“That would require actually knowing where to find the Shift. Not to mention the part about an angel’s blood a demon bone, and a dragon’s stone whatever that means.”
“Maybe it’s still at the penitentiary.”
He shook his head and handed me the journal. “We already searched what was left of that place.”
“Like your brother’s life depended on it?” I knew they had tried to find it because they believed the Shift belonged in Legion hands and Priest wanted to take it apart. But Jared’s life was on the line now.
Lukas seemed less convinced. He grabbed a hoodie and pulled it on over his T-shirt. “Let’s track down Priest and Alara.”
I didn’t need them to tell me this was long shot. Even if we found the Shift, I didn’t know how the angel blood, demon bone, and dragon stone fit in. Maybe they were symbolic references. Priest couldn’t just swing by and pick up a vial of angel blood at the hardware store. I considered asking Gabriel and Dimitri, but none of us trusted them enough to put Jared’s life in their hands.
The other details didn’t without the Shift.
There was still a chance to save Jared—one that didn’t involve trying to persuade a demon to leave his body and take up residence in someone else’s. And that possibility changed everything. It stirred something in the deepest part of me—a feeling I’d almost forgotten.
Hope.
27. MASTER OF BONES
If any of us leave, Dimitri and Gabriel will ask where we’re going.” Alara was right.
“I don’t want them looking for the Shift without us,” Lukas said.
No one argued. We needed to get to West Virginia State Penitentiary without Dimitri and Gabriel, and we had to do it fast.
“We’ll have to sneak out during the day,” Priest said. “Gabriel is up all night like a vampire.”
We were holed up in Lukas and Priest’s room, the safest place to plan. Between the constant soundtrack of Lukas playing Tetris and Linkin Park blaring from Priest’s MP3 player, Gabriel refused to set foot in here.
“If we disappear, they’ll come looking for us,” Lukas said.
Bear slept by the door, but I knew he be up if he heard anything in the hallway.
“I’m not leaving Jared here alone with them.” Even if I trusted Gabriel and Dimitri—a point I was still undecided on—I didn’t trust Gabriel’s rage. He couldn’t see past the demon when he looked at Jared, and Andras manifesting my mother had only made it worse.
Priest turned up “Castle of Glass. Two of us go, and everyone else stays to make sure Dimitri and Gabriel don’t do anything crazy.”
“That still leaves one problem.” Lukas said. “We left the Jeep parked on the street in Boston. It probably has a boot on it by now, and I doubt Dimitri and Gabriel are going to give us a ride unless we tell them what we’re looking for.”
A mischievous smile tugged at the corner of Elle’s lips. She was stretched out on Lukas’ bed, propped up on one elbow. “Maybe not to the prison. But I can get them to take us into town.”
“Then what? Moundsville is a ten hours from here,” Lukas said.
Priest perked up. “I can steal a car.”
“No one is stealing anything,” I said.
“I can get us a car.” Alara was swapping the black laces in her tactical boots with white ones covered in bleeding Ex-Voto hearts.
“How?” Priest still hadn’t figured out where Alara had gotten the Jeep, a detail she refused to divulge.
“Stick to designing weapons to save our asses and keep us from being possessed.” Alara winked at him. “Leave serious stuff like auto theft and saving the world to the girls.”
Even after we had explained Elle’s plan twice, Priest was having a hard time grasping the genius of it. “It’ll never work. Gabriel and Dimitri won’t care about buying that kinda stuff.”
Lukas kept his eyes on his game. He didn’t seem to want to discuss the specifics any more than we were hoping Dimitri and Gabriel would.
Alara checked the supplies in her tool belt: plastic soda bottle filled with holy water, paintball gun, ammo, pouches of herbs and rock salt, an EMF, a multi-tool. “You obviously don’t have any sisters.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Priest asked.
Alara winked at him. “Watch and learn.”
We found Gabriel camped out in the room with the glass dry erase boards. Azazel was stretched across the ebony table in front of him.
“Can I help you with something?” Gabriel didn’t look up from the barbed demon vertebrae he was polishing.
Alara and I fidgeted uncomfortably for his benefit. “I need to go to the store,” I said.
“I’m sure we’ve got whatever you want here.” He moved on to a hooked claw.
Alara cleared her throat. “Um… not everything.”
Gabriel rubbed the dark stubble on his chin. “Doubtful. But tell me what you need. If we don’t have it, I’ll go out.”
I gave Alara a questioning glance.
She shrugged. “If you’re sure. It’s girl stuff. It’s in a special aisle. There are lots of different kinds.”
Gabriel’s cheeks reddened.
“I have a picture on my phone.” Alara pressed a few buttons, pretending to look for something.
He held up his hand. “I’ll take you. But we can’t be gone too long.”
Priest, Lukas, and Elle were hanging out in the hallway, listening. I imagined the look on Priest’s face and smiled.
Gabriel wound the whip around his arm and hooked it behind him. “Do you both need to come?”
Alara gave him an innocent look. “Well, we both—”
Gabriel cut her off. “Let’s go.” He obviously didn’t want the details, which was exactly what we had counted on.
