Seduction (44 page)

Well, there was at least that. Feelings were a crapshoot. Too many bad ones. But Peter . . . I didn’t want to die without seeing him, without telling him how much I loved him.

Peter . . .

It was the last thing I remember thinking before giving in to the nothingness.

• • •

I felt something pulling at me.

“What,” I said stupidly, not knowing what it was I was asking. The word came out in a sandpapery rasp. My tongue felt like some gigantic thing that was too big to fit in my mouth. I opened my eyes with an effort. They were crusted closed, and I realized I must have been unconscious. The room seemed to be moving now, what I could see of it through the thick smoke that swirled around like a whirlpool.

I tried to lift my head. All I could see were flames and fallen timber. All I could smell was the acrid stench of burning bones.

Oh, my God,
I thought,
am I in Hell?
Had I become the Darkness at last?

Then I saw a face come into focus above me. Peter’s face. Or at least his jaw and above it, his nose, crusted with blood. That was all I could see of him. He was sweating. There were black streaks on his skin. He was carrying something disgusting-looking. A body covered with blood and soot.

Oh, yeah. It’s me,
I realized. Peter was carrying me out of Hell. “Hey, thanks,” I said. Or thought I did. I wasn’t sure I could speak anymore.

I began to cough, so deeply that it sounded like a bullhorn, so long that I started to choke.

“Just hold on,” Peter said. He was coughing himself, but he pressed me tighter against him. I nestled my head against his chest, where I heard his heart beating. And with each beat, I could hear what he was thinking.

I will never . . . let you go . . . I will never . . . let you go . . .

“I know,” I said, just as we burst out the door into the clean outdoor air. Peter placed me gently on the grass, out of harm’s way.

A fire truck pulled up nearby, its blaring siren winding down in a low wail as the firefighters unwound the big hose.

I sat up, and Peter threw his arms around me. I coughed some more. I wanted to tell him how much I loved him, but I couldn’t talk very well. So I touched him instead. It was just a brush across the top of his mangled hand, but I knew he understood everything because of the way he looked at me. At that moment I knew absolutely that even though I was bloody and dirty and my hair was probably burned off, he still thought I was the most beautiful thing in the world. In that instant I understood what Azrael had meant with his dying words:

Life is precious, if you make it so.

It really wasn’t about how long you lived. It was about how much love you could squeeze into the time you had. That was the real meaning of forever.

Azrael had been with Veronique for only a fraction of his
unnaturally long life, yet his love for her was strong enough to defeat even the Darkness. In the end he had called her name, and though I hadn’t been able to see her, I believe her spirit came to take him to the Summer Country, where they would always be together.

I kissed Peter. “Forever,” I said.

He understood. “Forever.”

EPILOGUE

When I was finally able to stand up after picking out the glass shards that had shot into my skin when the windows burst, I saw Fabienne. She was kneeling on the ground with her face buried in her hands. There wasn’t much I could say, I knew, to make her feel better, so I just sat down beside her.

She raised her tear-stained face. “They’re all gone,” she said. “All of them.”

Fabienne, Peter, and I were the only ones who’d made it out of the house. Her mother was gone. The man she’d thought of as her uncle was dead. The place that was the only home she’d known was a smoldering ruin.

Peter came over and hunkered down beside us.

“Did you find Jeremiah?” I asked.

“He wasn’t in.”

I sat up. “So what happened to him?”

Peter shook his head and blew air out of his nose. “I don’t know.”

“Is he still alive?”

Peter shrugged.

“Well, did he just disappear, or—”

“For goodness’ sake, I told you, I don’t know!”

“All right,” I said with a sniff. “I was just asking.”

He sighed. “Are we fighting again?”

“Is that bad?”

He smiled. “No.” He rubbed a handkerchief across my face. “It’s normal.” Gently, he put his arm on Fabienne’s shoulder. “The main thing we have to do right now is find our way home,” he said softly. “Are you up for that, Fabby?”

“It would probably be best if we didn’t stick around to talk to the police,” I added.

Peter shushed me, gesturing with his eyes toward Fabienne, who was facing a lot of loss at the moment.

But she was stronger than she looked. “Katy’s right,” she said. “We should leave now, before anyone questions us.”

That was for sure. Once we started to explain anything about the Abbey of Lost Souls, we’d be opening a can of worms that might never get closed again.

“Okay.” Peter stood up. “I’ve got a car waiting—”

“No car,” Fabienne said. “Come with me.”

Peter and I exchanged worried glances, but we followed as Fabby walked toward the river, where it was a lot quieter.

