Salem's Revenge Complete Boxed Set (95 page)

My heart is in my throat, my eyelids a dam against the deluge of tears still threatening like a river swollen by heavy rain. I am a lost soul. I am a broken teenage boy with too many years left to think about those I’ve loved and lost. I am a sinner. I am a saint. I am human, weak and strong, and made stronger by the lifeless kid before me. No more.

No more.

Rain throws herself into my side, wrenching me from my own darkly introspective thoughts. “We’re too late,” she cries. And I know she’s right, because Martin is still dying, his face still contorted with the agony of being near his children, and Xave isn’t breathing. He died a moment too soon, the very act of transferring the curse more than his body could take.

“No, there’s still a chance,” Laney says. “I know CPR. If I can revive him for even a second, you can transfer the curse.” She’s already in motion, positioning her hands just below his sternum, locking her elbows, performing chest compressions. I’m numb, as if watching from a distance as the love of my life tries to save my best friend long enough to kill him again.

She breathes into Xave’s mouth once, twice. Nothing. He’s dead. More compressions. More rescue breathing. To my left, my father is concentrating on pushing the curse away, into Xave, if he happens to wake up. Slowly the light is disappearing from his eyes.

Eventually, Laney stops the CPR. The magic that killed Xave was not to be thwarted, not even for a second. Not even to save my father. When she looks back at me, her face is laced with pain.

I think it’s because she failed, and she hates to fail. But wait. No. Her fingers are balled into fists, her body shaking. I mistook her hard expression for emotional pain.

It’s not. She’s in physical pain. Not aches and bruises from the battle, but something else. Something much worse.

“Oh, god,” I say.

Bil Nez says, “Look.”

My lip trembling, I wrench my gaze away from Laney to look at my father, Martin Carter, who’s changing before our very eyes. His wrinkles are smoothing, his hair growing back in thick gray tufts that seem to knit together, his pockmarked skin returning to a consistent rich shade of brown, his muscles once more becoming ropy and strong, filling out his too-skinny body. It’s as if he’s an old man who took a dip in the fountain of youth, shedding forty to fifty years of life in a few miraculous seconds.

When my eyes return to Laney, I say, “You did this on purpose. You knew you’d get the curse by accident.” I can hardly see her, my vision blinded by pools of sadness.

She doesn’t deny it. “I wanted it. I’d do anything for you, Rhett Carter,” she says, her voice trembling with pain. Pain that I’m causing her. “I love you.”

And then she’s gone, racing into the night, and I can’t follow.

If I follow the girl I love, she’ll die.

Laney

C
hloe reminds me of my sister. As I watch her chest rising and falling, she seems to gain strength with each cycle of inhalation and exhalation. She’s small. She’s underestimated.

She’s a hero, in her own way.

I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m not in denial. Watching Chloe, I want
her
to be my way forward. I want her to be my antidote for grief. A girl saved. A girl who saved me without having to die. A reason to forget about Trish and her sacrifice. A reason to forget about Rhett, who I can never be close to again. Even now, I’m still too close to Rhett, pain lashing through me like electric charges frying my nerve endings. But I’m not ready to go further just yet.

But Chloe is
not
my way forward. She’s just a girl who needs friends and role models. A girl who needs a hundred good memories to replace the million bad ones, stretching endlessly like a legion of nightmares. She twitches in her sleep and I know she’s remembering.

Reliving.

Re-feeling.

A hundred good memories will do it
, I think. Because these days every good memory is as precious as a diamond, and as powerful as ten thousand bad ones.

I’ll help her find each and every one. I’ll help her live again.

She is not Trish, but she
is
Chloe, and she is special.

A sound at the tent flap draws my attention and sends my heart fluttering…until it stops, becoming more still than a stone in a graveyard.

“You,” I say. Without even trying I’m able to make it sound like I’m referring to an obscenely large mound of steaming cow dung.

“You,” Angelique echoes, providing a vicious but beautiful smile that makes me want to barf.

And yet, I am curious. Of all people, I least expected—or wanted—to see her, just as I least expected her to swoop in to distract Flora long enough for Rhett to kill her. “Why?” I say.
Why did you help the humans? Why are you here?

“You probably see me as a complex person,” Angelique starts. Something about her is different. She’s obviously not the distraught suicidal woman with the kohl-smeared eyes that she was at the end of the last battle. But she’s also not the strong, devastatingly beautiful woman she was before that either. She’s something else. Something other. Still beautiful, but thinner, more reed-like, like she hasn’t eaten in weeks.

