A Secret to Die For (Secret McQueen) (22 page)

I hadn’t wanted her comatose!

This power was too foreign to me. I still wasn’t sure how it worked. I was on the verge of panic when her eyes fluttered open again, this time pale white like those of the dead. She stared straight ahead, but now her breath was normal, and her body no longer shook.

I’d made her so calm she was basically a zombie. Now I wasn’t so different from the necromancers I’d set out to kill, except instead of controlling the dead, I could manipulate the living.

That was a very frightening ability to have.

“What’s going on?” Morgan asked. “What the hell is happening with her eyes?” She’d crawled back a few inches, obviously frightened of what she was seeing.

I was scared too.

Was this what it felt like for Sig to wield control over me? I had the power to do whatever I wanted with Genie, and the only thing I wanted to do was rid myself of that power. Being responsible for another human was too daunting a task to be enjoyable. No wonder Sig so rarely made me do his bidding. To have all this control over someone was too much responsibility.

“Stand up,” I whispered, and Genie did, smoothly and without any hesitation. Still, the elevator groaned.

Morgan’s gaze was now fixed on me. She’d figured it out, at least in part. She knew I was piloting Genie’s actions, though I doubted she could understand how deep my control went. I could do anything, damn near anything, provided I could come up with the right word for it.

“How…?”

I cut my eyes to her briefly, giving her a quick warning glare that demanded silence. How could I be expected to steer the SS Eugenia
and
explain myself? Explanations wouldn’t come easily. If I could get Genie out of this and get us all out of the building before it collapsed, I’d gladly take the time to explain my devil’s bargain with Aubrey.

Now was
not
the time.

Lucas, responding either to the instructions I was giving or to Morgan’s surprised questions, abandoned his efforts at opening the other door and came back over, looming above us like a threat.

“Walk to me,” I instructed.

“Her eyes,” Lucas breathed, steadying himself on the wall. “They’re white.”

Ignoring them both, I continued to focus on Genie. She came towards me like a sleepwalker, with her arms down beside her and her distracted vision off somewhere in the middle distance. Still, she moved with purpose, and every step she took made the elevator groan more.

With a heavy
kathunk
, the car shifted and dropped an inch. My heart fell all the way to the bottom floor, because for one fraction of a moment I was absolutely convinced I was about to witness my sister fall to her death.

Stop,
my inner voice commanded.
STOP.

The elevator went still, but when I glanced back to Genie, her eyes had returned to normal. So there
were
limits to this gift. I could only execute one command at a time. Either I held the elevator in place, or made Genie move. I couldn’t do both.

“You have to help me.” I stared right at Lucas, with my mind focused more on the car than on him. “Please.” My expression must have shown an impressive amount of desperation, because he didn’t even pause.

“What do you need?”

“I can keep it from falling, but I need you to grab her.”

“Secret, that’s impossible, you can’t—”

“
I can,
” I shouted. “Don’t question it. Just believe me. I
can
.”

His expression told me he believed I might have lost my mind, but I hoped he still trusted me enough to do what I needed him to.

“Lucas, you have to do this for me.”

He heaved a sigh then got down on his knees, crawling towards the elevator doors.

“Morgan, keep the doors open,” he said, lying flat on his stomach. “Eugenia? Genie? It’s Lucas, can you hear me?”

I couldn’t hear whether or not she responded, I was too busy keeping all my attention locked on the elevator.

Stay.

Morgan pulled the doors back a few more inches, and the metal groaned in protest. An agonizing, white-hot spear of pain smashed through me, like a physical blow to the skull. I staggered, straining to keep concentrating.

Stay.

“Come on, baby girl, just a few more steps and I’ve got you. That’s right. You got it.” Lucas’s tone was comforting in a way mine hadn’t been. Even I believed his words as he cajoled her forward. I would have gone to him too.

The car screamed, pressing against the open brass doors, grinding metal on metal in a high-pitched wail. A fist closed on my brain and squeezed, forcing me to shut my eyes if I was going to keep it up.

Stay.

“I’ve got you. You got it. I’ve got you.” The relief in Lucas’s voice and the sudden cry from Genie gave me enough hope to open my eyes slightly.

