Abraham turned back to face me, his black eyes shining. “Enough talk, boy. Where is John? I know my worthless grandson didn’t kill him. Where is Macon hiding him?”
There it was. Someone had finally said it. John was alive.
I knew it was true. I felt like I’d known all along. We had never found John’s body. All this time he had probably been in the Caster Tunnels, hanging out at some club like Exile, waiting.
The anger welled up inside me, and I could barely force the words out. “The last time I saw him, he was in the cave at the Great Barrier, helping you and Sarafine destroy the world.”
When he wasn’t busy running away with my girlfriend.
Abraham looked smug. “I’m not sure you understand the gravity of the situation, so let me enlighten you. The Mortal world—your world, including this pathetic little town—is being destroyed, thanks to Macon’s niece and her ridiculous behavior, not me.”
I fell back onto my bed as if Abraham had punched me. It felt like he did. “Lena did what she had to do. She Claimed herself.”
“She destroyed the Order, boy. And she made the wrong choice when she chose to walk away from us.”
“Why do you care? You don’t seem like you’re concerned about anyone but yourself.”
He laughed, once. “A good point. Although we find ourselves in a dangerous state, it does provide me with certain opportunities.”
Aside from John Breed, I couldn’t imagine what he meant, and I didn’t want to. But I tried not to let him see how scared I really was. “I don’t care if John has something to do with your opportunities. I told you, I don’t know where he is.”
Abraham watched me carefully, like a Sybil who could read every line in my face. “Imagine a crack that runs deeper than the Tunnels. A crack that runs into the Underground, where only the darkest of Demons dwell. Your girlfriend’s youthful rebelliousness and her gifts have created such a crack.” He paused, flipping casually through the World History textbook on my desk. “I am not young, but with age comes power. And I have gifts of my own. I can call Demons and creatures of Darkness, even without The Book of Moons. If you don’t tell me where John is, I’ll show you.” He smiled, in his own deranged way.
Why was John Breed so important to him? I remembered the way Macon and Liv had talked about John in Macon’s study. John was the key. The question was—to what?
“I told you—”
Abraham didn’t let me finish. He ripped, reappearing at the foot of my bed. I could see the hate in his black eyes. “Don’t lie to me, boy!”
Lucille hissed again, and I heard another rip.
I didn’t have time to see who it was.
Something heavy fell on top of me, slamming down onto the bed like a bag of bricks dropped from the ceiling. My head hit the wooden frame behind me, and I bit through my bottom lip. The sickening metallic taste of blood from the dream filled my mouth.
Over Lucille’s gnarled cries, I heard the sound of the hundred-year-old mahogany splintering beneath me. I felt an elbow jab me in the ribs, and I knew. A bag of bricks hadn’t dropped on me.
It was a person.
There was a loud crack as the bed frame broke and the mattress crashed to the floor. I tried to throw them off. But I was pinned.
Please don’t let it be Hunting.
An arm flew out in front of me, the way my mom’s always did when I was a kid and she hit the brakes of the car unexpectedly. “Dude, chill!”
I stopped fighting. “Link?”
“Who else would risk disintegratin’ into a million pieces to save your sorry ass?”
I almost laughed. Link had never Traveled before, and now I knew why. Ripping must be harder than it looked, and he sucked at it.
Abraham’s voice cut through the darkness. “Save him? You? I think it’s a little late for that.” Link almost jumped out of the broken pile of bed at the sound of Abraham’s voice. Before I could answer, my bedroom door flew open so hard it almost came off the hinges. I heard the click of the light switch, and black splotches blurred everything as my eyes adjusted to the light.
“Holy—”
“What the devil is goin’ on in here!” Amma was standing in the doorway, wearing the rose-patterned bathrobe I bought her for Mother’s Day, with her hair wrapped in rollers and her hand wrapped around her old wooden rolling pin.
“—hell,” Link whispered. I realized he was practically sitting in my lap.
But Amma didn’t notice. Her eyes zeroed in on Abraham Ravenwood.
She pointed the rolling pin at him, her eyes narrowing. She circled him like a wild animal, only I couldn’t tell who was the predator and who was the prey.
“What are you doin’ in this house?” Her voice was angry and low. If she was afraid, she sure didn’t show it.
Abraham laughed. “Do you actually think you can chase me off with a rolling pin, like a lame dog? You can do better than that, Miss Treadeau.”
“You get outta my house or, the Good Lord as my witness, you’ll wish you were a lame dog.” Abraham’s face hardened. Amma turned the rolling pin so that it pointed at Abraham’s chest, like the tip of a sword. “Nobody messes with my boy. Not Abraham Ravenwood, not the Serpent or Old Scratch himself, you hear?”
Now the rolling pin was pushing into Abraham’s jacket. With every inch, the thread of tension between the two of them pulled tighter. Link and I moved closer to Amma on either side.
