by Jenna Black
“I want to say no,” Piper said, not meeting my gaze. “It’s the only decent thing to say, right? I mean, I know what I turned into, and no one in their right mind or with a hint of conscience would want to be like that.” Her shoulders slumped, and she let out a hissing sigh. “I swear to God I still have a conscience. I don’t want to want to go back. But sometimes it’s so hard…” Her voice trailed off, and she blinked rapidly to stave off tears.
I knew exactly how she felt, because that was how I’d felt for a little while after Luke had pulled me out of the square. The difference between her and me was that I’d gotten over it within a few hours. I won’t lie: there were definitely times when I felt a little tug of longing, when I missed how carefree I’d felt when I didn’t give a crap about anyone but myself. But despite Luke’s and Dr. Gilliam’s worries, I had more than enough willpower to fight that yearning off. Piper was a different story.
“So, yeah,” Piper concluded, her voice stronger. “I want to go back. And I think maybe you should want me to go back, too.”
I raised my eyebrows at her, bewildered by the statement. “Oh?”
“I’ve heard through the grapevine that the police have recovered your dad’s gun. The one you shot me with.” She looked away as she said it, but not before I caught the flash of anger and malice in her eyes. I might sympathize with her and might occasionally forget that she wasn’t my friend anymore, but Mr. Hyde would not forget.
“How did you hear that? The police don’t run around sharing the results of their investigations.” I’d been lucky when I’d persuaded Sam to tell me anything, and there would be no way I could have managed it if he hadn’t been such a good friend of my dad’s. No one would tell Piper or her parents anything.
“It’s amazing what rich parents and influence will do,” Piper said, but something about her tone was off, and I knew at once that her parents had nothing to do with it.
“You’ve been talking to Aleric, haven’t you?”
One corner of her mouth lifted then dropped in an aborted smile. “Maybe I have. Hell, I have to talk to someone other than my shrink and my parents. I don’t exactly get a lot of visitors you know.”
Before the city had started changing, Piper had been one of the most popular girls at our school, her social calendar always chock-full. I had often suspected a lot of those friendships weren’t much more than skin-deep, and it seemed I was right. If they’d been real friends, then as long as Piper hadn’t done anything heinous to them while she was Nightstruck, they’d have stuck with her. Or at least popped in for a visit now and then. Hell, if I could come visit her after what she’d done to me, you’d think some of her other friends could have, too.
I almost laughed at myself, because let’s get real, I wasn’t visiting for Piper’s benefit or out of the goodness of my heart.
I glanced over at the metal grille over Piper’s windows. I didn’t know what it turned into at night, but I was sure Aleric could find a way to get his Nightstruck in here regardless. Piper followed my gaze—and my line of thought.
“I asked him if he could break me out,” she said. “He said he could, but he wouldn’t. Not until I’ve told the police that you’re the one who shot me.”
I fought off the wave of panic that threatened to flood me. How long could Piper resist an enticement like that? I was probably lucky not to be in handcuffs already.
I caught another glimpse of malice on Piper’s face before she managed to hide the expression. She’d intended to scare me, and she’d succeeded. I hated feeling like I was somehow following her script. Or worse, Aleric’s.
I crossed my arms and gave her my blankest stare. “So why haven’t you done it?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m not the coldest bitch in the universe and don’t want you to go to prison for something I goaded you into doing.”
“That’s not it,” I said promptly. “You hate my guts. I can see it in your eyes.”
“I do not!” she protested. “You’re the one who hates me.”
She was looking at me with wide, innocent eyes, the picture of sincerity. Maybe there was even a part of her that meant it, that knew she was to blame for her current situation.
“So your Mr. Hyde has gone away?” I asked.
Piper groaned and closed her eyes. She was silent so long I thought maybe she was finished with our conversation. “He’s still here,” she finally admitted, eyes still closed. “And yeah, you’re right. He hates you.” She opened her eyes and met my gaze. She looked a little more like her old self in that moment, but I knew it was a lie. “I told Al no, that I wouldn’t do it. I have no intention of doing it. But I can’t swear I won’t. When I hit the lowest of the lows…” She finished the sentence with a helpless shrug.
Great. Even if my mom didn’t get permission to cross into the quarantine zone, there was no question in my mind that Aleric could wear Piper down until she turned me in. I had to find a way to fight him.
“I don’t want you to get hurt, Becks,” Piper said. “Really I don’t.” She reached out and put a hand on my arm. Things had changed between us so much I had to fight the instinct to flinch. “Help me get out of here,” she begged, her hand clenching convulsively on my arm.
“What?”
“I want to be Nightstruck again. I want to stop caring. I want it so bad that I know eventually I’m going to do what Aleric wants just so he’ll get me out. But if you get me out first…” Her eyes gleamed with a sudden, manic energy. “All I have to do is be outside at dawn. I’m so broken inside I know I’ll get swept away. And if I’m Nightstruck, then the police won’t be able to make me come in and make a statement or anything. They would have to drop the case.”
