Spellbent (39 page)

His jaw worked soundlessly for a moment before he got any words out. “They—they can’t be
normal
after that, they’ll be no better than demons—”

“If they go bad later I’ll send them right back where I found them. But until then, they deserve the chance to grow up in a nice place with decent people who love them. They deserve the chance to laugh and grow and learn that the world is a pretty cool place to be. They deserve it way more than you
ever
did.”

I stood up and stared down at him. “So before I accept that oh-so-awesome deal from you, I want to know what you’re going do for your baby brothers. Are you going to welcome them into this cozy family home of yours? Are you going to change their diapers, wipe their tears? What, exactly, are you going to do to make things right for the brothers you abandoned in hell?”

Jordan stared back at me, looking completely horrified. Through my stone eye, I saw the aura around him shift; he was subvocalizing some kind of spell. An offensive charm, or perhaps teleportation magic.

I barked an ancient word for “tongueless” and slammed my flame hand down on his right, pinning it to the desk. He gave a wordless scream, his eyes bugging out. There wasn’t a trace of guilt or regret on his face, just raw animal fear and pain.

“You think
that
hurts?” I shouted, the smell of his sizzling flesh and scorching mahogany filling my nostrils. “I’ll show you real pain.”

I closed my eyes and willed us both into the remnant of the Goad’s hell that existed in my fire.

When I opened my eyes again, Jordan and I were standing beneath the bare yellow bulb in Cooper’s chain-link bedroom in the empty, cold basement. Jarred memories glowed in the dark under the narrow bed.

“Where are we?” Jordan asked, his face gray.

“In a piece of the hell you dodged all these years,” I replied. “And as far as you’re concerned, I’m the Devil.”

Jordan whirled on the chained, padlocked door behind him, futilely rattling the cage as he tried to muscle it open. When it wouldn’t budge, he started shouting for help.

I gave a soft, bitter laugh. “Nobody can hear you in here, Benny. Save your breath.”

I knelt and pulled a jar from beneath the bed. The swirling memories inside flashed and strobed like red and black lightning. I could tell by the feel that they had belonged to Reggie Jordan. “Maybe you’re some kind of sociopath like your dear ol’ dad and you aren’t built to feel sympathy for anyone but yourself. But maybe you just grew up like any spoiled mundane rich kid and now you got a bad case of selfish. Either way, we’re going to see if we can’t make you feel a little something for your family’s suffering, okay?”

I held the jar toward him. “These are Reggie’s nightmares. They got so bad he finally killed himself. What exactly did you do to try to help your beloved cousin before that happened?”

“He—he never talked about his problems—”

“Or maybe he tried to talk but you never wanted to hear it?”

“He never told me what happened,” Jordan insisted. “We got to the farm, and we both knew something was wrong. Reggie made me wait in his car while he checked Out the house. Then he opened a mirror to talk to his mother, and she told us to burn the place down. I never went inside. He never told me what he found in there.
Never.”

“Someone once gave me a pithy little lecture regarding my aunt Vicky that I think very much applies to your situation, Benny. What was it? Oh, right: ‘A big part of knowing what’s going on is being
interested
enough to try to find out.’ And it doesn’t seem to me that you were very interested in Reggie’s life. Fortunately, you have me to clue you in.”

I dropped the jar onto the concrete floor. It shattered, splashing the contents in an irregular circle that quickly melted into a glowing silver pool.

Jordan was no match for me in this place. I grabbed him by the back of his neck, forced him down to his knees, pushed his face forward into the pool.

“Take a good long look, Benny,” I said as he struggled in my grip. “This is your sin of omission. This is how you failed your cousin. This is what you let happen.”

I pulled him from the nightmare pool when I felt him start to go slack, rolled him coughing and gagging to the fence.

“N-not my fault,” he insisted. “Not my fault.”

I materialized a fresh jar and swept the pool into it with a quick motion of my hand. “It seems that vintage didn’t broaden your horizons. How about Corvus?”

I reached under the cot and found Corvus’s memory of being forced to cripple himself.

“You weren’t responsible for their deaths, or their suffering, not at first. But the moment you became a real wizard, the moment you decided you were so important you should run the whole city, the day you decided you knew what was best for the rest of us—every day after that, what happened to them was
entirely
your fault, because you were the one who should have stopped it.”

I smashed the jar onto the floor and forced him down into the new pool.

“Can you feel that?” I said. “Can you feel what it’s like to push the saw through your own flesh and bone?”

Jordan shrieked in the pool, his hands scrabbling at the concrete, but I held him fast.

“His spirit had to relive that every day!
Every day!
You could have saved him, but you just let him suffer!”

I pulled him from the pool and lifted his head.

“No. . . I never.. . no. . .“ he said weakly.

Disgusted, I threw him against the chain-link fence. “So you’re not moved by the suffering of your cousin and Corvus? Fair enough.” My voice dripped with sarcasm as I put Corvus’s memories away in a fresh jar. “After all, Reggie was supposed to be the responsible adult. If he wasn’t man enough to take what the world dished out, then he was just a weakling, right? Doomed. You couldn’t have helped him if you tried, so why try? And Corvus, well, he’s not any blood relation to you, is he? He’s just a stranger. He might as well have been some mundane kid in a Chinese sweatshop putting the laces in your deck shoes. Out of sight, out of mind, not your problem, right?”

I went to the cot and pulled another jar from the darkness beneath.

Jordan’s eyes widened when he saw the glowing vessel.

“No, not that one,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Ah, this one you
do
recognize, don’t you, Benny? Every man should recognize the pain of the woman who gave him life.”

Jordan tried to crab-scramble away, but there was no place to go. I put him in an arm-bar, hauled him to the middle of the floor, and flipped him onto his back. I stepped on his neck to keep him down while I unscrewed the jar. He gasped in pain, grabbed my boot but couldn’t pry my foot away.

