Liv wrapped her fingers around the handle of the knife. She clenched her teeth and squeezed the handle hard before plunging it down toward Merek’s chest.
He batted her hand away in one easy swipe of his arm, then shook his head.
“Are you doing this poorly on purpose?”
“Obviously not,” Liv said, her voice tight.
“So are you naturally terrible at coordinating your movements? Or just at following directions?”
Instead of sniping out a reply, Liv closed her eyes and breathed in deep through her nose. In, out. In, out. There was the smell of the ocean, of salt and seaweed and fish. She and Merek were standing across from each other on the back porch of the Malibu house, and sand was blowing across her bare toes. She tried to focus on the feel of it.
“Liv? What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to go to a Zen place,” Liv replied through still-gritted teeth. “Because every time you talk I want to stab you.”
“Good,” Merek replied. “That is sort of the point of this whole exercise, after all.”
Liv’s eyes popped open. “You want me to actually try to stab you?”
Merek looked at her, incredulous. “Is that not what we have been doing for two hours? Did Cedric teach you nothing in Caelum?”
Liv tried to ignore how her heart pulsed a little harder at even the mention of Cedric’s name. Instead, she took another deep breath.
“We were a little preoccupied at the time.”
“Yes, I bet.”
Liv threw her hands up in frustration. It had been her idea to spend the evening practicing her poor knife-fighting skills with Merek. It had seemed better than obsessing, again, over the discovery they’d made in the Ralphs’s parking lot that afternoon and wondering about what it could mean for a Knight to turn into a sort of wrath and then die—right in front of her.
Liv quickly adjusted her hold on the knife, accidentally whizzing it past Merek’s ear. He had to lean away quickly to avoid the blade.
“Sorry,” she muttered.
“Do not apologize—that is the closest you have come to actually striking me all morning.”
“Well, I don’t want to really hurt you—most of the time—I just want to practice the basics of all this knife stuff. I need to know how to protect myself from the wraths and—well, whatever else might be out there.”
“Then maybe we should start with the most basic rule of all, one so obvious, I did not think it needed to be stated. Liv, when you are fighting with a weapon, you cannot just go through the motions. You have to mean to strike your opponent.”
“But what if I really hurt you?”
Merek gave her an irritating smile. “Trust me, you will not.”
Liv gritted her teeth again and lunged. Merek jumped backward quickly, narrowly missing the knifepoint. Liv hadn’t hit him, but at least she’d wiped the smile off his face.
“Well,” Merek said, swallowing hard. “That was a bit better.”
Liv heard a door slam in the distance. Her head automatically perked up at the sound. “He’s back.”
She left the silver-bladed knife—one they’d “borrowed” from an antique store—on the porch railing and walked along the side of the house, Merek tailing her. She saw Joe coming up the driveway, carrying a shovel in his hand.
Joe’s somber eyes lifted to meet hers. “It’s done.”
Liv didn’t know how to respond. She and Merek had both offered to go with Joe to bury the Knight-turned-wrath, but he’d insisted on doing it alone. “I can’t spare you much these days,” Joe had said with a heavy sigh, “but let me spare you this.”
And she’d let him, feeling a little guilty at how relieved she was that she wouldn’t have to look at the dead man’s face for another second. But now that Joe was back, there was one thing they couldn’t put off any longer.
“Joe, we have to talk about this.”
Joe leaned the shovel up against the side of the house and nodded. “You’re right. Dinner?”
But back inside the house around the Ratners’ giant dining table, he went quiet. The cavernous rooms were lit only by the orange glow coming in through the windows and the kerosene lamps they’d arranged around the house. In the dining room, they ate cans of creamed corn under the framed black-and-white photos of Daisy’s smiling movie-star parents.
“You guys didn’t leave the house while I was gone, did you?” Joe asked, washing a bite of creamed corn down with the orange-flavored sparkling water Liv had taken from the store the day before.
“No,” Peter responded. “These two have been in the back, fake-fighting with each other since you left.”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “Being careful, I hope?”
“Yes,” Liv responded. “Not that I’m getting better, though. Self-defense classes are one thing, but knife fights?”
