Текст книги "Boundless"

Автор книги: Cynthia Hand

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

She’s not talking about the gunfight.

We take the long way getting back to my car. When we’re both seat-belted in, ready to go, she suddenly reaches and takes the keys out of the ignition.

“So you’re still in love with my brother,” she says, and when I try to grab the keys, she adds, “Oh no, we’re going to talk about this.”

Silence. I fight the humiliating urge to cry again.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Let’s get it all out in the open. You still love him.”

I bite my lip, then release it. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve moved on, and he’s moved on. Clearly he’s with Allison now.”

Wendy snorts. “Tucker is not in love with Allison Lowell. Don’t blow stuff out of proportion.”

“But—”

“It’s you, Clara. You’re the only one, from the first day he saw you. He looks at you exactly the same way my daddy looks at my mom.”

“But I’m not good for him,” I say miserably. “I have to let him go.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“We’re not meant to be,” I murmur.

This gets another snort. “That,” she says, “is a matter of opinion.”

“Oh, so it’s your opinion that Tucker and I, that we—”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “But I do know that he loves you. And you love him.”

“I’m at Stanford. He’s here. You said yourself that long-distance relationships don’t work out. You and Jason—”

“I didn’t love Jason,” she says. “Plus, I didn’t know what I was talking about.” She sighs heavily. “Okay, so I probably shouldn’t be telling you this. I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, as a matter of fact. He’d kill me. But Tucker applied to college this year. And he’s going, in the fall.”

“What? Where?”

“UC Santa Clara. You see, don’t you, why this is important?”

I nod, stunned. UC Santa Clara just so happens to be in my part of California.

My heart is in my throat. I try to swallow it down. “You suck.”

Wendy puts her hand on mine. “I know. It’s my fault, partly. I kind of threw you two together that summer with the boots.”

“You really did.”

“You’re my friend, and I want you to be happy, and he’s my brother, and I want him to be happy, too. And I think you could make each other happy, if you’d give it a real chance.”

If only it were so simple.

“I think you should talk to him again, that’s all,” she says.

“Oh yeah? And what should I say?”

“The truth,” she says solemnly. “Tell him how you feel.”

Fantastic, I think. I’m crying over Tucker. Not very women’s lib of me, I know. It goes against everything I believe about myself, all that my mother taught me—that I am strong, that I am capable, that I don’t need a man to make me happy—but here I am, all curled up on the couch in the fetal position, an uneaten bowl of microwaved caramel popcorn on the floor by my feet, sobbing into the cushions because all I wanted was to watch a stupid movie to get my mind off things and all Netflix has lined up for me is romantic comedies.

I’m replaying that moment on the boardwalk over and over, Allison Lowell looking up at Tucker, her brown eyes all doe-like and alluring and crap, and how she touched him the way I’ve touched him. How she smiled.

And he smiled back at her.

But he’s also apparently going to college about twenty miles from me. The possibility of that, Tucker nearby, expands into an aching, hopeful, confused mess in my soggy brain.

He might want for us to be together.

I might want for us to be together.

But nothing else has changed, has it? I’m still me, still a T-person, still Little Miss Glowworm, still having creeptastic visions that I might not survive, and if I do survive, I’m still meant for someone else. He’s still him, funny, warm, gorgeous, kind, perfectly normal and yet so extraordinary, but when I kiss him too enthusiastically, I make him sick. Because he’s human. And I’m not, mostly. When he’s eighty, I’ll look like I’m thirty. It’s not right.

Except Dad told me to follow my heart.

Is this what he meant?

I blow my nose. I wish Angela were here to tell me to take a chill pill already, to kick my butt back to okay again, but that part of our friendship seems long gone. She’s not going to be in the mood to discuss boy issues. She’d probably kill for my easy little problems right now. So you still have a thing for the cowboy, I can imagine her saying. Big whoop.

