Chapter 62
I slept restlessly, expecting somehow that Finn would find me. Not the Finn I’d been dreaming about, but the one in real life who shook the earth, hunted conjurers, and hated me.
That Finn was terrifying. It was as if every bit of good had been scraped out of him and he’d been filled with cruelty and hate. He looked almost the same, but he felt entirely different.
There was a creature who’d visited Hell Gate years ago.
Jagger had business with it. I was only eight years old, but I remember clearly the dinner we ate together.
The creature was served a live growling.
It had long tentacles that drilled into the growling’s bones and sucked free all the marrow.
Then it replaced the marrow with acid, which liquefied the growling’s bones and organs.
It greedily sucked the juice free. When it was done eating, the growling was just a husk.
All its insides were gone. But I could still see its face, its features, its growling-ness.
That was what this terrifying version of Finn reminded me of. His spirit had been sucked out in death, and his body had come back filled with something horrible.
Sadly, though, he might believe the same thing about me.
Griff and I slept from near dawn until early afternoon. At the sounds of the asylum waking, he moaned unhappily, his wings twitching. Then his father’s form retreated, and he rolled off the bed. The sconces woke up at his movement, casting a dim glow across the small room.
Griff padded barefoot across the stone and shrugged into the clothing he’d folded and placed on the floor last night.
I stretched, wiggling my toes and yawning.
There was the faint but tantalizing scent of blueberry pancakes, crisp bacon, and scrambled eggs. I smiled.
“Rou’s made breakfast.” My smile faded. “She’s probably excited about the wedding. I bet she’ll want to hear all about it. Luvic and Last, a match made in hell.”
Griff had been pulling his T-shirt on over his head. He snorted and then poked his head through the neck hole to grin at me.
“Well, it’s the truth.” I shrugged and climbed out of bed.
The floor was cold, and I curled my toes, enjoying the feel.
While sleeping with Griff was okay—his father’s form had short, soft hair like a horse—he was almost as hot as I was.
I had fire in my veins because of Jagger, and Griff had fire in his veins because of his dad.
I’d sweated buckets last night, and the sheets were drenched.
“Maybe Rou made iced coffee,” I said hopefully. “What’re you doing today?”
As far as I knew, I was the only one of Jagger’s creatures who’d been invited to the wedding.
Griff pulled free the notebook and pencil from his pocket. He scribbled a drawing: a raptor and six conjurers.
Six?
“Jagger has you hunting today?” A slow lick of fear pulsed through me. Griff was a lure, not a hunter. Every time Jagger sent him out doing what Justice had once done, Griff’s chances of dying increased exponentially.
Just look at what had happened the last time Jagger sent him hunting.
Griff smiled like he knew I was imagining all the accidents that could kill him today. A runaway bus. A phone dropped from a skyscraper. Falling down an escalator. Honestly, if there were such a thing as accidental death by pigeon, it’d happen to Griff.
“Who are you hunting?”
He scratched his stubbled jaw with the pencil, his brow wrinkling. We’d never made a picture for the different conjurer families. He drew three quills and then three guitars.
“Three Clarks? Three Bards?”
His head tilted in assent.
Jagger was really stirring the pot. Every time he had a conjurer killed, pointing the death at another family, it made them more suspicious, paranoid, and angry. He hoped it would make them stupid enough to kill each other. Sow the seeds, see what grows.
“You’re after offshoots? Cousins? Not a principal or his family, right?”
Griff would never be able to take out a principal or any close relation. He’d be dead in seconds.
He nodded and knocked his shoulder against mine, trying to dispel my worry.
I couldn’t stop Jagger from ordering Griff to kill, but I could tell Griff—
“Be careful.” I laid my hand on his arm. “Even a third or a fifth cousin is dangerous. Especially when they’re fighting for their lives.”
I wouldn’t tell him I wished he didn’t have to do this. There wasn’t any point in saying it.
“Just be careful.”
He shrugged off my hand and drew a stack of pancakes, jutting his chin toward the door. His stomach rumbled, and his eyes lit with humor.
He was masking whatever he was feeling. He didn’t want to talk about how much he feared conjurers and how the end of his last life was racing toward him.
It was easier to think about pancakes than the fact that in a few hours, he might be dead.
“You go ahead. I’ll be just a minute.”
As he turned, I grabbed his sleeve and tugged him back. He had a cowlick sticking straight in the air. I stood on my tiptoes and reached up to smooth it down. It sprang right back up. Stubborn. I licked my hand, brushed it down, and held it in place.
Griff snorted. When I pulled away, the cowlick popped back up.
“It was worth a try.” I rumpled Griff’s fluffy hair. “See you.”
He gave me a half-smile and then hurried out the door, leaving me alone in my room.
I quickly stripped and changed into a new pair of jeans and a T-shirt and tugged on my boots. I crouched next to the bed and wiped away the blood I’d smeared under the frame.
I hadn’t dreamed about the ghost train, but I’d had a dream that something was lurking under the bed, raging at the locked frame, shouting and pounding. Then the shadowed figure had bent down and found the pebble I’d thrown into the abyss under the bed. They’d clutched it in their hand and laughed.
