by Lucy Auburn
She takes in a shallow breath, coughs into her hand; I shoot Yohan a concerned look, but before I can even say anything Victoria is pushing through the rattling cough to continue fiercely on. “I just can’t remember his face. His voice, sometimes... I think. It’s in here somewhere.” She taps her head with a fingertip. “I want to remember.”
I frown at her, then glance back at Meyer. “And I can help with that?”
He says, “You drained the necromantic energy from her. That forged a bond of a sorts. Since she’s been Grim-touched—since the life she’s living now was born of necromancy—a Grim should be able to force her memories to the forefront using the Grim bond. But I haven’t had any traction trying it.”
“And you think I will.”
“I hope you will. You’re the one who tore the necromantic energy from her, so in a way, you’re bonded. If anyone can help Victoria remember who enslaved her, it’s you.”
I swallow. This is far more than I expected to be tasked with when I followed Meyer here—far more than I thought I might have to do on my first day of Grim training. But as I look into Victoria’s fierce brown eyes, I can’t help but feel my heart twist—the very same heart she sank her claws into in a violent rage when she was still a White Phoenix.
“I’ll try,” I tell her, reluctantly. “But I barely understand my own powers.”
“That’s okay.” Her eyes flutter closed, and the fierce grip of her hand relaxes somewhat around my fingers. “Trying is all I dare to expect. Thank you for that.”
Licking my lips, I ask Meyer, “What do I do?”
“Prick your thumb. Then take some of the death energy powder I gave you, and smear it on the bloody pad. A simple press of your thumb to her forehead and you’ll be psychically linked.”
“I can do that... all on my own?”
Meyer narrows his eyes at me, like he can sense that I’m thinking of the demons just outside the door. “You can. There’s no need to rely on that quartet of yours.”
He says this, but they helped me drain the energy from Victoria in the first place. I wouldn’t be alive without them; I probably would’ve died when the White Phoenix attacked, or that night in Sticky’s attic.
Just thinking of them tugs them towards me. Ezra steps through the wall and leans up against the desk in the corner; Mateo jauntily breezes in, going right through Meyer. Lynx slips in next to my chair, and Sebastian walks all the way to the bed, perching on the edge near Victoria’s slim legs.
“Don’t look at us,” Ezra warns; I don’t, though I’m tempted. Instead I give Meyer a nod and reach into my blazer for the black bag he gave me. “I don’t want to give him a reason to try to interfere in our bond before we have the chance to say goodbye.”
In a bitter voice Sebastian says, “Yeah, you wouldn’t want him to be the reason why we’re torn apart without even knowing why we were brought together in the first place.”
There’s something going on there, and I don’t quite understand it, but there’s no time to consider it. Meyer hands me a needle in a tiny, sealed antiseptic bag, and I peel the two sides apart. Wincing, I force it into my thumb until a bead of blood appears.
“That’s it,” he encourages me. “Now, the powder, and press your thumb to her forehead quickly—before the wound heals.”
Nodding, I push a little more blood out of the tiny hole and shove my thumb into the black powder. Then I swiftly pull it out and stick it on Victoria’s forehead, trying to ignore how weird and honestly, kinda fucking gross this all is, what with all the blood and risk of infection.
Apparently dark magic rituals have never heard of bloodborne pathogens.
As the blood and weird death-powder-whatever stuff turns into some kind of mud-like glue between my thumb and Victoria’s forehead, I feel something stir in me. It starts in the flutter of my heart, then moves to a tingle through my limbs, until I feel a little like I’m on the verge of dreaming.
Lynx murmurs, “Can you see inside her head now?”
I ask Meyer, “Should something be... happening?”
“Wait.” Leaning forward, he instructs Victoria, “Let your mind wander. Loosen your thoughts. The less you concentrate, the easier it’ll be for your memories to slip into Dani’s mind.”
“Okay,” she murmurs, sinking back into the pillows. My thumb goes with her—I couldn’t pry it off if I tried.
