‘Could I have done anything different?’
Steph jerked awake, eyes snapping open and heart thudding at Amanda’s voice like she’d been hit by a Taser.
‘You said I’d limited myself. Were there any clues I could have followed? Could I have been faster?’ Amanda’s voice was low and hollow, like her dad’s voice had been during the divorce, the morose tone of a couple of drinks too many.
Steph didn’t dare roll over and alert anyone that she was listening. Caleb was asleep, she could hear the slow purr of his breath. Skeebs was muttering to himself, locked in his usual nightmare. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, examining the riffled pages of the charred text book at her side.
Her head still throbbed from crying over the ruined books. Her dreams of showing them to Karina were now only so much ash.
‘Did I have any chance of catching you sooner?’
The woman’s voice low to the ground. She could picture the woman slumped in the middle of the room.
There was the clink of chain links, the grinding of metal in its socket.
‘Yes.’
The reply made something coil inside her. Amanda had removed the gag.
Amanda drew a cold breath, wet and open and sorrowful. ‘I tried. I really did…’
‘Liar,’ Reeves hissed it low, the sound merging with the breath of the wheels on the rails and filling the air. ‘The night I was summoned, I sensed pain in you, power. You were to be my opponent. Some small challenge for my amusement. Imagine my disappointment when I watched you stumble in my wake. I gave you clues with which to track me, teeth and nails. You had only to use magic to find me but instead you swept them aside.’
The train rocked and lurched, joints creaking, the boxes shifting and shuffling.
‘Bridget was the expert.’
‘You despised her. Treated her art with disdain. Magic was a perversion to you. Beneath you.’
‘I didn’t think we needed it.’
‘You didn’t want to need it. It reminded you of your father. Your heists, your victims, reminded you of him. Always trying to prove that you were smarter than him, his magic irrelevant. You ignored that the thrill was the same. His ambition passed down to you. You shaped your entire life to deny him at the cost of your husband. Your children.’
‘No.’
‘Your fear of your father consumed you. You were too scared to do what needed to be done. Too stubborn to go into hiding. Your family’s safety meant less than your pride.’
‘I thought—’
‘Wrong. I tried to make you see, to face your past and overcome your fear. I goaded you, spent longer with each victim. Days at a time, savouring every strip of peeled flesh, every humiliation; men and women you cared about. I taunted you, twisted you, stoked your suffering. Still you refused to step out from under your father’s shadow. I wanted to be your adversary but he already had my place.’
‘Why? Why me?’
‘Because I wanted it. Your power. Your pain. A demon’s strength is born in shadows and needs the light of suffering to darken, magic born of anguish. You were rich with both when I saw you first but I needed you bursting and ripe when I consumed you – the plans I have for your power, the mass-murder I intend to commit. Humans aren’t the only ones who use blood magic. The only difference is that I don’t need to open your flesh to drain you. Not when I can have you open up to me in other ways. The connections a demon can open are more direct and more powerful by far. I will demonstrate soon enough.’
Steph’s mind whirled. If demons’ power could come from human magic and pain, that could change everything. She’d have to tell Karina. Reeves must have considered her mother as the strongest but then Amanda arrived to stop the ritual, angry and powerful and so much more suitable. If it hadn’t been for Amanda, Steph realised, she’d already be dead.
‘I urged you to grow your powers in hunting me,’ Reeves continued. ‘Once you had done so, I planned to kill your family so that you were nothing but rage and pain and energy when we met. I would have stoked your raw energy to a furnace in confrontation, convinced you to open up your power to mine as the only way to defeat me and drank from you as I’ve done so many others.’
‘Why not just drain me now?’ there was a tremor in Amanda’s voice. ‘If you wanted it so much.’
‘The human has to open up willingly. You could do it for me now if you wanted this to end. Or you will do it to banish me in the ritual. But when I was free I realised that you were never going to become what I needed unless I broke you as I broke Skeebs. Perhaps revenge would spur you to embrace your legacy. I kept your family awake while I worked, long after the time for them to depart had passed. I made your son watch. They wondered why you had abandoned them. And then I took your son’s body for my own.’
‘No. He shot you. He broke free from your—’
‘I let him go. The gun was on the bed. The triumph in his eyes when he brought it up.’
‘But we caught you.’
‘A miscalculation. I didn’t recover in time. But that can soon be corrected. Every outcome ends with my victory. The only one that ends in my defeat will be yours also. If you deciphered the ritual, confronted me and won, what would you be? The woman who killed her own son. The woman with blood magic hungering in her veins. The woman who will have opened a young girl’s flesh to grant her success. Your journey will have finally come full circle. You would have become the man you’ve always run from. How long before that hunger had you turning on your own daughter? The power in your veins that your father so coveted surely flows in hers as well.’
‘You’ll get nothing from me. The girl—’
‘You would put her in harm’s way to save yourself? She is powerful but not nearly so as you. Your power enhanced with her blood grants a greater chance of victory than the opposite. If you wish to succeed it will have to be you. But should you insist on sacrificing her, I will happily drain her. It means little to me, I only wish to spare myself the humiliation of this bondage and to have my retribution. No demon has suffered as I do now.’ Reeves shook his chains. ‘Or you may still free me. I may spare your life, your daughter’s. You will only have to live with the consequences. I can find my blood power elsewhere.’
The silence was so long that Steph didn’t think Amanda was going to answer.
‘I’m going to get my daughter back,’ Amanda whispered. ‘And I’m going to see you banished. And I won’t be my father.’
‘Still you limit yourself because of him. I will take the girl then. I will face her in the circle and win.’
‘I’ll see you get nothing from her. I’ll see that she beats you. If there’s a way, I’ll find it because I’m Amanda fucking Coleman.’
‘Always willing to put another in harm’s way. That’s Amanda fucking Coleman.’
Steph barely heard the rattle of leather and plastic as Amanda replaced the gag.
Her heart was pounding. Amanda would sacrifice her gladly to get what she wanted, dead or a blood addict, it didn’t matter to her. Like she, Steph, was nothing.
Well she’d show her. Steph scowled, anger building. She was going to survive this and go back a hero. She was going to change the world.