“Sunday was blind ten minutes ago,” Faith said.
“She’s not now,” I said.
Faith pleaded with her eyes. “But she’s not invincible, Night.”
And neither was I.
Red touched my shoulder. “Sunday’s been gone upstairs a long time.”
I looked at him, my heart sinking, knowing already what Sunday had done. I ran down the hall and up the stairs anyway, with Red and the girls hot on my heels. They searched all the rooms along the way, and the upstairs bathroom.
I burst into Ben’s bedroom. It looked the same as Red and I had left it, except that the closet door was open, half of the clothes that had been hung on the racks pulled into a tangle on the floor. Also on the floor? A collection of occult books that appeared to have been dragged off the top shelf inside the closet. Big, thick doorstoppers with hundreds of pages on spells, herbs, ethics.
The falling books had made the racket that reminded us about Dave, who sat on the neatly made bed, head in his hands. His white uniform shirt looked as if he’d slept in it because he had. His white hair stuck up at a funny angle on account of an unruly cowlick. His halo looked one-hundred-percent human and one-hundred-percent normal, in a rosy shade of gold.
He glanced up, pale eyes brightening when he saw me. “She said you’d come.”
Sunday. I’ll bet she had. “She say anything else?”
“Not to worry. She’s taking care of it, whatever it is.”
She was going to get herself killed. “Damn it.”
He held up both hands. “Look, she said you’d be mad, but if you could just tell me what the heck happened to me, I’d really appreciate it. Like, why was I in a closet?”
I started to say to keep you safe, but safety was an illusion, and hiding only worked for so long.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I did tell you,” I said. “Your truck’s outside. Drive yourself to the hospital and get checked out.”
“For what?”
What parts would most likely be injured by an angelic possession? I gave it my best guess. “A concussion.”
“I got hit on the head?”
“You fell and hit your head,” I said. “Don’t forget to call your girlfriend.”
He nodded as Corey walked into the room. “Who’re you?”
She ignored him. “Night, Faith’s gone.”
I rounded on her. “What?”
“She was looking for Sunday the same as the rest of us, but then I couldn’t find her. The front door’s open. And Ben’s bike is gone.”
It hadn’t been when I’d raced up the stairs. I would’ve noticed.
“Get Dave out of here, Corey. Put him in his truck and come right back into the house.”
“Okay,” she said, “but you’re not leaving me here. And Red’s not taking me on any airplane,” she said. “My friends are in trouble and I’m not leaving them.”
She wouldn’t. I could knock her out. Red could hogtie her and throw her in the back of his truck. She’d still find a way to get loose. I read it in her eyes. I understood how she felt.
She’d do whatever it took to save the ones she loved, even if she had to kill.
Even if she had to sacrifice herself.
Chapter 10
STREET TRAFFIC HAD THINNED, the splash of tires on the wet pavement coming fewer and farther between now that night blanketed the city. It seemed too quiet, in fact, as if someone or something caused most people to turn away. Mist fell steadily, and wind gusted from the west, swinging the wires from which the traffic lights hung. The windows of the Stump Town Diner were fogged, a tiny handful of patrons hunkered over their dinner. Sometime during the day, the employees had strung red-and-green Christmas lights along the window frame, adding a little cheer to the dark of the year.
Normals going about their everyday lives, oblivious to the danger that lurked all around. I’d never be one of them. Because of my magic. Because of my choices.
We stood on the sidewalk in front of Justice Gym, the chill seeping into our bones, water dripping from the eaves. The gym was pitch-black inside. No lights shone in the windows. No shadows moved. The paper sign that Red had taped to the door crinkled in the damp air. He’d written on it in red ink.
Closed Due To Family Emergency
Any normal person who took in the scene and read that note might wonder what had happened, and if they felt charitable, hope that everything would be all right. None of them would guess that a killer lurked behind the gym door, holding our loved ones hostage. None of them could guess that any minute now, blood would flow and people would die. The only questions were who, and how many?
Faith was behind that door. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her. I shouldn’t be able to. My magic didn’t work like that. I couldn’t wonder why. I couldn’t think about why, not while Faith was in there. Not while she was in pain.
All the hair on my body stood at attention, the muscles in my limbs clinging tight to the bones. The fear in my heart grew with every beat, but the fear could be martialed and used. I breathed in the damp and the faded scents of coffee and car exhaust. The knife strapped to my right thigh felt heavy, and it felt right, as if letting go of the trappings of my assassin’s life had been a mistake. This was who I was. This was where I belonged.
Red stood at my side, Corey behind him. Neither of them looked as terrified as they should. Their faces—and their halos—showed only determination.
We hadn’t said a single word on the drive over. To talk would be to make real all the things that could go wrong. There wasn’t much to be said now, either, and so much to be done.
I spoke my few words softly. “Stay behind me on the way in. Let me do the talking. Watch each other’s backs.”
I pushed open the door.
The familiar perfume of rubber, bleach wipes, and sweat filled my nose and mouth. I reached for the switch, flipping on the lights. The overhead fluorescents buzzed dimly. Whatever magic had kept most of the people away also kept the light from glowing too brightly. Still, it was enough to help me see the interlocked, black rubber mats that covered the concrete floor, the triple-stacked row of black plastic cubbies and lockers that covered the long wall in front of me, and the brown suede sofa on the right.
