Jillian Cade (17 page)

Twenty-Five

Sky and I
raced out of Norbert's room—straight into a stampede of doctors and nurses. All were racing toward the beeping—toward Todd Harmon's room—yelling things like “Code blue!” and “Crash cart!” The beeping was shrill, and it was loud, and it wouldn't stop.

Then Corabelle appeared. She floated right out of Todd's door, through the onslaught, and into the waiting area. Her hair was in the same ponytail that I'd seen when she raced in, but it didn't look the same. No longer greasy, no longer lank, it was once again the bouncy beautiful blond wave that it had always been. Her skin had cleared up too, and her eyes—as they found mine—were a gorgeous, crystal blue.

Corabelle was back.

We froze, staring at her. Her smile wasn't scary or bitchy at all. It was dazzling and enticing. The kind of friendly smile you wanted to return, that you almost couldn't
help
but return.

“Thank you,” Corabelle said to me. “Thank you for finding him.”

I nodded. She was beautiful and vital again, but she didn't look like a succubus. Or at least not like what I now believed succubi to look like. Corabelle wasn't as tall as Misty; her skin wasn't as pale or freakishly luminous. Most telling of all, Sky didn't seem to be losing his mind from her presence. I marched straight toward her, ignoring the chaos around us. Sky tried to stop me, but I twisted away.

“Stick out your tongue,” I ordered her.

Without missing a beat, she did it, as if I'd made the most normal request in the world in response to the gratitude she'd shown for my finding her boyfriend. She opened her perfect, pink lips and stuck out her perfect, pink tongue.

Okay, that would have been too easy.

“What happened to Todd?” I demanded. “Is he going to be okay?”

Before Corabelle could answer, Sky spun me around to face him. “Stop this. Maybe your dad was wrong about the tongue thing.”

“Since when do you doubt the great Dr. Cade?”

I turned back to Corabelle, but she wasn't there anymore. There was a flash of blond at the corner, and then she was gone.

I would have chased after her, but unfortunately my arms were pinned at my sides by one of Aunt Aggie's hugs.

“Angel love!” she shrieked into my ear.

Sky was trapped too. Uncle Edmund had grabbed him by the shoulders. “Where's Norbert?” he boomed.

I wrestled away from my aunt while Sky shook free and pointed in the direction of Norbert's room. “Over there,” he said. “And sorry but—”

“We have to go!” I finished for him.

Sky bolted from the waiting area. I should have been right behind him, but Uncle Edmund pounced on me.

“Hold it.”

“Please,” I gasped, struggling against his grasp. “You don't understand. I'll be fine. I have to do this one thing. It's really important. I'll come right back.”

My uncle was strong. Stronger than I'd realized. I couldn't even wriggle.

“No,” he snapped. “Jillian, this is very serious. We promised your father that we would keep you safe. And we always assumed you would do the same. We trusted you, Jilly. We trusted you with our son.”

Aunt Aggie stood by his side. Her relief had fallen away. Now her face was creased with anger. “Is it true you've been taking Norbert to explore crack houses in Leimert Park?”

I almost said,
It wasn't a crack house; it was a meth lab.
I bit my lip. Probably not a distinction they'd care to make. Besides, neither was true. Of course they were pissed. I had put Norbert in danger. I felt terrible too, but I didn't have time to apologize or make amends. Corabelle had escaped and I needed to find her. Succubus or not, she
was
dangerous.

“Clear!” came a shout from Todd Harmon's room. There was a jolt, followed by a high-pitched whine. No more beeping. Just an even tone.

I felt that rubber band pull around my heart again. I was responsible for this. If I hadn't found him in that basement, he wouldn't be here right now, and Corabelle wouldn't have hurt him. I had to convince my aunt and uncle to let me go.

Maybe I could. Maybe I had a trump card to play.

I looked at my uncle. “Listen, I get why you're mad. I get it because I trusted
you
. And I know you know that I would never hurt Norbert. So now that we're on the subject of trust, let me ask you something. Do I have a sister?”

Uncle Edmund went ashen. In seconds. Whiter than Misty. His grip loosened. A puff of air escaped Aunt Aggie's mouth.