“If you feel uncomfortable holding a weapon, then maybe it’s a sign you shouldn’t be holding one,” Joe responded in his most levelheaded social-worker voice.
“It’s not like I have much of a choice,” Liv muttered.
“She should be able to defend herself. If Shannon had had the same training . . .” Merek trailed off and looked away, as he often did whenever Shannon came up. “She might still be here.”
“I’m glad she’s not,” Liv replied.
Merek’s eyes flashed. “I disagree.”
“I just mean, I’m glad she’s safe. Shannon’s with her parents, far away, which is exactly where she should be. Meanwhile, we should be focusing on the person—the wrath—the whatever-it-was—that hurt her.” She turned to Joe. “You saw his face, Joe.”
Joe nodded, pushing his creamed corn away. “He was definitely a wrath. But what killed him . . . I have no idea. His whole body looked to be falling apart somehow.”
“I care less about what killed him and more about how he became a wrath in the first place,” Liv said.
“The two might be connected,” Joe replied.
No one at the table spoke as they let that cheerful thought sink in.
“But what does this mean?” Peter finally asked. “People can become wraths now? Does this prove what we’ve thought all along—that the wraths are behind all those Knights being murdered?”
“Which means Malquin’s behind it,” Liv said.
“We don’t know anything for sure,” Joe put in.
“That’s the same thing we’ve been saying for two months,” Liv said, throwing her fork down on the table a little too forcefully. The clattering noise bounced around the dimly lit dining room.
“I was thinking,” Joe said, keeping his gentle eyes on Liv, “maybe we should take a break for a few days.”
Liv blinked, not sure if she’d heard correctly. “A break?”
“Give us all a chance to relax for a bit, catch our breath.”
“But . . . but this is exactly the time when we shouldn’t take a break. Not only are we still looking for this Martin guy—who may or may not already be killed or driven off by wraths—but now we know something even worse is going on. The wraths are up to something, Joe! This is when we try harder, not catch a breath.”
Liv looked to Merek and Peter for support, but they both stared steadfastly into their cans of food. Joe’s eyes filled with concern—with pity—but that somehow made Liv even more angry.
“Come on, guys . . . you can’t be serious,” she said, her voice rising.
“She is right,” Merek said, “if a bit overheated.”
“I’m not overheated!”
“Liv,” Peter said, his voice maddeningly calm, “we hear what you’re saying, and what happened to that Knight is incredibly messed up. But we’re not going to solve that problem and fix everything else all at once. You’ve been going out on the moped every day, and now you’re practicing knife fighting, too? I mean, I know things are terrible, but we’re not exactly action stars here. Maybe you should just chill for a bit,” Peter said.
“Chill?” Liv asked. “Are you serious? Chill? We are so far past chill, I can’t even . . . I mean, don’t you think I’d rest if I could? Don’t you think I’m tired of seeing dead bodies, and learning how to stab things? I’m tired of living in this dark house with no electricity or air-conditioning, I’m tired of looking for some clue to help us all get out of this mess, and finding nothing. And now we finally, finally have some kind of idea as to what’s happening to these Knights, and you want us to just take a break? There is no break! None of us gets a break!”
Liv didn’t realize she was yelling until she’d stopped and the echo of her voice bounced around the walls of the dining room. Joe, Merek, and Peter all stared up at her as if she’d suddenly spewed pea soup from her mouth, Exorcist-style. It felt strange to yell, to let loose, to not be the calm voice of reason for once. But she didn’t know what else to do.
“Liv,” Joe started, and his tone was so gentle, so placating, but it did nothing to help. Couldn’t they understand? She wasn’t just trying to fix the world, she was trying to fix the world that she broke. She’d opened that giant portal on the beach; she’d gone through it to save Peter; she’d been the one to make the clouds boil in the sky. And every person injured in the evacuation or the fires, every house looted and burned, every day that went by, racking up more death and damage—that was on her.
So she couldn’t take a break. Not until she fixed this.
