Reeves glared out from her son’s split face, as she finished explaining.
Amanda stood frozen. She knew it wasn’t Darren any more. It was Darren’s voice but it didn’t sound like him. It was his wiry, teenage frame but it didn’t move like him. Reeves was wearing her boy’s flesh but the demon shone through as clear as the tattoos that swam under his skin.
The wounds turned Amanda’s stomach, emotions flashing and colliding, spinning her until she was dizzy. Maternal instinct clashed with rage, love with hate. Grief was a yawning chasm in her chest and she didn’t know what to fill it with. She wanted to hug the boy. Or push his face away towards the wall so she didn’t have to see it. A scream and a sob were the same thing in her throat. She wanted to do it all at once and so she did nothing, unsure what would happen if she crossed that empty space between them. All she could do was not look away, force herself to feel the sweet-sick-bitter ache. She owed her son that much, not giving Reeves the satisfaction of seeing the hold he had on her.
The thing was surely blind but he was looking straight into Amanda’s eyes through those big swollen slits, shadows like stitches in the folds. Reeves took in the room; the swinging lamps, the sweating walls, the detritus rolling on the floor with the rock of the carriage. The four of them, huddled before him.
There was the ‘tap, tap’ of cooling metal where the burning quad bike had stood. The smell of petrol poisoned the air, tasted on the tip of the tongue.
The chains creaked as the prisoner pulled his feet, toes dragging, beneath him. He stood, the chains bowing, taking the strain from his shoulders and arms. The boy flexed, bones popping in their sockets. The hardship on the boy’s body had taken its toll, fat whetted down to sinew until Amanda could see bone sliding under skin and scripture.
There was no steam on the thing’s breath, where everyone else’s was a bright white cloud. His eyes took them in, cold and disdainful. The most pitiless gaze Amanda had ever seen.
It was impossible not to feel small. Amanda was hyperaware of her soot-streaked face, hair and eyebrows singed, her blackened clothes, the stink of smoke. The others were no better, staring at the prisoner with varying expressions of horror.
She realised she was holding her breath. Couldn’t let it go.
‘This will come to a grave end.’ It was her son’s voice, yet it wasn’t – so hard and cold. His face didn’t move properly as he talked, a mask. ‘You all feel it. None of you chose this. You have no hope. You cling to her plan for fear of drowning. She has made you feel there is no other way and that reward lies waiting for you. But there is no peace. She has already betrayed you.’
Amanda didn’t know what to do, what to say, her mind a torrent.
‘Fuck’s he talking about?’ Skeebs’ voice was in constant tremor. There was a bruise blushing on his cheek.
Was it a smile that twitched Reeves’ cheek or a spasm? ‘Your leader has made a bargain in exchange for this final desperate act. None of you will be allowed to return home. She has already provided a full confession to your employer. You will never see home.’
They were all looking at her now. She tried, too late, to fix her expression and found she couldn’t. Reeves had flayed it away in seconds, leaving the shining, raw, ugly truth for them to see.
‘Fuck.’ Skeebs didn’t shout it. He didn’t need to. He took a step back, blinking like he’d just been slapped. ‘And after everything you… What about my brother, man?’
‘I didn’t have a choice,’ said Amanda, the words coming from afar. ‘Michaela, I… He’s just trying to push us apart. AK didn’t give me a choice. This was the only way.’
‘You lied to us,’ said Caleb, his face like granite. ‘Did your own thing. Again. Fuck the consequences.’
‘She abandoned you,’ said Reeves. ‘Your futures forfeit for her own.’
‘You fucking bitch. I knew it,’ said Skeebs. He began to storm towards her, stopped short when she brought the knife up between them.
‘She’s my little girl. She’s worth ten of any of us.’
‘She clings too. She doesn’t believe the plan will work, only that a solution will present itself before the circle. She hasn’t the stomach to do what is necessary,’ said Reeves.
‘We need to stop him talking.’
