“Just take your shirt off,” I answered.
He paused, blinking at me, and then he began unbuttoning. As he stretched his arms back to remove the sleeves, he doubled over. “Son of a—”
“Easy,” I murmured, and eased the shirt past his shoulders. The intimacy of removing his clothes painted a hot stroke of embarrassment over my face, but it was quickly replaced by a flush of cold horror. “Oh, Haden.”
He looked down at the wound. “I do believe that is going to leave a scar.”
I didn’t appreciate his sarcasm. The wound was festering and mottled. Dried blood, as well as fresh, covered the purplish mass. I saw his aura flare around him. Where his wound was, however, there was an absence of its glow. The gap was alarming, though I couldn’t say for certain why I knew it was a bad thing. The knife had broken his spirit, literally. It reminded me of an unfinished bridge, a breach that shouldn’t be.
I took a deep breath and wet down a cloth with warm water. I longed for a good old-fashioned fainting spell, but there was no getting out of this. “You’re probably going to hate me for a few minutes. This is going to hurt.”
He didn’t answer, so I met his eyes with mine. They were fathomless. I ached with how much I’d missed him.
“I don’t think I could ever hate you,” he said simply. He looked at my arm and wrinkled his forehead. “He bruised you.”
I brought my arm up and inspected the blue and purple skin. “It’s nothing.”
He took my hand. “You have such fragile skin.” He pressed a kiss to the inside of my wrist.
I shivered. Why was he making this so hard? “I’m not fragile, Haden.”
“No, you’re not. You certainly proved that today.”
I looked away, but he gently cupped my chin and brought my gaze back to his. “We need to talk about what happened in Under. How did you get there?”
Looking into his eyes hurt too much, so I avoided the contact and inspected his injury. “I don’t know, really.” I began pressing the cloth to the outside of the stab wound, getting most of the dried blood worked away so I had a better idea of the damage. His abdominal muscles twitched and tensed under my hand. I dabbed around the wound and then rinsed the cloth. “I played the song . . . the one from the first night in Under. The one they played in the labyrinth. Somehow I knew it would work. I was trying to find my father.”
“You should have come to me.”
I pressed too hard and his face screwed up in pain. “You weren’t around.”
“Theia . . .”
“Nobody had seen you since you left the party with Brittany.” I paused. “I know I shouldn’t be jealous. I’m the one that broke up with you. I just didn’t expect you to replace me so quickly.”
“Replace you? Now I
am
angry. I didn’t replace you. How could you even think that? I went home shortly after you left the party on Saturday night, but a few hours later Brittany called me. She was drunk. She told me she’d been having nightmares about you every night.”
“Me?”
Haden hissed as the cloth got closer to the open wound. “She said the weird part was that several other people at the party said they’d been having the same dream. The last few nights, just as they began to fall asleep, you would show up with glowing red eyes. They couldn’t move or breathe or wake up. Brittany was getting more and more agitated, so I drove back to the party, which had moved to Noelle’s.”
His voice got tighter the closer I got to the wound. “She was already mostly unconscious when I arrived. She’d been so sick, it didn’t take much booze to put her over the edge. I offered to take her home, hoping to get the rest of the story. People saw us leaving. She was belligerent and out of it, so I carried her. I suppose they assumed we were hooking up.”
“Where did you take her?” My own voice was tight as well. The wound was angry and ugly. It made me queasy and lightheaded.
“I took her home. Jesus, that stings.”
“I’m sorry. I’m being as gentle as I can.” I bit my lip and concentrated on not showing my revulsion. “What happened then?”
Haden dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling. His chest rose and fell heavily. “Her parents were still out of town, so I carried her all the way into the house. I tried talking to her, but most of what she said was gibberish.”
“Did she say anything more about me?” Was I really making nocturnal visits to the sneetches?
“No. Not a word. I even tried to bring you up. She was too far gone. I put her to bed.” He paused. “Fully clothed, mind you. And then I left. That was the last time I saw Brittany.” He lifted his head and fixed me with a look that reminded me he was still a demon, albeit a very charismatic one. “Are you satisfied?”
“I believe you,” was all I’d admit to.
