But I sure wasn’t going to be the first to bring it up.
“I thought that would just wear off,” I said instead.
“Yes, well, that’s what we told him. But it lasts rather longer on humans, you know, and he was insistent. And after calling up here . . ” He raised an eyebrow, his eyes going around the group.
“Caleb came at my request,” I told him, “to reverse a hex. And the coven leaders are . . . uh. Helping him.”
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t look like he bought it, although the Valkyrie did lower her wand thing. I still didn’t get a good look at it; it disappeared inside her coat faster than a cell phone in the hand of a teenager. Which didn’t make me feel better, since she could obviously take it out again just as quick.
Caleb, on the other hand, looked visibly relieved.
At least until the little witch came back over, looking like she was spoiling for a fight. But despite the wall incident, he wasn’t the target. “Jonas Marsden! Just the man.”
“Beatrice,” he said, sighing.
“I want to know what you think you’re doing, letting this girl go untrained!”
“We are training her,” Jonas said patiently. “But there are priorities—”
“Priorities? Like allowing her to go about completely defenseless?”
“She is hardly that. She has guards, as you can see. And wards. And normally a trusted member of my force is assigned to her, as well—”
“None of which kept us from breaking in here—”
“Yes, well, your skill set is somewhat greater than the norm—”
“—or taking the lobby apart! Where the girl was messing about, completely alone, and completely defenseless—”
“She isn’t as defenseless as she appears, as I believe you discovered. And in any case, what would you have me do? Lock her up?”
“I would have you show some sense! You should have called us in, long before this. Old rivalries are well
and good, but when lives are on the line—”
“You think I would deliberately endanger—”
“I think you have endangered—”
I stopped listening. I wasn’t interested in hearing a bunch of people debate my education or lack thereof. Again. I wasn’t interested in hearing them talk at all.
I was interested in Jules.
“Can you remove the hex or not?” I demanded.
The little witch had been glaring at Jonas. Now she turned the glare on me. For a second, before her eyes softened. “Yes, yes. Well, probably,” she hedged. “But it’s hardly worth the effort—”
“Not worth the effort?” I stared at her.
The room grew suddenly quiet.
“She didn’t mean it like that,” Jasmine said, looking at me with pity in her beautiful eyes.
“Then how exactly did she mean it?”
“You must understand, the spell has already done most of the damage that it was designed to do. Removing it now will prevent more, yes, but . . ”
“But what?”
“But it cannot reverse that which has already been done,” she told me softly. “I am sorry, lady. I do not know of anything that can.”
Chapter Twenty-five
I don’t know what happened then. I wasn’t hearing them anymore. I was hearing Jules. I took care of you. Take care of me.
I knelt on the floor beside him.
The face was bad, but the body wasn’t any better. He had been wearing a nice blue cotton button-down, starched and preppy like the man himself. Now it was almost like it was wearing him, with the fabric all tangled up in the too-smooth skin of his chest. It was as if his body had folded over on itself, like dough in a mixer, and taken pieces of the cotton with it. The area on his shoulders was still mostly intact, mostly normal. But the hands . .
His beautiful hands were all but gone, just two lumps poking up from what had been his stomach, with a few ridges where knuckles had once been. I covered them with my own anyway. Somehow I didn’t mind anymore, didn’t find them alien or horrifying or gross. They were just part of him, part of Jules. That was enough.
I closed my eyes, mainly to shut out the ring of staring faces. And as soon as I did, that feeling of connection strengthened. Maybe it was just my imagination working overtime, but I could swear I felt it: his anger, his confusion, his almost desperate desire to move, to gasp for air he didn’t need, to see—
But mostly, I felt his fear.
It was cold, overwhelming, debilitating, almost as much as what was happening to his body. The spell was cruel; it didn’t bother to trap the mind. Maybe Augustine hadn’t thought it necessary. After all, a human or fey would be dead by now.
But Jules was neither of those things.
And so he was left to drive himself mad on an endless loop of speculation: what if there was no way to reverse this? What if he was trapped like this forever? Hope gone, looks gone, just this piteous and pitied thing, unable to move, to speak, to do anything but scream into a darkness that would never end, and never answer back—
My hands tightened over his, and the torrent suddenly stopped. And then increased, a hundredfold, a wall of babbling, half-mad terror hitting me all at once. I gasped, and opened my eyes to find myself bent over him, sick and dizzy and quietly sobbing, my tears splashing down onto the ruined chest . .
