Teaching Cedric to drive a moped turned out to be much easier than teaching him to drive a car. The trickiest part was navigating where he would put his sword. This time, Liv knew better than to ask him to leave it behind. Getting pulled over and arrested by the police or an evacuation crew was possible, of course, but then again, having to use the sword to defend themselves was also a possibility.
That morning, Joe had consulted the list of leads he had left and divided the group into teams. Shannon and Merek were taking her van north to a doctor’s office in Thousand Oaks. It was a slim lead—the doctor’s office had been scribbled on a piece of paper left behind in a Knight’s abandoned house, and might just as easily be the man’s actual doctor as a clue to tracking down more Knights. Liv and Cedric were on their way to a home in Orange County that may or may not have been rented by a Knight at one point in the early 2000s, according to some old tax papers Joe had found in a former Knight’s filing cabinet.
Joe’s leads were definitely dwindling, and Liv had never felt farther from finding Martin.
Still, her spirits weren’t exactly low as she motored south along an empty highway, Cedric at her side. It was still hard to believe he was actually back, and she had to look over at him every few moments just to confirm he was still there.
Cedric caught Liv looking at her and smiled. He yelled something out, but his voice was swallowed by the wind.
“What?” Liv called.
Cedric shouted again, but again, she couldn’t hear. But she could tell from the excitement on his face that he liked riding the moped. He was taking to it much better than Merek, who scowled every time he had to approach the bike’s thin seat.
As they neared Orange County, the orange-ish color in the sky started to thin out, looking first yellow, then fading into a more normal blue. The lead they were chasing was firmly out of Apocalypse Zone, and the OC hadn’t felt many of the effects of the earthquakes. Still, the city roads were much emptier on a weekday afternoon than normal.
Unlike Los Angeles, with its twisty-crowded streets and buildings spanning from 1970s bungalows to modern skyscrapers to actual glass houses, Orange County was almost entirely uniform in its design. Its streets were wide and clean, and its neighborhoods were orderly. The buildings in the strip malls were all painted the same shades of white and tan, and they all had the same red tile roofs. Even the KFC looked classy.
“Weird,” Liv murmured to herself, looking around. Orange County seemed as different a world from LA as Caelum had.
Liv motioned with her head for Cedric to follow her, then pulled over into a giant parking lot surrounded by well-manicured shrubs and palm trees. Cedric pulled his moped over next to her.
“These are so much better than horses,” he said, grinning.
Liv couldn’t help but smile back. “Thought you might like it. We should be pretty close to the house from here. Snack?”
She motioned to the pack on her moped, but Cedric shook his head. “No, but a moment’s rest would be good. I feel as though my legs are vibrating.”
They both straddled their mopeds, only a couple feet apart from each other. It would be nothing for him to lean over and close the gap between them, nothing at all . . .
Instead, Cedric leaned back a fraction. “Liv.”
She tensed and looked away, not sure she was ready to hear what he was going to say. Emotional reunion make-outs aside, he was still a king in another world, and she was committed to staying in this one. There were so many things she wanted to tell him, but the second they started that conversation again, she knew where it would lead. Whenever they were honest with each other, it seemed to close doors rather than open them.
And she wasn’t ready for that yet. Not so soon after she’d gotten him back.
So she pretended she didn’t hear him, instead looking quickly away to check the map in her pack. Without the use of GPS, she’d had to pull over every twenty minutes or so to make sure they were still heading in the right direction.
“Looks like the house is just on the next street up,” she said, pointing to the starred location on the map.
He looked a bit startled, but then nodded. And when she started her moped up again, he did the same, following just a few feet behind. Liv led him down a wide and perfectly manicured side street, where white stucco houses lined the road like a row of sturdy wedding cakes. She tried to get her mind back to the task at hand as she stopped in front of their destination, noting its functioning sprinkler system and the Lexus in the driveway.
“That’s strange.”
