Phantom Eyes (Witch Eyes) (25 page)

I was so caught off guard I lacked any sort of retort at all. And the longer the silence, the wider Trey’s smile. “But his loss is my gain,” he whispered into my mouth a moment later.

I shouldn’t have kissed him. I should have pulled away. This wasn’t about having fun or being with a boy. This was supposed to be about Lucien. About finishing what Grace had started.

But this was the only time I was going to be at a high school dance. The only time I’d get to be in a room like this, have a gorgeous guy spinning me around the floor and know for a fact that it was okay. That the moment was perfect.

That I was happy. God, what would John have said, to see me right now? Being a sap and getting run over by
feelings.

I leaned in to Trey’s kiss and tried to surreptitiously pull one hand away to wipe at the corner of my eye. But Trey’s hand got there first,
and I opened my eyes, startled. His eyes were still closed, but he
knew.
His thumb rubbed soothingly across my cheek, but he never pulled away, and eventually my eyes closed again, and I lost myself to the moment.

No one came to interrupt us or to tell us to stop. No one paid us any attention at all. But eventually the song ended, and Trey and I pulled apart. My brain was in a haze, and I couldn’t seem to remember what was wrong with staying here and dancing with Trey all night long.

“You needed a crowd, right,” Trey said, his hand still cupped around my face. “You’ve got one.”

Sometime during the song, more people had poured in. Trey pulled me close to him, and even though it was a faster tempo, we danced and laughed, but the reminder that tonight wasn’t just about spending time with Trey stuck in my head now.

Five minutes. Then ten. Finally, what had been a small cro
wd when we first walked in packed around us. I could see why they went with the hall. It was bigger than the Harbor Club, and they were going to need all the space if people kept coming in at this pace. I didn’t do an exact head cou
nt, but it looked like at
least
the three hundred Jade had predicted were already here.

“I’ll be right back,” I murmured. I pulled the sunglasses out of my pocket and put them back on, darkening the room significantly but returning me to my comfort level. I walked through the crowd like a zombie, my thoughts not with what I was about to do, but on Lucien. Where was he right now? What was he planning? He hadn’t come after Trey yet, but he would.

I vaulted up the steps and onto the stage, staring out over the crowd. I opened my vision, seeing past the normal world and into the secret sight of the witch eyes.
Three hundred and twenty-seven people. Sixteen adults. Thirty are drunk, two of them teachers. There’s a kid I’ve never met, a kid named Stephen, and he’s got a flask he keeps refilling out at his car and sharing it with friends. One of the teachers caught him and drained the rest of it himself. The girl with the swimmer boyfriend is about to hook up with her best friend’s brother, and a couple of girls are sharing the first of many significant looks.

I took a deep breath. This was it. The beginning of the end.

I opened my eyes. Time to begin.

thirty-three

It wa
s the crystals that made it so easy. The way they hung and sparkled along the ceiling like a cavalcade of stars. It was easy to focus on them, and easier still to link the lights with my magic. Someone turned a spotlight on me, I couldn’t say for sure if it happened because I wanted it to or if someone simply decided that a Thorpe on the stage needed to be lit. Either way, the beam struck me as my head faced the stars, and little by little the room started to follow my gaze. To see what it was that I found so interesting. And that’s when I had them.

The lights hypnotized them. One by one, the crowd fell under my sway, lulled into silence by the sparkling metronome of lights. There was a pattern deep in the flash, coached by magic and focused through me. I could
feel
it as each person was added to the collective. Magic rushed through me, a cleansing fire that warmed my bones and gave me the strength to get through this.

Someone turned off the music. All movement in the room stilled. Even Jade and Trey were caught up in the moment, eyes vacant and jaws slightly parted.

From here, I could have done anything to them. To
any
of them. They were puppets, and I was the master. No one would stop me if I walked the crowd and thinned the herd however I saw fit. I was a god to these tiny creatures, and they would learn to fear me, and rightly so.

No. That wasn’t me. I shook my head, and focused on myself. On the reasons that I was doing all of this. This wasn’t about controlling anyone. It was about freeing them.

“You may not know me,” I whispered, and yet my words carried to every corner of the room. They couldn’t hear me but it focused me to use my words. “But I know all of you. All your lives, you’ve been pieces on the chessboard. Pawns. But even a pawn can fight back if he knows how. So tonight, I’m giving you that option. All you have to do is look me in the eyes, and say yes.”

One by one, the crowd turned down their heads and looked towards the stage. It was like staring into the heart of a zombie apocalypse, just waiting for the starting gun to ignite everyone into motion.

