Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Six

Shy and the Ritual Site

I take Anora home after the Order is finished questioning her. Now and then, I catch a glimpse of reddish-brown fur in the tree line. Anora’s hellhounds are following. I don’t think she notices as she seethes in my passenger seat, sitting as far away from me as possible. In response, I keep one of my hands clutched around the steering wheel of my Jeep and the other pressed against my chest where the thread connects us across lifetimes. It pinches and pulls. The feeling isn’t as severe as when she was in trouble, but it’s not the normal level of anxiety I’m used to with her. I want to snap at her, tell her to stop—but stop what? Feeling?

I can’t blame her for feeling right now—anger, fear, betrayal.

The Order found a way to make the Eurydice compliant. She will pay for her sins by serving them. They’d done exactly what she’d feared from the beginning—taken away her choice.

“Stop doing that!” she snaps at me, finally breaking the silence straining between us.

I jerk. I don’t like that she startled me. It means I’m not paying as much attention as I need to be, but how can I help it? I can’t shake her discomfort, and the cab of my Jeep is small and compact, thick with all her feelings and her smell. There are a million other things I’d prefer to do in this car rather than fight with her.

“What?”

“You keep rubbing your chest, and it’s making a noise, and it’s driving me crazy.”

I crush my fingers together and drop my hand, leaving it in a fist on my thigh. She watches it for a moment, and I think she might touch me, ease the tension and frustration, but she doesn’t.

That only increases my irritation.

“You do that a lot, you know,” she says.

“What?”

“Rub your chest.”

Because you’re always worried, I want to snap.

“Do you have a rash?”

“I don’t have a rash.” At this point, I can’t tell if she’s joking with me, because everything she says comes out between gritted teeth and sounds hostile.

She doesn’t say anything for a long moment.

“What is Mr. Val in your society? Why was he chosen as my trainer?” she asks.

“He chose to train you,” I say. “Elites are the best among the Valryn.”

“And elites make the rules,” she says. It’s not a question. “Rules like humans and Valryn can’t be together.”

“Yes.” I pause, and now my insides feel twisted. “Who told you?”

“I guessed,” she says. “Jake said he was a secret. Why is that a rule?”

“Because our DNA—what makes you up and what makes me up—doesn’t mesh. We make monsters. Abominations.”

She shivers, and suddenly I wish I had a better way to explain this, but I don’t. I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, hoping she doesn’t ask another question about abominations. This conversation won’t do anything to improve her opinion of me—or us.

“What happens to abominations?”

“A number of things,” I say, pausing so long, I’m not even sure I’ll finish explaining. “Sometimes they are killed. It depends on the severity of their deformity…if they can live with it. Some are placed in servitude for Compounds across the nation.”

I’m really just repeating something I’ve been told.

“Have you ever met an abomination?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know what one looks like? If they are actually… ‘deformed’ as you say.”

I don’t, and I say so.

“So how do you know there’s any truth to the claim that human and Valryn DNA doesn’t mix?”

I can’t answer that either.

“You obey this rule? Without evidence to support its truth?” she asks.

I open my mouth because I want to tell her no, I don’t obey that rule, because if she could hear the things I think about her, she’d know I don’t really care that she’s human, but no words come out.

“Why did you kiss me?” she asks, not looking at me.

I flex my fingers, crushing them into a fist. “Because…I wanted to.”

And I don’t regret it.

Even as I reiterate, much to my body’s complete disagreement, “Nothing good comes from a human and Valryn relationship.”

When we arrive at Anora’s house, she sits up in her seat. “Oh no.”

Her mom is outside on the porch, standing with her arms crossed. Her face is all harsh lines. It’s obvious she’s angry, and she has plenty of reasons—it’s about three in the morning, and Anora’s coming home in a boy’s Jeep.

“I can stick around. Help you explain where you’ve been.” I come to a stop in her driveway, but she’s already on her way out of the passenger seat.

“No, that’s okay.” She sounds defeated and tired. “See you.”

She closes the door and heads toward the porch. I roll down my window.

“Hey, Ms. Silby,” I say with a wave.

“Shy,” she says with a nod. Her arms tighten across her chest, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like me as much as she did a week ago.

“Sorry for bringing Anora home late. We fell asleep watching movies.”

Anora’s mom raises a brow. “I’ll be sure to talk to your mother. Good night, Shy.”

“Night,” I say, rolling up the window. As I leave, I spot the red-eyed gazes of Anora’s hellhounds in the shadows around her house.

I head back to the Compound to see Jacobi. I expect to see Malee, Jacobi’s mom, when I enter the infirmary. Instead, Natalie is sitting at his side, holding his hand.

“Where’s Malee?” I ask.

“She stepped out for coffee,” Natalie says. “I haven’t been here long.”

I watch their laced hands for a long moment. It reminds me of our childhood pre-training days when Natalie had a crush on Jacobi. It was one of the reasons she followed us around so much. Then I think about how obsessed Jacobi’s always been with the newest technology, how he would spend hours telling me about new game enhancements he researched when all I wanted to do was play the damn thing. Standing here in this dark room with beeping machines and a silent Jacobi, I regret being so impatient with him, because just as I can’t imagine living a life without Lily’s laugh and smile, I can’t imagine living without Jacobi’s technobabble.

