Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
“Can’t sleep?” Antonio asks, stepping into the kitchen and going straight to the fridge. It’s three in the morning, and we got home maybe an hour ago. Theo, Xavier, and Zeke went back out to deal with the body in the office building before heading to an emergency coalition meeting.
“Nope.” I push rice around my plate with my spoon. “But I’m also not tired. I feel like I’ve been way too harsh on people who struggle with jet lag.” Antonio laughs. “This human-vampire sleep schedule is really messing with me.”
“Yeah, I bet.” He opens the fridge. “Sometimes I’m jealous of how daft Leo is because he can fall asleep anywhere.”
“Right. I’m jealous too.” Our brother is upstairs sleeping peacefully while I sit here at three in the morning staring at rice I have no intention of eating.
“If it makes you feel better,” Devon says, suddenly appearing in the kitchen, “I’m still not used to not really needing sleep.”
“It doesn’t make me feel any better,” I tell him as he pulls leftovers from the fridge.
“I didn’t think it would.” He shrugs.
“What are we gonna do?” I ask. I feel like I can safely express my doubts around Antonio and Devon, though saying I have a bad feeling about this seems rather anticlimactic at this point.
“Letting Vaelric out was just the beginning.”
“I know,” Antonio agrees. “And we don’t have a plan yet.”
“Come up with one,” Devon says, like it’s that simple.
“There’s a reason my family locked him up instead of killing him.”
I give up on eating and push the plate away. I don’t think I could stomach another bite anyway. “It’s like he’s waiting for something, and the anticipation is killing me. Necromancy is his specialty, and we still don’t know for sure if that means…”
I trail off, shifting my eyes toward Devon.
I don’t even want to say it. “If a demon can control the dead, there’s a very good chance he can control vampires too.
They are dead.” The words sound worse out loud.
“And if tonight taught us anything, it’s that spells geared toward humans work surprisingly well against vampires.
So, if a necromancer can command a human corpse, it makes sense that he might be able to command a vampire.
” I shake my head. “I can’t even begin to think of all the ways that could be absolutely terrible. ”
“Well, it seems like this guy needs an army,” Devon starts. “He knows if he was locked up once, he can be locked up again. So maybe that’s why he’s trying to raise all his buddies from hell.”
“You know, that’s actually a really good point,” Antonio says and then looks at me. “And that’s one thing that wasn’t done before, Wren.”
“Taking out all his buddies?”
“Yeah. We don’t know how he was captured the first time. We don’t know what the fight looked like, or if the original goal was to kill him and things went south because he had backup.”
“Right.” I bite the inside of my cheek as I think.
“The only way we’d get those details would be to talk to someone from the Blackwood line.”
Except that happened years ago. There’s no one alive today who took part in that ritual.
But I’m sure the story was passed down. There have to be relatives or members of that coven who know exactly what happened.
Which means facing them. Telling them I was tricked into undoing everything they fought so hard to accomplish.
The shame of it clings to me like a sweater that’s two sizes too small, making me hot and itchy and desperate to crawl out of my own skin. Except I don’t feel like I’m allowed to take it off. I feel like I deserve the discomfort. The guilt. The shame.
Then I look at Antonio and wonder if he feels the same way. None of this was his choice. But the only reason he’s alive is because of Vaelric.
Devon pulls Mabel’s notebook from a kitchen drawer and flips to the last page. She drew a stick-figure army of eleven demons standing in front of Vaelric. Devon crosses one out.
“We know for certain we’ve taken out one of these guys. We don’t know if any others were killed before now, and at the moment, we don’t really have a way to find out.”
I hear the question in his voice, and I cradle my head in my hands.
“The more we try to figure this out, the more desperate it feels.” I lift my head again.
“We keep talking in circles. Going over the same information again and again. It doesn’t change the facts.
We’re not suddenly going to have some miraculous realization that the answer was sitting in front of us all along. ”
I sigh. “Because it isn’t. And then there’s…” I stop myself. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay, you can’t leave me with that,” Antonio says.
“There’s a notebook.” I close my eyes for a second before continuing.
“It has names in it. Witches the Order has been using.” Antonio’s expression changes.
“My name was in there. I found it at the warehouse with the vials of my blood and a vial of someone else’s.
Most of the names are crossed out, which makes me think those witches are dead.
” I swallow. “But not all of them are.” Neither of them says anything. “And I can’t let it go.”
The admission feels heavier than I expected.
“I know none of that matters compared to everything else going on, but I keep thinking about them. What’s the point of rescuing witches from the Order if the world is going to end because I freed a demon who’s going to bring about the apocalypse?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Devon says, holding up a hand. “He’s not actually going to end the world, is he?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I reply honestly.
“We’ve faced a lot of demons over the years,” Antonio says, trying to reason with me. “None of them brought about Armageddon.”
“Yeah, because we stopped them.”
“Look, Wren, as much as I’d love to give us all the credit in the world, I don’t think the world ending is a realistic possibility.” Antonio sounds confident when he starts. But by the end, even he doesn’t seem entirely convinced.
