Path of Night Read online

  “Wait,” she said tonight, just before their hands parted.

  Ambrose waited.

  “Why are you here?” Prudence asked abruptly. “My father framed you for murder and threatened your family. I understand why you want to kill him. But that’s not the same as a hunt across the world. You’re not the kind of man who chases revenge.”

  No. But he used to be a poet who chased beauty.

  Ambrose opened his mouth to say: Because you wept and begged for your sisters, then wielded swords with deadly, furious precision. Because you were so many different kinds of beautiful I couldn’t look away.

  “Never mind,” Prudence told him. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here.”

  Prudence stopped his open mouth with a kiss. Ambrose went still. Then, because his auntie Hilda hadn’t raised a fool, Ambrose kissed her back with wild abandon. Prudence seized hold of his vest and began to drag him, a willing captive, to her bedroom.

  Ambrose halted, catching Prudence’s gloriously merciless face in his hands for more kisses, and found himself surprised by tenderness. He didn’t know how old Prudence was. Such distinctions weren’t meaningful to witches, since they lived so long and didn’t mature fast. But he knew she was younger than he, still a student of the Academy. She’d hoped for something from her father, so recently. Blackwood had crushed Prudence’s dream. Ambrose wanted to kill him for that alone.

  Once, when they thought Prudence doomed to die, he’d made a crack about missing her body. As though a body was all she was.

  Ambrose didn’t want to make the mistake of acting like she didn’t matter. Not ever again.

  “Lioness,” Ambrose breathed. “Stop. Perhaps we shouldn’t.”

  Prudence wrenched herself away from him, eyes outraged black holes.

  “Wait,” Ambrose said. “Let me explain.”

  “There’s no need.” Prudence’s voice was very calm. “I understand you perfectly. And I don’t care much, either way. Why should I? You don’t matter to me.”

  “I never believed I did,” Ambrose murmured.

  What he had seen, and believed, was that Prudence loved her sisters in the same way Ambrose loved his family. Enough to fight and die for them. Seeing that, Ambrose had suddenly wanted her fierceness for his own.

  She retreated from Ambrose as she hadn’t from stone monsters, shaking her head.

  “I’m not Sabrina, who has to try not to love someone,” Prudence spat. “I don’t even know why she tries so much about love.”

  Ambrose tried to explain romantic love for one of the lost orphans. Prudence might have learned a way to love her sisters on her own, but she had read no poetry and received no tenderness. She had probably never even imagined being in love.

  “After what Nick did for Sabrina, she’ll want to do everything for him. Be loyal, in all the ways witches and mortals know how to be. It’s a mortal notion, the idea of the only one, but she grew up among the mortals. She will love Nick as ferociously and completely as she can.”

  Prudence gave a brittle-sounding laugh. “How absurd.”

  “Is it?” Ambrose asked. He took a step toward her.

  “Love always is. It won’t do Nick any good, her loving him,” sneered Prudence. “Not where he’s gone.”

  She slammed her bedroom door in Ambrose’s face.

  Ambrose was forced to admit that hadn’t gone particularly well, but tomorrow he and Prudence were going to a city made for lovers. He’d never been the type to back down from a challenge.

  Ambrose stayed on the balcony, thinking of songs and lions, hope and Paris, and poor lost Nick. “You never know. Perhaps love might do him some good,” Ambrose murmured. “Even where he’s gone.”

  In hell there were dark shores and woods with leering shadows, chambers for torture and chambers for sinister pleasure. Nick was sauntering by when an attractive demon leaned out of a doorway, snakes in her hair reaching past her arms toward him.

  “Child of earth and fire,” she murmured through sharp teeth. “Aren’t you beautiful?”

  “Don’t I know it,” returned Nick. “What’s up, snake demon?”

  The forked tongue of a snake flickered against the inside of his wrist. “Let’s find out.”

  Nick paused, then shook his head. “My girlfriend wouldn’t like that.”

  The lady and her snakes stared in genuine bewilderment. Nick shrugged. He didn’t fully understand Sabrina’s objections himself, but it was a small price to pay, to be with Sabrina.

