Chapter 17
Gabriel didn’t talk about the curse until lunch the next day.
Miles gave him the space he’d asked for, but it was difficult. He struggled not knowing what Gabriel was thinking, what hole he was sinking into. He’d experienced Gabriel’s conflicting emotions firsthand and could now picture the negative ones preying on his defeat.
“We should discuss our next steps,” Gabriel said as a greeting when Miles slipped into the chair beside him. The cafeteria was extra loud, everyone dressed up for Throwback Thursday and the excitement for homecoming was palpable as it drew closer.
Not for the first time, Miles wished he knew what it would be like for the biggest worry in his life to be what he would wear to homecoming. What exactly a boutonniere was. How to dance without stepping on anyone’s toes.
“We’ve hit a dead end with the curse and the premonitions.” There was a stiffness to Gabriel’s voice, as if he’d rehearsed this. “Without any leads to follow or proactive steps to take, I think we should reevaluate what we’re doing.”
He must’ve been up all night spiraling, assuming the worst.
“I’m all for reevaluating, but you might be jumping the gun,” Miles said. “The curse told us everything we need.”
Miles had spent all night with Charlee, texting Emily and trying to find anything that would send them in a new direction. Emily had finally had a breakthrough, giving Miles his first surge of hope in days.
He fished a notebook from his bag and plopped it triumphantly onto the table. He’d ended up having to write out the whole ritual by hand last night after trying to take pictures to send to Emily, only for the page to show up blank in every single one. More frustrating magical bullshit.
“Emily and Charlee helped me work on this last night.” He flipped to the scribbled page, covered in words circled, underlined, and crossed out. “And we realized that the original ritual might actually tell us how to undo the curse.”
Gabriel leaned in as Miles traced the top line, where he’d circled “bind” in red pen. On the other side of the cafeteria, there was a commotion and a bunch of cheering as a group brought out the ballot boxes to vote for homecoming queen and king. They both ignored it.
“The spell says it’s binding your family and the magic together.
” Miles’s finger slid down to where he’d underlined another part.
“And that Jocelyn’s life is what fuels the magic.
So this isn’t just a spell, it’s a bargain.
Give and take. Jocelyn’s energy, or life or whatever, in exchange for the magic in your family.
That explains why Jocelyn is still here, and why Rosalie can still sense her—the magic must be keeping her alive.
It’s like a parasite, and Jocelyn is the host. The longer it can keep the host alive, the longer it can feed. It’s only here because she is.”
What Rosalie said had slid the final piece into place. It didn’t make any sense for Jocelyn to still be alive and held captive—unless she had a use.
Gabriel drummed his fingers against his thigh. “So, if we freed Jocelyn…”
“Then it should undo the bargain,” Miles finished for him. “That’s how deals work—if you don’t keep up your side, neither will the other. No taking if you’re not giving, right? The magic won’t be bound to your family anymore.”
Skimming the written-out ritual again, Gabriel frowned. “How do we know the magic would leave? It’s already been bound, the sacrifice made. This doesn’t say anything about keeping the sacrifice alive.”
“It’s probably on the missing page. There’s no reason for Jocelyn to be alive otherwise. It must need a continuous source of life to feed from, or it would’ve just killed her immediately. Nothing else makes sense.”
Gabriel watched the line of students filter up to the ballot boxes on a table near the cafeteria entrance. “It’s only a hypothesis. We don’t know any of this for sure.”
“We’ve made bigger leaps based on less,” Miles pointed out. “But yeah, you’re right. Which is why I think we should ask Jocelyn herself.”
“That’s a fair idea in theory, but we already tried summoning her with the most powerful spell we could find.”
“Exactly. We tried summoning her. I only want to talk to her. Get her to tell us where she is or how to free her.”
“She hasn’t historically been forthcoming with her information. What makes you think this time would be any different?”
That same question had kept Miles up all night.
“The reason she wouldn’t tell me anything before is because she didn’t want to send me down the wrong path.
But we know what we need to do, we’re already on the path that’s leading straight to her freedom.
It would be crazy for her not to help us now. ”
She’d been trapped in some dank tomb for the last hundred years, being used as a food source for dark magic— there was no way she wouldn’t give them a hand with this final step. Not if she had any sense of self-preservation.
