“Kill him.”
Madeline cried out. The voice was
inside her head.
“Stop,” she whispered, clutching at her head feeling it press against her brain. She felt something hard and cold close around her chest—something was grabbing her heart from the inside. Cold. It was so cold that it burned. She clutched her hand to her heart and let out a soft sob.
Something had come for her—not the Perry demon; something else.
She had to act now. She had no more time.
Jonathan pushed himself forward, falling to the side, but still reaching clumsily for her, looking alarmed. “Madeline—”
The voice came again, cutting him off, shutting her ears so she could hear only the voice.
“You are mine! And through you, he will be mine too, and that which he holds inside him!”
Madeline felt sick. Now she knew what this was. “The daemon,” she whispered. “
My
daemon. The Elliott daemon.”
Or perhaps, she thought with sick dread, it was the Elliot demon now.
How had it come here? How could it be
here
? It wasn’t even supposed to exist anymore, let alone turn demonic!
“Madeline?” Jonathan’s voice, still hoarse, had grown sharp. His hands closed over her arms.
“You cannot deny me.”
Its fingers were like daggers through her skull, pressing into the soft flesh of her brain, making everything in her mind and consciousness explode in strange, forced symphony.
“I am
the
blood
—your
blood! I am the daemon! And he is the host of the Other. You will finish him, and we will be victorious!”
“No!” she cried and moved toward the bed.
“Madeline, what is going on?” Jonathan demanded, trying to rise.
I am the last
. Madeline steeled her mind, using every ounce of will and power she had, using everything she had ever learned in the Craft, shutting out everything else in the world.
I am the last. With me, so go you
. She raised her hands in spell.
The voice laughed.
“Foolish child. You know nothing.”
“I know enough.” She looked at Jonathan, who had fallen back against the bed. Her heart ached, and she risked one moment for vanity, for herself.
“I love you,” she whispered and launched herself into the Void.
One moment Madeline was standing beside Jonathan, and the next she was leaping on top of him. She screamed, lit up in blue fire, and stopped, frozen. She was suspended in midair, spread over the length of him, toe to toe, chest to chest. Her hair, long and silken, dangled into his face.
She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t even breathing. Her eyes were open, pupils fixed. Her mouth was agape, her expression frozen in horror and pain.
The room was strangely quiet, echoing and heavy around them. There was a powerful spell hanging in the room, but it was fading.
And Madeline was dead.
Jonathan stared up at the body hovering inches from his face. He tried to deny it. He tried to hope, telling himself this might be a spell, that he might be wrong, that this might, somehow, not be the moment he had been running from for ten years. But he could not hope because he knew death. He knew what a body looked like and what it felt like when it was nothing more than a shell. He had seen it many, many times. He had made many of these shells. And he knew with absolutely certainty he was looking at one of them now.
He reached up and touched her face.
Gone. Gone. She was gone.
He made a strangled, desperate sound in the back of his throat and lifted his other hand to her face—so cold, so cold it burned.
Gone. She was gone. Madeline Elliott was dead.
Jonathan stroked her cheek again. He tipped her face gently to his and looked deep into her fixed, unseeing eyes. Then he felt the demon stirring inside him, felt it reaching and growing, and he almost laughed.
Well. He had failed her again. But she, even in death, had managed to save him. Because as he felt the demon’s claws reaching up inside of him, he felt something shift and break, as if a bubble had surrounded him but now was gone. Whatever she had done, whatever this spell she had cast had been meant to do, it had resulted in giving him exactly what he had wanted.
The demon drove its talon into Jonathan’s heart, and he knew with certainty that when it withdrew, he would die. At last.
The pain was sharper than he had thought it would be, but Jonathan didn’t mind. Inside his body, the demon grew heavy, then burst open. It growled, and it clawed. Jonathan barely noticed, too caught up in Madeline. He smiled into her unseeing eyes, unable to stop touching her face.
