Jim obeyed wordlessly, blood oozing lazily from the claw marks on the left side of his handsome face. I stripped off my own sweatshirt and handed it back to him. “Cover that wound on your face, at least while we drive through the city. And pray we don’t get stopped by the cops.”
We made it back to the Guard house less than twenty minutes later. Raphael was waiting for us. He looked entirely undisturbed as Jim slowly and clumsily climbed out of the backseat, his shirt and pants soaked and sticky with the Mazikin’s blood.
“Go inside, Jim,” he said. “Get washed up quickly, and then I’ll heal you. The scarring won’t be bad if we do it soon.”
Jim walked into the house while Raphael peered into the backseat. “Why did you bring it back here?” he asked casually.
“Because it died in the car. And I was afraid there would be too much evidence if we left it behind. You might be able to protect me from indictment for something I didn’t do, but I don’t see how you can protect me if they find my skin under her fingernails.”
Raphael shrugged. “I can dispose of bodies.” He stood up and closed the car door, like the dead woman in the backseat was of as much concern as a bag of dirty laundry. “You need healing.” He nodded toward my neck.
“Jim goes first. His hand is pretty mangled, and he’s already feeling the effects of the venom.”
I followed Raphael into the house. The sound of the pipes told me that Jim was taking a shower, so I went to the kitchen and got myself a drink of water, and then joined Raphael in the parlor. “So … we met with a Mazikin this afternoon. She had some interesting things to say.”
Raphael gave me a small yet dazzling smile. “What a lovely way of putting it.”
“Was she telling the truth?”
“Only what you need, Lela.”
My fists clenched. “I’m not asking because I need it,” I blurted.
Raphael’s gray eyes met mine. “Malachi has not asked me for this information. Ever. He has had over seventy years to question me about what happens when a human is possessed by Mazikin. Why do you think he hasn’t?”
He was giving me such a knowing look, and I wanted to run from it. Or maybe punch it off his face. But it was a damn good question. “Maybe he knew you’d give him that bullshit not-what-you-want-only-what-you-need line.”
The smile didn’t leave his face. “But you said you thought he did need the answer. If that’s true, I would give him the information he needs. But only if he asks.”
Suddenly tired, I sank into the chair in front of the computer. “I don’t know why he hasn’t asked. I think it’s because … because he wanted to believe he was saving people. In his life here on Earth, he was powerless as everyone around him suffered and died, as his brother was killed in front of him. When he became a Guard, it gave him the chance to protect others. Even the ones taken by Mazikin. Even though they were lost and far away, he wanted to reach them. Do something for them. Help them.”
Raphael nodded. “Yes, I believe that’s what he wanted.”
Jim leaned in the doorway, his wounds standing out stark and grisly against his pale skin. “The human capacity for self-delusion is limitless,” he said softly.
Raphael turned to him. “Isn’t it, though?”
I went out to the front porch and sat on the swing to wait for my turn to be healed. Self-delusion. Jim was saying that Malachi had closed his eyes to the truth. My Lieutenant had chosen to trust in a lie to allow himself the luxurious belief that he was rescuing people.
That way, he didn’t have to face the alternative, which was that he was helpless in the face of all that evil.
It was a costly mistake. By killing the bodies Mazikin inhabited, he was giving them second chances. And third and fourth and fifth chances. If he’d only imprisoned them in the dark tower, or even in a cell at the Guard Station, he could have saved a few people. Maybe. The Mazikin would have sent more, but it still would have prevented their most powerful spirits from returning. Like Sil, Ibram, Juri. All of whom were either already here or had a chance to be, in part because Malachi hadn’t imprisoned them when he had the chance.
I scuffed my boots against the wooden slats of the porch, ignoring the throbbing sting radiating up and down the sides of my neck. Headlights turned into the driveway, and I recognized Laney’s car. She pulled to a stop behind the Taurus.
The one containing the dead hooker in the backseat.
I started to get up, but then looked down at the blood smeared across my sweatshirt. I pulled my knees to my chest and stayed where I was. This could get very bad very quickly.
