Deep into the early hours of morning, Liv was having trouble keeping herself awake. The temperature in the small bedroom seemed to only be going up, and even though she’d kicked the sheets off long ago, her tank top and shorts were stuck to her body. Part of her longed to get up, but a bigger part wanted to stay exactly where she was—curled up on her side with Cedric lying at her back. One of his long arms stretched over the space between her ribs and her hips. The weight of it was immensely comforting, like hot cocoa on a rainy day, but times a thousand.
Even though he’d tried—pretty valiantly—to stay awake, Cedric had eventually faded. Liv had meant to wake him, but she didn’t want to move, didn’t want to stop feeling his long, even breaths hit her skin at the exact place where her hair met her neck. She wanted to just lie here like this, safe, until the sky turned back to blue and the world turned back to normal.
And then maybe a few days more.
A bead of sweat dripped down her forehead, and Liv very gently moved her arm to wipe it away. That’s when she saw a flash of yellow light come through the window and scan across the wall. It almost looked like—headlights?
Joe.
The thought came to her instantly, and she knew it was true before she sat up carefully to look out the window to see the familiar Jeep in the driveway, lights on. Liv couldn’t see through the darkened windshield, but she knew it was Joe in there. And, in a flash, she knew where he was going.
Idiot, she thought. How could she have believed that Joe would give up on his plan to find his brother and talk some reason into him? Joe thought every problem in the world could be solved by talking reasonably. She thought back to how easily he’d given in when they’d tried to convince him not to find his brother. Of course he was going to do it anyway. Wouldn’t she have done the same reckless thing if one of her own siblings were on the line?
She carefully and quietly slipped off the bed and toward the door. Cedric rolled over once, snorting as he did so, and Liv wanted to smile at how innocent and ordinary he looked, lying on a tiny twin bed under a video game poster. It was hard to believe the boy lying in that bed was a king. Harder still to believe he could in any way be hers.
She thought for a moment about waking him up, but she knew the only person who could stop Joe from leaving was her.
So, tearing her gaze away from Cedric, Liv opened the door and sped lightly through the house and out the front door.
The Jeep’s headlights were focused directly on her, so she had to lift her hand up to her eyes to try to see through the windshield. She knew that, inside, Joe could see her. After a few seconds, the door opened and he stepped out.
“Joe,” Liv said, moving forward carefully on bare feet. “Please don’t do this.”
She could only see Joe’s frame silhouetted against the rust-brown sky. His head dipped down, but he didn’t come closer.
“I can’t imagine what you must be feeling right now,” Liv went on. “And I know that you want to reach Mal . . . John. I know that because it’s what you do, every day. You try to save people. Like you always saved me.”
Liv’s voice broke as she thought about how in the past ten years, after all the stupid stunts she’d pulled—running from foster homes, living on the street, lying, taking off to other worlds—Joe had never given up on her. Even in a foster system that seemed so impersonal, he’d always been a caring force. He’d always understood why she hated getting new placements and having to change schools, why she hated having every decision made for her.
So how could she turn around and tell him that he should ignore every instinct that made him . . . him? How could she try to make this decision for him, when she knew exactly how terrible that felt?
And yet, how could she let him go after Malquin and get himself killed? Even if it wasn’t fair, she had to try. She had to beg.
“But, Joe . . . we can’t lose you from this fight. I can’t lose you.”
Liv took another step forward at the same time Joe sighed. He looked off in the distance past Liv, as if he were looking for answers in the ocean waves, and then he nodded. Hope flared up inside of her. But as she took another step closer, Joe moved back, reaching a hand toward the Jeep’s door handle.
“Please,” Liv said, hearing the desperation in her voice. “Please, Joe, please don’t try to find him.”
That’s when Joe froze. Liv moved around the front of the Jeep, finally out of the glare of the headlights. Joe turned toward her, one hand still on the door handle.
“Too late,” he said.
Despite the sweltering heat, everything in Liv’s body turned to ice. That voice—it wasn’t Joe’s voice. It might have sounded like him, but it was—empty. Like it was lacking a key element. The element of Joe.
Without breathing, Liv took one more step forward, and that’s when she saw his eyes. Not the warm brown eyes she’d known for years. These eyes were hollow. Vacant.
Pools of inky black.
