Red (19 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

Kia

“What do we do now, Ethan?” Justine said. “What do we do?”

Even her dad was looking to him as if he had the answers.

“Get your trophy off the ogre,” he told Justine, turning away from the lake. When she scurried into the shadows with her knife, he added to her dad, “You get back to the bestiary and hold off the Cabal as long as you can.”

“Now see here—”

“
Now
, Dad,” Justine snapped over her shoulder. A large ogre tooth with a chunk of bleeding gum still attached to it hung from her belt. He frowned but hurried after her. “I’ll call my mom as well,” she added before vanishing into the forest.

Ethan looked at me. “You need a trophy, too.”

“I’m not cutting body parts off an ogre.”

He didn’t smile, which was good, because I wasn’t joking. “One trophy per creature,” he said. “So it wouldn’t work anyway. But the Cabal are here, Kia. If you don’t present them with a trophy, they’ll wipe your memory.”

I thought of his aunt staring blankly at nothing and shivered.

“We don’t have much time,” he said wildly.

“Firebird feather?” I suggested, just as panicked.

“Not fatal.”

“Then I run,” I said. “Because I’m not letting them touch my brain.”

“They’ll catch up eventually. We need a better plan.” A green flare shot into the sky. “They’re already here.”

“The wendigo,” Abby suggested.

“That’s Summer,” I interrupted before Ethan could say anything. He looked ill. “Not an option.”

“It’s not Summer anymore,” she said gently. “She doesn’t need protecting. You do.” She’d have suggested Sloane, if Sloane hadn’t shifted back to human as she died. Nausea churned in my belly.

Ethan was trembling, but he nodded. “She’s right,” he said hoarsely. “It’s not Summer.”

“I don’t care. No,” I insisted. I wasn’t going to hack up some girl, even if she had tried to kill me. “Absolutely not.”

“I’ll do it,” Abby said, stalking past us. Ethan took my hand, squeezing so tightly my knucklebones rubbed together.

When we caught up to Abby she was just standing there, stark and sharp as the icicles had been. They’d melted away. The fire had burned them to nothing, had kept burning while Holden fought Nix, burning through the unnatural storm, through Summer. Charred bones remained. They looked almost human.

I snuck a glance at Ethan. He looked relieved, somewhere under the chaos of all the other emotions he was trying to stifle. I knew how he felt.

“I won’t feed my granddaughter to the hunters,” Abby said with the kind of calm that prickled uncomfortably. Especially when she pulled a large, sharp knife out of the scabbard tucked in the back of her belt.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

Her hand curled into claws, fur bristling halfway up her arm. “I’m getting you a trophy.”

I grabbed her arm. “Are you—” I couldn’t even finish the question. “No. Hell, no.”

“There’s no time.” She looked at Ethan instead of me. “You know it’s the only way.”

“We could get to the bestiary.”

She shook her head. “They already cataloged it. It won’t count if it comes from something ill or caged. You know that.” She exhaled sharply. “Enough talking.”

I thought I’d already seen the worst tonight: Sloane, Summer’s wendigo, the sound of Justine sawing through the ogre. I was wrong.

Abby widened her paw against the trunk of a tree and then pressed down with the blade, cutting off the smallest claw on her left hand. She screamed, slumping to her knees. Sweat immediately froze to her forehead. She was shaking as she applied some kind of tourniquet bandage to stem the bleeding of the amputation. A werewolf claw lay in the snow, fur matted with blood. Ethan and I fell on our knees beside her.

“Abby!” I didn’t know what to do. “We need a hospital.”

“First you need to bring that to those Cabal bastards,” she said, nodding to the claw. Her hand was human again, twisted and faintly blue with cold. Her lips were the same color. She was going into shock. I was going into shock. “Fire,” she ground out. “You can cauterize the wound.”

“Or I could set you on fire!” Hadn’t she seen Summer’s bones? And I hadn’t even realized the fire was still burning.

“It’s not all you can do, Kia. You’ve been practicing.”

Fire was unpredictable. She’d already sacrificed so much for me. What if I hurt her more? What if it was like Riley all over again? I could smell roses and matchsticks.

“Kia.” She propped herself up on the tree. “Now. Before they find us. If they know the claw is mine, everything will be so much worse.”

I wasn’t sure that was physically possible. I wasn’t even sure I had any fire left inside me.

Abby unwrapped her hand. The flesh was swollen and ragged, and I could barely look at it. I closed my eyes for a moment. I wouldn’t make living coals out of myself this time. Instead, I would channel the fire, not just feed it. Abby wouldn’t feed me to the hunters, and I wouldn’t feed her to the fire. I would use it to help her.

I chafed my palms together to warm them up, to call the fire. Ethan had once said that like calls to like, magic calls to magic. Heat would draw heat. I felt it tingling and sparking, leaving tiny burns on my already inflamed skin. I wilted, forcing the last of the energy I had through my hands. I visualized candles burning, fire crackling, coals smoldering. I thought of my mother, still being ruled by fear of the fire.