It was dark inside her car, but I could see that their heads were close together. Too close. He didn’t emerge from the car for a full minute.
I knew, because I silently counted the seconds, my heart beating a sick, hard rhythm against my ribs. Malachi finally opened the passenger door and got out, his questioning gaze landing on mine immediately. I shot a fierce glance at the Guard car and shook my head, my eyes growing wide as Laney got out of her car.
I gritted my teeth and didn’t move. She was less than fifteen feet from where the dead woman was poorly hidden, where dark-red stains covered the backseat. Laney tossed her long hair over her shoulder and glared at me. “Hey, Lela,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I had to ask Malachi a question,” I answered in the friendliest voice I could muster. “He’s ace at pre-calc.”
Laney made a deeply skeptical noise in her throat as Malachi walked swiftly around the front of her car and met her before she could step forward. He stood close and bowed his head, speaking soft words meant only for her, and it hurt me more than the Mazikin claw marks on my neck. After a few minutes, Laney reached out and touched his arm, and he let her. Then she got back in her car and pulled out of the driveway, stopping long enough to wave to him and blow a kiss.
Malachi watched her go and then turned slowly to me. As he walked past the Guard car, he paused to look inside. With no discernible change of expression, he took the steps and sat down next to me on the swing.
“Who is she?”
“We caught a Mazikin. Tried to bring her back to interrogate her. It didn’t quite work out.”
He hooked an ankle over his knee and leaned back, staring out at the yard. “You were injured. How bad is it?”
“Just a scratch.”
“You’ve said that to me before.”
“This time it’s true. Most of this blood is hers. Jim was worse. Raphael is healing him now. How was your night?” I shouldn’t have asked, but some masochistic part of me needed to know.
“Pleasant,” he said, his voice giving nothing away.
“She likes you a lot.” I cleared my throat. Why did my voice have to shake like that?
“She also believes my heart belongs to another.”
He let the words fall like bombs into the space between us. My heart, already thumping hard, now beat double-time. I turned to look at him, his severe profile—a hard, dangerous kind of beauty. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He sat in silence, his gaze on the budding trees in front of us, and I hung on to those words with everything I had, wondering if what Laney believed was actually true. Was he trying to tell me it was? Was this an invitation, a hint, or just a report of the facts?
And could I be any more selfish, thinking about dumb high school stuff when everything Malachi believed might be crashing down around him? “We haven’t talked about what that Mazikin inside my mom told us today,” I said quietly.
“What is there to say?” he replied. His gaze was unfocused again, far away. It filled me with a savage ache, so much worse than the stupid jealousy that had been there before, especially as he added, “I have made yet another foolish, disastrous error, and in doing so have condemned countless innocents to eternal suffering.” The muscles of his shoulders were tight, shaking with tension and emotion. “At least the Mazikin that possessed your mother was too addled or ignorant to keep up the ruse. I’m quite sure Sil will be furious a
t her when he discovers that she’s corrected my idiotic misconceptions. Now,” he said as he stood up abruptly, “we should retrieve that body from the car.”
He rose and went into the house, and then emerged a moment later with a tarp. Together we tugged the body of the blonde prostitute out of the car and laid her on the starchy plastic. As we did, a small change purse fell from beneath her blouse. I picked it up and opened it.
Among a few neatly folded bills was her driver’s license. “Her name was Andrea,” I murmured, looking down at her beautiful smile in the picture, lit up by the sliver of moon above us, and then down at her white, bloodless face. Her eyes were still half-open. Her lipstick was smeared and smudged around her parted lips. I’d never taken the chance to really look at a person I had killed, too busy fighting or fleeing. Andrea. Did she have a family? A daughter? Had someone loved her? Was someone missing her right now?
“Malachi? What’s that thing you say over their bodies? You know, after you’ve killed one of them?”
He gave me a wary look. “It’s El Male Rachamim. A prayer for the dead.”
