Remi
Elena left my body, and Lydia’s agent clutched my arm. She’d used me like I meant nothing and had left me here to die.
It took my vision a minute to focus. By the time that happened, Christine was gone and so was my chance to kill her.
From what I knew about the Magical Council, they weren’t the type to suddenly disobey Lydia and try to turn the magical world against her, so I’d guessed Elena, or one of them, had made them rip the treaty. When they also went limp and started dry heaving, I gathered that Elena and her family had really left the building.
The crowd started shouting at each other—about Lydia, about Kamon, about war. It was chaos. The wrong kind of chaos.
“Remi Vaughn,” Lydia’s head flunky, Tyler, said. “You are under arrest for your affiliation with Kamon Yates.” Perfect. I was being arrested, and the thing that irritated me the most was that he thought that I was just affiliated with Kamon. But I didn’t scream to defend my relationship. That overconfident bastard hadn’t placed me in handcuffs or used any of his powers to keep me down.
Kamon had called that a strength of mine. Deception. I was much stronger than anyone expected me to be. So I kicked Tyler in the chest and knocked the wind out of him. He stumbled back just far enough for me to get away.
I took one last look at the chaos Elena had caused. She’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted—a hoard of angry creatures—and although they were angry about my favorite person to hate, the victory wasn’t sweet for me.
Elena had left me to die, her coven hadn’t attacked anyone directly, and Christine was still alive.
I took myself to my room in Japan.
I considered going to Elena’s house to yell at her, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make it out of there alive. In my closet, I threw my clothes into my suitcase and emptied Kamon’s box of knives inside of it. My gun. Where was my gun?
I sighed and let it go. I didn’t have time to look for it.
Because I had no idea where I was going, I kept my normal clothes on that Elena had asked me to wear. I looked ridiculous, but I’d go unnoticed this way if I had to get myself a hotel for the night … or for God only knew how long.
I had a feeling that things had expired with the coven. They were Carter’s friends, in some way, so I wasn’t sure if he’d leave with me. My friend would’ve, but I didn’t know who he was anymore.
I’d call him … from wherever I would end up. Maybe we’d start planning again, do our own thing, and find Christine together like we used to talk about doing all the time.
My things barely fit into the suitcase. I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever gotten all of that in there to move …
I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t packed my things. The maids that Carter had let go had done it for me. And by let go … I’d assumed he’d killed them. This was a good reason not to kill the help.
With sleeves hanging out of the zipper and a shoe lodged in the front pocket, I lifted my suitcase and closed my eyes. I had absolutely nowhere to go and no one to help me figure that out. My next thought burned like hell—I could’ve gone to Deerfield, if only for the night. Slept in my old bed. Talked to my family. How long would it take for them to call Lydia for me?
“Where are you going?”
Hearing that voice felt like salvation. I opened my eyes. Carter was leaning in my doorway with a slight smirk on his lips.
“I don’t know. Somewhere. I can’t do this anymore.”
“And what made you decide that?”
I dropped the suitcase and sat on my bed. Staying here or going somewhere with Carter had to be better than going back to Deerfield. “We can start with the fact that I got possessed today against my will. And Christine is still alive. I really don’t know what I’m doing here anymore.”
“Aww, is the bad girl having a soft moment? Are you ready to give up?”
“I’m not a bad girl,” I said, quoting what he’d told me a thousand times. I waited for him to add his usual joke about his dad trying to turn me into one.
Instead, he said, “You look like one to me.” I looked like one? Really? I grabbed my suitcase again. This was pointless. “You are much calmer than I expected you to be. You obviously know what we’re up to here. I’d thought you would be more upset. Screaming … throwing things. You come off as emotional.”
I come off … as emotional? I replayed his words in my head a few more times, and they still didn’t make sense.
