Authors: Bethany Frenette
Dread pooled in my stomach. I didn’t even know who she was anymore.
“Only one person knows who the Remnant is,” she repeated, digging her fingers deeper into the skin of the demons beside her. “But seventeen years ago, someone else did. He knew she was about to be born. He knew when. He could find her.”
My eyes flew to hers.
“This is the real reason your mother kept you hidden from the Kin. It’s why I transferred to Whitman—to find you. Your blood is special, Audrey. It’s the blood of Adrian St. Croix.”
My breath hissed in through my teeth. I knew what she meant. “Verrick is dead,” I whispered. But even as I said it, I knew it was untrue. I’d felt it. I’d sensed it myself—in my dreams, in my readings.
“Wrong,” Iris said. “He didn’t die when your mother defeated him. Not completely. He fell Beneath. Now he is … elsewhere. Waiting. Your father’s blood sealed him. Yours can release him. But you have to do it willingly—the same way Adrian did.”
Gaping, I nearly laughed in horror and disbelief. “Are you completely nuts? You can’t release Verrick.” He’d been frightening enough as a memory. Just the thought of him conjured up the dread I’d felt. To meet him in reality, to see his face that wasn’t a face, with everything that moved unseen—Iris couldn’t want that. No matter what.
“I’ll share his power. And he’ll share his knowledge with me.”
“You’ve spent too much time Beneath,” I said. She must have been there before, I realized. In its many layers and ways, the void pressing in on her—twisting her, changing her. “You think he’ll just wake up happy to see you? You’d never survive.”
“I will. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters once I find the Remnant.”
My eyes dropped to Gideon again, motionless at her feet. “Why are you doing this? For Tigue? He’s tricked you. You have to know that. He was there! He was watching you the night your parents died.”
“He saved me!”
Her voice was harsh in the stillness, something wild and broken and full of pain. For a second her eyes flashed, showing that hint of brown and gold, and I caught wisps of memory: The smell of roses, her shoes clapping hard against a funeral parlor floor. I saw her reach for Tigue in the rain, I saw him pull her against his body. The way the night melted around them, a sense of security, heat to beat back the cold.
I was wrong. She had known. She’d known all along.
“I was supposed to die that night,” she said, and now her voice was soft. Numb. “Elspeth would’ve survived, but not me. And it wasn’t an accident. It was my fault. I caused the crash. I killed my parents.”
“That’s not true,” I said, taking another step toward her. “I saw it. It was raining. The other car ran a red light. What could you have done?”
All emotion had left her voice. “I was practicing my Amplification, toying with borrowed Guardian powers. I sent a pulse through the car. My mother couldn’t control it. I killed them. Patrick saved me. He pulled me free when everything was burning.”
“To use you!” I shouted. “He must have known what you could do. He wanted you to amplify his powers, to help him control the Remnant.”
“You really have no idea, do you? He isn’t controlling me. He loves me. He’s doing what I ask, not the other way around. He’s not the one who wants the Remnant. I am.”
Shock jolted through me. I stared blankly at her. “Harrowers don’t love.”
“What the hell would you know about it?” she sneered.
“You expect me to believe this was all your idea?”
“It’s our idea.”
“You can’t really believe that.” I felt sick, and stupid, and hot with anger. Kelly. Anna. Tink. Me. All those other deaths. I couldn’t breathe. And my blood was still rushing, seething, loud in my ears.
“You killed them,” I choked out. “You killed all those people.”
“No. Harrowers did that.”
“But you let them! You let them kill their way through the city. You let them bleed me.” Somehow, that seemed worse than everything else. That she had claimed to be my friend and left me in the darkness of that alley to feel the burn at my ankles, my life force draining. “And—your sister. You had a demon attack your own sister.”
“That wasn’t one of mine,” she protested. “I didn’t want it to happen like this. Things just got out of control. And don’t forget I saved your life.”
“Your demon friends couldn’t have been too happy about that,” I jeered, an ugly feeling gripping me. “You killed one of their own.”
Anger sparked behind the white of her eyes. “This is pointless. It doesn’t matter, Audrey. When I have the Remnant, everything will be undone.”
My breath caught. “What do you mean?”