Which starts a whole new round of tears for me, because not only is my heart all confused and broken again, but I am totally, indisputably alone.

My cell rings. I sniffle and answer.

“Hey, you,” Christian says softly.

“Hey.”

He hears that something’s not quite right with my voice. “Did I wake you?”

I sit up, wiping at my eyes. “No. I was about to watch a movie.”

“Do you want some company?” he asks. “I could stop by.”

“Sure,” I say. “Come over. We could watch zombies.”

Zombies would be excellent. I scroll through the menu looking for anything zombie, and I feel moderately less devastated and worn-out.

There’s a knock on the door, and I think, Well, that was fast, but then I freeze.

Five syncopated raps.

Tucker’s knock.

Crap.

He knocks again. I stand in the hall and contemplate how quietly I can sneak out the back door and fly away. But I don’t know if I can fly when I feel this way, and Christian will be here any minute.

“I know you’re in there, Carrots,” he calls through the door.

Double crap.

I go to the door and open it. I hate that I look like I’ve been crying, my eyelids puffy, my skin all blotchy. I force myself to meet his gaze.

“What do you want, Tucker?”

“I want to talk to you.”

Cue the casual I-could-care-less shrug, which I don’t quite pull off in a convincing way. Still, I have to get points for trying. “Nothing to talk about. I’m sorry I interrupted you on your date. This isn’t a good time, actually. I’m expecting—”

He puts his hand on the door when I try to close it.

“I saw your face,” he says.

He means earlier. I stare at him. “I was surprised, that’s all.”

He shakes his head. “No. You still love me.”

Trust Tucker to just come right out and say it.

“No,” I say.

The corner of his mouth lifts. “You are such a bad liar.”

I take a few steps back, lift my chin. “You really should go.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Why do you have to be so pigheaded?” I exclaim, throwing my hands in the air. “Fine.” I turn away from the door and let him follow me inside.

He laughs. “Back at you.”

“Tucker! I swear!”

He sobers. He takes his hat off and puts it on the hook by the door. “The thing is, I’ve tried to stop thinking about you. Believe me, I’ve tried, but every time I think I’ve got a handle on my heart, you pop up again.”

“I will work on that. I will try to stay out of your barn,” I promise.

“No,” he says. “I don’t want you to stay out of my barn.”

“This is crazy,” I say. “I can’t. I’m trying to do—”

“What’s right,” he fills in. “You’re always trying to do what’s right. I love that about you.” He comes closer, too close now, stares down at me with that familiar heat in his eyes.

Then he says it. “I love you. That’s not going away.”

My heart flies up like a bird on wings, but I try to clobber it back down. “I can’t be with you,” I manage.

“Why, because of your purpose? Because God told you so? I want to see that written down somewhere, I want to see it decreed, that you, Clara Gardner, can’t love me because you’re part angel. Tell me where it says that.” He reaches behind him, and to my shock he pulls what looks to be a Bible out of the waistband of his jeans. “Because I want to read you this.”

He opens it, thumbs through to find the right passage.

“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. See, right there in black and white.”

“Thank you for the Sunday school lesson,” I say. “Don’t you find it a little silly that you’re quoting the Bible to somebody like me, who receives divine instructions straight from the source? Tucker, come on, you know it’s more complicated than that.”

“No, it’s not,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be. What we have, that’s divine. It’s beautiful and good and right. I feel it….” He presses his hand to his chest, over his heart. “I feel it all the time. You’re in here, part of me. You’re what I go to bed thinking about and what I wake up to in the morning.”

The tears start to slip down my face. He makes a noise in the back of his throat and crosses the room toward me, but I stumble back.

“Tuck. I can’t,” I breathe.

“I like it when you call me Tuck,” he says, smiling.

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Sudden understanding dawns in his eyes. “That’s what this breaking-up business was all about for you, wasn’t it? You thought I was going to get hurt. You pushed me away to protect me. You’re still pushing.” He shakes his head. “Losing you, that’s the worst kind of hurt there is.”

