IT’S OKAY,” CALL said. He grabbed Aaron’s hands. They were cold, but not cold. Definitely living hands. Call knew you were supposed to rub people’s hands to warm them up, so he set to it.
Aaron looked around. He was moving very slowly, as if all his muscles were stiff. “Where are we?”
“You should just concentrate on getting better,” Call said.
“Better?” Aaron definitely sounded like someone who was waking up after a long time asleep, but that made sense. “When did I get sick?”
Call didn’t know how to answer that. Instead, he said, “Tell me what you remember last.”
“We were in the woods,” Aaron said. Some color was starting to come back to his face. His eyes were still plain green, the way they always had been, no hint of spinning color. And no Chaos-ridden could talk, Call reminded himself. Not like this, in full, normal sentences. “We were looking for Tamara….”
Aaron crinkled up his nose in thought. Call let his hands go, and Aaron flexed his fingers. Normal hands, normally flushed skin, normal pulse in his throat … Call’s heart was banging wildly. He’d done it, he’d brought Aaron back, he’d accomplished the impossible …
“And then Alex turned on us,” Aaron went on. He was frowning more deeply now. “He was the traitor, all the time. He had the Alkahest. He made us kneel down …”
Wait, Call realized. This was about to get bad. “Aaron, it’s all right. You don’t have to —”
But Aaron had begun to shiver. Not small shivers as if he were cold, but shivers that made his whole body flinch. He clutched at the edge of the gurney. “We knelt down,” he said. “There was a blast. You were knocked away from me. I saw the white light of the Alkahest. It filled the sky. Call …” He raised haunted, green eyes. “What happened? Please tell me it wasn’t what I think.”
Call could only shake his head. Aaron was staring at his own hands. They were pale and looked ordinary to Call. But Aaron seemed to recoil from them.
Call realized what Aaron was looking at, then: His nails had grown long and ragged. Nails and hair grow after death, Call remembered. Aaron’s hair was too long, too, curling past his ears.
“Call,” Aaron said. “Was I — was I — ?”
Call cut him off desperately. “There’s no time. We have to get out of here. We have to move before someone finds us. Aaron, please.”
Aaron hesitated — then nodded. The desperation in Call’s voice seemed to have broken through his suspicions. He slid off the metal table, landing on his bare feet.
His legs gave way instantly. He crumpled to the ground and rolled over, groaning. Call leaned over him, as Aaron curled into an agonized ball. His hair was sticking to his forehead with sweat. “My legs — they’re burning —”
A laugh cut through the room. A loud, incredulous, harsh laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Call straightened up. It was Alex, in another one of his black outfits, standing in the doorway. Call’s heart sank.
Aaron pushed himself up onto his hands, kneeling. He’d gone a sort of waxy white color. “Not you,” he said. “You can’t be here. No.”
“I never thought you’d do it.” Alex swaggered into the room. “I never thought you’d have the nerve, Constantine Junior.”
Call flung himself between Aaron and Alex. “Stay away from him — from us,” Call said.
“Sure,” Alex drawled. “I’ll just wander off and pretend you didn’t just raise someone from the dead, which literally no one has ever successfully done before —”
Aaron screamed.
It was an awful noise. Both Call and Alex flinched back as the inhuman howl tore out of Aaron’s throat. He clawed at the ground, shoulders shaking, but there were no tears on his face. He wasn’t crying.
“Aaron!” Call knelt down. “You have to calm down. Please calm down.”
Aaron went limp. “I’m dead,” he whispered. “I died. That’s why everything looks gray and — and awful —”
The doors flew open. Master Joseph burst into the room, followed by Jasper and Tamara. His hand was raised, a core of fire burning in his palm. He’d come in response to Aaron’s scream, but now he went still, staring at Aaron in shock. He suddenly looked much older, his skin too tight, his mouth pinched into a line.
“My God,” he said.
Alex gave a bitter laugh. “Nothing to do with God here.”
“Get him up,” said Master Joseph hoarsely. “Get him on his feet. I need to see he’s alive.”
Call swung around to protect Aaron, but Alex was already there, hauling Aaron into a standing position. Aaron raised his face, looking past Master Joseph, seeing Tamara and Jasper there in the doorway. Jasper’s face was a mask of surprise, but Tamara — Tamara looked as if she’d fallen a long way and knocked all the air out of her body. Like she couldn’t breathe.
“Tamara,” Aaron whispered.
