1. CAGED
Iron bars were the only things separating us.
He sat on the cell floor, leaning against the wall, in nothing but a pair of jeans. I glanced at the chain binding his wrists. With his head bowed, he looked exactly the same.
But he’s not.
I let my fingers curl around the wet bars. Several times a day, holy water rained down from the sprinklers in the ceiling. I fought the urge to unlock the door and let him out.
“Thanks for coming.” He hadn’t moved, but I knew he didn’t need to see me to sense my presence. “No one else will.”
“Everyone’s trying to figure this out. They don’t know what to do about—” The words caught in my throat.
“About me.” He rose from the floor and walked toward me—the bars separating us.
As he drew closer, I counted the links in the chain hanging between his wrists. Anything to keep from looking him in the eye. But instead of moving away, I gripped the bars tighter. He reached out and wrapped his hands around the metal above mine. Close but not touching.
“Don’t!” I shouted.
Steam rose from the cold-iron bars as the holy water seared his scarred skin. He held on too long, intentionally letting his palms burn.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he whispered. “It’s not safe.”
Hot tears ran down my cheeks. Every decision we’d made up to this point felt wrong: the chains coiled around his wrists, the cell doused in holy water, the bars keeping him caged like an animal.
“I know you’d never hurt me.”
The words had barely left my lips when Jared lunged at the bars. He grabbed at my throat and I jumped back, his cold fingers grazing my skin as I slipped out of reach.
“You’re wrong about that, little dove.” His voice was different, cruel and soulless.
Laughter echoed off the walls chills rippled through me. I realized what everyone else had known all along.
The boy I knew was gone.
The one caged before me was a monster.
And I was the one who had to kill him.
NINE DAYS EARLIER
2. BLACK SKY
I’m standing in front of the burning building. Ash-covered bed sheets hang from the shattered windows, outside the rooms where people are still trapped. Inside, screams rise over the roaring flames, and my skin crawls.
I want to run through the wall of black smoke and save them, but I can’t move. My eyes drift down to my shaking hand, and I realize why.
I’m the one holding the match.
I bolted upright in bed, my heart pounding.
Another nightmare.
They started the night the walls of the penitentiary had crumbled around me, and I’d been having them ever since. I pressed my hands against my ears, trying to silence the sound of the screams.
It was just a dream.
And what I had done in real life was worse than setting fire to a house full of innocent people.
I had freed a demon.
Andras, the Author of Discords. A demon that had been imprisoned for more than a century.
Three months ago, he killed my mother and the other Legion members in her generation. Judging from the newspaper articles I obsessively collected, he’d probably killed even more since I released him. Some days I thought about it less than others.
This wasn’t one of those days.
I spent the day in the library reading articles, and printing weather charts and maps.
By dinnertime, I was burned out. As I trudged across the muddy quad, the rain soaked through the tall, black leather boots my mom gave me the night she died. Between and the rain and the Pennsylvania winter temperatures, pneumonia was becoming a real possibility. But it was worth the risk to wear something she had given me.
Other girls rushed by in their uniform skirts and Wellies, dodging puddles like land mines, while I stomped through every one. It hadn’t stopped raining since the night I assembled the Shift—the paranormal key that had unlocked Andras’ cage—and the sky looked as broken as I felt.
How could I have ever mistaken the Shift for a weapon capable of destroying Andras?
The details of that night were branded in my memory, as inescapable as the nightmares. Sitting on the prison floor, with the Shift’s cylindrical casing in my hand and the disks scattered in my lap. Jared, Lukas, Alara, and Priest on the other side of the cell door, urging me to put it together. The paralyzing fear, when I slid the last piece of the device in place.
That was nineteen days ago.
Nineteen days since I fell outside the prison, and the razor wire cut up legs.
Nineteen days since I sat in the emergency room covered in mud, while a doctor stitched up the gashes and the police questioned me. Nineteen days since I saw my friends or heard the sound of Jared’s voice.
The doctor had sounded apologetic when he finished. “You’re all patched up, but you will probably have a few scars.” I remember laughing. Scars from a piece of razor wire were nothing compared to the emotional scars that night would leave behind.
Hours later, while I was watching the storm batter the windows in my hospital room, when I heard voices outside my door. I only caught bits and pieces of the conversation, but it was enough.
“—from social services. Do you have any idea why your daughter ran away, Mrs. Waters?”
A runaway—that was the story I gave the police.
“It’s Diane Charles, not Waters. Kennedy’s mother is dead. I’m her aunt.”
“Your niece has been unresponsive for the most part, Ms. Charles. We need to conduct a psychiatric evaluation to determine her mental state before we can release her into your custody.”