‘Stop him then,’ said Caleb.
‘He wants to punish you,’ Reeves turned his swollen eyes to Caleb, split lips cracking with a smile. ‘You have only to look at me to see.’ He twitched open his mouth, baring his red-lined teeth. ‘You shouldn’t have turned away, Amanda. You’d have seen how he poured himself into beating me. He drank every moment until he was full.’ He turned his head this way and that, allowing the shadows to play across his bruises, his bent nose. ‘He saw no killer. Just a defenceless boy – ribs cracked, teeth to splinters, cartilage to soup. Just Amanda. Reckless. Impervious. In need of a lesson on the pain he carries.’
Caleb stared fixedly at the floor. Confirming everything.
‘Tell them how righteous it made you feel. You punished her for all the times she never listened. All the times she made the decisions and left you to pick up the pieces, reduced to nothing more than a tool. She ordered you to beat a boy you’d held as a babe. So that’s exactly what you did. You hate what she has made you become.’
Amanda stood, breathless, obliterated. To hear everything that had been left unsaid spoken aloud and from the lips of her own son, no less. ‘Is…’ she could barely find the words, ‘is what he saying—’
‘Yes,’ Caleb growled. He looked up, his eyes shining with angry tears. ‘I tell you and I fucking tell you. And you never listen. I thought after Michael… after everything…’ Caleb squeezed his fists like he could bleed the words out. Amanda could see the nicks and scratches across his knuckles. Twenty-five years she’d seen those fists and now they stirred a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘Every time you do what you want to do and fuck the consequences. I tried to tell you in the train yard but you were already fucking us all over to get what you want. No discussion. Not even a fucking word. Amanda just doing what she wants. AGAIN!’ The words rang out, Caleb’s torn throat cracking with the effort, tears running down his face.
‘I told you not to go after Brekke. But God knows, any old friend of your father’s couldn’t walk on the same planet as Amanda. You had to try and take him so everyone would know Amanda was the smartest. Except you weren’t, were you? Then, after you fucked up and he came after you, who did he find? I had to watch him pulled from the water. My Michael. And there was… shit in his hair and I couldn’t hold his hand because his fingers were all… You did that.’ Caleb cleared his throat, words coming strong again, anger giving the words spine. ‘You did that. And I cleaned it up. I tore that fucker a new one. No fucking plans. I fucking went through him. And there were days I wished he’d fucking killed me. Instead of just breaking my throat. And sometimes I wish I’d killed him. Then I’d still be in prison. And you were so sorry. I wanted to believe you’d changed. But you never fucking did. You’re never going to change. What this thing says just proves it.’
Reeves smiled. ‘This from the man you were going to trust to dispatch me. Do you really have what it takes to do it yourself?’
Amanda swallowed, her throat coarse as sandpaper. She was acutely aware of the knife in her hand. She barely had the strength to keep her palm curled around the handle, let alone thrust it in between her boy’s ribs.
She felt that weakness roll over into anger, into resentment. She knew Reeves was pulling her strings but that made no difference. The thing was using truth as a weapon, cold words cutting with scalpel precision. They cut just as deeply whether Amanda wanted them to or not.
‘Forget her.’ Skeebs was shaking, tears shimmering in his eyes, his bulky clothes making him look even smaller. But his mouth was set in grim defiance. His facial hair had grown in the hours that had passed, the peach fuzz only serving to make him look even younger. He flinched under Reeves’ sightless gaze and Amanda could see the cost it was taking the boy not to run. The boy’s face screwed up, like the next words were a stone, to either be spat or swallowed. ‘I’m gonna be the one put a knife in you.’
Reeves only stared at him, no flicker of emotion until the boy began to sweat. Skeebs was standing his ground and every second was costing him.
How had Skeebs escaped? Amanda wondered. That day when Reeves broke free? Had he really just been faster than two hundred others. Or was there more or less to it than that?
‘Stare at me all you want,’ said Skeebs. ‘But I’m not the one in fucking chains.’
