The Wicked We Have Done (4 page)

3

Jace screams.

The bubbling laughter spurts more rapidly from Gordon’s mouth as the girl slides off Salem’s limp body. Warmth has left every inch of me.

A gleam has risen in the girl, sharp and vibrant like a blade slicing open her irises. “Get ready to run.”

Fire mysteriously ignites in the hearth, bursting forth and catching on the couch, the carpet—on the nightie of Salem’s victim. Her face is illuminated as the flames eat her alive, charring her skin, broiling her insides.

In a matter of seconds, the fire has spread to all of the furniture, licking up the walls, igniting the curtains.

“We need to get out of here!” Valerie screams.

But I can’t. Not yet. My own body awakens, no longer paralyzed by invisible chains of terror. I run toward her, toward the girl now only walking muscle and bone—and drop to my knees, skidding across the stone until my legs collide with Salem’s body. I feel around his collarbone, moving my hands up toward his neck, where his head rolls at an impossible angle. It wasn’t an act. He’s gone.

Heat threatens to sear the skin straight off of me.

Someone grasps my arm and yanks me to my feet. “What are you doing?” Casey shouts. “We need to get out—”

A plume of flame erupts from the fireplace. Casey throws me in front of him, guiding me out the door. He runs so fast I can’t even keep both feet on the ground as he carries me blindly down the hill. There is nothing but darkness, the only light from the hell we’ve left behind.

“Where are the others? We can’t leave them!” I jerk backward and we both stumble. He gets up first, takes my hand, drags me to my feet, and doesn’t let go. The ground flies by faster than my legs will carry me, and I’m sure I’m going to trip until the land levels out and brush pelts my arms.

We’re in the forest.

Casey trips, and this time I’m the one to heave my entire body to get him up.

I slow and he tries to tug me along, but I tear my hand free from his grasp. My legs give out and I drop to my knees. My wheezing sounds like sobbing. Maybe I
am
sobbing. “I’m done.”

He sits next to me. “Hell. We’re in hell. Must have died on the train.” He pauses, and then, “The
fuck
were you doing back there?”

“Wha . . . what?”

“Running to Salem like that.”

“I needed to see . . . if he was dead.”

“Who cares? He was a terrible person. The house . . . look, look! It’s up in flames. You can see from here. And what, were you going to save him if he was still alive? Was that what you were going to—”

“Who cares? You? Why? Tell me, Casey . . . why did you drag me away? Why not leave me to die?”

“You were the only one I could see clearly.”

“Bullshit.”

“You were being psychotically heroic.”

“So I needed rescuing? I’m a mass murderer.”

“Apparently we’ve all done some pretty fucked-up things to get here.”

“My point exactly, now shut up. Let me think.” Actually, being alone with my thoughts is the last thing that I want right now. The image of the girl’s burning flesh replays over and over in my head. The lodge is on fire. What do we do—where do we go?

There might be other stops within the woods—other buildings with food and beds. Other horrors. Whatever the Compass Room is planning for us next.

The Compass Room.

We were given backpacks with provisions for a reason. The sudden eruption of flames wasn’t an accident. “Everything that just happened . . . that was all on purpose.”

“What?”

“They wanted us out of the house. They want us in the woods.”

Shuffling sounds in the distance—staggered footsteps. I stand, but Casey whispers, “Don’t move.”

We’re at the brink of a grove, before us a clearing where someone emerges, dragging a whimpering figure.

“Shut up!” Erity hisses to Jace, throwing her on the ground.

Casey’s up and pulling me to his chest before I can think. He covers my mouth. I fight against him but he’s too freaking huge. He’s keeping me from her, for no reason, and she needs help.

My vision has adjusted enough to see the darkness splattered across Jace’s shirt. Blood. Something juts from her shoulder.

“Please,” Jace cries.

“This is the only way I can escape,” Erity says.

With a fallen branch, Erity swings at Jace’s head, the contact
cracking
in the hollow night. Jace slumps to the ground on her back.

“If you want to die, you keep moving!” Casey hisses.

I fall limp, knowing he might be right, but also knowing that any more fighting is completely useless.

With the branch, Erity rushes to scratch a haphazard circle on the ground. Throwing the stick to the side, she picks up Jace’s legs and drags her to the center.

