The End of the Line

by The End of the Line (retail) (epub)

  Amanda stared after him, the boy’s sanguinity troubling. She wanted to say something that would get the boy back in line. But maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe Reeves was right. Skeebs knew what was at stake, what choice did he have but to play along? They were locked on this, same as her. Just like she’d planned it.

  Steph had begun to crawl on all fours, gathering every paper she could find. It was hard to ignore her sniffs and quiet sobs, the tears running down her face. She retrieved her glasses. They had broken during the panic, the frame was crooked but the lenses were intact. They didn’t fit right, sliding down her nose so she had to keep them pushed up.

  Occasionally she’d manage a fragment of a sentence. Something desperate accompanied by a flourish of paper, raising them and dropping them again in despair. ‘They’re just…’ or ‘It’s completely…’

  They were ruined, scorched, crumpled, torn. Many had been sucked out of the door or consumed completely in the blaze.

  There were one or two playing cards among them and Amanda felt something inside her tug as Steph let one slide off her crumbling page and onto the floor with the ash.

  Falling to her knees, she picked the card up into her palm, then another. They stayed like that for a few minutes; Amanda gathering up what cards she could find, Steph her pages. They worked around one another, each reaching past the other in a slow, careful dance.

  Every card found was like retrieving a sliver of her soul. There were so few left.

  Neither looked the other in the eye. The silence was thick with everything Reeves had said.

  Steph had begun to arrange the paper scraps into piles in the middle of the room. They all looked the same to Amanda. All symbols and blotchy, crowded lettering but it seemed the girl could tell the difference.

  How had she not seen it? How had she thought that something incomprehensible to her could be deciphered by a fourteen­year­old? This girl had been put through so much, more than she ever would have wanted visited on her Emily. After all their fights, their situations were so similar, both grieving the loss of their family and little ahead of them that seemed like salvation.

  The covers on almost every book were gone, peeled away by the heat. Only the old leather one had survived.

  Amanda watched a charred page crumble to ash delicate as a butterfly’s wing between Steph’s fingers, smearing soot on the pages below. The girl gave a shuddering breath and rattled the paper in a strangler’s grip. ‘It’s gone! It’s all ruined. I… I didn’t even get to reading this one. I don’t even know what it was about. These were my mother’s. They were going to be all I had of her. She would have wanted people to see them. They could have made a difference.’

  Hands filled with pages, Steph looked up as Amanda eclipsed her, eyes filled with sorrow. ‘These were the only things I had left of her.’

  ‘Here,’ Amanda reached for a page the girl hadn’t touched yet but before she could touch it, the girl snatched it out from under her hand.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Steph snarled. ‘You’ve done enough damage.’ She added the paper to one of her stacks. ‘He was right, you use everything up just because it suits you.’

  Amanda stood, nerves buzzing as though she’d just been struck, the demon’s words ringing in her ears. Amanda could feel that old, familiar anger breaking free, darkening her brow, her every muscle rioting to be let loose.

  She’d wanted to hit Reeves so badly, but hadn’t been able to allow herself. Now that aggression had found a new mark.

  ‘Well these weren’t much use if you couldn’t read them,’ Amanda replied, words hard as steel. She kicked another page toward the girl.

  ‘You have no idea how complicated this is,’ the girl replied, angry tears threatening. ‘No, it’s worse, you didn’t want to know. Every time, you just dismissed me. I’ve been wrestling with this for days. I get bits of it. Some of it almost makes sense. But… The knife needs blessing and it’s complicated and the ink mixing and the ritual itself… Even if I did think I knew how to do all three, we won’t know if I’m right until we’re in the circle. Even the slightest mistake… Not that that matters because we don’t have the power without blood magic and the more I look the more it’s clear that it’s the only way. But you didn’t want to hear that either.’ She lifted her hands to slap them back down on her knees. She’d been talking faster and faster, her pitch tightening and getting higher. Only now did she find time to gasp, the motion dislodging fresh tears to run down her cheeks, her anger burned away.