‘Aren’t you?’ The response was so immediate, so sharp that the boy blanched like the words were a physical blow. Then the silence made the air weep with questions, their thoughts tugged in the directions Reeves dictated. Was it Reeves who couldn’t sleep? Who twitched with nightmares? Who jumped at small noises and suffered panic attacks?
‘You never delivered the message I gave you,’ Reeves continued. ‘I will finish delivering it myself. I will carve my message across your histories, on every man, woman and child who knew your names and thousands more besides. The day I broke free will seem a prelude to what I will do when I escape. Stadiums. Arenas. Rivers of blood. No demon will ever suffer the indignity of being controlled again. I will tarnish the very idea of summoning for centuries to come.’
‘You go anywhere near Danny—’
‘I will take the longest with him. And I will tell him how you pleaded for me to let you go. I will tell him how eagerly you leapt to fulfil my demands. He will die seeing you as the coward you truly are.’
Skeebs hung his head, chastened, sweating and shivering.
‘You have nowhere to go,’ Reeves rattled the chains. ‘No one to turn to. But there are alternatives. Release me. I will kill your enemies. Save your loved ones. Teach you secrets.’
There was only silence.
Amanda looked to the others. None of them would meet her eye. They wore three identical frowns.
She headed for the tumbled boxes.
The contents were scattered across the floor but she found everything she was looking for.
Steph curled herself tighter around the pages in her arms.
There was a cloth bag tucked in Amanda’s armpit when she returned, a pair of headphones over her arm and in her hand, a ball gag. Without thinking, she held the gag out for Caleb to take.
But the big man only folded his arms. The act of defiance was like a cold spear through Amanda – an old habit tainted.
Reeves was watching, intently.
‘Open your mouth.’ Amanda couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice.
Reeves smiled, tight-lipped.
‘I said open your mouth.’
‘I knew I could push you,’ he said. ‘Ever since our confrontation began, you have limited yourself. But remove your friend and you’ll do your own dirty work. You’ll even look your son in the face and gag him. Remove the girl and you’d do the ritual, even if it meant holding her down and bleeding her for the power.’
Amanda’s heart caught against her ribs as Steph gasped.
Reeves leaned forward in his chains, the metal grinding like bone on bone until they were straining at his arms. His bruises were clear on his dark skin in the light, underwired by the patterns of tattoos. ‘But it’s pointless. Your books are gone. The girl knows none of it. What she’s found is far beyond her comprehension. She hasn’t spoken out because she fears you. You’re all of you adrift. Here because you have nowhere else to be. Meaningless as pawns. I have gutted your pasts. Every choice left to you means destruction. You can argue, you can fight but it is nothing more than animal lust for survival. Your only hope is my mercy.’
Bile burning at the back of her throat, eyes itching with more than smoke, Amanda pulled the gag into Reeves’ mouth, squeezing the strap tight. Reeves’ head bent back with the effort, the dark, stitched shadows of his eye slits locked on Amanda’s face.
Amanda forced herself not to lick her lips, though her mouth was dry as dust. She forced herself not to cough though her throat was closing up.
Her son’s face, she’d always marvelled at it, how much of his father was in him. Even now, she couldn’t stop seeing it, no matter how much it hurt. It had been easier to lock the fact away in her mind when Reeves had been unconscious but now here he was, standing and staring. But the more Reeves spoke the less of her boy she saw. That was worse.
The thing didn’t look away from her. As soon as Amanda’s hands were away, it looked straight at her. Her son’s face was swollen and bruised and bloody, staring as she placed the headphones over its ears and the bag went over its head.
Reeves didn’t struggle, didn’t demean himself by trying to talk. The chains relaxed as he stepped back, stood tall in them.
She let out a slow breath that wouldn’t come smooth.
The room was a big held breath, even the soot held in suspense. The air keened like a wine glass with the demon’s words, none of it a lie. The men refused to meet her eye, locked inside their own heads, eviscerated.
