Strange and Ever After (37 page)

The battle thundered over me. In the space of a gasp
ing breath, my eyes took in everything: clashing swords, hammering feet, and Jie’s wailing sobs. The queens’ guards swirled their swords faster than my eyes could follow.

But they were severely outnumbered.

I stumbled into Oliver. His face was flushed with relief, but I spared him no words, only a nod of soul-deep thanks before I staggered the two steps to Daniel.

His body was already stiffening. His lips blue. The blood on his chest was brown and congealed. And his head stayed on Jie’s lap as she continued to rock back and forth, screaming for him to wake up.

I couldn’t watch. Instead, I honed in on Jie’s face. On her weeping eyes.

“Where’s Joseph?” I shouted.

No response—I wasn’t even sure she heard.

But Oliver did. “Marcus has him.” He motioned into the fighting guards. “He collapsed right before I arrived, and Marcus reached him before I could.”

“I have to get him.” I swooped down and hefted my sword off the blood-covered sand. Daniel had died to protect Joseph; I would
not
let that sacrifice be for nothing. “You stay here and keep Jie safe.”

“No.” Oliver yanked the clappers from his belt. “I will get us through.” He thrust the ivory toward the attacking queens’ guards. Then he snagged my sleeve and yanked me onward.

The queens’ guards opened a path.

And we stepped into the battle.

Imperial spears stabbed at us; queens’ swords arced up. Tattered arms and shriveled skin blurred. It was an endless roar of slamming bodies and clanking weapons. Each step brought bronze armor and spear tips into my face, but always, swords would streak up and sling away the attacks.

On and on we moved, until I finally caught sight of Marcus. Just as he had done in Philadelphia all those months ago, he had Joseph by the collar, and he
dragged
. Joseph’s feet left two long trails in the sand. His eyes were closed.

I couldn’t tell if he was still alive. It didn’t matter; I was coming for him.

But the queens’ guards weren’t fast enough for me.

I shoved into the fray alone. I thrust and parried and
screamed
at the mummies to sleep. My magic blazed over my sword, blue and brilliant, and Oliver’s power scorched around me. Each mummy I met blasted back, briefly frozen. Each spear I hit snapped beneath the fury of my blade and my magic.

Until we finally reached the edge of the battlefield. Mummies gave chase, but Oliver’s magic and the queens’ guards kept them at bay.

I lurched into a run. Marcus was almost to his balloon two hundred paces away. He was almost to the boulder on which it was fastened.

And Joseph’s eyes stayed closed.

I screamed Marcus’s name. My heels kicked up sand. Moonlit dunes and crumbling ruins melted within my vision. But I wasn’t fast enough. Never as fast as I needed.

Marcus reached the boulder and slung Joseph across it. Then he knelt to his boot.

Silver flashed in his hand. A knife. Which meant Joseph wasn’t dead yet—and Marcus was finally doing what he’d planned all along.

But just as light glimmered on the blade, a second shimmer caught my eye. A movement in Joseph’s hand.

A crystal clamp.

Marcus stood, his back to us.

“Stop!”
I shrieked.

“Attack!”
Oliver bellowed beside me.

But slow. We were
so
slow.

Marcus reared back with the knife.

Not again,
I thought. I would
not
let this happen. So with all the strength and soul I could summon, I threw my sword.

Tarnished and ancient, my magic carried it in a perfect line through the air. . . .

It sliced into Marcus’s back. All the way to the hilt.

His knife fell. He staggered into the stone . . . but immediately shoved himself back up. When he twisted around, blood bubbled from between his teeth.

For the tiniest space of a breath, I saw him as Elijah. My brother impaled.

But then he smiled, and his hands rose. This was
not
Elijah.

Magic rammed into me. Cloying and putrid, it charged over me—over Oliver and the queens’ guards.

I swayed back . . . and then clutched my throat.

I couldn’t breathe. Magic coated my throat, choked off my airway. My lungs heaved and fought, but there was nothing coming in. Nothing going out.

Shadows crossed my vision.
Just a little air,
I pleaded with my body, thrusting magic against him. I fought the oil sliding through me. I
pushed
it back out. . . .

But it didn’t work. Marcus continued to chant . . . and smile . . . and
dig
his fingers toward us. And the sword in his back began to push out of his body. The flesh mended with each passing second.

My legs buckled, and panic seared through my brain. Was
this
the end? A single spell to suffocate us?

Just as I tumbled toward the sand, I had enough time to
see a dark figure rise up from behind the stone. Behind Joseph. Behind Marcus.

She lifted her arm, and a distant
crack!
pierced the fog inside me.

Blood exploded from Marcus’s forehead.

His spell lifted.

And I thrust back to my feet as Oliver staggered up beside me.

Crack!

Blood burst from Marcus’s chest, and Allison’s pistol smoked. She fired again. And again. Yet somehow, even as each bullet broke through him, Marcus stayed upright.

He was
so
strong.

But so was I.

My hand shot up. Power lanced out. Straight at Marcus’s heart, I poured every ounce of my soul into the assault. And I stumbled closer and closer.

Then from the boulder, lightning exploded. In agonizing slowness, Joseph gathered himself upright. Yet, though his body listed, his hand stayed steady. His electricity stayed true.

Like a thousand spiderwebs, my magic and Joseph’s sizzled over Marcus’s body. Then Oliver’s power unleashed, and Marcus was nothing more than a beacon of blinding light.

Yet no matter how much energy I shoved into my attack, it wasn’t enough. I could feel Marcus pushing back. Even as our souls wrapped around his, he wriggled and writhed free.

My feet carried me, shambling through the sand, toward Joseph. I was draining too fast, and even though I sucked at the
world around me, the world had nothing left to give.