Gabriel didn’t look convinced, twisting a button on his cuff. “Even if we could get her to tell us where she is or how to free her, how do you propose we speak with her in the first place?”
“Rosalie. She has a connection to Jocelyn. What if there’s a way we can use that connection to reach out to her?”
“That seems like a rather large reach,” Gabriel remarked dubiously. “Have you heard of this being done before?”
“Well… no. That just means we’ll be the first.” Miles was making it sound easier than it would be, based on their track record, but he needed that dull, hollow look of Gabriel’s to fade.
“Listen. I get it. This has been… let’s just be honest, a shit road for us so far.
” Gabriel had probably spent the whole night talking himself into a hopeless pit of despair and didn’t want to get his hopes up, pull himself out only to tumble back in.
“We’ve almost died more times than I want to count, we’ve messed up even more, and pretty much every time I think we’re about to make progress, we get screwed over.
I don’t blame you for wanting to call it quits.
I’m tired, I’m still sore from the cemetery, and I hate that the grimoire didn’t give us more.
” He put his hopefully-not-sweaty hand on Gabriel’s where it was resting on his leg beneath the table.
“But please, don’t give up yet. Not when my gut knows we’re so close. ”
“Well, if your gut says so…” Gabriel grumbled, lacking any real thorniness. He stared down at their hands. “I don’t want to give up. I’m just… exhausted from all of this. And I’m afraid.”
His moments of painful candor always made Miles ache to hug him tight. “Me too,” he admitted. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if this doesn’t work.”
Gabriel flipped his hand around to squeeze Miles’s back. “Then I guess we’d better hope it does.”
It suddenly seemed like a great idea to kiss him, right there in the middle of the cafeteria.
Clearing his throat, Miles glanced around. “Uh, hey, Rosalie. It’s me… Miles. You said you’d come if I called so… consider this me calling. We might have a plan to help Jocelyn, but we need your help.”
He scanned the cafeteria for any sign of her, for a ghostly wind or sudden chill, but nothing happened. A guy tripped over a chair and stumbled, but from the jeers and hoots of his friends, it was just normal clumsiness, not a ghostly attack.
“Well,” Miles said, after a minute, “she didn’t say she’d come quickly. And we’re here all day.”
“What do we do if she doesn’t come back?”
“She will.”
She had to.
* * *
Miles was starting to consider leaving the family business and giving up his life as a psychic to wage a one-man war against hot glue guns and all their manufacturers.
“Ouch!” he hissed for the sixth time, stuffing his singed fingers into his mouth. It did absolutely nothing to help with the pain and made everything taste like burnt plastic.
“I told you a dozen burns ago to put that thing away,” Gabriel snarked without glancing up from his book.
It was nice to see him reading something other than the grimoire, though Miles doubted that The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe was a much lighter read.
He should lend Gabriel one of Charlee’s sappy romance books.
“Your scathing commentary isn’t helping.” Miles took his finger from his mouth and examined the red blister, wincing. “It was this or glitter pens. What was I supposed to do?”
When they’d entered the gym after school, Miles had immediately been put to work.
A harried-looking Alexis had marched him over to a black background leaning against the bleachers and given him a hot glue gun, a screwdriver, a reference sketch of the painted stars glued down, and an ominous, “Don’t mess it up. ”
Miles was dreading the moment she came back and saw the mess he’d made. In his defense, the last time he’d crafted like this, he’d been making paper plate turkeys in third grade.
“We shouldn’t have bothered coming here at all,” Gabriel said.
“I heard you the first ten times.” Miles picked in vain at the wispy strands of glue all over his shirt. “I’m not going to leave just for Rosalie to show up the second we’re not together. We owe her as much time as we can give. And I told Mr. Keller I’d be here.”
Refusing to disappoint his teacher somehow felt like it would make up for what he’d done to Joe the librarian yesterday. The least he could do was suffer a few burns to clear his conscience.
Gabriel lowered his book, flashing the story he was reading—“The Fall of the House of Usher”—and gave Miles a look of disbelief. “The only way you can help that monstrosity at this point is to put it out of its misery.”
A laugh escaped Miles before he could catch it.
“C’mon, don’t tell me you don’t want to go to homecoming just to pose in front of this beauty.
” He’d stuck a few stars on lopsided, and the black backdrop was littered with stray drips and strings of glue, but it wasn’t hideous. “Think of the picture potential.”