The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (329 page)
“Reed! Reed! Are you all right?”
Josh was in front of me. I began to shake from head to toe, with relief, with terror, with confusion. Had we really just done a spell? Or had the door opened at the exact moment we’d tried, bringing the wind with it? Was Josh really here, or was I dreaming again?
“Reed? Answer me,” Josh said.
But he wasn’t real. None of this was real. None of this could really be happening. In the corner I saw Noelle. And Ivy. And Mr. Lange. And Grandmother Lange. And about two dozen police officers. None of it registered, though. They were all characters in a play. Features in someone else’s reality. I looked back down at my boyfriend, my eyes dry and narrowed, blood still dripping onto my shoulders.
“Reed?” Josh reached up and touched my face with his fingertips. His skin was warm. His fingers trembled. “Reed, please?”
He was real.
“Josh?” I blurted. “Josh?”
“Oh my God, you’re bleeding,” he said.
Someone started messing with my hands. Tugging at the ropes.
“Josh?”
I couldn’t stop saying his name. Something inside of me had broken, and I was like a skipping record.
“Josh? Josh? Josh?”
His face changed. The color drained and his eyes were like pinpricks.
“Get her down,” he growled.
Something slipped from my ankles and my feet were free. A second later my hands were too. I fell into Josh, launched into him, nearly flattened him. I was shaking so hard my head bumped his chin over and over and over again.
“Josh. Josh. Josh. Josh. Josh.”
“It’s okay,” he whispered into my hair, kissing my head, holding me as tightly as he could. “It’s okay. I found you. I found you and everything’s going to be okay.”
The weird thing was, it was almost exactly how I had imagined it a few minutes earlier. Exactly how I’d wished it to be.
“Drink this.”
I sat on a chair someone had found in a corner of the basement, a coarse NYPD-issue blanket over my shoulders. Josh crouched in front of me, holding out a paper cup full of water.
“I’m an idiot,” I said.
Josh blew out a sigh. “Well. I’m glad to hear you say anything other than my name, but I can’t agree with that.”
I swallowed hard. My mouth was full of dust and dirt and blood. I lifted the cup to my lips, shaking so hard some of the water spilled over onto my lap. I sipped just a little, and a trickle of clean coolness slithered down my throat. I stared down at the ring he’d given me. A spot of blood had dried over several of the diamonds.
“How can you love me?” I asked, my voice cracking. “All I do is bring you misery and . . . and head wounds. How can you even be with me?”
A single tear slid down my cheek and got caught in the crusted
blood, where it stopped and started to itch. Josh laughed quietly. He lifted his hand to cup my cheek, drawing his finger over the spot, driving the itch away.
“How could I
not
be with you?” he asked.
I sniffled. “But I—”
“Reed, none of this is your fault,” he said. “I know you don’t believe that right now, but I’m going to spend the rest of my life doing everything I can to convince you. You’re not cursed. You’re not unlucky. You’re perfect.”
He hugged me and I leaned into him, pressing my nose into his chest. Over his shoulder, I could see the police rounding up the suspects—the believers. I was surprised that Paige Ryan wasn’t among them, and happy to see that I didn’t recognize anyone else, except dimly from the society pages. I had feared that Susan Llewelyn, once one of my favorite alums, would be part of this, but thankfully, she wasn’t there either.
“Can I ask you something?” Josh asked, whispering in my ear.
I nodded into his jacket.
“Did you try to . . . send me a message?” he asked.
I drew back, my heart thumping extra hard. “What do you mean? Why?”
Josh swallowed hard, looking freaked. “I was with the police and Mr. Lange, Ivy, and Noelle, and all of a sudden I got this . . . I don’t know . . . this picture in my mind. Of a crate of Asti Movanti.”
We both looked toward the door, where dozens of Movanti crates were stacked.
“You . . . you did?” I asked.
He nodded. “I just sort of blurted it out and Mr. Lange said it was the name of this wine . . . some failed venture of Mrs. Cox’s. She bought controlling stock in this Italian company or something and the wine turned out to be swill. I don’t know. But anyway, as soon as I said it, Ivy told them we had to check out the Coxes’ house. Because they live right next door to the Langes, and Mrs. Cox . . . she’s a Billings alum and—”
He paused and took a breath. “That’s her,” he said quietly. “Over there. With the white hair.”
I glanced up to find a frail-looking woman with a short white coif being inched away in handcuffs.
“Did you lead me here?” he asked.
“You are the strongest of us all, Reed. You’re the only one who can save them.”
Eliza’s words sent a shiver right through me.
“Use your power to warn them.”
Was it possible? Had I actually sent Josh a telepathic message? Had I saved us all?
“Where is she?”
I straightened up at the sound of my mother’s voice, forgetting everything instantly.
“Mom!” I shouted.
Her face went slack when she saw me, and she raced over. Josh helped me stand up and I hugged her, clutching her to me as hard as I could.