“Water spraying from the ground?” Cedric asked, eyeing the sprinklers with suspicion. “Definitely strange.”
“Yeah. I mean, no, sprinklers are normal. But every other lead we’ve chased down has led to abandoned properties or . . . worse. It looks like someone’s actually home here.”
“Is that not a good thing?”
“Maybe. One way to find out, I guess.”
She hopped off her moped and made her way up the front walk. What would she say if someone answered the door? In all their searching over the past two months, she hadn’t yet encountered a living person, one who might actually know something helpful.
Liv stood in front of the door, her hand poised near a brass knocker. Cedric raised his eyebrows. “Well?”
“Give me a sec. And also maybe hide your sword?” He quickly stashed it behind a bush near the front door. Now there was nothing left to do but knock.
The man who answered the door was not at all what Liv was expecting. He looked to be in his mid-sixties, and he wore an old newsboy cap and a bow tie along with a freshly pressed shirt. His eyes narrowed under bushy white brows as he peered out the door.
“Yes? What?” he asked, though his gruff voice sounded more like a demand than a question.
“Um, hi?” Liv said, immediately cursing her shaky voice. She tried to sound more serious. “My name is Liv, and this is Cedric. I was wondering if we could ask you a few questions?”
“I’m not interested in buying anything,” the man said, already starting to shut the door.
“Right, well, we’re not selling anything,” Liv answered quickly. “We’re actually looking for someone who used to live in this house. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago?”
“Can’t help you there. Just moved in myself.”
“Really?” Liv asked. She looked down to the welcome mat under her feet. It was faded, its edges covered in dirt. It looked a lot like the mat that Liv’s most recent foster mom, Rita, had had outside her front door for years.
The man’s eyes narrowed again. His liver-spotted hand trembled a bit on the doorknob. “Yes,” he said. “Really. Now, I am quite busy this morning, so—”
“It’s just . . . ,” Liv said, stepping just a bit closer to keep the man from closing the door on her. “We’ve come a long way, and we only have a few questions. They’re about what’s been going on in Los Angeles. We’re looking for a way to help.”
The man gave no reaction to Liv’s words. When she mentioned Los Angeles, he looked as blank as if she’d said she needed to get a haircut.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said. “And like I said, I can’t help you.”
The man avoided her eyes, and Liv knew, in her gut, that she was missing something important here. She decided to just take a stab and see—
“We’re looking for a Knight of Valere.”
For the briefest moment, the old man flinched. And Liv knew.
“You’ve heard of them, haven’t you? Did one used to live here?” Liv asked, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice. “Or maybe, are you—”
“Who are you? What do you want?” the man barked. His hand gripped harder on the door edge, and Liv got the impression he was much stronger than he seemed. “Answer me now or I call the police.”
“We just want to talk,” Liv said, stepping forward, and Cedric moved to put his own arm and shoulder against the door.
“I will call 911, I swear,” the man said.
Cedric turned to Liv. “You are sure about this?”
No. But it was worth trying. She nodded.
Cedric pushed his way into the house, forcing the old man to take a few steps back. Liv followed, watching as the man’s expression morphed from confusion to rage. His cheeks turned red. She felt guilty, but she still followed Cedric inside. She couldn’t just walk away from the first lead that might have actually led to something.
“Please,” Liv said, trying to sound as nonthreatening as possible. “It’s like I said—we just want to ask you a few questions. Questions that might help save the world.”
The old man just stared at her from under his bushy eyebrows, his mouth opening and closing slightly.
“Liv,” Cedric said, his voice low and near her ear. He motioned to the living room behind the old man. Liv looked around the room with its tasteful pink couches sitting on a spotless rug. Above the mantel was a row of framed photos—all of a man and a woman, both fair-haired and in their mid-thirties. One of the man and woman together, one of the man holding a diploma, one of the woman petting a dog. Liv looked all around the room at the various framed photos—all of them had the same couple. In front of her, the old man was following her gaze, his face now going white.