  “You’re not with her, though, are you?” murmured the treacherous voice in his mind, growing louder every day. One of the last things Sabrina had said to him was that she hated him. She’d spoken to him of hate, never of love. She probably didn’t think she was his girlfriend anymore. Nick would never see her again. No matter what Nick did, Sabrina wouldn’t know or care.

  Drowning out misery in whatever entertainment offered was something Nick did plenty. He was great at being cruel and out of control.

  Nick wished he could be sure he wouldn’t give in to temptation. He couldn’t. Nobility wasn’t really his style.

  But he told himself: Not today. Hold out a little longer.

  Long after passing the demon’s chamber, Nick came upon a stone tower nestled in the midst of a wilderness. In the window set above his head, there was a light burning.

  He remembered this place.

  In the days when Nick ran with the wolves, they stayed away from the covens, but the world was crowded by mortals and Nick was human enough to require some necessities. Nick and Amalia occasionally stole food and clothes from mortal villages.

  Nick saw a mortal mother once. She had shining hair, and she sang to her child. Nick followed the sound. Amalia padded after him, inescapable as his shadow. They watched as the mortal mother chased her little boy, caught him, and made a fizzing noise against his cheek. She wasn’t trying to hurt him. “They’re playing,” Nick whispered. “Do humans do that?”

  “They all play with their young,” said Amalia dismissively. “The mortals.”

  “Oh,” said Nick. “I didn’t know.”

  The only one who ever played with him was Amalia. Later, Nick was sure Sabrina’s family played with her when she was small. At the time, he believed it was only mortals.

  After that, when the wolf pack ventured near mortals, Nick would … look. The mortals were fascinating, inventing substitutes for magic, using nonsense words like love and grace as though they were spells. Living with each other in little homes with false light that burned so bright.

  Nick discovered a mortal girl living in a stone tower. Light burned in her window like a small sun he could, just possibly, have for himself.

  He would sneak away from the pack at night and listen to the girl singing in her tower.

  “Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low,

  And the flick’ring shadows softly come and go,

  Tho’ the heart be weary, sad the day and long,

  Still to us at twilight comes Love’s old song,

  Comes Love’s old sweet song.”

  She had long dark hair, with gold in it. There was always something bright about the mortals. Nick thought she might like someone to sing to.

  By day she wandered the hills, guarding a flock of animals. Nick couldn’t remember whether they were sheep or goats. They were food. The wolves pulled some of them down.

  He tried speaking to her. The first couple of times hadn’t gone well, but you could always memory-charm mortals, then get another chance to make a good impression.

  Later, Father Blackwood and his society would complain in Nick’s presence about the unreasonable demands of females. Nick found this tiresome. In his experience, women’s requirements were that you be basically clean and interested in what they had to say. That wasn’t hard.

  The third time Nick had a first meeting with the mortal girl, he’d scrubbed himself in a spring, found the right clothes, and talked to her about her dreams of seeing the city one day.r />
  “You’re a charmer, aren’t you?” the girl asked.

  Nick wondered how she knew. The girl laughed a musical laugh.

  “My heart’s not safe! Are you a big bad wolf?”

  Nick saw she liked the idea of a little wickedness. “Something close.”

  They sat on a low stone wall together. She wore daisies in her hair.

  When Amalia found them, Nick was smiling, looking at the girl. He had only a split second to notice the gray shape slinking low on the winter ground, covering the space between them too fast. The mortal girl had less time than that. She never saw her death until it was on her. Her laugh broke apart and became a scream before her throat was torn out. Nick should have tried to save her, but he was frozen with horror. He watched as his familiar ripped the girl limb from limb.

  “What did you want?” Amalia snarled. “A little mortal love to call your own? The mortals don’t matter. This is where mortal love ends.”

  Blood on the snow, and the silence after a scream. Nick threw up.