So. The trump card worked. It was all I needed to know.

“Go see Norbert,” I said, and then I raced away.

The doors of two elevators at the end of the hallway were closed. The lights above them showed that one was on the top floor, the floor above us. The other was headed down. That had to be Sky. I would have done the same, guessing Corabelle had taken the stairs to throw us off, and was trying to flee the way she'd come in: out the front door.

I jabbed the up arrow. From the roof, I could both avoid Sky
and
get a bird's-eye view of the surrounding streets. Maybe I could even spot her.
Screw it.
I bolted for the stairs and took them two at a time, racing up to the roof door. It was marked
emergency exit only
. I held my breath as I pressed the thick metal bar
. . .
and no alarms blared.

Amazing. Something had actually gone my way.

I stepped out onto the roof, let go of the door, and then reached back to snag it before it could close. It's not like I'd never seen a movie before. The last thing I wanted was to get trapped. I wasn't carrying anything besides my nearly destroyed phone, so I took off one boot and used it to wedge the door open. I would have wadded up my T-shirt and used that, but then I'd be a girl on a hospital roof in a bra. The clock on that scenario would be a short one, and I'd end up talking to Officer Simon again.

It wasn't until I was outside that I remembered that it was the middle of the night. Floodlights illuminated a giant white cross with an
H
at its center. A helicopter landing pad, maybe? It was the only part of the roof that was lit up. Nothing but murky shadows everywhere else. From where I was standing, I could see a rusty red rail along the edge of the roof. I set my hand on it and followed it into the gloom, letting my fingers trail over the scabby roughness. To my left something was making a loud whirring sound: giant fans and air-conditioning vents.

I reached a corner and peered out over the edge. I wasn't sure of the hospital's exact location, but in the direction I was looking—which I thought was north—I could see the Santa Monica Freeway. I had to be in Baldwin Hills or nearby. When I looked straight down (which made me dizzy), I could see the entrance to an underground parking garage and a busy street. Lots of pedestrians, even at this hour. Lights at every intersection.

I didn't see a gleaming blond ponytail. I didn't see anyone running away. I didn't—

“Looking for this?”

I flinched. Corabelle stood right beside me, holding up my boot. I made a reflexive grab for it, but Corabelle chucked it over the railing. It fell to an unoccupied patch of pavement.

“Hey, that's a real Doc Marten!”

She laughed. Her laughter was easy, relaxed, almost musical. “And I'm a real succubus,” she said. “Boo!”

I tried to back up, but I was already pressed against the railing. “Are you trying to scare me?” I asked. A lame question, yes, but also an effort to buy time while I struggled through the information I'd received that day: Sky's role in my obituary, Uncle Edmund's knowledge of my sister, now Corabelle claiming to be a succubus.

“Honestly, you scare
me
,” she said with a disappointed sigh. “You're rude, and gross, and you never say anything interesting. It's like you've never even
seen
good makeup or a push-up bra. Being stuck babysitting you has been the assignment from hell.”

I stole a peek at the street below. My lone boot sat there in a pale circle of lamplight. “Does ‘from hell' mean that you're giving me a compliment? Seeing as you're
. . .
you know.”

“Ugh, you're not even funny,” she said. “You should drop the attempts at humor. And seriously, a little mascara would really open up your eyes.”

“Look, I'd love to trade beauty tips with you, but I think we can come up with a better topic of conversation.” Inside my head, a bulb brightened. “Like how you
can't
be a succubus because I've seen you in sunlight.”

Corabelle threw back her head and laughed again. Clear and loud and pretty, like a church bell. “Yeah, well, I've seen you in geometry class. Doesn't mean you like it.”

“So you're saying succubi don't burn in the sun?”

“Shit, Jillian.” Corabelle rolled her huge blue eyes. “You of all people should know how rumors work. Once one gets started, people will believe all kinds of crazy things. Now imagine a rumor mill that's been around for an eternity.”

I jabbed a finger at her. “Fine, but I've seen your tongue. It's totally pink and totally normal and totally human. So that proves it.”

“You're clueless.”

“You're a poser.”