“Mother thought we’d have to kill you when you found out about our original plan.” I raised my head slowly. Carter didn’t have a mother. Like ever. He’d never met the woman who’d carried them. One of his biggest secrets was how much that bothered him. He loved his father, but he’d always wondered what it would’ve been like to have a mother. I just stared at him with my mouth wide open. “Why are you looking at me like you didn’t know?”
I tried to stop trembling and sit still on the bed, but that didn’t seem possible. “Know what?” I asked.
“You know about what our family does, don’t you? Possession?” Our family. I felt sick, but I managed to nod. “So mother clearly explained it to you, didn’t she?”
I wanted to sound strong and confident more than I wanted to take my next breath, but when I spoke, my voice completely betrayed me. “She told me some things.” And Sam had told me other things, like that her only brother had died. But my friend was calling Elena … mother.
Brent. Her brother’s name was Brent, and it was abundantly clear that Brent was wearing my friend’s body, ordering the hunters to do whatever he said, telling me not to worry, pretending to be Carter Yates.
They’d killed my friend, the only real friend I’d ever had. All of this time I’d been waiting for him to act like himself, and he wasn’t ever going to do that.
A single tear fell out of my right eye as I remembered the many nights I’d spent in his room, playing video games and waiting for his father to come home. We’d both be excited like we were greeting a king. And all this time, the prince was an imposter. How long ago had they taken my only friend?
My throat tightened, and I took a loud breath.
“You didn’t know,” he said. “Dammit, Remi, I was really hoping to keep you around. You’re really beautiful. That’s why I stopped you from going back into that fire. It would’ve been such a waste of a body.” He sucked his teeth and pushed off of the wall. He walked to me slowly, almost seductively, and I couldn’t move again.
He sat next to me and twirled my hair around one of his—Carter’s—fingers. A knife appeared in his other hand. “This is truly upsetting. We could’ve really hit it off, but you know too much now and could use it against us. I thought you would figure it out if I spent too much time with you. That’s why I’ve been staying away, for you, sweetheart. Carter’s powers are fading by the day, and it’s harder for me to know certain things that you would expect me to know.”
He brushed his cold hand across my cheek. My stomach squirmed, and then the rest of me shook. I felt an ancient buzzing soaring through my blood. It felt like I was about to shift. Luckily, Kamon had cured me of that disease.
“If only you weren’t so caught up on that stupid human. That stupid, dead human who didn’t even love you. He was a manipulator, and you fell for it. That’s not your fault, but yet … we are here in this unfortunate situation.”
That wasn’t the first time someone had tried to tell me that Kamon didn’t love me. Yara Vaughn had spent years trying to convince me of that. I’d told her that I loved him, and she’d said he wasn’t anything to love and that he would laugh at my feelings for him. Then there were the snickers from Carter’s brothers who used to call me blind under their breaths but loud enough for me to hear. And then … there was Kamon himself.
He’d told me once that smart people knew how to show others exactly what they needed to see. And that had made me think, right then as he’d played with my hair and warmed my feet with his own, that he was showing me exactly what I’d needed to see. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew he’d wanted to be with me suddenly after Lydia Shaw had come to his chapel. I knew why he was interested in keeping me close, and I knew that in every kiss there was also a motive. But I didn’t care. I needed Kamon and I had him. I had him right where I wanted him.
He’d read my thoughts that night and laughed. He knew that I knew that he was using me, and he also knew that I was using his sick need to bring Lydia down to get him. He’d kissed me before bed and we’d never mentioned it again.
I was going to take my love’s advice and show Brent exactly what he needed to see.
Everything was frozen but my mouth. As he played with my hair and brought the knife closer, I said, “Thank you.” He paused and narrowed his eyes.
“For?”
I thought about a time that Carter and I had played Twister in Kamon’s living room, laughing so hard that it hurt, and more tears streamed out of my eyes. “I was afraid of Carter, and I couldn’t say that around the hunters. I couldn’t say it until now.”
He didn’t look like he was buying it. The knife was still on my throat. “Is that so?”