Tamara threw both her hands over her mouth and took a step back, almost slamming into Jasper, who caught her by the arm. She was shaking her head back and forth, her dark braids whipping across her face. Call felt a wave of sickness pass over him. “Tamara,” he began.
“Be quiet,” said Master Joseph. “All of you, be quiet.” He was staring at Aaron as if Aaron really were a ghost. As if he’d never imagined his plan could actually work. As if he’d never thought Aaron would live again.
“You did it,” he said. His gaze was on Aaron, but he was obviously speaking to Call. “I was right. I was right to leave the task of raising the dead to you, Constantine. You did it!”
“Call.” Jasper’s voice had sunk to a flat whisper. “You did this?”
Call realized he should have planned this a lot better. He shouldn’t have raised Aaron without a way to get him out of there — without a way for them all to escape together the way Tamara had hoped. He should have found a way to do it when the commotion wouldn’t have woken up the whole house.
Of course, he hadn’t realized this would work. He hadn’t known how much time it would take or what it would drain out of him.
All of a sudden, Call felt very dizzy.
That was when he remembered: A piece of his soul was missing.
He was going to pass out, he realized. Instinctively, he reached out for someone to grab, but there was no one there.
When Call tumbled to the floor, he did it entirely alone.
Call awoke in Constantine’s old room. Horrifyingly, Anastasia was sitting at the end of his bed, in a white pantsuit with a pin stuck through one lapel. On it, a moonstone eye winked at him.
He bit off a scream.
Whatever strangled sound he had made was what alerted her to his being awake.
“What are you doing here?” he wanted to know.
She smoothed the covers over his chest. “Master Joseph told me what you did. You’ve saved the world — do you know that?”
Call shook his head.
“You’ve changed what it is to be a mage. Oh, Call, you’ve changed everything. No longer will Constantine be thought of as a monster. His legacy will be honored. Your legacy.”
A horrible shudder went through him. He really hadn’t thought about those kind of consequences. And she didn’t understand. What he’d done wasn’t easy to replicate. He couldn’t just tear off pieces of his soul all the time. He had no idea how what he’d done was going to affect his power at all. He might never be able to do it again.
But he pushed that thought away for later.
“Is Aaron … is he still okay?” he asked.
“He’s resting,” she told him. “As you were.”
“Is he … angry with me?” Call wanted to know.
She blinked at him in confusion. “But, Con, why would anyone be angry with you? You’ve performed a miracle.”
He struggled upright. The covers were twisted around him. “I need to talk to Aaron,” he said. “I need to see Tamara.”
She sighed. “All right. Wait a moment.” She stood up, smoothing down her pantsuit. Her eyes were shining as she looked at him. “You don’t know what this means,” she said. “You don’t know who else you could bring back. You have broken into the dominion of death, Con. There are — there were reasons that people wanted Makars dead, back in the old country. But you’ve changed all that.”
Call felt his stomach lurch as she walked out of the room. Reasons people wanted Makars dead? Besides the obvious? He couldn’t think about it. He needed to see Aaron. Aaron was the proof he’d done the right thing. He’d saved Aaron. He’d never raise another person, never touch a piece of his own soul again. But this had been worth it. It had to be.
Anastasia returned, this time with Tamara, who was wearing a dress made of white tiers of lace. She walked with her head down, not looking at Call.
Anastasia went over to the door and stepped out, though Call could still see her shadow. She was standing just outside in the corridor, listening.
Call decided he didn’t care. He was so glad to see Tamara again his whole body had gone cold, then hot all over. He wished he could see her expression.
“Tamara,” he said. “I’m sorry —”
She cut him off. “You lied to me.”
“I know you’re mad,” he said. “And you have every right to be. Just please hear me out.”
Her chin jerked up. Her eyes were red from crying, but they blazed with emotion. “Yeah, you shouldn’t have lied, but that’s not the point, Call. And I’m not mad — I’m scared.”
He felt cold again. Cold all over.
“You shouldn’t have done what you did,” she said. “You shouldn’t have been able to do it. There’s only one person who was able to move around souls, who even got close to raising the dead. I staked everything on you not being the Enemy of Death. I broke you out of prison because I believed it. But I was wrong.” She shook her head. “You are Constantine.”
Call flinched as if she’d hit him. He thought about all the days he’d sat in prison, believing she might say these same words to him. And now she had.
“I just wanted Aaron back,” he tried to explain. “I thought I could fix things.”
