He was a nerd. Alara’s gorgeous, tough-looking secret boyfriend was a robot-battling geek from MIT. I felt like Clark Kent had just told me he was Superman.
“We’d better go,” Alara said.
I gave her a quick hug. “You know you just became exponentially cooler in my eyes, right?”
“Just don’t tell Priest and Lukas.” Her smile faded. “If the Shift is there, I’ll find it.”
“I know.”
As I turned back to store, Anthony opened the car door for her. “So, where are we going anyway?”
“How do you feel about partially destroyed, haunted prisons?”
I underestimated exactly how angry Gabriel would be when I showed up at the car without Alara. Enraged was more accurate. The only thing that infuriated him more was my refusal to tell him where she’d gone.
The car ride back to the safe house was miserable, a Jekyll and Hyde meltdown on Gabriel’s part. But his reaction had been nothing compared to Dimitri’s.
After he’d forced Gabriel to account for every second of the trip, it was my turn. “Where is she, Kennedy?” Dimitri sounded too calm, which only proved he wasn’t.
He chose the athenaeum for our little chat, otherwise known as an interrogation. Dimitri leaned forward in the chair across front of the one I was sitting in, next to the mummy. “I’m not angry—”
“Yes, you are.”
He took a deep breath. “All right. I am angry. But only because Alara is out there alone, and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”
Tell him and get it over with.
“She’s not exactly alone.”
Gabriel looked up from where he stood at the railing. “Who’s with her?”
“A friend.”
Dimitri scrubbed his hand over his face. “This isn’t a game. There are already seventeen dead girls, and we have no idea what Andras capable of, even from in here.”
Dead girls.
I’d never heard anyone call them that before. Usually, they were the missing girls or the abducted girls, or, more recently, the bodies. Hearing Dimitri refer to them that way made the possibility of Alara getting hurt feel more real.
What if he was right, and there were vengeance spirits hunting us—or possessing people who were under Andras’ control, like my aunt’s back-eyed neighbors?
Could Andras control people and spirits from in here?
“I still don’t understand why she ran off.” Gabriel shook his head. “You aren’t prisoners. I thought you all wanted to be here to help your friend.”
“She is trying to help him.”
Gabriel dropped into the chair next to Dimitri’s and closed his eyes. “But who’s going to help her?”
Alara was at the site of a haunted prison with a mechanical engineer, who built Battle Bots in his spare time. How much help would he be if they encountered vengeance spirits, like the ones that tried to kill us the last time we were there?
“She went back to Moundsville.”
Dimitri tensed. “The prison? Why?”
I couldn’t tell them, and Alara wouldn’t want me to. She and Priest still didn’t trust Dimitri and Gabriel, and Lukas and I were on the fence. We didn’t know enough about them, or how much of what they’d told us was true.
Gabriel leapt out of his chair. “I’m going to find her.”
“You can’t be gone that long.” Dimitri snatched his coat, his expression grim. “Andras is getting stronger every day. At this point, if we lose control of him, Azazel is our strongest weapon.”
The tail coiled tighter, as if the demonic whip recognized its name.
“You’re the only one who can command it.” Dimitri swept past him and down the stairs. “I’ll find her.”
Gabriel stood at the railing until the tails of Dimitri’s black coat disappeared through the doors.
“Can I ask you a question?” It was something I’d wanted to ask him the last time we were alone, but I was too afraid of the answer. “The Order sounds like it was full of monsters. Was my mom hurting people? ”
Gabriel rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “The Order was working against the Illuminati from the inside for a long time. The Order believed the best way to protect the world from demons was to learn to control them.” He took a deep breath, his every movement punctuated with guilt. “They were conducting experiments—summoning weaker demons and trying to train them like pets. But what they were actually doing was letting demons into our world and giving them a chance to learn about us.”
“They didn’t see that coming?” I asked. When Dimitri and Gabriel told us about the Order, I imagined a group of Illuminati extremists, not a bunch of misguided scientists secretly training demons.
“I guess it’s like being the guy who invented the atomic bomb. You think about all the ways your invention can help people. But in the wrong hands, the same invention can destroy the world.” Gabriel hunched over the railing, staring at his hands. “It took me a long time to figure out the truth about their research.”
“What gave them away?” I asked.
“I started spending spent time in the labs. I thought we were using the demons to make weapons.” Gabriel unhooked the whip and let it roll out across the floor, the ivory bones unhinging one by one. He looked over at me, his eyes full of sadness and shame.
“How do you think I made Azazel?”
28. NIGHTMARES AND ASH
After Gabriel finished lecturing me, I relayed the details to Lukas, Priest, and Elle. Everyone agreed with my decision to tell Dimitri and Gabriel where Alara went. She still had a few hours head start on Dimitri. Maybe she’d find the Shift before he made it to the prison.
I snuck down to the containment area alone. The walk through the tunnel was the worst part—wondering whether I’d find Jared or Andras on the other side of the bars. I always held my breath until I knew, like I was holding it now.
Jared sat on the mattress, wringing his hands in front of him. The names of the dead girls were on the wall. But now there was something new. Circles and strange symbol that looked like they belonged in an old alchemy book, some repeated over and over in manic sequences.
He looked up when he heard my footsteps, his pale eyes sad and heavy.
I exhaled.
Today it was him.
For a long moment, neither one of us moved or spoke. There was too much to say and no way to say it.
I wrapped my hands around the bars, longing to be closer to him. “Are you okay?”
Is the demon hurting you?
Jared adjusted his ripped thermal to cover the worst of the burns on his neck. “Yeah. How about you?”
“Me? I—” My voice cracked, and I pressed my fingers against my eyes.
Don’t cry. You can’t do that to him.
When I moved my hands, Jared was standing in front of me, a few feet away from the cell door. His expression was full of sadness and anguish and concern—for me, instead of himself.
“I’m fine. I’m just wor
ried about you.” I kept my voice even, so the lie would sound like the truth.
I miss you and I need you and I want you back.
“What’s that stuff on your face?” He pointed at the black marks on my cheeks.
“Sigils. Gabriel taught me how to paint them.”
Pain flickered in his eyes. “What are they for?”
“Don’t do this,” I whispered.
“What are they for?” he repeated.
“Protection.” I couldn’t look at him.
His eyes never expressed any feeling when Andras was behind them. But now they betrayed Jared’s every emotion. “From me.” His voice trembled as he spoke the words. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Why?”
Jared lifted his hands, letting the chain hang between his shackled wrists. “I’m chained up like this for a reason. I’m a monster, and you can’t save me.”
My heart hammered in my chest. “Andras is the monster.”
“Don’t you get it?” Jared shook his chained wrists in front of him. “He’s inside me.”
“We’re going to figure out a way—”
He didn’t wait for me to finish. “I don’t want you to come down here anymore. I can feel him getting stronger, Kennedy. Sometimes I can even hear him thinking, like we’re the same person. His thoughts, the things he wants to do to you.…” Jared turned around, hiding his face. “You can’t ever come down here again. Promise me.”
I couldn’t stay away. Knowing he was hurting and not being able to hold him or comfort him was hard enough. “That’s not a promise I can make.”
Jared slammed his palms against the wet stone, then pushed off and walked toward the bars. “I’m not going to make it out of this alive. If the strain of the possession doesn’t kill me, Andras will once he doesn’t need my body anymore. That’s his plan. By then, he’ll be stronger and impossible to stop. You have to help me stop him.”
“Did you hear something in his thoughts?” It could be the break we needed.
Jared shook his head. “There’s only one way. We both know that. If you won’t kill me, I need you to help me do it myself.”