Chapter 32
The world constricts, muffled. I resist the urge to spin in place, to flail for something—some weapon, some help. I hear movement, vague scrabbling.
“Oh no,” Ella whimpers. “Oh no, Titi.” I can feel her reaching for me, I can hear it in her voice, but she’s being held back.
“Walk to the middle of the field, girl,” says the voice. “Then sit down and cover your eyes.”
I won’t lie, there was a second when I thought it might be him. I didn’t really think that, not completely. But a little.
He wouldn’t actually harm Ella. I know that. But maybe he would have some other plan. Maybe he would try to convince me he would.
“Don’t hurt her!” Ella begs. “Please don’t hurt her!”
“I’ll come get you and bring you back to your mom soon,” says the voice. “I promise. I’ll take you back to your mom.”
“I want to stay with my aunt,” Ella says. “I want to stay.” She rarely refers to me as her aunt. “You can keep me if you don’t hurt my aunt.”
Her courage throbs in my chest, hurts me.
The voice smiles. “You’re a brave girl.” The first time someone has said this and really meant it about Ella? “But you need to go right now. You’ll be okay.”
There it is again. Ella will not be okay after I am killed in front of her.
“But— ” says Ella, and I can hear what it takes for her to disobey, even for a few seconds longer. “You don’t understand. She isn’t just an aunt like a regular aunt. I need her and my mom! I need them both!”
Desperate words form in my mouth against the barrier of the damp cloth. I start to gag, can’t breathe, force myself to draw air slowly through my nostrils. My chest heaves like it wants to split into gills along my ribs.
I told Al very explicitly to wait until Ella was safe. To wait until I was in obvious danger. I left him a short distance from the field, and tracking me is no problem for him. So where is he?
Is he here now?
I feel the proximity of my own death, the cool breath of it rising from an infinite blackness just at my feet. My heart drops toward that open dark.
“Go, girl,” the voice says, the edge in it sharpening. “I told you to go. Do it.”
Do it, I urge Ella in my mind. I turn toward the place where I think she is. I nod. I am desperate to tell her to go, too. She can’t stay here. She needs to be safe. I mumble through the gag, “Please go.” This is the worst possible time for her to find her courage.
There is a silence. And then Ella whispers, “No!”
The voice swears in another language, the strong accent finding its natural cadence. “I’ll have to carry you.”
“Don’t touch me!”
There’s a grunt, a scuffle.
I lunge forward blindly, the air too loose around me. I have the sensation of falling.
And then someone else is there, too, crashing out of the woods.
Al! Thank God.
No. Not Al.
“Put her down!”
Joel.
I feel instantly, illogically safer; something settles in me.
“You found me,” says the kidnapper, sounding mildly surprised.
“Joel! You have to help Titi!” Ella is screaming. “She has something over her head and she can’t see!”
“This is the problem,” says the kidnapper. “This is why you have failed.”
“You need to leave right now,” says Joel, low and menacing. I am so happy to hear his voice right now. Even though it should be Al. Where is Al?
I remember fleetingly that Joel and Al can’t be anywhere near each other.
“You summoned me,” the kidnapper says, her voice hard, matter-of-fact.
I was right. I don’t want to be right.
“You needed help,” she continues. “That was the right move. Now I’m here. I’ll finish it for you.”
“No,” he says, gruff. “You can’t.”
“I can’t?”
“I shouldn’t have brought you here. It was a mistake.”
My heart is a tennis ball being batted between them. I am listening with frantic attention, afraid a wind will sneak in and steal critical words away from my ears. Words that might determine my fate, Ella’s fate, everything.
“It was the right thing. You know that.”
Two angels, arguing over whether I should be dead.
I should have questioned him more. I should have pressed. I told Al I needed to find out more about the other angel. I was right. Only I got distracted, I didn’t follow my own advice.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” he says. “I thought you didn’t get the message.”
“I know. I wanted to check it out for myself.” She snorts. “Good thing I did. This is a mess. You’re weak.”
“Let’s talk,” he says. “I don’t even know who you are. Your story. We’re supposed to meet each other, right? Aren’t we supposed to get to know each other?”
She snorts again, dismissive. “First we do the right thing. Then we can talk. The succubus dies first.”
“Are you talking about killing Titi?” Ella sounds like she is shaking.
“Ella, go down the steps,” says Joel, his voice turning gentle. “I’ll make sure you’re safe.”
“You kidnapped a child!” he growls, seconds later.
“I did what I needed to do. I went to find the succubus and the girl was in the street. I took advantage of the opportunity to control the situation. I wasn’t going to hurt her.
” She sounds steely, utterly unrepentant.
“You are new to this, you’re a baby yourself, but you need to grow your skin thicker.
You are too soft now, and if we are soft, we put ourselves and the world in great danger.
Your grandmother must have taught you that much. ”
“It’s more complicated— ”
“It’s not. She has seduced you. That’s what they do. That’s her purpose, you stupid man.” She hisses the last part.
“Go, Ella,” Joel urges. I hear her moving past me.
I think I feel her hesitate. Then her hands are on my hands, feeling the zip tie.