“Whose house is this?” Liv asked.
“Now . . . now just a minute,” the man said, pointing a finger at Liv. “You can’t just come in here and . . . and . . .”
“What happened to the people in those photos? Where are they?”
“I’m not saying anything. Not till you tell me who you are.”
“I’m Liv, like I said. Liv Phillips.”
“That means nothing to me.” The man jutted his chin up. Liv made a quick calculation—on the one hand, there was something shady about this old man being in a house that was clearly not his. But on the other hand, if he had information . . . . She had to take the risk.
Liv looked to Cedric once, but there was no way to warn him what she was going to say.
“I’m a scroll. Does that mean anything to you?”
The man’s eyes widened, his eyebrows shooting so far up they almost met his hairline.
“See?” Liv turned around, pulling down the back collar of her shirt so the man could see her “tattoo.”
“A scroll,” the man whispered, staring at Liv in something like awe.
“So you have heard of them, then,” Cedric said.
The man hesitated a moment, as if he were debating whether or not to be as honest as Liv had been. But then he nodded. “I have not seen a scroll in a very long time.”
“We’re here because we need to find the Knights of Valere,” Liv went on in a rush. “They might have some of the answers we need to fix what’s going on in LA. But everywhere we look for them, we find—”
“Bodies,” the old man finished. “Yes, that’s what I have been finding, too.”
This time, Liv was the one to look confused. “You’ve been looking for the Knights?”
The old man sighed, then sat heavily on the couch. He looked around the empty, sanitized living room. “I knew a portal must have opened—maybe more than one—with what was going on in the city. I started looking for the Knights again, after all this time, just to see what was really happening. But everywhere I went, I came across this instead”—he gestured around the room—“abandoned houses. And dead bodies.”
“We must have been on the same trail,” Liv said. “So the people who own this house . . .”
“Were Knights, yes. Though not as active as most. And they were gone before I got here, a few days ago,” the old man said. “Left in a hurry, too, it looks like. No sign of a struggle, but some lights were left on; the mail keeps coming. The sprinklers keep turning on. Like they just walked out in the middle of the day and kept going.”
Goose bumps rose up on Liv’s arm. She looked to Cedric, but he was staring at the man intently. “What did you mean when you said you were looking for Knights ‘after all this time’?” he asked.
The old man waved a dismissive hand. “It doesn’t matter.”
But Liv was starting to pick up on Cedric’s train of thought. “It might,” she said. “We’re looking for one former Knight in particular—one who knows about the portals. Someone called Martin.”
The man’s mouth fell slightly open, and his shocked expression was all the confirmation Liv needed. She felt a rush of excitement. Finally, after all these weeks, the man she’d been searching for was right in front of her.
“Where did you get that name?” he asked.
“From another Knight,” Liv said, her voice shaking a bit as she thought of the professor, dead in another world. “One who said Martin could help us fix what was broken. What I helped break.”
The man studied Liv.
“So can you help me?” she asked. “Martin?”
After an agonizingly slow beat, he nodded. “Yes,” Martin said. “I think I can. And it’s Henry. Henry Martin.”
The relief Liv felt was so overpowering, her eyes actually closed for a few seconds. She’d found him. Martin was here. And now she’d be able to fix everything she’d broken.
“Do you know how to close the portals?” she asked.
Henry shook his head. “It’s too late for that.”
Liv’s heart sank.
“The magic from the other world is already here,” Henry continued. “Our world’s already fighting it. Closing the portals won’t stop what’s already started.”
“So what can we do? We were told you could help us.”
Henry’s thick eyebrows drew together. “When I was a Knight, there were certain theories I was interested in. Research into historical legends most Knights had long forgotten. I started to look into them after . . . well, it’s not worth getting into.”
“After you killed a child,” Liv said. Her words sounded blunt, but she didn’t think it was right for him to gloss over that part of his story—that part of Joe’s story as well.
