Chapter 52
ONE LAST HURRAH
Frost crunches underfoot. Fog hovers between headstones.
Dawn is slow to rise, the sky a muted bruise behind the trees.
My fingers ache as I plant the camcorder behind a crooked headstone, angled toward the mausoleum.
When I straighten from my crouched position, I’m overcome with a bout of dizziness.
The curse is hungry this morning, closer to the surface.
I can feel it beneath my skin.
Feeding on my warmth.
Feeding on my strength, too.
It’s not an optimal way to go into battle. Nor is it a pleasant sensation. But I’m comforted nonetheless. So far, its appetite remains fixed on me.
“Most people spend Halloween morning worrying about costumes, not wiring up graveyards.”
Twig’s voice comes so unexpectedly, I nearly drop the audio recorder. He emerges from behind the mausoleum, scanning my set up.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask.
He holds up his phone, showing me the tracking app on his screen. We synced up ages ago, mostly in the name of food—an easy way to score a biscuit any time one of us caught the other at Tudor’s.
“You’re avoiding me,” he says, sliding his phone into his back pocket. “So I figured I’d have to come to you.”
My guts squirm with guilt.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Helping you achieve your life’s ambition.” I wag the audio recorder. “If ever there was a time to unequivocally prove in some really weird stuff, tonight will be the night. It should make for some great podcast fodder, anyway.”
“You think I care about the podcast if I don’t have my cohost?”
My shoulders wilt. “You talked to Jude.”
“He’s not doing so great.”
I move to a stone angel and tuck our audio recorder behind its wing—out of sight from party-goers, but close enough to catch sound if any should slip through.
Twig sits on a headstone. “So … what’s your plan, Selah?”
With a resigned sigh, I tell him.
When the time comes, I will go with Rafe through the rift. Jude will follow. Rafe will threaten. Jude will spill his blood to protect me. Seraphina will rise. I’ll open the locket, touch her essence, and she and the curse will be destroyed once and for all.
When I finish, he remains as silent as the stone he sits on.
My teeth start to chatter.
I shove my hands deep into my coat pockets. “Think you can keep people away from this part of the cemetery tonight?”
He scoffs. “You’re putting your life on the line, and you want me to babysit drunk teenagers?”
“I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Just you, huh?”
He’s angry.
Twig doesn’t get angry.
But he is now.
My chest tightens. “Please, Twig. I need you to not be upset with me right now.”
He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, muttering something too quiet to catch. Then he groans a loud, frustrated groan. “I wish I could go through the rift with you. We could fight Seraphina together.”
“Fight her how—with our proton pack?”
“Why not?”
“Twig …”
“No, seriously, Selah. Why not?”
“Our proton pack is filled with granola bars and bug spray. Not to mention, your arm is broken.”
“But what if we made a real one? An actual scientific weapon?”
The set of his mouth, the eager tilt of his chin brings me back in time, to the summer before sixth grade, after we watched Ghostbusters 1 and 2 and built our very first ghost trap.
A shoebox wrapped in tinfoil with a magnetized coil of copper curled around a pack of D batteries and a candy bar for bait.
We planted it right here, in this very cemetery, convinced we were going to catch the Woman of the Woods.
The next morning, the lid was off and the candy bar gone.
A raccoon, probably. But Twig’s conviction that it had very nearly worked was so unshakable, it made me believe too.
And now, here he is again, that same conviction locked into place as he stands from the headstone. “Something that only requires one arm to wield.”
He begins to pace. I can practically see the gears turning behind his eyes—calculating, sketching mental blueprints. This has become a problem to solve. And Twig Calloway doesn’t fail when it comes to solving problems.
Honestly, it makes me want to cry.
“I can’t go through the rift because I can’t see the rift, but I can be here. The question is—how will I know when you’re here, too?” He stops suddenly, as if asking the question out loud has unlocked an answer. “The tracking app. What if it works through dimensions?”
He’s not asking me.
He’s asking himself.
I’ve seen Twig like this before, muttering his way through a plan. It’s best not to interrupt.
He resumes pacing. “The EMF meter went wild at the Vandenberg estate, which means this dimension must have a magnetic field. And magnetic fields can be destabilized.”
He bites his thumbnail. “I’d need some sort of disruptor coil.
A pulse generator. A high-voltage power cell—like a car battery, but way stronger.
There’ll be a bunch of people here, just like the masquerade ball, and a fallen angel will literally be rising from the grave.
With that much energy, we could tear it down completely.
Forget the rift. We could collapse the barrier between dimensions. ”
He turns to me with bright eyes. “I could fight with you. We could try to take her out in a way that doesn’t involve the locket.”
“Twig, she’s—”
“An angel, I know. But she’s fallen, Selah. Which means she’s bound to earth. Bound things have limits. They can break. Iron weakens fae. Silver burns werewolves.”
“Sunlight torches vampires,” I say softly.
“Exactly. So she has to have a weakness, too. Some kind of Achilles’ heel.”
She does.
Me.
I’m her weakness.
But I don’t say it.
Doing so would be cruel.
This is his outlet.
His coping mechanism.
Twig needs a mission. He needs to believe he can tip the odds. I get it. If the roles were reversed, I’d need the same thing.
Twelve hours stretch between now and nightfall.
Jude won’t take my calls or answer his door.
So I’ll spend the time I have left with my best and oldest friend, building something wildly implausible and entirely useless.
And I’ll savor every minute.
Our last supernatural hurrah.