  Later Nick stood at the mouth of the cave where they sheltered, murmuring the spells from his mother’s books so he wouldn’t forget. Amalia came to him, in her transformed werewolf form—walking on her hind legs, human shaped, dressed in a long nightgown she’d stolen, but still with fur and wolfish teeth. Nick found her pretending grotesque. It made him feel more trapped than anything else.

  “Look at me,” said Amalia. “I’m like a human. Better. You’re happy to be with me like this, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Nick assured her.

  Wolves couldn’t tell when you lied to them. People rarely could either.

  Nick never tried again, with a mortal. They could take their brightness and warmth away so easily and leave you out in the cold. Amalia was right about them.

  Now Nick was in hell, listening as the song drifted down from the tower top. “Tho’ the heart be weary, sad the day and long …” There was a hollow echoing place under his ribs, cold as an empty cave. Heartsick. Homesick. He’d felt this way his whole life.

  He could follow the melody of radiant mortal sweetness up the stairs.

  The door in the tower was a cage door.

  “Come on,” Nick told Satan and the flickering shadows. “I learned better than this long ago.”

  Mortals weren’t for him.

  Across icy fields in hell, through trees that sprang from the earth like mushrooms, Nick glimpsed a building that hadn’t been there before. A darker gray than snow in shadows, solid and reassuring. Built to look like a mortal tomb, with a flight of stone steps where witches could pass back and forth, and a broad stone banister where Nick sat outside in the sun and read. Invisible Academy, the mortal called it, because he was dumb.

  Nick always remembered the first time he saw his school. He’d been in the mountains with the wolves, days before his dark baptism. Amalia roamed far afield, and Nick saw his chance. He didn’t hatch any plan. He only realized, with a shock, how long she’d been gone. His head jerked up, and he thought: I cannot live like this for a moment longer.

  He ran. Amalia caught him. She tried to drag him back, but he fought. It felt like his last chance. She snarled and hurt him, werewolf red in tooth and claw. For a blurred, desperate moment Nick was sure she’d kill him. His mind seized on a spell he’d read years ago, sitting by his mother.

  With a mouth full of blood and trembling hands, Nick teleported away.

  Teleportation was advanced magic, the witches and warlocks of the Church of Night told him later. Far too advanced for a boy who hadn’t even signed the Book. It should have killed Nick. They were impressed that it hadn’t.

  Nick teleported to the foot of the mountains in the wild woods of Greendale. Through the trees, the Academy of Unseen Arts stood with its dark doors open wide.

  The witches welcomed him. He’d been so alone, but now he was surrounded by people like him. They showed Nick the Academy, soothing scarlet light safe behind stone walls, and brought him to a huge room with wonder on all sides. After years of words lost to the wind, Nick found again—at last—his mother’s books.

  Nick wasn’t like Sabrina, unwilling to trade her soul away. He signed his name in the Book of the Beast with total readiness. It made sense to Nick that a book would offer him refuge.

  Nick spent several days in the library, where he discovered the works of Edward Spellman. Then he emerged to explore his new home. The first students Nick met wanted to attack him, which went badly for them. Next was a guy with blond hair who wanted something else.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Luke Chalfant. And you are gorgeous.”

  Nick smirked. “Yes, I know.”

  “I’m on my way to a club run by Father Blackwood. No girls allowed. Good for witches to be locked out of a few things, am I right?”

  You’re trash, Nick thought, looking anywhere but at Luke. He chanced to see down a low stone passageway to a red velvet sofa and two girls. One was sleeping with her head in the other girl’s lap. The girl still awake was smoothing a hand over the sleeper’s coal-black hair, unaware anyone could see her. At the time, Nick didn’t know how rare it was, to catch Prudence in a moment of tenderness.

  “Would you like to join our society?” asked Luke. “You’d fit right in.”

  That was insulting, but no matter how much Nick disliked someone, he wanted everybody to approve of him.

  “Maybe later,” Nick said with a charming smile, meaning Never, please die. He went toward the girls.

  They noted his approach.

  The girl with marvelous cheekbones and even more marvelous sweetness in her face, who Nick would find out later was Prudence, raised an eyebrow and said: “Sister?”