She was so eager for me to say yes she was panting with it, like an addict hoping she was about to get a fix. And it made a certain kind of twisted sense, what she was asking. There was no way the police would arrest me if Piper was Nightstruck.
“It might destroy your parents if you were taken again,” I reminded her.
Piper scoffed. “Like hell. I’m the family embarrassment in the state I’m in. They used to love to show me off to their friends and brag about me—though Lord knows I was never that much to brag about. Now they lock me in my bedroom and barely bother to look in on me. They’ve probably told their friends I’m dead just so they don’t have to admit their daughter is one step short of being institutionalized.”
I’d never had a high opinion of the Grants, and there may have been a kernel of truth in what Piper was saying. They weren’t the warmest and most affectionate parents I’d ever met, and they’d shown a fair amount of indifference to Piper’s well-being even before she’d been Nightstruck. But I did believe they loved her—the shadows around her mother’s eyes weren’t as deep as Piper’s, but they were there nonetheless—and I knew they would be devastated if she disappeared again. Not that I expected Piper to take my word for it.
“I think if they were that eager to be rid of you, they wouldn’t have put bars on your windows,” I pointed out. Not to mention that if they’d been as uncaring as she thought, they would probably both have been Nightstruck by now. “And even so—how do you think Aleric is going to feel if you turn up Nightstruck and haven’t helped deliver me into his hands?”
Piper snorted. “You think I give a crap how he feels?”
“I think you’ll give a crap if he’s pissed off enough to kill you. Which I wouldn’t put past him.”
She dismissed the threat with a wave of her hand. “He’s not going to kill me. And even if he does … I’d rather be dead than locked up in here for the rest of my life.”
I couldn’t tell if she meant that, or if she was just trying to manipulate me. For all the anger I felt toward her, I didn’t want her to die. There was no question that she was desperately unhappy, but I couldn’t take anything she said at face value.
Piper heaved an enormous sigh. “I was always jealous of you, you know.”
I bl
inked uncomprehendingly. Piper being jealous of me made about as much sense as Donald Trump being jealous of some starving orphan in Africa.
“Your dad could be a pain in the ass sometimes,” she continued, “but it was always so obvious he loved you. I wished my folks could be more like him.”
“Your parents love you,” I protested. “And seeing as you killed my dad, you should maybe just shut up now.”
Piper was undeterred. “They don’t love me the way your parents love you. I’ve seen articles about your mom and her crusade to get into the quarantine zone. Neither of my parents would ever dream of doing something like that for me.”
I snorted derisively. “Yeah, like it would be so great to have her show up here and get herself killed just like my dad. I’m doing everything I can to keep her from coming, and Aleric’s little games are making it almost impossible.”
“My point is that she cares enough to fight for you, and my parents … don’t. I know my shrink has told them I should be hospitalized, but they’d rather keep me in prison here than suffer the embarrassment of having a daughter in a mental institution.”
“Or maybe they think your shrink is wrong and you’re better off at home. Maybe they can’t stand the idea of trusting a bunch of strangers to keep you safe.”
“That’s what they say, but I don’t believe them. I have to get out of here. Please help me. For both our sakes.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. Idea being a very loose term for what I had. “How about if instead of giving up, we try to win this fight?”
Piper arched an eyebrow at me. “Sounds great. If I can find a way out of this that doesn’t involve me ratting you out to the police or becoming a monster again, I’m all for it. What do you have in mind?”
I gave her a sheepish smile, feeling like I’d just pulled a bait and switch. “Um, well, that’s the tricky part.”
Piper snorted and shook her head at me. “In other words, you don’t have an idea, you just wish you did.”
“Luke’s convinced there has to be some way I can kill Aleric. I figured since you’ve spent almost as much time with Aleric as I have, you might have some ideas. If Aleric’s gone, it’s possible the night magic might go with him and the city might go back to normal. And without the night magic nibbling at you, you might start to feel better.”
“Do you realize you said ‘might’ four times?”
I huffed in irritation. “When we’re looking for an alternative to you being Nightstruck again and/or me being captured by Aleric and making Philadelphia into Night Maker Central, I think we can live with a few mights.”
“What makes you think I know anything more about how to kill Aleric than you do anyway?”
“You were always more attuned to the night magic than I was. You told Luke his idea to drag me out of the square might work. I never would have thought of that myself. At least it never would have occurred to me that it would work.”
Piper looked down at her hands and started picking at her ragged cuticles. “That was just … instinct. It’s not like I actually knew anything.”
“If I wait until I find something I know will work, I’m doomed and so is the city. Is there anything Aleric did or said while you were with him that made you think he had a vulnerability?”
Piper glanced up at me briefly with a hooded expression then quickly looked away again. I suspected her jittery behavior and lack of eye contact meant she had ideas she wasn’t sure she was willing to share with me.
“Anything at all,” I pressed. “You want a chance to go back to normal, don’t you?”
When she met my eyes this time, there was no question it was Mr. Hyde who stared out. “What I want is for you to help me get out of this goddamn prison. It’s your fault I’m here in the first place!”