She wiped her eyes as she turned back to look at the charred ruins of the abbey, shimmering in waves of heat and spray from the fire hoses. From the pocket of her hoodie she took out the photograph she’d taken from her room. It was an old sepia-tinted picture of Jeremiah Shaw, wearing a tuxedo.
There was a woman on his arm, a flapper from the Twenties, judging from her spangled dress. Sophie.

“I didn’t even get to say good-bye,” she said.

We rarely do,
I thought. We’d all had to leave so many people, or had been left by them. But the greatest losses were the ones who might have loved us but couldn’t. I would never know my mother, who’d died before I could imprint her face on my memory. Peter, too, had missed out by being orphaned at six. His great-uncle Jeremiah had come into his life too late to have given him a real sense of family.

And Fabby . . . well, her mom hadn’t been very good to her, but maybe that’s what made her death so painful for Fabienne. There was nothing left for her but a lot of “might have beens.”

Maybe, in time, Sophie might have come around to realizing that her daughter was a greater gift to her than being a siren, and that the bond between them had been more powerful than a spell to keep them beautiful. But there hadn’t been enough time for that.

Funny thing: No matter how much time we have, it never seems to be enough. I guess we are all lost souls, in a way, with only this moment to live.

“There’s just one thing,” I confessed reluctantly.

Peter looked annoyed. “We’ve got to get out of here, Katy.”

“Yeah, well, you might not want to take me along after I tell you.”

He blew hair out of his eyes. “Go ahead,” he said. “What’d you do now?”

“Well, I—er . . .”

“Yes?” His hands were on his hips.

“I might be infected with the Darkness,” I said.

Peter threw up his hands and turned his back to me. “Great,” he muttered.

“But this doesn’t seem possible,” Fabienne said, frowning. “You do not seem to be evil.”

“I don’t feel evil either. But I was the closest person to Azrael when he . . .” Thinking of him made me choke up. “When he died. That’s how it spreads, through death.”

“Are you sure he died?” Fabby asked. “At that moment when you were close to him? Did you see him—”

I held up my hand to stop her. The memory of my friend walking willingly into the fire was more than I could bear.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I only thought . . . that maybe . . . he waited . . .” Her voice faded away. She was squinting at something in the sky. “Katy . . .”

“He did wait,” Peter said, pointing toward the house.

Above the smoldering wreckage of the ancient abbey, in the rolling clouds of soot and black smoke, an image was appearing. As I peered more closely, I could begin to make it out: a face, ferocious and depraved, covered in scales, with yellow slitted eyes that glowed through the black clouds like jewels.

“The Darkness.” There It was again.
It.
Feeling nauseous, I staggered backward, but Peter caught me.

“It went up in smoke because there was no one close enough to infect when the old man died,” he said. “He must have stayed alive until he knew you were safe from him.”

My eyes welled with tears. Azrael had done that for me, stayed alive for me, even though his burned body had been in agony. How hard that must have been for him, I thought. How
badly he must have suffered during those last minutes of life.

Thank you,
I said silently.
Thank you for giving those minutes to me.

Fabby squeezed my hand. Then she placed my other hand in Peter’s. “Hang on tight,” she said. “We’re leaving now.”

“Where are we going?” Peter asked, puzzled.

“Whitfield.” She looked at me and smiled. “You’re—
we’re
—going home.”

Then, with a sensation that was sort of like how it feels when a flashbulb goes off in your face, the whole world instantly whited out while Peter, Fabienne, and I hung suspended in space with nothing to hang on to except one another. It felt like going down a roller coaster at top speed, with no gravity and no time.

For a moment I almost panicked, but then I told myself that Peter was holding my hand. I knew he would never let me go even if his arm were cut off, so I could stop worrying. Besides, Fabby was smiling like she’d done this a hundred times before. Her hair was blowing all around her. She looked like a mermaid or something, swirling in magic.
Her
magic.

Gosh, she’s pretty,
I thought. But Peter was looking only at me.

The nut.

MOLLY COCHRAN
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than twenty-five books. Her first novel,
Grandmaster
, written with Warren Murphy, was a
New York Times
bestseller and Edgar Award recipient. She and Warren Murphy also wrote the international bestseller
The Forever King. Publishers Weekly
called
Legacy
, the first book in this series, “an exciting and well-written tale of contemporary witchcraft and romance.” She lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Visit her at
mollycochran.com
.

A P
AULA
W
ISEMAN
B
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Simon & Schuster • New York

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