C
HAPTER
2
I
don’t know how long we were out. Not long, probably, because Lena entered, her expression more mild concern than outright panic as I was waking up. “Everything all ... holy shit.”
Constance was sprawled near the sinks, pale as moonlight except for the crimson streaks dribbling from her nose. I knelt next to her, holding my hand an inch above her open mouth. “She’s breathing.”
She looked at me, did a double take. “You’re bleeding! What happened?”
I shifted Constance’s head onto my lap instead of the black and white tiles. “It was an accident.”
“Her fist accidentally ran into your face?” Lena yanked a handful of paper towels out of the dispenser and ran cold water over them. “Use this.”
“Thanks. She didn’t mean it. She’s ... sick.” Could magic make people sick? The instant before we’d been knocked out, I’d felt it. Raw magic, staggeringly powerful, sweeping through us both. It was gone now, but its appearance in that bathroom pretty much confirmed Constance was an Arc.
So much for getting back to normal life.
“Look, Mo. I know you worry about her, but maybe it’s time for some tough love, you know? The girl is on something.” She handed me another clutch of damp paper towels.
I brushed Constance’s hair away from her face and dabbed at the blood. A whisper of a breeze flittered through the room and vanished. “She’s not waking up. Shouldn’t she be waking up?”
“Hell if I know. We should get the nurse.”
“The nurse can’t do anything.” We needed Luc. I’d promised him my help, if he needed it, but I wasn’t looking forward to asking for his. Owing Lucien DeFoudre was never a good idea. I touched my wrist, trying to sense the faint, otherworldly chain connecting us. The last time I’d felt it had been a month ago, in the graveyard where Verity was buried. “I need more time.”
Lena checked her watch. “You’ve got eight minutes until the bell rings. What if she’s hurt?”
“I know somebody. He can help.”
Lena squatted down, carefully tucking her skirt under her. “Mo, whatever the frosh is mixed up in, it’s bad. Don’t let her bring you down, too. Let someone else take care of this.”
Constance convulsed once on the floor. The air thrummed while my scar burned white through the blood coating my hand. Last time the blood had been Verity’s, and she’d died. I wouldn’t let that happen again.
“Promise you won’t get the nurse,” I said.
“Tell me you are joking.”
“I’ll take care of her. You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to her; she’s Verity’s sister, for God’s sake. But I can’t let anyone else see her like this.”
“Mo, in five minutes, half the sophomore class will be in here.”
“Go back to the library. Tell Sister Agatha I didn’t feel well.” Which was not a lie. My headache had bloomed into a migraine and my stomach clenched with nausea. My skin crawled as the magic built, turning the air oppressive and charged, like a lightning strike. The sensation made me nervous, for all of us. “Seriously. I will take care of Constance. But you need to go.”
“I do not understand you.”
“I know. Lena, please.”
She bit her lip, hurt and indecision clouding her face. Lena was the kind of pretty that made people underestimate her. They saw big brown eyes in a heart-shaped face and immediately wanted to protect her. At first, anyway. Once they’d seen her in action—ferociously bloodthirsty on the soccer field, blunt and opinionated everywhere else—they reconsidered. But right now, she just looked wounded, like I’d betrayed her somehow.
“Later,” she said, voice brittle. “You’re going to explain all this later, right?”
I hesitated, not wanting to make a promise I couldn’t keep. “I’ll let you know how she’s doing.”
Constance convulsed again, eyes rolling back, her body slamming into the ground.
Lena shook her head and backed out of the bathroom.
“Constance, honey. It’ll be okay.” Another false promise, and the stall doors banged wildly, as if a tornado were ripping through the room. She gasped, trying to get a full breath as the pressure in the room ramped up. Why was the magic attacking her—attacking
us?
I didn’t want to see Luc again. I’d done what he and his people, the Arcs, had asked of me, stopping a prophecy that would have destroyed them. I’d even agreed to help if they needed me again. Something about the sharp slash of his smile, hinting at things I wasn’t sure I was ready for and wanted all the same, had convinced me to say yes. But I’d barely recovered from the experience. Now my days were filled with school and work, trying to figure out how to live a normal life without my best friend. To invite Luc back would ruin all of that. He’d upend everything, he’d make Colin furious, he’d pull me back into a world where I was even more of an outcast than at St. Brigid’s.
But Verity’s sister was in danger, and Luc was the only one who could help us.