  Steph glared up at Amanda but the anger that had charged the woman a few moments ago had dampened beneath the girl’s outburst. It was still there, a hot tight wire clenching her jaw, threading her limbs, but suddenly there was her daughter, Emily, again, worrying about her exams. Darren wasn’t her only child with a physical presence in the room.

  The horror of it washed over her, at how she’d acted, how this girl must see her – a replica of her father.

  ‘Just get this shit cleaned up,’ she growled. ‘Not worth my fucking time.’

  Turning away, Amanda pretended to search the room for more cards. Behind her, she could hear Steph begin to gather more pages.

  Amanda was glad that none of the others could see her face.

  And Skeebs broke, sobbing for all he was worth.

  Chapter 21

  Steph

  The present – forty-one hours to go

  ‘Could I have done anything different?’

  Steph jerked awake, eyes snapping open and heart thudding at Amanda’s voice like she’d been hit by a Taser.

  ‘You said I’d limited myself. Were there any clues I could have followed? Could I have been faster?’ Amanda’s voice was low and hollow, like her dad’s voice had been during the divorce, the morose tone of a couple of drinks too many.

  Steph didn’t dare roll over and alert anyone that she was listening. Caleb was asleep, she could hear the slow purr of his breath. Skeebs was muttering to himself, locked in his usual nightmare. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, examining the riffled pages of the charred text book at her side.

  Her head still throbbed from crying over the ruined books. Her dreams of showing them to Karina were now only so much ash.

  ‘Did I have any chance of catching you sooner?’

  The woman’s voice low to the ground. She could picture the woman slumped in the middle of the room.

  There was the clink of chain links, the grinding of metal in its socket.

  ‘Yes.’

  The reply made something coil inside her. Amanda had removed the gag.

  Amanda drew a cold breath, wet and open and sorrowful. ‘I tried. I really did…’

  ‘Liar,’ Reeves hissed it low, the sound merging with the breath of the wheels on the rails and filling the air. ‘The night I was summoned, I sensed pain in you, power. You were to be my opponent. Some small challenge for my amusement. Imagine my disappointment when I watched you stumble in my wake. I gave you clues with which to track me, teeth and nails. You had only to use magic to find me but instead you swept them aside.’

  The train rocked and lurched, joints creaking, the boxes shifting and shuffling.

  ‘Bridget was the expert.’

  ‘You despised her. Treated her art with disdain. Magic was a perversion to you. Beneath you.’

  ‘I didn’t think we needed it.’

  ‘You didn’t want to need it. It reminded you of your father. Your heists, your victims, reminded you of him. Always trying to prove that you were smarter than him, his magic irrelevant. You ignored that the thrill was the same. His ambition passed down to you. You shaped your entire life to deny him at the cost of your husband. Your children.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your fear of your father consumed you. You were too scared to do what needed to be done. Too stubborn to go into hiding. Your family’s safety meant less than your pride.’

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘Wrong. I tried to make you see, to face your past and ove
rcome your fear. I goaded you, spent longer with each victim. Days at a time, savouring every strip of peeled flesh, every humiliation; men and women you cared about. I taunted you, twisted you, stoked your suffering. Still you refused to step out from under your father’s shadow. I wanted to be your adversary but he already had my place.’

  ‘Why? Why me?’

  ‘Because I wanted it. Your power. Your pain. A demon’s strength is born in shadows and needs the light of suffering to darken, magic born of anguish. You were rich with both when I saw you first but I needed you bursting and ripe when I consumed you – the plans I have for your power, the mass-murder I intend to commit. Humans aren’t the only ones who use blood magic. The only difference is that I don’t need to open your flesh to drain you. Not when I can have you open up to me in other ways. The connections a demon can open are more direct and more powerful by far. I will demonstrate soon enough.’