“And then I went to Under.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been forming an army.” Before I could ask, he continued. “We’re staging a coup. I didn’t tell you about it because . . . well, you wouldn’t like it. I’m going back, Theia. I’ve been planning this for a while, actually.”
“Haden, no.” All the reasons that was a bad idea began ricocheting through my head. I’d broken my heart so he could have a normal human life and all the while he’d been planning to return to Under? “Why didn’t you tell me? Were you just going to disappear?”
“You broke up with me, remember?” It was an accusation posed as a question.
“It sounds to me like you were planning this before we broke up.”
He held his jaw so tautly it must have ached. “Mara has to be stopped. It’s my job to keep you safe.”
I threw one of the rags into the sink. “Your job? I’m not a responsibility, Haden.” My outrage was quickly boiling over. I took a deep breath, trying to stay in control. “What happens if you win . . . or, God forbid, lose? It’s not fair that you kept this from me.”
“Like you came to me when you started worrying that your demon side was getting stronger? Don’t look at me like that. Of course I knew. I kept waiting for you to ask me for help, but instead you pushed me away. Look, I don’t want to fight. We both should have been more honest.”
“You didn’t answer my question. If you win?”
“Then I take my place in Under.”
I sucked in a breath. “No.” A shock of cold froze my blood at the thought. “Haden, you can’t do that.”
“I have to. I was hoping that someday, somehow, I could find a way we could be together—but it has to be after the danger is gone. You already compromised your soul for me once. I need to make sure Mara can’t hurt you again. So, yes, I was going behind your back because I knew you would try to talk me out of it.”
It felt like a betrayal to know that he’d been plotting a course of leaving me without my knowledge. “So it’s okay to lie to me if it makes me easier to live with?”
“Of course not. I’ve known all along it wasn’t okay. It doesn’t change the fact that I have to do it. Do you think I enjoyed knowing how much I was going to hurt you by leaving? But then, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway, since you left me first—right?”
Anger warmed my face and I turned away. “It sounds like you’re just mad that I beat you to it.”
Haden grasped my wrist, pulling my attention back to him. “I would have come back to you.”
I twisted from his hand. “Unless you died.” He wanted to look away then, but I silently dared him to keep the eye contact. “You were going to rush headlong into some kind of war. What would happen to me—to all of us—if you didn’t come back?”
“It’s a chance I have to take.”
He hadn’t used past tense. “You’re still going through with it?”
He closed his eyes. Getting that small distance from me made his words seem sharper, more forceful. “I will make sure she can no longer threaten you or those you care about. If it’s the last thing I do, I promise you that.”
I wanted to throw something, hit something. “I hate that you lied to me . . . that you’ve been lying.” I thought about how hard it had been to break ties with him when all along he’d been planning on doing the same.
“I lied because I love you. Everything I do is because I love you.”
Though I knew he meant the words, they felt hollow. What good was love now? I shook my head. “Did you see my father . . . when you were in Under?”
“No, I didn’t know he was there.”
Something else niggled at my brain as I returned to dabbing the cloth around his cut. “How did you find me tonight? If you were in Under, how did you know to find me here?”
“I listened to my heart,” he answered, very softly.
His words made my own heart trip and stumble over all the blocks I’d tried to put between us. I felt the pull and I wanted to fall back under his spell as if I’d never left it. No. That couldn’t happen. I had to be stronger. I tried to find the anger I had felt only a moment before and held tightly to it. I stepped back, trying to put some distance between us. The wound was as clean as I could get it.
He was right—it was healing already.
Which meant it was on to the next impossible thing on my to-do list. It was hard to believe it was still the same day. Every time I came up for air, my head got plunged back into the icy water. “If the sneetches are all dreaming about me, then I must be the one feeding from them. I thought they were flowers, Haden. I swear to God I thought they were flowers.”
“Tonight wasn’t the first time?”
I shook my head slowly.
“How did you get there the other times?”
I washed my shaking hands, all the words from our conversation finally sinking in and making a home in my brain. “I don’t know. I just kept waking up there.”
I looked into the mirror above the sink, surprised to see Haden’s reflection behind my own. His face was bruised from the fight outside and he was tired, so tired. But he rested his hand on my shoulder and kissed my messy curls. “Are we done with the stupid breakup now?”