  Dorcas came fluttering from a corner of the room to sit beside Prudence, red head tilted against Prudence’s shoulder.

  There were three of them, Nick noted approvingly. Like a pack—no. Like a family. They would be safer in a group. And they could do magic. They would protect each other.

  He leaned forward, reaching up to catch the stone lintel so he was framed in the doorway, and let them take a long look.

  “Hello, ladies,” he murmured. “I’m Nick Scratch.”

  After some time, Nick proved his prowess in all areas, and was officially their boyfriend.

  Except being with the Weird Sisters wasn’t how Nick thought. Prudence never looked at him with that sweetness in her face. He slowly understood it wasn’t for him. There were occasions when the Weird Sisters said it was girls’ time and shut the door in his face.

  There were the illusions they created too. Illusion was second nature to witches. It shouldn’t have reminded Nick of Amalia, pretending to be human with her wolfish teeth. But it did.

  After Amalia, Nick’s world was his school and his spells, witches and books. Everybody said he was the guy who had it all.

  Only in his latest and loneliest hours did he admit to himself that nothing felt real.

  The Weird Sisters harassed the half mortal who lived nearby whenever they caught her alone. Nick had never seen her, but he paid attention when the Weird Sisters talked about Sabrina Spellman, his favorite author’s daughter. Nick was curious about Edward Spellman, the man who’d written those wonderful books and married a mortal wife.

  Once, the Weird Sisters were discussing how much they dreaded Sabrina coming to the Academy. Father Blackwood and the coven had never permitted the half mortal to even attend unholy service at the Church of Night. She’d been raised away from other witches.

  “She must be lonely,” Nick mused.

  Prudence heard. “Her lonely? Her family fusses over her as if she’s the only girl in the world. She goes to a mortal school! She collects mortals. She’s got one of her very own. They walk around the woods holding hands as if she’s afraid she’ll lose him.”

  Nick hesitated. “Is he trying to get away?”

  Prudence scoffed. “She treats him like gold. She’s soft, if you ask me. Like Edward Spellman.”

 
“Oh,” said Nick.

  At the next opportunity, he got eyes on Sabrina and her mortal. He grabbed a chance to talk to the mortal. Naturally Nick memory-charmed him after, but he learned what he wanted to know. The mortal was happy to stay with Sabrina. The mortal was in love.

  Nick saw Sabrina from afar, and liked what he saw.

  He went home and broke up with the Weird Sisters.

  Cold in hell, Nick remembered seeing Sabrina in summertime. He turned away from the illusion of the Academy of Unseen Arts. He knew it wasn’t real. The doors of his school hadn’t looked like cage doors.

  Nick had waited for All Hallow’s Eve, for Sabrina to come to the Academy. But Nick worried. Perhaps pretty Sabrina was too like a mortal. The harrowing at the Academy was brutal.

  A girl from the mortal world might be frightened. She might be killed.

  Then Sabrina walked into their Infernal Choir. She sang under the furious gaze of the Weird Sisters, and everybody understood she feared nothing. She actually was as daring as Nick pretended to be. He stood silent amid the chanting, stunned.

  It felt like recognition, Nick’s burst of joy and relief at seeing her face, hearing the ring of her voice.

  Oh, there you are, Nick thought. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.

  He asked to sit with Sabrina at lunch that day. That night, the Dark Lord came to Nick and demanded the obedience Nick had promised. Lucifer told Nick to make Sabrina trust him.

  Deceit was easy for Nick.

  He liked doing things for Sabrina. He could tell she liked him too. Nick had hope.

  Until Amalia came back, as Nick always knew she would, deep down. Amalia sensed Nick might finally be happy.

  Nick should have killed Amalia, for Sabrina. But he didn’t, because he was weak. He lured another of his wolves to him, and gave Sabrina the heart as though it was Amalia’s. A false heart, like Nick’s own.

  He chained Amalia in a cave. He didn’t want either of them to die.

  “Please understand,” Nick begged Amalia as he chained her.

  She turned her face away. “I understand you grew up to be the kind of man who cages.”