Chapter 23
Sidney comes to on a cold floor.
His head is pounding. Not the dull ache of a hangover or the sharp throb of an impact but something deeper, chemical, a wrongness that sits behind his eyes and pulses in time with his heartbeat.
His arms are numb. His fingers feel thick and distant and when he tries to move them they twitch but don’t obey.
When he tries to move anything, his legs, his torso, his head, his body won’t cooperate.
Not because he’s restrained. There are no ropes, no cuffs, nothing physical holding him down.
His body simply won’t listen, as though the signal between his brain and his muscles has been rerouted through something that is intercepting the commands and swallowing them whole.
There’s a buzzing in his veins. A vibration, low and constant, running through him, and every cell in his body is being tuned to a frequency it was never meant to sustain.
It hums in his teeth, in his fingertips, in the marrow of his bones, and it feels wrong.
Not painful, not yet, but fundamentally, deeply wrong, the way a note played on a broken instrument is wrong.
Close to the right sound but off in a way that makes everything around it distort.
He opens his eyes.
The ceiling of a warehouse. High, industrial, crisscrossed with steel beams and rusted piping.
Broken windows let in the gray light of predawn, thin and watery and colorless.
The floor beneath him is concrete, cracked and stained with things he doesn’t want to identify, and the air smells of rust and damp and something else, something underneath, something that smells the way the underworld feels, heavy and old and too close to death.
Around him, glowing faintly red in the dim light, is a circle.
It’s drawn on the floor in something dark.
Something that could be paint but isn’t.
It’s too thick, too viscous, and it gleams wetly in the light even though it appears to have been there for a while.
The symbols at its edges are moving. Not quickly, not spinning or flashing, but shifting, rearranging themselves in slow, deliberate patterns, letters rewriting themselves into new words.
If Sidney stares at them too long his vision swims and a nausea that has nothing to do with the chemical in his blood rises in his throat.
He stops staring at them.
The first thing he registers beyond the circle is the sound of fighting.
He turns his head. Slowly. The muscles in his neck resist with a deep, grinding reluctance, his body moving through something thicker than air, and his vision takes a moment to catch up, the warehouse tilting and blurring before it settles.
Malik is fighting two coven members near the eastern wall.
Fighting is a generous word. Malik is dismantling them.
He moves with the fluid, effortless violence of something that was built for combat and enjoys it, ducking a hex that crackles past his head, closing the distance in two strides, and putting one of them through a support column with an open-palmed strike that sends concrete dust billowing into the air.
The second one throws a blood curse at him, a sizzling red arc that splits the air, and Malik catches it.
Catches it in his hand, and the magic hisses against his skin and he doesn’t flinch.
He crushes it in his fist and the fragments dissipate and then he’s on the coven member before they can cast again, and Sidney hears the crack of impact and sees the body hit the floor and Malik is already turning, already moving, already looking for the next threat.
Behind him, further across the warehouse floor, Newt is fighting three more.
His magic is bright and sharp, white light that erupts from his hands in precise, controlled bursts, and it fills the warehouse with flashes every time he throws a ward or breaks a hex.
But he’s not aiming to kill. He’s not even aiming to maim.
Every spell is designed to move. Push aside.
Knock down. Clear a path. A coven member charges him and Newt throws up a barrier that the woman runs into face-first, and she crumples, dazed but breathing, and Newt is already stepping over her, already casting the next ward, already pressing forward toward the center of the warehouse.
Toward Sidney.
Toward the circle.
Toward Angelica.
She is standing beside a stone table about fifteen feet from where Sidney lies.
The table is covered in symbols and candles, black candles, their flames burning a color that isn’t quite orange, more amber, more gold, more wrong, and other things that Sidney doesn’t want to identify.
Bones, maybe. Jars of something dark. A knife with a curved blade that catches the candlelight and holds it.
Angelica stands behind the table with her hands resting on its surface and she is not watching the fighting.
She is not watching Malik put her people through walls.
