Chapter Fourteen #2
I hated her now. She’d touched her lips and thought of Ezra’s mouth. She’d fallen back into her bed and smiled into her sheets and wondered when she’d find him again.
A skeletal bush beside me started to smoke, and I jumped away from it, startled, before I realized I’d set the frayed edge of a broken branch on fire.
Using my bare hands, I squeezed the embers away.
It stung. I deserved it. My entire life, I’d fought to keep my emotions from ruling the radiance within me.
All it had taken was a boy’s soft laugh to crumble my control to dust.
I’d harden myself again. I’d never let someone take my control away.
It was dark by the time I could tell where I was.
Following the path the workers took from the rail yard to the Mission, I broke into a run.
The shadows were deep and dark, but I couldn’t risk moving slowly.
My hair stood out like flame in the moonlight.
I’d be recognized sooner than later, and I had no way of knowing who was with the resistor bandits and who wasn’t.
All I could do now was sprint and hope that I’d reach Julian before they did.
Through the trees, I could make out the flicker of torches and fires at the work camp in the distance.
The Mission was totally dark—even the sliver of Julian’s window, a room that should have been glowing with lamplight far into the night.
A chicken scratched idly in the middle of the courtyard and clucked at me ruefully as I hurtled by and threw myself against the door, aching with hope that I’d find it soundly locked.
It swung open before I could press my hand to the locking mechanism. I didn’t have to look close to know the lock had been jammed. It hadn’t shut properly because Ezra had called my attention away. I’d given him time to sabotage the lock.
“Julian!” I called out as I rushed inside, my voice startling me with its rawness. The lamps in the entranceway roared to life, lit by my reckless bolts of radiance. The light cast the hall in white-blue shadows before the small flames tempered to a soft glow. “Julian! Are you here?”
Was I already too late?
I could barely convince my feet to move for all the hurt and fear that clouded my thoughts. Upstairs, my door was closed as I’d left it this morning, but Julian’s hung open, and moonlight gleamed from inside.
“Julian!” I called as I squeezed through the opening, my hands already raised, palms exposed like weapons. His name died in my throat.
A gasping scream tore out of me before I could cover my mouth. The floor was covered in blood. It blackened the polished stone like spilled ink.
Before me, on his hands and knees, Ezra had a rag and a pail, and he was feverishly scrubbing at the floor. Absurdly, I wanted to tell him that he was only smearing the blood around. He’d never get it out. It would never come out; it was too much.
Instead, my legs gave out, and I crashed to the floor. Betrayal was one thing. This …
“What did you do?” I croaked. The blood under my hands bubbled and smoked. A noxious, sticky scent filled the room that had always smelled like clean woodsmoke and amber. “He never did anything to you.”
Ezra sank back on his heels in an unsteady motion, as if my gaze threatened to topple him. The rag slipped out of his bloodstained fingers. The faint moonlight lit his wide, wild gaze. “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be on the train.”
“What did you do to him?”
“There’s no time.” Ezra grabbed on to Julian’s desk to haul himself up, and recoiled clumsily when I blasted the corner of the wood with a thread of radiance that left small flames licking along the broken edge.
The way he stumbled back satisfied the cold animal rage inside me. “There’s time,” I said, letting out a raspy laugh that sounded like a stranger’s. “I didn’t get here fast enough. Now there’s nothing left but time.”
“Josephine.” The sound was wretched. He raised his hands slowly, not a threat but a plea. “Listen to me. I can explain. But they’ll be here any second. You have to run. You have to go.”
Loud voices sounded in the hallway behind me, and Ezra froze, horror dawning on his pale features.
A single smear of blood crossed his cheek, and for a moment, that’s all I could see.
It was garish against his skin, and he wasn’t usually so pale, and the room smelled like death and fire. My head spun.
When two men rushed into the room and saw me, I had little time to react before one was lunging for my hands.
I stumbled back with an angry scream. Bolts of white-hot radiance shot from my palms, but I was falling, reaching for nothing, and all I did was strike the wooden ceiling beams. Flames roared to life, shockingly hot.
They’d wanted to burn down the Mission, and now I was doing it for them.
I knew the hands that caught me and kept me from striking my head against the hard stone at my feet. I knew the strong arms that pulled me close and the tight grip that held my wrists as the men shoved something itchy and heavy over my hands and bound them together.
“Don’t fight,” Ezra whispered into my hair.
I resolved to fight harder. Kicking and snarling, I managed to catch one of the men in his bearded face, and I felt the satisfying crack of his nose under my boots.
Movement and sound exploded around me. Ezra was yelling at them, and embers rained down on us, and a rough, calloused hand slapped my face so hard, the inside of my lip tore against my teeth.
My mouth filled with blood, and I kicked again and spit, brilliant red drops painting the face of the man with the shaggy beard.
“Josephine, stop,” Ezra muttered, again too quiet. As if speaking only to me. My wrists were bound too tightly for me to elbow him, and he kept his arms around me in a terrible mockery of an embrace. “We have to get out of here,” he was saying as the flames along the ceiling roared and crackled.
