Chapter 43

To ensure he wouldn't hurt himself even if the spirits put ideas into his head, Leech had been strapped down on the bed. For all his size and strength, the big man couldn't move. His dark eyes were wide with horror as he lay there, completely at Mariah's mercy. She ran her fingers through his hair—she was younger than the others had been. Maybe even the age she was supposed to be.

And angrier than the other versions of her had been.

"How did you get here?" Bryce asked. Both he and Savannah were sizing up the situation and I could only hope that whichever one of them decided to do something stupid first, they wouldn't get us all killed.

"I stole a car and drove here. It was easy enough to get inside. I helped design the security for this building. Though only Hollis knows that, of course, since he didn't bother to give me any credit."

Her eyes went to the corner of the room, her hate obvious. The three of us turned to see Hollis, seated on a chair, the chair he had probably been sitting on since we had dropped him off the night before, his dark eyes fixed on his son. I don't think he had heard a word she had said; the second she had walked in with a gun, all he could see was how this would end.

She was going to kill his son because she couldn't save hers.

"Put the gun down, Mariah," Bryce said. "I can give you immunity, just please put the gun down."

"It's too late for that and we all know it." The most terrifying thing about her were her eyes, the way they glowed with all the things she had seen and the terrible certainty she thought that gave her. "It's too late for anything except this. Your immunity means nothing—kill me, curse me, part of me lives on. We share everything, every memory of every defeat. And I share our victory, even though I die today. I will escape all of Thomas's curses, as long as part of me remains alive. Somewhere the spell is working. Zach is safe—but I'm not there. He may have his mother, but he cannot have me. So all I can do is show Hollis that he was right; it's such a waste of time caring about your children."

"I'm sure he'd really love to apologize for that right about now," Savannah hinted. But Hollis was in his own personal hell and didn't respond.

"I can see if you move your lips," the necromancer informed the spellcasters. "There's nothing for you do to but wait."

"For what?"

"Do you want to tell your son what you did, Hollis? Or should I?"

Hollis shifted uncomfortably in his chair, looking anywhere but at his boy lying on the cot. But he couldn't escape Mariah's vengeance.

"I called Claire," he said. "I thought—"

"She's coming here?" Leech managed to gasp out. Mariah drank in the horror in his face, the hate he felt for his father, loving it. Over my head, Savannah and Bryce were looking at each other, planning—they knew what this meant. If Mariah was waiting for the ex-love of his life, she wasn't waiting around to give the woman a hug.

"I'm sorry," Hollis said. "I'm so sorry, Martin. I wanted to help."

She was going to kill us all; she was going to make him watch. The massacre would begin when Claire arrived. Savannah and me, it didn't matter the order, then Bryce, then Claire, then Leech—and Hollis last of all. Or maybe she wouldn't kill Hollis at all, just let him live knowing his son died hating him with every fibre of his being. I think that's what she would do.

"Mariah," Leech pleaded, desperate now, straining against his bindings, "They haven't done anything. You don't even know the witches; let them go. Punish my dad all you want, punish me—but they haven't done anything wrong. Just..."

"I can't do that, Martin, no matter how helpful the witches have been in the past. Now Gillian has something to tell you, something I've been waiting all day for you to hear. Or maybe it would be better coming from Bryce."

She gave us a half-smile, then threatened, "Or I could tell him."

Bryce stepped forward, trying to draw her attention to him, speaking without preamble: "Nadira's dead. They took her father, she got stupid—they shot her. When we cross over she's going to bitch us out for not living long enough to go to her funeral."

It was a pathetic attempt at a joke, though I doubt Leech heard. Bryce had made it too real. Like his father, he could see how this would end and he couldn't handle it.

The gunshot rang out in the silence.

I could only gape, trembling, staring down the barrel of a gun. Taking a deep breath helped and my body was finally able to inform my brain that I was unharmed.

There were good things about being short.

"I have eyes," Mariah told Savannah. "I can see you trying to cast. Next time, I'll kill her. Understand?"

"Yeah," Savannah muttered. "How the hell did no one hear that?"

"The rooms are soundproof," Bryce answered, eyes on Mariah who was thankfully (and I didn't care what sort of person that made me) back to pointing the gun at Leech.

"So no one can hear us when we scream for help, right, Hollis?" she asked her boss. A look passed between, one of understanding, even in all this. They had built these rooms to give themselves some dignity when the spirits tried to take everything from them. No matter the hate between them, they would always share an understanding of that fear.

"Well, that's just fucking perfect," Savannah snapped.