I bit my lip and knelt by Andrea’s head. With the tips of my fingers, I closed her eyes. I wiped her lipstick with the cuff of my sleeve. “Can you say it?” Maybe this would be what both of us needed.
He knelt next to me. “I cannot promise a perfect translation.” After a long pause, he said, “Ah … God who is full of compassion, who dwells on high …” He spoke slowly, carefully, with sadness and reverence in his voice. “Grant true rest on the wings of the Divine Presence, in the exalted spheres of the holy and pure, who shine like the stars, to the soul of … Andrea, who … who …”
He cursed and stood up suddenly. “I can’t do this.” He leaned over and rolled Andrea’s body into the tarp.
I slowly got to my feet, heavy with new understanding. Every time he’d chanted over the body of someone he’d killed, he hadn’t been praying for the Mazikin, or even for the body. He’d been praying for the human soul he thought he was freeing, far away in the Mazikin realm, unreachable except for the wishful words of his heart.
What did he have to pray for now?
His usually steady hands were trembling as he pulled the edges of the tarp tight. “I will take her to the basement. They’ll send someone to come and get her.” He picked up the wrapped body, slung it over his shoulder, and turned his back to me. “I’m glad you weren’t badly hurt,” he said, and then marched up the stairs and into the house.
TWENTY-FOUR
I DIDN’T MAKE IT home until four, and suffered through a few hours of dreams in which I stared at the world through a stranger’s eyes, wearing skin that wasn’t my own. Filled with hunger, an insatiable craving for one thing. Something I couldn’t have.
My alarm was almost a relief, but that keen sense of need followed me right out of sleep. I ran to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, just to make sure I was still me. I slipped out early and drove to the Guard house, because with Henry gone, I was the only one who could drive Jim and Malachi to school. It seemed beneath Raphael to have to do it.
When I arrived, only Jim was waiting for me. I glanced at his face. Raphael had done a pretty good job—the scarring was faint, and only when Jim turned his head could I see the narrow, silvery tracks crossing his pale, otherwise perfect skin.
He gave me a look I couldn’t decipher but that seemed to fall somewhere between pity and amusement. “Laney showed up this morning and offered to drive Malachi to school.”
We drove in silence. Jim folded his arms over his chest and leaned his head back with his eyes closed. Shutting me out. Or maybe catching a few moments of sleep, which was hard for all of us to come by these days.
Prom posters were plastered on all the glass doors at the front of the school. Just a simple lacy font, white on navy blue. Memories and Moments. It was a reminder of what we’d lost—and also that my senior year was rapidly coming to a close. I’d barely noticed. Prom was in three weeks, and graduation was only a month after that. It was hard to believe that a few months ago, I’d assumed I’d be here with Nadia, enjoying all of this. Now that Nadia was gone, I had nothing to look forward to except the hope that I could prevent a bunch of evil spirits from overrunning Rhode Island.
The cafeteria was packed with the before-school crowd. Tegan and Laney were sitting at a table under a row of prom posters, selling tickets to the big party. Jim peeled off to say hi to Tegan, whose face lit up when she spotted him. She tilted her head and frowned as her gaze lingered on his cheek, and when he reached her, she put her fingers up to touch the faint silver streaks on his skin. He pressed her hand to his face and said something that made her expression brighten again, and then both of them were laughing and leaning in close. As I watched the two of them head for their lockers hand in hand, I was glad I’d told him he could take her to prom.
I sank onto the hard cafeteria bench and put my backpack in front of me so that I could use it as a pillow. I’d just lowered my head onto it when someone sat down next to me.
“We won last night,” Ian said. “And no van sightings.”
I raised my head. Ian had his eyes on his large hands, which were gripping his knees in a way that looked painful. “Congratulations?”
His eyes met mine, and he gave me a quick smile; then pivoted so that he was facing me. “Do anything fun yesterday?”
“Hell no,” I said, and was rewarded with dimples.