I wanted that more than anything. I wanted to rest. I wanted to feel the peace I always felt in his arms, but how could I? How could I lead him down the path of his own destruction? Especially now, knowing how out of control I’d been without even knowing it. “How can you still want to be with me?” And how could I trust him?
He turned me around to face him, his hands on my shoulders. “You were tricked into smelling the flowers, Theia. Why would that make me want you less?”
I swallowed the tears. “I’ve been slowly killing my classmates. I need to be locked up or something.”
“I’m not convinced you’re to blame.”
“You heard what Brittany said . . . and you saw me do it.”
He squeezed my shoulders gently. “Brittany was out of her mind. She’d been sick and then she added alcohol and who knows what else at that party. Just like you were deceived by the flowers, it’s possible she and the others were deceived by Mara. She feeds nightmares, remember? She could have planted those dreams in their heads.”
My chin trembled; the tears were imminent. I felt like there was no place to step that didn’t turn my world upside down. “Do you really think I could be innocent? Oh, Haden, I feel so terrible. I had begun to think it was you and it was probably me all along.”
“You were definitely draining souls when I found you, but I don’t think you’re strong enough yet to be the one responsible for all the sickness in Serendipity Falls. And I can assure you it wasn’t me.”
Though I should have put a stop to it, the weight of his hands on my shoulders felt good. I brought a shaky hand up to wipe at the tears gathering in my eyes. I didn’t understand how I could be so angry with him and want him at the same time. “How have you been able to fight the urges all this time? It’s so hard. I’m afraid that part of me knew what I was doing, but I didn’t want to stop, so I pretended not to know.”
Haden exhaled a sigh that seemed bottomless. “The urges are powerful. We both know that. But there is something more powerful and you have to believe that. The thing that you will do anything to protect, anything to save . . . that is the thing that will keep you strong. For me, it’s you.”
He tucked a curl behind my ear and I was suddenly quite aware that he was shirtless. The intimacy, the sense of the forbidden, the ache in my chest—all conspired against me. It would be so easy to fall back into his arms, to let him comfort me, to forget the lies and the hurt. But my father was still a captive, Mike Matheny had suddenly become a problem, Amelia needed our help, the passion I felt for Haden would destroy him if we gave in to it, and I was dangerous to my friends and family and every soul I encountered. They never should have brought me back from Under. I should have stayed below and been stronger. I was guilty no matter who was actually consuming the souls.
“I can’t do this,” I whispered.
“You’re where I find my strength, Theia. Your love changed me. I will always come back for you.”
“I’m more like Mara than you think,” I argued.
“You are nothing like Mara.”
I thought of that little girl and her teddy bear. “You don’t know what I’m capable of. I’m not even sure I know. I can’t be your girlfriend right now. I can’t be counted on to be anything to anyone.”
I brushed past him to get out of the small bathroom. Everywhere we touched sparked, singeing me with longing. He held me gently inside the door and leaned down to whisper into my ear. “You don’t have to do this alone. When you’re ready, I’ll still be here. I will
always
be here.”
The moment was the edge of a cliff. I wanted to let him hold me back from the fall. My traitorous heart skipped a beat in order to sync to the rhythm of his. I had to give him up, though. I had to give all of them up. I imagined the looks on their faces when I told them that I had slipped into the sleep of a child to give her a night terror. How would I explain to Donny and Amelia that I relished the scent of human fear? How could they ever trust me after they learned that I felt so good after I took the essence from the souls of the “flowers” I had found in Under.
They were better off without me and all my failings. Once they were all safely home again and we figured out what was wrong with Mike Matheny, I would return to Under and free my father. Then I would disappear for good.
And then Donny screamed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
W
e rushed out of the bathroom to see Mike on his feet in the corner and Gabe and Varnie standing in front of him trying to stay between him and the girls. The mood was definitely tense.
“What’s going on?” Mike asked. “Why won’t you let me out of here?”
“What happened?” I asked.
Donny leaned on the broom she was holding. “I might have overreacted. I’m a little jumpy. I was sweeping and Mike regained consciousness, sitting up and rambling like a crazy person, and I screamed. He startled me, plus he’s all whackadoo.”
Mike looked up, his eyes red and glassy, his upper lip puffy from the fight outside. “Look out!” Mike shouted. “Haden’s behind you!”
