Текст книги "Fire Fall"

Автор книги: Bethany Frenette

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In the days that followed, Iris’s return was never far from my thoughts. I found myself listening for her, always—a thread of sound in the air, that particular pitch to her voice as she spoke my name. She seemed to whisper just beyond my hearing. I was alert for any sense or sign, any prickle of Knowing. At night I tossed and turned, chasing sleep. My dreams were nebulous and disjointed, images of smoking skies and sunlight underwater that evaporated the moment I woke.

I called Gideon as soon as I got out of bed on Saturday, to make certain that Iris hadn’t tried her hand at haunting him.

“For the fiftieth time, I’m fine,” he told me. Some of my tension eased; his exasperation was strangely reassuring. “And the role of my mother is already taken, so you and Tink can quit auditioning any time now.”

“Tink’s been pestering you, too?”

“When is she not pestering me?”

“Fair point,” I said with a laugh. “But admit it. You like us fussing over you.”

I was relieved to hear him sounding like himself, but I couldn’t quiet the voice that echoed in the back of my mind, murmuring that Iris was here, Iris was home. Biding her time, maybe, waiting for any opportunity. She would emerge from Beneath once more. And Iris knew.

I wasn’t the only one struggling with Iris’s reappearance. Shortly after I’d finished my conversation with Gideon, Elspeth called.

“You saw my sister,” she said. Her voice was thin and strained.

“I didn’t really see her,” I answered. “I heard her.”

“How did she sound? Is she okay?”

Iris hadn’t exactly been okay before she’d gone Beneath, and I doubted an extended stay had improved her any. I hesitated, choosing my words carefully. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Elspeth.”

“If you see her again…tell her to come home. Just to come home.”

I guessed that meant Elspeth didn’t share Mom’s theory that the Kin elders would have Iris’s powers sealed if she were ever caught. Or maybe Elspeth just wanted her back in any capacity. Within the worry of her tone, I caught the faint note of hope.

I swallowed. “I’ll tell her.”

Tink was right—Mr. Alvarez did call to ask for my input on the Harrower attack the previous weekend. But since he’d been informed of Iris’s involvement, most of his questions revolved around her: when I first heard her; what I thought I heard; why I thought she might be contacting me. I came up with a hasty excuse to get him off the phone.

Leon wasn’t quite as easy to dissuade.

We spent Monday morning in the basement of the house, where Mom’s exercise room functioned as our training space. When we’d first begun our lessons, Leon had taught me the basics of fighting as a Guardian and defending myself against Harrowers. Then, after I’d started amplifying, the focus of our sessions shifted. Most of our time was spent practicing fighting together, working side by side. We’d concentrated on learning to move in sync and to anticipate one another’s actions. Recently, we’d gone back to sparring.

Now that I could share Leon’s powers, we were more evenly matched, but since the Amplification meant he was still stronger, he was wary of injuring me. I felt no such compunction. I doubted I could hurt him even if I tried. But the best part of training together was that Leon could no longer just vanish and reappear across the room. He flatly refused to teleport while I was amplifying. Ever since he’d accidentally transported us to Iowa a few months ago, he’d decided it was too dangerous to even attempt.

That also meant he wouldn’t consider letting me try it on my own. Sharing his powers technically meant that I could have teleported—if I’d known how. But if there was a secret to it, Leon wasn’t telling.

How do you Know? he’d asked, the one time I’d brought it up. How do you breathe? It’s not something I can explain. It’s instinct. I just do it. Then he’d paused. And even if I could explain it, I wouldn’t.

His newest training idea involved trying to break my Amplification. He claimed this was to help me work on maintaining the bond, even under duress. To me, it seemed more like he was just trying to see if he actually could break it—and it had turned into something of a competition between us.

I was expecting another round of our ongoing contest when we began our session, but Leon wasn’t concentrating. Or at least, not concentrating on training. I managed to throw him almost immediately, and instead of going on the offensive, he just lay there on the exercise mat, his forehead knotted in a frown.

