Christine
My brain had split into three pieces. One piece was with Paul as Sophia, Pop, and his parents chanted over his injuries. Between chanting and crying, I’d heard Paul’s dad say something about third-degree burns.
The second part of my mind was with my mother in the dining room as we tried to break through Nate’s shield, and the last part of my mind was with Nate, wherever he was. Thinking of him as this person who was cosmically tied to me was keeping me sane. I imagined that our connection was a real thing, a rope that stretched from him to me, and that no matter how far apart we were, we were always together. We were one being. My heart was beating, so his had to be. My lungs were moving, so there was no way that his weren’t. He was fine. He had to be fine.
Fifteen minutes passed, and we still hadn’t heard anything. There weren’t even any ghosts who wanted to talk to me about Nate. Where was my grandfather when I needed him?
Mom’s phone had rung at least fifty times from agents calling her and reporting their discoveries. One of them had found motion sensors outside of Nate’s house that were clearly there to tip off our enemies. Another of them had found traces of a flammable chemical, which was strange for hunters to use. None of them had found the one thing that mattered. Nathan.
I closed my eyes and thought of his face, his voice, his thoughts, his future, his death, anything to give the powers in my brain something to latch on to. I saw nothing but the inside of my eyelids, and I heard nothing but Mom’s phone ringing.
If we didn’t find him soon, there was a ninety-five percent chance that my heart would give out from the stress of this alone.
“Go take a walk or something, sweetie,” Mom said. “I can feel what you’re feeling, and it’s killing me. Step away from this for a while.”
“I’m fine. I’m actually surprised that you haven’t tried to drug me.”
She raked her hand nervously through her hair and sighed. “You wouldn’t drink it, and you wouldn’t forgive me for forcing you to. I can’t see much right now, but I can see that. I’m just hoping that you realize that they want us to get all worked up and run right into some trap they have planned.”
I shrugged my shoulders. The truth was that I didn’t care. Trap or no trap, someone needed to rescue Nate.
“I don’t care,” I said, not in the mood to even pretend to be listening to her. “If they want a fight, that’s what they’re about to get.”
She sighed and scooted her chair closer to mine. She grabbed both sides of my face and stared deeply into my eyes.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere. This isn’t going to come down to throwing people against walls and breaking bones, honey. This will require murder. The act of it is so against who you are.”
“I could kill if I needed to,” I said. “I used to think about killing people all day.”
She laughed, a short and humorless chuckle, and gripped my face harder. “You used to think about killing people. Then you would berate yourself for even having the thought. And as if you weren’t pious enough, you would pray for God’s forgiveness and his mercy on your enemies. Angel, you are not a killer.”
She kissed my nose and pissed me off, but my dad called my name before I could say anything to her.
He stepped into the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
“Come talk to me for a minute.”
“But, Dad…” He made a face—his adorable I’m your dad face—and I met him in the doorway.
“You two aren’t going to find Nathan like this,” he said. “How about you come in the kitchen with me, and I’ll help you get your mind off of things?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. He walked into the kitchen and pulled me in there with him. “You need a break, and I have an idea. Come over here.”
He gestured to one of the seats around the island, and I reluctantly sat down.
“I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with my mom before she died, but the time I did spend with her was usually in the kitchen. She left these ancient cookbooks for me when she passed. I still have them. They might be the most valuable things I own. I used to take them with me to whatever foster home I was being moved to. And then, when I met your mom, I took them all around the world with us. Can I show them to you?”
Really? He was going with the dead mom story? There was no way that I could crush his spirit by declining, so I nodded.
He opened a drawer that I’d never seen him go into, and he pulled out three battered cookbooks with ripped covers and frayed edges.
“On my second date with your mother, I cooked for her. The first date had gone so well that I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her the next day, but I knew I didn’t have the money to spare. But I had food and my mother’s cookbooks.” He opened the one on top and flipped to a page with a faded picture of Chicken Parmesan Pasta.