“It is. I … was becoming a panther for good, so I had to get purged. I didn’t know how to leave after that, and Carter … Carter threatened me and told me that I had to be with his father. With an old man! They were going to chain me up like the rest of their prisoners, so I pretended…” I paused to cry, real and thick tears, for a minute. His face softened. “And he made me get these tattoos. I didn’t want to, and I was afraid to call my family because of what I’ve become. They would be upset about me … being a hunter. It’s a disgrace to my blood.”
“It is,” he agreed and lowered the knife. “A huge disgrace.”
“Do what you have to do. I just wanted to thank you for taking care of him. I thought I would be stuck with him forever. That’s really why I was packing.”
He opened Carter’s arms for a hug, and I forgot all about Brent for a moment. I hugged my friend and rubbed my hand through his hair and remembered how silly I got to be with him. No one had ever understood me like Carter, and I had no idea how long he’d been gone. I squeezed him harder to apologize for that, for letting him die alone.
I knew I would never get the chance to say a real goodbye, but I pulled away and kissed his cheek.
“That’s more like it,” he said. “I knew I liked you, Remi. It broke my heart for a strong magical girl like you to be so …”
“Stupid?” I finished. He nodded. “I just wish you would’ve told me sooner. Pretending is so exhausting.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve been pretending to be sixteen for almost two months.” Two months. Oh, God. He’d died before Kamon.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“Possession eventually suffocates the original host. That part was easy. The hard part was getting Kamon and his brothers not to notice me in their home and notice the rest of my family in his army.”
I managed to laugh, though my heart was bleeding. “Kamon thought he was so smart,” I joked.
“Right! I know, but he was really just this stupid nerd who’d listen to any bad idea you threw at him. Even before I took his son, we hid out inside of his hunters. He wasn’t the least bit suspicious of the people we were encouraging him to meet or the wizards we were encouraging him to work with. We made him ruin himself.”
Every part of me went still. Not frozen in shock, and not paralyzed from anything he was doing. I was the kind of still that only happened when something completely died. I was hollow and dry. A gentle breeze could’ve blown and scattered my pieces like dust. Or ashes.
How long had they been planning to kill Kamon?
“Everyone praises him for being this genius, but wouldn’t a genius notice the terrible decisions we were getting him to make, and all of the things that weakened his army and moved the Magical Council to finally take action against him. And most of all, he should’ve noticed when we took his son, his favorite son, and groomed him to take out his own father. But we didn’t have to. Lydia started planning her own attack, and we saw the chance to kill them both at once. If only she’d actually gone into the prison that night.”
Elena and her coven had been with us for much longer than I’d imagined.
It sounded like it might have been as long as the portal, when they’d made Kamon make the fatal decision to work with Devin. That was what had made the Magical Council force Lydia to kill him.
Months. These people had been in our lives for months.
Brent moved Carter’s head closer for a kiss, a real kiss, and I trembled. There were some lines that I wasn’t willing to cross, even to save my life.
“What are you two doing?” Elena yelled.
He jerked away. His mother and sister were suddenly, thankfully, standing in the room with us. Then, I spotted the knife in her hand, and I wasn’t sure if I could sweet talk my way out of getting killed again.
****
I gave it a shot. The worst that could’ve happened was that I would die, and I felt dead inside anyway. So I led with tears and the sad story of my purging, and how Kamon had threatened my life every time something bad would happen with Christine. Sadly, I didn’t have to lie much.
Then, I apologized to Sam for not being honest with her about my horrible life as a hunter when we were becoming friends. That idiot apologized back for lying about dating Carter. Then, I apologized to Brent, with my hand on his face, for pushing him away before. He understood now that I’d only pushed away Carter, the hunter, and wouldn’t have done that to a wizard.
I’d escaped this horrible day with my life, but I hadn’t escaped them yet. They walked me out of my room, and I expected to see the hunters. There was a tiny glimmer of hope in me that I would see Travis, and he’d end this night on a high note. He was Kamon’s best hunter, second only to Carter, but no one was in the house. We walked past four empty bedrooms, an empty living room and the kitchen.
