Path of Night Read online

  Classic Sabrina, forever seeing him first.

  Nick called: “Harry!”

  Quit it, jerk, Theo thought. Also, are Roz and I invisible?

  Theo was distracted when Sabrina explained about Satan coming to destroy them.

  Then Theo saw Nick wince. “You’re going to want to sit this one out, farm boy.”

  Harvey’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I wasn’t really talking to you, Nick!”

  While Sabrina and Harvey made a truly, deeply Sabrina-and-Harvey scheme to blow up the gates of hell with dynamite, Nick visibly reconsidered his life choices.

  Nick’s gaze flicked from Harvey to Roz to Theo. He argued with Sabrina, though Theo could tell the guy hated doing it. “They’re mortals …”

  Nicholas, Theo wanted to tell him. My guy. Trying to convince Harvey and Sabrina not to do stuff, that’s baby vultures all the way down.

  Theo didn’t plan on fighting his friends. He wanted to fight demons. The apocalypse was coming: It was time to empty the clip. But Theo liked Nick for his effort to shield them. From what Sabrina said, most witches were careless about mortal lives. Nick obviously cared.

  In the truck, Theo said: “Does Nick Scratch think you live on a farm?”

  Theo was the only farm boy around here.

  “No,” Harvey answered. “He just calls me farm boy sometimes.”

  “Uh, why?”

  “Because he’s a jackass,” snarled Harvey, turning the wheel with a wrench.

  Nick Scratch had a special joke name for Harvey but was pretending he’d forgotten Harvey’s actual name. That made it such a weird and transparent pretense, Theo found Nick’s behavior almost endearing. Nick wasn’t doing this to make Harvey feel small: he was doing it because he felt small, for some reason Theo didn’t understand. Okay, Theo decided, Nick Scratch wasn’t a jerk. He’d just gone demented from romantic drama like everyone else. He was a big fake who must chill and introduce Theo to a hot magic guy.

  Except Nick never got the chance. He was thrown in hell.

  When Theo thought of hell, he remembered a blast of terrible heat and even more terrible light, when he thought the gates of hell would be flung wide. He’d run forward, trying to push them closed. Even getting that close had been too much.

  Theo was driving more slowly.

  “I like Nick,” Theo told the bird who was questioning him. The other bird hadn’t hassled him. Theo had no beef with the other bird. “And I love my friends.”

  “More than your father?”

  Uncle Jesse was dead. Theo was all his dad had.

  Sabrina’d explained to Roz and Theo that Satan had set up Nick and Sabrina without Sabrina’s knowledge. Gross move on Satan’s part, but Sabrina and Roz insisted it wasn’t Nick’s fault.

  Nobody had explained the satanic setup to Harvey. When Harvey found out, there would be trouble. Theo didn’t approve of what Nick had done himself.

  “The boy stays in hell and makes up for what he did,” suggested the bird. “You stay with your father and find a love of your own.”

  “What would my friends think of me?”

  Up ahead, more winged demons gathered. He realized the whole road was blanketed with living darkness. Demons perched on the hood of the pickup. The arch of their wings blotted out the setting sun.

  Theo revved the engine and drove into the cloud of demons. The demons shrieked. Theo drove with all the rage that made Theo fling himself at jerks in school, even though he knew he wouldn’t win any fights. Theo had never run from a fight in his life.

  “Left,” said the bird on Theo’s left shoulder.

  Theo jerked the steering wheel left, hit another demon, and missed hitting a sleek black automobile.

  The car halted. Zelda Spellman emerged, adjusting the tuft of lace on her jaunty hat, and shouted: “Lux sit!”

  The demons around her burst into flame. Embers glowed in the air and burned out at her feet as Zelda walked over and rapped sharply on the truck window.

  “Oh, hey, Miz S.” Theo beamed at her innocently.

  Zelda’s eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been—meddling with magic to change anything about yourself, have you?”

  “I honestly haven’t. I did think about it. When I didn’t feel like me. But I don’t know that changing myself would make me feel like me either. I’m okay as I am.”

  He’d imagined having a big muscular body would be great, and occasionally he still did, but—it was more complicated than that. He wanted to take his time, with his body and his mind, changing them when and if he felt it was right. They were his.