“This is the hell your mother was in while you were jacking off in boarding school,’ I said as I slowly poured the contents of the jar straight down into his gaping mouth. “This is the hell she had to endure for decades because of your cowardice. Every Christmas, every Easter, every Mother’s Day,
this
is what she was enduring because of your cowardice. Justify it to me. Go ahead. Justify it.”

Jordan couldn’t speak under the bitter silver stream, couldn’t take a breath, and soon his eyes rolled up into his skull. I tossed the empty jar aside and willed us back to his library.

We reappeared in the same positions as we’d left.

The air was thick with the stench of charred flesh. Jordan was still sitting at his desk, slumped in his chair, out cold. I released his nearly cremated hand and checked his neck for a pulse. He was still alive. Whether his mind was irretrievably broken, I didn’t know. And found I didn’t much care.

I turned his head to the side, then gently patted his cheek with my flesh hand.

“Sweet dre—on second thought, maybe not so much. Nighty-night.”

I stepped away from the desk. My rage was gone, but my arm still blazed. My eye fell on a nearby suit of German gothic armor, and an idea pinged. I went to the suit, pried off the steel gauntlet, vambrace, and greaves, then slipped the armor onto my arm. The metal quickly turned hot to the touch, but contained my flames nicely.

I left the library and found the butler sitting in a chair in the hallway. He looked supremely worried.

“Is Master Jordan. .. ?“

“He’s alive,” I replied curtly. “But I’d call a healer if I were you.”

I strode past him and went to the courtyard to find Pal.

Ever and Ever

Pal landed on Mother Karen’s front lawn, and I swung my legs over his head and slid to the ground.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll bring you something from the kitchen after I check on Cooper. I don’t think you’ll fit in the house. What do you want?”

“Erm.” He scratched the ground with one leg. “Ham, I think.”

“Ham you want, ham you get. I bet she’s got one in her freezer.”

I jogged across the grass toward the front door.

A cool breeze ruffled my hair, and then I heard the same faint whisper that had spoken to me in the Warlock’s apartment. “You’ve done well, my girl. Your mother will be so proud of you.”

I stopped, spun around. “Who’s there?”

“There will be plenty of time for explanations later. We’ll soon have the chance to meet properly,” the voice replied. “That man of yours has a bright soul, hard as a diamond. Not a scratch on it, even with a murder before the age of seven.”

“That wasn’t his fault,” I said. “He was forced to do what he did.”

“In the end, weren’t we all?” The voice faded away.

I shivered, continued on to the house. Mother Karen opened the door before I reached it.

“Is everyone okay?” I asked.

The witch nodded, looking tired. “It took me forever to get the babies to sleep. They’re a real handful.”

“Sorry about that. I did offer Jordan the opportunity to take care of his family responsibilities, but unfortunately he declined to take custody of the kids.” I paused. “I couldn’t have just left them down there...”

“No, no. Of course not. That would have been a monstrous thing to do. You did the right thing.” Karen wiped her hands on the front of her apron. “Cooper’s asleep in the guest room. I’m making a late dinner for everyone. Do you think you can eat something, or are you too wound up?”

“I can eat. Could you cook up a whole ham for Pal? I’ve been working him pretty hard.”

“Consider it done.” Mother Karen grimaced as I looked at the greasy ichor on my dragonskins. “But you are
not
bringing all that into my house. Wait out here, and I’ll find you some fresh clothes. I’ll tell the Warlock to hose these off and leave them to dry on the back porch. . .“

Cooper was fast asleep under the homemade quilt. I gently brushed his hair away from his forehead, then leaned down and planted a kiss on his lips. His eyes opened, focused on the elbow-length gray satin opera glove that the Warlock and Mother Karen had enchanted to contain my flames.

“Ooh, silky,” he said, his voice slurred. Mother Karen had probably given him a heavy-duty pain-killer. “But do you really think it goes with those khakis and the Hello Kitty T-shirt?”

“It goes better than the armor. The metal was starting to chafe.”

“Huh?”

“I love you, too, goofball,” I replied.

He looked at me with amazed adoration. “You are the best girlfriend
ever.”

I laughed. “Why, thank you.”

“I can’t believe you came after me. That was... incredibly awesome. I’m taking you to dinner in Paris. Rome. Wherever you wanna go.” He cleared his throat. “I heard Mother Karen talking. . . are we in a lot of trouble with the Circle Jerks?”

“‘A lot’ might be an understatement, but whatever happens, we’ll manage.”

He looked out the window at the bright harvest moon. “So much is going to change.”

“But not everything. . . you still love me, right?” He gazed up into my eyes. “Forever and ever and ever.”

I crawled onto the bed beside him. We kissed deeply, passionately, until Mother Karen stuck her head in and told us dinner was ready.

There’s more to our stories, of course. A lot more. I haven’t even gotten to the parts where I’ve changed the course of your life, have I? I mean, you’re probably
not
that guy who saw me and Pal flying to Jordan’s house, thought I was some kind of angel, and consequently had a religious epiphany that inspired him to quit his job and start an apocalyptic cult in Marysville. Seriously, you’re not him, right? Because that would be pretty weird.

Anyway. I’m out of paper and shotgun shells, so I need to make a run for fresh supplies. Wish me luck if that’s in your heart. If I make it back here, I’ll get to work on the rest. Which would have happened way before you found these pages, actually, so check my sock drawer. And if you
are
that guy.. . hands off my undies.

Want to delve back into Lucy A. Snyder’s world of dark and sexy magic?

Read on for a glimpse, inside
Spellbent’s
gripping sequel

The Devil in Miss Shimmer