"Do you do this every time?" I asked her. All I could do was keep her distracted, express a vaguely academic interest in what she had done. Try not to take her vendetta and plots against me personally. "To Leech? Or do you just do that when there's nothing left for you in a reality?"

"We try and teach Hollis a lesson every time. He never learns, though."

"Can't you go back in time before he insults you? Or—why don't you just go back before your son is born and just...make sure you have a son who isn't sick?"

"He wouldn't be my son then, would he?" She looked almost sorry for me, that I didn't understand this. "Besides, the tear won't let us go back to before we created it. We never could figure out why, but we can't go back to when Zach's alive."

So the time tear really was a sick son of a bitch. It showed us a nightmare future so it could get off on our fear. It gave the Eisenbergs the power of god, just not the power to see their son alive. Bastard.

"Why us, though? I mean, we sort of figured out why, but how did you? There has to be thousands of witches out there and I can't really see Nast employees going to witches before they tried the sorcerers. No offence."

"None taken." She smiled at me, warmly, and again she made me think of some sort of trying-to-hard soccer mom. "You see what she's doing, Martin? It's always worth keeping Gillian alive, to hear her talk. Twelve-Thirteen has grown particularly fond of her; though personally, there's only so much of her I can stand. Once I've grown tired of her prattling, I'm going to kill one of the witches. You have until then to decide which one you want to see die first. Now what is it you wanted to know?"

"How'd you figure out you needed us?" This was what I could do. Let Savannah and Bryce figure out how to take out the necromancer with a gun. I would distract her until then.

"It took us a long time," she admitted. More than seven lifetimes. So many more than that, it was written on her face. I was going to be sick. "We went to Thomas, first, but he gave up so quickly. The dead must remain dead, he said. He was never comfortable with the power of the time tear. Luckily, we found Penelope."

"You didn't need to kill her."

"She wasn't comfortable with the power she had, either. What's the point of all that power if you can't use it? We had to take it from her. Edmund tried to perform the spell. He tried—so many times. But it was witch magic. It killed him. It killed Penelope. It killed everyone. We couldn't get it to work.

"We ended up trying with Paige Cortez. Her mother had been head of the North American Coven and she was sympathetic to our plight—we told her Zach was sick, that she could save him. It killed her too, but" her eyes went to Savannah, sparkling, loving, "you saved her. You brought her back."

"I hope I kicked your ass afterwards, too," Savannah spat. I took her hand, squeezed, reminding her to stay calm and start planning.

"Once we saw what you had done, we realized it had to be you performing the spell. There were just two problems. But that was all right. The thing about the future, you all have to understand, is that it's not completely variable. People are fairly predictable."

"I wasn't stupid enough to perform your stupid spell?"

"You always perform it. You can't help wanting to prove you can perform it." Savannah flinched, mostly because we all knew Mariah was right about that. She was too proud, sometimes. "No, you weren't the problem. Thomas and Gillian were, though it took us a long time to realize that."

Great. I was getting lumped together with Thomas Nast.

"Thomas will almost always react poorly to certain actions. He hates you—there's no doubt about that. Any reality we enter and you're always just Kristof's murderer to him. But he will not let us use you to perform the spell; he thinks it will kill you and so he won't let us force you to help us. We've never been able to figure out why."

Bryce snorted, but said nothing. I guess he didn't want to explain his grandfather to anyone outside the family.

"We had to take you without his help and it was difficult. But eventually we succeeded and the spell worked. We were able to hold Zach as he had never been before and—" Her face fell. "Sean arrived too quickly. He killed our son and most of us in the fighting. The next time, we tried a different moment, only it didn't work. We kept trying and trying and we couldn't get it to work again. It took us the longest time to figure out what was different about the first time."

"I was pregnant," I blurted out. "Right?"

"Yes. Though at first we simply thought you had to be alive. It was only after many tries that we were able to arrange for the second success. You told us you were pregnant and we, foolishly sentimental as we are, almost called it off. Fortunately, your habit of crying wolf served us well. We simply didn't believe you—and it worked. Only...it killed you that time. You were much older than you are now and the child was too far along. Savannah survived, though. As did Zach."

"I'm tougher than Gillian is." But there was no pride in Savannah's voice; just Cabal steel. Mariah was too far gone to realize she should have been very afraid.

"Yes. We still aren't sure how you brought the Cortezes down upon us, that time. It was impressive even if I really wish you hadn't been able to. But we learned from that. And we tried to be merciful. We stopped waiting so long, so you had a better chance of living through it."

I wasn't stupid enough to believe her—if they wanted us to perform the spell when we were younger, it was only because the spell had a better chance of succeeding then.