  Zelda scrutinized him. At last, she nodded. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Sure. We have plenty going on without me summoning demons on the sly.”

  “It’s not only that,” Zelda told him. “I do occasionally listen when Sabrina talks about you mortals. One tries not to, but she has a piercing voice. I know you are harassed by lackwits groveling in their own ignorance for not fitting into the narrow boxes that are all their narrow minds can imagine.”

  Theo blinked. “You’ve got a real way with words.”

  “Two thousand years ago, people recognized six genders, but I suppose those imbecile children can’t count to six. There are witches who want to fit people into narrow boxes as well.” Zelda’s mouth was a thin furious line for a moment. “A man recently tried to fit me into a box. Such a pretty little box, with flowers on it, placed a step behind him. A woman should be happy with such a box, he thought. No matter that I couldn’t move in it. Never be confined by other people’s expectations.”

  “What’d you do when the guy tried to shove you in a box?”

  “When people have narrow minds …” mused Zelda. “The best thing to do is blast them wide open.”

  “Wow!” said Theo. “Did you explode his skull?”

  Zelda gave Theo a startled glance. “I didn’t. Though in the past, I have been known to—no matter. He believed he was made to lead, and I to follow, so I intend to be a greater leader than he could dream. You can be a better man than any who doubted you.”

  Theo considered Billy and his gang.

  “You know, I really can.”

  Zelda nodded crisply. “Excellent. No summoning eldritch spirits, Theo, if you please. But excuse me, Hilda says I must visit a ‘valued client’ and apologize for ‘making mock’ of his ‘bereavement.’ ”

  It was something, the way Zelda Spellman could indicate finger quotes with a curl of her lip alone.

  “By the way,” Theo called out, “I wanna date guys!”

  “Good for you,” Zelda called back. “Personally, I’m thoroughly tired of men.”

  Zelda climbed into the back of her black car, and the car sped off. There was nobody at the wheel.

  Genuinely, Theo wondered how it’d taken him so long to notice the Spellmans were witches.

  Theo started the truck and made it almost to Sabrina’s house when several demons hurtled right into his windshield. Theo jerked the wheel around and found himself tipping into a ditch. He immediately tried to back out. The wheels whirred, stuck in the soft earth. Theo jumped from the carriage and ran into the woods.

  He texted Harvey as he went. Drove ur truck off the road. Sorry!

  A demon flung itself at him. Theo dropped his phone, shot the demon, then blundered on.

  Roz said she’d been in the woods after dark and had a vision. Theo was in the woods after dark, but he couldn’t see anything. How was he meant to find some hidden cloak with the winged demons flying and falling around him? He couldn’t. He was trapped in a storm of feathers.

  Unless … Theo thought about Zelda Spellman, and Harvey, and his dad. Unless he wasn’t trapped.

  “A cloak of feathers,” murmured the silver bird on Theo’s left shoulder, who had been mean but then decided to help.

  Everything Theo needed was right here.

  Theo reached inside his flannel shirt for his sewing kit. The demons above him obscured the whole sky, but Theo kept his head
down, intent as his dad. He collected jagged black demon feathers, and in every handful of darkness he found a few silver ones, delicate as lace and bright as the moon behind the clouds. Theo had to use every bit of thread from his kit, but the thread didn’t break. The thread should’ve run out, the whole idea shouldn’t have worked, but Theo kept stitching the different pieces together anyway. Feathers rained down in a cascade of mingled shadow and moonshine. The crisscrossing threads formed a rainbow tangle. The bird on Theo’s left shoulder sang.

  When Theo finally looked up from his stitching, there was a ring of the Lady’s birds, flying in a protective circle over his head.

  Feathers spilled from the sky like black snow. As Theo watched, the feathers formed shapes. A tower, and a boy. Theo thought he knew who the boy might be.

  Before Theo could say Nick’s name, the shapes disintegrated. The feathers blew away in a gust of wind that sent the Lady’s silver birds tumbling. Demons launched themselves, shrieking, at Theo’s head.

  Theo snapped out the cloak of feathers, and the dark-and-bright garment turned pure dazzling silver. Like a stretch of water, transformed by something as simple as light.