Kamon’s hunters were gone. For the first time, I wondered why Elena had kept us around. This was obviously not Carter’s home, so why were we all living here?
I kept my voice even and disinterested as I said, “Where are they?”
“Resting … in our other home,” Elena said. “They have a busy day tomorrow. We need them to do something for us. We find that it’s much easier to stay alive when you have others do your dirty work. You’ll learn, dear, and we can also teach you how to preserve yourself as well as we’re preserved.” Brent grabbed my hand and held it as we walked down the hall. It took everything in me not to pull away. “The world is exactly the way we need it to be. Half of it is suspicious of Lydia, and the other half is livid. We can’t wait too long to strike. Tomorrow, the hunters will cause more mischief, and within a week, this world will be ours. It’s a variation of our original plan, but our success is mostly guaranteed because of you, Remi.”
At the risk of sounding too curious and giving myself away, I asked, “What are you going to do?” I impressed myself by not stuttering.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Sam said, grinning like we were best friends. “We’re just going to incite a war, kill enough humans to force the rest of them into submission, and actually take credit for it this time.”
This time.
I couldn’t breathe.
Eighteen years of growing up in a straitlaced magical home made me shudder. They were talking about murdering humans in mass numbers and probably murdering anyone with magical blood who opposed them. I’d known that they wanted to rule the world, but today, for some reason, I wasn’t as blind to how horrible that would be.
The world didn’t mean that much to me, but deep down inside, I still cared about my family and how this would affect them. And I cared about how Kamon’s hunters factored into the plan. Travis had been kind to me, but what I really couldn’t stand was for Kamon’s legacy to be diminished any further. There would be nothing left of my life with him, no proof that it had existed outside of my imagination.
“What are the hunters doing?” I asked, with a huge smile on my face.
“You’ll see tomorrow, love,” Brent said. “Mother, how’s my uncle?”
“He’s healing,” Elena said. “They nearly killed him with some kind of amulet. We have to be careful. We should have a week before we see them again. I’ll figure out a way around the magic by then.” She stopped in front of one of the large windows facing their home, and the three of us stopped with her. “Your old friends are in there, being prepared,” Elena said. “We’re staying here tonight. I hope you will join us.”
I couldn’t look at the house if I wanted to stay composed. The sky was completely black with not even a hint of the coming sunrise. There was no light for miles, no signs of life. Civilization was very far away. I kept thinking that if Elena would catch on to my act and discover how upset I truly was about Kamon and Carter, there would be no one to hear me scream.
“She can stay with me,” Brent said. I almost died from disgust.
I had to think fast. “Actually,” I said. “I needed to talk to Sam about some things. Big … sister type things.”
She and Elena grinned, much too happy to say that they were evil demons from the pits of Hell. “I just want to make sure that I’m not all broken inside from my time with them. I hope you don’t mind talking to me … and giving me some advice.”
“Of course not,” Sam said. “We’ll have a sleepover.”
Perfect. I couldn’t imagine spending a night with anyone other than Kamon. When I would inevitably freak out and try to kill Brent for touching me, my whole act would be blown.
“Don’t stay up too late,” Elena said. “We have a lot of planning to do tomorrow. That goes for you, too, Remi.”
In that moment, as she spoke to me like I was one of them, I felt like I had a choice. Go back to Deerfield until someone hunted me down or stay with Elena for the chance to see Christine again. The choice was too easy. So easy that I knew that I hadn’t really given it much thought, because a smarter person would’ve gone home as soon as she’d had the chance.
But I didn’t have a home anymore. But I did have passion and an untamed desire for revenge still burning inside of me. I was alive with it, on fire with it, and that had made my decision for me.
I would fight until I couldn’t anymore and get my revenge on everyone, or I would die trying. While I still blamed that annoying girl for the fire, I now saw blood all over the coven’s hands, the precious blood of my god, and they were going to pay for every drop of it.