The knife lay before her, inert.
Steph tried again, legs crossed, back straight, hands out, palms over the knife.
Took a breath. Closed her eyes.
All she had to do was transfer some power from herself into the blade.
She concentrated. Pictured the knife in her mind. The black, blistered plastic handle, its rough, anti-slip texture. The runes scratched neatly into the cold metal of the blade. The sharpness of the edge, the smell of steel.
There. She could feel the power already held in it. Potent, but not enough to send Reeves back where he came from. She could feel the runes, like canals waiting to be filled or ears straining to listen. The runes wanted the power, would gladly feed from her.
Just like Reeves wanted to do to Amanda. Just like Amanda would rather Reeves did to her.
No. She shoved the thought aside. Now wasn’t the time.
She just needed to make the connection. Just needed to…
Her brow creased.
If she could just…
It wouldn’t…
The look on Karina’s face when she showed up on her doorstep and… Would she even be allowed as far as Karina’s doorstep?
Her bent glasses slipped down her nose again and she batted them off her face onto the pages of gibberish by her side. Brow an aching furrow, she scratched angrily at the irritated skin where the crooked leg had begun to rub. She ran her tongue under her bottom lip, feeling the raw, burned skin across her chin crackle.
Just the tip of a giant pile of shit.
And she had no option but to keep digging.
Putting her pen back in her mouth, chewing intently, she squinted at the last note she had written. If anything, she thought miserably, it made even more sense as a blurry smudge.
How had Mum come up with all this? So little of what Steph had read made sense. She slumped back. All that time she’d spent with Karina or sneaking around Mum’s office, looking through her textbooks while she was out and it turned out she’d just been kidding herself that she understood it all. Guilt burned as she recalled all the undecipherable paragraphs she’d skipped, telling herself those paragraphs weren’t important. She thought of all the smiles and nods of encouragement from Karina telling her she’d done a good job. Had the woman just been patronising her?
Amanda was pacing like a caged animal. She had been for hours. No one was speaking to one another so no one told her to stop.
At least the fawning over the prisoner had stopped. Steph couldn’t imagine what that felt like; your enemy and family rolled up into one.
Well, maybe she could, though Steph wasn’t feeling inclined toward sympathy for the woman. That whole thing with Caleb and his boyfriend, to see a man like that, a killer, cry.
And the conversation she’d overheard Amanda having with Reeves rolled over and over in her mind. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep afterwards. She’d had the same feeling the night her parents had told her they were divorcing. Like she was a chrysalis and the her that would get up wouldn’t be the same one that lay down. She’d heard caterpillars turned to a soup before they became butterflies. Her thoughts had felt the same but what would emerge wouldn’t be nearly as pretty. But would be better equipped to survive.
She was going to walk away from this. She would work hard and she would get this done and she’d come away with what she wanted. Fuck Amanda. She’d take on Reeves, win and go home an Abra hero.
Her eyes met Amanda’s and Steph looked away, back to the text book, pulling her crooked glasses back on. She flipped a page for form’s sake, held a hand out over the knife again. Then, after Amanda had gone back to her pacing, quietly flipped it back.
The knowledge squirmed like eels in her stomach. Whether they wanted it or not, they were fast approaching the end of the line, a decision would have to be made about what to do. Her fate and Reeves’ were almost the same thing. Amanda would only use her if there was any use to her at all. What the woman would do if she was useless…
Keep trying. All routes pointed to her studying, improving, planning. Fuck Amanda, fuck Reeves, fuck all of them. She wanted to live and her only way out of this had to be in these pages. Jesus Christ, let them still be in these pages. She had to be missing something, some leap in understanding that she wasn’t making.
Readopting the position, she held her hands out over the blade again. She could feel the runes again, feel their thirst. But they remained impermeable. Should she figure a way to— Wait. What if she was thinking about it in the wrong way? What if she did it like… this?
Nothing.
Chains clinked across the room. She could feel Reeves’ eyes boring into her through the bag, mocking and gleeful.
Amanda paced to the edge of exhaustion.
She wanted to cry, collapse into a miserable pile of grief. She apologised to Simon over and over, longing for his understanding. That man who knew the root of her, who knew every part and how they fitted and where to soothe when it all ground to a halt. She wanted her kids around her, not this painful void that continued to eat her piece by piece. Even her cards were gone, the half-filled pack like a beautiful smile filled with bloody, raw gaps.
Reeves’ words still echoed through her head, hours after she had slipped the gag back between her son’s lips.
It was wrong. It was lying. This wasn’t her fault. She wanted this done as much as anyone, she needed only to find a way. A way without magic.
None of this was her fault.
But its words had hurt, hurt because it might be true. It said her fear of her father had been what had attracted it to her. Her fear of becoming her father was what had prevented her from killing it and defending her family. But she couldn’t have done both. Could she?