Joe was still staring at her, his expression a picture of calm. But Liv didn’t hear whatever consoling words he’d been about to give her, because at that moment, there was a knock at the door.
“Expecting someone?” Merek drawled.
“Could be someone saw our lights, came to see if we have fresh water,” Joe said, rising. “You guys wait here.”
He grabbed a baseball bat—pretty unsteadily, Liv noticed—and went to answer the door.
“Liv! Better get out here,” Joe yelled from the other room a moment later. “You have . . . a visitor.”
The can of soda nearly slipped from Liv’s hand. She stood, heart pounding.
Relax, she told herself sternly. It’s not him, it can’t be him.
Liv made her way quickly toward the front room, Peter and Merek on her heels. She ran through the list of people who might come searching for her at Daisy’s Malibu beach house—other than the one person she hoped it would be. Her mind came up blank. No one else knew she was here. Only one person would come looking for her like this, only one person who could reasonably show up at exactly this moment.
Except it wasn’t reasonable, was it? That after all these weeks of trying desperately not to think about him, of coming to terms with the fact that she’d never see him again, that she might turn the corner and see his face looking back at hers?
She turned the corner.
“Miss me?” Shannon asked.
Her hair was a little longer than when Liv had seen it last, its tips now muted pink rather than bright red. But she had her same Shannon-ish grin. Liv yelped, ran across the room, and hugged her best friend, hard.
“Guess that’s a yes,” Shannon said. “Okay, those are my lungs you’re crushing.”
Liv stepped back, a goofy smile still on her face.
Shannon looked around at the others in the dim light of the room. Her eyes fell on Merek, who stood stock-still a few feet away, his posture rigid. “I know, I know, you’re way too cool to ever admit it, but I can see in your eyes you’re glad to see—”
The rest of her words were muffled as Merek suddenly lunged forward in two giant steps and gathered Shannon to him, his arms almost swallowing her small frame.
Everyone, even Shannon, froze, unsure of exactly what was happening, but Merek still held on to her in a tight embrace. Finally, he pulled away, his face flushed. Shannon looked up at him, her eyes wide as saucers. For maybe the first time since Liv had known her, she seemed at a loss for words.
“Um,” Shannon said.
Merek composed himself first. He shrugged, falling easily back into his lazy posture, though he kept his eyes on the floor. “It is too quiet without you here.”
“Agreed,” Liv said. But as she looked at her best friend grinning in the doorway, the dark orange sky looming behind her like a threat, the smile slipped from her face. “Except . . . why are you here?”
“Is everything okay? With your parents?” Joe asked.
“Oh yeah, they’re fine,” Shannon said. But there was a small hitch in her voice that Liv recognized. The Shannon-is-lying hitch.
“And they know where you are?” Joe asked.
“Of course!” Shannon said. “I mean, they will, as soon as they read the note I left them.”
“Shannon.” Liv beat Joe to a disapproving reply, crossing her arms.
“Hey, they left me no choice!” Shannon responded. “Do you know what’s going on in Utah right now? Nothing, that’s what. Even with my wrist healed I just had to sit there, day in and day out, making friendship bracelets with my thumb-sucking cousins, wondering what was going on out here. After you lost the internet in LA, I didn’t even know if you were alive. I had to come back.”
“So you just . . . left?” Liv asked, hating the scolding tone in her voice. “You left them there to worry about you?”
“Hey,” Shannon said, sounding defensive now. “They know where I am. Not, like, the exact coordinates or anything, but I told them I was coming here to help you.”
“How did you get here?” Joe asked. Liv was amazed by how calm he sounded.
“Stole the van, obviously. Driving into the city wasn’t easy with half the roads closed, but I managed.”
“Well, you have to go back,” Joe said. He ran a hand through his hair, something he did when exasperated. Liv wondered how he had any hair left at all.
“No way,” Shannon said, crossing her arms to mirror Liv. “It took me forever to get here. I’m not going back there. I’m not. Liv, come on.”
Liv knew she should come to Shannon’s defense. She should take her best friend’s side, just like she’d always done. Just like Shannon had always done for her. But she couldn’t help shaking her head.
