Phantom Eyes (Witch Eyes) (21 page)

twenty-eight

The contact between us kept the power inside me writhing, electric and angry. Demanding release. I couldn’t leave Riley like this much longer if I could help it. Whatever she was becoming, it seemed like it was getting worse. Or maybe it was finally revealing itself, now that I had my powers back. She’d been broken by a combination of Lucien’s power and my own, but more and more it seemed like the demon was stronger in her.

Her hand in mine was icy, but her grip was inhumanly strong. She could have broken my bones if she wanted to, I had no doubt.

“Tell Riley where you want it to hurt,” she whispered, leaning close to me. I wanted to squirm away, because this wasn’t Riley. More and more, she was becoming what I
would imagine Lucien and Grace’s child would be like.

“Lucien hides behind his abilities,” I said, licking my lips. “He relies on them for everything. I’ve tried using them before, but it’s too much chaos in my head. There
aren’t just a thousand different outcomes to anything, there’s a thousand times a thousand. And that’s a few hours’ worth. I can’t keep up with them the way Lucien does.”

“I don’t hear a request.”

Yes, definitely the sooner the better. “I have a plan to take it away from him, but I want to do something else first. Something … worse.”

A slow smile started to creep across her face, off-putting in the way that muscles seemed to contract at random, rather than by intent. Like someone trying to mimic smiling when they’d only seen the anatomy of one, muscles tightening, pulling against bone for leverage.

“You want the confluence,” she said. Her hand slipped out of mine and then brushed against my temple again. “Open your eyes. See the dark lines. See the futures, the threads.”

The demonic power in me reacted, again, to her words. I tried to pull away, tried to throw myself off the bed and away from her, but awareness of my body faded as my vision was clouded with futures.

The world became a creature of fog, sweeping in from the sides and giving contrast to the thousands of colored threads that spilled out in front of me like an explosion of iridescent fishing line. Each thread twisted around others, knotted up, wrapped around, intersected, and cut off other threads. Even just an inch in front of my face was a maze of colors I could barely decipher. And Lucien could sift through thousands of them in an instant. It was his birthright the same way the witch eyes were mine, but I hadn’t even mastered my gift. I had to have Grace’s help. So how would I ever master Lucien’s?

That’s what Riley was for.

You want the confluences,
her voice pressed into my head from the outside, ringing in my ears.
The places where futures intersect.
Her fingers floated into my vision, filled with sparkling stars and transparent against the wave of potential in front of me. She strummed her fingers along the threads like they were strings on a guitar, tugging on places where five, ten, twenty lines all cam
e together.

Take away one point,
but she didn’t finish the thought before the confluence went dark,
and everything is dominoes
. All the threads that had spilled out of it, maybe twice what had entered it, vanished. Dark fog appeared through now- empty spaces in the future weave.
Take away many points, and what will he have left?

One by one, the futures started to vanish, until all paths lead to the same five or six outcomes. And then even those, too, began to fade away until there was only one left.

A future that ended with my boot on Lucien’s neck—and the town around me charred from existence.

Only in this version of the future, Riley was there. Her hair was hacked short, her face gaunt and skeletal, and eyes burning like gas flames. She stood behind Trey in placement, but her role was clear. Protégé. Handmaiden. Whatever it was that Elle fulfilled for Grace, Riley would be for me in the dark turn of my future.

It was enough to send me recoiling back. The connection between us split with an awful screech of mental feedback, the psychic equivalent to a microphone going rogue. The visions faded, and Riley sat there watching me with disaffection.

I can’t let her stay like this. She can’t become … whatever that was.

I didn’t think it through. The power in me swelled, responding to my need. Whatever Lucien and I had done before had attacked Riley’s mind: scrambling what was there, twisting it and perverting its shape. She’d come out of it broken and inhuman. But I had both of the same powers inside of me now—the witch eyes and Lucien’s wellspring essence—so in theory I should have been able to.

But I’d never seen Riley’s mind without my sunglasses on, so even if I could figure it out, I wasn’t sure what it should look like before it had been altered. Her mind now was a towering stack of faded blue bricks, aged and dark in some places, faded and bone white in others. There were holes in the wall, entire sections where the bricks were missing. By any rights, the whole thing should have toppled to the ground, but somehow there was an equilibrium formed by the bricks and emptiness.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put her back together again,” Riley said with a giggle.

“King me,” I muttered back as
there—that spot right there—
the wall was different. Squid-spongy instead of stiff and unyielding, bricks the same shade of blue as Riley’s eyes.

It’s just a stain,
the winter voices whispered slyly,
you can strip it away. We can show you how.
I sucked my lower lip down between my teeth and bit down, focusing on the wall. Everything felt … jumbled. Like the colors were wrong and the wall wasn’t supposed to even be a wall at all. It had been taken and shaken around like a handful of dice, its purpose completely changed.

The winter voices were right, though. I could feel the way the stain had a sticky side to it and how easy it would be to tear it away. As soon as I started to tear, I realized my mistake, although it was already too late. The spot was cornflower blue for a reason—it was a fraction of Lucien’s power just like the wellspring, although this had the added benefit of coming directly from the source.

In contrast to the depths of the wellspring, it was a miniscule bit of demonic power. But size didn’t always matter, and taking in a little more demon into me was just like adding a guilty conscience to an already bad day: it just made things worse.