So, yeah. This is not what I signed up for.
“Close your eyes,” Meyer tells me. “Let your mind wander too.”
Since I’ve got my thumb stuck to a dying lady, I figure I might as well go with it. How much weirder can really fucking weird get, after all? And I owe this to her—and to Yohan, not to mention if I’m being honest I’m more than a little curious. Whoever was controlling her tried to use her to kill me, and might have even sent that masked Grim after me; I’d like to get to the bottom of that one way or another.
So I go with it.
I let my mind wander.
Straight to thinking about the guys. I’m going to miss them. Stop it. I don’t want to say goodbye. But you’ll have to. I’m going to feel lonely and bored when they’re gone. I might actually have to pay attention during class if Lynx isn’t always wandering around behind the teacher with his shirt off. This is not wandering, this is torture.
But somehow in that space where I’m thinking of the four of them, I feel something inside. It’s at the edges of my mind, a darkness with a light in the middle, reaching forward and growing, unfolding into something more.
Until. Until.
I’m there. I’m her.
I’m lying on the ground, staring up at the dark sky, listening to footsteps run away. I know that I’m dying; I can feel the blood pouring down my throat into my lungs, broken bones screaming in pain. My Shields—my beautiful, wonderful shifters who protected me—are strewn around me, brave warriors turned to carcasses, their lives given to save others.
The footsteps fade; the sound of them disappears into the distance. The students got away. They’re safe. It was all worth it.
I close my eyes; I let the horror around me—the bodies, the blood, the smell of death and pain—fade away. I listen to the breeze running through the trees in the park to my left; I think about the people sleeping further down the block, about the hotel the students are running to, the wards they’re safely slipping behind.
It was supposed to be an innocent field trip, a chance to show them all that they can become. We spent the morning at an orphanage and the evening in a hospice; I taught them not to fear death, to use their gifts to take away the pain and suffering of others.
And now. Now I die for it, die for my hope and naivety, for one day beyond the academy’s walls spent breathing the air.
The figure approaches. The last Grim. I slide my eyes closed, relax my chest, and prepare for the hand that will reach inside to steal my still-beating heart. This is it; my last death, the first and only one not to be followed by all-consuming agony.
Then. Fingers brush my chest. A voice, so close to me that I wince. “Let’s see if we can do something else with this heart of yours.”
They crack my ribs open with a strength given from the beyond, from death itself. I scream; my eyes fly open. I stare up into the face—up into the face—silhouetted by darkness, revealing nothing.
I pause in the moment, trying desperately to see. Who is it, who is it, who is it. Not that I would recognize the Grim if I saw him through Victoria’s eyes, but maybe I could at least give a description, do one of those crime scene sketches I’ve seen on TV that look a little stupid every time.
But nothing is revealed to me, and the memory slips away, curling in on its edges into darkness. My mind, or Victoria’s mind—I can’t tell the difference—retreats from the pain.
I open my eyes, in the real world this time, and look into Meyer’s expectant face. I shake my head; he sighs. The skin of my thumb heats up, and with a wince I pull it away from Victoria’s forehead. She’s in a deep sleep,
eyes closed, hand relaxed against the sheets; it feels like a mercy.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Yohan, as he smooths a thin strand of white hair from her forehead and brushes away the bloodied powder. “I really did try, but I’m not even sure she ever saw him. Or if she did, it’s buried in everything else.”
“It’s okay.” He gives me a wan smile. “You tried, and that’s all we ever expected.”
Searching for something, I tell him, “I figured out how to summon fire in my Grim Training class.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows go up. “I see. So for me, you give no effort, but for the new teacher you’re suddenly an above average performer.”
Oh boy. “Uh... sorry?”
“You will be tomorrow morning,” he promises, “when you come in thirty minutes early to practice our exercises. Maybe if you’re not stuffed full of twelve types of breakfast cereal you won’t sleep through my class.”