Liv felt like her brain was short-circuiting. She couldn’t move to run, she couldn’t remember to breathe. Her mouth opened, and she thought she might scream. But that’s when heavy arms circled her from behind, clamping a large cloth over her mouth. She tried to fight back, kicking and yelling and scratching, but the arms were too strong.
As she struggled, the thing in front of her that was no longer Joe calmly opened up the back door of the Jeep.
Liv stayed conscious during the entire ride through the abandoned, darkened streets of LA. Her mouth, hands, and feet were tightly bound. The creatures in the Jeep hadn’t thought to cover her eyes, though, and she could see every turn they took as they made their way slowly through the city.
Joe sat right next to Liv, and she couldn’t stop herself from trying to look into his eyes. He had to be in there somewhere, still . . . didn’t he? She willed him to look at her so she could see something, anything there she recognized. The disappointment when she did something stupid, the anger when a foster family treated her poorly, the guilt when he’d first told her about his past. But there were no emotions in Joe’s eyes—there was nothing.
How was this possible? How could this monster be wearing Joe’s face? Liv thought she’d already felt the worst pain in her life the day her parents were killed. But this, to see Joe sitting next to her, there but gone, that was a new kind of pain.
If her mouth hadn’t been gagged, she would have screamed herself raw. But instead, all that came out was a muffled, moaning noise. Not-Joe had to have heard her, but he made zero reaction. He sat, stiff, eyes forward, for the entire ride.
Liv couldn’t remember ever feeling so alone.
And the others were sleeping in the house, maybe for hours. No one even knew she’d gone. She imagined Cedric waking up to an empty spot next to him, going to look for her, finding nothing there. What would he think?
Eventually, the Jeep turned onto Melrose Avenue. It made its way past darkened and shuttered boutiques and vegan restaurants, past abandoned cars and tipped-over trash cans. Down one side street, Liv could see another Gravity Incident, marked off with caution tape. She could just barely make out a park bench floating in the air before they passed it.
The Jeep slowed as it neared a tall green hedge lining the side of the road and then turned into a business driveway. In front of them was a small guard hut with a long wooden arm that was meant to raise and lower to let people onto the property. Only the arm had clearly been smashed through, and was now just a broken piece of wood dangling onto the pavement. The car made its way toward the guard hut quickly, driving under a large double-arch bearing a familiar sign in cursive: “Paramount Studios.”
“What the—?” Liv mumbled into her gag.
No one answered her.
Just months before, it would have been a dream come true for Liv to finally be on the grounds of an actual movie studio. But now, the moment barely counted as surreal. Just like everywhere else in the city, the studio lot was abandoned. Liv highly doubted anyone would have stuck around a semi-apocalypse just to finish up reshoots on the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel.
Some golf carts were strewn along the side of the street, and a giant parking lot sat mostly empty, the Paramount water tower standing tall like a defunct sentinel. They made their way past tan-colored buildings and an entire backlot designed to look like a New York City block before stopping in front of a massive building labeled “Stage 18.”
Joe barely looked at Liv as he hauled her out of the Jeep, the other wrath following behind. He pushed her through a small side door in the soundstage.
The interior of the stage was enormous, one large room that was three stories high, with metal rafters barely visible in the ceiling. But what caught Liv’s attention wasn’t just the scope of the room, but what was inside of it.
A castle.
It sprouted up in the middle of the room, its tallest spires reaching nearly to the top of the ceiling. With its stone walls, battlements, and thick wooden doors, it looked like it belonged in Caelum. It could practically pass for a mini replica of Cedric’s home.
That is, until Liv looked closer and was able to take in more detail—how some parts of the castle ceiling were completely gone, revealing the sets in the rooms below, and how other parts of the ceiling were covered in cardboard. How the blue sky surrounding the castle was painted onto a backdrop. How one of the giant wooden doors was ripped in half, revealing its white Styrofoam center. Up close, it was easy to see how fake everything really was. Not that it mattered, really—the danger was just as real.
The room teemed with wraths, more than Liv could count. Some stood apart; some stood in groups. Some chatted with one another; some scowled alone. A few sparred while others tore into the bags of potato chips that covered a table at the far end of the room. Liv’s heart dropped. Even if Cedric and the others had realized she was gone by now (which seemed unlikely, given that it was still the dead of night), and even if they could figure out where she was (unlikelier), they would never be able to take on this many wraths themselves. They’d be massacred.