I nudged his shoulder with the tips of my toes, then pulled back quickly in case he decided to catch my foot. “All right, what’s your strategy here? Are you trying to lull me into a false sense of security?”

“I’m thinking,” he said.

“Horizontally?”

He hopped to his feet in one smooth motion. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. Iris has been gone for six months, so why has she come back now? What is it she wants from you?”

“You said you thought it was revenge,” I replied.

“You said you thought it wasn’t.” He paused, his frown deepening. There was a slight hitch in his voice. “Do you think she’s still trying to unseal Verrick?”

“It wasn’t Verrick she wanted,” I said quickly. “It was his knowledge of the Remnant. And the Remnant is gone.” I hadn’t seen Brooke Oliver since the day Leon and I had killed Susannah, but I knew the elders had sealed her powers, and that she and her mother had been sent away from the Astral Circle. As a Remnant, Brooke had had the ability to open new passages Beneath—an ability that Harrowers coveted, and the Kin feared. An ability that had been deemed too dangerous to even be allowed to exist.

“Iris might not be aware of that,” Leon continued. He ran a hand through his hair. “Or she might just want to unleash him anyway.”

I didn’t want to talk about Iris, and I definitely didn’t want to talk about Verrick. “Or maybe she just decided that spending the rest of eternity in a realm overrun by reptilian hellbeasts wasn’t such a good plan, after all.”

Something in my tone must have alerted him. His hand came down on my shoulder. His words were quiet. “Do you know something?”

Instead of answering, I turned and threw him again.

From the ground, he made a noise that was half-laugh, half-sigh. “Audrey.”

“What? It’s not my fault you’re not paying attention.”

“I’m trying to have a conversation.”

“And I am trying to train. Isn’t that why we came down here?”

He stood once more, but now he was on his guard, observing me closely. I studied him back. His tie was askew and his hair was in disarray, but he still had that easy grace and confidence in his stance. He was all vigilance, watchful and ready for any movement I might make. His blue eyes were intent on mine. A smile tugged at his lips.

“That’s better,” I said, grinning.

When I attacked again, he was prepared for it. He caught me in a hold as I went for the throw, and though I still managed to unbalance him, we both ended up on the floor.

I rolled away, laughing, and scrambled to my feet. Leon was half a second behind me.

Though I was already amplifying, I hadn’t really been using his powers until this point. Now, as we circled each other across the exercise mat, I felt the hum of the bond and the surge of strength in my veins. It burned between us, crackling, almost tangible. Leon gave me a crooked smile. He feinted, but I didn’t react. I waited, watching for an opening.

When I saw an opportunity, I didn’t hesitate. I rushed forward with all the accelerated speed of my borrowed Guardian powers.

This time I didn’t attempt a throw. Instead, I caught his shirt at the shoulders and steered him backward, shoving him against the wall. Hard. Then I jumped up, pushing my body against his, and kissed him.

For a long moment, he kissed me back. Eagerly. Hungrily. His arms tightened around me, one hand tangling in my hair. I pressed my fingers to his chest and inched even closer.

Abruptly, he lifted me from him and set me on the ground, moving a few steps away. His face was flushed, but all he said was, “That isn’t working this time.”

“Kissing you?”

“Distracting me.”

“You seemed pretty distracted,” I said.

“Audrey, we need to be serious here.”

I felt a flash of annoyance and let it flare. “I don’t know what Iris wants with me, okay?” I said, clenching my hands into fists. “She didn’t send the Harrowers out with some secret coded message—two snarls for peace and friendship, three for impending doom. I don’t know why she’s targeting me. And I’m not to blame for it.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just trying to—”

“To protect me. I know.” I stalked toward him, erasing the distance between us. “But I’m fine. If she sends another Harrower, we’ll take care of it. I won’t hesitate. I promised you that already. You protect me and I protect you, that’s how this works, remember?” Still amplifying, I pushed him with such force that he stumbled and sat down on the mat.

He raised an eyebrow. “You have a strange notion of protection.”

“Sorry.” I reached out a hand to help him back up, but he hooked a foot around my leg and sent me hurtling down to the mat beside him.