Marcus was taking
his
power from the sand, the wind, the stones.

I needed the power of the crystal clamp. I needed electricity.

I reached the stone, my left hand slung clumsily out toward the lines blazing from Joseph’s fingertips. I laced my fingers through his. . . .

Electricity tore from me. Blistering and trembling, it sliced through my veins and gathered in my heart—then surged from my right wrist. Smoke filled the air. Flames licked up my sleeve. I could barely see, and I certainly couldn’t hear.

But I could feel. Somehow, with the power of electricity, Joseph and I had stabbed into Marcus’s soul. I felt each of his heartbeats. I understood the scale of his power. And even his thoughts trickled around inside me.

And that, more than anything else,
terrified
me.

For Marcus was amused. Eventually our power would run out, and he simply had to wait until that moment. Then he would crush us. He had two souls to lean on. He had the Black Pullet’s soul too. And he had the very soul of the earth.

We could not stop him, and he found it funny that we even tried.

Horror choked through me, spiraling around the electricity. I looked at Joseph. His eyes shone blue, but there was fear within. We
weren’t
strong enough.

Crack!
More pistol shots, almost lost in the eternal thunder of our electricity.

My eyes crept right. The world swam, and each fragment of
a breath was torture. I met Oliver’s gaze, glowing with the pure magic of who he was.

As I watched, the light in his eyes dimmed and dimmed. He was stopping—and I couldn’t blame him. He had already given more than he needed to. He had come back, and my soul would never forget.

Save yourself,
I thought, though he could not hear me with our bond broken. I hoped he might see the want in my eyes.
Save yourself, Ollie. Please go while you still can.

The slightest tug wound through my gut. Then the flicker of a thought nestled inside my brain. Somehow, despite our broken bond, he still managed to meet my mind with his.

And what he thought was simple:
No.

At that moment the sword popped from Marcus’s chest and hit the sand. Then the bullet in his forehead spat out. The bullet from his heart.

And again, the hint of Oliver’s thought flamed inside me.

No
.

Oliver’s magic cut off. In two impossibly long strides, he came to me.

He grabbed my wrist.

And his vast demon soul hurtled through me. Instantly, the electricity doubled. Tripled. It grew so hot, I lost all sense of where I was or who I was. My body became a distant, fleeting thing. A vessel much too small for all this raw power gathering inside.

Three spirits laced together as one. Joseph. Oliver. And me. Power boiled in my brain, beneath my ribs, behind my eyes. My
clothes burned—my eyelashes, my hair. Everything
ignited
.

And our power hit Marcus’s attack. For an endless fragment of a second, it was a balanced collision of souls.

But then the scales tipped too far. In a heavy, clicking
twist
, all the electricity shifted.

And Marcus could not stop it. His eyes widened. His mouth fell open with silent screams. His skin caught fire, melting over sinew and bones.

Elijah’s skin. My brother’s body was crumbling before my eyes.

Oliver felt that loss too—it sang through our shared electricity. A high-pitched shriek of grief for someone whose soul we had already lost . . . and whose body we now lost too.

But we did not stop pushing against Marcus. Skin flayed off his skull. His yellow eyes spun and rolled . . . and then burst. They exploded outward. Blood sprayed.

Then, bit by bit, his lungs and guts scorched and popped. The red muscle ignited . . . and then shaved away.

Until there was nothing left but a skeleton and a pulsing, festered heart.

Joseph’s fingers all furled in, save one, and then he
thrust
a final whip of electricity at Marcus.

And his heart exploded. Black, oily blood spewed on the sand, on the bones, over us.

And the necromancer Marcus Duval collapsed in a pile of charred bones.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

There was a long silence that seemed to fill the earth
after that.

No one moved. No one spoke.

But then screams slithered into my ears. Into my consciousness.

Allison. She sobbed for mercy at our feet, begging us to help her.

“He took my life,” she screamed. “You must get it back! You must get it back!”

I ignored her. I could not even look upon her. She turned to Joseph. To Oliver.

But none of us had any mercy to give. She had dug her own grave, and now she could lie in it.

I stumbled to Marcus’s blackened, ashy bones. Elijah’s bones. I brushed them gingerly aside. I would save them; bury them somewhere here in this ancient, timeless necropolis.

But first . . .

I found the ivory clappers. Clean and white, both hands were now open. No souls left inside.

I swooped them up and turned to the frozen battle behind us. “Go home,” I whispered.

It was the only phrase I could rasp out, and in a great lurch of movement, the imperial guards left. They radiated in all directions, bounding for their tombs all across Egypt.

The queens’ guards followed.

“Here.” Oliver’s voice was a broken, rattling thing. “Take these too.” He offered me the queens’ clappers . . . and my gaze slid up his dusty, ripped sleeve to settle on his face.

To stare into his hazel eyes.
Hazel
. Not gold.

“Oh no,” I breathed, gripping for his arm. Then his chin. “Oh my demon, what did you do?”

“I did what needed doing.” He tried to look away—but my left hand cupped his jaw. Tears pooled in his gold-flecked eyes.

“Oliver, Oliver.” I pulled him to me. My arms clutched his shoulders, and I held him as tightly as I could. “Oh my demon.”

“I am your demon no longer, El. I am just . . .” His voice broke. He sank his face into my neck. “I am just a man now. A man with no magic. A man with a . . . a
man’s
soul.”

And as he began to weep, I wept too.

He had given up his demon soul to save us all. The electricity from the crystal clamp had blasted it away, just as it had in Paris—but a thousandfold worse. Oliver’s immortality was gone, his soul shrunk and shredded to a human size. My demon would never,
ever
go home. He would never touch magic again or cross the curtain or be anything but Oliver.

No matter how many times I uttered the words—
Thank you, thank you, thank you
—it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.