We all looked at one another like
Yeah, and . . . ?
Haden was with us the whole time. At any rate, he moved in front of us and stood directly before Mike, waiting for another fight.
“He’s a demon,” Mike explained.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Donny, of course.
Gabe and Varnie closed in on him and “convinced” him to sit in a chair.
I looked to Ame for advice on how to proceed. “Amelia?” She stood transfixed. Just staring at Mike. “Sweetie, are you all right?”
Donny let go of me and we put Amelia between us like we were bookends.
Donny said, “She hasn’t said a word since we got in here. After she stopped crying she just stopped making any noise at all. It’s like she’s catatonic. Varnie has been trying to get through to her, but she’s someplace else.”
To prove her point, she waved her hand in front of Amelia’s face. Nothing registered. Amelia was in a trance of some kind and that really scared me. Ame was our solid ground, our group mother and the expert on all things paranormal as well as all things Mike Matheny. I didn’t like seeing her “there” but gone. Selfishly, I needed her sweetness and boundless enthusiasm more than ever.
I looked back at Mike and noticed a strange trail of light between him and Amelia. It wasn’t bright like a healthy aura, but rather an almost sickly color of gray. It roped like a fleshy intestine and was pockmarked in some places with odd funguslike growths in others.
I pointed to it. “Does anybody else see that?”
Everybody looked in the direction I pointed, but nobody jumped in with an affirmative answer. Great. My jolly good day just continued with all the fun.
“What do you see, love?” Haden asked.
“There is something connecting Amelia and Mike. It’s like an aura of some kind, only it’s really unhealthy-looking.” Unnatural.
“Describe ‘unhealthy,’” Varnie said.
I nodded to him. I had to hope that he would understand. Without Ame contributing to our cause, we were quite short on expert opinions. “Okay, it’s a gray . . . -ish light that extends between the two of them like a cord. Almost . . . um . . . gelatinous-looking. It reminds me of when we looked at different germs under a microscope in biology.”
“Fantastic.” Donny threw her arms up. “Is it too much to ask that you guys attach yourself to normal boys? Who would have guessed I’d have the only normal boyfriend?”
Mike got my attention. “It’s not your fault what you’ve been doing.” He jutted his chin out at Haden. “If you turn from him and come back to where you belong, I swear I can get you the help you need to stop. The kids are dying. You’re killing them a little more every night—”
“Shut up!” Haden yelled, lunging at Mike, but Varnie stepped between them. “I should have killed you when I had the chance, you lying piece of—”
Mike shook his head in disgust, but before he could say another word, Donny wanted to know what he meant by me killing them every night.
I took a deep breath. “You saw me today, Donny. It’s possible that all the sneetches are sick because of me . . . because I can’t control what changed in me when Mara gave me her blood.”
Mike shook his head. “Theia, it’s not your fault. Haden brought this on you, on all of us. But we can stop it. We have to kill him. It’s the only way.”
My blood ran cold.
Before I could respond, Varnie had already begun. “Whoa, dude. Chill out. That’s my best friend you’re talking about. How about you tell us about whatever fleshy trail thing you’ve got attached to Miss Amelia and lay off the demon rhetoric.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mike answered. “I hardly know Amelia. I don’t have anything attached to her.”
Varnie looked at me and I pointed to it again. “I know you can’t see it, but it’s still there. Pulsing.”
“Gross,” Donny said.
“Don’t you understand?” Mike began again, and we all rolled our eyes. “You’re special. I’m special. We’re meant to bring the worlds together. The queen told me so.”
“The queen?” We all looked at one another when we asked the same question.
“The Queen of England?” Gabe asked.
“No, of course not,” Mike said. He glared at Haden, but hardly managed to look menacing. “He could have been a prince, but he chose the path of evil. She gave him everything, but instead he took what was forbidden.”
“Excuse me,” Donny said, “but who the hell are you talking about? Who is the queen?”
“She goes by many names, but we know her as Queen Mara, and she’s asked me to save this world and her own, which I will do. Salvation will be ours when I kill the demon.”
We all looked at one another again. Dumbfounded.