The video on the train had shown Erity as a member of a secret coven that believed they could extract power from human sacrifices.

Casey’s hand slips from my mouth.

“She’s going to sacrifice Jace if we don’t stop her!”

For how small she is, Erity’s strength is phenomenal. I recognize the object jutting from Jace’s chest as a knife handle.

“We have to do something!” I whisper.

“Let me think, let me think!”

There’s no time to think. A howl picks up in the distance, tortured screams filling the air. Even the trees quake in fear, the rustle of leaves surrounding us. Wind whips violently back and forth.

Erity sinks to her knees by Jace, her face lit in excitement. She mutters something I can’t hear; the shrieking now deafens me. I scream along with the noise until Casey covers my mouth again.

Erity is casting a spell.

Tendrils of black smoke swarm into the clearing. She stretches out her arms. “I’m ready!”

She waits to be filled with Jace’s soul.

Suddenly the smoke separates into thousands of black pellets—like oil hit by water. Erity’s expression shifts from joy to horror, and her scream joins those that lace the air. All at once, the smoke rushes forward, slamming into her. She seizes until every pellet has found its way inside her skin.

And then she explodes.

Her body rips into a million pieces. For a second I swear the flecks of her hover in the air, bits of flesh and bone and organ tissue, before they spray all over the forest, all over Jace.

All over me.

Casey releases me in a fit of curses. I race into the blood-soaked field and drop to my knees near Jace. She’s coated in a red, chunky mixture of Erity’s insides. I’m so packed full of adrenaline that I don’t even think twice when I drag the coil of intestine off her chest and press my ear to her soaked shirt, blood squelching beneath my head.

The beat of her heart is solid.

“Casey!” I scream. He isn’t budging. With the help of the full moon, I’ve adjusted to the night. He stands still, gaping at the clearing, running his fingers over his cheeks to clean away chunks of our former fellow inmate.

The knife penetrates Jace to the hilt. There’s no telling if I’ll hurt her more trying to remove it. I take a moment to trace the bone-white handle.

“Dammit,
help me
, Casey
!
”

Casey snaps out of it and joins me, kneeling by Jace’s head. He lifts up her shoulders so I can slide her pack off.

“I saw the moon reflecting a little farther that way.” Casey points.

“On water?”

“A lake, I think.”

“Can you carry her?”

He nods, determined, though his entire body shakes.

“I can’t tell how much she’s bleeding. I don’t know if the blade hit anything,” I say as he staggers to his feet with Jace in his arms. I gently peel Jace’s sticky hair off her face. Her cheeks are cold. She won’t be conscious any time soon.

If I can put all of my effort into saving this girl, then I can dull the memory of what just happened.

I wonder if Casey’s thinking the same thing.

As we walk through the woods, a green light illuminates the night for a split second before disappearing.

“Lightning?” Casey asks.

“I don’t know,” I respond, hoping it’s not the beginning of another horror. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

***

The sun is coming up.

Casey and I have been hovering around Jace for the past few hours, unable to revive her. Her skin is tinged gray, hair laced with blood and the beach’s white, grainy sand. The same sand that stretches for hundreds of yards on the northern edge of a crystalline, perfect alpine lake.

The paradise mocks us. Nothing is reminiscent of the night’s events other than the blood crusted onto all of us, and the knife stuck in Jace’s shoulder. We have to pull it out—the question is when one of us will muster enough courage to do so.

Salem and Erity are dead for sure . . . maybe others are too. I didn’t see anyone else make it out of the house. I don’t even remember seeing Tanner in the living room before the place burst into flame. He could have been burned alive.

In the direction of the lodge, smoke still floats into the sky, clouding the north, filtering the new sun. All that’s left is a hellish orange hue.

I start to cry. I stupidly start to cry. With my adrenaline gauge on empty, I have no way to gain my bearings. In the past few hours, I’ve seen the impossible. Like we’re lab rats in a globe of secret supernatural government experiments. We’re criminals, and we don’t deserve more than that.

I wipe my cheeks, the tears softening up the blood. Casey’s lip rises in disgust.

“I’m fine, thanks for caring.” I return my attention to Jace.