“I love you too,” he said and leaned up to place a soft, sweet kiss against her lips. Then he kissed her again. And again. And again.
He lost himself in the now warm touch of her lips, the smooth curve of her face, living not in his body of pain, but in this sad, strange space of her death. The demon clawed once more, raking him. Jonathan ignored it and held on to Madeline. Soon it would take him into hell, into the dark prison of traitorous Perrys, and he would never see her again, but it did not have him yet, and so he lingered with her. The demon tugged at him, stretching him as far as he could be stretched, shouting, screaming, scolding in some horribly wretched tongue.
Only at the end, when he had no choice, did Jonathan let go.
Take me. I cannot be with her, and I have failed her, failed everything. Take me to my death and end this at last.
He drew a deep breath, his last, and let go. But to his surprise, he didn’t let go of Madeline. He let go of his body.
Chapter Six
do
cup
The cup is associated with water, because water cannot properly exist
without a container.
But water is not always happy to be contained.
Jonathan felt the snap, a slap against his back, except as soon as he thought that, he realized he didn’t
have
a back. Confused, he held on as he felt himself—what self? what?—rushing, streaming, screaming through the black. He shuddered. Cold. Goddess save him, it was so cold. He opened his eyes, or the things that were there, whatever they were, in the place where eyes would be. She was here—blue, made of light and shimmering in an unseen sun, but she was here. Madeline, in his arms.
He opened his mouth to speak, but water rushed in, making him choke. She clutched at him.
“How did you come here?”
She didn’t open her mouth, but he heard the words inside his head.
But I have no head
. He felt panic, felt a pull, felt her slipping from his arms—
She bore him up, holding him steady.
“Stop thinking. Don’t think of your body. This is a spirit body. It has what you wish it to have. But if you panic, it will pull you back.”
Her control slipped a little, and her fingers tightened against him.
“Please don’t go.”
That settled him a great deal, and he pushed the panic fully away. She was here. She wasn’t dead, or if she was, so was he. “I won’t go,” he tried to say, but he got water again.
She pressed cold fingers against his lips. They made his body buzz with an electric hum.
“Not your mouth. Just think at me. Don’t try so hard. You’re screaming. Just…think.”
Jonathan nodded, then tried too hard. He gasped, got more water, and fell against her.
“Goddess damn it,”
he thought and realized he’d just done it.
She laughed and kissed his hair. Or whatever was there in place of it.
“How did you come here?”
She stroked him gently.
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t. I don’t know how—I just—”
He lifted his head and looked her in the eye, remembering. He remembered her death and the pain and his sorrow.
“I kissed you.”
She smiled. It looked odd in shimmer blue, but it was still her smile. He smiled back and wondered briefly if he was blue too, but something told him not to try to look.
“Where are we?”
he asked.
“What happened?”
She looked up and around at the great rushing vastness of black nothing.
“I don’t know.”
She looked grim.
“The daemon was there in the circle. Mine this time. It wanted me to kill you so it could consume you. I refused, and I cast a spell to bind your demon. But I have no guides, so I cannot ground. So I leaped at it. It was a stupid thing to do.”
She looked sadly at him.
“Especially since it seems to have killed you anyway.”
Something about that didn’t quite fit, but Jonathan had fixated more deeply on a different point. His head felt strange and disjointed—he was vaguely aware that he should be rejoicing and embracing her, but his emotions felt like wind here: difficult to see and impossible to grasp. Facts were so much easier. And so many of them made no sense.
“What do you mean, you have no guides?”
he asked her.
“I thought they came when you took your vows to be an Apprentice.”
“I did have them—until today.”
She shook her blue head in despair.
“I defied them to come and try to save you. They told me I wasn’t strong enough, and they were right.”
“You seemed to do well enough to me,”
he said. He glanced around at the sucking black of space around them.
“Outside of this, I suppose.”
He drew her closer to him.
“What happens now?”
“Nothing,”
she said.