"But it was almost impossible to find a future where all the variables existed. The two of you were never pregnant at the same time. If one of you was pregnant, either the protection around her was too great, or Gillian's health was too poor to let her finish the spell, or you were both too old to survive, or the other was dead. If we forcibly impregnated one of you, the other—well, you taught us that way was not in our best interests fairly convincingly."

"So you resorted to emotional rape instead?" I was trying to keep the edge out of my voice, but I was getting tired of her game. It turned out I didn't really want to hear about all the terrible things she had done to me in various alternate realties, after all.

"We found something else. Just as Thomas is fairly predictable, so it turned out that the three of you are as well. As long as we forced you together and made sure you couldn't separate for a while, the situation resolved itself. Sometimes naturally, sometimes with the help of the spell you willingly performed, but always the situation resolved itself. The two witches were young and together and eventually their power was amplified by the too volatile mixing of witch and sorcerer blood."

"I didn't sleep with my sister in any of these alternate realities, did I?" Bryce asked. There was something in his tone of voice—the Cabal brat nonchalance—that got under my skin. He was planning something now, something unpleasant. Someone was going to end up dead.

"No, you didn't. You know, the only thing that ever impressed me about you, Bryce, was your ability to handle those women you play with—yet you can never manage to keep a mere witch from outmanoeuvring you. Edmund says you must have been doing it intentionally since you're usually more careful than that, but between you and me, I think he's just trying to stick up for a fellow sorcerer. I think the witch is just that much better than you. The Nast fortune is just a little too tempting for her to pass up and you're too distracted by her pretty little mouth to stop her."

I flinched, even as I felt a tiny bit of hope. After all this time, she really didn't know us at all. There was no need to trap Bryce—he was already stuck. I was the one who ran away.

"Where's Edmund?" Bryce demanded. He even took a step forward, so she turned the gun on him.

Even if she was a psychopath, she knew a threat when she saw one. "Stand back. Do you know, Bryce, that your grandfather only cries in public every other time you die? Should we find out what he does in this reality?"

"Don't be stupid. You kill me and my grandfather will make sure that your precious reject stays dead."

Bryce really couldn't be polite if his life depended on it.

"Don't talk about him that way!"

"Why did your husband let you come alone, Mariah?"

"He knows there's no coming away from here. There's no hope for us if we can't return to the tear. Then again, we always have before."

"And he was never out for blood, was he? It wasn't personal—he just needed an heir. You're the one who got it in your head that it had to be that dead little weakling and it was somehow Hollis's fault and Edmund just went along with it because there's just no reasoning with women like you."

"Zach is not just Edmund's heir; he's his son."

"That's not what he's telling my grandfather right now, as he asks for immunity. He might even get it. I'm sure he wouldn't mind taking another wife, one that wouldn't give him useless children—"

She had kidnapped me and cheerfully admitted to having me murdered, raped and who-knew what else in other realities. And yet, at that moment, I felt sorry for Mariah Eisenberg. Because Bryce had done what he did best. He found exactly where it hurt the most and he stuck in the knife and he twisted as hard as he could.

It was her fault, she thought, every day for more days than most people could ever imagine. She believed it was her fault her son had died, no matter how many times she had been told it was just an unfortunate twist of genetics. It was her fault and so she had no choice but to do everything humanly (and inhumanly) possible to fix her mistake.

"Shut up," she screamed. "Shut up! Shut up! Time's up, Martin! Pick one. You have ten seconds and then I'm just going to shoot them both."

"Hollis was right about you," Bryce told her. "You're clearly not management material. Can't even make life and death decisions."

"I've changed my mind. So sorry, Martin, but you lost your vote. It's your choice now, Bryce. Which one do I kill? Your sister? Or...whatever the hell your relationship with the other witch is, in this reality? Pick fast because—"

"Savannah. Kill Savannah."

There wasn't even a hint of emotion in his voice. It was like he was ordering coffee instead of sentencing someone to death. I was so terrified by his voice it took me a second to realize that he hadn't told her to kill me.

Still, the gun turned in my direction.

"So you'd rather kill your own flesh and blood? How sweet." Her finger was just dying to pull the trigger. I was going to die. She was going to kill me. My brain didn't seem to want to make sense of it all. "After I kill the blonde, maybe you can ask your sister for forgiveness. Who knows? Maybe she'll—"

"Get tired of you talking?" Savannah asked the women in the binding spell. "Too late for that."

"Took you fucking long enough," Bryce snapped. "She was about to blow Gillian's head off."

"That's your fault for antagonizing her," I informed him.

"Politely distracting her wasn't working."