I’m trying to understand what would happen if her heart stops beating. Would that mean the Compass Room deemed her worthy to die? Logically, it would have to. It was obvious that Salem should have died. Erity too. But Jace—I can’t imagine what she did or thought in the past few hours to condemn her.

I’m not going to sit here and watch her die.

I promised myself.

Never again would I wait for anything.

I reach out, curling my fingers around the bone hilt of the knife.

“What are you doing?” Casey’s back tenses. “You don’t know what that will do to her.”

“True, but I know what doing nothing will.”

He doesn’t argue.

I rest my left palm on her shoulder to steady myself. There’s no telling what will happen when I pull—or if I’ll even be able to rip the blade out. If she’ll wake up.

I count to three in my head and yank as hard as I can.

My hand flies back, and only the hilt catapults through the air.

“Fuck!” I scream. This is worse than leaving the knife in her—now the blade is buried deep within Jace and we have no means of getting it out.

Casey jumps up to grab the hilt—wherever it landed—and I examine the damage. I’m expecting to see the sharp edge of the blade where it broke. Instead, there’s nothing more than a shallow puncture wound, maybe an inch deep.

“Evalyn.”

I glance at Casey. He lifts the hilt. The unbroken piece of the blade is coated with blood—about an inch, enough to make the cut in Jace’s shoulder. The end isn’t jagged, but smooth.

Like it’s been sanded down. Like it dissolved.

“What the hell?”

“Why would Erity try to stab her with
this
?” Casey chucks the hilt onto the sand.

I study it, the blood melding states of glistening liquid and crust.

“She didn’t.” Jace coughs once, raising her shaking hands to wipe her cheeks. “She stabbed me with a knife.” Her words are slurred. “A real, full one. She recognized it. She said it was her ritual weapon.”

I hush her. “Rest. Don’t talk. You can do that later.” I squeeze her uninjured shoulder, releasing a breath of thanks that she’s awake.

Casey kneels next to me. “Where’d the rest of the blade go?”

I pick the handle of the knife up off the sand, running my finger over the smooth, dull edge. Jace says Erity stabbed her with a whole knife. But Jace’s wound isn’t more than an inch deep, which is the amount of blade here.

I hold my thumb into the bit of blade until my skin turns white and leaves a crescent imprint in the metal.

“It’s dissolving,” I say.

“Dissolving?” Casey reaches out and runs a finger over the metal. “Why?”

I shrug, a handful of possible answers racing through my head, though only one seems likely. “This place kills those deserving death. Maybe it isn’t sure about Jace yet.”

“So if they knew Jace was morally tarnished, then the blade wouldn’t have dissolved?”

I brush more sticky strands of hair from Jace’s forehead. Her eyes have fluttered shut. “I’m not sure.”

“You think they’re literally watching our every move, the Compass Room engineers—gods—whatever they are?”

“I think they have to be.”

“So did
they
make Salem’s victim magically appear? Or Erity’s motherfucking deity?”

“Is that what it was? A deity?”

Casey pushes his fingers through his hair. “We were sentenced to the Compass Room on the same day. That’s the only reason why I even know. Thankfully, she outshined me on all of the news programs. An archaic coven had been reborn. They believed they could waken a deity with a ritual involving a brimstone fire that created black smoke.”

“Then they’d have to sacrifice someone to the deity to gain power,” I conclude. “Right?”

Casey nods.

“So all we know so far are that there are two deaths, and both were somehow caused by a part of the criminal’s crime coming back to life.” But that’s all I can piece together. There are too many open ends in the Compass Room’s logic to try and mentally close any loopholes right now.

I use one of my pairs of underwear to clean Jace’s shoulder after I’ve taken off her shirt. She whimpers and tries to jerk away, and Casey holds her down. “It’s okay,” he whispers to her, fondly—
fatherly
—and waits with his hands on either side of her neck for her to calm down. “What do you remember?”

She takes a moment to gather herself. “Running through the woods.” Her face scrunches up as she gets ready to cry. I refocus on cleaning her up. “I was with both Erity and Valerie until we lost Valerie. Erity . . . She found that knife sticking out of a stump. She said it belonged to her, and that it must be a sign. I didn’t think to question her. I was still freaked out by the fire. She stabbed me when I wasn’t paying attention.”