“She comes to me in my dreams. She tells me stories of her kingdom. How beautiful it is.” Mike smiled. “She told me I was brave and strong and had a destiny to fulfill.”
“This is getting creepier every second,” Donny said.
“I agree,” Varnie said. “Let’s get back to Amelia. What is the thing attached to you both, Mike?”
“I told you I don’t know,” Mike answered sullenly. “Ask the demon. He probably did some perverted spell.”
Gabe scratched the back of his neck in a gesture that looked nonchalant, but I realized he was pointing his head at the knife on the table, warning me, since I was closest to it. I moved it to a drawer. Mike had been thoroughly brainwashed and we didn’t need any more violence.
“Mara is a demon too, dude,” Donny offered, perhaps trying to lure Mike back to normal logic.
“She’s not a demon,” he protested. “Mara is a queen. Haden’s father was the soulless monster that raped her. He was the demon. She had too big a heart to blame Haden for his father’s sins, so she tried to raise him with love. This is how he repays her.”
Haden snorted. “Ah, yes. Love. She baked cookies and read me bedtime stories every night.” He shook his head ruefully. “You imbecile. You believe every lie that comes from her mouth. My father was a human. Mara took him from this realm and forced him to stay in Under. She doesn’t have a maternal instinct in her body.”
“You liar,” Mike spat.
Varnie wrapped his jacket around Ame’s shoulders. “All this is fascinating, really, but Amelia is catatonic and Mr. Alderson is being tortured. Should we—I don’t know—leave or something?”
“I’m here to save you all,” Mike said. “The sooner we kill Haden the—”
“Enough,” I interrupted him, my voice gritty with anger and exhaustion. “If you don’t stop threatening to kill Haden we’re going to gag you when we tie you up.”
“Theia, you’re making a mistake,” he said. “I’m not the one you should tie up. Haden is the dangerous one. He stole you. Mara has plans for us.”
I held up my hand, the trinket he gave me jingling on my wrist. “Stop right there. I know exactly what kind of plans Mara has for me. She’s ripping apart the fabric of my life because I betrayed her, and all of you get to come along for the ride. She’s no benevolent queen. She’s a killer and worse.”
Gabe grabbed the rope, sensing that things were going to get dicey. “Sorry, dude, but Theia is right. You’re usually an okay guy, but I was at the bowling alley the night Mara came to town. Your queen is totally psycho.”
Fatigue overwhelmed me, but something kept poking at my subconscious. Something that wasn’t right. “Mike, how did you know I would be here tonight?”
He smiled and it chilled me. There wasn’t any happiness in it—whatever he was seeing in his mind was something completely different from the world the rest of us lived in. “We’re supposed to be together, Theia. I told you. You can’t hide from destiny. You’ll never be lost again.”
I looked at my wrist. My skin was suddenly hot underneath the bracelet.
The bracelet
.
My fingers itched to remove it, but the clasp wouldn’t come undone. “Get this off me.” It should have broken easily, but I suspected it wasn’t a cheap toy from an innocent vending machine after all.
“Calm down, Thei.” Donny tried to work the clasp, but it zapped her. She shook her hand and paled visibly. “What is that?”
“I don’t know. I can’t get it off.”
“It’s how we stay connected, Theia. I’ll always know where you are.”
Donny exploded. “You put a supernatural tracking device on Theia? Are you crazy? What are you, a stalker now?”
“I love her,” Mike answered. “We’re supposed to be together.”
Haden’s face turned to stone. While his anger was usually white-hot, it seemed even more dangerous when it was ice-cold.
Mike inched in his seat, sensing his doom and ready to make a break for it. “Don’t side with the devil. Haden is the one with all the tricks. He’s got you all under his spell. Mara is the one who will save us.”
“You’re delusional,” Haden said, his voice firm with resolve. “And whatever plans you have for Theia are hereby canceled.”
Mike looked wild, hunted. He pulled a small vial from his pocket. “Mara warned me that I might not be able to save you all. I didn’t want to believe her, but she’s right. We planned for this.”
He threw the vial to the floor and a fog filled the room, murky and sulfuric. As the smoke of brimstone filled my nose, covering the rest of my senses, I began a long descent into a bleak, desolate place. My body stretched like rubber and ached with intense pressure.
And then I knew no more.