Corabelle's smile shifted. Her gaze hardened even as her mouth very slowly turned up at the corners.

She took a step toward me. I swear the shadows around us deepened. Corabelle couldn't have possibly grown because my eyes stayed at the same level with hers as they had been, but it
felt
like she got bigger. It seemed like I was looking up at her now. But maybe I was cowering. She leaned close to me and spoke in a gentle whisper. “I know that you are tremendously stupid. But surely you have enough brains to realize that
you
, like most of humanity, don't believe in us because
that's the way we want it
. The more legends that swirl around us, the less real we become
.”

Cold sweat broke out along my hairline. My mind flashed back to Sky's words about Santa Claus. Someone, somewhere, in the past had been real. But the eternal rumor mill had turned that real, charitable person into a jolly myth.

“You've said it yourself: we don't exist.” Corabelle's voice was too deep, her eyes too intense, her stare too menacing for her to be the girl I thought I'd known.

I put up my hands in what I thought was a pacifying gesture. “Hey, I'm not saying you don't exist—”

“Shh,” she whispered. Her fingers encircled my wrists. Her grip was strong. Stronger than Uncle Edmund's. Inhumanly strong. Corabelle was still smiling as she moved her face even closer to mine. “Here's the thing. You're making an assumption about me. About us. About how we are.”

She parted her glossy, plump lips and stuck her tongue out at me again. For a second, all was okay in the world. The hot, popular girl from high school was just an immature bitch, trying to freak me out. She was not a man-sucking demon. Life still made a tiny bit of sense.

But then, from underneath that tongue—one that would have sent any straight high-school boy into a hormonal frenzy—another shape darted out.

It was long and thin and black.

And it ended in a fork.

Corabelle had a second tongue.

Twenty-Six

I'm not sure
how much time passed after the worst version of show-and-tell I'd ever experienced. I do know that I briefly considered throwing myself after my boot.

“You really don't know, do you?” Corabelle asked.

I shook my head. She was right, whatever she meant. I knew now that I knew almost nothing. I had stumbled into one of those nightmares where you're being chased but you can't run fast enough because the whole world has turned to mud. Except this wasn't a nightmare. I was awake, on the edge of a roof, face-to-face with
. . .
Corabelle. Maybe that's why I said what I said. What came out of my mouth in a burst of whispered honesty was this: “I thought none of it was real.”

“You're the worst.” Corabelle mimicked my head shake. “I have to spend two years of my life watching you when you've never even
heard
of the Abomination, and now you're trying to engage my services as a tutor? Please. I'm a valuable commodity. I didn't awaken for this.”

“Watching me? Awaken from what?” The questions fell from my mouth in the order they sprung from my stupefied brain.

“From sleep, stupid.” She looked me up and down. “I should throw you off this roof right now. I'm not falling apart anymore. I'm back on my game. You can be dead along with Todd.”

I pushed aside my guilt and sadness and remorse over Todd (who would now be forever falsely known as a dead meth addict, not as the naïve pre-med student who got caught up in something he'd never imagined). I scrambled for ideas that might possibly save me. “But what if someone steals your
next
guy? That happens all the time to succubi, right? I can help get
that
guy back. I can be like your safety net.”

Too bad Dad wasn't there. Or Norbert. Or even Sky. I was having a conversation, in English, on a rooftop, with someone who killed people and had a venomous second tongue. This was now my life.

“Imprinted energy is more satisfying,” Corabelle informed me with a shrug. “Imagine eating salad all the time. Sure, there are decent salads, and you'd be fine and alive, but at some point, you'd be sick to death of leafy greens. All you'd want would be a piece of freaking chocolate.”

“So Todd was your chocolate?”

She turned away and slumped against the railing, resting her forearms on its top and gazing out over the city lights. “Yeah, he was my chocolate. I'll kinda miss him.”

I stared at her. “But we found him alive. You could have
kept
him.”

Corabelle sighed. “He was a liability. He made me weak. Which was not good, since I was awakened to watch
you
.”

“In school?” I whispered, baffled.

