Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Two

Anora and the Eurydice

When I come to consciousness, someone’s tapping my cheek hard.

“Anora,” the voice says.

My throat feels raw, and I’m aware of a band of bruising around my neck, like Thane’s arm is still there, cutting into my skin. My hands are bound in front of me, palms pressed tight together. I don’t know where I am, but this place feels familiar. The air carries the weight of the dead. It settles over me like some sort of soul sucker, draining my energy. That tells me one thing: I have to be near a lot of dead people.

The tapping continues. “Open those eyes,” the voice coaxes.

I do and jerk away from Thane, who’s crouched in front of me. I can still feel his cold fingers on my face—the same fingers that crushed my windpipe.

“I wasn’t sure you’d wake up,” he says and stands, taking a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Once one is lit, he says with a smile, “I thought I might have done too good a job.”

I hate him.

But I don’t.

I can’t help thinking this isn’t Thane. He doesn’t look the same. This Thane is angrier, scarier, darker. This Thane is controlled by Influence.

“Thane…please.”

“Don’t beg, Anora. It doesn’t become you,” he says, taking a long drag from his cigarette. He acts so casual standing there, as if he hadn’t strangled and kidnapped me. It’s then I realize he’s brought me to the mausoleum—the entrance to Samael’s office. I knew it felt familiar. We’re in the main room, the one with the large stained-glass window. I’m resting on one of the red couches. The upholstery is soft but dusty and makes my skin crawl.

“Why then?” I demand.

“You’re going to help me get my mother back.”

“What?”

“I’ve been honest with you from the beginning about what I want,” he says. “When I was sure you were the Eurydice, I knew I had my bargaining chip. Charon will raise the gates for you if you are dying, and I can demand my mother’s soul is returned to me.”

“You have my coin,” I accuse, and he shakes his head.

“Lennon has your coin,” he says, and I’m not sure I can feel any worse. Shy was right, which means…

“She killed Lily?” I whisper. “And…you knew?”

Thane shrugs. “I didn’t want Lily to die, but she knew too much. Lennon felt she had to get rid of her.”

“You work together?”

“I don’t know the occult like Lennon does,” Thane says. “Once I’m able to open the gates and obtain my mother’s soul, she’s going to help me resurrect her.”

“With what?” I demand. “You don’t have a body!”

“There’s a whole cemetery full. We’ve been watching for the newly deceased. Lennon says it’s best to have a fresh one.”

Things are suddenly falling into place. With the coin, it’s possible Lennon can obtain a soul from Spirit. She’d resurrected Lily’s soul into her body for practice.

“You can’t be serious. Thane, your mom won’t come back right.”

He sucks in a breath. “I knew you’d say that, but Lennon’s been perfecting her spell.”

He’s delusional.

“I do hate this, Anora. I’d like to think we might have been friends.”

I grit my teeth. We were friends, I want to say, but I know now that’s not true. Instead, I ask, “How long?”

“How long what? How long have I been working with Lennon, or do you want to know when Influence took me?”

It is strange to hear him talk of Influence, as if he’s fully aware of the darkling inside him. I stare, waiting. Answers to both questions will suffice.

“Influence took hold the day my mom died,” he says. “Lennon approached me shortly after. We are united by our hatred of the Order. I introduced her to the death-speaker Underworld. She has a following there.”

A following? I try imagining Lennon rallying the death-speaker troops to defeat the Order. Prior to tonight, I’d have said it wasn’t possible, but you never know who or what you’re dealing with. The Lennon I witnessed today is completely capable of such a feat.

But it’s not even her presence that makes her a threat. It’s her story. She lost her mother to the Order. She was rejected by Valryn society, forced to go underground. Yet she’s survived.

People rally behind stories, and hers—it is powerful.

“You didn’t have to do this. You had friends.”

“You never consider that I might like what I’ve become.”

“Do you?” I challenge.

“It wouldn’t have worked anyway, Anora. We have two different perspectives on the world. You think it’s worth saving. I do not.”

I didn’t always care. Before coming to Rayon, I wanted to hide, lead a normal life, let the world spiral out of control around me if it meant I could continue going to school.

But I can’t live each day turning on the news to another horrific disaster perpetrated by Influence, knowing I can change it.

What kind of person would that make me?

No better than the thing that killed my poppa. No better than Influence.

