Henry Martin was dead.
He was lying on the living room floor of the OC house, his body half on the rug, one foot extended into the fireplace. A pool of blood was congealing under his head.
Liv stared down at him, a wave of nausea overtaking her. If she didn’t sit down soon, she was definitely going to throw up. But she couldn’t move. For two whole months, her mission had been clear: find the Knight called Martin, then save the city. Maybe the world. And after all that searching, she’d finally found him. He’d been on the verge of giving them the answers they needed, and now . . .
He wouldn’t be giving them anything now.
Liv had hit a wall—in more ways than one—and she didn’t know what to do next. Her whole body was still as she stared at the unmoving form of Henry Martin. Or what was Henry Martin. Another dead Knight. So many dead Knights.
“What do we do now?” she whispered, then swallowed against the bile rising in her throat. She sensed that Cedric was moving behind her, but she couldn’t remember what he was doing. Looking for something? She should help him, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t tear her eyes away from their last chance to fix things, lying dead at her feet.
“Liv.” She heard Cedric behind her, urgent, low. “We have to find those car keys. The wraths will be back at any second. Where are keys generally stored?”
Liv’s mind spun. It felt like her thoughts were whirring around her, and she was unable to catch and hold on to a single one. Her tongue felt thick. She really needed to sit down.
“Liv?” That urgent voice again. More footsteps. Out of the corner of her eye, Liv saw Cedric pick up a vaseful of fake flowers and empty it, then look inside.
“The keys, Liv. We need those keys.”
Liv swayed on her feet. She was going down. She lowered herself, as gently as she could, to her knees. She was careful to keep away from the pool of blood. Her eyes stayed transfixed on Henry Martin, on their last hope.
“Please,” Cedric said, kneeling down low across from her, on the other side of the body. “I know you’re upset, but we have to leave.”
Liv knew she had to focus, had to concentrate. . . . Her hand went to the edge of Henry Martin’s pants pocket, and she realized she wasn’t breathing. If she exhaled now, she would definitely throw up. Carefully, keeping her line of sight just a few inches above the spot where Henry Martin lay, she reached her hand into his pocket. Her fingers closed firmly over a thin piece of metal, and she forced herself to pull them out again.
She splayed her palm, holding the keys up to Cedric. He looked down at them for a moment, eyes wide now with amazement.
“Let’s go,” he said, gently. “Can you stand?”
She could.
It was barely nighttime, but the Malibu house was already dark. Or maybe it just felt dark. Liv’s nausea had been gone for a few hours, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of low-level dread that had crept in just under her skin.
She’d managed to stay awake enough to guide Cedric back to Malibu, even stopping at a pay phone to call the police in Orange County and give them an anonymous tip about Henry Martin.
As soon as they got back to the house, Joe and the others had immediately taken out the first-aid kit and seen to Cedric’s and Liv’s wounds. Fortunately, the gash on Cedric’s leg wouldn’t need stitches, and Liv had only suffered a bump on the head. After some aspirin and water and a few hours’ rest she was feeling physically better, though Joe told her she’d have to stay awake for the next twenty-four hours just in case she had a concussion.
Which gave her plenty of time to think of all the ways they were screwed.
“Did Henry Martin have anything with him? Any papers or books, anything that might help us?” Joe asked. He was sitting in an armchair in the Malibu house. Liv, Cedric, Merek, Shannon, and Peter sat scattered nearby.
Liv shook her head gently. “We didn’t have time to look.”
“The car we took was his,” Cedric added. “But there was nothing inside apart from an old bagful of clothes.”
Joe’s shoulders fell as he leaned back against his chair.
“Henry Martin talked about a way of bringing magic back to Earth permanently—restoring the balance to stop all this destruction,” Liv said, repeating the information she’d already told them all. “He just didn’t get a chance to tell us how.”
“The how is kind of important,” Shannon put in from her spot on the floor, where she was eating from a can of cold SpaghettiOs with a spoon.
“Kind of very important,” Liv said.
“Did he say anything else? Anything at all?” Joe asked.
Liv tried to remember. She still wasn’t thinking as clearly as she could; her head felt like it was wrapped in gauze, her thoughts muted. “We need to use the magic to do it, that’s all he said.”