I look around for help, but all I find is Sebastian’s smirk, Ezra’s silence, Mateo’s snicker, and Meyer’s unsympathetic gaze. Even Lynx isn’t really looking at me—he’s staring at Victoria, a frown wrinkling his brow.
I sigh. “Fine. Eight thirty in the morning it is. Just don’t be shocked if I show up with a bagel in hand. I need some form of calories if I’m going to start regularly summoning fire with my hands.”
I just hope I’m able to sleep well tonight. Maybe without the unintentional summoning of demons into my dreams it’ll be easy. Maybe I won’t feel lonely at all.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Class is officially over; it’s time for Meyer and me to leave Victoria’s room, that much is clear from the soft snoring starting up from her bed. After this, there’s no excuse between me and my four goodbyes.
Meyer must sense what I’m thinking about, because as we head out of the teachers’ wing and into the front entry of the Great House, he puts a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “If you need any help performing the spell tonight, let me know. I suggest doing it after a full meal.”
That perks me up a little. “Full meal, got it.”
“And I suggest you be on time to Yohan’s class tomorrow morning,” he adds. “From what I can tell, his sister won’t make it through the night. He’ll need a distraction to get him through tomorrow—I’ve only known the man a short time, and already I can tell he’s a workaholic.”
My heart plummets at the thought of Victoria dying. “Do you think... there’s no other way to find out who did this to her?”
“If you couldn’t see his face, no one will be able to.” He squeezes my shoulder and drops his hand away; behind him, Sebastian is glaring into the back of his head like he thinks he’ll make a hole in it if he tries hard enough. “Don’t worry about it too much. Whoever turned Victoria into a White Phoenix, they won’t be able to get back onto the academy grounds or send another necromantic lackey through either. And I doubt we’ll see another White Phoenix again for several decades. This was a one-off.”
I try to believe him, but my street rat senses tell me that the attacks were anything but a one-off.
Someone wanted very, very badly to use a phoenix to kill the students here.
And I don’t think they’re going to give up so quickly.
Chapter 8
It comes too soon. Like a teenage boy getting his hard-on touched for the first time, there’s little to no buildup before the defining moment. Just a whimper and some gross sheets.
Okay, so the whimper is me because I stubbed my toe bending down to fetch The Arcane Arts blah blah out from under the bed, and the sheets are gross because I took some cake back to my dorm room after dinner and ate it in the middle of my bed like the grownup I am.
Still, the metaphor applies. They’re leaving and I’ve barely gotten to touch them at all.
Early ejaculation sucks.
Everything about this sucks so bad it makes my scarred heart twist with sadness. Staring down at the book where I placed it on my crumb-and-icing dusted sheets, I try to imagine my life here at the academy without them and realize I have no idea what that’ll look like.
Lynx is standing behind me suddenly, looking over my shoulder. While I dismissed the demons during dinner and ate my cake alone, simmering in my misery, all it seems to take is one little surge of emotion in my heart and suddenly they’re here.
Ezra leaning against the doorway. Mateo pacing back and forth in the small space between the wardrobe and the bathroom like a caged animal. Sebastian looking out the window, back to me, running a hand through his dark hair.
They’re here.
So that they can say goodbye, forever.
Fuckers.
“What does the spell say?” Lynx asks, craning his head over my shoulder. “Open up the book so I can see.”
Reluctantly, I flip to the page number Meyer gave me. I already knew the spell was there—I’ve looked for it before, tried to pretend it didn’t exist—but reading it in preparation of casting it is something else.
“It says the death powder stuff is optional.” I let my finger rest on the ingredients, which seem to be mostly just blood and demonic energy. “I’m supposed to mark each of you on the palm and tell you to begone, basically. But it says it takes a lot of power to pull off, so the death energy is supposed to help if I ingest some of it.” I wrinkle my nose. “Hope it doesn’t taste bad going down.”
Mateo stops and sulks with his arms crossed. “So that’s it, then. We say goodbye without even getting to use your powers to make a really big explosion.” He cocks his head to the side. “Think I could get my bike back? You never did say where you put it.”