They wrestled me out of the room, Ezra lifting me bodily with grunting effort. I took hysterical pleasure in how difficult I made it for him to drag me, but once we were in the hallway, I could see how much smoke poured out of Julian’s room and I understood what I’d done.
I let out a ragged sob. “Put it out. Put the fire out!”
All that was left in Julian’s room was his blood, but I couldn’t let his things burn. I couldn’t let this be my legacy. Death. Destruction.
The two men laughed. Nose broken and bleeding over his mouth, the bearded man bared red teeth at me with an expression that promised violence. He coughed and waved at the billowing smoke. A knife I hadn’t noticed before gleamed in his hand. “Let’s do it in the courtyard.”
It didn’t take much imagining to know what he planned.
Ezra’s arms tightened around me. “We could use a hostage.”
“That isn’t the plan,” the bearded man snarled.
“I’m improvising.”
The other man watched me with quiet malice. We were heading down the stairs now. They were dragging me away from the damage I’d done. “Ainsley said to destroy the conduction coils and burn what was left. That’s all,” he said.
“Ainsley?” I choked. Ezra shifted me around to cover my mouth with his hand.
The woman in the woods. Did you take care of her? The voice responding had been Ainsley’s. She’d tried to murder me on my way out of Frostbrook, and Julian had saved me by taking the food away.
He’d saved me. And now he was dead.
“Be. Quiet,” he muttered, desperation thinning his voice. I twisted, trying to see his face, but he wouldn’t let me move. When he took his hand off my mouth, I clenched my teeth tightly, poised to burn the cloth away from my hands.
Instead, my radiance felt like a bird trapped behind glass.
Horror rose in me like bile. The heavy sacks tied around my hands were doing something strange.
It was like dipping my arms in frigid water.
My fingers had gone numb. The fabric glinted in the lamplight, odd threads like gleaming mineral veins woven through the rough scratch of it. “What did you do to me?”
“Haven’t you heard of insulation, Conductor?” the bearded man said, spitting the word like a foul curse. “Your vile magic can’t get through it.”
“We could wrap it around her face,” the other said thoughtfully. He had a scar notched in his eyebrow and brown hair shot through with shocks of silver. “Smother her.”
We reached the courtyard. I craned my neck to Julian’s window where smoke poured out into the night, backlit by raging flames.
“What did you do to him?” I asked in a miserable whisper. If I was to die here, I needed to know how Julian had gone before me. The fate I’d caused by bringing Ezra into the Mission, by bringing him into our lives.
“That’s right, Ezra, what did you do to him?” The quieter man gave Ezra a cold, appraising look. “All that blood and no body.”
“Didn’t you see the bucket of slop?” Ezra said with a strained growl. “I tried out a new idea. Called to the blood in him and made it boil until it tore him apart like fruit left to rot.”
They shuffled back, eyeing Ezra warily. The man with the beard spat at our feet. “Abomination,” he muttered.
“I’m your abomination, aren’t I?” Ezra asked, his voice like shattered glass. “Feel free to sift through the ashes tomorrow if you’re looking for proof. You can pick through his bones and run back to your mistress with his teeth.”
Nausea gripped me, and I made a noise that must have made it clear to Ezra what was going to happen next.
With one arm painfully gentle at my waist, he let me double over and empty the scant contents of my stomach into the chicken-scratched dirt at my feet.
I was unable to move my hands, unable to comprehend how the boy who had made flowers for me in the woods could say something so grotesque.
Do something so foul, so unimaginably violent.
The man with the scar let out a low chuckle. “Some sweetheart you got yourself.”
Ezra’s arm tightened around me. He lunged with a growl, dragging me awkwardly with him.
The other man stepped between them. He was short and stocky, built like a barrel. Sunburn made his pink nose peel. “Careful, Marshall. There’s no telling what a witch will do once he tastes blood.”
Ezra’s fingers tightened against my ribs, a brief, convulsive movement. But his voice was stony and even when he said, “Finally, an intelligent contribution from Ike.”
Ike said nothing, but his expression darkened, gaze flicking to my face with a leer that sent a shudder through me as I gasped to catch my breath and swallowed against the sting of sick in my throat.
The eerie, numb emptiness reached deeper within me, working into my muscles and clawing my insides.
It made me feel trapped, as if they’d pushed me underwater.
My arms thrashed involuntarily, weakly trying to shake the bindings from my wrists.
“We need to get back to camp,” Ezra said. “The fire will attract too much attention. We can come back for the conduction coils tomorrow. The Mission won’t recover from this.”
“When Ainsley comes in the morning, you can explain to her why you dragged your slut apprentice along,” Ike said, coming so close that I could smell the sour tang of ale on his breath. He spoke with the thickness of blood in his nose, like a child with a pathetic cold.
Using Ezra’s grip on my waist as leverage, I kicked Ike in the knee. He dropped to the ground with a yelp and clutched his leg.
“Bitch,” he snarled. “I’ll kill you myself.”
I was kicking, twisting, and fighting the spreading numbness that reached for my lungs. I was drowning. I’d pull Ezra down with me. Pull all of them down and hold them under until they went still.
“You were supposed to be on the train.” Ezra sounded very tired as he wound his arm around my throat and squeezed until the night swallowed me whole.