Ben perched on the edge of the sofa, his wrists zip-tied in front of him, a similar job done on his ankles. His eyes widened when he caught sight of me, and he opened his mouth but no words fell out. He’d been rendered mute.
I reached him in three strides, pulling my knife to slice through his bonds. I intended to whisper, to ask him for a report on the situation around the corner and down the short staircase, on the gym floor. I got no further than the thought. I couldn’t make my mouth move.
I felt wary of trying to reach him with my magic. Surely the Order operative knew I’d be coming. He’d have made preparations against my magic. If I used it and ended up trapped or dead because of it, what would happen to Faith? What would happen to all of them?
If I didn’t try, and I missed something important, we’d all end up in the ground and that would somehow be worse.
I took hold of Ben’s hands and squeezed tightly, bending my forehead to touch his. I probed for a way through his considerable defenses—and understood why the Order’s man had left Ben out here. Ben was the shield. He could protect his people if he was close enough. Out here, he’d be just far away enough not to do them a damn bit of good. And if I tried to get information out of him, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Unless he let me in. Which he was magically designed not to do.
He tried. He peeled apart the pieces of his magic far enough for me to catch a brief glimpse of what we faced. The Order’s man: five-seven and skin-and-bones, with long, braided black hair and dark brown eyes. Vietnamese descent. He’d done the magical preparation, set the snare that I’d fall into if I so much as breathed harder—or set loose an ounce more magic from my body. The trap would damp my magic. I wouldn’t be able to see halos. I wouldn’t be able to slip i
nto others’ minds. It wouldn’t affect me physically, only magically. I would be—normal.
The Order’s man had done all of this, but he was no danger to anyone right now. He lay on the floor at Faith’s feet, unconscious, his breathing slow and labored. The man was seconds from death. Faith made no move to tie him up, or to set free any of her friends, who were trussed up like Ben had been, and sat in a row to her left. Jess. Addie. And Sunday, who had been blindfolded.
Something was very wrong with that picture.
I pulled away from Ben and met his gaze. He couldn’t tell me what any of it meant in words. But his halo wept. Just like it had after he’d tried to shield us all from the Angel of Death but failed, after the Angel had dragged me under and fought to take me over. After I’d wounded the Angel and come back to myself, lucky as hell.
I raised a brow, asking him to confirm the only way I could.
Ben nodded.
I pushed to my feet and pointed at him, pointed to Red and Corey. He got the message.
I turned toward the stairs, taking them two at a time on my way down to the floor, where Faith stood guard over our friends, holding them prisoner. That Faith was not my Faith. She’d been taken over.
Her halo shimmered silver, its usual color and character when she wasn’t angry or upset. That and the fact that she showed no fury, no unbridled emotion, would’ve set me on edge all by itself. The cold that flowed off of her in waves—a chill far more powerful than the cold outside—and the magnetism in her gaze when she glanced at me told me exactly who I was dealing with. The Angel of Death.
He’d taken possession of Faith. She had the kind of magic that the Watchers had been willing to wipe from the face of the earth, and it was deep and wide enough—as young as she was in years and to her power—to sustain the Angel should he choose to make Faith’s body his permanent home.
He’d possessed Dave, but not fully. He’d used Dave for a time, gathering information, never intending to stay. Never intending to make Dave his home.
The Angel had never fully possessed me. I’d fought hard, and I’d wounded him, and I’d been aware the whole time of what he was trying to do. Was Faith aware? Was she in there somewhere, still fighting? Had the Angel’s presence put her soul to sleep? Or had his taking over, if he intended it to be permanent, killed her soul?
My limited knowledge of and experience with possession aside, who the hell knew the consequences of possession by a being that powerful?
Addie might. She was a Watcher, descended from angels. She’d been gagged by the Order operative’s spell, and I couldn’t reach far enough with my magic to slip into her mind without triggering the trap the operative had set for me.
I walked slowly towards Faith, splitting my focus between her and the operative, whose chest rose and fell as I watched, and then rose and fell a final time. His death meant the end of the magic he’d used in life. Which meant the magical gag and the trap ought to be history.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
I stared at Faith. A slow grin curved her lips—the Angel’s lips. Whatever spells had been cast here, the Order operative hadn’t retained ownership of his own spell.
I didn’t see or hear or feel the operative’s soul leave his body, but I hoped Corey did. I hoped she held him here in this place and asked him every question under the sun. We needed any information the operative could contribute. What the Order had planned. What the operatives planned, if that turned out to be different from what the mentors had in mind. And most of all, most urgently, anything the operative knew about the Angel of Death.
Because whatever had happened before we arrived, the Angel had complete control now. What the Order had started, the Angel would finish.
I met his gaze—Faith’s gaze—and held it, knowing that the being in charge behind those eyes was not Faith, but part of me didn’t understand or accept that at all. That part of me only saw my daughter imprisoned in her own body, violated by a power that had no care for her other than what he could use.
