My Beautiful Reality (My Dear Illusion #2)

Chapter 1

There is a spiritual battle raging on the physical plane, and the front lines are drawn inside the confines of every human heart.

Good. Evil. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lie.

Life, my dear friend, is a battle for your soul. Don’t let anyone tell you different. They’ll try to lure you with pleasure or pain. They’ll try to blind you with falsehoods or twisted truths. They’ll promise there isn’t a heaven and there isn’t a hell.

But I’m here to tell you, your heart is a battlefield.

When the bloody battle is done, where will you stand?

With me?

Or against me?

* * *

A hot lick of breeze weaved through the iron bars on my bedroom window and brushed against my cheek. The wind didn’t cool the suffocating July heat; instead, it shifted around the oven-hot air and stirred up the subtle scent of violets, cranberry, and allspice.

Violets, because I always smelled like violets after coming back to a new body.

Cranberry and allspice because . . . Finn?

At the fluttering of my hair and the gentle lover’s pressure on the back of my neck, I turned toward the open window, but he wasn’t there. No one was. It was dark outside Hell Gate, and the only light was the sulfuric glow of the Victorian electroliers trying futilely to penetrate the black night.

There were the spikes of the tall iron gates and my iron bars, laying crisscross shadows over me. There was the dark concrete city beyond the gates and the inky-leafed maple and Callery pear trees that hugged the East River’s edge.

While it was midnight-dark and crawl-out-of-your-skin hot, there were still city sounds—a siren that cracked like thunder, an engine backfiring, a lone shout—and farther out, a distant laugh.

And Hell Gate? At midnight, it would yawn, stretch . . . and then the celebration would begin.

But right now, the hall outside my bedroom was still and quiet.

So the subtle scent of cranberry and allspice was just the wind playing wind tricks. It blew a sluggishly hot breeze off the East River and taunted me while I tried to keep the half-moon from rising.

Unfortunately, I did not have (and never have had) the ability to shove the moon beneath the black line of the East River. I didn’t even have the power to slow its ascent. I couldn’t keep the moon from rising, and I couldn’t keep time from moving forward.

It would be midnight soon, and that, as they said, was that.

I’d taken to telling myself, Mari, if you want to go backward, you have to move forward. If you want to go back to him, you have to move on.

So.

Finn was dead. I’d killed him, hadn’t I?

And while the wind told me he was alive, and Jagger said he’d come back to the world, I hadn’t seen him in the weeks since he’d reportedly started hunting conjurers and sending wrathful earthquakes to shake the city’s buildings.

Was he truly alive? A part of me desperately hoped he was, and a part of me desperately hoped he wasn’t. Because if he were alive, then he’d come back wrong.

The stories Jagger told me about the Smith who wore the crown . . .

He’d come back as the sort of conjurer who gleefully threw humanity toward war, destruction, and disease. If I could trust what Jagger said, then Finn was everything I hated.

Except . . .

I’d never trusted Jagger. Had I?

I’d only ever trusted you.

The wind moaned, dragging itself over my heat-flushed cheeks and whispering wind-nothings. Since I woke up in Hell Gate’s basement to find Jagger smiling cruelly over me, the wind had been mourning.

The boy, it howled. The boy, it wailed. The boy.

It pushed heavy mists, cloaked the city with weepy fog, and sent torrential rains to flood the streets and wash up trash and dirt. During the day, the wind wept, and at night, it shoved itself through the bars of my window to brush against my sweat-soaked skin and ask, Where is the boy?

I didn’t know. I couldn’t answer.

How do you console the wind? How do you hold something that can’t be held? How do you stop something from weeping when you want to weep too?

Jagger laughed when he heard the rumor Darin killed Jacob.

Supposedly, Darin killed Philoneas too, although no one knew for sure.

I think I would’ve felt it if it happened. I hadn’t felt anything though. Maybe the torrent of their deaths had been swallowed by the misery of my own.

Regardless, no Ward had descended on New York to avenge their deaths or claim to be the new principal, and Uliea was curiously missing.

Jagger was gleeful. He cackled with a rockslide-tumble laugh that segued into jocular odes to the death of all conjurers.

The death of any conjurer was worth celebrating.

That was why, ten days ago, he broke his own “no technology” rule and brought a giant screen into Hell Gate’s great hall so all his creatures could watch the funeral of Celia and Ragnor Bard.

