Night Magic Read online

  I sat heavily on the bed, wishing I could have used the cell phone so I could pace while I talked. I had already decided it was time to tell her the whole story, even though I didn’t expect her to believe me. But it was really hard getting started, so I stalled a bit. “Dr. Gilliam hired a lawyer for me, so—”

  “I don’t care,” my mom interrupted. “She wouldn’t know a brilliant criminal attorney from an ambulance-chaser, and you’re my daughter. I am going to take care of you, whether you want me to or not. Now tell me what happened.”

  I bristled all over again at the way my mom dismissed Dr. Gilliam, but now was not the time to start another argument. So I started at the beginning, telling my mom about the night I found the not-a-baby in that dark alley and inadvertently opened a door to another world. I also told her about Aleric, the creature that was formed by the combination of my blood and the night magic. I told her about opening a gate for the Night Maker in Rittenhouse Square, and I told her about Aleric’s desire to have me open more. I also explained why I was so desperate for her not to come to Philadelphia, though I only mentioned her potential as a hostage, not my worry that the night might tempt her.

  And finally, I told her about the night I shot Piper. I found that my courage and honesty had its limits, however, because I couldn’t bring myself to give my mom all the details about that night. For instance, I didn’t tell her that I’d intended to kill Piper all along, nor did I tell her that Piper was just standing there harmlessly when I pulled the trigger. I made it sound as if I had legitimate reason to believe I was in mortal danger, when in fact I’d done it because Aleric had goaded me beyond my endurance.

  My mom listened to the story in silence. I wished I could see her face so I could have some clue what she was thinking. I had to admit, it had to sound pretty crazy from where she was sitting, especially if she was buying into the government’s claims that we were all suffering from some kind of mass hallucination. And the fact that I was claiming to be the center of it all, the person who had triggered the nightmare and whose blood could be used to make the nightmare infinitely worse must have made me sound like I was some troubled teen desperately seeking attention.

  When I finally finished with my story, she neatly sidestepped all the most important issues and homed in on the one that was most familiar, that she could wrap her brain around.

  “So it was self-defense then,” she said with satisfaction.

  “Um, yeah.” I’m not sure what I was hoping to accomplish by lying to her, but I just couldn’t force myself to tell her that I’d tried to commit cold-blooded murder—while I wasn’t even Nightstruck yet. “Look, Mom, I’m not so much worried about being prosecuted as being arrested in the first place. It’s Aleric who’s feeding the police the evidence they need, and he was very certain he’d be able to get me out of jail.”

  “If we find you the right lawyer, we can make sure it never comes to that,” she answered without a hint of doubt in her voice. She’s not stupid, so she had to know this wasn’t something we could control no matter how good my lawyer was. I suspected she was merely trying to comfort me.

  “Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” I muttered, and wasn’t surprised when my mom ignored the comment completely.

  “I think your legal troubles are going to give me the extra push I need to get into the quarantine zone,” she said, making me groan out loud. She ignored that, too. “You should not be deprived of your legal guardian when you’re facing potential criminal charges, and I think once I’ve signed several libraries’ worth of waivers they’re eventually going to let me come to you and take care of things.”

  Exactly what I was afraid of. “You can’t come to the city, Mom. You’ll have a giant target printed on your back.” I let my voice quaver instead of keeping a stiff upper lip. “I couldn’t bear it if you ended up like Dad.”

  “I’m not going to let that happen, honey,” she assured me.

  I wished I could believe her. “You don’t have to come here to hire a good lawyer for me,” I tried, knowing full well her mind was already made up.

  “I am your mother, and I’m not letting the police question my little girl without me present. In person. So I’m coming for you, whether you want me to or not.”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed! You don’t understand what it’s like here, what we’re facing.”