Keeping one arm around Constance’s shuddering form, I touched my wrist again. The line where we’d been bound was blisteringly hot, probably reacting to the magic in the room. I closed my eyes, trying to envision the silver chain trailing off into a network of magical lines I knew existed yet couldn’t see. I pictured my fingers gripping it and yanking, like someone in a church tower, ringing the bell for compline. “Please,” I whispered to the wild, charged air around me. “Come on, Luc. You promised.”
Constance writhed. Around us, the air began to hum again. I leaned over, trying to shield her from the rising magic as she clawed at her skin and caught my arm, too. My lungs squeezed shut. We wouldn’t survive another surge. Distantly, I heard the bell ringing and the clamor of two hundred teenage girls spilling into the corridor outside.
And then, much closer, a noise like the world splitting open. I braced myself for what came next.
“Mouse,” Luc drawled, unflappable and infuriating as always. “Next time, maybe just pick up the phone, hmn?”
C
HAPTER
3
I
sank back as Luc’s dark green eyes darted around the room. Someone pulled on the door, and he waved his hand as if he was shooing a gnat. It slammed shut. On the other side, voices rose in outrage. He moved to Constance’s side and checked her pupils and pulse, frowning.
While he looked over Constance, I watched him—never a chore. The keening of the magic ratcheted up, and the pounding on the door increased. He touched my chin gently and then pulled back. “Best we go,” he said abruptly.
“Won’t the door hold?” I asked, my fingers hovering over where he’d touched me, trying to focus. He always had that effect on me. It was one of the things I had not missed.
“Keeps them out. Won’t keep the magic in. Hold tight,” he said, lacing his fingers through mine with one hand and sliding the other arm around Constance. The awful, nauseating, familiar sensation of going Between jerked through me, everything black and bottomless.
When we came through, we were in a shack—the walls more gaps than boards, two chairs and a slanted table shoved against one wall, an ancient-looking twin bed under a window with a cracked pane of glass. I stumbled on the braided rug.
“Bed,” he grunted, jerking his head in the right direction.
Constance was still seizing, but we managed to settle her down, even as the air began to charge again.
“Out,” he said. “I got this.”
“She’s Verity’s sister. I’m not leaving her.”
He touched her shoulder and murmured indistinctly. I’d forgotten how he sounded when he was casting magic, the weirdly beautiful echo of it slipping over me. Constance seemed to relax a bit. I tried to move toward her, but Luc blocked my way.
“Happens this way, sometimes. You can’t help.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
He ran a hand through his hair, jet black strands immediately falling back into place. “Her powers are comin’ through. Nothing for you to do, Mouse. Out you go.”
As the magic gathered strength, the room took a slow, sickening spin.
“I managed before,” I said, grabbing on to the back of a chair and trying to sound confident. “I’m not leaving.” But the distance across the tiny room seemed so far.
Luc glanced at Constance again, and then he reached out to steady me, his hand on my shoulder. “Can’t watch you both,” he said, his face so close to mine I was afraid he might kiss me. The thought terrified me and I didn’t know why. We had bigger problems right now than our nonexistent relationship. “You want to help her, get clear. Now.”
So I did, stumbling through the doorway into a patchy clearing. To one side, a dirt road left a faint trail through low, scrubby grass. My sweater, the same navy V-neck every girl at St. Brigid’s wore October through April, was suffocatingly warm. I pulled it off, and my hair crackled with static. Or magic. Hard to tell which.
The press of the magic seemed to ease as I moved away, and I filled my lungs with humid air. The only sound was the whir of insects and, farther away, an occasional splash. The shack was silent, and a sudden fear enveloped me, my vision going dark again. What if Constance died? How would I explain it to the Greys, their only remaining child gone, months after their oldest had been slaughtered?
My knees buckled, and I stumbled to a giant tree stump, sweater clutched in my hand. Despite the stabbing pain in my temples, I tried to reason through what I’d witnessed.
Constance’s powers were coming through. By Arc standards, it was happening too early. Magic was hereditary, but they typically didn’t develop their powers until sixteen or seventeen. Verity’s powers had manifested junior year, though she’d kept it from me. Was Constance in danger because her powers appeared earlier?
Arcs didn’t interact with raw magic; they drew their power from ley lines—currents of magical energy, rooted in one of the four elements. The lines crisscrossed the world, from the core of the earth to the stratosphere, conduits that tempered the corrosive raw magic and made it usable for Arcs. Flats, regular humans, were unaffected. They could pass through a line and never realize it. Most Flats went about their everyday life unaware that just beyond their seeing was a world with near-limitless power.