“Why don’t you go munch on a celery stick or whatever it is you eat,” I say, unable to soften my sharp tongue. Old habits die hard, even in the aftermath of war.

She says nothing, her expression feigning indifference. But I can see through it. She desperately wants to tell me something, otherwise she wouldn’t be here. A confession?

“Worms aren’t that complex,” I say, which is probably not too nice of a thing to say to the woman who helped save the world.

She remains silent.

Gah, why won’t she just leave me alone?
I take a deep breath and say, “Okay. Fine. Spill. Say what you have to say.”

She continues on as if I hadn’t sidetracked our conversation at all. “But my motivations are generally quite simple.”

Yeah, inflict as much pain as possible on anyone who gets too close.
I remain silent this time, keeping my thoughts to myself.

“Nothing to say?” the red-haired witch says. “No clever insult?”

“You
hated
the humans,” I say. “Although you seemed to hate most of the magic-born, too. So maybe you just like stirring things up. Maybe you live to watch others be destroyed. Hey, I’m not complaining, in this case it helped save us. But next time I suspect we won’t be so lucky.”

Her head is shaking halfway through my monologue and continues long after I finish. “You’re wrong,” she says. “I might not care about the close-minded humans who would rather trample me under their feet than offer a hand to help me up, but I do care about this world. I do care about peace.”

I sense an undercurrent to her words, a big, huge, finger-raising “But!” that’s surely coming. “But that’s not why you helped us kill Flora,” I say, an unapologetic attempt to steal her thunder.

She laughs. “You’re smarter than you look,” she says. “Perhaps even a smidgen smarter than a worm.”

Damn. I can’t hold back the smile when she uses my own metaphor against me. It’s something I would do. I wipe my face blank and wait.

“Revenge,” she says. “I didn’t do it to save those stupid humans or even to save your beloved Rhett Carter. I attacked Flora because she was the reason my sisters are dead.”

For once, the Changeling leader has surprised me, my mind churning through a dozen possibilities, each of which make less sense than the one before. “She had nothing to do with it,” I say. “President Washington’s magic-born killed your Changelings. Flora—regardless of her plans—is the only reason we won that battle.”

Angelique’s eyes darken. “You fool. You underestimated her exactly the way everyone else did. She played us all from the very beginning. We had an alliance, you see?”

A piece clicks into place, but I’m not ready to accept it. “You were allied with the Claires,” I say. “With my sister.”

“You think I would content myself with a single alliance? The plan was foolproof. The Claires get the Changelings past the missiles and into New Washington—”

“And then you defeat President Washington,” I say, cutting her off and finishing her thought.

“Yes…and no. I knew as well as anyone that President Washington could not be defeated so easily.”

Another piece moves into position. “You knew Flora would betray her. You knew half of President Washington’s allies weren’t real, that they wouldn’t fight for her.”

Angelique smiles, as if reliving her beautiful plan. “Of course. It was the only way we’d have a chance.” Her smile drops into a pain-filled grimace. “A fool’s chance. Our agreement was more than that. She was supposed to attack with her supporters at the same time. We would’ve crushed President Washington and her pathetic allies. We would’ve piled their corpses to the sky.”

As unlovely as that image is, the puzzle is complete, and it takes my breath away. “She betrayed you the same way she betrayed President Washington,” I say.

“My sisters were slaughtered like cattle. She didn’t want us to defeat President Washington. She wanted us to defeat each other.”

Flora’s cunning and evil went way beyond anything I could’ve possibly imagined. An unexpected swell of compassion rolls through me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. When the witch looks at me in surprise, I explain. “About your sisters. No one should have to lose a sister of any kind.”

Her sparkling green eyes transform to cold, flat, black obsidian marbles. “None of that matters anymore,” she lies. “Flora is dead and I am happy. What I don’t get, however, is why you did what you did. You and Rhett could’ve been together, even if the very thought of it makes me sick. It wasn’t your job to save his father.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I say. “Even if I didn’t know it until yesterday, it was my purpose all along.”

Angelique raises an unconvinced eyebrow, but then manages a single quick dip of her chin.

As she somehow makes her stomping exit from the tent appear graceful, she looks anything but happy. I don’t miss the fact that her hand rises to her cheek, wiping something unseen away with remarkable efficiency.

