Chapter 43
There was darkness. But there wasn’t only darkness.
There was also the stench of burning tar, chemical fire, and noxious ash. There was the wrecking-ball boom of Hell Gate’s collapse. There was the thousand-degree heat spewed out from conjured flames.
There was a lot more to darkness than just the dark.
A second before Hell Gate had become an actual hell, Griff had transformed into his father’s form and thrown himself on top of me.
We didn’t have any warning. One moment, I was reassuring Griff I’d only woken up screaming because of a harmless nightmare, and the next, the wind had rattled the window so loudly I’d looked outside.
“Smith!” I’d screamed, trying to rip away the knots of flame. I hadn’t managed to pull any free. Griff had launched at me, and within half a second, we were buried under an avalanche of stone and fire.
We were cocooned under his leathery wings.
He was large in this form. Twice my size.
He had a horse-like head, horns, giant bat-like wings, clawed hands, hooves, and a pointed tail.
His father had a bloodcurdling scream, and maybe Griff did too, but I’d never heard it.
When he spoke, it was a monstrous growl, and the words were hard to discern.
“Hello” sounded more like a snarl than a greeting.
Griff rarely transformed, and one of his greatest fears was that Jagger would keep him in his father’s form forever once he was a mine. As a kid, he used to wish he could cut that half of himself out. “I don’t want to be a Jersey Devil. I’m human. I only want to be human.”
Once, when he was thirteen, when puberty made him accidentally transform every other day, he’d gotten so scared he’d tried to cut off his wings.
But Justice had wrestled him and fought him over the knife until they were both bloody.
Then they’d sat together. Griff was back in his human form, and Justice put an arm around his shoulder.
He was a year and a half older than Griff and the only big brother he’d ever have.
“You can’t cut out parts of yourself you don’t like,” Justice had said, his voice low and vehement.
He’d recently become a mine, and that was the first time in weeks he’d shown any emotion.
He’d wiped at the blood dripping down his lip.
“It won’t work. What do you think’ll happen?
You cut it out, but it’ll still be there.
You might hate it, but it’s not going away.
It’s inside you. You’ll just have hurt yourself. ”
Justice was speaking from experience. For a long while, he’d hated that he was part-conjurer.
“So? What if I want to hurt myself?” Griff had thrown back.
“Then do it, I guess.” Justice had shrugged. “Make yourself weak. What do I care? You die, your wings’ll come back anyway. They always will, one way or another. If it were me, instead of trying to cut out what I hate, I’d just accept it.”
But Griff wouldn’t. The Jersey Devil had raped his human mother and then she’d died in childbirth. Then Griff’s father had sold him to Jagger for a half-bottle of Furtig. To him, there was nothing good there. Nothing.
“No. I won’t ever accept it.”
Justice had shrugged again. “Then I guess you’re gonna have a hard life.”
Griff did end up cutting off his wings, his tail, and his horns. Then, weeks later, he’d slipped on a patch of ice and died. When he came back in his new body, I asked him if he was going to cut them off again.
“No,” he’d said. “Justice was right. I’m my father’s son, whether I admit it or not.
It’s stupid—when I realized I still felt the same, that I was the Jersey Devil’s son even without my wings .
. . it felt worse than before. I cut them off, and nothing changed except I realized I hated a part of me so much I’d hurt myself to make it disappear.
What’s worse is, when it didn’t work, I was almost glad I slipped on that ice. Stupid.”
“Not stupid.” I’d shaken my head. “Human.”
He’d grinned at that. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Human.” He’d nodded. “Right. Human.”
After that, he didn’t change into his father’s form very often, but he didn’t avoid it either. And he didn’t hate it, because he’d stopped hating that part of himself.
He’d accepted it. Which meant he’d been able to save our lives.
If he’d stayed human, we both would’ve burned up in the Smith’s fire. But since he’d transformed into his father’s form, we were saved.
A Jersey Devil is fireproof. How else would it flit in and out of hell?
So Griff had covered my body and wrapped his wings around me, shielding me from the volcanic flames swallowing our home. He was strong, and so even though he grunted and winced as Hell Gate collapsed on top of him, I don’t think he was hurt.
Then there was only darkness, heat, and silence.
“Can you lockpick us out?” Griff asked. It took me awhile to decipher the low growl of his words.
When I did, I shook my head. “No. We’re buried so deep I can’t see any illusion.” I sent my senses outward, searching for knots to untie. There was nothing.