The winter voices surged into a furor of words, in languages I didn’t even think had ever been spoken out loud before, just before the English my mind translated it to.
Riders at the Gate. So many sins at our fingertips. Agony first, then the blood. Open doors and throats and don’t mind the mess. Thrown from the lighthouse, not messy enough. Decapitation much better. Funnier. So much humor in the moment the light fades. Let them all diminish. It’s time. It’s time. Waited so long and now there is—

“No!”

But even as I fought against it, I could feel the part of me that was in control slipping away, and something else rising up underneath it all. Like a combine scything through wheat fields, it roared across the landscape of my mind, blades of diamond dicing away at all the chaff and wasted potential
.

This is how it happens. This is how I become the dark thing.

There was too much in me now—too much demon, and not enough human. How Grace ever thought she could control the power of the wellspring was beyond me. I only had a fraction of it inside me, and it was too much. It felt like I was a balloon that had filled far past the point where it should have exploded, only I hadn’t yet. But it was only a matter of time.

“Braden?” Jade appeared at the door, an angel dressed in black.

“No!” Riley screamed, a renegade fury in her voice. She lunged off the bed and it was only at the last second that some part of my brain rebooted, and I slammed a wall of magic in between the two girls. Riley had found a knife somewhere, long and sharp and gripped by the blade rather than the pommel, causing blood to spill from between her fingers.

The blue light erupted around me like a security blanket, and instantly the shifting balance in my head reversed, and the demonic energy was no longer in control. As my mind cleared, I realized how close to slipping I was.
Three days? How am I even going to manage three more hours?

Letting the wellspring power run free, listening to the winter voices, all of it was designed to make me weak, and exploit those moments.

Wisely, Jade didn’t say anything at first. She just stared at the scene in front of her with wide, terrified eyes. Riley fought against the barrier, blood splattering against the air and smearing against it, making the invisible slightly … not. Her eyes and face were still screwed up in an animalistic fury.

“Jade, keep talking,” I said. Maybe if I had something to latch onto, something I could focus on. Because I had to try again. I couldn’t leave Riley like … this. There had to be something I could do.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked.

“I don’t care,” I whispered, feeling nerves and exhaustion skipping along the edges of my awareness. I might not get another shot at this. I had to do
something.

Again I tried to fight the wall, to tear it apart piece by piece. I could tear away the weak parts, where there was nothing but stain upon the bricks, but that hadn’t worked out so easily last time. Then I realized I was going about it all wrong. Instead of stripping the stain from the bricks, I started moving the bricks themselves.

I couldn’t even say for sure what Jade said in the background, but the sound of her voice was a soothing buzz against the harshness in Riley’s mind. I could feel the sweat pooling under my arms, down my back, even in the backs of my knees, but the more pieces I started to move, the easier they started to give way. The entire structure of Riley’s mind started to fall into a different shape, and even without some sort of blueprint to work off, I could
feel
where pieces were meant to go. Bit by bit the color, and even the texture of the bricks began to change—some became like glass, while others glowed with an inner source of light stronger than any light bulb.

Even as I worked, I could sense something awry. An integral part missing. The more I worked, the more apparent it became. Until finally the wall was torn down, and Riley’s mind was the maze it must have been before, and it was … void. Empty.

I pulled back my vision, slipping through the folds and layers that had returned to Riley’s mind until like a nighttime flower, its bloom reversed upon the light’s return.

Riley had slumped down on the side of the bed, the knife clattered to the ground sometime while I was gone. Her eyes were wide and empty, and I reached out, terrified that she was dead. That in my need to cure her, I’d somehow killed her instead.

“Braden, she needs help. We have to call the nurses,” Jade said, her hands pressed against the barrier that divided the room.

The winter voices had gone sullen and silent when I’d regained control of myself, but when I reached out and touched Riley, I could feel their intrigue. They recognized something in her—something I didn’t at first.
Her future. That’s what’s missing.

I’d tried to stop Lucien from devouring Riley’s mind, but I must not have been fast enough. He’d still managed to drain away the future potential she had, stripping her life down to its bare minimum.

With a tired sigh, I waved the barrier down and climbed to my feet. “Go call the nurses,” I said.

Unfortunately, my night was far from over.

When it came down to it, the fact that I could bring Belle Dam to its knees with only three text messages was pretty impressive. I’d instructed Matthias to send the first two, and Jade to send the last before I left the hospital.

There were a few cars on the road, and I stayed tucked into the shadows until they passed. As I crossed into the town square, Trey was already waiting for me. It was still ten minutes to midnight, when I’d told him to meet me,
but he paced like he’d been here twice that.

He kept passing by the same city bench, turning towards it long enough to glare at it, like it was somehow responsible for his predicament. Just like in the hospital, I used my magic to smooth away any signs of my approach and kept out of his line of sight. I couldn’t say why I did it at first, especially since Trey was probably worried.
I’d disappeared without a trace for weeks, and then he gets a text from his sister to meet me at midnight? Not traumatic at all.

I cut across the path, making sure I slid into his line of sight as I finished my approach. As I stepped into the streetlight, Trey sucked in a breath. “My god, you’re okay,” he muttered. He moved for me at once, the tension holding him upright squeezed out of him. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping. For all I knew, he hadn’t.

“I had to go away for a while,” I said, knowing how that sounded. “I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening.”