I loved my dad, but I literally felt like I was about to explode. I was a ticking time bomb, and I didn’t want him to get caught in the devastation. “Dad, I really do want to hear this, but Nate is somewhere drugged and probably terrified. This isn’t going to help.”
“It could. I used to do this with your mom all the time. This will help clear your head, and without you breathing down her neck, she’ll clear her head. And … boom … we’ll find Nathan.”
He meant well, and for that reason alone, I flipped through the tattered pages of the cookbook. I rubbed my fingertips along the written notes in the corners of the pages. Rohina Gavin’s notes. She’d scratched through many of the titles and renamed the dishes after her son, like Christopher’s Potato Surprise and Christopher’s Favorite Meatloaf.
Dad didn’t speak as I flipped through more pages. On one of them, she’d scribbled a recipe for something called Man Catching Pie. I frowned. Rohina had died with no one but her son, so the name of the pie made me sad for her and my dad … who didn’t have a dad.
I flipped through more pages, and soon, the rhythm of flipping and reading and flipping and reading became oddly calming. Dad stayed silent at my side, never commenting on the recipes or interjecting memories of his mother.
With a clear head and a heavy heart, I thought about Nathan again. I closed my eyes, and pushed my powers harder without feeling an ounce of pain, and, suddenly, it felt like I was falling through an immense dark void. As I fell, I focused my mind on Nate’s emerald eyes. I pushed away all thoughts of what could’ve been happening to him, what I would do if he died, and how life would never be the same without him. I just thought of his eyes.
And I kept falling and falling through open space without seeing anything for what felt like forever … until cold water blasted into my face and chest. It had hit me with so much force that I opened my eyes to see who’d sprayed me, but nothing had changed in the kitchen.
We were still leaning over my grandmother’s cookbooks. My dad was humming lightly under his breath.
I closed my eyes again, and the cold water that wasn’t really there seemed to rip at my skin. It reminded me of when the groundskeeper had broken a window while pressure-washing the dorm at St. Catalina once. At that age, learning that water had a stronger and more dangerous side had amazed me. It was an unexpectedly dangerous thing, just like I was.
Someone was pressure-washing Nate.
I felt the water beating against my bones, and instead of thinking about how much pressure it would take to break them or giving in to the panic rising in my chest, I stayed still in my seat. I breathed slowly, calmly, as though I were doing nothing but flipping the pages of the cookbook.
“Christopher,” Sophia whispered. I didn’t open my eyes. I had to focus on Nate. “Lydia and I are going to leave for a second. Can you keep an eye on things here?” That was a polite way to say: Can you babysit your seventeen-year-old daughter?
With my powers on full blast, I asked, “Where are you going?” The answer was: to hide something from me. “What are you hiding?”
The answer was: a video.
I knew how the rest of this conversation with Sophia would go. Her primary method of dealing with me was to deny everything and distract me with food. I would say: Show me the video. She would say: I don’t have a video, but I made a pie.
So I skipped that altogether and moved myself to the dining room. My mom’s back was turned to me, but I saw that she was holding her phone close to her face. “Go back in there with your father,” she said, without turning around. “Tell Sophia to hurry up.”
“Show me the video.”
“Later, Christine. I have to go.” That answer didn’t work for me, so I pointed at her phone and made it fly from her hand to mine. “Hey!” she yelled.
If she’d said anything after that, I didn’t hear it. The entire world muted as I looked at the screen. Nathan, my Nathan, was chained to a wall as someone out of the range of the camera blasted him with a high-pressure hose. His head drooped to his shoulder and his arms looked heavy on the ground. He either couldn’t raise them because of the drugs they’d given him or he’d given up on blocking the water altogether.
The hose shut off, and a deep voice spoke. “Mr. Reece,” he said. “We really don’t want to treat you this way. It would be nice if you could make this easy and just tell us where your girlfriend is.”
After a moment, Nate said, “Go to hell.” All of my muscles tightened. He’d managed to sound strong despite his slurred speech and the tremble in his voice.