“Sorry,” he echoed, smirking.

It was the smirk that did it. Something inside me snapped. Furious, I whipped around and launched myself at him. He’d been climbing to his feet, but I bowled us both over. I landed awkwardly, the breath rushing out of my lungs, but I didn’t relent. We grappled a moment, rolling. My elbow connected with his ribs. He grunted, trying to thrust me away from him. When that didn’t work, he caught me, clasping me against his body. I stilled.

“Okay,” I said. “You win. Are you going to let me go?”

Leon wasn’t fooled. He didn’t relax his hold. “That depends. Are you done going crazy?”

In response, I wriggled and kicked, trying to free myself. Finally, he flipped me over, pinning me to the ground with my hands above my head.

“I guess that’s a no,” he said.

For once, he was using his full Amplified strength. I couldn’t break loose. I glared up at him mutinously. “You’re cheating,” I said.

“I’m employing necessary self-defense measures.”

“And, what—you’re just going to keep me here indefinitely?”

“You could try telling me what’s going on with you,” he suggested.

“I thought you needed to be taught a lesson.”

The smile he gave me now wasn’t a smirk—but it was close. “How’s that working out for you?”

My glare went from mutinous to murderous.

He laughed, then rested his forehead against mine. “All right, brat. Let’s try this again. If I let you go, are you going to play nice?”

I responded by biting his lip.

The bite became a kiss, and the kiss was hot and dizzying. Any thought of retaliation evaporated. Leon released my arms, and I looped them about him, one hand in his hair, the other tracing the ridge of his spine. His hands slid down me, and his mouth trailed along the hollow of my throat.

When he stopped again, I opened my eyes to find him grinning down at me. “I win,” he said.

Breathless, I gaped at him. It took me a second to realize what he was talking about. I’d stopped amplifying.

“That’s not fair,” I panted.

“Now who’s distracted?”

His mouth came down on mine again before I could answer.

There was no sign of Iris during the following week, and no further Harrower activity. The Cities were quiet—but it wasn’t a calm sort of quiet. It was tense, expectant, like a breath being held. The Guardians were on edge. Iris’s role in the hunting and harming of Kin girls had not been forgotten, and her culpability in their deaths would not be easily forgiven, if that was what she was seeking. I thought of Anna Berkeley, the girl I’d hoped to save, her blond hair and the plum-colored coat she’d worn. I thought of slashed ankles. A street turning red.

Since the Kin had no courts, and no way of bringing Iris to trial, the Guardians—in conjunction with Esther and the elders—were formulating a plan.

“The system isn’t perfect,” Mom said. “But it’s the only one we have.”

For once, I didn’t want to know the details. My hope was that Iris would simply never resurface. It could be that the Beneath would swallow her once more, I told myself. Just carry her off into the farthest recesses, into the dark heart of the void, and she would never again breach the surface. Maybe she was happier there, as Shane had said. Maybe she had only meant to say good-bye.

I didn’t believe that, but I didn’t have many other options.

Tink had been talked into continuing her training and patrols, but since she’d learned of Iris’s involvement in the Harrower attacks, she hadn’t asked me to come along again. In fact, she’d asked me not to come along again.

“If I’m going to swim in the ocean,” she’d said over the phone Tuesday night, “I’m not doing it with blood in the water. And you are a giant gaping wound.”

“Way to flatter a girl,” I’d said.

“Sorry, but I’m not the one who drew a bull’s-eye on your back. All I’m saying is, I would prefer not to creep down dark alleys with you just now, okay? We can still see each other during the day.”

“Tink, are you breaking up with me?”

I almost heard her rolling her eyes. “Trust me. When I break up with you, you’ll know it,” she’d said. I figured that wouldn’t be anytime soon, however, since she was still traumatized by her near-poultry experience. A few of our friends had organized a barbecue for the following afternoon, and she needed me to drive her to the lake.