I felt the warmth of the flames when it flared in the living room, felt the press of Ethan’s mouth on mine, the taste of his kiss. I opened my eyes, and in my palms, fire burned. It was small but searing, wavering the air around it. Abby tried to smile right before she shoved what was left of her finger in the flames. The smell of smoke and scorched flesh distracted me enough that the flames flickered weakly. I forced it to keep burning, fed it anger and pain and love and friends lying in the snow.

Abby finally drew back, and Ethan wrapped her hand up. I tucked the severed werewolf claw into my pocket even though touching it made me gag.

Ethan and I helped Abby to the ATV she’d used to find us in the first place. We took her back to the house, and even though I hated to leave her there, we kept going.

At the edge of the bestiary, Ethan took my hand, and we walked out of the woods together, a monster and a monster hunter.

Epilogue

Kia

We buried the wendigo bones by Summer’s standing stone. After tending to Abby, Justine’s mom came on the ATV and left with Sloane’s body. Not long after that, she kicked her husband out of the house and sent Ariel to a boarding school in Switzerland with a personal bodyguard.

Abby and I stayed in the castle. Ethan was the heir to the estate and his father’s fortune. He put Abby in charge of rehabilitating the creatures that could be trusted to live peacefully outside of the bestiary enclosures. The troll stayed in his cage. The yeth hound slept outside under Ethan’s window every night and followed him down to the lake when he visited his father.

Ethan was talking to the Cabal about his ideas for a new kind of Blackwood bestiary. He and Abby had a plan to heal wounded creatures and accept those who couldn’t be fully healed enough to live free from other bestiaries. It required less training and fewer rules, more privacy. And years from now, when old age had claimed the last creature, we’d hopefully have figured out a way to leave the Cabal for good. Or maybe we’d see something worth saving.

Ethan, Justine, and Justin still patrolled, of course, watching for basilisks and wyverns and other beasts that had to be controlled. After Sloane’s funeral, Tobias took to the forest and never came back. We found a moss girl arrow with a note attached, in his handwriting, assuring us that he was safe.

I spent a lot of time practicing with fire in the snow. The extra safety of all the cold and the wet made it less harrowing, and I almost never had to plunge my hands in the snow to ease burn blisters. On the first full moon after Sloane died, I went outside and sat in the snow, missing her. I lit a candle and left it to burn out in the garden. A wolf howled, and I wondered if it was Abby. She often patrolled the castle in her animal shape. She claimed a mere human couldn’t look after me, not the way I attracted trouble. She said I took after her.

Ethan grabbed me when I was heading back, pulling me into the orchids and ferns of the pool house for a long, searing kiss. I felt it in every part of my body. His tongue slid along mine until our breaths grew ragged. The candle outside flared high, nearly touching one of the maple branches.

When I finally went up to my attic room, a girl floated over the hardwood floor, smelling of flowers and snow. I blinked furiously. “
Sloane
?”

She wore a dress made of wolf pelts, and there were pink lilies in her hair. I choked on a bunch of words that probably wouldn’t have made sense anyway. “Don’t you dare tell me you don’t believe in ghosts,” she said. “It took me forever to corporealize.”

“But…” My head hurt. Grief was making me hallucinate. I’d finally cracked under the pressure.

“Wanna see something cool?” Sloane asked cheerfully. She walked right through me before I could reply. It was like being covered in frozen, sticky spiderwebs. I shuddered. She laughed.

“You’re really here,” I said.

“Yeah. I died on the edge of one of the magical wards. I guess it did something. Are you crying?”

“No,” I sobbed.

“Kia Alcott, you’re a marshmallow.” She paused. “Damn it, now I want to eat marshmallows. I already miss food.”

“God, Sloane.” I laughed through my tears. “I missed you.”

“Of course you did.” She winked. “I’m very missable.” She sat on the edge of my desk and swung her feet as if this was all very normal. “So. Still kissing Ethan?”

“Yes.”

“Good. One of us should get kissed at least.”

I could see right through her to the bulletin board. It made me feel like I had vertigo. I loved every beautiful impossible spin of the room.

“Kia.” Sara’s voice crackled through the intercom. “Dinner.”

“Dinner,” Sloane groaned. “I’m so going with you. Do you think there’ll be mashed potatoes?” She had the kind of look on her face generally reserved for hot guys.

“You can’t perv at the dinner table,” I told her.

“I’m not perving on your boyfriend. I’m perving on mashed potatoes, so it’s totally allowed.”

Sloane was still technically dead.

Abby was still a werewolf.

Ethan still had a mess on his hands.

I was still expelled. And I still had fire.

But we also had each other. And one more thing—

The knowledge that some monsters are beautiful, after all.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to my agent, Marlene Stringer, and all the folks at Entangled for this new adventure! Thank you especially to Stacy and Lydia for sharp, insightful editing suggestions. And to everyone who contributed to the beautiful cover: if it were candy, I would eat it!

About the Author

Alyxandra Harvey
lives in an old stone house in Ontario, Canada, with her husband, their dogs, and a few resident ghosts who are allowed to stay as long as they keep company manners. She likes gingerbread lattes, tattoos, and books. Visit her online at
www.alyxandraharvey.com
.

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