Just as Liv was getting her bearings, Joe threw her down to the cement floor, hard. With her hands still bound, her elbows took most of the hit, and she cried out against her gag as a sharp pain shot up her arm. Her head landed on something crinkly, and she turned to get a closer look.
It was a script, crumpled and half-torn. The title page read “KING ARTHUR VS. THE UNDEAD.” Liv vaguely remembered reading about the project on Deadline—some sort of zombie retelling of Camelot. She had thought it sounded kind of cool at the time.
Suddenly, the script was pulled out from under Liv’s head. She tilted up as far as she could to see someone walk past her.
It was Malquin. He barely cast her a second glance, instead sneering at the script’s title page with disdain.
“Can you believe this garbage? I suppose it makes sense, given that its executive producer was secretly a member of a fanatical cult bent on killing magical children. That kind of multitasking leads to shoddy work,” he said, throwing the script back to the ground. “At least he let me know about this place. Before he died.”
Liv tried to yell against her gag, but Malquin just talked over her.
“But honestly, I can’t believe what’s happened to cinema in the years I’ve been away. As if the glut of superhero movies wasn’t enough, now there’s all this zombie tripe. It’s almost enough to make me wish I’d stayed in a medieval dimension with no plumbing.”
Liv scoffed. Malquin tipped his head toward Joe, who knelt down and undid the knot of the fabric tied around Liv’s jaw. She carefully kept her gaze averted as Joe knelt down, knowing that if she looked into the blankness of his eyes, she’d start to cry again.
Instead, she forced herself to look up to Malquin. “Of course you’d be a movie snob. You’re evil.”
Malquin gave a tinkling little laugh. “Evil? I guess I understand how you’d believe that, what with you being tied up on the floor at my feet. But, Liv, try to see things from my side, would you? ‘Evil’ is a bit strong. Just look at everything I’ve done for these wraths! I brought them to a whole new world, and I even set up base in this falling-down joke of a prop to make them feel a little more at home. Because I care.”
Liv gritted her teeth. “And what you did to Joe? He’s your brother.”
Malquin shrugged. “My brother is perfectly fine. He’s standing right there, as you can see.”
“That’s not Joe,” Liv whispered.
“Well, that’s a matter of opinion,” Malquin replied. “I could have killed Joe after how he abandoned me. I should have. I knew he would come crawling back eventually, looking to apologize, looking to ‘save’ me. Took longer than I thought it would, honestly. I was just about to tell the wraths staking out his apartment to give up. And then he shows up tonight, sure enough, looking for me. Like I knew he would. All these years later, and I still know exactly what my little brother will do to ease some of his own guilt. It was my right to do whatever I wanted with him, and I showed him mercy. Which, again, supports my not being evil.”
“Joe had—has—nothing to feel guilty for,” Liv said, again carefully avoiding looking in Joe’s direction. As long as she kept her Joe and whatever this creature was separate in her mind, she’d avoid dissolving into a useless mess.
Malquin’s eyes narrowed. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. But he was angry now—and talking. Liv knew how he loved to talk. As soon as Malquin looked over at Not-Joe, Liv tried quietly shifting her hands around, hoping there was some way to get a finger or two free from the ropes that bound her without drawing the attention of any nearby wraths.
Malquin was still looking at Joe with disdain. But the thing that used to be Joe stood, solid and indifferent, under his brother’s glare. “Things would have been so different if he’d just come with me when he said he would. The two of us together in Caelum, looking out for each other, helping each other . . . but he left me to go alone.”
Malquin glanced at his own withered arm, and his expression turned stony. But in a blink, it softened, and he shook his head as if shaking off a negative thought.
“But that’s not even the worst of it. An instant of cowardice? That, I could maybe forgive. But he knew what was happening here. He knew the Knights were bent on killing more scrolls. Just like they killed Eric. And he did nothing to stop them.”
Wrath Joe continued staring forward. If any of Malquin’s words were affecting him, he didn’t let it show.