Magic fucked you up. How could you have the power to control people and not end up seeing them as puppets? She could feel it inside her. She needed to be in control. After her childhood how could she not? But if she had magic, how far would that need to grow? No, magic would be the end of her. Power might be in her blood but so was her father’s anger and ambition.
The girl sighed as she turned a page.
The look on her face when Reeves had revealed she didn’t know what she was doing. It had stopped Amanda’s heart in her chest. Having the girl do magic had always been a bitter pill, something she’d have done without. Now she didn’t even have that. If the girl had been able to do it, Reeves was saying that if she failed not only would they die but the girl’s power would be used to kill countless others.
But the girl couldn’t do it. She didn’t know the rituals.
Amanda clenched her teeth, fighting tears of frustration and exhaustion. The sound of Michaela’s chair on the concrete scraped across her mind and up her spine again. Her daughter was her last salvation, the only good thing she could take from any of this. But she needed another girl to get her there.
Why hadn’t Steph said anything?
Well, she’d say something now.
‘Well?’
Steph jumped. She’d been so wrapped up in feeling sorry for herself she hadn’t noticed Amanda approach. Up close she looked worse than ever, bags under her eyes, her scowl deepening the etches in her face. The cold had taken its toll on her skin, drying it out and making it flake. She looked bigger, every layer of clothing piled on. It was colder than before, finding every chink in their armour and sinking deeper and deeper into their bones.
Steph looked away, snatching the pen from her mouth, pretending to study her pages, straightening them. And everything she’d been feeling, all the grief, fear and determination fused into a white-hot flood of anger. ‘Well what?’
‘Have you got it?’
A page trembled as she snorted down her nose. Everyone else had been allowed their say. If she was going to die anyway. What did it matter if she spoke up now?
‘No. I haven’t got it. And I’m not going to get it because I don’t know what’s here and what’s missing. Everything my mum brought, she brought for a reason and now a third of it is…’ She held up one of her mum’s textbooks. All that was left was the spine, the pages nothing but a ragged edge of charred paper.
‘I’ve tried putting them back together but I can’t be sure I’ve done it right. But that doesn’t matter because I’m trying to do, I don’t know, twenty years of learning in a few days while you keep standing over me and getting in my light. So just…’ she took a breath, turned a page again for effect, ‘go back to ignoring me. Me and my “perversion”.’
She didn’t dare look up, expecting Amanda to grab or kick at any moment.
‘You…’ Amanda crouched down, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘You heard all that?’
She could feel Amanda’s anger, her brittle resolve trembling at what was about to come.
‘Every word. You are not going to use me. I’m not some thing for you to use and throw away. Or get hurt like you did to Caleb.’
She could see Amanda’s hand in the corner of her eye, saw her work her hands, wiping sweat on the inside of her gloves.
Wind whistled a piercing note. It was finding its way in somewhere, bringing in more cold with it. She pulled her blanket further about her.
The train shook beneath them, like a beast shivering in the cold.
‘Then if you were listening you’d know I don’t want to use you at all. I just don’t have a choice. You’re all I’ve got if I want to see my daughter again. Neither of us started this but we’re the ones who have to finish it. I got us this far and we’re running out of options. All we’ve been doing since we climbed aboard is reacting to his shit. At this rate we’ll be dead before we get there unless you figure that out.’ She gestured to the pages in front of her. ‘We can’t stay on the defensive. You should have told me you didn’t know what you were doing.’
‘You literally dragged me into this thing and then ignored me for days. You didn’t want anything to do with me.’
‘You said you knew the theory.’
‘I was in a strange country, my mum had just died and the woman asking me was famous for killing Abras. What did you think I was going to say? I mean, I was crying at the time. I asked to be sent home. But you ignored everything else and made me get on just because that’s what you wanted with me. It’s like we’re all just bargaining chips to you and now it’s not working and you’re realising that you might need our help.’
‘Treating them around you like crew,’ Caleb rumbled from across the room.
Amanda’s face screwed at the sound of the man’s voice. ‘What do we do?’
‘I don’t know. Whichever of us performs the ritual, he’ll win and suck the magic right out of us and kill the rest. Or he gets powerful enough to break free and kills us all. Or we let him go and hope he’ll let us live. Whatever way we do it, he walks away and we’re just the top of a long list he kills. And he’ll use our power to do it.’
‘Unless we do the ritual and beat him.’
‘But that won’t happen. Even if I could figure this out I won’t be strong enough.’
‘There’s another way. There has to be.’
‘Like what?’
‘We figure something out.’
‘Then help me,’ said Steph. ‘I don’t understand half of this.’
‘I can’t. You have to—’
‘You said you’d do anything. What if it makes a difference? What if it helps you see things differently? I bet you’d be really powerful as well if your d… if your family has a history of being powerful.’
‘I’m not doing magic. You said that’s exactly what he wants.’