I know she won’t be able to remove it, and she only has a second before the kidnapper tries to stop her.
I bob forward, and she understands, pulls the bag from my head.
My brain erupts in fireworks of relief at the return of my sight.
Ella’s eyes are huge as they take in the tape.
“Stop!” the woman yells, lunging. I have the blurry impression of long blond hair, long limbs, a long white coat. Joel is already there, catching her, shoving her back.
Ella tugs at the tape. I grunt, trying to get her to pull harder. She winces, yanks. I cough out the gag. “I love you, baby. You need to go right now. Run to the middle of the field!” She throws her arms around me, I lean against her, then she separates and hurries down the steps.
“Get out of my way,” the woman commands Joel. She barrels into him, tries to elbow him aside, but he’s too big, and he hardly wavers. She is wearing a calf-length, belted cream wool coat, like a movie star from another time. Like an angel, maybe.
“I want you to leave!” I yell. I don’t actually know how to do Dick Face’s power-of-suggestion stuff.
I don’t know what makes it work, why certain people have responded automatically to my needs or desires while others have acted normally toward me.
It did work over the phone, though, with that scam caller.
And the blond kidnapper didn’t want me to speak. So I should definitely speak.
“Shut up!” she screams. And something flashes. Joel gasps, lurches back. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she tells him, “But you need to get out of my way.” She kicks him aside and he stumbles. He’s holding his stomach, his pale shirt darkening—he’s bleeding. I can’t tell how badly. He’s silent.
I don’t have any time to react. The woman is coming for me now, reaching.
When she touches me, her power will flow into me, the way Joel’s did.
But I am not seducing her, I am not replenishing myself at the same time.
I realize, I feel with a wild certainty that precedes knowledge, that I am in terrible danger.
I dodge, flinging myself to the side. I’m off balance—I can’t use my hands, which are still pinned behind my back. I wish, uselessly, that I had figured out some clever way to loosen the zip tie while putting it on, but instead I did what I was told, and did it well, apparently.
She misses me by half an inch. She swings around, I wrench away, and for an instant, I am clear, but then in the next one my heel hangs in open air; I’m teetering at the edge of the top step and I can’t regain balance.
I hurl myself forward, trip, collapse against a column, my shoulder hitting hard.
My knee cracks on the stone as I fall, pain lancing through me.
I am kneeling, I can’t move. In movies, when someone is about to be killed, when they are badly injured, they always somehow manage to keep moving, to fight one last fight, to scramble aside.
But here I am, felled. One knock to the knee and all my newfound strength is meaningless.
And here she is, looming pale and ferocious, her face clarified by its nearness: the flare of her cheekbones, her pale eyes, her beauty almost computer-generated in its specificity, a throwback to a time when models were always Nordic, always extremely white.
I hear my own intake of breath.
I’m vaguely aware of Joel behind her, trying to get to her, but he’s too slow.
She reaches out.
And then something slams into place between us, and her hand connects with that thing instead of me. Her face contorts into a frustrated snarl.
It’s Ella. Ella has thrown herself onto me, knocking me onto my back, and is shielding me with her body. She can’t possibly know what will happen if the woman touches me. But somehow, it seems, she does.
“Titi, Titi, please get up,” she begs against my neck.
“Don’t touch me!” I gasp at the woman, my hands twisted under me, one wrist throbbing. “Don’t touch me, don’t— ” I’m panting.
She hesitates fractionally. Is it working? I think—or maybe it’s more a frantic prayer than a thought—that I am reaching her.
I know what I need to do next. I need to kiss her. I need to use my dark power. I need to be the succubus she is trying to destroy.
But even as I think this, I know it won’t work. I don’t feel it in me, that rise, the movement of it. It isn’t there.
Dick Face said I could command it, even if I didn’t want the person I wanted to kill. I thought I had done that, with Joel. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe I never learned how.
If my voice doesn’t work on her, if my words can’t shift her brain, then that’s it. I have nothing. And now she’s moving again; her eyes seem to refocus.
“Ella, leave!” I croak. I don’t know how quick it will be. Maybe she is more powerful than Joel. Ella can’t see this. I can’t let her watch me die.
But I can’t stop her from seeing.
I can’t stop anything.
The woman swoops down. I flinch, turning my head.
Ella shrieks; she is starfishing her body over mine, trying to cover every point of contact, trying to hide me under a blanket of her.
The woman peels her off me, and Ella is a screeching, mauling creature in a puffy coat, as though she knows instinctively that she is my last chance.
It happens very quickly, all of it crammed into a second, it seems, slurried with dark.
The woman makes a noise— Ella has clawed her, maybe—and she hurls Ella off her.
Ella thuds against the pillar just beside me, a terrible weight in the sound, and falls into a heap.
I flip toward her, my breath gushing out of my lungs as though my chest has been torn apart. I already know everything is wrong.
She is a huddle of clumped dark, her angles inanimate. Like a pile of extra clothing, but with too much substance.
I am gasping her name but she doesn’t respond. Her hair is on her face, her face is turned the other way, there is a small ink spill puddling where her head meets the pale stone. But it isn’t ink.