And then there was me. No one knew exactly how Verity’s powers had been transferred to me or what the long-term repercussions would be. Everything about me was an anomaly to the Arcs—a Flat who could withstand raw magic but couldn’t cast a spell. A month ago, I’d stepped into the very heart of the magic, dug my fingers into it, and remade the ley lines. I’d kept none of it for myself, except one small shard I’d used to kill the woman who had ordered my best friend’s death. Constance and Verity’s aunt. I didn’t regret it. I’d sworn to get revenge for Verity’s death, and in killing Evangeline, I’d gotten it. But if Constance died because Evangeline wasn’t here to help her, it was my fault.
I sank onto the tree stump, knees wobbly, and stared at the battered shack.
The tiny building with its slanted porch and sagging roof seemed perfectly real. I’d seen firsthand how Arcs could spell a building, making it look disreputable and uninviting, to keep Flats out. But there was no one here to break the quiet or pay attention to the run-down little house. It truly was as sorry looking as it had seemed at first glance.
It totally didn’t fit Luc. Luc, with his perfect, nonchalantly elegant clothing, so carelessly gorgeous you knew it must have cost a fortune. Luc, with his charming, luxurious townhouse in the French Quarter, filled with art from around the world and some very nice, very potent bourbon. Luc, who made me furious and made me want him, usually within the same minute.
Luc, who wanted the girl he believed me to be, not the girl I actually was.
I pulled my knees to my chest and watched the windows with their twisting, flapping gingham curtains. He couldn’t expect me to sit out here forever. My teachers would mark me absent. The school would call my mom. Mom would run to my uncle. And then it was all over. Because I’d learned how to lie to my family in the last few months, keep secrets bigger and more dangerous than anything they’d ever held close. They’d taught me, after all. But when I turned up missing, my uncle would call the one person I couldn’t lie to. The person who knew me so well, he practically had a road map of my soul. Colin, who would know immediately that whoever had taken me was more magic than Mafia.
And he would be pissed.
I tried to envision what to tell him:
Verity’s sister was attacked by magic, so I called Luc, not you, and he took me someplace hot.
I glanced up, taking in the mossy vegetation and the damp, decaying scent of the air. Hot and swampy. Louisiana, I guessed. Luc’s home, though he was more suited to the glamour of New Orleans than the bayou.
The peeling green shutters slammed against the walls. A splintering sound rent the air, and I expected to see the shack fall down, but in the silence that followed, a couple stepped around the edge of the shack. They strolled across the clearing, flames edging their path like an awards ceremony carpet, extinguishing harmlessly when they’d passed. Important people, I guessed, and the kind that wanted everyone to know it.
The woman wore a dress the color of wine, simple lines in beautifully rumpled linen with a gauzy scarf wound around her neck. Her fingertips rested lightly on the man’s arm as he guided her across the scrubby terrain. Despite the oppressive heat, they both looked cool and fresh. The man doffed his hat as they approached, and I stood, trying to straighten my shirt. My filthy, bloodstained, slightly singed shirt. I discreetly tossed my ruined sweater behind the tree stump.
“You must be the Vessel,” drawled the man. His skin was the color of pecans, dark and shiny, his features strong and aristocratic. “Yes?”
I was a lot more than the Vessel. It would be nice if one of the Arcs would notice. I didn’t bother to keep the edge out of my voice. “I’m Mo Fitzgerald.”
“The Vessel,” he said again, his expression faintly amused but his tone expectant, a bit challenging. I had the sensation I was being tested for more than just my identity.
The woman, delicate and birdlike, with her dark hair in an elaborate chignon, tugged his arm. “Dominic,” she chided. “Of course it’s her. Who else would Luc bring here?”
Dominic. The name stirred a whisper of memory, and I followed it back through events I’d tried to forget.
Yes, Dominic cleaves to the old ways, doesn’t he? It’s certainly cost him enough,
Evangeline had said, mocking and triumphant.
I stared, mortified at the realization I’d just mouthed off to one of the most powerful people in the Arcs’ world. It was like having the president of the United States drop in on a student council meeting. Dominic DeFoudre stopping by meant that something had gone very, very wrong. “You’re Luc’s dad? He called his
dad?
”
We were in bigger trouble than I thought.