Chapter Forty
Silas flicked his caster open and closed, open and closed, open and closed. Minutes passed as he echoed the motion, a blister building on his finger from repetition.
The traffic didn’t move a fucking inch.
Whoever built the roads around LAX deserved to burn in the deepest, darkest pits of Hell.
Open and closed. Open and closed.
“Can you stop doing that? It’s creepy.”
Silas turned to Anika, who tapped her fingers on the steering wheel of their rental car. He had wanted to drive, but she insisted that she do it because he had “scary murder eyes” and was “likely to road rage them into a D-list celebrity.”
Open and closed. Open and closed.
“Oh my god, Silas, put that damn thing away before I put you away.”
Closed.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that this whole plan is ridiculous and I was kind of hoping you’d drop the weird revenge mission thing on the plane, except instead you spent six and a half hours staring daggers at the seat in front of you and now you’re doing knife bits in the passenger seat like a freaking psychopath!”
Open. Closed.
“I’m not dropping this, Anika.”
Anika’s fingers stopped tapping, her grip going tight for a minute before relaxing. She sighed. “Revenge isn’t going to bring him back.”
A loud horn split the air. “Line’s moving,” he said.
Anika tutted, but let it drop, focusing on the road ahead as the car inched forward.
Open. Closed.
Revenge isn’t going to bring him back.
It was true.
Nothing was going to bring him back.
But revenge, at least, would be something. Revenge would mean Silas was trying to fix the catastrophic mistake he’d made.
Revenge would mean this wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
Revenge was the only thing he could think of when he was this fucking angry.
It was a pit, the rage, and he didn’t think he could climb out of it, not without a ladder of bones and blood to pull him up.
He didn’t just want Sylvia gone—he needed her gone.
Anyone with that type of power living in their blood was a ticking time bomb.
How those other bombs would be dealt with was something he couldn’t even begin to decide amid the fury that clouded his brain.
All he knew was that no unsettled witch was safe. He wouldn’t think about who that list included.
The car moved forward a whole foot. They were practically flying.
He should just get out. He could run to Aestas faster than this. He reached for the handle, ready to—
The pulse threw him back against the seat. Fire shot up his spine, down his hands. He slammed them so hard against the door that the reverberations went down to his bones. He started hyperventilating, his breath whipping out of his lungs.
He was going to—
Not again. Not again. Not again.
People screamed.
He couldn’t do this. He needed to find a way to—
Except the feeling was already gone.
He hadn’t snapped.
People were still screaming. Why were they screaming?
“Silas! Silas, come on!”
Hands grabbed at him, and he opened his eyes to see Anika, struggling to get his seatbelt undone. The airbags had gone off at some point, he realized. He raised a hand to his breastbone—it was tender, bruised from the force of slamming into the airbag. How had he not felt that?
“Motherfucking motherfucker of a goddamn fucking seatbelt—”
For some reason, he gathered, it was very important that he get out of this seat. He pushed Anika’s hands away and fiddled with the buckle until it opened.
“Thank fuck,” she said. “Out. We need to get out.”
Silas exited the car, immediately getting assaulted with smoke and heat. The fog cleared from his mind as he took in the scene in front of him.
He might not have snapped, but someone else certainly had.
The immediate problem presented itself quickly—a streetlamp that had fallen on top of their Escalade.
The engine was smoking beneath it, and Silas smelled gasoline leaking into the air.
Whether that was from their car or the dozens of others that had been turned into a battlefield in front of them remained to be seen.
Silas stood frozen, taking in the scene, until Anika ran to him and pulled him a few feet away from their car, ranting about explosions and fires and “who knows what the fuck else, what the literal fuck is going on right now?”
“Snap,” he said, the only word he could get out.
Anika turned to him, her eyes wide. “Fuck.”
He didn’t bother responding, instead looking out at what had been the line of cars they’d been stuck in. Traffic’s cleared, at least, the morbid voice in the back of his head offered. People are dead, the sane part of him responded.
Most of the damage was a few yards ahead of them.
A pedestrian bridge that ran over the roadway had collapsed, scattering concrete and plastic and people, screaming people, on top of the cars below.
Silas’ gaze searched through the wreckage, doing his best to tune out the noises of anguish and terror that filled the air.
He didn’t know how, but Sylvia had caused this. He had to find the source of the snap. Had to find who had done this and make sure they could never do it again.
Smoke billowed through the air, blocking Silas’ vision as he searched the debris. Vaguely, he heard Anika behind him, felt her trying to grab for his arm. He kept going. Someone shoved his shoulder, and he saw blood on their body.