“The Remnant has more power than you can even begin to imagine. She can open gateways. Holes between here and Beneath.”
“You mean to bring a Harrowing.”
“Not a Harrowing. Time works differently Beneath. It can turn seconds into decades. And the Remnant—her power works both ways. She creates passages, don’t you see? With her powers Amplified—she could even cut a hole through time.”
Everything about me stilled. “You are insane,” I breathed. “Listen to yourself. You really think that’s possible? Tigue is deluding you!”
She shook her head. “It will happen. I’ll make it happen. And then all of this will go away.”
“You plan to bring back the dead.” It was incomprehensible. Of all the things I could have imagined—this was not one of them. “Your parents.”
“I’m going to fix things. I’m going to make things right again.” Her tone went hard. “But first, I need to find her. And for that, I need you to unseal Verrick.”
“I wasn’t planning to do it before,” I said. “And I am definitely not going to do it now.”
“Then your friend dies,” she said, withdrawing a knife from the pocket of her coat. She slid one foot through the snow to touch Gideon’s neck. A noise escaped him, almost like a whimper, but I didn’t think he was conscious. “Do you think I’m bluffing?”
“I think you’re crazy!” I shouted. My vision blurred again. Something here—
Something was stirring within me.
“None of this matters, Audrey. It will all be undone.” She dropped her knife to the ground and kicked it toward me. “But not unless I find the Remnant. So can—we—please—hurry?”
I stared at the knife. It had stopped about a foot from me, its silver edge gleaming in the snow. I bent slowly, my fingers curving toward it. She would kill Gideon. I believed that now.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked softly, taking the knife in my hand.
“It’s a ritual. We start with five cuts. They don’t have to be deep. This won’t kill you. You need to bleed from the five sacred spaces. Wrists, ankles, throat. Be careful of the arteries.”
Soundless, nodding, I held the knife to my left wrist. I pressed the point against it, not quite enough to break the skin.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t unseal Verrick.
His face swam before me, and all the horror that lived behind it. The hunger and need that filled me with dread. His last words echoed up and down my skin. We’ ll meet again.
“It’s useless,” I said, keeping the knife at my wrist. “My mother will find you before you ever reach the Remnant.”
Iris shrugged, unconcerned. “Patrick is keeping her busy.”
“I’ve seen Verrick. You can’t control him,” I argued. “You know he won’t just let you use his powers. He didn’t work with anyone. He’ll take the Remnant for himself. There won’t be anything to stop him.”
She tapped her foot against Gideon’s neck. “I want to see blood, Audrey. Show me your blood or I’ll show you his.” Her demons had gathered close to her again, and I felt other Harrowers around me stir, pressing close.
I winced, slipping the edge of the knife into my skin, then held it up for Iris to see. A single bead of blood welled up in the cut.
Heat poured through me.
Blood, I thought.
Bloodlines—
“That’s one down,” she said. “Four more and I’ll let him live.”
I moved the knife to my other hand. “Why here?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions. This is where it all ended. Where he fell. This is where he must be unsealed. I know you saw it.”
“Then you must know what happened,” I said, pricking my other wrist. It felt as though my pulse were moving even faster now, faster than was even possible—but the blood dripped out slowly. “Even with his powers sealed, my mother barely defeated him. He nearly destroyed the Circle. He’ll kill you. He’ll kill us both as soon as he’s unsealed, and then he’ll take the Remnant. You won’t be able to undo anything.”
Iris sighed. “I didn’t want it to happen this way, believe me. But you left me no choice.”
“Me?”
“At the banquet tonight—I knew you were close. I knew you would find out about Patrick and me. He told me what we had to do.”
“Of course he did,” I scoffed.
Rage brought the gold back into her eyes. “Stop stalling, Audrey, or I kill Gideon and move on to someone else. Would you prefer it if I went through all of your friends?”
I lifted the knife to my throat. Made a slight cut. I felt the warmth ooze out onto my neck.
“Two more. You’re doing well.”
I bent, crouching, and rolled down my socks. The scar of my first bleeding was still there, a thin white line marring my skin. I closed my eyes and nicked it.
“There’s more to it than just bleeding me, right?” I asked, feeling nausea rise in my stomach. “It can’t be that simple.”