Henry looked momentarily shocked at her words, and then he shrank back against the couch cushions. “There is no excuse for what I did,” he continued. “I could argue how much we believed . . . as Knights, we truly thought we had to eliminate the scrolls to save the world. It wasn’t until I actually had to do it that I questioned everything. . . .” He trailed off, though his lips kept moving silently, searching for the words that would never be enough. “I still see his face every day. Every minute.” Henry kept his eyes not on Liv, but on the ground. But she didn’t want to hear his apologies. They were for Joe, not her.
“That was when I left the Knights. I wanted to search for another way to end the threat that portals and magic posed to Earth.”
“And you found it?” Liv prompted. “A way to keep portals from hurting Earth?”
“It’s a long shot. All those years of research, and all I have is a theory. A hunch. It’s the magic. We can’t overlook the magic.”
“Trust me, we’re definitely not,” Liv said.
But Henry went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Our world’s not used to magic anymore, and that’s why it’s causing so much destruction.”
“Right, because it’s sneezing,” Liv said, remembering how the professor had described it to her. “We already know that.”
Henry and Cedric both looked at her with puzzled expressions, but she just motioned for the older man to continue.
“But what if the Earth didn’t view magic as a threat? What if there was a way to properly restore the balance between nature and magic that once existed here?”
He paused to let this idea sink in.
“So . . . keep the magic here? Like, for good?” Liv asked. “What would that even look like?”
Henry shrugged. “I don’t know. All I have is a theory on how to do it. And now that we have you, an actual scroll, we might truly be able to stop what’s happening before it gets worse—”
Henry stopped talking, his body going tense. Liv followed his gaze to the door on the other side of the room, where Cedric was already headed.
“What?” she asked.
But Cedric raised his hand, cutting her off. He walked quietly, pausing in front of the mostly closed door. Beyond it, Liv could just make out the edge of what looked like a kitchen counter.
And then she heard the noise.
It was a light scraping, the sound of a door handle turning.
Once again, she felt goose bumps rise on her skin.
“You brought more with you?” Henry asked in a whisper.
Liv shook her head quickly. Before they could do anything—before they could say another word—loud footsteps made their way across the kitchen. Just as Cedric put up a hand to push the door closed, it was slammed open from the other side, knocking him backward.
A man stepped into the doorway, so large he blocked their view of whatever might be standing behind him. But it wasn’t just his size that caught Liv’s attention. It was his eyes—all black.
“Well, look what we got here,” the wrath said. For a moment, Liv thought he was talking to them. Then she heard more footsteps moving through the kitchen. How many wraths were in the house? Two? Three?
Before Liv could think to move, Cedric was darting toward the front door. Belatedly, Liv remembered the sword he’d left just outside. She knew that as long as Cedric could get to his weapon, they might be okay. She’d seen him take on three wraths before.
Cedric ripped the front door open. Standing there, filling up the main doorway, were two more wraths. The one standing closest held a long, silver blade in his hand—Cedric’s sword.
“You were right,” the wrath at the front door said to the creature standing behind him. “Wife did come back.”
The second wrath stepped up, his added bulk blocking out the light from the outside. His eyes narrowed as he took Liv in, his mouth twisting up in a sneer. She recognized him just before he spoke.
“That’s not my wife.”
The second wrath was tall, with fair hair and a thin face. The same face that was framed in dozens of places around the living room. Just inches away from Liv, on the side table, was a picture of the fair-haired man on a beach with his arm around a blond woman.
He’d lived here. As a man. But he wasn’t a man anymore. Just like the Knight in the Ralphs’s parking lot, he’d somehow been turned. His black eyes flashed as he tilted his head at her and stepped into the house.
“Course it’s not the wife, idiot,” scoffed the wrath by the kitchen doorway. “Don’t you know anything?”
The first wrath at the front door trained his black eyes on Liv. He smiled. “It’s her, isn’t it?” He smiled. “That’s even better.”