And then the impossible happens:

I feel sorry for her.

~~~

Rhett

“How is she?” I ask Bil when he approaches the fire after checking on Laney.

“Sleeping,” he says, “but she woke up long enough to tell me to take a hike.”

In any other circumstance I’d laugh, but not tonight. Maybe not ever again. Bil drops onto the bench beside me. On my opposite side, Tillman Huckle plays a handheld video game. He’s some sort of a demon hunter fighting lizard-like creatures with red scales and teeth-filled mouths almost as big as his character. And, as usual, he’s winning.

“Thanks Huckle,” I say, because of what he did during the battle. And for what he did afterwards, when he watched over my father.

Huckle doesn’t look up, another roaring demon falling under his character’s sword, which, remarkably, looks exactly like a light saber. “I didn’t do anything,” he says. “I was too scared. I watched the battle from far away. But then I saw Laney and she needed help.”

“You did everything,” I say. “Never forget that. We all do our part in different ways.”

Although Huckle doesn’t answer, his fingers flying over his controller, I see the change in his eyes and the lines of his jaw. My words mean more to him than anything.

Weariness sweeps through me as I picture the pain on Laney’s face before she took off. Exhaustion in my body: my bones ache, my muscles scream, my nerves burn. Exhaustion in my mind: bloody memories and vivid images of all the dead from my past cascade in an endless waterfall of regret. Exhaustion in my soul: Laney and Xave. Their names are like candles, lit and then snuffed out, again and again, their light fading with each attempt, the wax of their lives pooling at the base. One of them is dead and the other just feels like she is.

“Your dog is freaking hilarious,” Bil Nez says, which isn’t any kind of a revelation, but does pull my attention away from my emotions, which are bare and raw, and to Hex. He’s licking the fire and then breathing out flames across the ground. Grogg dances and hops from foot to foot, avoiding them, his mud softening and melting off in oozing lumps.

The mud troll is giggling hysterically. At least I think it’s his version of giggling, which sounds more like rusty nails being crushed in a compactor.

As we watch the antics of my dog and his new best friend, Bil rests an elbow on my shoulder. “Where’s your dad?” he asks.

“With Rain,” I say. Shortly after Bil left to check on Laney, Rain asked Martin—I mean, our father—to go for a walk. Although I desperately need to talk to him too, I don’t know if I’m ready. I think Rain’s memories are coming back to her, even the ones that happened when she was under the wizard’s control. Her face was ashen when they left.

“What happened to you guys?” I ask Bil, changing the subject, knowing full well that none of us will be able to sleep tonight.

Bil tells the whole story in monotone, not even stopping when my eyebrows go up at the part about Laney hugging him. When he finishes, there are so many more important questions to ask, but I can’t help myself.

“So you and Laney, uh, you guys are like…cool…and stuff?”

Bil chuckles. “It’s not like we’re going to share our innermost secrets and make each other friendship bracelets,” he says. “But yeah, we’re cool.”

“I’m glad,” I say, clinging to the news like a single bright point in a sea of darkness.

~~~

The rain arrives with dawn’s light, rattling over the blood-soaked world like machine gun chatter, as if cleansing the earth of evil. As if washing away our sins.

I’m drenched in seconds, pulling Laney after me into our tent, which is surprisingly still standing and somehow managing to keep out most of the rain—at least, so far.

Although it feels like we’re both broken in a million pieces, damaged beyond repair, somehow when our cold, shivering bodies meet we’re complete again, instantly warm—no, beyond warm; on fire. Our lips are a dance and our hands the music, as our lives intertwine like individual strands of pure silk woven together. Through our love, we represent the Living. Through our love, we are the Rememberers of the Dead. Through our love, we are the Past and the Present and the Future. We will do our part. We will make life worth living again.

We will be happy.

~~~

When I awake, the dream immediately begins to fade into reality. Tears prick my eyes as I realize that the only truth in the dream was the rain, which pelts the pitched roof of my tent.

The rains come and go, but eventually the clouds move on and the sun comes out, warming an otherwise chilly day. Shirtless, I stick my head out of our tent and Bil Nez immediately catcalls, “Sexy beast!” which is so inappropriate considering what happened last night. I think he’s as uncomfortable with sorrow as I am.

My face heats and I duck back inside, pulling on a shirt just as the tent flap pushes open.

I’m about to tell Bil to leave me alone when I see her face.

Laney’s expression is etched with pain, her teeth clamped tightly together, her eyes filled with liquid steel.

And even as my heart breaks in half, I say, “You can’t be here. You have to go. Now!”

When she doesn’t move, I attempt to push past her, to escape through the mouth of the tent; if she won’t leave, I will. She dives at me, tackling me, hugging me around the chest from behind. All the while she’s hissing through her teeth, choking out sobs.

“Laney?” I say. “Laney, you’re killing yourself!” But she won’t let go, her tears soaking through the back of my shirt, wetting my neck.