Though thunderstorms had ripped across the sky all Tuesday evening, turning the horizon a sickly sort of yellow, Wednesday morning dawned clear and bright. Droplets of rain still clung to the grass when I awoke, but they’d melted away by the time I loaded up Mom’s car with potato chips and French onion dip—my contribution to the barbecue—and headed for Gideon’s house.

I hadn’t seen him since the baseball game, but he seemed considerably improved. He looked healthy, and even happy. There was no indication of that panic I’d sensed in him, and his brown eyes were warm and untroubled. He grinned as he hopped into the car, his hands full with a bag of charcoal and a can of lighter fluid. At some point in the past few days, he’d acquired a painful-looking burn on his arms that was already beginning to peel. Since I’d actually remembered sunscreen, I tossed the bottle at him and ordered him to slather himself with it while we drove to pick up Tink.

“No Leon?” Tink asked as she climbed into the back. Instead of sitting and buckling her seat belt, she shoved bags of food out of the way and draped herself across the seat, propping her feet against the window.

“He’s working, and then he has class,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose. “That’s no fun.”

Tink’s philosophy was that half the point of having a boyfriend was being able to show him off. I laughed. “Agreed.”

The beach at Lake George was busy enough that we could hear splashing and a low hum of chatter all the way to the parking lot, but Kit and Erica had arrived early and secured a picnic table. They were both sitting on top of it, waving their arms wildly as we approached. Next to them was a much more subdued boy in glasses and a baseball cap, who turned out to be Erica’s cousin from Wisconsin. He glanced up from his phone long enough to say “Hey” and then spent the rest of the afternoon texting his girlfriend.

Since Gideon claimed that Belmonte children learned the basics of barbecue around the same time they learned the alphabet, he was put in charge of the grill. While Tink made straight for the water, I sat in the grass next to him and handed him the hot dogs and burger patties Kit had packed into his parents’ cooler.

I pictured a four-year-old Gideon standing next to his father on their patio and decided he had to be exaggerating. I adored Gideon’s family, but I had to admit they weren’t the most graceful of creatures. The majority of his childhood stories involved shrieks, tears, tantrums, and trips to the emergency room. A few years ago, his middle sister had actually had to have her thumb sewn back on after a disastrous incident involving a hayride and a tractor. “How is it that none of you set yourselves on fire?” I asked, sucking on a piece of ice I’d stolen from the cooler.

“I said the basics,” Gideon replied.

“And what are the basics of barbecue?”

He grinned again. “Lesson one: don’t set yourself on fire.”

I shook my head.

I was able to relax as the day wore on. The sun was warm, but not blistering, and the water just cool enough to provide a pleasant contrast. The storms appeared to have passed by. A few tufts of cloud drifted lazily above, but there were no flashes of light across the sky, no rumbles of thunder. Tink, Gideon, and I rested in the sand between swims. I lay back on my towel, shutting my eyes and feeling the sun on my face.

Then I snapped into awareness when Tink asked Gideon, “When’s your next game?”

I sat up in time to see Gideon tense. He’d been drawing little circles in the sand with a twig, but now he stopped, hunching his shoulders and closing his fist. Around us, the sounds of the beach faded, the peals of laughter and squealing of children suddenly distant. I heard the twig crack. “I quit the team,” Gideon said, tossing both pieces of the stick into the nearby crabgrass.

Tink and I exchanged a glance. A furrow appeared in her brow, but all she said was, “Oh.”

Gideon shrugged and smiled, rising to his feet. “Maybe I’ll play again next year. I haven’t decided. I’m going swimming.” Without waiting for a response, he took off toward the water. He paused a few steps in, the current lapping at his ankles, and turned to wave.

Beside me, Tink had fallen quiet. We watched as Gideon vanished into the lake, propelling himself from the shore with long, sure strokes. Sunlight glinted off the beads of water in his hair, and then he was below the surface, lost among the ripples and waves.

He was always better at swimming than I was. Quick and confident, even when we were little. Whenever he joined my family at our cabin or I went on lake trips with the Belmontes, he would be gone in an instant, swimming fast and far, all the way to the buoys, while I was still standing near the shore. I would linger there, watching the flash of the minnows darting around me. And then he would come back. He would go out, touch the buoy, and come back.