Cedric turned to Liv, but she was already running before a word could come out of his mouth.
Not that there was anywhere to run to. Both doors were blocked. She raced for a window, but the fair-haired wrath grabbed her by the back of her shirt and yanked her off her feet, throwing her down. As she hit the ground, Liv scrabbled for the knife she’d hidden in her boot. She pulled it out a little too quickly, scraping the skin of her ankle. She crawled forward, slicing the knife at the wrath’s calf. He jumped back, clearing the blade by inches. Then he pulled his leg back and kicked out at Liv. His foot hit her shoulder with a painful jolt, and she went flying backward. Her head smacked hard against the wall.
Black dots swam before Liv’s eyes.
“Don’t kill her,” she heard another wrath growl. “Orders.”
The voice sounded fuzzy to Liv, as if it were coming from far away. She looked up, but could barely see Cedric grappling with another wrath, trying to get his sword back. Henry was still on the couch, his hands in the air as if they could protect him from the creatures in the room. As a wrath approached him, she saw Henry reach for a poker from the fireplace and hold it out before him, shaking.
Not that Liv was faring much better with her own weapon. The small knife in her hand felt flimsy, and she suddenly realized that all of her weapons training had been a joke. These creatures were bigger than her, and stronger. And though they weren’t the seven-foot-tall, horned monsters of Caelum, in some ways they were even worse. Because they walked around like men, hiding their true natures underneath. And Liv knew she couldn’t beat them.
Her head felt fuzzy and thick as the fair-haired wrath leaned down to grab her. For a moment it looked like there were two of the same wrath, bending down, getting closer and closer. Only when he was inches from her face did the wrath morph back into one being. Liv heard grunts and a cry, but the shapes behind the wrath were too hazy to make out. She tried blinking, but things weren’t getting clearer.
As the wrath started to haul her up, Liv thrust her hand out one more time, plunging the knife wildly. But it was hard to see where she was aiming. The wrath tried to smash her arm against her side, and then he tried to take her knife. But she wriggled her hand free.
Merek’s words rang, suddenly, in her ears. You have to mean it.
Liv took a deep breath and stabbed toward the wrath’s hand as it reached for her. Stab him, she thought. Mean it. The wrath made a sharp hissing noise, drawing his hand back. She’d done it—she’d hit him.
That’s when she heard the scream.
It wasn’t from the fair-haired wrath she’d stabbed—it was coming from across the room. She looked up just in time to see another wrath twist the fire poker from Henry’s hand. He raised the iron bar high. Liv called out for Cedric, but he was too far away, busy fighting the other three wraths near the kitchen doorway. Liv could only watch as the wrath with the fire poker swung it out wide and brought it down hard over Henry’s skull.
“No!” she screamed. The effort of it caused black dots to swim again before her eyes, so she couldn’t see Henry as he fell—she only heard him hit the ground.
She took one shaky step toward him, but the fair-haired wrath was waiting for her. He grabbed her up, hauling her over his shoulder. Already woozy, Liv’s stomach dropped at the movement. She thought she might throw up. Then the knife was wrenched from her fingers and thrown across the room.
Liv heard Cedric yell her name. She knew he was still in the same room with her, but he sounded so far away. There was movement, so many arms and legs and torsos blocking her line of sight. If she could just see him. If she could just get clear of these wraths, if they could just get back to their mopeds and get away from here . . .
But they were too outnumbered; they had too few weapons. Liv had trouble lifting her gaze up off the floor as her head bounced against the wrath’s back with every step. Soon the wood of the living room changed to the stone of the front steps and then the grass of the front lawn. The grass looked much darker than it had when she’d walked across it not twenty minutes earlier, and it was getting dimmer with every step.
“Liv!”
Someone was shouting. Cedric? Yes. But where was he? She couldn’t see him. She wanted to shout, but her mouth wasn’t working. The grass looked darker, darker, darker still.
She heard her name being screamed—over and over and over—and then everything went black.