This was only half of the process, though. Using a trick I’d learned from Grace, I split my vision until I was seeing two different things at once. My magic coiled around me, and I split my sight again. And again. I split it three hundred different ways until I saw the world the way a fly does, out of a thousand different eyes. I looked every single person in their eyes, all at once, and I didn’t collapse under the strain.

Blue light began to fill the room, a beacon of magical energy that could probably be seen from space. Grace would no doubt feel it, as would any witch worth their weight. But just as quickly as it built, I turned the demon’s power loose, circling the exterior of the building like a guard dog, building up wards and protections to keep what we were doing in here secret. To hide from prying eyes.

As far as the adults were concerned, it was nothing more than a momentary blip—a pulse of energy far on the other side of town. Certainly nothing to get out of bed for. At least, so long as Catherine and Jason did what they were supposed to, and stayed the hell out of it.

The blue light continued to glow until it drowned out the other colors in the room, and everything was washed in azure and cobalt.

“Do you want to make your own path?” I asked them. “Do you want to hold your own destiny again?”

As they said yes, one at a time and each one a significant moment in its own right, the spell snapped into place. Magic wrapped itself around all of them, no matter if they were sixteen or sixty. Everyone in this building was part of the same moment, but for each of them, it was a new start.

A free start.

It cost a lot of power. A
lot.
I staggered back as the light diminished and the magic started to fade. But even as weak as I was, I smiled as the dance picked up exactly where it had left off a few moments before. No one was any the wiser about what happened, the spotlight clicked off, and I hopped down off the stage.

But I had just given three hundred twenty-seven people the same gift I’d been given. Freedom from Lucien’s sight. Freedom from his influence in their direction in life, freedom from the never-ending hunger that meant Lucien was devouring someone’s potential. As far as Lucien was concerned, there was a tangle of threads that had suddenly vanished completely, and I was responsible.

If nothing else, I’d done one thing good with my power. I’d saved over three hundred people from his influence.

Trey was on me the moment my feet hit the floor. “Everything okay?”

I nodded, leaning on his arm. “We’re good.”

“What do we do now?” he asked, eyeing the door.

“Now we wait,” I said. “And hope that Lucien was paying attention.”

An hour passed, and even though I thought it would be impossible to relax, Trey proved me wrong. We moved across the dance floor a couple of times, he threw his sister into my arms until we were dancing and laughing too hard to even move, he pulled me up against him near the drink table and kissed me chastely, slinging his arm around my shoulder. It was the most surreal night of my life, the two worlds I couldn’t manage to maintain on my own had been woven together so seamlessly.

It made me wish I’d made different decisions. Maybe I could have found a way to balance school on top of all this. Maybe I should have tried harder.

“Stop brooding,” Trey whispered. We were dancing to another slow song, our foreheads pressed together.

I mustered up a smile. “I’m fine. Just … thinking.”

“Well, stop. Everything’s going to work out.”

I didn’t get it, this
faith
he had. He really did believe that everything was going to be okay. “How do you do that?” I asked honestly. “You know what we’re up against, right?”

“I know they’re up against
you,
” Trey said, his smile never faltering. “And you have this way of always making the unexpected happen.” He lifted his head away, and looked around the dance. “Four months ago, who would have put odds on a Thorpe bringing not one, but
two
Lansings to the winter formal as his dates?”

I laughed. “It’s just a shame that Jade looks so much better in a dress than you do,” I teased.

Trey’s expression changed, and he pulled me in tight against him, his entire body suddenly tense. “Look,” Trey said into my ear. “It worked. He’s here.”

Like it was a move we’d practiced a thousand times before, we swayed to the music, but each movement turned us more and more until I spotted him, lurking underneath the curved staircases that led to the upper landing. This time it was Trey who reached into my pocket and put the sunglasses back on. It was all about appearances.

I left the safety of his arms and walked towards the stage. I didn’t even have to focus my power, people moved out of my way simply because I wanted them to. A hall full of teenagers, and so many of them were turning to watch me.
Did they know what was going to happen? Or were we still connected?

I climbed the stairs to the stage slowly, one foot in front of the other. Walked to the edge, then looked out at the crowd. The magic I had inside of me split through my skin, and I felt like a different person from the one who’d been trapped in Trey’s arms just a few moments before. I was something new. I could have anything I wanted, all I had to do was want it bad enough.

Heat and cold warred within me, and ice came out the winner. My skin hardened into frosted armor. This was my moment. This was the beginning.

A crook of my finger, and the spotlight clacked loudly on, and my world was a luxury of light. For seventeen years, that much light pouring right into my face might have kicked off a world of trauma. But tonight, it was like a baptism.