Genie was in his arms, and Lucas was helping her to her feet.

I let go of the thought, and the moment I did the doors jerked open, forcing Morgan to release them. An instant later the car scraped against the doors in an ear-splitting shriek, and the elevator fell, plummeting all the way to the basement, leaving us staring at the empty pit of space the car had formerly occupied.

“Genie?” I stared at my sister, breathing heavily. I could barely believe she was standing in front of me, unscathed save for a few bumps and bruises.

“You saved me.” She wrestled herself free of Lucas and moved to embrace me, but Morgan caught hold of her arm and tugged her back.

“Not so fast.”

“Morgan, what are you—?”

“You thought I’d come all this way to help you? Either of you? You thought I’d
let it go
?”

My mind was too full of fear and confusion to understand what she was talking about.

“Whatever you think you need to do, don’t.” Lucas lifted his hands and spoke in his most soothing, alpha voice. “We can work this out. You want back in the pack? Fine. Christ, you want your old position back? We can do that. Just let go of the girl.”

Morgan smiled at him, the same beaming, lovesick smile I’d seen her give him a thousand times. She nodded once and said, “Okay.”

Then she pushed my sister off the ledge.

Chapter Thirty-One

Everything changed in that second.

Lucas grabbed hold of the door in an attempt to catch Genie. Morgan raised her weapon and aimed it at him, and her snarling voice demanded, “Stop.”

The command rang through me like a church bell at noon, and I, too, thought,
Stop.

But it was different now than it had been when I held the car in place, because instead of just thinking the one word, I demanded, with every fiber of my being,
Stop everything.

Pain zapped through my skull again, reminding me Aubrey had spent hundreds if not thousands of years honing these abilities, while I had only had them for about an hour. I was putting my mind and body through the ringer by using his gifts too much and too quickly.

Time went still.

Morgan’s face was frozen in a hateful sneer, and Lucas’s attention was not on the gun pointed at him, but on Genie’s falling body. My sister was caught midair, her hand having missed a steel beam by inches. She was poised for a very long drop.

Stepping towards the edge of the pit, I almost jumped without thinking. And while Aubrey’s magic might give me the ability to fly, I’d already learned I could only do one thing at a time. If I made any further demands, time would un-freeze and Genie would fall.

But I couldn’t reach her from the ledge. Gravity was a fast-acting menace, and Genie was at least one floor down. I might be able to run down to the floor below, but what if the magic only worked as long as I was focused on it? With Aubrey, we’d been able to walk around like it was a lovely afternoon in the park and he’d barely seemed to twitch.

I was not the fairy king, though.

Now that the car had fallen, there was no cable to grab hold of, only the steel framework of the elevator shaft. Many of the beams meant to create a safe structure were bent or broken clean in half. But if I could climb down them, I should be able to get hold of her. Bringing her back up might prove impossible, but perhaps if we could get to the floor beneath us, I could will the doors open.

Keeping her from falling was the most important thing. Any other concerns could be fretted over once I got to them.

Without much thought for my personal safety—something I rarely worried about—I stepped out onto the ledge, knocking the gun out of Morgan’s hands as I did, tossing it down the open chute. At least now, if time unstuck, she wouldn’t put a hole in Lucas.

I sat on the edge and stretched my legs down until my toes touched the beam of a girder below me. I tested my weight on it, making sure it wouldn’t break the moment I used it as a foothold, then turned around, using the ledge as a hand grip, and let myself drop.

I kept moving, trying not to spend too long on any one beam, since I couldn’t see which ones were damaged or not. It took me five minutes to get from the open doors to a larger steel beam, where I was able to stand without holding on to anything else.

Genie was level with me now, and the expression of shock and terror on her face was heart wrenching. She’d thought she was free. We’d saved her, and she had believed the nightmare was over, only to be pushed into one so much worse.

I cursed Morgan for her cruelty, and cursed myself for letting her live when I’d had a chance to kill her.

Another situation where my foolish mercy had turned around to bite me in the ass.

I held the beam above me for support, then swung out and grasped Genie’s arm by the cuff of her shirtsleeve. She moved easily, like she was weightless and floating in space. Still, my position made it difficult to retrieve her, and her shirt slipped out of my grasp. She drifted back to her former position.