“I think I’m gonna go upstairs and try to get some sleep,” I say, fully knowing I’m probably going to end up doom-scrolling on my phone or watching reruns of Gilmore Girls. I put my plate in the dishwasher and head upstairs. I climb into the large, empty bed, wishing there were a TV in here.
Xavier doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who watches much television, let alone someone who would lie in bed and watch reruns of an old sitcom.
I remember reading a study once that said bedrooms should be reserved for sleeping and sex, and that putting a TV in the room could be damaging to a relationship.
I thought it was an odd study at the time.
Not that I had a relationship to put to the test. Or even a bedroom without a TV in it, really, because I spent almost an entire year on the road after reading that article.
I don’t think having a TV in our bedroom would dampen anything between Xavier and me, but as I prop my phone on the nightstand to watch something mindless, I can see how the idea has some merit.
I don’t even make it through the opening credits before I feel too restless to stay in bed.
With a sigh, I get up, turn on the lamp beside the bed, and pull the leather notebook from the nightstand drawer.
It feels silly keeping it hidden away like some sort of secret diary.
Though, in a way, I guess that’s exactly what it is.
I flip through the pages absentmindedly while I think.
There are no dates written beside any of the entries.
The ink doesn’t look faded. And up until I was sold to the Malus family, I was still very relevant to the Order.
Hell, until literally yesterday, they were still trying to figure out exactly how to free Vaelric.
If this notebook contains relatively recent information, then there’s a chance some of the names that haven’t been crossed out belong to people who are still alive.
Alive and trapped by the Order in one way or another.
The thought makes my stomach twist. And sitting around waiting for Vaelric to strike is going to drive me insane.
Possibly quite literally. I get up and grab the laptop Xavier gave me when I first got here.
Then I open the Notes app and start typing out the names.
There are seventeen names in the notebook, including mine.
Only three aren’t crossed out.
Is that because they’re still alive? Or because whoever was running these experiments never got the chance to cross them off? I stare at the list of three uncrossed names until my vision starts to blur.
I wish I were more in tune with my intuition like Marie is. Deciding to just go with whatever my gut is telling me right now, I open Google and type in the first name.
Brianna.
My fingers hover over the keyboard as I stare at the screen, unsure what else to add.
“Missing,” I say out loud. Then I hit enter.
The first thing that comes up is a well-documented case from the early 2000s.
I don’t think it’s her. I scroll quickly through the results, but everything I find circles back to the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl named Brianna who vanished after leaving work one night.
I do a quick search on her family, but nothing jumps out at me as remotely witchy.
Then again, witches and werewolves alike live ordinary lives and look like ordinary people.
I tap my fingers against the laptop while I think.
There were several vials of blood in that bag, and every single one was labeled.
Just not with actual names.
I get out of bed again and retrieve the leather bag hanging in the back of my closet.
I’m sure Xavier hates having vials of blood stored in our bedroom, but he hasn’t said anything—yet. Only one vial has a human name written on it.
Claire.
And it’s dated from only a few weeks ago. But there’s no Claire in the notebook. I turn the vial over in my hand. There are serial numbers on all of them. Eight digits each. I flip back through the notebook, looking more carefully at the pages belonging to the names that aren’t crossed out.
Then I stop. At the top of the page for a girl named Eudora are three smudged numbers: 083. My pulse kicks up. The last three numbers on the most recent vial of blood are also 083.
“The same person,” I say out loud. I turn the vial over in my hand again.
I wish Xavier were home right now so I could ask whether the blood smells different.
He told me once that mine tasted different because of the magic in it.
But that was when it was fresh. We know magic dies with us, and it isn’t transferred through blood in the same way once it’s removed from the body.
Would he even be able to tell the difference between an old vial of human blood and an old vial of witch blood?
I look back at Eudora’s page. There aren’t many notes; mostly numbers. Measurements, maybe? Test results? I have no idea. Beneath them, in messy, smudged handwriting, are the words: Not pure enough, but worthy of continued investigation and possible integration.
“That doesn’t tell me much,” I mutter. I set the notebook down on the bed and turn back to the laptop.
Then I type: Eudora Claire, missing girl.
A news article pops up almost immediately.
My stomach tightens. Eudora Bellamy disappeared a year and a half ago.
She was sixteen at the time and living in a group home in Ohio.
The article describes her as a troubled youth and says authorities believed she might have run away in an attempt to return to the East Coast. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time.
According to the article, Eudora had run away twice before. Both times, she’d tried to get back to Connecticut. I blink. Then read the article again. My family is from Connecticut. The feeling in my gut sharpens.
I pick up my phone and text Marie.
Does the name Eudora Bellamy mean anything to you?
I set my phone down, not expecting a response for several hours since it’s the middle of the night. I’m just about to search for the third and final name when my phone vibrates.
I don’t know Eudora Bellamy personally, but the Bellamy family is another prestigious East Coast witch family. They were one of the few other families in your parents’ coven that fought demons. Why do you ask?
Holy fucking shit. I slowly close the laptop and stare at my phone. I blink several times before I can even figure out what to type back.
I think the Order is holding her hostage.