Chapter Forty-Three
ENZO
My hands tighten on the steering wheel. “What is this?” I ask Nic softly, my gaze darting from figure to figure, each illuminated by our headlights and wearing the same rictus expression. Only their eyes, wide and glassy, seem alive. They stand otherwise still and silent, watching us.
“Lola, get down,” Nic breathes next to me, his hand slipping between us into the back seat to push Lola out of sight. “Don’t let her see you.”
“Her?” I repeat, mind whirring as my own panic and Lola’s roar through me. “Her who?”
“Reverse,” Nic says. “Get us out of here. Now.”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. My hand is already reaching for the gear shift, my foot going for the clutch. But then something ripples through me. Something cold, something other. A whisper inside my bones, trickling along the marrow, strumming the tendons in every limb.
My body freezes, my fingers barely brushing the shift.
“Enzo?” Nic says.
I try to open my mouth to respond, try to meet his eyes, but I cannot. It’s as though my body has turned to stone.
Terror slams through me, stinging like icefire.
“I think not,” my mouth says of its own accord, and then my head turns to Nic. A smile tears itself across my face.
My hands throw the car into park, kill the engine, and then wrench the gear shift out, tossing it through the open window.
Pain bolts through my shoulder, but my body does not react.
It’s too busy clambering out of the vehicle and crossing to join the army outside the Liar’s Den.
A few of the figures near the back of the crowd twitch, breaking free of whatever spell they’re under, running away into the night.
“How kind of you to return,” my mouth says to Nic on its own, and it’s my voice, my tongue, my teeth, but not my words. “Why don’t you get out of the car?”
He dives for the steering wheel, ducking beneath it to fiddle with the wires I used to start the engine earlier.
My heart sinks. Nic, for all his experience manipulating business moguls and deceiving the city’s elite, has never hot-wired a motorcar.
I want to glance into the back seat of the vehicle to make sure Lola is hidden, but even my eyes seem to be under someone else’s control, and they’re trained on my brother like I might be able to bore through his flesh with my gaze alone.
“Nic,” my mouth barks, a warning, and then horror lances through me as another sensation unfurls in my chest.
The icy curl of my magic.
It’s like there are fingers in its stream, eddying the currents, splashing clumsily, looking for purchase. Whoever has commandeered my body seems to be able to make me wield my power, as well.
Who are you? I scream in my head.
But they must not have access to my thoughts, because there is no response.
“Nic, get out now!” my captor snaps through my teeth.
Sweat beads on his brow as he fumbles with the wires.
“I tore out the gear shift,” my captor growls impatiently. “Even if you manage to start it, you’re not going anywhere.”
But when Nic still doesn’t even glance my way, my captor turns to face their army. As my eyes scan each face, I recognize several of them from previous rounds of the game. Players I competed alongside back in the University of Aethera library and again at the Warthington Theater.
Is this part of round three, somehow? The barest sliver of hope feathers through me. Maybe this is the final challenge—finding our way out of not a location but the captivity of our own bodies?
If that’s the case, then there will have to be clues. I just need to look for them.
Seized with a determination that borders on insanity, I search for a chink in my captor’s control. A weakness. A crack.
“Ah,” my captor says, eyes landing on a man at the center of the crowd. He moves forward stiffly, weaving between the others, each movement jerky, as though his limbs don’t quite work right. When he steps into the line of the headlights, I recognize him instantly.
This was not a player in Nocturne’s game. It was Nic’s head of security, Paol Chen. Dark, glossy hair hangs over terrified black eyes.
“Paol!” Nic’s cry is little more than a gasp.
Paol’s gaze flicks toward Nic in a silent plea.
“If you don’t get out of that vehicle right now,” my mouth says, calm yet lethal, “I’ll have Enzo here drain his soullight.”
Blood roars in my ears. If this is part of Nocturne’s game, surely she wouldn’t hurt Paol, right? This has to be a test. Or maybe a clue.
My mind races, but dizziness churns through me, the pounding of Lola’s heart intensifying until it’s all I can do to stay upright. Sweat prickles, cold on my brow.
Nic glares at me. “You’re better than this, Laurel.”
Laurel?
My captor curls my hands into fists so tight my fingernails dig into my palms. “I am, but apparently you are not.”
My body moves forward, pressing one of my empty voratium pendants to Paol’s slender throat and pulling his life force out of him. Clumsily at first, but as my captor gets the hang of my magic, they pull it in harder and faster.
Suddenly, all I hear is that priest’s rasping breath as I sucked out his soullight, so ravenously hungry I could not pause even if I wanted to.
Stop, I try to say to whatever force is using my body. Nocturne? Laurel? Whoever you are, STOP!
“Laurel, stop!” Nic repeats my words aloud, stumbling out of the vehicle, pelting for us.
He reaches us just in time to catch Paol’s body as it drops.
He and I gape at his friend, who stares unseeing at the sky, ashen and pale as though I drew out his blood alongside his soullight. Horror streaks through me like lightning.
This is not a game.
“Are you ready to let me back in?” My voice comes out a whisper, a rasp. Light as moth wings, dripping with warning.
Nic raises his eyes to meet mine, and they’re glassy and full of an emotion I’ve very rarely seen on him. Rage.
“Laurel,” he says through clenched teeth. “This is not what the gods want. Paol was a good man.”
“If he was good,” Laurel says simply, taunting with my voice, “then I wouldn’t have had power over him.”
Nic shakes his head. “That’s not true.”
But Laurel is already turning me away, scanning her army with my eyes until she lands on a shadow off to the side. One I recognize instantly with a bolt of terror.
Soren stalks forward on disjointed limbs, nostrils flaring with panic. I shudder as Laurel jolts my hand out to pull the pistol from his belt and offer it to Nic. He takes it with a shaking hand while still supporting Paol’s body with the other.
“Hold that for me, will you, love?” my mouth coos, and my vocal cords ache with the effort of resisting.
My magic rises yet again, unbidden, and the world swims, the Warthington priest’s rasping breaths roaring in my ears.
No. Not again. Not like this.
Yet no matter how hard I try to stop my fingers from moving, they rise to my throat, fishing among my pendants until they find an empty one. My arm jerks forward like a puppet’s to press it to Soren’s collarbone.
But then pressure releases in my eyes—and only my eyes. I can move them.
I immediately meet Nic’s gaze, pleading.
Begging my mouth to scream at him to stop this, my hands to pull the gem away from Soren’s skin, my body to run.
Nic stares at me, jaw working, a vein pulsing in his jaw as his hand tightens on the pistol, which he keeps pointed at the cobblestones.
I see the whirring of his mind in the lines around his eyes, the unblinking, piercing stare, the furrow in his brow.
He realizes exactly what Laurel is doing the moment I do.
She’s using his own compassion against him. Whatever the reason is that she cannot control his body the way she’s taken over mine, she wants to make him bow to her whims all the same—and she knows draining one of my own Tentacles of their soullight will break me.
And Nic will never let me break.
It’s cold. It’s cruel.
Shoot me! I want to shout. I will come back. Soren won’t!
Magic blossoms inside me, and Soren’s nostrils flare as his skin where my voratium rests against it begins to glow a faint, pale green.
Please, I beg Nic with my eyes as tears sting at their corners, wishing I could scream it aloud, terrified I’ll never be able to again. Help me.