“This is the last time I’m going to ask,” Abraham said, his eyes bearing down on Amma. “And if the boy doesn’t answer me, your Lucifer will seem like a welcome reprieve from the hell I will rain down on this town.”
He paused and looked at me. “Where is John?”
I recognized the look in his eye. It was the same look I had seen in the visions, when Abraham killed his own brother and fed from him. It was vicious and sadistic, and for a second I considered naming a random place so I could get this monster out of my house.
But I couldn’t think fast enough. “I swear to God, I don’t—”
The wind blew in through the broken window, hard, whipping around us and scattering papers all over the room. Amma staggered back, and her rolling pin went flying. Abraham didn’t move, the wind blowing past him without so much as rustling his jacket, as if it was as terrified of him as the rest of us.
“I wouldn’t swear, boy.” He smiled, a terrible, lifeless smile. “I would pray.”
9.19
Winds of Hell
The wind rushed through my window with a force so powerful it took everything on top of my desk with it. Books and papers, even my backpack, twisted in the air, swirling like a tornado trapped in a bottle. The towers of shoe boxes that lined my walls crashed to the floor, sending everything from comic books to my bottle cap collection from first grade flying through the air. I grabbed hold of Amma, who was so tiny I was worried she might get picked up with everything else.
“What’s happenin’?” I could hear Link yelling from somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t see him.
Abraham was standing in the center of the room, his voice calling into the churning black vortex. “To those who have brought destruction into my house, I invite chaos into yours.” The wind circled around him without even catching his coattails. He was commanding it. “The Order is Broken. The Door is Open. Arise, Ascend, Destroy!” His voice grew louder. “Ratio Fracta est! Ianua Aperta est! Sugite, Ascendite, Exscindite!” Now he was shouting. “Ratio Fracta est! Ianua Aperta est! Sugite, Ascendite, Exscindite!”
The swirling air darkened and began to take shape. The hazy black forms jerked out of the spiral, as if they were climbing their way out of the vortex and hurling themselves over the edge, into the world. Which seemed pretty disturbing, considering what they were hurling themselves into was the middle of my bedroom.
I knew what they were. I’d seen them before. I never wanted to see them again.
Vexes—the Demons that inhabited the Underground, void of soul and shape—erupted from the wind, curling into dark forms that moved across my plain blue ceiling, growing until it seemed like they would suck all the air from the room itself. The creatures of shadow moved like a thick, churning fog, shifting in the air. I remembered the one that had almost attacked us outside Exile—the terrifying scream when it reared back and opened its jaws. As the shadows grew into beasts in front of us, I knew the screaming wouldn’t be far behind.
Amma tried to wrestle free from my arms, but I wouldn’t let go. She would have attacked Abraham with her bare hands if I’d let her. “Don’t you come into my house thinkin’ you can bring a world a evil through one tiny crack in the sky.”
“Your house? This seems more like the Wayward’s house to me. And the Wayward is exactly the person to show my friends the way in, through your tiny crack in the sky.”
Amma closed her eyes, murmuring to herself. “Aunt Delilah, Uncle Abner, Grandmamma Sulla….” She was trying to call the Greats, her ancestors in the Otherworld, who had protected us from the Vexes twice before. They were their own force to be reckoned with.
Abraham laughed, his voice carrying above the hissing wind. “No need to call up your ghosts, old woman. We were just leaving.” I could hear the rip begin before he dematerialized. “But don’t worry. I’ll see you soon. Sooner than you’d like.”
Then he ripped open the sky and stepped through it. Gone.
Before any of us could say a word, the Vexes shot out my open window, a single streak of black moving above the sleeping houses on Cotton Bend. At the end of the street, the line of Demons divided in different directions, like the fingers of a dark hand wrapping itself around our town.
My room was strangely quiet. Link tried to navigate around the papers and comic books settling on the floor. But he could barely stand still. “Man, I thought they were gonna drag us down to hell, or wherever they came from. Maybe my mom is right and it is the End a Days.” He scratched his head. “We’re lucky they’re gone.”
Amma walked over to the window, rubbing the gold charm she wore around her neck. “They’re not gone and we’re not lucky. Only a fool would think either.”
The lubbers buzzed underneath the window, the broken symphony of destruction that had become the sound track of our lives. Amma’s expression was just as broken, a mix of fear and sorrow and something I’d never seen before.
Unreadable, inscrutable Amma. Staring out at the night.
“The hole in the sky. It’s gettin’ bigger.”
There was no way we could go back to sleep, and there was no way Amma was letting us out of her sight, so the three of us sat around the scarred pine table in the kitchen listening to the clock tick. Luckily, my dad was in Charleston, like he was most weeknights now that he was teaching at the university. Tonight would’ve sent him back to Blue Horizons for sure.
I could tell Amma was distracted because she cut Link a slice of chocolate pecan pie when she cut one for me. He made a face and slid it onto the china plate next to Lucille’s water dish. Lucille sniffed it and walked away, curling up quietly under Amma’s wooden chair. Not even Lucille had an appetite tonight.