52
EVIE
I dris was crying. I could hear his wails through the wall. I also heard voices downstairs, loud and angry. Dad was back, behaving strangely again, and Mama was screaming at him. Maybe that was why he was always leaving—the yelling.
I wished I was an adult like him, so I could leave too.
I tiptoed to Idris’s room, cringing at every squeak in the old floorboards. Each wail was a pierce to my heart. Because I remembered how it felt to be his age, screaming until my voice was raw, hoping for someone to come for me.
So I would be the one who came for Idris. I would give him what I’d always wanted.
When he saw me, his little hands relaxed where they gripped his crib. His face was red, tears streaming down his fair cheeks.
He reached for me, and I met his fingers through the wooden bars.
“Hi,” I said. “Wanna see the stars?”
Idris sniffled, still choking on sobs even as he’d quieted. He nodded.
I sat cross-legged in front of him, and he watched me with wide eyes. I concentrated, listening for the sound beneath the yelling and slamming and breaking from downstairs—the sound of stillness, the voices who spoke to me softly, gently.
Think of the night sky, someone whispered.
I thought maybe they were faeries, my friends who lived in the stillness. Because I’d read about faeries one time, in a book I’d found when we went into Florimell. I didn’t know that it had been wrong to take it. I’d put it in my backpack, and I’d read out in the field after lessons the next day. Mama had found me and screamed and grabbed me painfully before burning the book to ashes. She’d told me I’d stolen. She’d told me I was bad, ungrateful, disrespectful to Lillian and her Word.
A soothing whisper called me back from the memory.
I thought of the night sky.
I thought of when Dad had taken me outside one night when Mama wasn’t home and let me look up at the stars. He’d been drinking a special potion. He didn’t talk much, but I was happy to lie in the grass next to him. While there was no yelling, no prayers, no lessons. Just those flickering constellations.
They looked like freedom.
My palms began to warm, my brow creasing. The comforting whispers continued to guide me, to offer praise.
Idris squealed gleefully.
I opened my eyes and lifted a finger to my lips. All around us, tiny orbs of light danced and flickered in the darkness. My head was floaty, and the space in my throat and chest that was usually so tight began to loosen. I felt light.
Idris and I stared at the tiny stars, catching them in our hands, pushing them around and making them spin.
He’d stopped sobbing. Eventually, he sat down.
I told him about the faeries until his eyes began to droop.
Making the stars had exhausted me, so I curled up on the floor beside the crib.
As soon as my eyes drifted shut, the yelling grew louder, and a door slammed against the doorstopper.
The stars went out all at once.
“ Evelynn Lockwood .”
Mama grabbed my arm too hard, yanking me up as tears filled my eyes.
“You stop those manipulative tears, you ungrateful brat,” she hissed, dragging me away from Idris.
He began to wail again, reaching for me. My heart tightened back up, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
In the hallway, Mama slammed the door shut and let go of me, letting me fall to the ground. A piercing ache erupted in my tailbone from the fall, and I cried harder.
“Don’t you fucking cry,” she hissed.
She left me there. I heard her say something to Dad, but he never came upstairs. I hadn’t seen him in days. He heard me crying, and he stayed down in the living room.
When Mama returned, I sobbed harder, recognizing the glint in her eyes and the bag of rice she held.
I spent the rest of the night kneeling on those prickly grains in the hallway. Until my legs had gone numb, and I couldn’t feel any more pain.
Until I couldn’t remember the stars.
I woke up in tears. I wasn’t sure which was worse—the night terrors that existed only in jagged fragments, caught between reality and the dreamworld—or these whole, unwanted memories replaying as if they were happening all over again.
At first, I was even more disoriented by the hands reaching for me, the fingers combing through my hair and the gentle voice at my ear.
“You’re safe,” Kylo whispered in the dark of my bedroom.
I grabbed his hand and snuggled back into his hold. A long-forgotten sadness rolled through me, and I remembered the thirteen-year-old crying in the corner of the room.
No, I didn’t hate her.
I was terrified of her.
As the days went on, the memories and nightmares only got worse. And I couldn’t help but partially blame Princeton and his meddling with my subconscious.
The new moon would be here before I knew it. Only two more weeks, and then I could be sure that the Whitfields wouldn’t come after me. So far, no one else from Jacob’s life had confronted me.
Kylo was busier than ever. Mortals were disappearing at a more rapid rate—humans for the slave trade, witches for the witch hunt, others suspected of sympathizing with the Masked Order.
And I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop my walls from continuing to crumble and reveal all the poison and sickness I’d long buried. I couldn’t stop the violence all around us, the threats closing in. The fights between masked turned and the born unfolding in the streets. The whispers of what King Earle had done to the clan in Florimell—the events that Kylo didn’t discuss in more than brief sentences.