I’d woken gasping and sweating, with that laughter echoing in my ears.
I had one mission. I needed to find the pebble Finn had given me. I’d thrown it into the abyss so no one would find it, but clearly, anyone walking the tunnels could stumble on it. Everyone knew some creatures could read the history of objects as easily as Jagger read ancestry in blood.
I knocked on the floor, chanting the rhyme to open the abyss.
There wasn’t anything but darkness. There wasn’t any sound. I sent up a prayer and then dropped down into the hole.
* * *
It wasn’t a dream.
Something or someone had been under my bed last night. Maybe it was the monster under the bed, but I didn’t think so. Harry had claimed the monster was a weak coward. He’d scoffed at him and hadn’t been afraid at all.
But Harry had died very, very afraid.
There was a burned-flesh stench. The bitter smell of singed hair and charred skin.
Harry’s bowels had leaked, and my eyes watered as I held back a gag.
There wasn’t a breeze or wind in the tunnel, so the death smell lingered heavily.
Maybe it would sink permanently into the marrow-white, spongy walls.
I turned my face to the side, breathing shallowly through my mouth. The air stung. It was heavy with an acrid, biting smoke.
The rounded tunnel walls pulsed, letting off a dim reddish-white glow. The humming whoosh was still there, but today, the whoosh had twisted into a pained moan. The walls were riddled with long, beastlike gouges. Claw. Tooth. Fang.
Jackaltooth?
No.
There was fire too. Scorch marks singed the walls, and red liquid leaked from the black. A jackaltooth, no matter how violent, couldn’t shoot flame.
Looking up at the underside of my bed, I saw a massacre of deep scratches, claw marks, and fist-size indents. Some horror had been knocking on my door.
A cold chill brushed over my skin, and I felt the ghost of a claw trailing down my spine. I shivered and crouched next to Harry’s body.
My stomach churned. He was barely recognizable.
It seemed to me that whatever had done this had abused him long after he was gone.
Sometimes, animals played with their dead prey, scratching it, biting it, tossing it in the air, well after death.
This was different. There was a twisted enjoyment here.
“What did this to you?” I whispered. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
You may think I was mad for talking to a dead slipshot.
But slipshots are different than other beings.
They’re born of greed and murder, and often, they die the same way.
They believe if they die a violent death, then their spirit will linger happily, soaking up the blood.
Then, eventually, they’ll disintegrate and make their way back to the spirit of avarice and its companion murder.
Harry’s body was sinking into the sponge floor. Half his legs had disappeared. His abdomen was nearly swallowed. His left arm was flung wide, but the right rested on his chest.
“A monster.”
I swung around and narrowed my eyes on the dark tunnel. There were the legs of the figments hanging from the ceiling, the sparks of nightmares and dreams lighting the dark path, but no creature. No being.
“Harry?”
His voice was distant and barely discernable. The whooshing moan nearly swallowed his words.
“What monster?”
I strained, trying to catch his voice.
Slipshots bodies never survived after death. Usually, within an hour, their physical remains had vanished. I’d seen it countless times in Hell Gate. He was still here, though, which meant he hadn’t been dead long.
Was the monster still here?
I looked over my shoulder, shivering at the twitching figment legs and the shifting red and white walls covered in claw marks and scorch stains.
“The Smith.” Harry’s voice was hollow and barely above a whisper. All the same, I jerked at the name.
“The Smith did this? The Smith killed you?”
Finn was the monster who’d killed Harry and ravaged the tunnel walls? Had he been the shadowed figure in my dream? Was it him who had raged?
“Thief . . . Liar . . . Die . . . My hand.”
His words were growing farther apart and so distant I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
I shivered, then I kneeled at his side and pried open his right hand.
I let out a sharp breath. He was holding the comb of discernment and the “take in event of emergency” vial. Surprisingly, they were both whole and unbroken. The comb’s ivory was stained with Harry’s blood. I held the vial up to the red light and tilted it to the side. Half of it was gone.
I looked at Harry’s mouth and noticed a tinge of gold and glitter. So. This had been an emergency. It hadn’t saved him though. I sighed.
“I’m sorry.” I gripped the comb and the vial and then shoved them into my pocket.
“You were a really good slipshot. A great thief. Not many people have ever stolen from me. Thank you, and . . .” I frowned as Harry’s body slipped fully beneath the spongy floor.
The white-marrow surface gulped and gasped like hungry quicksand. “Good luck. Wherever you go.”
Harry didn’t respond. The only sound was the moan of the walls and the scratching of figment’s legs kicking and twitching. I stood and searched the surrounding tunnel for an hour, crawling on the floor, looking for my lost pebble.
Finally, I had to admit what I didn’t want to.
Finn had killed Harry. Finn was a monster. Finn had the pebble he’d once given me.
I pulled myself back into the asylum.
The stench of death lingered on my skin. I’d missed breakfast. Rou or Griff had left a plate of pancakes on my bed. I forced myself to eat. I’d need the energy.
It was time for the wedding.