Chapter 26
Instinctively, I start toward her, Devon right behind me.
Another victim, one we’re in time to save, for a change.
But I stop short, just before the typewriter, my boots skidding on the gritty floor. Instinct is screaming at me, and I’m not sure why.
“What’s wrong?” Devon asks at my shoulder, tension winding through the question, like vines clinging to brick.
I shake my head, unable to explain. Just the feeling that something is wrong, as if my subconscious is aware of details I’m missing and trying desperately to set off flares.
The girl’s mouth moves rapidly, words spewing everywhere, with frantic hand gestures, but I can only catch portions of what she’s saying. Her voice is somehow … diminished. Like hearing a voice on speakerphone from across a football field. Tiny, tinny, almost inaudible.
“… before he comes back, please! Don’t leave me here. He’s going to turn me into … suck all the life right out of me!”
“Who?” I ask.
She turns blue eyes, golden lashes damp with tears, toward Devon. “Please.”
“Is everything okay in there?” Carter’s voice floats in from outside. “Jocasta?”
“Yes, fine, just a minute,” I call back. “Stay out.”
“Jo,” Devon begins. “We should get her out—”
“What does he look like, the one who put you in here?” I persist, moving a little closer to be able to hear her.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. He was tall, I think?
” She smooths her hands over her legs, and the tiny red-and-blue checked pattern of her pants shivers with the movement, the wide hemmed fabric nearly touching her shoes.
“Kind of shaggy hair, grayish. Light eyes. Handsome but … freaky deaky.” She shudders.
Handsome but also like if you looked at him from the corner of your eye, you’d see a skull leering at you from beneath his skin? Eyes like frozen slush, a color between blue and gray and also somehow colorless at the same time?
Shit.
“My father,” I murmur to Devon, who blanches.
He could have easily stuffed this girl in here, like an alligator hiding his food for later, though I don’t know why he would.
Even where’s she sitting, behind some kind of magical barrier that prevents her from leaving, surrounded by objects from those poor dead girls—the typewriter, the necklace, a sparkly headband, and a framed photo of a beautiful dark-haired girl with her hair cut in a flippy bob—reeks of my father’s sense of drama and ritual.
“Please just get me out before he comes back,” she begs, carefully enunciating each word so we can hear her.
I detect a hint of a southern accent. Georgia, maybe?
“I was walking back from class, after all that fuss.” She waves her hand in the direction of the torn-up street and the Foreign Language House.
“Next thing I know, he’s in front of me.
” Her lower lip shakes. “I don’t know what happened after that, I just ended up here.
He said he would be back for me, to take my life. Turn me into one of those skin things.”
“The husks?” I ask.
“Yes, those awful things.” She whimpers. “Please, please.” She holds her hand out to Devon. But she’s not crossing the line created by the objects surrounding her.
His expression pained, Devon turns to me. “Jo, if she’s right about the timing, that was almost twenty-four hours ago. He could be back any second.” He’s seconds from pushing past me to take her hand and pull her free, if he can.
And this mysterious girl, she’s ready for it, leaning so far that the pointed white collars of her shirt fall forward, revealing a gold-banded choker with a butterfly charm and the letter N dangling at the center around her neck.
I narrow my eyes at her, the voice of warning in my head practically one loud screech at this point.
“I’m so scared,” she says, with a fresh batch of tears trickling forth. But now, her whole focus is on Devon, a lioness honing in on the slower zebra.
“No.” I step sideways to block Devon.
“Jo!” He sounds appalled.
“It’s my father’s magic that’s keeping her in here,” I say. “I think maybe we should consider that he might have had good reason to lock her up.”
The girl’s gaze flicks to me, and despite the fresh tears, I sense calculation in her stare. I’m a problem she’s trying to crack.
“She’s a kid, just like the others,” Devon protests. “He probably stashed her here until he could come back for her later.”
“My father doesn’t need to hoard food,” I say slowly, the pieces finally coming together. Those clothes. Her description of the husks. The rusty padlock on the doors. The idea that she was at class today on Old Campus. “And if he did, he wouldn’t have left it for this long.”
“What are you talking about? It’s only been a day or two,” Devon says.
I take one last look at the girl. Nope, definitely not. More like decades. “We need to get out of here now, come on.” Because the warning sirens in my head have ceased, leaving only an eerie silence and the greasy, sickening sense of impending trouble.