“Are you all right?” she asked, leaning back and holding my face with both hands. “My God, what did they do to you?”
“I’m okay, Mom,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Behind her, near the door, I saw Grandmother Lange watching us. She had a proud gleam in her eye that made me want to hurl something at her. Was what Mrs. Kane had said about her true? Had she engineered my very existence?
But even as I asked myself the question, I suddenly remembered what Mr. Lange had said that day in his office—that his mother had kept a close eye on all the old families—that she probably knew about me before my own mother did. It was true. All of it. Mrs. Kane and those who believed in the curse might have been nuts, but the people running our side of things weren’t playing with a full deck either.
I glared at her, hating her for what she’d done to my dad. To my mom. To my brother. To me. Even to Mr. Lange and Noelle and her mom. It was like she thought she was God. She couldn’t mess with people’s lives like that, and as soon as I had the chance, I was going to let her know how I felt about her.
As soon as I could get her away from my mother and Mr. Lange and my dad. Who might flatten her the same way he had Demetria Rosewell.
The crowd of officers on the other side of the room shifted, and one of them dragged a handcuffed Mrs. Kane out of a chair. Her makeup was smudged and her hair stuck out around her head as if she’d been hit with an electric shock. She kept her chin high as they led her across the room, but she trembled violently. Clearly she hadn’t expected to end up this way. Clearly she’d had the utmost confidence in her crazy-ass plan.
Suddenly she turned to look at me, as if she’d felt me watching, and sneered. “This isn’t over. You’re trash and you will always be trash.”
I felt a surge of anger and triumph all at once. I pulled away from my mother and Josh, even as they both tried to hold on to me, and strode toward her, my bare feet freezing on the cold cement floor. Clenching my teeth, I got right up in her face, ignoring the forbidding, outstretched arms of the police.
“At least I’m not going to prison,” I seethed. “Have fun rotting in your prison cell with the rest of your crazy friends.”
Mrs. Kane bared her teeth. Her eyes were like an abyss. Dark—so much darker than I’d ever realized. She let out a screech that couldn’t have come from nature, and somehow flung the officer who was holding her to the floor.
Before anyone could move, she had freed herself from her handcuffs, grabbed a knife from the table where they were being bagged and tagged, and flung it, with both hands, at my chest.
“Reed!” Josh screamed.
“No . . .!” my father shouted.
But I couldn’t move. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t make myself move. It was as if I was being held in place by some invisible force. All I could do was think about how powerful Eliza Williams claimed I could be, and how very, very wrong she was if I couldn’t even step aside to save my own life.
And then, out of nowhere, Mr. Lange flung himself in front of me. The knife pierced his chest with a sickening slicing sound I
will never forget as long as I live. And just like that, Noelle’s father, Theresa Billings’s great-grandson, the person who’d given me life, fell to the floor at my feet. His eyes were open, his lungs were still.
I would never get the chance to thank him.
Chapter 1: Imagining The Positive
Chapter 7: Peaceful Perfection
Chapter 10: All About Noelle Day
Chapter 13: Cutting The Ribbon
Chapter 19: Not According to Plan
Chapter 27: Technology is Not Your Friend
Chapter 31: Life’s Little Surprises
Chapter 37: Past, Present, Future
To all the fans who have shown me and Reed such love and support over the past few years and sixteen books, this one’s for you
The sky that early June day was the kind of blue that goes on forever and makes you believe anything is possible. As I stood at the edge of the new Billings House construction site—my boyfriend, Josh Hollis, holding my hand, and my sister and best friend, Noelle Lange, standing just to my right—I felt like that particular blue had been conjured just for me.
It was all happening. Billings was being rebuilt. A huge, yellow backhoe was clearing the plot, bringing up the dark, wet earth of spring with each drag of its shovel, releasing the sweet scent of new beginnings into the air. Construction workers in hard hats marked off the area, unloaded cement blocks and workbenches, and walked in and out of trailers, letting the doors slam purposefully behind them. It was the fresh start I had always hoped for, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I reached up and touched the gold locket hanging around my neck—the one that had once belonged to my ancestor, Eliza Williams—with
this warm, comforting sense that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
“Reed, are you
sure
this is a good idea?” Josh asked, squeezing my hand.
My smile faltered. He squinted his green eyes against the sun as he turned to look at me. His light blue sweater had a few drops of yellow paint on the collar and his always unruly, dark blond hair was pushed up in the back by the breeze. Josh was, hands down, the hottest guy at Easton Academy—the most handsome, adorable, mature, attentive guy I’d ever met—even when he was raining on my parade.
“It just seems so . . . wrong,” Noelle added.
I gaped at her. Her dark hair was back in a low ponytail and she wore a black boatneck dress over black boots. Not very bright-and-bold, spring-fashion runway, but Noelle had never been one for color in her wardrobe. And, of course, she looked perfect anyway.