He kept going.
Until.
The car was in the center of the chaos, everything else radiating from it in a gruesome circle.
It was only a few feet away, but the haze made it difficult to see clearly.
All Silas could grasp was the faint outline of a figure huddling inside, exposed to the air by car doors that had been blown off their hinges.
Anika spotted the car at the same time he did.
“Silas, don’t,” she said, reaching for him.
He evaded her grip, rushing toward the car.
He heard her feet pounding behind him, but he didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, even as he tripped over bricks and bodies and god knew what else.
He was single-minded, focused only on putting an end to the dark power that had caused this.
But when he got to the car, he saw that the dark power was a teenager, if that—the short-haired kid who was curled in a ball in the back seat might not even be out of middle school.
Their head was in their hands, their body rocking back and forth as they wailed.
It sounded so much like his mom that for a second Silas was thrown back in time, the sheer misery of it dropping him to his knees.
All of the violence that had invaded him disappeared, his body going slack in its wake. He felt paralyzed, stuck on the pavement, watching a life be unraveled.
Anika, though, was not paralyzed. She moved around him to the cowering teen. She reached out her hand, carefully laying it on the kid’s arm.
“Hey.” He’d never heard her voice that soft.
“No, no, no,” the kid cried. “Please. I’ll hurt you.”
“You’re not going to hurt me,” Anika said. “It’s all going to be okay.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”
The teen lifted their head up, looking at her with big, watery eyes. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
“I know,” Anika repeated. “I’m Anika. This is Silas. What’s your name?”
“Wren.”
“We’re going to help you, Wren. Can you get out of the car?”
Wren shook their head, the sobs starting again. “No. No. They wouldn’t—I can’t leave them.”
And then Silas looked to the front seat.
It was Wren’s parents, and it was his dad, and it was all those people outside, and the people from that snap he’d helped clean up when he was just a kid himself, and it was what he knew Katherine must have seen when she snapped, and he wanted to pull Wren into a hug and tell them it was all going to be okay, but they didn’t have time.
Because LAX was falling apart.
It was the parking garage that was going down now, the structures that had been connected to the bridge crumbling without its support.
Feet pounded around him as people tried to escape the debris that started falling from the sky.
He heard Anika’s voice rise, heard Wren protest as she pulled the kid out of the car, felt her grab Silas’ hand and pull him away.
Anika ran. Silas followed.
Stopped, when he realized Wren had stopped.
Turned, to see the teen looking back at the car, their eyes glued to the bodies of their parents.
“We need to go!” Anika said, trying to pull Wren with her, but they kept their feet glued to the ground. Silas knew that feeling. Knew it too well.
He moved to Wren. Bent down. Looked the kid in the eyes. Let all of his pain shine through—two matching broken souls.
“You can’t undo it,” he said. “You can’t go back in time. All you can do is move forward.”
Behind Wren’s head, Silas watched as a station wagon rolled off the collapsing parking structure, exploding in a puff of fire. They still didn’t have time for this, but Silas would make time. He’d carve out the space to have this conversation, because he knew that Wren needed to have it.
“What if I don’t want to?” Wren asked, in a shaky voice.
“You don’t have a choice.”
Wren looked at him, their face raw with emotion. The air started to heat—from another impending snap or from the chaos around them, Silas didn’t know. But he kept his eyes glued to Wren’s, focused on this moment. On this pain. On the chance that he could help heal at least this one wound.
Wren blinked away tears. “I don’t want to be here without them.”
“I know. But they wouldn’t want you to stop living just because they’re gone.”
Wren looked at the destroyed car again, then at Silas. Then they nodded.
Silas slipped Wren’s hand into his. Everything became instinct as they ran, Silas’ body telling him when to jump, when to duck, when to weave.
His lungs burned with effort, but he kept going, kept pushing until the air cleared, the noises of pain getting overtaken by the sounds of sirens—ambulances, fire trucks, desperately needed help.
They finally stopped, carving out a small space for their group on the sidewalk as people streamed around them. Silas didn’t even wait to catch his breath before he turned to Anika. “Take Wren to El Sereno Coffee in east LA. You’ll be safe there.”
Her face tightened. “Silas, I can’t let you go by yourself.”
The meaning of her words was clear. She wasn’t worried about the risk to him. She was worried about what he might do to everyone else.
But the rage was gone. Clarity had replaced it.
“The only person who is going to burn for this is Sylvia.”
Anika looked at him, then at Wren, then at the scene behind her. Finally, she turned back to him.
“Make her pay.”