacant, except for a single crow that had taken up residence on the rail at the top of the slide. The trees that lined the street were all maples except the one in front of Ben’s place, which was a hawthorn. When it bloomed, it would flower white, with red berries dripping from its thorny branches. Now its form was hollowed out by the season, but it was still a powerful being with the purpose of guarding the house, just like Addie’s lavender and rosemary. It had a halo that resembled is magical form—an impenetrable hedge.
The hawthorn was actively on guard, but did not seem overly interested in us.
I led the way up the walk to the house, my sneakers sliding on wet, packed leaves that’d drifted into the yard and slicked the driveway, where Ben’s father’s gray Fiat crouched, while Red dogged my heels. The place was a gray duplex, and Ben and his dad had the left side. I took the two steps to the porch in one bound and knocked loudly since there was no bell.
Ben answered the door. He’d changed from his gym clothes into dark jeans and a long-sleeved, black T-shirt. He’d thrown a gray tee that matched his gray halo over the top. He shook the long bangs to one side, giving me a great view of one of his brown eyes. He stretched his arms above his head, leaning forward to grip the doorjamb and effectively blocking the entry.
“Night,” he said. “You’re looking for Faith again, right?”
Night Awakens: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 1) Page 6