‘But I’m not powerful enough.’
‘You have to be.’
‘Well if you won’t do it then,’ she sighed, pinching off the words. ‘We might have to…’
‘If you’re talking about blood magic again…’
‘It’s better than dying, isn’t it? Or better than this? Just staring at all these notes and being so afraid I can’t even see the words. There are people who live with the addiction. I’ve read of addicted Abras who went on to do great things. If I got home and explained, I know people who would take care of me. I don’t want to do it, I’m not saying that, I just really don’t think we have a choice and…’
‘What?’
‘If I did have to take blood, out of the three of you, yours would be best.’
‘What about his?’ she gestured to the boy-demon in his chains. Steph swore she saw the bag over the thing’s head twitch around the mouth, like he knew that they were talking about him. ‘His blood’s got to have more power than anybody’s.’
‘Demons used to torment their victims by forcing them to drink their blood. It’s poisonous. We can’t do that. If you would just consider it. You’re probably so powerful I might not even need the tattoo. I’d get no side effects.’
‘Not happening. He wants that too. You heard him, whoever he feeds off will just be an even bigger meal with blood magic in their veins. He still thinks he can win even with us juiced up.’
‘Then what do you want from me? How is this different from before? I’m not your father. Neither are you. Doing magic doesn’t make you a monster. We’re just trying to survive.’
Amanda began to roll up the sleeve of her left arm.
The woman’s forearm was a network of scar tissue, blurring the smooth skin like static on an old TV screen. She thrust her arm forward for Steph to see.
‘My father gave me these. Every line here is a dozen times he bled me and there wasn’t a single person he worked with who didn’t know. They didn’t care so long as he kept making them money. I had to take iron supplements every morning. He’d count the pills. Sometimes he’d get so bad I could barely walk in a straight line. Years, me and my mum bled like livestock. Bodies not our own, his to cut any hour of the day. Imagine, being dragged out your bed and handed a knife and a bowl. And I let him. He convinced me that was what I was for. Until I stopped him.’
She left that to hang in the air between them. Steph didn’t know where to look, whether to meet Amanda’s eye or stare down at the floor.
‘He was the last one I ever let control me. I wasn’t going to bleed for anyone else in any way. So when you tell me we haven’t got a choice? Fuck that. I’ve got a choice and I say we find another way.’
‘You mean I find another way,’ said Steph.
‘Take mine,’ said Skeebs. ‘I don’t give a shit.’
‘I don’t need it now,’ the girl’s eyes widened as the boy began to roll up a sleeve.
‘I’m making a decision,’ said Amanda. ‘That piece of shit’s responsible for taking my family, I’m not bleeding for him too. And I’m not going back to my daughter an addict.’ She locked her gaze with Steph’s. ‘And I don’t want you in danger but whatever happens we’re all in danger. We are stuck with each other right now and everyone has to understand we’re not just fighting to survive, we’re fighting for our fucking lives here.’
‘’Cept you gave up our homes,’ said Skeebs. ‘I ain’t ever going to see my brother again. Not that I ever was.’
‘If he loved you he’d never have asked you to do that,’ said Steph.
Skeebs winces. ‘Fuck you.’ The words came without strength.
‘I agreed with AK because it got us what we needed,’ said Amanda. ‘You didn’t need to know because what difference would it have made? I’m going home. I’m getting my daughter and we’re staying. AK will get his. I’m already two steps ahead of him. I intend to get what I’m owed and I’m going to get it with a clean conscience because that’s exactly what that thing in chains doesn’t want me to have. Fuck everyone else, fuck all those people he might kill, this is all or nothing. We’re not going to sacrifice a little girl to a fucking blood addiction to get what we want. I’m not going to look my daughter in the eye knowing that we did that. You’re saying it’ll be fine, Steph, that you can take the weight of that hunger, but that’s because you have no idea what you’re letting yourself in for. But I guarantee if you do it, a year from now you’ll wish you’d died on this fucking train.’
‘So what do we do then?’ said Skeebs.
‘I’m not saying I want to do this,’ said Steph. ‘I’m saying it’s our only choice. My mum was willing to do this so I have to be.’
‘Bollocks to that,’ said Amanda. ‘I’ve built my whole fucking career on finding another way. Forget the blood. It’s useless if you can’t get the knife blessed or do the ink. Blood’s not the first piece, it’s the last. Concentrate on that.’
Steph felt a small swell of hope in her chest, Amanda’s iron belief buoying her. ‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘It’s just so complicated. I need help.’
She pushed some of the pages towards Amanda, felt the woman recoil though she didn’t move a muscle.
‘This one’s the toughest. It doesn’t make sense a lot of the time.’
Steph held her breath. Didn’t dare push any harder. There was a feeling of coaxing a wounded animal, which, she supposed she was.
Amanda took a page.