She is not watching Newt cut through her defenses with a precision that speaks to months of training and a lifetime of rage held carefully in check.
She is preparing. Her hands move across the table’s surface, adjusting, arranging, her fingers tracing symbols that glow briefly under her touch and then fade.
Every few seconds she glances at Sidney in the circle, and the look she gives him is appraising and detached, the look she might give a tool she’s about to use. Not a person. A mechanism.
Sidney stares back at her. His body won’t move and his veins are humming and the circle is doing something to him that he doesn’t understand, but he can still look at her, and he does.
She’s beautiful. That’s the first thing he thinks, absurdly.
She has Penny’s eyes, or Penny has hers, dark and sharp and set beneath brows that are arched in a permanent expression of mild superiority.
Her features are fine and symmetrical and her hair is dark and pulled back from her face and she carries herself with the posture of someone who has never questioned her worth.
Sidney looks at her and can see Penny in the bones of her face and the thought makes something in his chest clench with a protectiveness so fierce it surprises him.
“You’re awake,” she says. “Good. It works better if you’re conscious.”
Sidney’s mouth is dry. His tongue feels thick, clumsy, and when he speaks his voice is a rasp. “What—”
“The circle is a conduit channeler,” Angelica says.
She doesn’t come closer. She stays at her table, her hands still moving, still preparing, and her tone is measured and instructional, the tone of someone who truly doesn’t care if he understands or not but is explaining anyway because the silence bores her.
“It will use your body to open a passage between the living world and the underworld, through which I will summon my mother and father back to life.”
Sidney’s jaw tightens. The humming in his veins intensifies, or maybe it doesn’t, maybe he’s just more aware of it now that he knows what it’s for, and the symbols at the edge of the circle shift faster.
“Penny would have worked better,” Angelica continues, adjusting a candle on the table.
“She was born for this. But you’ve been threaded through with enough of her power to serve the same purpose.
” She looks at him. “The process will be painful, but it won’t kill you.
” A pause. She tilts her head, considering.
“Probably. I haven’t done it before, so I can’t make promises. ”
She says it with a shrug. A small, unconcerned lift of her shoulders, as if the prospect of killing him is a mild inconvenience rather than a murder. A variable in an equation that she’s accounted for but isn’t ly worried about.
From across the warehouse, Newt finally breaks through.
He sends the last coven member between them sprawling with a blast of white light that cracks the concrete where it hits, a spider web of fractures radiating outward from the impact site, and the woman goes down hard and stays down.
Newt is breathing hard. His hands are still glowing, fading from bright white to a dimmer luminescence, and there’s a cut above his eyebrow that’s bleeding into his left eye and he doesn’t seem to notice.
Malik falls in at his shoulder, blood on his knuckles that isn’t his, and the two of them face Angelica across the warehouse floor.
Newt doesn’t look at Angelica the way a son looks at his mother.
There’s no yearning in it. No desperation for her to be something she’s not.
No ache, no reaching, no plea for her to be, just this once, the person he needed her to be.
Sidney recognizes the absence of that look because he’s worn it himself, in different rooms, with different people, for different reasons, and there’s a hollowness to it that never fully heals.
Newt has grieved this woman. Not her death, she’s standing right there, but the idea of her.
The possibility of her. The mother she could have been and chose not to be.
He grieved it a long time ago, and what’s left is not anger and not sadness but something flatter, something more exhausted, something that has finished hoping and has not yet figured out what comes after.
But Newt is Newt. And Newt believes, stubbornly and probably stupidly, with the kind of conviction that only exists in people who have been given every reason to abandon it and haven’t, that everyone has a choice.
That no one is so far gone they can’t turn around.
It’s the thing that makes him good. Genuinely good, in a way that has nothing to do with naivety and everything to do with a deliberate, hard-won decision to be better than the people who raised him.
He has seen the worst of what people can do.
He has been the recipient of the worst of what people can do. And he still believes in the choice.
“Stop,” Newt says.