“Fuck,” I grumbled, readjusting my hold on the beam. My hands were sweaty now, and I was worried I might slip off if I stretched too far. “Come on, come on.”

I swung out again, getting a much firmer hold on her arm, and reeled her in towards me until I was back with both feet on the beam and my arm wrapped around her waist. I considered trying to adjust her body position to see if she’d be easier to move but decided it wasn’t worth the time. She was so light, as long as I kept one hand on her, it didn’t matter how her body was posed.

Because I didn’t have to worry about hauling the weight of a second body up with me, it made sense to go back the way I’d come. I followed the same series of railings and handholds that had gotten me to her, with slightly more difficulty since I was now one-handed. It took twice as long to climb up with her as it had to climb down, but the moment I pushed her body up over the ledge and felt her weight settle onto the floor, I let out a sigh of relief.

She was safe.

I gripped the edge with both hands now, and thought to myself,
It’s going to be okay.

Evidently, I should have kept my mind focused on other things before getting too far ahead of myself. A wish for things to be okay was not a command my new powers recognized, nor one I imagined was in my scope of ability to perform.

Yet I’d focused on something other than the command of
Stop
, and so time started moving again.

Morgan was too motivated in her goal to kill Lucas to notice right away anything had changed. And Lucas, who had been ready to dive in after Genie, pulled to an abrupt stop when he saw me dangling in the shaft and realized Genie was on the floor beside him. My sister, who had probably experienced more shock in the last ten minutes than anyone her age ought to go through in a lifetime, was curled up in a ball, sobbing.

When Morgan became aware she was no longer armed, the look on her face was worth the extra seconds I’d spent to take the gun from her. She appeared mystified and enraged, something that contorted her once-beautiful face into a reflection of her true, inner ugliness. She looked like the monster she was.

No mercy.
My own instructions to the others echoed in my head, and I thought of all the pain she had caused. I turned my anger and hatred towards every other person who had betrayed me onto her, and in that moment I wanted to see her die. If I could have done it slowly and painfully, I would have, but I’d settle for fast and excruciating.

I got hold of her ankle and tugged, sending her tumbling to the floor where she smashed her face against the carpet. I pulled harder, giving up my own certain hold on the ledge if it meant I could drag her over it.

“You fucked with the wrong goddamn pack,” I growled, heaving on her as she struggled against me, crawling back up as I tried to bring her down. “You’re going to wish you stayed in Siberia.”

“Secret, stop,” Lucas pleaded, now on his knees as he tried to get hold of me. I shook him off, my sole focus on killing Morgan. “We don’t have time for this.”

A halo of thick black smoke around him was creeping down and filling the elevator shaft. The fire had to be getting worse because I could barely breathe through the ashy stink, and my eyes were starting to burn.

He was right. I didn’t even know if we could get back down to the lobby at this point. I could kill Morgan if she’d go easily, but she didn’t show any signs of letting me murder her without a struggle.

The red haze of my rage dimmed, and I let go of her leg. Lucas, seeing he’d won me with reason—a rare treat indeed—grasped me under my arms and hoisted me up onto solid ground like I weighed nothing.

I gave Morgan a kick in the ribs, hoping to keep her down long enough that she might burn to death, then picked up her duffel bag of weapons and tossed it to Lucas. I might be leaving her behind, but I wasn’t leaving her armed.

As much as I wanted to shove her over the ledge and be done with it, now that I was up here with the smoke, I knew we had to move fast. I got to Genie, who was still sobbing, and shook her. “We have to go.”

When she lifted her head to look at me, I stumbled back.

Her eyes had changed. They weren’t the milky white they’d been when I seized control of her, nor were they the feral wolf eyes of a shifter in the midst of a change. Her entire eye was glowing red, like a coal at the center of a fire.

“Genie?”

“
Incendemus te, propter peccata vestra.
”

I trembled, because her voice was not her own. She wasn’t possessed, but she seemed to have stepped outside herself and was not the sweet girl I knew. Lucas helped me to my feet as Genie adjusted herself into a crouch.