He reaches out and touches a strand of my hair, tucks it behind my ear, then backs off a little, tries a different approach. “Hey. How about this? You’re home for a couple more days, right? I’m home, as usual.” I see the news of his college situation rise up in his mind, but for some reason he doesn’t tell me about it. “Let’s go fishing. Let’s climb a mountain. Let’s try again.”

I’ve never wanted anything so much.

He sees the uncertainty on my face. “I should have fought for you, Clara, even if I would have had to fight you to fight for you. I should never have let you go.”

I close my eyes. I know that any minute now he’s going to kiss me, and my resistance is going to melt away completely.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I whisper. And then, out of self-protection more than anything else, I bring the glory. I don’t warn him or anything. I don’t damp it down. I bring it. The room fills with light.

“This is what I am,” I say, my hair ablaze around my head.

He squints at me. His jaw juts out a little in pure stubbornness. He stands his ground.

“I know,” he says.

I take a step toward him, close the space between us, put my glowing hand against his ashen cheek. He starts to tremble. “This is what I am,” I say again, and my wings are out now.

His knees wobble, but he fights it. He puts his hand at my waist, turns me, pulls me closer, which surprises me.

“I can accept that,” he whispers, and holds his breath, and leans in to kiss me.

His lips brush mine for an instant, and an emotion like victory tears through him, but then he pulls away and glances toward the front door. Groans.

Christian is standing in the doorway.

“Wow,” Tucker says, trying to grin. “You really know how to cramp a guy’s style.”

His legs give out. He falls to his knees.

My light blinks off.

Christian’s clutching a DVD copy of Zombieland in one hand, the other hand clenched into a fist at his side. His expression is completely shut down.

“I guess I’ll come back later,” he says. “Or not.”

Tucker’s still catching his breath on the floor.

I follow Christian to the door. “He just came over. I didn’t mean for you to—”

“See that?” he finishes for me. “Great. Thanks for trying to spare my feelings.”

“I was trying to prove a point to him.”

“Right,” he says. “Well, let me know how that turns out.”

He turns toward the door, then stops, the muscles in his back tensing. He’s about to say something really harsh, I think, something he won’t be able to take back.

“Don’t,” I say.

Dizziness crashes over me. I hear a strange whooshing sound, like wind in my ears, accompanied by the distinct smell of smoke. Christian turns, his face all scrunched up like he’s confused by what he sees in my head. He looks suddenly worried.

That’s when I pass out.

The black room is filling up with smoke.

I jolt into future Clara in the exact instant that the darkness explodes into light, and in that moment I understand: This light’s not glory. It’s fire. A fireball streaks over my shoulder and strikes the wall somewhere off to the side, behind me. Then Christian screams, “Get down!” and I drop just in time for him to literally leap over my body, his glory sword out and bright and deadly, blinding me. Everything’s a jumble of black-and-white flashing: Christian and the figures circling him, the swift movement of his blade against the dark. I scramble backward until my back hits something solid, glance over my shoulder to see what’s happening with the fire.

The flames lick up the side of the room, igniting the velvet curtains like tissue paper. This place is going to be an inferno in about five minutes. My heart’s hammering, but I swallow and push myself to my knees, then to my feet. I have to help Christian. I have to fight.

No, he says in my mind. You’ve got to find him. Go.

The high-pitched noise comes again, thin and reedy, frightened. Smoke chokes me, the air in here close and hot and heavy in my lungs, but inexplicably I turn away from Christian and what I think must be the exit and stumble toward the fire, coughing, my eyes watering.

I hit the edge of something hard and wooden right at chest level, hard enough to knock the wind out of me if I had any wind in me to begin with. I figure out what the barrier is at the same time that my eyes finally decide to adjust.

It’s a stage.