  He ran for Sabrina’s house, toward the gables and the graves. The demons followed hard on his heels. And Theo saw Sabrina erupt from her front door, like a bullet out of a gun. White hair flung back from her grim face, hands uplifted, racing to Theo’s aid.

  Theo threw the cloak of feathers over his shoulders. He hurdled the fence between them and the gravestones in the Spellmans’ yard, and found himself soaring, feathers catching a drift of wind and bearing him across. Theo fetched up on one knee, laying the cloak at Sabrina’s feet as though Sabrina would walk across its silvery surface.

  Sabrina seized the cloak in one hand and the back of Theo’s flannel shirt in the other, drawing him to her in a tight hug.

  “You did it,” she whispered.

  He’d done it. All on his own.

  “No problem.” Theo paused. “There were a few problems.”

  Sabrina held on to him fast. “Was it awful? Were you scared?”

  While Roz was the best person Theo knew, and Harvey was Theo’s best friend, Sabrina was Theo’s partner in crime. Whenever Hilda and Theo’s dad arranged a playdate for just the two of them, Theo and Sabrina would get up to so much mischief.

  Theo didn’t know why he’d been thinking of courage as a guy thing when Sabrina was the most fearless person he knew.

  “Sabrina? Do you ever … doubt yourself? Like, is there a little voice in your head telling you that you shouldn’t do something?”

  “Yes,” Sabrina whispered.

  “Even for you, huh?”

  Sabrina’s mouth caught between a frown and a grin. “Even for me. I just don’t listen to the little voice. Ever.”

  Theo reviewed their whole lives in his mind. “That makes sense.”

  Sabrina’s voice went low. “I don’t want anything to stop me. Especially now.”

  Theo nudged her. “I get it.”

  He’d always found Sabrina easy to understand. They grinned at each other, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the same gravestone, with the cloak of feathers held in both their hands.

  “I worry all the time,” Sabrina confided. “About whose daughter I am, what my family think of me, and—I want you guys with me but I don’t want you to be in danger. Was it wrong to ask you to help?”

  “Nah. It’s a barn raising.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a farming term, creepy funeral-home girl,” said Theo. Sabrina grinned and kicked him in the ankle. “A whole community gets together to build a barn. One person can’t do it on their own. They shouldn’t feel like they have to.”

  Sabrina nodded thoughtfully. Their quiet in the moonlight was interrupted by Harvey, running up the curved path with his gun slung over his shoulder.

  “Harvey!” Sabrina called out, as always.

  Wow, his friends were an embarrassment. Sabrina and Harvey were genuinely terrible at not being in love with each other. They’d had no practice at it. Theo spoke quickly, before Harvey or Sabrina could say something dramatic.

  “My man, just in time. I decided to help make clothes for the Academy students. Sketch me some ideas.”

  Harvey’s expression softened from grim witch-hunter to dreamy artist. Sabrina grasped one of Harvey’s sleeves and one of Theo’s, towing them into her house.

  Sabrina was a shrimp like Theo, and addicted to hair bands, but she wanted to protect everybody. It wasn’t about being manly. It was just everybody being who they were. Nobody fit in boxes.

  Theo acquired some old curtains and settled cross-legged in front of the fire, while Harvey leaned against him and drew sketches of a dress for Elspeth.

  “I was thinking, if you do manage to sing with other people watching, what if we formed a band? Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “So cool.”

  “Speaking of cool, I completed my quest,” said Theo. “Gimme a high five for being a badass.”

  Harvey obliged. “You’re always a badass.”

  Theo beamed. “You think so?”

  “Everybody does.” Harvey turned at the sound of the door opening and lit up. “Roz, who’s the bravest guy we know?”

  “Theo, of course,” Roz answered promptly, stepping into the room. She looked much more cheerful after hanging with cheerleaders. “I remember how great you were when I collapsed in class,” Roz added.

  Theo blinked. “Was I?”

  “You stormed right into the guys’ locker rooms to get Harvey, in spite of how horrible they’d been to you!”

  Harvey was nodding. “Then you ran forward and barred the gates to hell. You’re … a more specific word than brave. Dauntless. You won’t let yourself be daunted. That’s you, Theo. I learn how to be the kind of guy I wanna be from you every day.”