“One step at a time. We start with blood.”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
Iris rolled her eyes. “Stop being so melodramatic.”
“I’m not kidding. Something really weird is happening to me.”
It wasn’t just nausea. It wasn’t just blood. It wasn’t just heat. My body felt strange, sense running down my skin, in my bones, as though every part of me had begun to breathe.
“It’ll be—”
She broke off, gasping, as the air before her shimmered and the two demons fell back, tripping over Gideon in their haste. A surge of relief flooded through me and then evaporated as I realized the shape that appeared so suddenly in front of her was not Leon or my mother—but Patrick Tigue.
It didn’t take a second glance to realize he was in bad shape. His skin had gone pale, sickly, beginning to ripple. For a moment, I could see through him. His body was being pulled Beneath. With a sharp breath, he slumped forward. His arms went around Iris, clutching her tightly.
His word was soft, but the wind carried it to me.
“Sorry—”
Iris’s voice went low and soothing. “Shh,” she murmured, her hand in his hair.
“They’re on their way. It has to be now.”
And then he simply faded.
Iris didn’t scream. She didn’t sob or wail. She stared at me across the blank distance between us and lifted her arm. “We’re taking it all back,” she said. “We’re going to make things good again. Now Audrey. Right—now.”
I pressed the knife against my other ankle, barely touching it, my hand shaking, my vision pulsing. I made the final cut.
For the second time that night, the universe stopped.
The city around us went dark. The sky, the buildings, the world below. We stood beneath the vanishing stars. Everything else dissolved—no movement of cars in the streets beneath us, no lampposts, no shadows of clouds passing over. Just the blank, empty, endless void of space.
I looked up. The sky was bare, save for a single point of yellow where the moon should have been.
A pinprick of light in the darkness, I thought.
Where all hope begins.
I had seen all of this before. The city dead around me, vacant and silent and cold. The dark of the buildings. It was my dream called into life.
I’d dreamed of destruction—but as Gram liked to say, just because you had a Knowing didn’t make it right.
I stood, dropping the knife. I looked at my hands. They were glowing. Not like a Guardian’s, not with colors that shone at the fingers and wrists, but a shine beneath my skin, vibrant and pulsing and hot.
I faced Iris. I understood, now, the vision Esther had shown me. My mother falling, the arc of light that wrapped her body, rushing beneath her skin, the sudden hush. How she had lived. The Astral Circle was diminished, but its power wasn’t lost. Verrick had weakened it, but he hadn’t destroyed it.
The Circle had saved my mother—and she had saved it. Its light had hidden within her. In the unformed, sheltering flesh of the child she carried.
It was in me, a part of me, in my blood, singing through me. Leon wasn’t just guarding me; he was guarding the power I held.
And here, at the center of the Circle’s power—here, where my mother had fought and fallen—I could release it.
I looked down.
Fire.
Fire in my hands.
The light was blinding.
It was hot, unbearable. It burned me.
It flowed out of me like flame, angry and merciless, ripping its way through my skin, spreading outward, everywhere, a flood released.
Around me, Iris’s Harrowers shrieked and squirmed, their bodies buckling as they clawed their way back into the cold emptiness of the Beneath. The light rushed toward Iris, dragging her down to her knees. For a single moment she looked up at me, frightened and surprised—and then her eyes went blank again. Her face washed clean of emotion, and she turned away. Her body flickered and then vanished.
She wasn’t Kin anymore. She wasn’t my cousin. I didn’t know who she was, or what. She’d gone Beneath.
And still the light kept coming. It poured out of me, boundless and violent. But even as it swelled, it didn’t leave me. I felt myself moving with it, a part of it, moving through earth and air, soaking up shadow. And I felt connected to everything. I felt the city, the motion of engines and tires and feet, of doors opening, of throats trembling with sound. I smelled soil and snow, grease, garbage, sweat, breath, heat. I felt the earth, and everything beneath and Beneath.
The Astral Circle’s strength was renewed, and I was a part of it. It was a part of me.
Finally, the light ebbed and then vanished. The Circle was unseen once more. I walked across the roof to where Gideon lay. I knelt, pressing my hand to his cheek, watching the steady movement of his breath.