I look around wildly to confirm what I already know, but it’s so crazy obvious I can’t believe I never figured this out before. It all falls neatly into place: the slanted floor of the auditorium, the ghosts of white tablecloths along the front, the rows of metal-backed seats. The velvet curtains and the smell of sawdust and paint.

We’re in the Pink Garter.

And in that instant, I figure out what the noise is.

It’s a baby crying.

“Clara!”

I open my eyes. Somehow I ended up on my living room floor, and I don’t quite know how. Two sets of eyes are staring down at me, one blue and one green, both insanely worried.

“What happened?” Tucker asks.

“It was the black room,” Christian says, not a question.

“It was the Garter.” I struggle to sit up. “I need my phone. Where’s my phone?”

Tucker finds it on the coffee table and brings it to me, while Christian helps me over to the couch. I still feel out of breath.

“There’s going to be a fire,” I tell Christian.

Tucker makes a disbelieving noise. “Oh, great.”

I dial Angela’s number. It rings and rings, and each second that ticks by where she doesn’t pick up makes the sense of dread in my stomach grow stronger. But then, finally, there’s a click and a faint hello on the other end.

“Angela!” I say.

“Clara?” She sounds like she’s been sleeping.

“I just had my vision again, and the black room is the Garter, Angela, and the noise I hear—do you remember me telling you?—that noise, which is what gives us away, it’s a baby. It’s got to be Webster. You need to get out. Now.”

“Now?” she says, still half-awake. “It’s nine o’clock at night. I just got Web to sleep.”

“Ange, they’re coming.” I can’t help the frantic squeak in my voice.

“Okay, slow down, C,” Angela says. “Who’s coming?”

“I don’t know. Black Wings.”

“Do they know about Web?” she asks, starting to comprehend some of what I’m saying. “Are they coming for him? How would they know?”

“I don’t know,” I say again.

“Well, what do you know?”

“I know something terrible is going to happen there. You have to leave.”

“And go where?” she asks, still not fully getting it. “No. I can’t go anywhere tonight.”

“But Ange—”

“How long have you been having the vision? Almost a year? There’s no need to rush off all panicked and clueless. We’ll think it through.”

“The vision was different tonight. It was urgent.”

Her voice hardens. “Well, sometimes the visions are like that, aren’t they? And you think you know what they mean, but you don’t.” She sighs like she realizes that she’s taking her issues out on me, and she’s sorry. “I can’t go running off in the middle of the night on a whim, C. I have Web to think about now. We need a plan. Come to the Garter in the morning, and we’ll talk about your vision, okay? Then I’ll decide where to go from there.”

There’s a high-pitched wail in the background. The sound of it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Oh, great. You woke him up,” she says, annoyed. “I have to go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She hangs up on me.

I stare at the phone for a minute.

“What was that all about?” Tucker asks from behind me. “What’s going on?”

I meet Christian’s eyes, and he knows what I’m thinking. “We can take my truck,” he says.

We start moving toward the door. “We’ll go over there and I can put my hand on her and try to show her what I see. Maybe she’ll be able to receive it. We’ll make her understand. Then we’ll pack her and the baby up and take them to a hotel.” I sling my coat over my shoulder.

“Wait, what?” Tucker follows us out onto the porch. “Hold on, Carrots. Explain this to me. What’s happening?”

“We don’t have time.” I look at Tucker over my shoulder as I’m dashing away, and I say, “I have to go; I’m sorry,” and then I climb up into Christian’s pickup and we take off, spraying the gravel in the driveway, off to Jackson, and I get the sinking feeling that the trials my dad was telling me about are really about to begin.

14

ABANDON ALL HOPE

Just before we get to town, I get a text from Angela: trp dr, it says, and I don’t know what that means, but it makes my bad feeling get worse. Then when we arrive at the Garter, we find the front door open a crack. Christian and I both stiffen at the sight. We know that Anna Zerbino keeps this place locked up extra tight in the off hours, ever since an incident last year when a group of drunken tourists broke in and stole a bunch of costumes out of the dressing rooms and went gallivanting in chaps and petticoats all over town. Christian toes the door open enough for us to pass through, and we creep into the front lobby. The room is empty. He takes a moment to inspect the door, but there’s nothing to suggest violence. The lock is intact.