When we pulled up in front of the drug store, Alara hopped out first. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”
Gabriel gave her a hard stare, and opened a tattered issue of Soldier of Fortune. “I’ll wait here.”
Alara sauntered through the automatic doors in her black cargos like she owned the place, and the world along with it.
I followed her through the aisles toward the back of the store. “You’re really going to do this?”
She stopped in the makeup section and glanced in the mirror, smudging her black eyeliner a little. “Just give me a head start. Hang out in here for fifteen minutes before you go back to the car.”
That’s the part I was dreading, but it was worth it if she found the Shift.
Alara pushed open the swinging doors at the end of the freezer aisle, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. “There’s always an exit in the back of these stores.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “How do I look?”
It was the last thing I expected her to ask. “Are you serious?”
She zipped her hooded leather jacket and tightened her tool belt. “Of course I am. Do I look like the kind of girl a guy would mess with on the subway?”
For a second, I thought she was joking. But she was still waiting for an answer. “No.”
“Perfect.” Alara strode through the back door and straight up to the jet-black Dodge Challenger parked in the alley.
A broad-shouldered guy with dark hair and sun-kissed skin leaned against the car, his arms folded in front of him. Everything about him was rough around the edges, but he was gorgeous.
The moment he saw Alara, his bad boy demeanor vanished and his face broke into a wide smile. He didn’t wait for her to make it all the way to the car. Instead, he met her halfway and hooked an arm around her neck, pulling her in for a hug. “I knew you’d miss me.”
She pretended to push him away, but he only held on tighter. “What if I said I just needed a ride?”
He grinned. “I’d ask you what you did with the last ride I lent you. Then I’d say you were lying.” He held out his hand. “You’re Kennedy, right? Alara talks about you all the time. I’m Anthony D’Amore.”
I couldn’t decide what surprised me more—that
I was about to shake hands with Alara’s mystery guy or that she’d told him about me.
“Nice to meet you. Alara’s told me—”
“Nothing about me, right?” He took her hand and interlaced his fingers with hers. “That’s my girl.”
His girl?
Priest and Lukas would’ve killed to see this.
“How do you two know each other?” I had to ask.
“We met at one of those junior high mixers. Alara went to our sister school.”
A mixer? I had enough trouble imagining Alara in a club, let alone a school dance.
“I used to get into a lot of trouble. Alara was always the one who got me out of it.”
“Now it’s your turn to return the favor,” she said, nudging him playfully.
“You’re lucky I’m on break, or I’d be training. I have a big match coming up.”
“Are you a boxer?” I asked.
Anthony laughed. “No, Alara’s the fighter. I design Battle Bots for the team at MIT.”
He was a nerd. Alara’s gorgeous, tough-looking secret boyfriend was a robot-battling geek from MIT. I felt like Clark Kent had just told me he was Superman.
“We’d better go,” Alara said.
I gave her a quick hug. “You know you just became exponentially cooler in my eyes, right?”
“Just don’t tell Priest and Lukas.” Her smile faded. “If the Shift is there, I’ll find it.”
“I know.”
As I turned back to store, Anthony opened the car door for her. “So, where are we going anyway?”
“How do you feel about partially destroyed, haunted prisons?”
I underestimated exactly how angry Gabriel would be when I showed up at the car without Alara. Enraged was more accurate. The only thing that infuriated him more was my refusal to tell him where she’d gone.
The car ride back to the safe house was miserable, a Jekyll and Hyde meltdown on Gabriel’s part. But his reaction had been nothing compared to Dimitri’s.
After he’d forced Gabriel to account for every second of the trip, it was my turn. “Where is she, Kennedy?” Dimitri sounded too calm, which only proved he wasn’t.
He chose the athenaeum for our little chat, otherwise known as an interrogation. Dimitri leaned forward in the chair across front of the one I was sitting in, next to the mummy. “I’m not angry—”
“Yes, you are.”
He took a deep breath. “All right. I am angry. But only because Alara is out there alone, and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”
Tell him and get it over with.
“She’s not exactly alone.”
Gabriel looked up from where he stood at the railing. “Who’s with her?”
“A friend.”
Dimitri scrubbed his hand over his face. “This isn’t a game. There are already seventeen dead girls, and we have no idea what Andras capable of, even from in here.”
Dead girls.
I’d never heard anyone call them that before. Usually, they were the missing girls or the abducted girls, or, more recently, the bodies. Hearing Dimitri refer to them that way made the possibility of Alara getting hurt feel more real.
What if he was right, and there were vengeance spirits hunting us—or possessing people who were under Andras’ control, like my aunt’s back-eyed neighbors?
Could Andras control people and spirits from in here?
“I still don’t understand why she ran off.” Gabriel shook his head. “You aren’t prisoners. I thought you all wanted to be here to help your friend.”
“She is trying to help him.”
Gabriel dropped into the chair next to Dimitri’s and closed his eyes. “But who’s going to help her?”
Alara was at the site of a haunted prison with a mechanical engineer, who built Battle Bots in his spare time. How much help would he be if they encountered vengeance spirits, like the ones that tried to kill us the last time we were there?
“She went back to Moundsville.”