Caleb was immovable, glaring stonily at the floor. Skeebs moved away to the boxes, arms up to his face, his whole body weak and trembling.
Silent tears ran down the girl’s face, dripping from her chin, onto the papers clutched in her hand. The burned skin of her chin and mouth was a vivid, sore-looking red, speckled white by small blisters. Her eyes were pleading as she stared up at Amanda, filled with fear she’d only ever seen in the mirror.
Amanda was numb. Her hands shook as she tried to find herself a cigarette, then remembered that Steph had taken her lighter. It would be in the debris somewhere stamped flat under someone’s boot heel.
Her beloved cards, they were gone too.
Soot flakes rattled across the paper as Steph twitched to life, hurriedly gathering those pages closest to her. Amanda could see that her hair had caught the flames, melted, clumped and shortened in places.
Caleb climbed slowly to his feet. Now he was looking at Amanda, tears wet in the creases of his cheeks. She couldn’t read her friend’s expression, seeing only a stranger.
Amanda wanted to say something, didn’t know if it would be angry or conciliatory or where she would even begin. So she left it unsaid. Their friendship was over now. Maybe it had died the night she’d gone after Brekke. Now it was just another hole in her. What was she now but holes where her life had once been? Everything she had ever chased for, it had never filled her, only left her feeling more empty.
Caleb retrieved his sleeping bag to resume his old sleeping spot.
Skeebs was staring at her now, much as he’d been staring at Reeves; anger, defiance and fear mixed up and holding the boy straight. The way he trembled suggested the enormous urge to attack or curl up and die. ‘There anything else you ain’t telling us?’
‘We’re going home. You have to trust me.’
‘Trust you? Jesus, you even fucking told me. “Make it like they think the only options are the ones you’re giving them”. And as for that?’ the boy jabbed a finger at Reeves. ‘You think I couldn’t handle it?’
‘You didn’t need to—’
‘Fuck that. That why you’ve been so easy on him? That’s not your son in there. And if you don’t—’
‘My son!’ Amanda burst, fists screwed, face hot. ‘My son…’ She could hear her own voice, feel the brittleness of it. Any moment and it would break. She would break. ‘…is dead. He’s dead and I’m going to crack the thing that killed him out of his body. And you’re all going to shut the fuck up and help me.’
Skeebs looked away, the emotion that darkened Amanda’s voice cowing him a moment. But he kicked back defiant.
‘Because that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Us helping you. I should have just told you how I got out so you could leave me the fuck alone. Saved myself the effort of dying in the cold.’
‘You could tell me now.’
‘Man…’ Skeebs shook his head and sighed, the anger draining from him. He wiped his hands over his face and for the first time since this had all begun, he seemed calm. ‘I’m not even going to argue with you. Far as I’m concerned, this is where we’re done. Your girl’s probably dead already. Because that’s how AK does…’ he shrugged. ‘I was just beginning to stand up to that thing? You see? I wasn’t afraid of it. It was awake and I thought we were… I mean I actually thought we still had…’ He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it. ‘Fuck, if we had some alcohol right now…’ Kicking things aside, he moved around Amanda and picked up his sleeping bag, shaking it to shed the sheaves of loose pages and errant playing cards that had caught in it.
Amanda stared after him, the boy’s sanguinity troubling. She wanted to say something that would get the boy back in line. But maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe Reeves was right. Skeebs knew what was at stake, what choice did he have but to play along? They were locked on this, same as her. Just like she’d planned it.
Steph had begun to crawl on all fours, gathering every paper she could find. It was hard to ignore her sniffs and quiet sobs, the tears running down her face. She retrieved her glasses. They had broken during the panic, the frame was crooked but the lenses were intact. They didn’t fit right, sliding down her nose so she had to keep them pushed up.