I cross the lobby to the red velvet curtain that separates the front of the house from the auditorium and push it aside. The lights are off. The theater is a pit of blackness straight out of my worst fears, and I can’t look at it for more than a few seconds before I have to turn away.

Upstairs there’s the sound of a muffled voice, a dragging noise like a chair scraping across the floor.

I glance uncertainly at Christian like, What should we do?

He gestures with his head toward the back corner, where there’s a staircase that goes to the second floor. We take the stairs slowly, careful not to make any noise. At the top we stop and listen. This door is closed, a ribbon of bright light glowing beneath it.

I’m tempted by the ridiculous urge to knock, like maybe if I act normal, things will be normal. I’ll knock, and Anna will answer it all serious and ask us what we’re doing here at this late hour, but then she’ll take us back to Angela’s room, and Angela will look up from where she’s sprawled on her bed, reading, and she’ll say, Really, you guys? You’re really so paranoid that you couldn’t wait until morning?

I could knock, and then there wouldn’t be anything evil on the other side of that door.

Christian shakes his head slightly. What do you feel? he asks.

I open my mind. The minute I lower my defenses—which I wasn’t even aware I had up—sorrow floods me, a deep penetrating pain, so fierce it makes me gasp for air. I lean against the wall and try to delve inside the suffering, to identify its source, but all I get is an image of a woman’s body floating facedown in the water, her dark hair spreading out around her head. The angel—oh yes, definitely an angel—is not Samjeeza, that much I know. His sorrow is different from Sam’s, angrier, a rage caught up in an agony that’s centuries old and still red hot, but it’s also more controlled than Sam’s, less self-pitying, like he’s channeling his emotions into something else: a purpose. A desire to destroy.

There’s a Black Wing, I say to Christian silently, careful to keep the words flowing only between us, the way Dad taught us to do. Grade-A sorrow. That’s about all I can get—it overwhelms everything else. What about you? Can you tell what somebody’s thinking in there?

There are at least seven people in that room, he says, closing his eyes. It’s hard to sift through.

“I told you that you’re not welcome here,” a voice says suddenly, low and frightened. “I want you to leave.”

“Come now, Anna,” responds another voice—an older man, from the sound of it, with the slight lilt to his speech that Dad has. “Is that any way to treat an old friend?”

“You were never my friend,” Anna says. “You were a mistake. A sin.”

“Oh, a sin,” he says. “I’m flattered.”

“I rebuke you,” Anna says. “In the name of Jesus Christ. Begone.”

This annoys him. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. This isn’t about you.”

“Then what is it about?” This from Angela, steady and crazy calm considering there’s a Black Wing in her living room. “What do you want?”

“We’ve come to see the baby,” he says.

Christian and I exchange troubled glances. Where is Webster?

“My baby?” Angela repeats, almost stupidly. “Why?”

“Penamue would like to see the wee thing, as would I. I’m the grandfather, after all.”

Holy crap, I think. Phen’s here. And … does that mean that the other angel is Angela’s father?

“You are nothing to him, Asael,” Anna spits out. “Nothing.”

At the name Asael my brain floods with every piece of information I’ve gathered about this guy over the past year: the collector, the big bad who would stop at nothing to recruit or destroy all of the Triplare from this world, the brother who usurped Samjeeza as the leader of the Watchers. Very dangerous, I can practically hear my father saying. Without pity. Without hesitation. He takes what he wants, and if he sees you, if he knows what you are, he will take you. I want to run, that’s my instinct—run, run down the stairs and out the door and not look back—but I clench my teeth and stay right where I am.