  Steph’s mind whirled. If demons’ power could come from human magic and pain, that could change everything. She’d have to tell Karina. Reeves must have considered her mother as the strongest but then Amanda arrived to stop the ritual, angry and powerful and so much more suitable. If it hadn’t been for Amanda, Steph realised, she’d already be dead.

  ‘I urged you to grow your powers in hunting me,’ Reeves continued. ‘Once you had done so, I planned to kill your family so that you were nothing but rage and pain and energy when we met. I would have stoked your raw energy to a furnace in confrontation, convinced you to open up your power to mine as the only way to defeat me and drank from you as I’ve done so many others.’

  ‘Why not just drain me now?’ there was a tremor in Amanda’s voice. ‘If you wanted it so much.’

  ‘The human has to open up willingly. You could do it for me now if you wanted this to end. Or you will do it to banish me in the ritual. But when I was free I realised that you were never going to become what I needed unless I broke you as I broke Skeebs. Perhaps revenge would spur you to embrace your legacy. I kept your family awake while I worked, long after the time for them to depart had passed. I made your son watch. They wondered why you had abandoned them. And then I took your son’s body for my own.’

  ‘No. He shot you. He broke free from your—’

  ‘I let him go. The gun was on the bed. The triumph in his eyes when he brought it up.’

  ‘But we caught you.’

  ‘A miscalculation. I didn’t recover in time. But that can soon be corrected. Every outcome ends with my victory. The only one that ends in my defeat will be yours also. If you deciphered the ritual, confronted me and won, what would you be? The woman who killed her own son. The woman with blood magic hungering in her veins. The woman who will have opened a young girl’s flesh to grant her success. Your journey will have finally come full circle. You would have become the man you’ve always run from. How long before that hunger had you turning on your own daughter? The power in your veins that your father so coveted surely flows in hers as well.’

  ‘You’ll get nothing from me. The girl—’

  ‘You would put her in harm’s way to save yourself? She is powerful but not nearly so as you. Your power enhanced with her blood grants a greater chance of victory than the opposite. If you wish to succeed it will have to be you. But should you insist on sacrificing her, I will happily drain her. It means little to me, I only wish to spare myself the humiliation of this bondage and to have my retribution. No demon has suffered as I do now.’ Reeves shook his chains. ‘Or you may still free me. I may spare your life, your daughter’s. You will only have to live with the consequences. I can find my blood power elsewhere.’

  The silence was so long that Steph didn’t think Amanda was going to answer.

  ‘I’m going to get my daughter back,’ Amanda whispered. ‘And I’m going to see you banished. And I won’t be my father.’

  ‘Still you limit yourself because of him. I will take the girl then. I will face her in the circle and win.’

  ‘I’ll see you get nothing from her. I’ll see that she beats you. If there’s a way, I’ll find it because I’m Amanda fucking Coleman.’

  ‘Always willing to put another in harm’s way. That’s Amanda fucking Coleman.’

  Steph barely heard the rattle of leather and plastic as Amanda replaced the gag.

  Her heart was pounding. Amanda would sacrifice her gladly to get what she wanted, dead or a blood addict, it didn’t matter to her. Like she, Steph, was nothing.

  Well she’d show her. Steph scowled, anger building. She was going to survive this and go back a hero. She was going to change the world.

  Chapter 22

  Steph

  The present – thirty-nine hours to destination

  The knife lay before her, inert.

  Steph tried again, legs crossed, back straight, hands out, palms over the knife.

  Took a breath. Closed her eyes.

  All she had to do was transfer some power from herself into the blade.

  She concentrated. Pictured the knife in her mind. The black, blistered plastic handle, its rough, anti-slip texture. The runes scratched neatly into the cold metal of the blade. The sharpness of the edge, the smell of steel.

  There. She could feel the power already held in it. Potent, but not enough to send Reeves back where he came from. She could feel the runes, like canals waiting to be filled or ears straining to listen. The runes wanted the power, would gladly feed from her.