I would miss it.

Don’t you dare die on me.

“Malee says he woke up briefly. The medics say he has a severe concussion. He will have a long road to recovery.”

I don’t know what that means. Will Jacobi be different when he wakes fully? How will this affect his tech skills? His fighting skills? His progress toward graduation?

After a long moment, Natalie says what I’m thinking. “What if he doesn’t recover?”

Her voice sounds hollow, and the only thing I can think to say is, “He will.”

I say it like an oath, a promise that can’t be broken.

“There are things I still need to say,” she says. “I need to apologize for thinking rules are more important than friends.” She inhales sharply, and I come to stand beside her. “I’m sorry for what happened with Blake and your mom. You were right. Blake never did really forgive me. She just said it. I think maybe she hoped she could believe the words one day.”

“Blake blamed the Order, not you, Nat,” I say quietly.

She shakes her head and then looks up at me. Her eyes are red, and tears slide down her cheeks. I brush them away. I hate seeing her cry. “I lost Lily even before she died… I’ll never forgive myself for that,” and then she falls into me and sobs.

Sometime later, after Natalie’s tears have subsided, we leave. Shifting into our hybrid forms, we land in the clearing where I parked my Jeep after leaving Anora’s. I look at Natalie. “I want to go back to where we found Lily. What if she was resurrected nearby?”

Natalie stares at me for a moment and then says, “Are you asking me to come along?”

“If you’re up for it,” I say.

She smiles. “More than ever.”

We shift and take off together. The Rayon High students chose to hide Anora in a pocket of wood near the graveyard. Guess they didn’t want to take Anora too far from where they abducted her.

We land in the field. Natalie and I pause a moment, observing our surroundings before we make a plan. Evidence of Lily’s animalistic state are everywhere—in the blood pooled on the ground where Jake fell, the earth torn apart by her savage attacks. The Order will brush Jake’s death under the rug, claim it was an animal attack, and only a few of us will ever know what really happened. It’s hard to be back here so soon, but necessary. Someone reanimated Lily’s corpse, and with the graveyard so close, I’m guessing the ritual was completed nearby. All that energy from lost souls probably fed the spell.

Natalie and I split up. She heads for the graveyard, and I follow a set of hellhound tracks into the woods in the opposite direction. Their prints are deep and fierce, evidence of their desperation to reach Anora. At some point, the tracks diverge—two on the left, two on the right, and one straight ahead. I follow the tracks in front of me, thinking they will probably lead straight to the ritual site. The other sets make me think the hounds got distracted by a scent or a chase. I’ll check them later.

It’s the smell that gives the ritual location away—a mix of wax and sage and blood. Thin black candles identify the barrier of the spell, a place for the magic to gather over the body. Whoever conducted the spell hadn’t had time to remove any of the evidence.

I stand outside the circle, studying the impressions in the ground: where Lily’s body lay, where she rose and dragged her feet, awakening from an eternal sleep that should have never been disturbed. Somehow, she managed not to bother the circle of candles. I stoop to study them. They hum with a faint vibration—energy, what humans call magic. I shiver involuntarily.

It’s just another reason Anora—the Eurydice—is so important to us. The more dead on earth means more energy—power—for death-speakers in the occult to work with. We have a name for it, death essence: the energy of the dead.

As I step into the center of the circle, my whole body shakes, and I feel cold. Something latches on to my arm, and it goes numb. It’s a phantom, residue left over from the spell cast hours earlier. It takes a moment, but soon I’m free of its icy grip, though my arm is still numb, and my chest feels like ice. I look up and find a clear view to the starry sky above. There’s a full moon tonight, and I’d bet anything it shone right through that opening hours ago.

“It’s impossible to tell if Lily’s grave was disturbed. It’s…fresh.” Natalie’s voice comes from behind me. I glance at her. She’s looking at the ritual site. “I swear to Charon…I hate the feel of the occult.” She shivers involuntarily. “It’s…”

“Creepy,” I provide.

“Wrong.”

I nod in agreement. It is wrong—contrary to the rules of life, death, and rebirth.

Natalie’s looking around in the trees outside the circle. “What’s that?” she asks and shifts, reappearing in front of me with something black.

“Where did you see that?” I ask.

“It was tangled in the branches.”

I wonder if our culprit hid in the trees to escape the hellhounds.

“Whoever this belongs to, they’re walking around with a pretty bad injury. There’s blood all over it. Plus…” She holds up the sweater. There are four gashes across the back where a hound’s claws bit into the fabric and the body wearing it.

I inhale sharply. Being bitten by a hellhound is pretty painful, but these gashes? They have to be excruciating.

“At least we have something to connect whoever did this to the scene,” I say.

“Yeah, but unless they’re shirtless, we won’t be able to tell,” Natalie says, frowning at the sweater.

“What’s wrong?”

She hesitates for a moment. “I just…well, there’s one name that comes to mind when I see cardigans, especially this one, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before…on Lennon Ryder.”