  “I’ll figure it out when I get there. I’ve already arranged for a cleaning service to take care of the damage to our house, and when I get there, you and I can replace anything that needs replacing. You’ll have your home back again and be able to sleep in your own room. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said? I’m in hiding, Mom. People in hiding don’t get to go home and sleep in their own bedrooms. Not unless they’re terminally stupid.” I had stopped by my house only once since Luke had pulled me from the square. I hadn’t been surprised to find that Aleric had sent his buddies in to trash it once again. It was a remarkably petty gesture, but then that was Aleric for you.

  “Becket, honey, you’re making yourself hysterical over nothing. You’re sick, and it’s making you see threats where none exist. I can’t imagine all the stress you’ve been under is helping the situation. What you need is to get back to your home and get some rest and let me handle things for a while.”

  “I’m not sick!” I said, but what chance did I have of convincing her? The press and the government had laid down this narrative about sickness, reinforcing it with the draconian quarantine, and no one who wasn’t experiencing the madness firsthand could possibly understand. And as long as no camera could capture the way the city changed at night, the outside world was going to cling to the illusion that we were all hallucinating because it was the only thing that came close to making sense to them.

  “The city really does change at night, and I really am the center of it all. Dr. Gilliam says I’m like Patient Zero in some big outbreak, only in this case it’s an outbreak of magic instead of disease.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized I’d made a big mistake. My mom was still blaming Dr. Gilliam for me having been Nightstruck for almost a month, and she was supremely uninterested in anything Dr. Gilliam had to say.

  “We’ll talk about this more when I get there,” my mom said. “It should only be a couple of days now, and I’ve made it very clear to the Philadelphia police department that I will slap them with a lawsuit if they try to question you before I get there.”

  Her mind was completely closed, and I didn’t have a battering ram big enough to break down her barriers. If she really meant to take me back to our house and install me in my own bedroom, then I might as well walk out into the street and hand myself over to Aleric right now. At least if I were in a prison or some juvenile detention facility, Aleric would have to work to break me out. The Nightstruck had broken into my house before without any difficulty, and they could easily do so again.

  The walls were closing in on me, and I had a hard time seeing any hope of escape.

  * * *

  Things had been weird between Luke and me since I’d told him about what happened with Aleric. It was hard to say for sure whether the weirdness was coming from me or from him, but it was definitely there. But after getting off the phone with my mom, I needed someone to talk to. Someone who would believe me when I said my mom coming to the city would be a disaster. Dr. Gilliam was at work, I had no desire to call Piper for a friendly chat, and that left Luke. Little by little, my world kept shrinking.

  The hotel that we were staying in that night had a kitchenette, and after I recounted my conversation, Luke used the microwave to make us each a cup of soothing hot cocoa while he thought it all over. Chocolate can solve a lot of problems, but this one was far out of its league. I set my mug on the coffee table and took a seat on the hard-as-a-rock sofa. I have yet to stay in a hotel that has a comfortable one. I meant for Luke to sit next to me, but Bob got to th
e middle seat faster. A furry chaperone.

  Luke smiled as Bob laid his head on my lap and gave me imploring eyes. That dog knows exactly which buttons to push. Instead of picking up my cocoa again, I started scratching behind Bob’s ear. He signed contentedly and closed his eyes, not bothering to open them when Luke moved his tail out of the way so he could sit down.

  “Maybe when your mom gets here and gets a firsthand look at what’s going on…” Luke suggested, but his voice trailed off. He knew that was wishful thinking.

  “She’ll just believe she’s sick, too. And there’s nothing short of Aleric showing up to drag me away that’s going to convince her I’m not suffering from some kind of paranoid delusion when I say I’m in danger. She’s going to take me home the first chance she gets, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  Aleric would drag me out of my house, and he’d probably bring my mom, too, to use as leverage against me. Letting another Night Maker into the city was about the last thing I wanted to do, but how could I possibly resist him if he started hurting my mom in front of me? My hand tightened in Bob’s fur as I remembered the sick, unbearable feeling in my gut when I’d seen Billy ram my dad, when I’d heard my dad’s screams of pain. There was no way I could withstand that, even knowing that Aleric would have no reason to keep my mom alive after I’d given him what he wanted. He’d probably kill her just to punish me for having run away from him.