“Is that Latin?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Most of my experience with Latin had been leafing through Keaty’s old books and during one very memorable fight with a demon. I knew it to hear it, but I certainly had no clue what she was saying.

Now her hands were glowing the same red as her eyes, a sign I
did
recognize as her preparing to do a spell.

“Secret, run,” Lucas said.

“I’m not leaving without her.”

He shoved the duffel bag into my hands. “
Go.
”

I stepped backwards, almost tripping over Morgan and avoiding her at the last moment. Genie looked like a creature out of a nightmare. She was still hunched in a ghoulish pose, her fingers curved into claws—without actually changing—and her focus all for Morgan.

This, I realized, was the reason everyone feared my great-grandmother,
La Sorcière
. The amount of power Genie was channeling could only be used with a level head.
Grandmere
had taught me at an early age that anger and magic were a toxic combination. But Genie was well beyond being reasoned with.

What did Lucas think he was going to do?

I stopped wondering when Genie went nuclear.

She muttered a final Latin word, “
Ustulo,
” then leveled her hands at Morgan. The wolf on the floor who had so recently attempted to kill Genie screamed. She might have said please, might have begged, but all her words were lost when she was engulfed with bright red fire. This was no natural flame, this was something fast acting and vaguely evil.

I watched Morgan writhe and shriek, but she didn’t die. She kept flopping around like a dead fish attached to a live wire as the flames swallowed her up. Her hair melted away first, then her skin, peeling back away from her face to expose bright white bone. And still she didn’t die.

Moments ago I’d been all for killing Morgan, but I’d wanted to do it by throwing her twenty-one floors down to her death. This was too much, even for me. I wasn’t against killing people who deserved to die, but I’d known torture. This was beyond anything I could have brought myself to do to another living soul.

Genie curled her hand into a fist, then opened her palm wide. The fire exploded outward. I was knocked on my ass, clinging to the duffel bag, when I realized what had happened.

Morgan now lay in pieces, and still those pieces moved. Her mouth screamed, though soundlessly now that it was no longer attached to her lungs. I got to my feet, my shirt spattered with gore, and I looked at my sister, no longer knowing who or what she was.

I was afraid of her.

As quickly as it happened, Genie went limp, sagging to her knees. The moment the red light faded from her hands and eyes, Morgan’s body stopped moving, and death stole over her, much to my relief. I couldn’t undo the suffering she’d experienced before that final moment, but at least now it was all over.

Lucas, too, looked stunned and sickened by the scene laid out before him. This was not something we could explain to the others, because it defied understanding. We’d witnessed it, yet I still couldn’t rationalize it.

Genie had been pushed past her breaking point, and she had retaliated the only way she knew how.

When Aubrey had told me the magic he’d given me was too much for me and the best I could hope to do was not let it control me, I finally
got
what he meant. If Genie’s magic had been able to do this much damage, what would I be capable of if I let the magic use me instead of the other way around?

I wasn’t keen to find out.

“Your nose is bleeding,” she said to me.

I lifted my hand to my face, and my fingertips came away bloody. Further proof I was right about Aubrey’s gift being too massive. I’d stopped time, and it was taking its toll.

But there was still more work to be done.

The building creaked, and I looked up at the ceiling in fear. “We need to get out of here.” I hoped the others had already cleared the lobby and were waiting for us outside. I didn’t need to add any more lives to the list of those I had to worry about right now.

The floor beneath me trembled like I imagined an earthquake might feel, and I glanced at the others in time to see the carpet sag beneath them, right under Genie’s feet.

“Lucas.”

He saw it too, diving forward and pushing her towards me. I caught her and hugged her, then held my hand out for him. He’d stumbled to his knees pushing her out of the way, but now that the creaking had stopped, it seemed we had overreacted.

“It’s okay,” I said, stepping closer.

He got up and reached for me, shaking his head and laughing. “I know they say the captain is supposed to go down with the ship, but I sure hope that doesn’t apply to hotel owners.”

His fingers brushed mine, and I opened my mouth to say something quippy to him, when he vanished.

One moment he was within my grasp, and a moment later the floor gave way and he was gone. He didn’t scream, he didn’t fight. There was a split second for him to look surprised, and then I lost him forever.