Sylvia pulled out her phone and slid it over to Katherine. Her breath caught as she took in the photo on the screen—a yearbook picture of a young teen smiling awkwardly against a navy-blue backdrop, her pale skin marred by blemishes, her blond eyebrows and straw-like hair making her look like a patch of monotone. Katherine’s last class picture—the one taken just a few weeks before everything happened, the one that was pasted all over the news after—looked almost exactly the same. Her face now was a product of magic, but before all that changed, this girl could’ve been her sister.
“Who is she?”
“Lily Woodson. She’s fourteen.”
Katherine sucked in a breath. So young. Usually they had a year or two more before it happened. “Did she snap?”
Sylvia nodded. “I think so. Bolted from her apartment yesterday after sending her little brother through their coffee table.”
Katherine’s heart pounded in her chest, drowning out the sound of her own words as she asked if Lily’s brother was okay.
Please let him be okay.
“He’s all right. He’s in the hospital, but he should make a full recovery.”
Relief. She should feel relief. But it was impossible to feel anything other than the death grip of anxiety around her heart.
“It’s okay, Katherine.” And it was, Katherine reminded herself. It would be, because she’d make sure it would be. She forced her heartbeat to slow, her ears to clear so she could listen to what Sylvia was saying. “We can get to her before anything bad happens.”
Anything worse.
“Where is she?”
Sylvia took her phone and navigated to the maps app. Katherine stared at the blue spark blinking on the screen, sitting on a side street in Glendale. The dot came courtesy of a locator spell, tied by Noctis’ developers a few years ago to a smartphone rather than a paper map. It was what Katherine had used to track Joe that morning. A burst of magic that she sent out, bouncing off his own, showing her where he was.
“Bring her back safe. We both know what will happen if she’s left out there on her own with all that power.”
Katherine grabbed her car keys as she rushed out the door. The clock on Lily’s life was already ticking.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lily Woodson lay in the filth of the alley and contemplated ways to make herself disintegrate into the concrete. Her body felt like it was on the verge of falling apart anyway. Like she was full of cracks, and whatever was inside of her—whatever vile, rotten, awful thing—was pushing, pulsing, demanding to be let out. And soon it would be free, and then she would be lost entirely. That, at least, she was sure of. What she wasn’t sure of was how long she could fight it off. Or if she would be strong enough to end herself before it broke out.
She pulled herself tighter into a ball. Her fingers were bone white against the dark blue of her jeans, despite the fact that it must be upwards of ninety degrees. Her body was both hot and cold at once—burning up from the inside out, but frozen by the layer of dread that coated her like a second skin.
She hadn’t meant to do that to Noah. Sure, she’d been mad at him—he was blasting the TV while she was trying to scroll through her feed, interrupting a very dramatic thread about a girl who walked in on her boyfriend making out with her best friend. She’d yelled at him to keep it down, and because he was ten, he yelled back that he was going to keep her big fat butt down. It was a pointless comment, the type of thing she normally would have laughed off, but something about it snagged. Made her remember the boys in the school cafeteria who would snicker about what every girl had put on her tray for lunch that day. And that, that whiff of discomfort and danger she’d alreadytrained herself to put in a box in the back of her mind, made her boil with rage.
It came at her in a wave then, this thing she’d felt twinges of before. The other times, she’d been able to push it down, dismissing it as nausea or a sugar rush. But now she couldn’t get rid of it, this tsunami that was drowning her, crowding out her ability to think of anything other than the white-hot anger that seared every corner of her body. It overwhelmed her, coming and coming until she had no choice but to let it out.
At first, she thought there’d been an earthquake. One second everything was fine, and then the coffee table was flipped, the TV was smashed, the couch was upended. She hadn’t felt the shake, but sometimes these things were quick, right?
But then she saw Noah. Lying on the ground, his body thrown into the coffee table, shards of wood sprinkled across the floor. A singed hole in his T-shirt, a bloom of red growing in the center of his stomach. And her hands, hot with anger, hot with rage, hot with actualfire, sparks darting across her skin.
She threw up, right over her brother’s shoes. Her dead brother, she’d thought, but then she’d seen the faint rise and fall of his chest. She managed to get herself to her phone to try to call 911, but when she touched it, the metal melted in her hands. They were still covered in those red sparks. She was on fire. How was she on fire?
There were keys jingling in the door. Her mom, coming home from work. Her dad would be home soon too.
And she was on fire, Noah bleeding on the floor, with something inside of her screaming to do it again.
She went for the window. Crawled out, leaving burnt handprints in her wake, and then ran, and ran, and ran, until the fire finally gave out, and then ran and ran and ran some more until her legs gave out too, and then she wound up here.
She decided she’d die here, away from anyone she could possibly hurt. Alone.
Only she wasn’t alone anymore. She spotted the feet out of the corner of her eye as she shifted, white sneakers with scuff marks on thebottoms. She pushed herself closer to the wall, until she was hidden in the shadow of the building. Whoever this was could just throw away their trash or smoke their joint and leave her alone.
But they didn’t leave. The white sneakers took a step closer, and then another, and then they were right above her, and then a female voice said, softly, “Lily?”
Lily closed her eyes tighter, buried her face further in her knees.Just wait for her to go away, she told herself.This is a test—ignore the voices in your head, and then you’ll stop being crazy and everything will go back to normal.