Practically before the last word was out, she clapped her hand over her mouth and her eyes widened and filled with remorse. “I’m so sorry,” she said from behind her hand. “Can we just pretend I didn’t say that?”
My blood thundered in my ears, and my hands clenched into fists so tight my fingers dug into my palms. I ground my teeth and kept my mouth shut to keep a torrent of angry words from spilling out of me. Maybe if I hadn’t felt so guilty about letting the night magic into the city in the first place, her words wouldn’t have had so much power to wound.
“I don’t know if or how he can be killed,” Piper said, “but Aleric definitely has a vulnerability: you.”
It was an olive branch, and the only reasonable and productive thing to do was to take it. If only I didn’t feel so … raw. But with everything that was happening in my life, with all the weight I carried on my shoulders, Piper’s condemnation was just too much to bear, and I was shaking with the effort to keep from screaming at her.
“He was completely obsessed with you, Becks,” Piper continued, undaunted by my furious silence. “I thought when he lured me out of your house that it was because he saw something in me, because he wanted me, but it was always all about you. I wanted you to come out and join me, but I wouldn’t have worked at it so hard if Al hadn’t insisted.”
I finally found my voice, though it came out sounding tight and angry. “Because he needs me to bring in more Night Makers.”
Piper shook her head. “It’s more than that. It has to be. I mean, I’m sure it’s nice for him to have that little patch of night in the city, but what is he really getting out of it that’s such a big deal?”
It was a question I’d never put a moment’s thought into. I knew why I had wanted that patch of night, but as far as I could tell, Aleric had little to nothing to gain from it. He usually disappeared in the day even when he didn’t have to.
“Maybe it’s some kind of territorial thing,” I mused, but the idea didn’t feel right. “He wants more Night Makers in the city because he wants to conquer the world, and that helps him. Somehow.”
“Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure he wants to bring more Night Makers into the city, and I’m sure expanding his territory is part of his plan. But he doesn’t want it enough to explain how badly he wanted you to be Nightstruck. I think Luke’s right and you might be dangerous to him somehow.”
“If I’m dangerous to him, why doesn’t he just kill me?”
“Maybe he can’t. You were the key that let him into our world. Maybe if you died—”
Piper’s voice cut off abruptly, and she swallowed hard. I didn’t know why at first, but then I really thought about what she’d just said: Aleric couldn’t kill me because I was the key that let him into this world. In other words, she was suggesting that if I was dead, Aleric and the night magic would vanish back to wherever it was they came from.
“So your suggestion is I should kill myself?” I asked coldly. “That’s what you’ve been leading up to?”
I should have known better than to think Mr. Hyde had crawled back into his hiding place, but I’d allowed myself to be lulled out of my anger. What an idiot. I jumped from the bed like there was a spring in my butt, my eyes stinging with tears of rage and hurt. I knew I shouldn’t allow her words to hurt me, that she was not the Piper I knew anymore. She was practically a stranger to me, and why should a stranger have the power to hurt me? But knowing it wasn’t the same as feeling it.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Piper said miserably, but I didn’t wait around to hear what else she had to say.
* * *
The thought that haunted me as Luke drove us back to that night’s hotel was that Piper might be right. Maybe if I were dead, the magic would all go away and no one else would have to die. But as miserable as I had been ever since the night I’d unwittingly opened the first gate, I wasn’t suicidal. Maybe if I’d been sure my death would banish the magic, I’d have had to put a little more thought into the idea, but even if I bought into Piper’s logic, there was no proof of any of it.
I told Luke that nothing useful had come out of our conversation, and as far as I was concerned, that was the truth. I wasn’t going to k
ill myself for the greater good, and I hadn’t learned anything important from the conversation. After all, I already knew Aleric was obsessed with me. I was no closer to figuring out what to do about Aleric than I had been before I’d talked to Piper.
I figured I still had at least a couple of days to try to come up with a plan, but it turned out my mom had been working overtime. She called about a half hour after I got back from talking to Piper and dropped a bombshell.
“I’ve been granted permission to enter the quarantine zone,” she told me. Her tone told me she was riding high from the victory—like all lawyers, she really loves winning, especially when the odds are heavily against her. Even if we didn’t have the looming threat of Aleric, I wondered how she’d feel about her victory in a few days, when she’d had a chance to experience the nightmare and it finally sank in what she’d done.
I know I’ve made some pretty scathing remarks about my mom. I always felt like her career was more important to her than her family, and I’d always felt that she loved Beth—the chip off the old block—way more than she loved me. There were about a million reasons I didn’t want her to come to Philadelphia, but I had to admit I was both touched and humbled that she’d do it.
For all we knew, Philadelphia was going to be under quarantine forever, which meant that not only was my mom giving up her career to be with me, but she was giving up her ability to see Beth, her golden girl. I’d told myself in the past that her campaign to break through the quarantine to get to me was an act of vanity, that it was all for show. But if that were the case, she wouldn’t actually do it. And none of that takes into account that Philadelphia was not a pleasant or safe place to live these days. Mom thought she was going to be breathing toxins or viruses or something that was going to make her hallucinate—and she was still coming for me.