“That’s not true,” Liv spat. If Joe couldn’t defend himself, the least she could do was speak up for him. “He saved me and my brother and sister—”
“Did he?” Malquin said. “He separated you, lied to you, put you into different homes. And how did your life go then, Liv? What was it like growing up without parents?”
Liv stopped pulling against her bindings, her whole body going still.
“Do you know they might still be alive if Joe had just fulfilled the promise we made to each other?”
Malquin was watching her with a kind of burning intensity that made her feel pinned to the ground, like an ant struggling under a magnifying glass in the heat of the sun.
“After Eric died, Joe and I made a promise that nothing like that would ever happen again. We wouldn’t let the Knights hurt us—us or anyone else. But after I went through the portal, Joe let that promise die. Instead of eradicating the Knights, he hid. He kept them a secret, even when they kept killing. So every single body the Knights have piled up since is on his head.” Malquin swiveled to Liv. “Even your parents’.”
Liv’s breath caught in her throat, and she struggled to find a response.
“You still think I’m the evil one?” Malquin asked.
Liv shook her head. “That’s not . . . it’s not his fault.” But her words came out shaky, and she avoided looking at Not-Joe.
“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t,” Malquin continued. “But I won’t let the Knights live to hurt a single more person. I’ll admit it took years—and a lot of mistakes—but I finally have the power necessary to eradicate their organization entirely. And to make sure it never returns.”
Liv looked at the looming shadows against the walls of the castle set. The wrath army.
“I will get payback for Eric and for everyone else they ever hurt. Every family they destroyed.”
This time it was Liv who kept her eyes trained on the floor as Malquin peered at her. She wanted to block out his words as much as she wanted him to keep talking. The Knights had killed her parents. And they deserved . . .
She thought of the professor, lying cold and dead on the floor of a cave. Did he deserve that? For being part of an organization that killed children, that killed her parents?
Yes, came the voice from inside of her. An angry voice. She physically shook her head to keep it away.
Malquin still frowned down at her. “As you know, my original plans to bring the wraths through a giant, permanent portal and have them destroy the Knights . . . went awry.” Malquin waved a hand. “But my actions had a rather exciting side effect, as it turns out. The second I got back to Caelum, I made my way to the castle portal. I came through again to check on my scattered army here, and saw instantly what had become of Los Angeles—what we had done together, Liv. We’ve changed the entire world! And finally, finally, the power I sought all those years ago in Caelum—it’s here. It’s all around us.”
This time, Liv shook her head in confusion. Malquin seemed disappointed that she wasn’t catching on to what he was saying.
“Don’t you see?” he asked, his voice dripping more with condescension than excitement. “It’s the magic, Liv. Magic that we brought back to Earth, you and I.”
“You mean the magic that’s ruining the city, throwing off the balance, destroying the world? How is that going to help you against the Knights?”
“How?” Malquin asked. “However we want. It’s magic. As a scroll, I thought you’d have a bit of imagination. Don’t tell me you’re just as bad as every terrified Angeleno who ran at the sight of anything new or different.”
“New or different?” Liv retorted. “The sky is practically on fire. There’s an earthquake every few hours. Gravity’s just . . . not working—”
“I know!” Malquin yelled. “Isn’t it amazing?”
Liv just shook her head, at a loss for words. She knew Malquin was crazy, but this . . . this was crazy crazy.
“Anything could happen! Magic is back in our world, Liv. Which means that anyone who figures out how to use it might have power. Real power. Not just the power to find and destroy the Knights—though that’s certainly been my first priority. But now we have the power to really change, well . . . everything.” As he spoke, Malquin gestured to Joe and the wraths around him.
“So it’s true. You used magic to do this to them. To turn men into monsters.”
“And they’re just the beginning. Just the start of what I can do. I’m going to remake the whole world, Liv. Into whatever I want it to be, into what it should be. And you’re going to help me.”
Malquin looked at Liv, his face lit up like an overzealous TV game show host. He looked almost insane. Except Liv knew he wasn’t—everything he was talking about was possible. Magic was back on Earth, and Malquin had figured out how to use it first. And Joe was standing there, his black eyes proof of everything Malquin could do.
And, as if to highlight his point at just that moment, the world around Liv started to shake. Malquin lifted his arms above his head, as if he were an orchestra conductor leading the earthquake. He closed his eyes, almost serene, and smiled.