“He’s not here,” Angela says, like she’s only irritated at this intrusion and not terrified out of her mind. “You could have simply called, Phen, and I would have told you that. You didn’t have to make the trip all this way.”

Asael laughs. The sound makes my skin crawl. “We could have called,” he repeats, amused. “Where is the baby, then, if not here?”

“I gave him away.”

“You gave him away? To whom?”

“To a nice couple in a profile I picked at the adoption agency, who desperately wanted a kid. The dad’s a musician; the mom’s a pastry chef. I liked the idea that he’d always have music and good food.”

“Hmm,” Asael says thoughtfully. “I believe that Penamue was under the impression that you were going to keep the child. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” answers a voice I wouldn’t have recognized as Phen’s if I didn’t know it was him speaking. He sounds like he has a bad cold. “She told me she was keeping it.”

“Him,” Angela corrects. “And I changed my mind, after it was clear that you were going to bail on me.” She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Look, I’m not the maternal type. I’m nineteen years old. I go to Stanford. I have a life. Being strapped with a kid’s the last thing I want. So I gave him to some people who’d take care of him.”

I can’t see, but I can imagine Angela standing there, that carefully blank expression she gets when she’s hiding something, her hip pushed out a bit to one side, her head cocked like she can’t believe she’s still having this oh-so-boring conversation. “So it looks like you wasted your time,” she adds. “And mine.”

There’s a moment of silence. Then Asael starts to clap, slowly, so loudly I flinch every time his hands strike each other.

“What a performance,” he says. “You’re quite the actress, my dear.”

“Believe me or don’t,” she says. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Search the apartment,” Asael says, an untroubled calm to his voice, like still water on the lake, which doesn’t reveal the turmoil under the surface. “Look in all the nooks and crannies. I believe the baby is here, somewhere.”

I hear people moving away from us, down the hall, and then the noise of tossing furniture and breaking glass. Anna starts to whisper to herself, soft and desperate, something that I vaguely recognize as the Lord’s Prayer.

We should do something, I send to Christian.

He shakes his head again. We’re outnumbered. There are two full angels, Clara, and your dad said we wouldn’t be able to beat even one of them in a head-to-head fight. Then add in a few what I am betting are Triplare. We wouldn’t stand a chance in there.

I bite my lip. But we have to help Angela.

He shakes his head. We should figure out where Web is. That’s what Angela would want us to do, he says. I can feel his desire to run away, the way he’s been conditioned to in this situation, and I can feel his fear, almost panic at this point, rising in him. He’s not afraid for himself. He’s afraid for me. He wants to put me in his truck and drive far away from here. He knows if we stay it will all play out like his vision, which ends with me covered in blood, staring up at him with glassy eyes. He can’t let that happen.

Now it’s my turn to shake my head. We can’t just leave Angela.

“He’s not here. I told you,” Angela says.

“You are mine,” Asael says in a harder voice, starting to lose patience. The floor creaks under his weight as he takes a step toward her. “You are blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, and that baby belongs to me as well. The seventh is mine. I will have it.”

“Him,” she corrects again softly.

The others return.

“There’s no baby,” a woman’s voice reports. “But there’s a crib in one of the back rooms.” Then they start tearing apart the kitchen, dumping out drawers, throwing things on the floor for good measure.

Anna’s praying gets louder.

“Enough,” Asael says, his voice calm again. “Tell us where he is.”

“He’s gone,” Angela says, her voice wavering. “I sent him away from here.”

“Where?” Asael asks again, less patiently. “Where did you send him?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Angela,” rasps Phen. “Please. Tell him. Just tell him, and he will let you go.”

Asael makes an amused sound in the back of his throat. “Oh, Penamue, you really do care for her, don’t you? How droll. I would never have imagined, when I sent you to check up on my long-lost daughter in Italy, that you’d lose your little gray heart. But I suppose I understand. I do. She’s so young, isn’t she? So new, like a tender green sprout pushing up out of the earth.”