“That’s too bad. I was hoping to make this simple,” the man said. The camera turned to him, and I stopped breathing. Mom loosened my grip on the phone with gentle fingers and kept me from falling by wrapping her arms around me. I watched the screen in the space between our bodies and shivered. The man torturing Nate was wearing a purple robe. It was oddly familiar, in a way that I didn’t want it to be familiar at all.
In the portal world, the magical guards in the forest had been wearing purple robes just like that one.
To the camera, he said, “Lydia … you and your copy, daughter, or whatever you want to call her, have half an hour to get here before I kill him. I trust you can trace where this video is coming from. Or you can stay where you are if he means nothing. I’ll send you a video of his death. Then, we will pick all of you off, one by one. Even your witches, their families, all of you. It will be a preview of what we do to this world once we reclaim what is ours.”
The video ended and left a still image of the hooded man. Shadows hid most of his features. Only the end of his pointy nose peeked through the hood.
His words echoed in my head. A preview of what we do to this world once we reclaim what is ours.
Mom took the phone, and I gasped like I’d been holding my breath underwater for a long time. As I exhaled, tears streamed down my face for Nathan. He was chained to a wall because of me, being blasted with water because of me, as some guy in a hood ransomed his life for mine.
“He’s not human, is he?” I asked. Mom shook her head. “Play it again. We can use pictures to move anywhere in the world, and we have a video.”
“They didn’t show enough, baby. I’ve watched it five times already, and I tried.”
“Then how do we get there? He’s going to kill him.”
“It’s a trap, Christine. Don’t do anything crazy. We will find him as soon as we figure out who that is.”
“It’s the Coven of the Night Star!” I screamed. I felt like I was losing my mind. No, I’d lost it. It had been taken with Nate.
Then she started her mom thing—talking at me instead of talking to me, calling me angel and honey and sweetie too many times to mean it.
“We’ll find him,” she said. “Give me ten minutes.”
Even though my muscles were jittering and my heart was beating fast enough to give out, I sat at the table. Ten minutes would be my limit. I’d use it to think and to be better than that girl who’d jumped into the portal.
Mom got to work. With nine minutes to go, she picked up her phone. She called one of her agents and ordered them to track the email address of the person who’d sent her the message. With seven minutes to go, that agent called her back.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Don’t go there. That’s a trap. It makes no sense for them to be keeping him in a shopping mall, but get surveillance on the area. They threatened my life and they threatened to reclaim the world. These are the boldest rebels we’ve had in a long time.”
These people weren’t passionate potheads like Devin and his friends, and that scared me even more.
My muscles felt like wet spaghetti noodles. I slumped over the table until my forehead pressed into the cold wood. With four minutes to go, Sophia said, “Lydia, I’m going to try the crystal ball again. Maybe something has cleared up. Emma’s parents are going to help.”
“Great idea.”
Two minutes. One and a half. One.
“Christine,” Mom said, drumming her fingers nervously on the table. “I need more time.”
It always came down to time with her. The time she had. The time she didn’t have. I could deal with that in all other instances but this one, not when giving her more time meant that Nathan would be killed.
We’d only been given thirty minutes, and that was before I’d seen the video. I could’ve been moments away from losing my soul mate, or he could’ve already been gone.
“Okay,” I said, the calmest I’d ever been in my life. “I’m going back in there with Dad. He was actually helping me to get through this.”
“Perfect,” Mom said, and answered her phone.
I walked out of the room, and just before I stepped into the kitchen, I paused. Between rooms and between my parents, I felt like I didn’t have anyone to answer to. No Mom. No Dad. I was a family of one again. At St. Catalina, I’d used my moral compass to make decisions, and I would go with whatever felt right. Finding Nate before someone killed him felt right.
I closed my eyes and calmly coaxed my powers into breaking through Nate’s shield again. Before seeing the video, I’d felt water stinging my skin, so I’d been on to something.