Thane lingers in my periphery like the dead on the edge of campus. I wait until I catch him on his phone and bolt, charging out the mausoleum door. I slide on the slick cement, wet from dew, and land right in the middle of a dead man standing at the end of the steps. My chest seizes, and I can’t breathe. My arm goes numb, and I think for a moment that my heart might explode. I manage to stagger to my feet but don’t gain my balance before falling again. This time, I tumble through a dead woman in a long skirt. My stomach turns, and I hit the ground, vomit, and black out.

I wake to Thane lifting me from the ground. I feel like a child, cradled against his chest, my hands bound in front of me.

He returns me to the mausoleum and sets me down on top of a tomb in one of the adjoining rooms. From outside the mausoleum, I hear the howls of my hounds. They’ve found me. It means two things—the Valryn can find me faster, but Thane’s also running out of time.

He leans over me, eyes wandering over my face as if he’s trying to memorize me. I wonder if, for a moment, Influence has lessened its hold. Then he says, “I really do care about you, Anora.”

For a moment, I spy the other Thane, the one buried deep under Influence’s control.

Then he says, “Which is why I’m going to try and do this without killing you.”

Then Thane lifts a knife and brings it down into my shoulder.

I scream as the blade pierces my skin and hits the tomb beneath me with a clunk. He draws back and waits, as if expecting something to happen—and suddenly, I understand what he’s trying to do…summon Charon with my death.

My face is wet, stained with tears, and hot blood gushes from my wound, soaking my clothes and matting my hair.

I think of stupid things like how much blood I have to lose before it’s too much and where major arteries are located. This can’t be my end. Where the hell are Shy and Natalie? Mr. Val? The Order?

He draws the blade over his head again, aiming for the other shoulder. When the knife breaks skin, I swear it hits bone, and the impact makes my screams a thousand times louder. My ears ring.

“Stop, please, please, please.” My words turn into a whispered, breathless prayer, and Charon doesn’t come.

“Fuck!” he says, and his dark eyes contain a frantic fire. He lifts the blade to strike when a blur of black charges into him, knocking him off his feet. The next moment, Natalie is standing over me, reaching for my bound hands with a knife.

“Look out!” I shriek as Thane comes forward, swiping at Natalie with his bloodied blade. She springs away, dodging his blow. With Thane distracted, I roll off the stone slab and land hard on the floor. I try prying my wrists from the restraints, but the tape bunches and pulls painfully against my skin.

Thane and Natalie are locked in a knife fight. While Natalie fights like a dancer, her thrusts graceful and deliberate, Thane is full of rage, slicing and cleaving, backing her into a corner. At the last second, she shifts into her raven form and takes flight overhead, but Thane is quick and grabs her claw, jerking her from the air and slamming her into the wall. She reverts to her hybrid form, a heap of feathers on the floor.

“No!” I scream, and Thane advances on me. I bite at the tape around my wrists to loosen it. He lifts the blade over his head with both hands, and as it comes down, my hands are free and the thread comes to life in my palm. It lances him, piercing his chest. His eyes and mouth go wide as the thread passes through his throat and pops out one eye, then the other.

When he’s consumed, Thane’s body falls, lifeless, to the floor, and the coin lands on my chest with a thud, but I barely register the feeling, because a dark cloud stands in the place where Thane was. It is powerful and crackles with the energy of the dead. Influence hisses at me, and I swear to Charon it rears back as if to punch me and charges forward. The sensation of it inside me is something I don’t quite have words for. It’s like the sensation of falling when you’re upright and haven’t even moved. It’s the sensation that someone’s in the room with you but you’re alone.

It’s searching for something to latch on to—a dark seed it can fertilize and grow into something all-consuming and terrible.

It finds what it’s looking for in the form of my poppa’s death. The day I found him dead after he put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. It’s a day I’ve never forgotten but one I don’t bring to the surface often, yet Influence pulls it out of the dark pool of my mind, sets it high upon a pedestal, and tells me to worship it.

I scream.

My brain feels divided in two: one side rational, the other desperate for death. Tears rush down my face, and I feel split into a thousand jagged pieces. I’ll never be put back together again. Too much of myself has been lost. With this new sadness comes a power I’ve never felt, a pump of adrenaline, motivated by a wish to kill myself.

I cannot continue.

I have to end the pain and suffering…

Now.

The pain in my shoulders where Thane stabbed me is nothing compared to the way my heart seizes at the memory of Poppa’s death.

I push Thane’s lifeless body on the floor. He had a knife. Where is it?

There!

Just a few feet from me. I grab for it, but someone kicks it out of my reach.

“No, no, no!” I howl. Disappointment crashes into me hard. I try following the blade as it slides across the floor, but someone stomps down on my leg, then grabs a handful of hair.