  “Well then you obviously can’t let her take you home,” Luke said, reasonably.

  “How can I stop her? She’s never going to listen to reason. Not until it’s too late, at least.”

  Luke grinned at me, a hint of genuine humor in his eyes. “You are the most stubborn, pigheaded person I know. I think I still have bruises from dragging you out of that square. Do you honestly think your mom can force you to go anywhere you don’t want to go?”

  I smiled involuntarily, and I suspected I blushed just a little bit as well. A lot of guys would find stubbornness unappealing in a girl, but it didn’t sound like Luke was one of them. The smile faded quickly.

  “My mom’s the one who taught me to be stubborn, and let me tell you, I learned from a true master,” I said. “If I dig in my heels and refuse to go, she’ll probably get the police to drag me there in handcuffs or something. She’s sure she’s right and this is all in my head.”

  Luke thought that over for a moment and nodded. He didn’t know my mom as well as he’d known my dad, but he knew her well enough.

  “So what are you planning to do? Just give up and go quietly?”

  I spared him a sour look, but I knew he was poking at me with a purpose. He was right, too. Thinking about all the ways I was screwed wasn’t going to help the situation. Unfortunately, I wasn’t brimming with clever solutions.

  “I’m not going to give up,” I assured Luke, “but my mom is pretty good at being an unstoppable force, which kind of leaves me at a loss.”

  “Your mom isn’t the real problem here. Aleric is.”

  “Well yeah, but…” My voice trailed off as I realized Luke had just cut directly to the heart of the matter.

  Ever since Luke had pulled me from the square, we’d been playing defense, running and hiding, our situation never improving. How long could we possibly keep it up? Even without the threat of arrest hanging over me or my mom making herself a potential victim, the chances that Aleric and his people would eventually get to me or Luke or Dr. Gilliam were frighteningly high. To the point that it seemed nearly inevitable.

  “The only way any of us will ever be free is if we can stop Aleric,” I said, then let out a bitter snort of laughter. “Which was exactly what I was thinking when I snuck out to kill Piper, and look how well that turned out.”

  “But you weren’t wrong. You just didn’t take the idea far enough.”

  “I took it as far as I could,” I retorted. “Piper’s just a human being. Aleric is something altogether different. And in case you’ve forgotten, I tried shooting him point-blank and it didn’t bother him a bit.”

  “There has to be some way to kill him,” Luke said. “Or at least send him back to wherever he came from. And I’d bet anything you’re the one who can do it.”

  I was still unconvinced. Aleric was an unnatural being who by all rights shouldn’t exist. Why should I believe there had to be some way to kill him? Hell, I wasn’t even sure he was exactly alive by any definition we would use.

  “There’s a reason he’s so obsessed with you,” Luke said when I was silent for too long. He took my hand and squeezed it. Bob didn’t appreciate this interference with his petting machine and shoved his nose upward into our joined hands, making us both smile briefly.

  I used my free hand to resume petting, because having Luke hold my hand felt way too good to let go.

  “He’s obsessed because he wants me to open more gates so he can bring more Night Makers through.”

  “But maybe it’s more than that. He sure seemed awfully possessive of you when you were Nightstruck. Why did he feel the need to seduce you? And why did he start pounding his chest whenever I showed up?”

  “Because he’s a guy.”

  “That’s just it: he’s not a guy. You spent a lot of time with him when you were Nightstruck. Did he show a lot of normal human emotions?”

  “Well, no,” I had to concede. “He got grumpy with me sometimes when I didn’t immediately do what he wanted me to, but then I was the only person around him who didn’t bow and scrape to him.” I thought about it a little harder, furrowing my eyebrows as I tried to bring to mind a time when Aleric had seemed to be emotional over anything other than me. And I couldn’t do it. He barely interacted with the Nightstruck at all, except to issue orders now and again. There were no ups or downs to his moods, at least not that he showed.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little strange then that he acted so jealous?”