The Angel looked at me through Faith’s eyes. He spoke in her voice, but not aloud. His thoughts bloomed in my mind. I knew you would come.
I could not talk back—not out loud. I sent my thoughts instead. You made sure of it, I said.
The Angel nodded. If you fought as hard as you did to save yourself, I knew you would fight harder to save her. I knew you would come.
And then what? I asked.
I would try to reason with you, he said. To explain.
What could you possibly want to explain? Why would anything you said matter? You hurt her.
No, the Angel said. I saved her.
I stared at him. At his face—at Faith’s face. At her brown eyes and her serious mouth, at the flush in her cheeks, her too-pale skin, and her dark hair, framing it all, the ends curled by the rain. He’d trapped her in her body and taken it over.
Did you take her completely? I asked.
Yes, he said. I had no choice.
There’s always a choice. Choices are all we have.
You need to know why, he said.
Did I want an explanation? Did I want it more than I wanted to watch his starlight blood flood out of him, pooling on the floor? Did I want it more than I wanted to hear him cry out? I wanted to taste his pain. I wanted to watch as the life drained from him. To send him back to his god or whoever would have what was left of him. Fuck him for what he’d done to my daughter. Fuck him for what he planned to do to us all, for his scheming, for the hell on earth his apocalypse promised.
I’d killed a lot of people in my time with the Order. I’d never actually wanted any of them dead. I’d followed orders. I’d never craved the taste of their suffering the way I did his. If I had a chance in heaven of actually killing him, I’d take it. Even if I had no chance at all.
If I killed him, would I kill Faith, too? He wore her skin. He saw with her eyes. He spoke with her voice. He’d wrapped himself around her soul, if she still had one.
Tell me, I said.
He shook his head. Show you.
That meant more than letting him into my mind. It meant letting him into my magic. It meant surrendering control, and all the horror that could flow from that should he choose to turn my magic on my friends. But I knew as well, more than anyone, that seeing through someone else’s eyes, walking in their shoes, made those things real in ways that words never could.
There was a secret that I’d never told another soul. It was the one thing that made my magic a living, breathing weapon: in entering the minds of others, in knowing their hearts, they didn’t just become vulnerable to me—I became vulnerable to them.
The feelings I felt when I used my magic to enter them became a part of me. When I took lives with my magic—even when I simply slipped behind another’s eyes—a part of that person came back with me when I slipped out again. Fear and desire. Bitterness and hate. Regret and sadness. And strongest of all, love.
I did not steal these things. My victims did not give them either. These things simply were, and they became a part of me. Every time I used my magic, the magic changed me.
Red saw someone different than who he remembered when he looked into me because I was different. Would he be able to imagine what it was like to carry bits and pieces of my victims with me, knowing not only that I’d killed, but knowing—intimately—who they’d been? How that had transformed a little girl who’d been brought into the arms of the Order with death in her heart into a woman who finally understood what it was to have a heart?
It was wrong as hell and it made no sense at all. There was no justice in it. There was only the growing realization that I’d been granted a second chance and that it would mean nothing if I didn’t do something right with it. I’d sold my soul to monsters. The only way out was death. Either I killed myself, or I let the Order do it. There was no other way. That was what my head told me. My heart told me different. It told me not to give up.
The night I’d killed Faith’s parent
s, the night I’d broken down the door to her room and found her hiding under her bed, I’d understood what my second chance was for.
I looked at the Angel of Death. He thought he understood me. He had no idea who he was dealing with.
I closed my eyes. I opened my magic like a blossoming rose, kissed by the sun. I waited.
The Angel entered me.
I’d wounded him back at the house, but I felt no trace of pain in him. He’d been healed by some god or other, maybe even his own.
This time, I didn’t fight him. This time, I let him take control. He took me back along the threads of time to an hour ago, when the Order’s operative at the gym had been alive and Sunday and Faith stood on the sidewalk outside, drops of mist in their hair, their faces half-hidden in shadow.
The cold air smelled of comfort, of home. That was not my thought or feeling, but the Angel’s.
The Angel of Death was the absence of life, after the warmth had fled a body and the blood surrendered to gravity and the flesh began to break down. The Angel of Death was the cold embrace of the grave—the concrete vault, the weight of earth.
The women before him were the opposite. Sunday Sloan, whom he knew well because she served him in all things. She killed with precision and passion, and sometimes with relish. She always would. That had been her nature all her life, and it had come to the fore after she’d run away from her stepmother’s house on a sticky July night, fireworks lighting the sky in sprays and waterfalls of color, barbecue and mesquite smoke perfuming the air.
On the street, she could be a victim or she could be a perpetrator.
One taste of her own blood in a rain-soaked, dead-end alley, in the shadow of a dumpster that leaked rancid grease, had shown her that. One glimpse of her battered and bruised face reflected in a puddle, her mouth contorted, every broken-rib breath an agony, made her lash out at the man who’d told her how special she was, taken her in, and turned her out. The man who’d accused her of stealing from him because she’d refused a trick that she’d known—because of her magic, she’d known—would kill her.
Night Awakens: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 1) Page 13