Tamara wiped her eyes. “I want him back, too. I want to believe that he is back, just like he was before, but I don’t know …”
Call started to get up, out of the bed. Both his legs felt weak, but he forced himself upright, clinging to one of the bedposts. “Tamara, listen. He’s not Chaos-ridden. I used a piece of my own soul to revive him. He’s Aaron. He can talk. He can remember. He remembers Alex murdering him.”
“After you passed out, he started screaming,” she said flatly. “Just screaming and screaming.”
“He’s scared. Anybody would be. He’s scared and he’s —”
“It didn’t seem like fear,” Tamara said, her face like marble. Call didn’t want her to be right, but there was a pit in his stomach. Tamara wasn’t wrong a lot.
“He’s our best friend,” he said, his voice scraping out of his throat. “I couldn’t just let him go.”
“Sometimes we have to let people go,” Tamara said softly. “Sometimes things happen that can’t be fixed.”
“You thought you had to let Ravan go. Your family told you — the whole mage world told you that she was as good as dead once she used too much fire magic and got devoured by the element. But she was part of the jailbreak. You trusted her enough for that. So you must think she’s your sister, at least some of the time. You know the mages can be wrong.”
“That’s different,” Tamara protested. “She’s not dead; she’s Devoured.”
“Is it really different?” Call took a deep breath. “I know you’re worried about what it means that I did this. But people hate Constantine Madden because he was an evil psycho with a giant undead army who tried to destroy the mage world — not because he wanted to bring the dead back to life. Everyone wants that. That’s why he had so many followers. Because everyone’s lost somebody. Because when we lose someone, it seems so pointless and random and dumb that there isn’t some answer. Maybe Constantine was a terrible person and maybe I’m a terrible person, too. But I might be the terrible person who saved Aaron.”
“I hope so,” Tamara said. “I want to believe that. I missed Aaron so much and all I want to do is believe that his death was some kind of hideous mistake. But if he’s not himself, Call — if he’s not really back, then you have to promise me that you will let him go, once and for all.”
Call stared at her face. She looked sad instead of hopeful.
“I promise,” he said. “I would never leave Aaron as a Chaos-ridden. I would never do anything to hurt him.”
Tamara grabbed one of Call’s hands and squeezed it tightly. He was so grateful and relieved that he wanted to throw his arms around her, hold her the way he had before. But he didn’t.
She said, “If you stop trusting me, Call, then the only people you’re listening to are Master Joseph and Alex. And they’re not good people. They don’t want the best for you. Or for Aaron.”
“I know that.”
“Then you have to trust me. If I say Aaron isn’t himself, you have to believe me.”
Call nodded. “I will. I trust you. If you say it’s not Aaron, I’ll believe you.”
“You better,” Tamara said, heading for the door. “Because if you don’t, I am going to stop trusting you, too.”
Call flopped back on the bed, leaning down to pet Havoc’s head. The wolf whined once, as though he could understand what Tamara had said.
After she left, Call was too tired to get up, but too upset to rest anymore. He wanted to go see Aaron, to convince himself that Aaron was fine and that Tamara was wrong, but he was terrified that she might be right. What if Aaron wasn’t really back? What if the use of Call’s soul had just delayed the whole swirling-eye thing? Gloomy thoughts filled his head until finally there was another knock on the door.
“Come in,” he said, sure it was going to be Anastasia with more creepy pronouncements about how great he was.
To his surprise, it was Alex.
He was wearing even more black than before, if that was possible, and his hair was gelled into spikes. There were big metal buckles on his boots and his school bracelet glittered on his wrist. Somewhere he’d found someone to stick a black stone in it, showing that he was a Makar.
“Call, little buddy,” he said. “Dinner.”
Call wondered if it was awkward to be in the same house with the person you murdered, now back from the dead and maybe planning revenge. He hoped so.
“Come on,” Alex said when Call didn’t reply. “Don’t just sit there. Your zombie is already at the table.”
“Don’t call him that!” Call snapped. Alex only grinned.
Pushing himself to his feet, Call walked past Alex and limped his way downstairs to the dining room. His whole body ached and he couldn’t keep Tamara’s words from ringing in his ears, but he couldn’t hide. He couldn’t leave Aaron to face everyone alone.
He tried to tell himself that Aaron was fine — really fine — and that Tamara would come around when she realized it, but some part of him wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be.
