Night Magic

by Jenna Black

  I wished I could feel confident of that, but then I didn’t feel confident about much of anything.

  Apparently Dr. Gilliam felt much the same way. When she’d worked during the day, Luke and I had for the most part ignored each other. He stayed in his room, and I stayed in mine. I had to go shopping a couple of times to buy some new clothes, but though Luke came with me to keep an eye on me, we didn’t talk a whole lot. I didn’t know what to say to him, and he didn’t seem to have much clue what to say to me, either. But just before Dr. Gilliam left for her evening shift, Luke came into our room and announced he felt like watching a movie. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to watch one with him, instead picking up the remote and flipping to the hotel’s movie selections. I didn’t miss the brief but definite eye contact between him and his mom before she slipped out the door.

  “What are you in the mood for?” he asked with forced cheer. “Comedy? Drama? Action?”

  “So you and your mom think I need a babysitter,” I said. “Are you planning to spend the whole night in here watching me?”

  He hit the mute button on the TV, tossing the remote onto one of the beds and sitting down. “I’m supposed to play it by ear. If I’m feeling worried about you, I’ll ‘accidentally’ fall asleep while watching a movie, and you’ll be too polite to wake me up and kick me out.”

  I’d expected a denial, not an honest answer, so I momentarily wasn’t sure what to say. To cover my confusion, I beckoned to Bob, inviting him up onto the bed with me. When we lived at home with my dad, Bob had been officially banned from all furniture—a rule that I had been known to bend on more than one occasion—but that was a change he had no trouble adapting to. Ears perked and tail wagging, he jumped easily onto the bed and flopped down beside me, putting his head on my lap in case I was in the mood for a good ear-scratching. He made a contented moaning sound when I obliged.

  “My mom is worried about you,” Luke continued, “but I don’t see any reason why you’d want to go running out into the night again.”

  I appreciated his vote of confidence, though I doubted he could grasp just how badly a part of me wanted to go back to that carefree oblivion. I kept telling myself nothing I’d done while I was Nightstruck counted. Therefore I wasn’t responsible for bringing the Night Maker into the city, or sleeping with Aleric, or tacitly condoning a horrific murder. It would have been much easier to convince myself if I didn’t suspect … no, know … that I’d been acting on my own deeply buried desires.

  “Why would I want to go back to that,” I asked with a bitter edge in my voice, “when I can spend all day every day wallowing in guilt and grief and disgust? While fearing for my life and the lives of the people I care about and having nightmares every time I sleep?” I was being weird about it, but I would almost have preferred it if he weren’t so … accepting. If he’d looked at me like I was some kind of freak, if he’d been angry, if he’d been mean to me … Those things I could have fought. I might even have made myself feel stronger as I built a fortress of defenses around me. But his kindness and his lack of judgment made me feel vulnerable and exposed.

  “Piper would go back in a heartbeat,” Luke said. “She says she feels terrible about everything she did, and she says she hates what she became. But her folks have to lock her in her room every night to keep her from leaving.”

  I winced. I’d never been all that impressed with Piper’s parents. They were total snobs, and I think if they had paid more attention to her, she might not have been so fond of getting herself into trouble. I understood the necessity of keeping her home and safe, but surely there was some better way than to lock her up as if she were a prisoner. Not that I had any idea what that way might have been.

  “You were never as far gone as she was,” Luke said. “I can’t see you voluntarily going back.”

  I tried to latch onto something that would let me be angry and strong. “I kept telling you I hadn’t changed that much, and you kept telling me I’d changed more than I thought. You can’t have it both ways.”

  Instead of rising to the bait, Luke shrugged. “You know exactly how much you changed, now that your head is clear. You have to have an easier path back than Piper does.”

  There he was, being all reasonable again. Back when I was Nightstruck, I’d thought he’d written me off entirely. He’d seemed pretty pissed off at me, and it wasn’t unreasonable for him to blame me for what had happened. It had been my decision to run off and confront Piper, after all. But then if he’d written me off entirely, he wouldn’t have met me at the square when I’d asked him to. I wondered if he’d have shown up if he’d known I was sleeping with Aleric and had basically murdered my old classmate.