“Can you break us free?” I asked.
Griff made a noise that was halfway between “no” and “I wish.”
The air was stuffy, and each breath scraped my lungs and left my eyes and my throat itchy and pained.
There was something caustic in the air. Worse, though, the air was thin and growing thinner.
I couldn’t see anything outside the cocoon of Griff’s wings, but I wondered if we were sealed in an airtight pocket.
My back was pressed against Griff’s front, and my knees were wrapped to my chest in a fetal position. It made me think of the pictures I’d seen of Pompeii. The people there had been covered in ash, their bodies preserved. All of them were in the fetal position too.
“Are we running out of air?” I asked, my voice surprisingly steady.
Griff nodded. “No air flow.”
So we had minutes. Maybe.
Griff would die and come back as a mine.
I would die and not come back.
I suppose Finn was being honest when he’d told me he was going to make me watch the world burn. I’d seen Darin throw the fire. There were others with him. I wondered if Finn had been there too.
Orange dots, like tiny flames, danced in my vision. I was dizzy, and my head hurt.
If this was my last moment, I wanted to make it real. No lies. No hiding. No Jagger.
“Griff.” I reached over my shoulder and put my hand to his cheek. His skin was molten-hot, and his breath was like Rou’s kitchen fire. “I’m sorry.”
He made a noise, and I could hear his words—“don’t say that”—even though he didn’t speak.
I smiled. “I am. I’m sorry. When you’re a mine, promise me you won’t hate yourself? Okay?”
Instead of answering, Griff jerked, tightening his arms around me. He cocked his head.
“What—?”
He growled.
I listened. Then I heard the noise that had made Griff stiffen.
It was a scratching noise. It sounded like a dog clawing at a concrete floor, or a mole tunneling through gravel. It was an animal sound.
“What is that?”
The scratching stopped. Then it started again even faster.
Was it Jagger? He’d survived unharmed. If he hadn’t, I’d be dead or experiencing his injuries.
But no, it couldn’t be Jagger. It went against everything he was to rescue another being.
Was it another survivor? One of the conjurers? Primus? Last? Luvic?
Light pierced the dark, shining through Griff’s wings. It hit us in laser-thin streams.
Griff winced when a weight was shoved off him. He grunted and then stretched his wings, allowing a burst of warm, fresh air to flow around us. Full morning light flooded over us.
Slowly, he pulled back his wings, and I sat up, blinking at our rescuer.
“Jack . . . jackal . . .” Jackaltooth.
Griff snarled and launched from the hole. His claws extended, and he lunged for the jackaltooth’s throat.
The jackaltooth snarled and swiped his paw at Griff, punching him to the side. Then, with his orange eyes blazing, he leaped into the smoking hole where we’d been trapped. I scrambled upright, and the jackaltooth lunged at me. He caught my pajama shirt in his teeth and dragged me from the hole.
Griff let out a bloodcurdling scream. He beat his wings and charged. The jackaltooth snarled and raked his claws down Griff’s bare torso.
I twisted and punched, and then the jackaltooth sprinted away from the smoking wreckage of Hell Gate, with me hanging from its mouth. A block away, there was an open grate leading down to the sewers, as if it’d been left open just for our quick escape. The jackaltooth dove in.
It was dark. Hot. The tunnel was filled with the stench of sewage.
My teeth clattered, and I was jarred as the jackaltooth ran. It was big. Bigger than any jackaltooth I’d ever seen. Gray, mottled, with dark stripes. Orange-eyed. And . . .
“Luvic?”
He snarled and shook my shirt. I flopped in his mouth. At a second snarl, I held still.
Okay.
So . . . yes.
The jackaltooth wasn’t a monster sent by the Bard to finish what the Smiths had started. It was Luvic.
“Change back,” I said.
Luvic growled and then he tossed me into the air like a dog throwing a dead squirrel, and I dropped onto his back. He started running so quickly all I could do was crouch over his back and dig my fingers into his bristled fur.
He raced through the sewers, charging south. Sometimes, I swear I saw people in the dark, but they fled into the shadows. There had always been people who lived under the city, but there were creatures that did too.
Luvic avoided both. He ran like a greyhound, his body flexing with fluid, powerful strides.
We leaped across the underground river flowing beneath the New York Athletic Club on 59th Street.
He sprinted though the arched and strangely beautiful brick sewers built in the 1800s.
He ran past rats and cockroaches, raw sewage splashing us as the tunnels narrowed.