“I crashed it,” I admit, wincing at the horrified expression that crosses his face. “I guess I never told you?”
“You were too busy getting almost-killed,” Ezra points out. “Mateo, you can get a new bike. That one was probably never going to go back to Purgatory with us once it was stuck on the mortal plane by Dani’s summoning. It’s your own fault for trying to travel back and forth with something you can’t carry.”
He scowls, crossed arms tightening even further as he really settles into his mope. “It was so cool though. And I killed a Wall Street guy for it. Had to clean his guts out of the chrome and everything.”
It’s hard not to let my mouth tug up at the corners at this image, one that would’ve horrified me not that long ago. “You’ll find another bike. Plenty of assholes with dark souls and darker hearts ride them.”
“But we won’t find another you.” Sebastian turns, his stark blue eyes boring right into me. “Once this is over, it might really be over. You may never be able to summon us again.”
I open my mouth to say something reassuring, but no words come to mind. It shouldn’t hurt this much to get rid of a bunch of demons—should it? But somehow it does, despite all the common sense in the world.
In the silence Lynx says, “The aftereffects listed at the bottom of the spell say it causes a permanent severing between the castee and the summoned. If you do this—”
“When she does it.” Was Ezra always this much of a hardass?
Lynx sounds weary. “When it’s cast, that’ll be it. It’s goodbye goodbye.”
He’s so close to me that, as I shift uncomfortably in the silence, our arms briefly brush. A shiver goes through me, from my middle to my fingertips, unbearable and alive.
And I find myself staring into Sebastian’s blue eyes, even as Lynx moves away a step, the air charged and uncomfortable. A memory rises to the forefront of my mind, stark and alive: laying back on the bed, letting my fingers drift lower, touching myself as I thought of them. Dreaming of them, and finding out that somehow I’d summoned them to me. Dreams I never got to enact in real life.
I feel like I’m closing a book right as the story gets good.
“I guess the first step is to make you all corporeal.” Looking down at the book, I trail my finger across the instructions; they’re so short, so simple for such a monumental thing. “So I’ll do that first.”
&nbs
p; Something stirs in Sebastian’s blue gaze at this. “What are you waiting for? Don’t tell us, just do it.”
“Right.”
Licking my lips, I do the hardest thing of all: I imagine what it would be like for them to touch me. I let myself yearn, want, even desire. And I feel it as the bond between us surges to life and yanks them into this world with me.
Lynx’s presence a foot away is suddenly more than just a feeling shivering up my spine. There’s a warmth to him, an undeniable heat. The desire to lean over and let my hand brush against his is overwhelming.
“Let’s do this.” Ezra’s gruff voice grinds my voice to a halt. “Rip the band-aid off.”
“And all the hairy bits with it?” I offer.
“Yes.”
He’s not backing down, apparently. I don’t recognize this suddenly cold, distant Ezra, but maybe it’s for the best. It would be hard to say goodbye if he were acting like he didn’t want to go.
“Okay. So... I guess I’ll eat a bit of this stuff first.” Holding the black silk bag up, I get a whiff of the smell inside and wrinkle my nose. “It smells like death.”
Lynx gives me a of-course-it-does-dummy look. “It is called death energy for a reason.”
“Bottoms up, I guess.”
“Wait!” He reaches out to stop me before I can tip the contents of the bag into my mouth, his broad palm catching mine, and I swear sparks practically fly where our skin connects. “Just take a little bit of it. The spell book recommends half a teaspoon.”
“Oh.” I pull away from his warm hands, skimming the page again. He’s right. “A dash of death it is.”
Scooping up a bit of it with my fingers, I shove the black powder into my mouth expecting it to taste like feet or molded cheese, the way it smells. But as it hits my tongue I get a pleasant, somewhat citrus taste, and it goes down easy, practically melting away in the back of my throat as I swallow.