“Okay, are you going to say it, or am I?” Tink asked, leaning back on her hands.

Cautiously, keeping my eyes on the lake, I said, “Say what?”

She sighed, gesturing toward the lake. “Something is seriously going on with him.”

I inched forward on my towel, digging my toes into the sand. I hadn’t told Tink the truth about Gideon. And never planned to. “I think he still misses Brooke,” I said.

Gideon had had a crush on Brooke Oliver for years, as long as I’d even known him. And though I wasn’t certain how much of that was Verrick’s fevered obsession with the Remnant, and how much of it was genuine, Gideon hadn’t taken her absence well. She had occupied so much of his mind for so long, her loss left a gap. A sudden blank space to be tiptoed around.

Tink wasn’t convinced. She was frowning toward the water. “But you’d think he’d get past that eventually. It’s been months, and he’s getting worse.”

“Just because he doesn’t get over someone in a week like you do doesn’t mean he’s broken.”

She turned toward me, squinting against the bright sun. “I’m going to take this moment to point out how bitchy that statement was. Luckily for you, I am unoffended.”

“Sorry,” I said, meaning it. “That was uncalled for.”

“Accepted. So now we can turn our attention to the problem at hand. Pining solves nothing. Maybe we should find him a girlfriend.”

“Because that’s worked so well in the past.”

Tink had tried to fling girls at him before, with varying degrees of success. Gideon was too friendly and polite to outright rebuff anyone, but sooner or later they’d all been gently rejected. Brooke had remained the sole source of his hope.

“He was still fixating on Brooke.” She paused, running her finger along the circles Gideon had drawn in the sand. “You know, I’m not even sure it’s about her, though. It started before then. You really didn’t notice?”

“I noticed,” I admitted, somewhat surprised she had. As far as I knew, Gideon hadn’t discussed his nightmares with her—and Tink had had her own problems to deal with at the time. Like being called as a Guardian.

But apparently Tink was more observant than I realized, because she chewed her lip and said, “I think it began when your cousin took him to Harlow Tower.”

It had, but not for the reason she assumed. “It was a pretty traumatic experience,” I hedged. I saw him lying at Iris’s feet, snow in his hair. “If that’s what’s upsetting him, there’s not a lot we can do about it.”

“You don’t think it has something to do with her—with Iris coming back?”

I hunched my shoulders. “How would he know? I didn’t tell him. Did you?”

“No…I don’t know. But he has gotten worse. It’s not just him quitting baseball. It’s like—he’s afraid of something.”

I thought of that surge of panic I’d felt from him the day of the baseball game. The sweat beading his brow. He wasn’t afraid of something. He was afraid of himself. And there wasn’t any cure for that.

“So are you,” I told Tink. “So am I. Demons, remember?” I gave an exaggerated shudder.

She sighed again. “I suppose therapy is out, since he can’t really discuss demons. Maybe we could…I don’t know, hire a hypnotist. Get him to forget it.”

“Right. Repression is definitely the answer here.”

“Hey, I am just trying to help.”

“I don’t think a hypnotist is going to do the trick.”

“Fine. Then we’re back to finding him a girlfriend.”

While Tink went through a list of candidates, counting them out on her fingers, my mind strayed.

He’s getting worse.

Tink wasn’t wrong, as much as I wanted to deny it.

But maybe she wasn’t wrong about the solution, either.

Not hypnotism. Not getting him to forget what had happened, exactly. But maybe there was a way to reverse the damage.

I glanced down at my wrist, the tiny notch of a scar just under my palm.

It went back to Iris. It went back to the knife in my hand, five small cuts. We hadn’t unsealed Verrick, but the process had been started. I had felt him stirring there, poised at the very edge of consciousness, fighting to awaken. I had felt his eyes begin to open. He was sleeping still, but it wasn’t a heavy slumber. He was worming his way through the cracks, clawing them wider. But if my blood could be used to unseal him, maybe the opposite was true as well. Maybe he could be locked away again. Permanently.

I just needed to figure out how.