He couldn’t help but spot me. And like a moth to the flame, he headed towards the spotlight, and towards me. The winter voice whispered murder in my ears, and my power surged like barely constrained waves. But it wasn’t the right time to break him. First, he had to suffer.

“What did you do?” Lucien hissed, climbing the stairs and circling me.

“That’s enough,” I called out, but I wasn’t talking to him. He still didn’t merit all of my attention just yet. Magic and demon power surged within me, and I could feel the two powers warring against each other even as they complemented so perfectly. It was almost like a drug, the feeling that coursed through my veins. But the demon power was still coming out on top, feeding on all the dark thoughts that Lucien had brought in the door with him. If there was anyone who deserved my darkness, it was him.

The world stopped around us. It wasn’t enough to make everything quiet, as I’d done before. He needed to know the power I had at my disposal. So I plucked the two of us out of time and didn’t even have to pause to catch a breath. The world froze around us, but it was a moment of iced over motion. Teenagers who’d been dancing a moment ago were in two places at once, in two moments at once. The music hummed in the air, a note dragged out so long it was a weeping cry. Smells were more potent, and the air had a texture. The world was so alive that if I wasn’t buffered by my powers, it would have driven me insane.

The room had grown so quiet I could hear dreams being born almost as fast as dreams were broken.

I had his attention.

“You … what did … ” His eyes scanned futures, as he’d been doing ever since he walked into the hall.

“You’ve probably forgotten why I terrify you, right? Why you’re so scared of me?” I made a beckoning gesture with my hand, and pulled Carter out of the crowd and into this moment between moments.

Carter had been a friend of Jade’s, once upon a time. When he found out I was living at Jason’s, Carter thought he could get a little payback. Kick the crap out of me because of something Jason had done. He deserved anything I chose to do to him. He was an a
nt. He didn’t matter.

Carter, who probably thought the rented suit he was wearing looked good on him, who probably thought he was getting laid tonight, even though his date was already making eyes at one of his teammates. Carter, the only person in the hall who I hadn’t looked into half an hour before. The lone beacon that had led Lucien right here. Right to me.

Carter hopped up onto the stage, and I lowered my hand. He fell to his knees and looked up at me.
Break him break him break him,
the winter voices chanted in my head. I was tempted.

“Look at me, Carter,” I whispered, and to his ears, my voice was a melody. A song he would never hear again, no matter how desperately he searched. “Remember when you thought you were better than me? When you thought you would teach me a lesson?”

His head dropped, but I didn’t need to see his face to know the flush that was spreading.

“You are blessed, aren’t you? I should eviscerate you for what you did, but instead, I’m granting you asylum.” I passed my hands over his head and tugged his head up. I looked into him and spread the tiniest part of my powers. Magic wrapped around him like fishing line, constricting until it was tight against his skin. One moment visible, the next absorbed inside. It was a small magic, but if I wanted to make the effect permanent, a part of me would always reside in him. A part of my power would always be lost.

By the time I’d turned back to Lucien, I knew he’d seen it firsthand already. The way Carter’s threads just vanished from the futures that Lucien traveled so extensively, making them duller and more faded than they were a moment before. “I’ve found a better use for your powers, Lucien. Take a look around. Congratulate them. It’s a brand-new day. A graduating class free from you.”

“A party trick,” Lucien sniffed. “Nothing more. When you die, the magic will be revealed, and everyone goes back to where they belong.”

“Except you,” I said with a smile. “You’ll never find your way home. And you’ll never find the rest of your power. Because I’m not going to die, Lucien. I know something you don’t know.”

“Do you forget who you’re talking to?” he demanded, swelling up where he stood. It was funny how impressive he’d looked to me that first day, and how the shine had faded. His suit was expensive, but mine looked better. He was … haggard, in a way. His clothes didn’t fit quite right, as if even the natural fabrics of the world knew he was just a pretender to a humanity he eschewed. He was playing dress-up, nothing more. “Do you forget the things that I hold over you? I can take him at any time.”

I realized now, in a moment of clarity, why I’d let the winter grow so strong in me. And in a rush of clarity, I saw the path that was opening wide before me, a path I was stepping onto, even now. The vision of the future, the one in which I brought ruin down upon the town, it all came down to this night. And it was as simple as the war inside of me. Grace’s ruby, burning eyes, the cerulean glow and warmth of my own. And the pale, cold cornflower blue of the demon eyes. It was all of them together. All the darkness and light inside of me, all of what I was and what I could be.