I followed the same steps. Thinking of Nate’s eyes. Falling through the dark void. Falling through his shield.
Water blasted into my chest again.
Spots of bright light broke through the darkness and revealed a blurry image of white tiles. More of the room came into view, and I prayed that I wasn’t hurting Nate too much by cracking into his mind.
I saw a line of rusted showerheads, a man dressed in black holding the hose, and a dingy shower curtain hanging behind him.
Telling my mother would’ve undoubtedly made her question what I was seeing, ask for more time to research what I already knew, and risk Nate’s life for even longer. I couldn’t have that, so I focused on the shower curtain and studied the brown stains coating the bottom of it. I imagined myself standing in front of it, and in the next moment, I was really there. I’d landed on the other side of the curtain, shielding my body from the two people who were torturing my boyfriend—a man and a woman who were dressed in black like hunters.
I peeked around the curtain and saw Nate pinned against a dingy wall with a chain around his neck.
As they sprayed him with the hose, I watched carefully and weighed all of my options. The best one seemed to be getting Nate free from the wall.
The hose shut off, and the man said, “Bunny, see if our friend is ready to talk to us now.” Bunny? What kind of name was that?
“Hey, pooch,” she said. I clenched my fists but stayed hidden, still studying the room to formulate a viable plan. “Where is Christine?” Nate struggled to catch his breath. “Where is she?” she screamed.
Nate chuckled and upset her even more. “I don’t know,” he said, “but you can’t imagine how much fun I’m going to have when I get out of this chain. I’m thinking it’s about time I make some adjustments to your ugly faces with my teeth.”
Bunny drove her boot right into Nate’s chin, and I caught myself before jumping at her. Something told me to wait. To think. “So you’re a comedian?” she said. “Eagle, why don’t you show him how funny you can be?”
Eagle? Those had to be code names. Why would they need to hide their identities? Were they preparing for this to fail? Keeping their real names hidden in case they had to retreat? That gave me a little more hope than I’d had before.
“My pleasure,” Eagle said.
A long knife appeared in his hand. It was a deadly little thing with a jagged blade and a hook for the handle. It was now or never.
I stared at the end of the chain they’d hooked to Nate and yanked it from the wall from where I stood. White tiles shattered on the wet floor. Eagle and Bunny still couldn’t see me. I held both of my hands out towards Nate and imagined his body flying to me.
He and the chain lifted out of the puddle. I smiled, triumphant, as his body sped towards the shower curtain.
Abruptly, he yelped as Bunny yanked the end of the chain and slammed him back to the floor. She pulled him closer to her. His neck looked incredibly fragile under the metal. I locked my eyes on the part that was pressing into his throat, making red marks on his pale skin. Break, I thought. Break. Break. Break.
Something snapped, and for a moment, I held my breath and prayed that it wasn’t his neck. I forced my eyes open and saw metal links scattered on the wet floor and Bunny holding the end of the chain that led to no one. Nate was free.
I ducked.
Something had made me sure that I’d needed to.
The jagged knife cut through the shower curtain, and the man smiled at me through the slit he’d made. “My Lord,” he said. “She’s here.”
I flicked my hand in his direction, and he flew to the other side of the room. He caught his balance just before hitting the wall. Next, the woman lunged at me, and I sent her whirling to the wall that Nate had been chained to. When Eagle came back, I sent him again. Then her. Then him. Then both of them.
I felt myself missing the moment to really end this. To kill them. My mind automatically thought to throw them into walls to injure them, but that wasn’t enough. They were going to keep coming, and eventually my novice move wasn’t going to stop them.
But I couldn’t imagine myself killing them. It seemed to require the ability to not look into their eyes and see them as real people. I would have to reduce them to nothing, like a spider that I didn’t want in my room, an insignificant thing that could die and not be missed.
I spent useless moments thinking about how I couldn’t kill them, and the jagged knife slashed through the shower curtain again. I jerked backwards, right into the arms of the man in the purple hood.