And changing.
Like a drop of rain falling into a lake, the eddies rippled outward, disturbing the flawless flow of the skin, revealing small blemishes in the instant they passed over: a hair, a freckle, a scar. I let go of his hands in surprise, and the skin retained the imprint of my hands for a second. And it, too, looked different, with the knuckles clearly visible in the instant before that eerie nonflesh washed over them again, erasing them as smoothly as footprints in the tide.
It was so quick it made me wonder if I’d imagined it. But no. I scowled at the too-perfect flesh, because I had seen it, if only for an instant. I had seen Jules, inside the body bag his flesh was busy crafting for him.
And somehow I had to find a way to get him out.
I vaguely registered Marco pulling everyone back to the lounge—the witches, the Circle, everyone except for the vampires. This wasn’t for outsiders, if they couldn’t help. This was about family.
Someone dimmed the lights; I don’t know why. Maybe to give the gawkers less to stare at; maybe because it just felt like the right thing to do. And vampire eyes didn’t need the light. Mine didn’t, either, with a diffuse beam leaking through from the lounge, illuminating Jules like a spotlight.
It was enough. It was more than enough. I pressed my hands against him, both of them, palms flat and fingers outstretched, gripping hard enough to make indentations in his skin.
And then I swiped down, revealing pink nipples, hard abs, a concave stomach, and the brief indentation of a naval. It looked like a plasterer had taken a trowel to a wall, scraping away the surface to reveal what lay beneath. And what lay beneath was Jules.
He was still in there, somewhere.
But a second later, the healthy skin had been washed away, replaced by the pale, poreless perfection I had already come to hate.
Someone put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off. And tried again, but it was the same. Wherever my hands rested, and for a small space around them, the skin looked normal, and the body was whole, straight, perfect. But as soon as I took them away, or tried to move onto another spot, it was as if whatever magic was there simply vanished.
And I didn’t know how to make it stay.
“No,” I said, helplessly. “No!”
“Cassie. Come away.”
I looked up to see Marco staring at me, dark eyes troubled. “Come away? I’m trying to help him!”
“I know. But there’s nothing you can do. We . . . we’ll call someone—”
“Who?” I demanded. “We already tried Augustine, and if the maker and a senior war mage can’t remove it, do you really think—”
“What I think is that you’re exhausting yourself for nothing. You need—”
“Nothing?” I stared at him. “Don’t you see it?”
“Don’t I see what?”
I looked back down, at where my balled fists were resting on the pink and perfect skin of Jules’ stomach. It looked like some kind of modern art installation, where a white painted mannequin is punched only to reveal part of a living person beneath. Only Marco didn’t see that person. Marco, I realized blankly, didn’t see anything.
I blinked at him, confused. I’d thought maybe I’d inherited some of Roger’s skill, that maybe that was why . . . but was I imagining things? Was this necromancy or just wishful thinking? Or something else entirely?
“Come on, girl,” he told me gently. “You’ve got raccoon eyes. You need rest—”
No! Let her try!
God, Marco must be right; I must be tired, I thought, rubbing my eyes. Because that had sounded like Jules. A lot like, I realized, as the voice came again.
Please, Cassie, please! Oh God, you can’t—don’t leave me like this! I can’t bear it. I can’t! I can’t! I—
I was hallucinating; I had to be. You can hear me? He sounded almost as shocked as I
was. You heard that?
“I—no. No.”
“Don’t lie!” And suddenly, the tiny sound at the back of my mind that I might have been imagining was a full-blown voice, and there was no question this time. It was Jules. And he was talking a mile a minute. “Nobody could hear me! I’ve been trapped in here, screaming and screaming, but there’s only been silence and—oh God. Oh, Cassie, oh God!”
“This isn’t possible,” I told him numbly. I wasn’t a vampire; I couldn’t mind-speak. Well, with anyone but Billy Joe, and even he had to be in residence. When he was outside my body, I had to talk to him like anyone else.
“Well, you’re doing it!” Jules said frantically. “And I can’t—I haven’t been able to talk to anybody. I’ve been calling and calling, but nobody answered. I didn’t even try you; I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t think you could do it—”