Occasionally she’d manage a fragment of a sentence. Something desperate accompanied by a flourish of paper, raising them and dropping them again in despair. ‘They’re just…’ or ‘It’s completely…’
They were ruined, scorched, crumpled, torn. Many had been sucked out of the door or consumed completely in the blaze.
There were one or two playing cards among them and Amanda felt something inside her tug as Steph let one slide off her crumbling page and onto the floor with the ash.
Falling to her knees, she picked the card up into her palm, then another. They stayed like that for a few minutes; Amanda gathering up what cards she could find, Steph her pages. They worked around one another, each reaching past the other in a slow, careful dance.
Every card found was like retrieving a sliver of her soul. There were so few left.
Neither looked the other in the eye. The silence was thick with everything Reeves had said.
Steph had begun to arrange the paper scraps into piles in the middle of the room. They all looked the same to Amanda. All symbols and blotchy, crowded lettering but it seemed the girl could tell the difference.
How had she not seen it? How had she thought that something incomprehensible to her could be deciphered by a fourteen-year-old? This girl had been put through so much, more than she ever would have wanted visited on her Emily. After all their fights, their situations were so similar, both grieving the loss of their family and little ahead of them that seemed like salvation.
The covers on almost every book were gone, peeled away by the heat. Only the old leather one had survived.
Amanda watched a charred page crumble to ash delicate as a butterfly’s wing between Steph’s fingers, smearing soot on the pages below. The girl gave a shuddering breath and rattled the paper in a strangler’s grip. ‘It’s gone! It’s all ruined. I… I didn’t even get to reading this one. I don’t even know what it was about. These were my mother’s. They were going to be all I had of her. She would have wanted people to see them. They could have made a difference.’
Hands filled with pages, Steph looked up as Amanda eclipsed her, eyes filled with sorrow. ‘These were the only things I had left of her.’
‘Here,’ Amanda reached for a page the girl hadn’t touched yet but before she could touch it, the girl snatched it out from under her hand.
‘Don’t you dare,’ Steph snarled. ‘You’ve done enough damage.’ She added the paper to one of her stacks. ‘He was right, you use everything up just because it suits you.’
Amanda stood, nerves buzzing as though she’d just been struck, the demon’s words ringing in her ears. Amanda could feel that old, familiar anger breaking free, darkening her brow, her every muscle rioting to be let loose.
She’d wanted to hit Reeves so badly, but hadn’t been able to allow herself. Now that aggression had found a new mark.
‘Well these weren’t much use if you couldn’t read them,’ Amanda replied, words hard as steel. She kicked another page toward the girl.
‘You have no idea how complicated this is,’ the girl replied, angry tears threatening. ‘No, it’s worse, you didn’t want to know. Every time, you just dismissed me. I’ve been wrestling with this for days. I get bits of it. Some of it almost makes sense. But… The knife needs blessing and it’s complicated and the ink mixing and the ritual itself… Even if I did think I knew how to do all three, we won’t know if I’m right until we’re in the circle. Even the slightest mistake… Not that that matters because we don’t have the power without blood magic and the more I look the more it’s clear that it’s the only way. But you didn’t want to hear that either.’ She lifted her hands to slap them back down on her knees. She’d been talking faster and faster, her pitch tightening and getting higher. Only now did she find time to gasp, the motion dislodging fresh tears to run down her cheeks, her anger burned away.
Steph glared up at Amanda but the anger that had charged the woman a few moments ago had dampened beneath the girl’s outburst. It was still there, a hot tight wire clenching her jaw, threading her limbs, but suddenly there was her daughter, Emily, again, worrying about her exams. Darren wasn’t her only child with a physical presence in the room.
The horror of it washed over her, at how she’d acted, how this girl must see her – a replica of her father.
‘Just get this shit cleaned up,’ she growled. ‘Not worth my fucking time.’
Turning away, Amanda pretended to search the room for more cards. Behind her, she could hear Steph begin to gather more pages.
Amanda was glad that none of the others could see her face.
And Skeebs broke, sobbing for all he was worth.