I had to do what was best for my clan. They would’ve done the same.
The grief I saw in his eyes that he refused to vocalize.
And gods, even Idris was changing. I may have covertly prevented him from joining the clan, but that hadn’t stopped him from growing more vocal about born violence and the need to push them out of Etherdale for good. It hadn’t stopped him from wanting to spend time with Kylo, to talk to him about philosophy. Without me there to listen.
I could hear the hum of fate. It was weaving around all of us, booming underneath our feet, through Etherdale and her hidden underground.
The woman I was at the beginning of the summer would’ve crumbled. But now… it was more complicated.
Because I was angry. Fucking livid. And not at the turned. Not at Kylo.
I was furious with the born demons who left bodies and missing persons in their wake. The vile creatures who had attacked me, who had threatened the workers at Celeste’s, who had squashed my dreams of opening my own shop. Who infected my brother with thoughts of retribution, fear for his life and the lives of his classmates, rather than concerns about girls and architecture and university parties.
Maybe I did want the born out of the city. And even more concerning, maybe I was starting to believe that Kylo and his clan could actually accomplish such a feat.
Today in Princeton’s living room, I got closer than ever to accessing my power. My eyes were closed, and I allowed magick to move through me without my usual fear.
“Good, Evie,” he said. “I can still see the block. There’s an aspect you’re hiding, and I think you know that too.”
I nodded.
“But a lot more energy is moving through you than before, less restricted.”
“I’ve been talking to the part—the younger version of me,” I admitted. “Not much. But I’ve been trying. I thought she was a demon, but now I see the truth.”
My eyes opened.
Princeton smiled. “What truth?”
I lifted a shoulder. “That she’s just me.”
Furniture rattled softly, and a familiar fear gathered in my belly.
“Do not let that panic spiral,” Princeton said. “We have countless wards in this neighborhood. No one dangerous will sense your magick. You’re safe here.”
I shook my head. “It’s not only that.”
I saw the girl in the corner, her eyes lit with rage—she remembered the house in the rolling hills. She remembered my legs covered in countless tiny red marks. She remembered everything.
“I—” I paused, deciding how much I wanted to reveal. I shook my head. “I don’t like all of my power. It’s not safe.”
“All magick carries risk. There is no good or bad force, only what we use them for. It must’ve been frightening, when your power manifested. Would you like to tell me about it?”
I clamped my mouth shut.
Princeton sighed. “Okay. We’ll work with what you’re willing to use.”
He guided me through breathing exercises, this time ones to induce a heightened state of power rather than trance.
“We’re going to let your power build, and then we’re going to find an anchor to bring you back down to equilibrium.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Get angry,” Princeton said. “If you can’t think of anything yourself, I am more than willing to do what I do best… provoke and infuriate.” He winked.
I closed my eyes again. I was already on edge, heightened by the mood of the space and our quick, erratic breathing.
I thought of the born. What they’d done to Kylo and his friend. What they’d done to me here in Etherdale.
The past reached up, but I refused to go there. Or else I might lose control.
I thought of Cindy Fucking Whitfield and her lazy, manipulative son. I thought of the way I’d let Jacob trample all over me. How I should’ve gotten angry with him instead of being so damn meek and people-pleasing and naive.
All I’d ever wanted was comfort, and I was treated with cruelty instead. I remembered that slight smirk Jacob wore, the way his eyes shone with the same hollow emptiness as my mother’s. How had I not noticed that before? I’d bent myself backward begging for his empathy and love. I wished I’d stood up for myself. I wished I’d wiped that soulless smirk from his lips.
“Gods below,” Princeton said.
But I could hardly hear him over the rush of blood to my palms through the crown of my head—this raw, unfiltered rage that had been building for so long, blocked and ignored, begging to pour from my lips.
So pretty and pale, like a porcelain doll, a voice from the past cooed in my ear. Your blood smells unique. Delicious. Perfect.
I trembled, my lip curling.
“Evie!” someone yelled—Kylo, it was Kylo.
But my eyes were trapped in the back of my head, where all I saw was churning darkness, all I heard was rushing wind and whispers.
“She’s past the point of return,” Princeton said.
I’d never heard him panicked before. It sounded quite strange.
“What in the good gods is happening in here? Lillian’s fucking reckoning?” someone else yelled.
At the mention of Lillian, I went fucking feral. I couldn’t hear anyone anymore. I lost touch with myself. Memories and voices and feelings tangled up together, yanking me in every direction.
Sudden pressure weighed me down. There was a pinching in my neck, and then my body melted into decadent pleasure. Calm washed over me. The darkness pulled me under.
I blacked out.