“This is the Void. The true Void, beyond the reach even of the witches. There is nothing here, and there is no way out.”
Jonathan felt her shimmering spirit body in his arms, felt her heart center pressed against his.
“We found a way in. Therefore there must also be a way out.”
She could look exasperated even in a spirit body, it turned out.
“I already told you, we can’t. I did not ground when I came here. I only leaped.”
“How do you ground?”
he dogged her.
“What does that mean?”
She gestured to the black.
“When I cast, I leave my body. For small spells, it’s not such a problem, but for large ones, I need spirit anchors—guides—to pull me back. They guide me back to my body. But I have no life cord, Jonathan. I severed it when I left. There was no one to guard it for me.”
Jonathan remembered her earlier warning, how he had panicked and almost slipped away. But where, he wondered now, would he have slipped
to
? If this was the Void, where did one fall to in the Void? He tried to remember the feeling. He hadn’t been about to disintegrate; he’d been being pulled back to something. He could feel the pull even now, he thought, like wreckage dragging on a ship. He frowned.
“Madeline, I’m fairly certain I can still feel my body,”
he said.
She looked startled, then hopeful. Then disappointed again.
“But I can’t ground to you.”
“Why not?”
he demanded.
“If I can see my body, and you can see my spirit, why can’t you follow me back to your own?”
“It isn’t like following string. A guide almost…possesses me.”
She looked momentarily abashed.
“They enter me, ‘hooking’ me, pulling me back, rushing into my body, then releasing my spirit when it is back in my body. From the moment they claim me until they release me, I am literally one with them.”
It all sounded so perfectly ethereal and spiritual and very witchy, and yet the description was supremely irritating to Jonathan.
“It sounds like sex.”
Her face shimmered and she looked demure.
“It is much like intercourse, I suppose.”
It was exactly like it, from the look of her. It made him angry, irrationally so. He’d left her thinking she would marry, which would have meant sex with someone, so why was he so jealous of some misty, ethereal spirit who was solely interested in shepherding and didn’t have a body? It did bother him, though. It sounded fantastically intimate.
Something fantastically intimate that he had never allowed himself to enjoy with her.
“I want to do it, then.”
He imagined he was blushing now, feeling like a bumbling boy of fourteen telling his sweetheart he wanted to take off his pants and show her his penis. He didn’t care.
“If I’m a spirit now, why can’t I do it?”
“But you can’t place me in my body! They enter me, Jonathan. How can you enter me and then go back to yourself? We could, maybe, put
me
inside of you, but then how would you get me out again—Ah.”
She blushed so hard that for a moment she seemed to vanish entirely.
Jonathan wanted to scream. It had to be this, didn’t it? The one thing he couldn’t give her.
“Too broken.”
It made him angry, made him feel hot with rage, even though he was still so, so cold.
She turned to him, taking his face in her hands.
“We will try. We will try your idea—and if it doesn’t work, you’ll let go.”
“I can’t,”
he said, hating this, hating himself, hating his father all over again.
“The wound my father gave me made me impotent, Madeline. I can’t—well, for a while I could, but now—”
He shut his eyes, the feeling of darkness in darkness very strange, but at least he didn’t have to see the look on her face.
“I’m sorry.”
She remained silent for long moments that didn’t need a Void to make them feel like years, and Jonathan used that time to alternate between hating himself and hating his father and the whole Whitby/Perry insanity that had led him to this indignity. But then he felt her kiss against his eyebrow, and it made his spirit flutter.
“Are you…damaged, or is it the pain? Are you incapable, or—”
“Just pain,”
he said, cutting her off. Hearing her speak of it was far worse than admitting it himself.
“I can, if pressed, but I have to be fantastically drunk and randy as a goat. It’s the tightening. It hurts too much—”
She laughed, the sound so happy and light that it made him open his eyes in time to see her kiss him firmly on the mouth.
“Then we can do it, Jonathan. If you ground me, if you just hold tight to me, I can push the pain outside of you.”