I meet Lennon’s icelike eyes. My right hand is free to defend, and I send my sharp nails down her face. Her skin comes loose under my nails, and she screams, casting me aside.

“Bitch!”

Influence continues to invade my body, like thick oil, coating and suffocating all the parts of me that like the light.

“Your soul is mine!” Lennon hisses, reaching for me again. I grab her arms and pull hard. She tumbles over me and onto the ground. The impact jars her hold, and then I’m free. I stumble to my feet. My mind still feels split in two, and I understand that as much as I need to be free of Lennon, I also need to be free of Influence. I call the thread forth, just as shadowlike creatures circle me like sharks smelling blood. When they rise to the surface, it’s as thick, tar-like glue. I’m lodged in a puddle of darkling quicksand. I stumble, and my hands are consumed, quashing the thread.

I scream, trying to free myself, when I hear Lennon laugh. She bends so that her eyes are even with mine. “This is for your own good. Once Influence takes hold, you won’t feel so desperate to die. You’ll be used to this feeling of hopelessness and easier to control. Just like Thane.”

At the mention of Thane, I recall the marks on his wrists. Times when he’d cut himself, probably as a result of Influence taking hold.

Suddenly, it feels like someone’s cracking my head open, and I have this renewed determination to win, to defeat Lennon and Influence. I know how Influence corrupts. Grief might be all-consuming, but there are pockets of light, memories that bring a flood of feeling—sadness, yes, but also happiness and love and warmth. Sensations that make the darkness a little more worth it. All I have to do is knock some holes into his darkness.

And so I think about all the nights spent with Poppa on the old quilt Grandma Poppy made, watching the stars. He would spread it out, his crepe-paper hands decorated with brown spots and raised veins.

“Gotta bring Poppy,” he says and winks. “Help me set up the telescope.”

A chasm forms between my mind and Influence. Tendrils of its being reach out, stroking, testing my resolve.

I prepare the tripod. Poppa assembles the telescope. I sit on the quilt, the dew-stained grass already soaking through the blanket to dampen my clothes.

“Tonight I spy with my little eye,” Poppa says as he closes one eye to focus on something in the sky. He pauses and turns to look at me. “Well, why don’t you tell me.”

The tendrils draw back as if burned. Influences hisses.

I imitate him, drawing close to the telescope, closing one eye to gaze at what he’s located in the sky. I inhale sharply and exclaim, “Mars!”

Poppa laughs, his wrinkled face a map of his happiness and sadness.

“How right you are, my little astronomer!” He hands me a Twinkie, and I rest my head on his shoulder as I eat.

My eyes fly open as Influence tears from my mind. Lennon stands in front of me, a gun in her hand. When she realizes what’s happening, her eyes go wide, and she lifts her weapon.

“No!”

Influence races for her. The impact causes her to stagger as she absorbs the darkling. Before she can regain her stance, a black shape zooms before my vision. It crashes into Lennon and transforms as they tumble to the ground. The spell’s interrupted, and the coin and the gun go flying.

It’s Shy! I’ve never felt such joy. I want to collapse with relief, but another black shape enters the mausoleum and shifts. I’m caught in strong arms and held up.

“Oh no, you don’t,” a familiar voice says.

“Roth?”

“If you fall, the occulates will consume you,” he says. “Stay up.”

I obey, shaking as Roth unsheathes his scythe and starts stabbing at the occulate pool at my feet and hands. The creatures hiss and steam, and soon my hand and feet are free.

“Get the coins,” I order Roth as I stand.

I call the thread forward and move toward Lennon. She’s clawing at Shy, reaching for his hair and ripping feathers from his wings. Then she rears back and hits him hard in the side. He cries out and falls, breathless. Lennon scrambles to her feet and reaches for him, but she freezes when she notices me.

“You wouldn’t,” she says.

“Anora.” My name escapes Shy’s lips in a harsh breath, and he shakes his head.

I glance at his hand, and I swear I see a flicker of a silver thread in his palm. I can almost see the connection between us. But then it disappears.

My fist shakes, and as bad as I want to watch her soul being consumed, I know it’s not right—the thread has caused enough damage. As my thread reels back into my palm, Lennon reaches for a nearby scythe. A shot rings out, and she falls backward, hitting the ground hard.

I twist to find Roth holding her gun.

“Damn,” he says. “We should use these more often.”

Then I collapse. My vision blurs, and the last thing I remember is the sight of ravens swarming overhead.