  “To be fair, you did pull me out of the square. Maybe he knew all along that was a possibility and that was why he didn’t want me around you.”

  Luke didn’t look convinced. “That makes it sound like something completely pragmatic and rational. You getting away wasn’t just some inconvenience for him. It really mattered. Enough for him to feel threatened by me.”

  “Well it’s not because of his deep and abiding love for me,” I said, but Luke’s argument was starting to make a little more sense. His jealousy of Luke was the only genuine, lasting human emotion I’d ever seen in Aleric, and there had to be a reason for it. “Maybe it’s just really important to him that I be Nightstruck so he can convince me to open more gates.”

  “If he was that eager to bring more Night Makers through, why did you only open one gate in the whole month you were with him?”

  “I wasn’t jumping for joy at the thought of slicing myself open for him. Maybe he was just trying to slowly coax me down the slippery slope.”

  “Or maybe he was afraid of what you might do if you weren’t under his thumb anymore.”

  Luke had theorized before that I might somehow be the key to getting the night magic out of the city for good, that because it was tied to my blood, I had some kind of power over it. But I’d seen no evidence that would help sell me on the idea. As far as I could tell, the only thing I could do was make things worse.

  I was about ready to pull my hair out with frustration. “If I have some magical way to make Aleric go poof, then I’m too stupid to figure it out.” I leaned my head against the back of the sofa and closed my eyes to avoid the look of reproach Luke was giving me.

  “The good news is that you don’t have to figure it out all on your own. We have at least a couple of days before your mom gets here. Maybe if we put our heads together, we can come up with something.”

  I was clearly in a glass-half-empty frame of mind, but if I was going to keep out of Aleric’s clutches, I was going to have to fill up that glass real fast.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but Piper looked even wor
se than she had the last time I’d visited. The hollows under her cheekbones were deeper, the bruise-like shadows around her eyes darker. Her nails were bitten to the quick, with little bloody spots around the edges that said she’d been chewing her cuticles as well. Clearly whatever shrink her parents had hired wasn’t making any progress.

  Disturbingly, there was now an ornamental grille stretching all the way across her window. I didn’t think it had been put there to keep anyone out.

  Piper saw me staring at it and grinned wryly, a shadow of her former self flickering briefly. “Isn’t it sweet how my folks are protecting me from any Nightstruck who might come calling?”

  “Are they just being cautious, or did they put it there for a reason?”

  Piper shrugged, but didn’t answer. In the past, her room had always been in a state of organized chaos. Relatively neat because her parents had a maid service come in every day, but always overflowing with evidence of a full life. Now it seemed barren, almost sterile, and the air felt close and stale. Or maybe that last part was just my imagination.

  “I’m probably lucky it’s just a grille and not bricks,” Piper said, kicking listlessly at the rolling chair that sat in front of her computer desk. A desk that in the past had always been piled high with dog-eared books and doodle-covered papers, but was now empty except for her sleeping computer.

  I still harbored a lot of anger toward Piper, but even so I felt a pang of sympathy. This was no way to live, and jailing her in her room didn’t seem like the best way to help her get back to normal. Not that normal was possible for her anymore, but surely she could be better than this. If Aleric and the night magic were out of the picture, would she finally recover? It might well be her only chance, but I wasn’t so sure she’d see it that way.

  “If you had a choice,” I asked, though I already knew the answer, “would you join the Nightstruck again?”

  Piper pulled the rolling chair toward her, straddling it and sitting on it backward with her arms draped over the back. The only other place to sit was on the bed. In the old days, I’d have flopped there carelessly without a second thought. Now, I sat stiffly on the edge and felt restless and out of place. There wasn’t a whole lot of life in Piper’s eyes—certainly not like there used to be—but something flared for a moment before it almost instantly died back down. The expression was gone before I could interpret it, but I couldn’t help wondering if she felt I was invading her space by sitting on her bed without an explicit invitation.