  I was suddenly flooded with hot shame as I realized that not once had I even thought to thank him for saving me. He had pulled me out of the square at great personal risk. If it had taken even a fraction of a second longer for the night to lose its hold on me, Leo would have bitten, clawed, or stung him and he’d have died.

  Not only had I not thanked him for it, I’d fought him like a wild thing. I could barely remember the blur of time right after it happened, but I was pretty sure I’d called him some terrible names and told him I hated him. And it had never entered my mind to take any of that back.

  Maybe some of the night was still inside me, slowly poisoning me.

  That was not a comfortable thought. Most of the time, I thought I was completely back to normal, but what did that really tell me? I’d thought I was pretty close to normal while I was Nightstruck, and I could clearly see now that I hadn’t been. So if I was warped and twisted in more subtle ways now, would I even know it?

  I shivered and hugged myself, fearing I was about ten seconds away from having a complete meltdown. So much for the quaint illusion that I’d been getting a little better every day.

  “I’m sorry about some of the things I said to you when you were Nightstruck,” Luke said.

  The injustice of him feeling like he had to apologize to me almost made me laugh out loud. “You don’t have anything to apologize for,” I hurried to reassure him. “You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

  “That doesn’t mean I had to say it. I know better than to just blurt out the first thing that comes into my head. And I had no right to be angry at you. Nothing that happened was your fault.”

  I bit back my urge to remind him that everything was my fault. Wallowing in self-pity is not an attractive habit, and I was determined not to do it. Well, not much, at least.

  “Thank you for getting me out of there,” I said, before I could forget those important words again.

  Luke grinned at me in a way that never failed to make my heart flutter. I remembered simultaneously how wonderful his lips had felt on mine when he kissed me, and that my last act before being Nightstruck was to text him a declaration of love. It had been almost reflexive, something I’d done without thinking and certainly without worrying about the consequences. Thank God he hadn’t said anything to me about it, but it was still insanely embarrassing, and the memory made me blush.

  “You sure didn’t seem very happy about it at the time,” he said. That grin of his said he was teasing, but something in his eyes told me there was more to it than that. He was hiding some secret pain behind that teasing. I was sort of glad I didn’t remember just what kinds of awful things I’d said to him.

  I grimaced and looked away. “I wasn’t,” I admitted. “Being Nightstruck was kind of like being anesthetized, and it wasn’t easy to go back to having to feel … everything.” I scraped up a little scrap of courage from somewhere deep within and met his eyes once more. “But you did the right thing. I’m really glad to be back.”

  I looked away again, because I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth or not. I’d never had so many mixed feelings in all my life. I wanted to be glad I was back. I should be glad I was back. And there were times when I was, times when I thought about how much it must have hurt Luke and Dr. Gilliam—and even my mom—to thin
k they’d lost me forever. If only there weren’t always a sense of impending doom hanging over my head. If only I didn’t keep hearing my father scream when Billy the goat savaged him. If only I didn’t remember tumbling naked into bed with Aleric in our tent in Rittenhouse Square, or standing by and watching Stuart be killed when I could have saved him. What I wouldn’t have done for a nice case of amnesia …

  “If you’re feeling very generous,” Luke said, “maybe you and I can go see Piper tomorrow and you can thank her, too. She was the one who suggested I might be able to pull you out of the square.”

  Thanking Piper—for anything—was not a high priority on my to-do list. Maybe she’d had a hand in helping Luke pull me back from the night, but if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have been Nightstruck in the first place. Hell, if it weren’t for her, my dad would still be alive!

  I didn’t say anything, but obviously Luke had no trouble reading my ungracious thoughts on my too-open face.

  “She’s in a lot of pain, Becks,” he said.