“You were safe, Shan. Isn’t that why you left in the first place? To get away from this whole mess and be safe?”
Shannon looked stunned, her cheeks going a bit red. “I went away because my parents were freaked after what happened . . . and maybe I was a little, too. But I’m all healed up now.” She held up her arm, waving her wrist in the air. “And I made the decision to help before you even came back home, Liv. Now that I’m better and my parents are doing better, I’m sticking by that.”
“And we are glad for it,” Merek interjected, glaring at Liv.
Liv sighed. “But you’re putting yourself in danger all over again—”
“So are you,” Shannon retorted.
“I have no choice!” Liv exploded. “I have to fix this mess because I started it. It’s my responsibility. And besides, it’s not like I have anywhere else to go. But, Shannon, you have parents. People who care about you and love you and want to keep you safe. Do you know how lucky you are to have that?”
“Of course I do,” Shannon said, her eyes glittering in anger now.
“Then how could you do this to them? You can’t just do whatever you want and not even think of the consequences!” The words poured out of her, hot and fast. “How do you think your parents will feel the next time you get yourself hurt?”
Shannon flinched, the red in her face deepening. She moved her healed wrist a little behind her back, and it was clear she was embarrassed she’d gotten hurt in the first place. Liv knew all that just by looking at her, and knew she should stop. But she couldn’t. Things just kept getting worse, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t control a single thing about the situation they were in. Every time she thought she had a handle on what was happening, something even crazier would pop up. Gravity would stop working. Men would turn into wraths. Things were spinning away from her, and there was no way to predict, let alone stop, what would happen next.
The one thing she’d been sure about was that Shannon and Daisy, at least, were safe and far away.
“I know what I’m doing,” Shannon said.
“Oh, really? And what am I supposed to tell your parents if you get killed, huh?”
“Tell them it was my decision,” Shannon responded, her dark eyes narrowing. “My decision to do what I can to help fix this. For them.”
“Shannon is right,” Merek said, taking a step to stand next to her. “We have all made a choice to continue on in this fight, despite the danger. Is that not what you told me, once, was special about this world? That everyone can make choices for themselves?”
“That isn’t . . . That’s not . . . ,” Liv sputtered. She looked to Joe for help. “Please back me up on this one.”
Joe sighed. “I’m on your side, Liv. If these were normal circumstances, I’d throw Shannon in the back of my car and drive her straight to her parents. But . . . these aren’t normal circumstances. Even if we found the time to drive to Utah—”
“I’d just turn around and come right back,” Shannon said.
“I can’t believe this,” Liv said, shaking her head. She looked at Shannon, who was wearing her most pissed-off expression, the one usually reserved for bouncers who wouldn’t let her into nightclubs. Or for her parents. Liv could barely believe that the look was being directed at her. That Shannon would be against her. Or was it the other way around? Was it her against Shannon? But even as she thought about backing down, she remembered again the moment she’d learned Shannon had been hurt while she was in Caelum. And she imagined what worse things could happen to Shannon if she stayed in L.A. Worse than running into another Knight, worse than stumbling across a dead body. She pictured Shannon being torn apart by black-eyed wraths. Pictured her becoming one. Pictured her lying on the ground, her eyes staring up at nothing.
“I can’t believe you’d be so . . . selfish,” Liv said.
“And I can’t believe you’d be such a hypocrite,” Shannon spit back. “And kind of a bitch.”
“All right,” Joe said, spreading out his hands. “Let’s just calm down. We’ll go in the other room, take a breath—”
“No,” Liv said. “We won’t. Maybe you’ve all agreed this is okay, but I don’t.” She pushed her way past Joe, grabbing a set of moped keys from the side table and running out the still-open door into the stifling hot night air, her heart beating wildly in her chest.
Two hours later, Liv still felt horrible. In fact, she felt more horrible, if that was even possible.
She kept running the conversation over and over again in her mind, wondering what could possibly have made her say those things to her very best friend? But no answers came to her. Yelling at Shannon was just one more mistake in the list of mistakes she’d made lately; though at least this one hadn’t resulted in a near-apocalypse.