I get a flash of the floating woman again, him carrying her this time, his face pressed against her white, pulseless neck.

“So,” Asael continues, “do as your lover bids you. Tell us where you’ve taken the baby.”

“No.”

He sighs. “Very well. I don’t enjoy having to employ this particular tactic, but … Desmond, hold her mother for a moment?”

Footsteps. Anna stops praying as she’s yanked away from Angela. Then she starts up again: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven….”

“Amen. I do hope He’s listening to all this,” Asael says. “Now, then, tell me what I want to know, or your mother will die.”

I hear Angela’s sharp intake of breath. I cast a desperate glance at Christian, my mind whirling. What can we do?

“It’s quite the dilemma,” Asael says. “Your mother or your son. But consider this: If you tell us where to find the infant, I promise you that he’ll be safe from harm. He’ll want for nothing. I will raise him as my own child.”

“Yeah, well, I’m your child,” Angela says. “And that’s not working out so great.”

He gives a startled laugh at her back talk. “Then be my daughter, as these two lovely girls have been—your sisters, you know. I will give you a room in my house, a place at my table, by my side.”

“In hell, you mean,” she says.

“Hell’s not so bad. We’re free there. The angels are kings, and you could be a princess. And you could remain with your child.”

“Don’t do it,” Anna says.

“Come with me, and we’ll let your mother go unharmed, for the rest of her life,” Asael promises.

“No. Remember what I taught you,” Anna murmurs. “Don’t worry about me. They can murder my body, but they can never harm my soul.”

“Are you so sure about that?” Asael asks. “Olivia, come here, dear. Perhaps we should educate her. This”—he pauses briefly—“is a very special kind of knife. I call it Dubium Alta—the great doubt. The blade causes grievous injury, I’m afraid, to both body and soul. If I say the word, my girl Olivia here will cut your soul to ribbons. I think she’ll rather enjoy it.”

“Lead us not into temptation—”

“Olivia,” he prompts.

I don’t hear the one called Olivia move, but suddenly Anna gives a long, agonized cry.

“Mom,” whispers Angela, as Anna dissolves into ragged sobs.

I taste blood I’m biting my lip so hard. Christian’s hand comes down on my arm, tight enough to hurt.

No, he says.

I’ll call glory, I say, and we’ll run to them, before they can—

I feel him going through the possible scenarios, but none of them work, none of them will end the way we want them to, with all of us together and safe. It’s no use, he says. They’re too fast. Even with surprise on our side, there are too many of them. They’re too strong.

“And deliver us from evil,” Anna pants out finally.

“She’s a bit like a broken record, isn’t she? Olivia, sweetheart …”

Anna cries out again.

“Stop,” Angela says. “Stop hurting her!” She takes a deep breath. “I will take you to Web—to the baby.”

“Excellent,” Asael almost purrs.

“No, Angela,” Anna pleads weakly, like speaking is almost too much for her.

“You have to promise me that he’ll be taken care of, that he’ll be safe,” Angela says.

“I give you my word,” Asael agrees. “Not a hair on his head will be harmed.”

“All right. Let’s go, then,” she says.

Christian starts pulling me down the stairs.

But Asael sighs. “I wish I could believe you, my dear.”

“What?” Angela’s confused.

“You have no intention of taking us to your son. I hate to think of the wild goose chase you’d lead us on.”

“No, I swear—”

“You’ll give me what I want,” he says almost cheerfully. “Eventually. A few hours in hell and you’ll be drawing me a map to the child, I think.” His voice hardens. “All right, Olivia. I’m tired of playing games.”

“Wait!” Angela says desperately. “I said I would—”

Someone gags—a muffled cough, choking.

“Mom!” Angela’s crying, struggling against someone’s arms. “Mom! Mom!”

Anna whispers hoarsely, “God help me,” and falls heavily to the floor.

I can smell her blood.

God help me.

“Mom,” whimpers Angela. “No.”