  His use of my nickname felt almost accusatory, but that was probably just my own guilt talking. Piper had been my best friend for a long time, and if I hadn’t been tricked into letting the magic into the city, she would have gone right on being that wonderful—if occasionally infuriating—best friend for who knew how long. It was because of me and my actions that she’d changed, and yet I couldn’t stop blaming her for what she’d done.

  “That’s why she’s seeing a shrink, isn’t it?” I asked. I tried for an almost callous tone but found my voice coming out tight. I then noticed that my hands had both clenched into fists. Bob noticed, too, sticking a cold wet dog-nose into one of those fists to remind me of my duty to pet him at all times. I gave him a quick, irritated glance. “You’re not the boss of me.”

  Luke and Bob made almost identical snorting sounds, startling me into a quick, half-choked laugh.

  “You two have been spending waaay too much time together,” I muttered.

  We had a good laugh about that. Then we both laughed even harder when I reflexively started petting Bob again, proving that he was, in fact, the boss of me. For a few heartbeats, things felt almost … normal between us.

  But of course that couldn’t last. The awkwardness came back as soon as I noticed its brief absence. Maybe the best thing would be to try to talk it out, but I wasn’t up to that. Not in my fragile mental state.

  “How about a comedy?” I said in response to his long-ago, almost forgotten question about what type of movie to watch. “I think we could both use a few good laughs.”

  My suggestion made the awkwardness spike again. We both knew I was looking for an excuse for the two of us not to talk anymore. I tensed up, just in case Luke wasn’t going to let me change the subject so easily, but after one long, uncomfortable stare, he shrugged and picked up the remote once again.

  “Comedy it is.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I was sick and tired of feeling guilty. Guilty about letting the magic into our city, guilty about what had happened to my dad, guilty about putting Luke and his mom in danger, guilty about … Well, about just about everything. And thanks to that conversation with Luke, I was now feeling guilty about my attitude toward Piper.

  She had done awful things to me when she was Nightstruck. But then when I’d shot her, instead of being angry with me, she’d desperately tried to save me. She’d practically shoved me away, screaming at me to run for safety and leave her there in the square to bleed to death. And then after she’d miraculously recovered from my attempt to kill her, she’d helped Luke come up with a plan to drag me from Aleric’s clutches. Clearly, she had forgiven me for trying to murder her in cold blood. It seemed the least I could do was try to forgive her.

  It was embarrassingly hard to do—hence, the guilt-fest. However, I decided my best chance at achieving something approximating forgiveness was to pay her a visit. If nothing else, she was probably the only person on the planet who could come close to understanding what I was feeling. Maybe we were beyond having any touchy-feely moments, and maybe there was no hope of ever healing my bruised and battered psyche, but at least I could say I tried.

  Luke drove me to Piper’s house out on the Main Line while Dr. Gilliam caught what little sleep she could before she’d have to arrange for a new hotel room for the night. Things were still uncomfortable between Luke and me, but I was glad for his presence anyway. I was so nervous my stomach was tied up in knots, and I wanted to scream. I didn’t know how I would react to seeing Piper, and I was terrified of finding out.

  “You didn’t bring a gun, did you?” Luke asked in a poor attempt at a joke when we pulled up in front of Piper’s stately home.

  I gave him a glare that probably didn’t have any heat behind it because I was too freaked out to manage a good one.

  He grinned unrepentantly. “Too soon?”

  I appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood, but even his good cheer couldn’t lift the dread that was weighing me down. I considered telling him I’d wait in the car while he visited with Piper, but I refused to be that much of a coward.

  Piper’s mom let us in. Even with the city in chaos and her daughter recovering from a gunshot wound after turning into a psychotic bitch from hell, Mrs. Grant was clearly convinced that a lady was never to be seen in anything but designer clothes and full makeup. She had the same pressed and starched look she’d always had, and based on how straight her back was and how high she held her chin, I swear she spent half her childhood walking around with a book on her head to create perfect posture.