“Yeah, and it was crap. No other succubus got stuck in stupid high school for two years. I ended up being a part of it. I hated you all, but I got used to being one of you. I started to
feel
like one of you.”

Sadly, I knew what Corabelle meant. It wasn't much different than what Sky had been saying about Santa Claus. I had spent so much time cultivating “Jillian Cade,” unfeeling badass, that the image had started to become real. I believed in my own myth too.

“Ugh, it's such a weakness,” said Corabelle. “All that love crap and the thing where you want to be nice to someone else and pretend to listen to them about their boring day.”

An image flashed into my mind. It was the photo that I'd seen in Todd's room, the one of Corabelle hiking. The one where she had looked happy
. . .

Then Corabelle's fingers tightened around the railing, and she snapped off the top bar like it was a popsicle stick. I jerked backward as she whirled to me, holding what was now essentially a rusted metal club. “My gifts were being squandered,” she informed me. “Sure, I went against regulations, and sure, I engaged the Abomination—”

That word again. It made it through to my brain despite the loud beating in my ears.

“—but it's not like I had a choice! It's not like I volunteered to be on guard duty.
He
made me!” Corabelle was becoming more agitated. Frenzied, really. She bore down on me. “This is all
your
fault. You don't deserve to be here! You were never
supposed
to be here!”

I tripped on something behind me and fell backward, landing on the pavement by the edge of the roof. Loose pieces of concrete dug into my palms. I tried to scuttle away from her like a crab. Corabelle raised the metal bar over my head, and the sound of my pulse turned into a rushing stream, a river, a waterfall. It was deafening, thunderous, way too loud to make any sense, and Corabelle
had
to hear it because it was booming out of me, over us both.

Corabelle froze, except for her golden-fire hair whipping in the wind. The wind that had suddenly erupted around us. We looked skyward at the same moment—the moment we were bathed in a blinding glare of light.

It wasn't my pulse, after all. It was a helicopter. A sleek, black helicopter. It settled atop the
H
painted in the roof's center. Blades still whirring, its door opened and stairs descended.

A dark angel stepped out.

At least that's what I thought in that moment.

Corabelle LaCaze was a succubus. So calling this guy a “dark angel” (in my brain) made sense, given the circumstances, which didn't. Besides, he wasn't a doctor; this wasn't a medevac chopper. He was a tall, slender guy in black, loose-fitting clothing. He could have been in high school, or he could have been ten years older; it was impossible to tell. His face was unlined, blemish-free, framed with dark, straight, chin-length hair. His cheekbones alone screamed “angel.” Or the world's most terrifying
GQ
model. He started toward us.

“Hide me,” Corabelle yelped.

Now I had to process that
she
was scared. Corabelle: a fiend, who just a second ago was about to kill me. I stared at the guy as he drew close enough for me to see his gray, almond-shaped eyes. I scrambled to my feet, making an attempt to smooth my hair. After all, I had a pretty good guess at who was now looming over us, all dark and chiseled and intimidating. I stuck one hand out toward him.

“I'm Jillian Cade,” I said. “But you probably already knew that.”

He didn't take my hand, so I dropped it. He shot a glance at Corabelle before turning back to me. In a smooth, melodious voice, he asked, “And who do you think I am?”

“The Abomination?” It came out like a question.

Corabelle flinched. “I did not tell her that,” she said. “I swear I never said that—”

“No,” he interrupted in that soft voice. “I am not the Abomination.”

I couldn't stop myself from saying it: “You're not?”

“No,” he said again. He took a step closer and peered down into my eyes. “Jillian Cade,
you
are the Abomination.”

Corabelle took this opportunity to bargain with whoever this guy was. He was not the Abomination, because that delightful moniker apparently belonged to me. Now that I heard it, it
was
a perfect summation of the image I'd created at school. The fake/real me.

“I know I broke the rules, but I had a really good reason,” Corabelle was saying. “You have to hear me out—”

“The job you were given was a simple one,” he interrupted. “Keep quiet. Watch the Abomination. Report any signs of self-awareness.”