While it may have worked, I wasn't going to congratulate him on his ability to piss people off beyond reason. I was still shaking too badly from having that gun pointed at me, so I just let Savannah sit me down on the bed as Bryce went to disarm Mariah. His hands weren't exactly steady either, I noticed, as he took the gun from her hand.

It almost hadn't worked.

"Can I fry her now?" Savannah asked.

"I think you've earned this one," he said as I forced my shaking hands to begin untying Leech. Savannah began the familiar spell.

"No!"

Hollis's voice cut through the room the instant the binding spell broke. Savannah was the most talented witch I knew, but she wasn't perfect. She was exhausted and we were stupid not to remember that. Mariah flew at Bryce, who was still closest, jumping on his back, hands around his neck, knocking them both into the cot, right on top of Leech. They yanked the gun this way and that as I hurried to cast a binding spell, my tongue rushing over the words, screwing up now that it mattered too much. Savannah managed to jump on Mariah's back, pulling all three of them to the floor, but also kicking into me, knocking me over and once again preventing me from saying the spell.

All three of them scrambled for the dropped gun. Mariah grabbed it first; Bryce grabbed her hand. The gun went off. Then Bryce managed to tear it right out of her hands.

In a second, the older necromancer joined the fray. Hollis picked up the chair he had been sitting on and brought it down on his subordinate's head. Over and over and over again. Flesh and brain and blood...I looked away. I had to. And then I was staring at Savannah, leaning against the wall as her shirt began to soak through with blood.

No.

Savannah caught my look of horror and gave me an apologetic look.

"That bitch."

She collapsed. Bryce and I got to her side at the same time, but he was already ordering Hollis to call for a doctor. Her chest was rising and falling at a rapid rate. There was blood, but I was used to it by now, so I ignored it while I searched for a wound to close.

"I'm sorry. I don't know how to turn a gun off. I never bothered to learn," Bryce was speaking softly, actually scared now that he couldn't just bluster his way out of the situation. "I didn't think she had it in her to break your spell."

She couldn't force out a response.

"Oh god."

"What?" Bryce demanded as Savannah looked at me with bright blue eyes, already aware. She could feel it.

I brought my hands back to her chest. It wasn't difficult to remember Nadira, when Bryce had been shot, prattling on needlessly. He's very lucky...a few more inches down and to the left, it would have caught him right in the heart...see, right there...there wouldn't be anything for me to do then...

"Savannah...? Oh god. No. No, it can't—no. No, I love you, I love you. You—you can't. Don't leave me. You can't."

Her blue eyes looked at me, with that horrible knowledge in them. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. And then there wasn't the knowing look in her eyes. There wasn't anything.

"She can't be—" Bryce muttered beside me. "Did I just get her killed?"

"Lock the door," I ordered him.

"What?"

"Lock the door, Bryce. Now."

I had learned something from being around him for so long; I could give orders like a Cabal son, now. He hurried to do exactly as I said. Her blue eyes were too bright. I had to close them. But that was the only compromise I was making today.

"You need to cast the spell," I told him. "Now. As fast you can. The longer you wait the more likely it is to kill you."

"What—you want me to cast the resurrection spell? You're nuts. It'll—"

"She just died, from unnatural causes. It's a small hole. It should work. It'll probably kill you, but it should work. Once you've brought her back, I'll perform the spell on you. Our combined power should be enough to save you and keep us alive at the same time. Okay?"

"I don't even know the spell."

"Yes, you do. I've said it around you so often you have to have picked it up. You can't help it; you're great with magic that way. The sounds just get in your head. You know the spell, Bryce. You're just too scared to cast it."

"I'm not dying for her. I—I'm not dying for her. I hardly know her."

"She's Kristof's daughter. She's Sean's sister. She's your sister. You can save her. We can—"

"Calm down," Leech said, but he wasn't talking to us. "Savannah you need to calm down. The pushing feeling is the wards trying to banish you—you shouldn't be able to stay in here. But it'll be okay. Someone will be by, soon, to help you onwards. It'll be good there. Your parents will be there and others...it's not so bad."

"Bryce, please," I begged. "I won't let you die for her. I promise you; trust me enough to do this."

"You shouldn't play God, Gillian."

"Why not? Whoever's playing at being in charge right now is doing a lousy job."

"The dead stay dead. That's the rule. You don't get to fuck with that. Not even the Cabals get to fuck with that."

"Says who, Bryce? And why should we listen to them? What has it gotten us? Are you happy? I'm not. I haven't been for years. But we can do this. No one's telling us to, everyone would tell us not to, but we can. We can save her, even if we are breaking every rule in existence to do it."

