1
There is a spiritual battle raging on the physical plane, and the front lines are drawn inside the confines of every human heart.
Good. Evil. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lie.
Life, my dear friend, is a battle for your soul. Don’t let anyone tell you different. They’ll try to lure you with pleasure or pain. They’ll try to blind you with falsehoods or twisted truths. They’ll promise there isn’t a heaven and there isn’t a hell.
But I’m here to tell you, your heart is a battlefield.
When the bloody battle is done, where will you stand?
With me?
Or against me?
A hot lick of breeze weaved through the iron bars on my bedroom window and brushed against my cheek. The wind didn’t cool the suffocating July heat; instead, it shifted around the oven-hot air and stirred up the subtle scent of violets, cranberry, and allspice.
Violets, because I always smelled like violets after coming back to a new body.
Cranberry and allspice because . . . Finn?
At the fluttering of my hair and the gentle lover’s pressure on the back of my neck, I turned toward the open window, but he wasn’t there. No one was. It was dark outside Hell Gate, and the only light was the sulfuric glow of the Victorian electroliers trying futilely to penetrate the black night.
There were the spikes of the tall iron gates and my iron bars, laying crisscross shadows over me. There was the dark concrete city beyond the gates and the inky-leafed maple and Callery pear trees that hugged the East River’s edge.
While it was midnight-dark and crawl-out-of-your-skin hot, there were still city sounds—a siren that cracked like thunder, an engine backfiring, a lone shout—and farther out, a distant laugh.
And Hell Gate? At midnight, it would yawn, stretch . . . and then the celebration would begin.
But right now, the hall outside my bedroom was still and quiet.
So the subtle scent of cranberry and allspice was just the wind playing wind tricks. It blew a sluggishly hot breeze off the East River and taunted me while I tried to keep the half-moon from rising.
Unfortunately, I did not have (and never have had) the ability to shove the moon beneath the black line of the East River. I didn’t even have the power to slow its ascent. I couldn’t keep the moon from rising, and I couldn’t keep time from moving forward.
It would be midnight soon, and that, as they said, was that.
I’d taken to telling myself, Mari, if you want to go backward, you have to move forward. If you want to go back to him, you have to move on.
So.
Finn was dead. I’d killed him, hadn’t I?
And while the wind told me he was alive, and Jagger said he’d come back to the world, I hadn’t seen him in the weeks since he’d reportedly started hunting conjurers and sending wrathful earthquakes to shake the city’s buildings.
Was he truly alive? A part of me desperately hoped he was, and a part of me desperately hoped he wasn’t. Because if he were alive, then he’d come back wrong.
The stories Jagger told me about the Smith who wore the crown . . .
He’d come back as the sort of conjurer who gleefully threw humanity toward war, destruction, and disease. If I could trust what Jagger said, then Finn was everything I hated.
Except . . .
I’d never trusted Jagger. Had I?
I’d only ever trusted you.
The wind moaned, dragging itself over my heat-flushed cheeks and whispering wind-nothings. Since I woke up in Hell Gate’s basement to find Jagger smiling cruelly over me, the wind had been mourning.