  Just like Reeves wanted to do to Amanda. Just like Amanda would rather Reeves did to her.

  No. She shoved the thought aside. Now wasn’t the time.

  She just needed to make the connection. Just needed to…

  Her brow creased.

  If she could just…

  It wouldn’t…

  The look on Karina’s face when she showed up on her doorstep and… Would she even be allowed as far as Karina’s doorstep?

  Her bent glasses slipped down her nose again and she batted them off her face onto the pages of gibberish by her side. Brow an aching furrow, she scratched angrily at the irritated skin where the crooked leg had begun to rub. She ran her tongue under her bottom lip, feeling the raw, burned skin across her chin crackle.

  Just the tip of a giant pile of shit.

  And she had no option but to keep digging.

  Putting her pen back in her mouth, chewing intently, she squinted at the last note she had written. If anything, she thought miserably, it made even more sense as a blurry smudge.

  How had Mum come up with all this? So little of what Steph had read made sense. She slumped back. All that time she’d spent with Karina or sneaking around Mum’s office, looking through her textbooks while she was out and it turned out she’d just been kidding herself that she understood it all. Guilt burned as she recalled all the undecipherable paragraphs she’d skipped, telling herself those paragraphs weren’t important. She thought of all the smiles and nods of encouragement from Karina telling her she’d done a good job. Had the woman just been patronising her?

  Amanda was pacing like a caged animal. She had been for hours. No one was speaking to one another so no one told her to stop.

  At least the fawning over the prisoner had stopped. Steph couldn’t imagine what that felt like; your enemy and family rolled up into one.

  Well, maybe she could, though Steph wasn’t feeling inclined toward sympathy for the woman. That whole thing with Caleb and his boyfriend, to see a man like that, a killer, cry.

  And the conversation she’d overheard Amanda having with Reeves rolled over and over in her mind. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep afterwards. She’d had the same feeling the night her parents had told her they were divorcing. Like she was a chrysalis and the her that would get up wouldn’t be the same one that lay down. She’d heard caterpillars turned to a soup before they became butterflies. Her thoughts had felt the same but what would emerge wouldn’t be nearly as pretty. But would be better equipped to survive.

  She was going to walk away fr
om this. She would work hard and she would get this done and she’d come away with what she wanted. Fuck Amanda. She’d take on Reeves, win and go home an Abra hero.

  Her eyes met Amanda’s and Steph looked away, back to the text book, pulling her crooked glasses back on. She flipped a page for form’s sake, held a hand out over the knife again. Then, after Amanda had gone back to her pacing, quietly flipped it back.

  The knowledge squirmed like eels in her stomach. Whether they wanted it or not, they were fast approaching the end of the line, a decision would have to be made about what to do. Her fate and Reeves’ were almost the same thing. Amanda would only use her if there was any use to her at all. What the woman would do if she was useless…

  Keep trying. All routes pointed to her studying, improving, planning. Fuck Amanda, fuck Reeves, fuck all of them. She wanted to live and her only way out of this had to be in these pages. Jesus Christ, let them still be in these pages. She had to be missing something, some leap in understanding that she wasn’t making.

  Readopting the position, she held her hands out over the blade again. She could feel the runes again, feel their thirst. But they remained impermeable. Should she figure a way to— Wait. What if she was thinking about it in the wrong way? What if she did it like… this?

  Nothing.

  Chains clinked across the room. She could feel Reeves’ eyes boring into her through the bag, mocking and gleeful.

  Amanda

  Amanda paced to the edge of exhaustion.

  She wanted to cry, collapse into a miserable pile of grief. She apologised to Simon over and over, longing for his understanding. That man who knew the root of her, who knew every part and how they fitted and where to soothe when it all ground to a halt. She wanted her kids around her, not this painful void that continued to eat her piece by piece. Even her cards were gone, the half-filled pack like a beautiful smile filled with bloody, raw gaps.