  I imagined she didn’t think much of my jeans-and-hoodie outfit, or of the fact that I’d made no attempt to hide the bruising and swelling around my nose with makeup. It looked a little better each day and no longer throbbed relentlessly, but it wasn’t exactly pretty.

  She greeted me stiffly, and Luke a little more warmly. I wondered if she knew her daughter had killed my dad, but I wasn’t about to ask.

  “You can go on back,” Mrs. Grant said to me. “Luke, why don’t you come to the kitchen and I’ll make you some tea.”

  I felt a stab of something between panic and confusion. Luke wasn’t coming with me?

  “You’re not coming to see Piper?” I asked in a squeak. It was all I could do not to reach out and grab him like a security blanket.

  “Piper said she wanted a chance to talk to you alone first,” Mrs. Grant said. “She says you had a fight and she needs to clear the air.”

  Well, that was one way of putting it.

  “I’ll come with you if you want,” Luke said quietly. “Piper doesn’t get to call all the shots.”

  God, it was hard to turn him down. So often in the past, I’d used Piper as a shield to help me deal with how nervous Luke made me. Maybe someday I would laugh at how things had changed. You know, when the pigs are gracefully soaring over the glacial landscape of Hell.

  I reminded myself that I was not a coward. I’d dredged up the courage to go marching out into the night and try to kill Piper, knowing I was more likely to get myself killed than succeed. Surely going to talk to her one-on-one now was no big deal compared to that.

  My mental pep talk didn’t make me feel any better, but I resisted the urge to accept Luke’s offer. This was something I had to do on my own.

  “Thanks,” I said to him, “but it’ll be okay.”

  Mrs. Grant was looking at me oddly. I’m sure she was wondering what kind of fight could justify my level of reluctance when Piper and I had once been so close. Knowing Piper, she’d probably passed it off as some minor disagreement.

  I hadn’t spent tons of time at Piper’s house, but I knew how to get to her bedroom without a native guide. You’d never have guessed it from how long it took me to get there, though. My palms were sweating as I reached up and gingerly knocked on the closed door.

  “Come in,” Piper said.

  I took a deep breath and pushed the door open, trying to brace myself for the shock of emotions
I was sure to feel when I laid eyes on her.

  No amount of bracing could prepare me for the sight that met my eyes when I stepped into that room and got my first look at the post-Nightstruck Piper. I barely recognized her, and all the anger I’d been afraid would come bursting out of me took cover in the deepest recesses of my mind.

  I’d always been just a little jealous of my former best friend, because as well as being insanely popular, she was also drop-dead gorgeous. Exactly the kind of girl you’d expect a guy like Luke to be with. She’d made herself less gorgeous even before she was Nightstruck by chopping off her beautiful red-gold hair and dyeing it a stark, unappealing white. Seeing her like that for the first time had been a shock, but nothing like the shock of seeing her now.

  She’d lost so much weight her clothes were hanging on her like a sack. Her skin was sickly pale, which made the bruise-like blotches around her eyes look even deeper and darker. She’d dyed her hair back to some approximation of its natural color and it had grown out some, but it was brittle-looking and had no luster to it.

  But the most shocking change, the one that immediately hit me the hardest, was something less tangible than that. Something to do with the slump of her shoulders, the curve of her back, the hollowness in her eyes. This Piper was a shadow of her former self, with none of the confidence, vivacity, and cheer I’d come to expect from her.

  She was sitting on her bed, her back against the wall, and she didn’t get up when I came in. Maybe that seemed like too much of an effort. I saw her notice my nose and frown. Then she managed a tired-looking smile that didn’t come close to reaching her eyes.

  “Wow,” she said. Even her voice sounded different, less firm. “I must look even worse than I thought.”

  I swallowed hard, stepping tentatively closer as if I were approaching a potentially dangerous stranger. The polite thing would be to reassure her that she really didn’t look so bad after all, but I couldn’t seem to make myself do it. Hell, I couldn’t seem to make myself say anything at all.