  Theo regarded Harvey with dismay. Their tender flower already made a daily spectacle of himself over romance. Bromantic scenes weren’t allowed.

  “Too far, Harv.”

  Theo smacked Harvey on the back of his head. Harvey grinned down at Theo, and Theo loved the dude a lot. So it was whatever.

  “What are you talking about?” Sabrina asked from the door.

  “Theo being great,” Harvey and Roz chorused.

  Sabrina draped herself over Theo’s shoulders, then enchanted the curtains, her spellwork combining with his stitching. Sabrina’s aunt Hilda poked her head in to ask what they were up to.

  Sabrina answered, arms around Theo’s neck: “It’s a barn raising.”

  Theo’d done what he wanted to do, and discovered he had nothing to prove. He sat in a circle with his friends, talking and laughing, well-known and well-loved and not one of them belonging in any box.

  Maybe someone brand-new and exciting would come along and take a shine to Theo, exactly as Theo was now, like Nick had to Sabrina. Theo could wait happily enough. Theo loved his life right now, loved the truth of it. He wanted to keep it.

  Theo wished to be ride-or-die for his friends, but … he didn’t want to actually die. He wanted to live in the light.

  He didn’t want to go down into hell.

  Ambrose spun down the Rue Crémieux at the golden hour of evening, the last and warmest sunshine splashing on each of the vibrantly colored houses in turn. Walking down this narrow cobbled street was like dancing along a string of colored glass beads, light infusing each color with brilliance so the beads transformed into a ruby, an emerald, a topaz, or a pink pearl.

  The entrance of one house boasted a painting of a cat stalking birds, which made Ambrose imagine a hunting lioness. He cast a look over his shoulder at Prudence, ravishing in a black Audrey Hepburn–style dress and ornate earrings in the shape of guillotines.

  Trompe l’oeil, he told her. “It means ‘deceives the eye.’ Art that uses perspective cleverly enough to give an illusion of reality. You almost expect the cat to move.”

  Prudence murmured under her breath. For a
moment Ambrose believed she was admiring the sight.

  Then the artistic illusion of the cat leaped up and consumed a fluttering bird in one bite. A spray of red paint on the cat’s whiskers was all that remained.

  Prudence stalked away down the street.

  Ambrose was beginning to get the feeling Prudence might be annoyed with him.

  “Prudence, can I make something clear about our last night in Florence?”

  Prudence was adjusting her black lace gloves and didn’t spare him a look. “I have something to say about that night as well.” She spoke with perfect sangfroid. Prudence already had an air of belonging in Paris, as though her arch loveliness granted her automatic citizenship. “Thank you.”

  There wasn’t much gratitude in her tone.

  “Ah, yes, you’re welcome.” Ambrose directed a quizzical look at a lamppost. “For …?”

  “As a daughter of the Church of Night, I do disport with dark carnality, ruin men for anyone else, cause them to die wasting away with longing for another glance from my brilliant eyes, and so on.” Prudence waved her gloved hand. “You know, the usual.”

  “I do know the usual,” said Ambrose. “I thank all the tiny imps in hell for dark carnality.”

  “This isn’t the time for it.” Prudence spoke with finality on carnality. “What was that absurd poem you were reciting?”

  Ambrose brightened. “You’d like to hear the poem again?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Prudence declared. “‘The lioness, you may move her, to give o’er her prey.’ Nothing moves me. I must dedicate myself, body and soul, to my revenge mission.”

  “Would it be inappropriate to say that’s very hot?” Ambrose asked.

  Prudence sighed, exasperated, in the direction of Versailles. “I don’t wish to be distracted by irrelevant nonsense. You may be a romantic fool, but I’m not. Frankly, given your lurid family history, I’m concerned you might become fond of me. I can’t imagine anything more inconvenient or unwelcome.”

  She shook her head with the expression of a woman who wished to hold her nose but was trying to conceal her distaste.

  Ambrose murmured: “Wouldn’t want that.”

  He was dispirited for the length of several streets. Then he reminded himself that the idea of softer feelings must be strange and new to Prudence. Still, they were in the City of Lights. Paris might open her eyes to new possibilities.