"And dying is supposed to make me happy? You're the suicidal one, not—"

"It was never about killing myself," I said, finally able to figure out the truth, now that it really mattered. "Never, even when it looked like it was. It was me trying to be brave enough, maybe even crazy enough, so that if it ever happened again...if she walked out that door again...I could stop her. I wouldn't just sit there crying, I would dig in my heels and hold onto her and she would stay. I'm a coward, I know that about myself, but for her...I have to be better. And trust me when I say that if you don't do this—if you don't bring her back, if you don't make her stay—you will regret it for the rest of your life."

"Gillian," Leech's hoarse voice croaked out. "She says it's okay. That you don't have to risk this. She understands why you wouldn't want to—"

"Bullshit," Bryce interrupted. "She's related to me. There's no way she's doing anything but bitching that we aren't helping her fast enough."

From the look on Leech's face, it was obvious Bryce was right. She was his family. Family came first. I hadn't remembered before, but as I watched him gaze down at his sister's corpse, I finally remembered Kristof wasn't the only name on his back, that Dana hadn't been the only one who had died at the hands of a vampire. Bryce could only watch, then, he had once told me. I didn't think it made him a coward (just a sheltered kid who panicked at the wrong moment), but I knew better than most that nothing anybody could ever say would make him believe it.

"If I die because of this, Gillian, I will haunt you for the rest of your life."

But once he made a decision, Bryce committed to it completely. There was no more reluctance, no more hesitation. He was going to help. He wasn't going to feel the same way about his sister as he felt about his cousin; this time, he wasn't just going to stand there waiting for help. Even if he didn't want to die.

"My crazy plans work," I promised. "Most of the time. Now hurry up. Hollis might get through that door."

He quickly finished untying Leech, telling the big man to block the door, at least until all three of us were alive to receive medical helf. His friend grabbed his arm, but Bryce shook him off. "The witch is right, man. I...I have to at least try."

"Don't die on me."

"Hey, you went crazy on me first."

Leech cringed, told Savannah we were working on it and began pushing the bed in front of the door. Bryce sat down, cross-legged across from me on the other side of Savannah's body. I went over the spell, once, slowly, and just like I thought, he already knew it. He had a great ear.

So he took her dead hands in his and began the spell, a prayer to Osiris.

Bring her back to us, whole and new.

The colour drained from his skin. I tried not to panic because I had expected that. It would drain him, maybe even kill him, but I could fix him. I could fix this. The only person I would let it kill was me.

He doubled over a little when he hit the three-quarter mark, but kept going, his voice fainter, his eyes dimmer but still alive. Maybe he could do this without my help—maybe not. He was shaking as he got to the end, trembling so badly Leech started to move away from the door though my gaze stopped him. Bryce caught my eye, held it (he was a fool for ever thinking he could stop me from getting in over my head), finished the spell, and closed his eyes.

Savannah's eyes flew open.

Thank you. Thank you Osiris, thank you God, thank you time tear, thank you whoever. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

"Big foot?"

"It...?"

"Just a second, okay?" I said, trying to hold her eye while desperately reaching towards her brother. My hands, covered in his sister's blood, frantically felt around for a pulse, felt around for something, anything, the faint flutter of a heartbeat. There was nothing.

But that was okay.

"Just give me a second, okay Savannah? Just give me a second."

This was it. No mistakes. No classic Gillian MacArthur fuck ups. This would worked. Or—no or. This worked. I would save him and then kick his ass for making me feel this way.

I began the prayer. It was long, especially for a spell, but it was doing far more than most spells and so that was acceptable. Heat shot through my body, stronger than ever before, almost strong enough to shock me into stopping. Almost.

I pushed on, saying the words as carefully as I could. I had spent hours on this spell and it was paying off. The words came without thought as I clung to Bryce's dead hands.

The power was intoxicating. I was tapping into everything I had, everything Savannah had. The addition of Savannah's power at the club had been like my very first shot. This was a barrelful of twenty-year-old Scotch. I was trembling with the strength of it all, not because I was weak but because it was so strong. But I kept my eyes on Bryce's dead blue ones and kept on talking. Talking and talking. Twenty lines, twenty-five, twenty-seven, thirty...almost there. Thirty-two, one more...finished.

Light when off in front of my eyes, blinding me. My body was on fire, burning and blistering and the pain crippled me. I blinked furiously. From somewhere far away I could hear a familiar voice calling my name. Savannah.

I smiled through the pain and then started screaming as fire shot through me, my heart about to burst from the strength of it all. And then—