And it happened again. Suddenly, waves of nausea rolled through my stomach, and my lunch lurched up to my throat. Something about him felt odd and wrong, like when I’d looked at pictures of Carter and when I’d seen my mother stumbling through her office during her attack.
Something about this man made me want to vomit. He turned me around. I only saw his pointy nose. The rest of his features were a mystery.
“The heir,” he said. “It is very nice to meet you.”
I looked down at the arms holding me and broke them. I moved myself to Nate with a thought and just as my fingertips reached his skin, preparing to take us away from this terrible place, the chain wrapped around my ankle.
I slid along the nasty floor, through brown water, and hair, and odors that made me gag, and I stopped at the feet of the man in the robe. He wasn’t wearing shoes.
He stretched his arms towards me, and a strong force pinned me to the floor.
There was nothing touching me, but it suddenly felt like there were hands covering my mouth, arms, and legs. I tried moving my legs and arms, then I tried using my powers to move my entire body away from him. Nothing worked. Next, I tried moving him, but he didn’t budge.
I thought about fire consuming him. It had obeyed me for years, coming at my command, burning right out of my hand when I’d needed it to. Not today. Today, it didn’t come.
I’d spent years being afraid of being too powerful, but that had nothing on how it felt to be … normal. For some terrible reason, I was no longer extraordinary.
He laughed this creepy and out of place chuckle. “Are you surprised, little one?” he asked. “Did they teach you that you’re stronger than us? Not all of us. Some of us have been waiting for a long time to take this world back from your mother.”
The only things that I could move were my eyes. They darted from the man in the hood, to his bare feet, to Nate’s unmoving body in the corner.
“She’s getting weaker and we’re getting stronger. I can’t think of a better way to start her downfall than by killing her child. She has killed so many of ours. It’s poetic in a way.”
It was anything but poetic. My death would get him what he wanted sooner than he thought. It would get him a world without Lydia Shaw.
“My lord,” Bunny said. “The deal was that the panther gets the girl. Remi.”
****
Remi
I waited and waited, with the gun in my hand and a vendetta in my heart.
The witches across the table from me had promised that today would be the day that Christine would pay for everything she’d taken from me. With the help of my new allies, the world was really going to be consumed because of my hatred and anger. Bits of the old me that had managed to hang on through years of depression and my time as a hunter were making my stomach twist into knots. Nothing good could come from Carter’s friends ending the world before he had a chance to stake his claim on it, but that was a problem for another day.
“Any minute now, right?” I said.
“Yes,” Sam answered. “Any minute now. You’ll have her.”
****
Christine
“I don’t care what that girl wants,” the wizard said, and he began to chant. He spoke in a low murmur that almost made him sound like a monk, but the seemingly peaceful mantra made me feel more trapped than before—arms pinned to my sides, powers quelled inside of me.
A dagger appeared in his hands. The long silver blade reflected my terrified face. He thrust the dagger down, and it sliced through the air on the way to my chest. I closed my eyes and wept for my mother, who would have to bear this death, and my father who would have to lose her again.
A flash of white appeared between the hooded wizard and me. Nate barked and sank his teeth into his arm. A river of blood flowed between them—way too much for a bite. It splattered all over the wizard’s purple robe and stained Nate’s white coat.
“Nate!” I screamed, as Eagle and Bunny tried to pry his jaw open.
The force restraining me to the floor suddenly lifted. I regained control over my body just in time to slam them into the wall again.
“Nate!” I screamed. “Let go!”
I had a terrible feeling that if we stayed for another minute that life would drastically change for the worse. Throwing them into walls wouldn’t keep them away, and a bite on the arm wasn’t going to end this. I was a thousand percent sure that we needed to escape while we still could.
“Let go, Nate. Let him go!”
In the same moment that he listened to me, I moved us from the dingy shower to my bedroom. Three things landed on my bed. Nate, me, and the dagger that was painfully lodged into his neck.