Master Joseph beamed at Callum. He was presiding over a table laden down with what looked like a Thanksgiving dinner — there was turkey and stuffing, bowls of glazed carrots and sweet potatoes, peas and whipped potatoes and cranberry sauce.
Anastasia sat beside Master Joseph, glowing. Across from her were Jasper, looking very tense, and Aaron, who flinched when Alex came into the room. Call shoved past Alex and went next to Aaron, who had his hands tightly bunched together in his lap. He looked at Call oddly — as if he were a little glad to see him, and a little bit not.
Smirking, Alex threw himself into a chair beside Anastasia. Absently, she reached over and ruffled his hair, though her eyes were on Call. Hungry eyes, he thought, devouring him.
“Where’s Tamara?” Aaron asked as Call settled into his chair. Call started ladling food onto his own plate and then onto Aaron’s. Aaron picked up his fork and knife, and Call’s spirits lifted. When everyone saw Aaron eat, he thought, they’d have to accept he was normal. Chaos-ridden didn’t eat.
“She’s upstairs,” Jasper said quickly. “Resting. She had a headache.”
Aaron put his fork down.
Call felt a little sick. “It’s okay,” he whispered, hoping Aaron would believe him. “Eat something. You’ll feel better.”
Aaron exhaled. Tamara had said he’d been screaming, and Call realized now he’d braced for that, but Aaron seemed calm enough, if upset about Tamara. Aaron picked his fork back up and shoved some stuffing into his mouth.
His shoulders were stiff, as if he were angry. Call wondered if Aaron hated him. He had every right. But maybe he was just upset about Tamara. Aaron was used to people thinking of him like a hero. He would be devastated if he knew Tamara thought there was something wrong with him.
Tamara was wrong.
She had to be wrong.
“It is not so easy to have your whole world turned upside down,” said Master Joseph. “As she struggles to accept what is possible, so too will the Assembly. So will the Magisterium. But our time — the time of harnessing the power of the void — begins now. With you.” He gestured to Call. “And you.” He turned to Aaron.
“What about the rest of us?” Alex asked.
“Call was able to bring back Aaron. That’s only the beginning. Aaron’s only the first of our departed to return. When the Assembly realizes what we’re capable of, they will have to make an alliance with us — on our terms. This is the biggest breakthrough since lead was first made into gold. Bigger, maybe.”
“You will be able to replicate it, I’m sure,” Anastasia told Alex, answering his question. Obviously Master Joseph had gotten so tangled up with his own thoughts about the future that he’d forgotten everything else.
“It is amazing that you were able to do what Constantine couldn’t,” Jasper told Call, then looked at Aaron. “How are you doing, buddy?”
Aaron turned toward Jasper, his expression haunted.
For a moment, no one spoke. Call held his breath.
“You okay?” Jasper asked.
“I feel tired,” said Aaron. “And strange. Everything is so strange.”
“Yeah, I feel that way a lot, too,” Jasper said, leaning over to clap him on the shoulder. Call stared. It seemed like such a casual gesture, and so out of place.
“Am I really back?” Aaron asked.
Master Joseph smiled at him. “If you can ask that, then you must be.”
Aaron nodded and went back to methodically eating his food, which wasn’t the way Aaron usually ate at all. Aaron was either really mannered and polite, or devoured his food like he was afraid someone was going to snatch it away from him. Call watched him, worriedly.
But then, if Aaron had just gotten out of the hospital, he might act weird, too. Call tried to think of it as getting out of surgery. Years ago, Alastair had needed to have his appendix taken out and when he’d gotten home, he’d been too tired to do anything but sit in front of the television, eating soup out of a can and watching a weekend-long marathon of Antiques Roadshow.
“So what was it like?” Alex asked finally, breaking the silence.
Aaron looked up from his food. “What?”
“What was it like, being dead?”
“Shut up,” Call hissed. But Alex just smirked at him.
“I don’t remember.” Aaron stared at his plate. “I remember dying. I remember you.” He looked up at Alex and his green eyes were as hard and cold as malachite. “And then I don’t remember anything else until Call woke me up.”
“He’s lying,” Alex said, reaching for his glass of Coke.
“Leave him alone,” Call said fiercely.
“Call’s right,” said Anastasia. “If Aaron doesn’t remember —”
“Though it would be very useful to have someone who knew what the afterlife was like among us,” said Master Joseph. “Imagine what powerful information that would be.”