I drag Devon, still protesting, back toward the entrance. The girl’s hysterical sobs and pleas follow us.
“Don’t leave me, oh, please don’t leave me. You have to take me with you, I’m going to die. He’s going to kill me.”
I grimace but keep my grip tight on Devon’s arm, keep us moving.
“You have to save me, you’re the only one who can! Please!”
Devon’s arm tenses beneath my hand, his breathing sharp. I hope I’m not screwing this up. But then, right as we reach the doors, the shrieks morph into unhinged laughter. It echoes around us, tinny and sharp.
Relief unravels something tight in me, before dread winds it right back up tight again.
“All right, fine, you got me,” the girl calls after us, loud enough that we can hear through the barrier. “What was it?” she asks, clapping her hands together. “How did you figure it out? I have to know, you clever little thing.”
Shoving Devon out ahead of me, I stop at the threshold and pivot in her direction. Because despite my big talk about leaving, I can’t. I can’t let her continue this. “No one goes to class anymore on Old Campus. All those buildings have been torn down.” I inch back toward her. “Also, it’s Sunday.”
“Well, shoot.” She snaps her fingers, and I flinch even at the muted crack of sound.
“But mostly, it’s because you’re dressed like you should be snorting cocaine at Studio 45 under a disco ball in the seventies.”
Her icy look undercuts through her affected friendliness. “Studio 54,” she corrects. “And I don’t think you’re one to criticize—you’re wearing tights without a skirt.”
Yeah, it probably would look like that to someone who’s been trapped in a crypt for fifty years.
“Whatever.” I shrug, stuffing my hands into my pockets so she can’t see them shaking.
This woman, whoever she is, is responsible for that terrible void, that sucking hole of darkness, pulling me down into the ground when I tried to yank Izzy free.
Which means she could do it again. I’m not sure why she isn’t doing it right now.
She must want something else.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“You don’t know?” Rage flickers behind her polished smile, and a shiver traces its way down my spine. There is something impossibly familiar about her. Impossible, being the key word.
“You’re one of the girls whose name is on the side of this thing.
” I gesture toward the mausoleum around us.
“Nova, probably, because you’re the only one whose body they never found.
” Which, hey, I’m betting that’s not a coincidence.
“But I don’t know why my father would give a shit about you. ” Enough to lock her away, anyway.
Her smile trembles, and tears flood her eyes again, but this time … this time, they’re real. And not because she’s sad. Her expression shifts, like the bones are moving beneath her skin, a carved statue coming to life with fury oozing from every pore.
“For half a century, I’ve barely managed to keep myself alive—lapsing into sleep for months or years at a time, whispering dark thoughts to the susceptible as they passed by to keep myself fed.
Just trying to survive long enough for a chance to escape.
” Her mouth thins to a tight line. “And I thought that was bad, until you showed up. Did you ever consider why you might be drawn to this place, why you might feel at home here?”
“I thought…” My voice breaks off into a whisper, and I force myself to speak up. “I did research. I thought it was a dead zone. No magic.”
Nova, presumably, throws her head back into a laugh, too long, too harsh, for true amusement. “Are you that stupid? You don’t even recognize your own brand of magic? Your own family?”
This whole place has the vibe of a funeral home. That’s what Devon said when he first arrived. Because he thought I’d claimed Beecher.
No, but the magic was here, all along.
She stands, loathing contorting her heart-shaped porcelain face.
“At first, I thought you were here to get me out. But no. Instead, for the last three years, I’ve been stuck in here, feeling these pathetic little brushes and tickles of magic.
My magic,” she shouts. “But never enough to wake me fully, to give me enough strength to do anything. Not until two nights ago. You finally fed properly and left scraps behind. But that was enough.” She pauses to draw in breath, her chest heaving. “And you don’t know who I am?”
The husks with life drained out of them, the familiar feel of the magic in the cemetery—like stepping into bathwater at my exact body temperature—her awareness of what Death looks like, even her pissy rage-tantrum at me not knowing who she is.
It all adds up—to a possibility I never, ever, would have considered before this moment.
I am Death’s daughter. Death’s only child. It’s what I’ve been told my whole life. But that doesn’t mean I’ve always been the only one.
Nova bares her teeth in a grin, slightly crooked canines adding to her feral expression.
“Well, greetings, little sister. Now get me the fuck out of here.”