Above Liv’s head, the sky was dark and burnt-looking, which was as close to nighttime as Los Angeles got these days. In the distance, beyond the rust-colored clouds, heat lightning flashed every few seconds. Liv dimly wondered if she should get inside, but there was nowhere to get inside to. In all her burning anger and frustration and shame, she’d jumped on the moped and taken off, not really thinking about where she was going.
And of course she’d wound up on the cracked cement banks of the LA River. She hadn’t been here since—well, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been here. Her days had been so full of tracking down leads and missing Knights that she hadn’t taken the time to come to what had once been her favorite place in the world. More than her favorite place, really; in a lifetime full of rotating houses, guardians, and foster siblings, this spot by the river was basically her only constant. The closest thing she had to home.
But now it was as broken and unrecognizable as the rest of her city. Looking down at the completely dried-up riverbed and then up at the lightless, empty blocks of the downtown skyscrapers beyond, Liv felt a sharp pang and hugged her knees to her chest.
She was homesick.
It was strange, particularly since she’d expected her homesickness to end the second she got back from Caelum, but there it was—strong and overpowering—the urge to go home.
But the place she’d been yearning for in Caelum—with its sprawl and bustle and dreamers and schemers, its cement and bridges and forgotten, beautiful spaces—was wrecked. Torn from her, like her parents, siblings, and first home had been.
But she could get it back. She had to get it back.
So what did it matter if Shannon helped her to do it? Surely she could use all the help she could get?
And if Shannon got hurt . . .
Well, she wouldn’t let that happen. She’d train harder with Merek, get better at using the knives, be faster than the evacuation crews and police still scanning the city for stubborn citizens who’d stayed behind.
Liv had to get back to Malibu right away and apologize. She was just about to push herself up off the dusty ground when she heard it.
A voice. Clear as day. And impossible.
“Liv.”
She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. She felt the speaker approach from behind, but she knew that as soon as she turned around, she’d be disappointed again. It wouldn’t be him—it would be someone else. Merek had come after her, or maybe Joe. Her ears were playing tricks on her.
“Liv?”
More tentative this time. And much closer.
Liv slowly turned.
He was standing with his back to the bridge. And just like on the first night she’d met him, he stepped away from a swirling darkness in the structure’s shadows—a darkness that closed down to nothing and disappeared. Unlike that night, he wasn’t wearing nightclothes and a confused, frightened expression. He was in formal gear, the kind she’d last seen him wearing in the castle. And in his eyes there was disbelief and happiness, like he’d just stumbled across something amazing and was afraid to move a muscle it in case it disappeared in front of him.
Liv knew the feeling.
She jumped up, and he was moving toward her, too—they weren’t that far away at all, practically nothing was between them, and she’d be at him in a matter of seconds.
Just before they could crash into each other, she stopped short, and Cedric did, too.
Liv had a million things to ask, a million things to say. But the words scrambled against each other in her mind.
“H-how?” she finally managed.
Cedric exhaled and motioned back to the now-closed portal under the bridge.
“Right,” Liv managed, feeling breathless herself. “What I meant was . . . why?”
Cedric paused then, and it occurred to Liv that he was fighting for the right first words, too. That he was just as excited, just as nervous that they were actually, truly standing across from each other. And it suddenly didn’t matter what he had to say.
“You know what? Forget it. I don’t care why.”
She launched herself at him.
Before he could move, her arms went around the shoulders she thought she’d never touch again, her fingers moved through the hair she thought she’d never feel again. Cedric’s hands met around her waist, his fingers gathering at the small of her back. He pulled her in tight, and then her face was angling up to his, and their lips were a breath apart, and then that breath was gone.
She didn’t think about it, or question it, or worry what would happen next. She just kissed him, and he kissed her back. Everything that wasn’t his lips or his hands floated from her mind, and at the moment she didn’t care if it ever came back.
Because Cedric was here. Finally, finally here.
When the ground started shaking, it knocked them off their feet. Just like when they’d first met, they fell together to the cement before they could catch their balance, though this time Liv barely felt it at all.