Call pushed back his chair. “I’m not feeling well. I think I’d better go lie down.”
Anastasia was on her feet. “I’m sure you must still be exhausted. I’ll walk you back up to your room.”
“But what about Aaron?” Call said. “Where’s he going to sleep?” He tried to keep his voice calm; he was imagining Master Joseph telling him Aaron was going to go back to sleep in the experiment room, or be imprisoned somewhere.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Aaron being back was supposed to solve everything. Aaron’s death had been the moment that everything had gone terribly wrong — Call being exposed as having the Enemy’s soul, being imprisoned, being hated by most of the people he cared about. Some part of him had expected the world to right itself as soon as Aaron opened his eyes.
That part of him was childish.
“There’s a room that connects to yours,” said Anastasia. “Jericho used to stay there sometimes. Aaron could use it, right?”
She looked toward Master Joseph as she said it. His answering gaze was unreadable. There was a glint deep in his eyes that Call really didn’t like. Now that Call had done it — now that he’d actually raised Aaron — would he still be of use to Master Joseph, or would Master Joseph decide Call’s powers would be a lot more useful without Call attached to them?
“Of course,” Master Joseph said. “It may need some dusting.”
The room did need dusting — a lot of it. Anastasia used her air magic to shake the worst of it out of the bed covers and blinds, leaving all of them coughing. Jasper excused himself to “check on Tamara,” though Call suspected he was just trying to get away from the choking dust clouds.
By the time Anastasia could finally be persuaded to leave, it was clear neither Jasper nor Tamara were likely to come back. They were probably in one of their rooms, talking about Aaron’s return and what it meant. Talking about Call. He tried to tell himself that was fine and that he shouldn’t be jealous, but he was.
Aaron lay down on the bed, on top of the coverlets, and looked at the ceiling, hugging his arms around himself as if he were cold.
“Do you want to talk?” Call asked, feeling awkward.
“No,” Aaron said.
“Look,” Call said. “If you’re mad at me —”
There was a light knock on the door. It swung open slowly.
Tamara came into the room. She was wearing a lavender dress she hadn’t bothered to cut the lace off of. She looked pretty, like she was on her way to a garden party.
Call blinked, surprised to see her.
“Aaron,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back.”
He sat up slowly and looked at Tamara. His eyes weren’t swirling. He wasn’t Chaos-ridden. But Call could see Tamara wince anyway as she looked at Aaron, as if he seemed strange to her. But he’s just Aaron, Call’s mind screamed. He was traumatized. It couldn’t be easy to come back from the dead. Call willed Tamara to be understanding. He could tell she was trying. She sat down on a chair next to the dresser and clenched her hands in her lap.
“Sorry I was so weird before,” she said. “I didn’t know what to think.”
“I remember you crying,” Aaron said. “When I died.”
“Oh,” Tamara said, swallowing.
“And you knocked Call out of the way of the Alkahest,” he said. “It hit me instead.”
“Aaron.” Tamara gasped. Call’s heart was twisting inside his chest. He remembered Jasper saying to him, I just think Tamara — well, Call, I just think she liked someone else, if you get my meaning, and how he’d felt when Tamara had told him she’d never regretted saving him.
“She couldn’t save both of us and she made a split-second decision,” Call said, his voice rough. “So knock it off, Aaron.”
Aaron nodded. Call felt a slight pressure ease off his chest. That was more like Aaron. “I’m not angry,” he said. “Not at Tamara, and not at you, either, Call. I just feel like — like I have to concentrate really hard to pull myself together. Like all I want is to lie down and shut my eyes and have it be dark and quiet.”
“That makes total sense,” Call said, his words tripping over themselves in his eagerness. “You just have to get used to being alive again.”
Aaron nodded. “I guess people can get used to anything.”
“It’s incredible,” Tamara whispered. “Sitting here and listening to you talk, actually talk.”
“I’m going to be an example,” Aaron said. “Master Joseph is going to use me and Call to show them he knows how to end death.”
“Probably,” said Call.
“We have to leave,” said Aaron. “They want to use us, but they won’t hesitate to hurt us if they need to.”
“We’re going to run,” Tamara said. “All of us. We have to make it to the Magisterium.”
Aaron looked surprised. “Why go there?”
“To warn them,” Tamara explained. “They need to know what Master Joseph is planning. What his weaknesses are.”
“We won’t be safe at the Magisterium,” Aaron said. “We’ll just be in a different kind of danger.”
