After pulling open the top drawer of the dresser, he took out the sheathed athame. With one last glance back at Alan, he crept toward the door and slipped out.
He tiptoed over the worn rug in the hall. On the stairs, he rolled his feet from the outside in so that his footsteps were undetectable as he glided down the stairs. He snuck through the drawing room and through the glass doors, taking his opportunity to slip out silently when the large guard had his back turned. He no longer needed the invisibility spell to go undetected.
He crept through the gardens, listening to the rustling and whispering of the trees. A bright moon hung below the Milky Way like a fat jewel dangling from a silvery belt. Chorus frogs droned over the sound of the river’s gentle waves. This time, I will fight the battle against Rawhed alone. It had been a mistake to drag his friends into Maremount—a world they little understood. How could they understand the savagery of a place where children could be slaughtered in the street for breaking rules? They’d grown up with easy, sheltered lives.
Tobias had trained for years, fighting demons and practicing magic. There was a war going on now, and the untrained were a liability. Maybe Eden would still be alive if his Boston friends hadn’t followed him into Maremount.
But death seemed to hover around him like a miasma. He’d tried to keep the memories locked up—his father pushing his mother and sister on the wagon after the plague came. But the memories clawed at their cage, and after seeing Eden die, there was nothing he could do to keep them from running wild.
He crept along a path shrouded by magnolia trees, until the lights from the house were no longer visible. Focus on your task, Tobias. He would need total seclusion for this next spell. A little incantation like lighting a candle might not create much of an aura, but there was no telling what kind of chaos a conjuring might invite. Any nearby demon or wight would come to greet him.
Tobias slipped deeper through the trees along the riverbank, the night breeze cool against his bare arms. He’d learned how to conjure with the Ragmen. In fact, it was how he and Oswald had practiced pike-fighting against demons. Only knowledge of a demon’s true name could summon them. Unless, of course, you had a different sort of power over them—if you’d dispatched them to the afterlife. But it was a dangerous sort of magic, and he certainly wasn’t going to involve his Boston friends in a spell like this.
Just a few feet from the river, in an overgrown copse of trees, he paused in a small clearing. Moonlight glinted off the water, and thick undergrowth curled from the marshy ground under his feet. Using the athame, he traced a circle close to the ground. Then, in the center, he drew a triangle. As he completed the final swoop of the athame, flames blazed around him, and an electrifying power flowed through him.
He closed his eyes and envisioned the demon he’d killed—Ms. Bouchard, Mather’s former art teacher. As a succubus, she was beautiful when sated, but a withered hag when her aura grew weak. The mark on his chest began to warm.
“I call upon the succubus Amauberge Bouchard!” His heart raced as he chanted the conjuring spell, stabbing the athame into the earth. The flames rose higher, warming his skin.
Behind him, a gurgling sound rose from the river’s edge. Tobias turned, adrenaline coursing through his veins. Through the trees, he could see a form emerge from boiling water—hunched shoulders, curling silver hair and glistening skin. The creature crawled out of the muck, her breath loud and raspy. She rose to her full height, prowling forward on withered and shaking limbs. When she stepped into the moonlight, Tobias saw her long teeth bared in fury.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fiona
The clock ticked over the slow whistling of Mariana’s breath. Fiona pulled sheets up around her shoulders as a wet, perfumed scent floated into her room from the garden. It was a cozy setup in the alcove by the window, but her heart raced whenever she closed her eyes.
Each time her muscles relaxed into sleep, her mind greeted her with images of her burning schoolmates, or the gallows monster snapping Eden’s neck. And when the hair rose on her arms, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something dangerous was brewing by the river.
She rolled over, trying her other side and stretching out her legs. What is Tobias doing now? Is he asleep like everyone else?
A tapping noise interrupted her thoughts. She turned to see a bat fluttering outside the warped windowpanes.
She smiled, sitting up and throwing off her sheets. Byron. It was just as Tobias had said: her animal familiar had found her. She pushed the window open and the bat flew in, flapping near the ceiling. She swung her legs over the edge of her bed, watching as he swooped around the room.
“Mariana! My familiar is here.”
“Cool,” Mariana mumbled, rolling over and pulling the covers over her head.