Dimitri tensed. “The prison? Why?”
I couldn’t tell them, and Alara wouldn’t want me to. She and Priest still didn’t trust Dimitri and Gabriel, and Lukas and I were on the fence. We didn’t know enough about them, or how much of what they’d told us was true.
Gabriel leapt out of his chair. “I’m going to find her.”
“You can’t be gone that long.” Dimitri snatched his coat, his expression grim. “Andras is getting stronger every day. At this point, if we lose control of him, Azazel is our strongest weapon.”
The tail coiled tighter, as if the demonic whip recognized its name.
“You’re the only one who can command it.” Dimitri swept past him and down the stairs. “I’ll find her.”
Gabriel stood at the railing until the tails of Dimitri’s black coat disappeared through the doors.
“Can I ask you a question?” It was something I’d wanted to ask him the last time we were alone, but I was too afraid of the answer. “The Order sounds like it was full of monsters. Was my mom hurting people? ”
Gabriel rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “The Order was working against the Illuminati from the inside for a long time. The Order believed the best way to protect the world from demons was to learn to control them.” He took a deep breath, his every movement punctuated with guilt. “They were conducting experiments—summoning weaker demons and trying to train them like pets. But what they were actually doing was letting demons into our world and giving them a chance to learn about us.”
“They didn’t see that coming?” I asked. When Dimitri and Gabriel told us about the Order, I imagined a group of Illuminati extremists, not a bunch of misguided scientists secretly training demons.
“I guess it’s like being the guy who invented the atomic bomb. You think about all the ways your invention can help people. But in the wrong hands, the same invention can destroy the world.” Gabriel hunched over the railing, staring at his hands. “It took me a long time to figure out the truth about their research.”
“What gave them away?” I asked.
“I started spending spent time in the labs. I thought we were using the demons to make weapons.” Gabriel unhooked the whip and let it roll out across the floor, the ivory bones unhinging one by one. He looked over at me, his eyes full of sadness and shame.
“How do you think I made Azazel?”
28. NIGHTMARES AND ASH
After Gabriel finished lecturing me, I relayed the details to Lukas, Priest, and Elle. Everyone agreed with my decision to tell Dimitri and Gabriel where Alara went. She still had a few hours head start on Dimitri. Maybe she’d find the Shift before he made it to the prison.
I snuck down to the containment area alone. The walk through the tunnel was the worst part—wondering whether I’d find Jared or Andras on the other side of the bars. I always held my breath until I knew, like I was holding it now.
Jared sat on the mattress, wringing his hands in front of him. The names of the dead girls were on the wall. But now there was something new. Circles and strange symbol that looked like they belonged in an old alchemy book, some repeated over and over in manic sequences.
He looked up when he heard my footsteps, his pale eyes sad and heavy.
I exhaled.
Today it was him.
For a long moment, neither one of us moved or spoke. There was too much to say and no way to say it.
I wrapped my hands around the bars, longing to be closer to him. “Are you okay?”
Is the demon hurting you?
Jared adjusted his ripped thermal to cover the worst of the burns on his neck. “Yeah. How about you?”
“Me? I—” My voice cracked, and I pressed my fingers against my eyes.
Don’t cry. You can’t do that to him.
When I moved my hands, Jared was standing in front of me, a few feet away from the cell door. His expression was full of sadness and anguish and concern—for me, instead of himself.
“I’m fine. I’m just wor
ried about you.” I kept my voice even, so the lie would sound like the truth.
I miss you and I need you and I want you back.
“What’s that stuff on your face?” He pointed at the black marks on my cheeks.
“Sigils. Gabriel taught me how to paint them.”
Pain flickered in his eyes. “What are they for?”
“Don’t do this,” I whispered.
“What are they for?” he repeated.
“Protection.” I couldn’t look at him.
His eyes never expressed any feeling when Andras was behind them. But now they betrayed Jared’s every emotion. “From me.” His voice trembled as he spoke the words. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Why?”
Jared lifted his hands, letting the chain hang between his shackled wrists. “I’m chained up like this for a reason. I’m a monster, and you can’t save me.”
My heart hammered in my chest. “Andras is the monster.”
“Don’t you get it?” Jared shook his chained wrists in front of him. “He’s inside me.”
“We’re going to figure out a way—”
He didn’t wait for me to finish. “I don’t want you to come down here anymore. I can feel him getting stronger, Kennedy. Sometimes I can even hear him thinking, like we’re the same person. His thoughts, the things he wants to do to you.…” Jared turned around, hiding his face. “You can’t ever come down here again. Promise me.”
I couldn’t stay away. Knowing he was hurting and not being able to hold him or comfort him was hard enough. “That’s not a promise I can make.”
Jared slammed his palms against the wet stone, then pushed off and walked toward the bars. “I’m not going to make it out of this alive. If the strain of the possession doesn’t kill me, Andras will once he doesn’t need my body anymore. That’s his plan. By then, he’ll be stronger and impossible to stop. You have to help me stop him.”
“Did you hear something in his thoughts?” It could be the break we needed.
Jared shook his head. “There’s only one way. We both know that. If you won’t kill me, I need you to help me do it myself.”