“But if we don’t warn them, they’ll be in danger,” Call said.
“So what?” said Aaron.
Tamara was twisting her hands in her lap. “We’re talking about our friends,” she said. “The Magisterium — people you know. Master Rufus, Celia, Rafe, Kai, Gwenda —”
“I don’t know them that well,” said Aaron. He didn’t sound angry. Just distant. Weary and distant in a way he’d never sounded before.
Tamara pushed her chair back. “I have to go — go to sleep,” she said, and moved toward the door. She paused and picked up a book from on the dresser. Jericho’s diary. Call wondered what she wanted it for. He was going to ask her when Aaron spoke again.
“Everyone has to die eventually,” said Aaron. “I don’t see how us dying for the Magisterium helps.”
Call heard Tamara choke back a sob as she fumbled for the knob and let herself out of the room.
When Aaron turned back to him, Call felt more exhausted than he ever had before. He didn’t want to talk to Aaron, for the first time in his life. He wanted to be alone.
“Go to sleep, Aaron,” he said, standing up. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Aaron nodded and lay down, closing his eyes, asleep almost immediately, as if nothing had happened at all to trouble his dreams.
After an hour of listening to Havoc snore and the eerie silence from Aaron — he didn’t turn or rustle and barely seemed to breathe — Call realized that he wasn’t going to sleep. He kept thinking about his dad, about Master Rufus, and what they would think of what he’d done. He wished he could talk to one of them, get some advice.
Finally he got up, deciding to brave the creepy house and the Chaos-ridden to get a glass of water. He padded down the stairs, into the kitchen.
“Call?” a voice called. Tamara stepped out of the shadows. For a moment, it didn’t seem possible that she was real. But then he saw how tired she looked and figured he wouldn’t have imagined that.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I’ve been sitting in the dark trying to figure out what to do.” She was wearing the clothes she’d arrived in. He looked down at his pajamas and then over at her, puzzled.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You said that if he wasn’t right, you’d let him go,” Tamara said. “You promised.”
“It’s too soon.” It was true that Aaron was acting weird, like maybe some of him was still stuck in death. “He’s going to get better. You’ll see. I know he was a little weird tonight, but he’s just back. And he sounds like himself sometimes.”
Tamara shook her head. “He doesn’t, Call. The Aaron who was our best friend never sounded like that.”
Call shook his head. “Tamara, he was murdered. He’s not going to come back from that cheerful and optimistic!”
She flushed. “I’m not expecting him to be perfect.”
“Really? Because it sounds like you are,” said Call. “Like you think either he has to be exactly the same as he was or he’s — broken. You didn’t say he couldn’t be different, or traumatized. I wouldn’t have agreed to that.”
She hesitated. “Call, the way he talked about other people — Aaron was never indifferent.”
“Just give him a few days,” Call said. “He’ll get better.”
Tamara reached out and touched Call’s face with the palm of her hand. Her fingers felt soft against his cheek. He shivered.
“Okay,” she said, but she looked incredibly sad. “A few more days. We better get back to sleep.”
Call nodded. He got his glass of water and went back up the stairs.
Back when he’d been at the Magisterium, Call had known right from wrong — even if he hadn’t always done the right thing. In prison, everything seemed to have slid away from him.
Maybe it was just that Aaron had always been his moral center. He didn’t want to believe that there was anything wrong with Aaron that couldn’t be fixed. He wanted Aaron to be okay, not just because he was Call’s best friend but because if Aaron wasn’t okay, then Call wasn’t okay either.
If Aaron wasn’t okay, then Call was exactly what everyone had been afraid of all along.
Back in Constantine’s bedroom, Call flopped down, willing himself to sleep. This time he did.
He woke up what felt like a few moments later, to an explosion. Leaping out of bed, he went to a window. Trucks were revving up outside, the sound almost drowned out by shouting.
His first thought was that the Assembly had come to arrest them. And in that brief moment, fear warred with relief.
Master Joseph came into view as he stepped off the porch, wearing the silver mask of the Enemy of Death. Without what looked like any effort at all, he flew up into the air. Below him, crowding around the porch steps, Call could see a cluster of figures: Anastasia in a white dressing gown, Alex glowering.
“Find them! Find them both!” Master Joseph shouted. It was then that Call realized what he was looking at. Who had set off the explosions.
Tamara and Jasper had done it. They had run.
Tamara and Jasper had run and they had left him behind.