I was self-aware enough to know I needed to get out of there. If Corabelle LaCaze was afraid of Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Terrifying, then it only made sense for me to be too. My gaze slid over to the emergency door where I had emerged onto the roof. Surely someone else would come up here. A freaking
helicopter
had landed. All I had to do was live long enough for backup to arrive, right?

“I was smart to engage the Abomination,” Corabelle argued. “We don't know what using her powers could lead to.”

He turned to me. “Have you heard the call of our kind? Are you pulled in the direction of the bridge?”

The bridge.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out memories of my mother writhing on the floor, a corkscrew of screaming insanity.

“Jillian Cade,” Dark Angel said.

My eyes popped open.

“You have never been educated about your heritage—”

“Allow me,” Corabelle interrupted. “Jillian Cade, you're the daughter of a traitor and should have been killed at birth.”

I let the words sink in. I wasn't sure what she meant by “traitor” (Dad was a run-of-the-mill con man), but the second part felt overly harsh, even for someone who wanted me dead.
I
couldn't help who'd given birth to me. I hadn't
asked
for my family, not by a long shot.

“Quiet,” Dark Angel said. “Killing the Abomination could destroy the bridge.”

“We don't
need
armies to cross over,” Corabelle retorted. “Enough of us have awakened to
be
the army. Let's take control for once and—”

“You don't make decisions,” he told her. “You receive instructions.”

Corabelle trembled. “You are wasting my innumerable talents,” she said through gritted teeth before whirling in my direction. “I told you. This is
your
fault.” Her fingers whitened around the rusted metal railing she was still holding.

I glanced between the two of them. “I don't even know what's going on,” I whispered. “How can anything be my fault?”

“Your mother betrayed the Pact,” said Corabelle. The way she pronounced it, the word definitely had a capital P. “She was one of the seven traitors.”

Wait.
Mom
was the traitor Corabelle was talking about?

Corabelle glared at me. “She stayed awake and hidden when all else slept. She was the breaker of laws and the destroyer of worlds. She coupled with a
human
.”

“Enough!” thundered Dark Angel.

But Corabelle's anger issues were stronger than her ability to censor herself. “
You
were the disgusting result,” she finished.

Not that her words were necessary. No, it was all clear: I'd had the pieces wrong before. I had missed this entire puzzle. So had Norbert. So had
. . .

Actually, I had no idea what Sky had missed or what he knew. But at least now
I
knew a few things.

My mother: not a human.

My father: the human she had coupled with.

Me: the result.

The Abomination.

Corabelle lunged forward and jabbed my cheekbone with the metal. The jab was hard enough to snap my head back, hard enough to snap my brain back to my present danger. “We're all supposed to be thankful for the awakenings, but
. . .
”

The guy—Dark Angel or whatever he was—stepped in. He plucked the railing out of Corabelle's hands as easily as if it were a rattle and she were a crabby toddler. She gasped and leapt backward, but he was faster. In a single step, he'd seized her. Behind us, the helicopter's blades gained speed. Dark Angel lifted Corabelle in his arms and carried her to the railing.

She twisted her neck to look back at me. “He's going to kill me,” she said. “He wants you to watch.”

I wasn't sure what to say. She was right: it definitely seemed that way.

“Are you?” I asked Dark Angel, mopping at the blood I felt trickling from my cheekbone.

He nodded.

Against all odds, I felt a surge of indignation. Even
. . .
yes,
sympathy
. I knew what Corabelle was feeling, because she'd made me feel the same way. No one deserves to be murdered in cold blood. Not even a horrible, life-sucking succubus.

“Maybe you don't have to do that,” I said. “We can all work this out, right, Corabelle?”

Corabelle shook her head. “God, you're such a human.” It was definitely not a compliment.

“I'm trying to help you here.”

“Well, don't,” she snapped. “I didn't get awakened just so my last moments could be spent accepting help from the half-human Abomination.”

Dark Angel looked at me. I kept my eyes on Corabelle.

“You loved Todd,” I said, taking a step toward her and ignoring him. “I saw a picture he took of you. It was the only time I've ever seen you look happy.”

“Yeah, well, you people are contagious. Hanging out with you all the time, your humanity rubs off. That was
the part of me that loved him. The part that was human. The
part that was weak.”