“He also mentioned that Liv is a scroll,” Cedric said, leaning forward from his spot next to her on the couch. He hadn’t left her side since helping her out of Henry Martin’s house. “He said it as though . . . as though she would be important in fixing things.”
“Hold on.” Peter said. “Didn’t Malquin tell you before, Liv, that there’s a little bit of magic inside of us? The Knights put it there in our markings to open the first portal. And maybe there’s a way they can use it now, manipulate it somehow . . . ?” Peter’s voice trailed off. He didn’t have the answers they needed—the only person who had those answers was gone.
“Manipulating magic . . .” Cedric’s voice was low, almost as though he were talking to himself. “Mathilde said something like that to me. She said that when the Knights first created the portal to Caelum all those generations ago, they did it by manipulating magic. It took hundreds of them, she said, and they accidentally created a whole world instead of just opening a portal to one, but they were able to use their belief in magic to get it done.”
“Well, if Knights hundreds of years ago could use magic to do what they wanted, why can’t they do it now?” Shannon asked. “I’m sure they’d help us if it meant keeping the world from being destroyed.”
“You mean the Knights who’ve been mysteriously disappearing and showing up dead for the past two months?” Merek asked.
“Oh . . . yeah.”
“Malquin is definitely behind that,” Liv said. “Those wraths who showed up were looking for one of the Knights of Valere who lived there, a woman. They’d already . . . turned . . . her husband.”
She fought back a shudder, thinking of the fair-haired Knight with his black eyes. It was hard to believe he’d been a man just recently.
“We still do not know how Malquin is managing that. Turning humans into wraths?” Merek asked.
“I think the how is less important than the why,” Cedric said.
“He’s right,” Liv added. “It’s not just one lone Knight they’ve turned anymore—Malquin’s up to something. And it can’t be something good.”
“I can ask him,” Joe said, his voice ringing out clear in the stifling room.
“Joe, you can’t,” Liv said. “We don’t even know where he is.”
“He might even be in Caelum,” Cedric put in, his voice still tight.
“That’s true, I forgot,” Liv added. “The wraths . . . my head was kind of fuzzy at the time, but right after they took me, they said something about going to a castle . . . Malquin might not even be in LA anymore.”
“He still has wraths here looking for you . . . and he knows I’d stay with you, which means they’ll be looking for me, too,” Joe said. “My old apartment, my work—if they’re tracking me at all, I can find them, and get to John—”
“Even if you could, Joe, we have no idea how many wraths are working with him,” Liv said. She felt her voice growing louder, more anxious. She just couldn’t risk it, losing Joe to Malquin. “The ones we came across today, they weren’t messing around.”
“We barely got away,” Cedric replied. “And Henry Martin didn’t.”
Joe sucked in a breath, but pushed on. “I hear what you’re saying, but . . . I might be able to reach him. I’m his brother.”
“And he’s a killer.”
“So was Henry Martin, and we were going to trust him,” Joe said.
“It’s not the same, Joe,” she said gently. “What Henry did was a horrible thing, but Malquin . . . he has no remorse for anything. He’ll never help us, and he’ll kill again; I know he will. He could kill you.”
For a moment, Joe looked like he was going to continue arguing. But finally, he sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “You’re right. It’s not worth it.”
A tense silence fell over the room.
“Okay,” Liv said slowly, trying to get the conversation back on track. “So Malquin is turning the Knights into wraths. And we need the Knights—maybe hundreds of them—in order to manipulate magic. In order to, somehow, create a spell or something that will stop the Quelling, turning off the planet’s giant immune system and saving both worlds.”
Liv paused to look at the others.
“I’m following you,” Peter said, nodding.
“Okay, so . . . let’s say we somehow manage to find that many . . . we track down those who haven’t been killed or kidnapped or turned, and we get them to help us.”
“Right,” Shannon said.
“Then what?” Liv asked. “How would we actually do this?”
Once again, silence fell over the room. No one had an answer.
As they sat in the darkness, the heat seemed to press down on them more with every passing second. The orange sky turned darker and more sickly-looking outside. They’d already run out of answers.
And soon, they would run out of time.