I wondered if he’d wanted me to go to his game, if his halting silences on the phone yesterday had been him trying to figure out a way to ask me. I was overcome with this sense of want, for this kind of normal thing. Of having a guy ask me to watch his baseball game, of wondering if he liked me, of wondering what it might mean. But now I was a Guard, and on top of that, I’d managed to fall for a guy caught in the same trap. I scanned the cafeteria for Malachi, surprised he wasn’t at the prom ticket table with Laney. I finally spotted him at a table next to the cafeteria line, his back to the crowd, shoulders slumped. He looked … defeated.
“Still with me here?” Ian asked.
“Yeah. Sorry. I’m kind of in a haze this morning. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
He looked over at the prom ticket table. “Me neither.”
“How come?”
He laughed. “Nervous again. I got up in the middle of the night and ate my way through the kitchen. My mom was all over me this morning because I scarfed some stuff she was supposed to take to her book group.”
A chuckle escaped from my mouth, despite my horrible mood. “What did you eat, exactly?”
He shrugged. “They were these little cakes. Really good. I should have known better, though. I mean, they looked kind of fancy. She doesn’t usually buy that stuff for us.” He shook his head, still laughing. “I woke up to her screams. ‘My petit fours! My petit fours!’ I had no idea what was wrong until she barged into my room and waved the empty tray at me. I thought she’d be happy I put it in the dishwasher for her.”
“So a petit four is a cake? That’s what she was talking about?”
His smile brightened his whole face. “Best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. When she stopped yelling at me, I asked her where she’d gotten them.”
“And she actually told you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I can be persuasive. There’s a bakery in Barrington.”
“That’s a long drive for a little cake.” It was hard to feel down when he was with me. I looked him over, all carelessly graceful and long-limbed, and wondered how I had managed not to notice him in the last year.
“Long drive, yes. But worth it. Maybe we should go sometime.” He gave me a sidelong glance.
I sighed. “I don’t think I belong in Barrington.” It was the wealthiest town in the state.
Hesitantly, Ian slid the tip of his finger along a lock of my hair. I didn’t move away or flinch. I let him, astounded at the warmth in his gaze. “You belong anywhere you want to be, Lela.”
I rolle
d my eyes. “And a few places I don’t.”
“Will you go to the prom with me?” he blurted, and then looked kind of stunned that he’d actually said it.
I let out a shaky laugh. “You want to go to prom with me?” I searched his face for a joke that I rapidly realized wasn’t there.
He gave me a lopsided smile. “Badly enough to eat my mother out of house and home, just to control the nerves. Are you going to turn me down?”
I stared into his bright green eyes and was overcome with the same feeling I’d had last Friday—I wanted this. I wanted this ordinary, normal life. No heartache, no death or killing, no misery. “No.”
He leaned a little closer. “No, you don’t want to go with me, or no, you’re not turning me down?”
“I’m not turning you down,” I said.
He grinned. “Really?”
“Yeah. No promises about my dancing skills, though.”
Ian stood up. “This is awesome. I’m going to buy our tickets, all right? I’ll see you at lunch?”
I nodded mutely, already wondering if I’d made a mistake. What the hell did I think I was doing? But then I looked over at Laney, who was twirling her hair around her finger while she stared at Malachi.
Then she screamed.
I whipped my head around in the direction she was looking and nearly screamed myself. Evan Crociere, that gangly, disheveled drug dealer, was behind Malachi, whose head was still bowed over his book.
In Evan’s hand was a ballpoint pen.
I was in motion before it descended, but it was too late. With utter ferocity, Evan drove the pen right into the side of Malachi’s neck.
Everything in my world narrowed to a point, and the only thing that mattered was Malachi. I vaulted over the cafeteria table where I’d been sitting and sprinted along an aisle, grabbing a tray from the stacks as I ran.
With a crazy glint in his eye, Evan yanked the pen out of Malachi’s neck, painting the wall beside them with a spray of Malachi’s blood. Despite the wound in his neck, I would have expected Malachi to respond more quickly, but he seemed so caught off guard by the attack that he barely had time to lean away before Evan buried the pen in the junction of his neck and shoulder again.