Rou cooked a feast. I’d never seen so much food. All desserts, of course, because—as she said—a conjurer’s death was sweet, and the death of two conjurers was doubly sweet.

We had chocolate silk pies, double fudge brownies, white chocolate brownies, chocolate eclairs, raspberry trifle, strawberries and cream piled onto chiffon cake, hot fudge sundaes with fudge that always stayed hot and ice cream that always stayed cold, milkshakes that were thick and icy and could be sucked up a straw perfectly, caramel corn with caramel that didn’t stick to your teeth, and root beer floats with root beer that stayed frothy and ice cream that only melted if you wanted it to.

The funeral lasted six hours and was watched by everyone everywhere.

Bars, churches, schools, prisons, taxis, hospitals—everybody tuned in.

The funeral brought the world together. Everyone believed Celia and Ragnor had died in a tragic car accident.

According to the news, thousands of people called in sick the morning after the news aired, distraught at the unexpected deaths of their young idols.

Two million people lined the streets of New York for the funeral procession.

White horses pulled Celia’s glass coffin, and black horses pulled Ragnor’s.

There were bagpipes. I’m not kidding. They had a procession of bagpipes.

An honor guard. And of course, a half-dozen different famous bands and musicians singing tribute songs as the coffins were carried into St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the funeral.

Was the President there?

Yes. Yes, indeed.

Was half of Hollywood?

Sure.

Most of the music industry?

Yeah.

But do you know who the cameras zoomed in on most?

Luvic.

Luvic Bard.

While I shoveled spoonful after spoonful of hot fudge sundae into my mouth, I watched Luvic put on the best performance of his life.

He was gloriously, beautifully, tragically heartbroken.

The cameras constantly turned to him because he was gorgeous in his grief.

When he lifted his sister’s casket with his fellow pallbearers, his expression stayed stoically, heartbreakingly resolute.

When Celia was lowered into the ground, a single tear spilled down his smooth cheek.

When a little girl broke free from the crowd and gave him a white rose to place on Ragnor’s casket, he kneeled down, accepted the rose, and held back a waterfall of tears.

The world went mad. The newscasters and the internet fell in irrevocable love with him. Luvic stole everyone’s heart the second he dropped to his knees and kept himself from sobbing at a little girl’s feet.

Jagger howled with laughter.

“Look at him!” he shouted in admiration, banging his rocklike fist into his hand. “Look at him. Killed his siblings, and they love him for it.”

Justice stood to the side, not smiling, not laughing, not eating sweets. “They don’t actually know he killed his siblings.”

Justice wanted very badly to kill Luvic. It was clear in the way he clenched his fists and kept his gaze narrowed on the screen.

Jagger barred his serrated teeth. “Is it better to know who does the killing?”

Justice’s skin lost its color, and he very carefully turned so he wouldn’t accidently look at me.

It’d been like that since I was let out of the conjurer’s cage. Justice avoided looking at me. Avoided talking to me. Avoided me, period. I wasn’t sure if he couldn’t look at me or if he couldn’t look at what he’d done to me.

Or maybe it was that he was afraid to see himself through my eyes. If he never looked at me, he wouldn’t have to know how I felt.

Griff was the opposite. He looked at me all the time. That was almost worse. I caught him during meals, while I stalked through Hell Gate, while talking with Jagger, always looking at me. The first time he saw me, his eyes went wide, his face lost all its color, and he started to cry.

He stumbled away. Ran right from the room.

After that, whenever he looked at me, his eyes got watery and he blinked too much, trying to clear the tears away—but he never cried like he did the first time he saw me as a mine.

Poor Griff was having a hard time.

Justice was a mine.

I was a mine.

He was the last nine.

I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me. I don’t know what made him cry. I didn’t ask.

I figured it was the same thing that had made his mouth go flat and his eyes limpid when he first saw Justice as a mine.

His Justice light had gone out. The spark in his soul had fled. Every happy, hopeful Justice thing in him was gone.

I think innocent, cautious, puppylike Griff saw what I didn’t want to.

It was something I’d been avoiding for two weeks.

But as I looked in the mirror and braided my hair, preparing for tonight’s celebration and my formal initiation as a mine, I admitted to myself what Griff knew the second he saw me: the old Mari was dead.

There was no going back.

There was only going forward.