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She screamed from pain and shock. “Sam, what in the hell?” Ellen said.
“Ninety seconds,” Rivkah said.
Oliver barreled around me and lunged at Sam.
“It isn’t Sam,” I said, tugging on the back of Oliver’s shirt, trying to pull him back. He broke free from my grasp and dove at Sam, but Sam flung Iris to the floor and swung his fist. Oliver was knocked backward, his head hitting the edge of the tub. Red began dripping from the point of contact.
“I have been aching to do that for years.” The voice came from Sam. Iris had managed to sit up. She held her good arm up toward him, a ball of blue light forming at her fingertips. It shot out and encased Sam’s body. For an instant, he stood there frozen, but then the casing curled open like a blooming lily. “It is so good to be home.” A childish voice piped from Sam’s mouth. He kicked Iris in the stomach, and she crumpled over.
“Wren,” she said between coughs.
He licked his lips and shrugged his shoulders. “This body is so comfortable. It is so spacious and solid. Fits like a glove, you might say.” He winked at Iris. “I hope you don’t mind I took it out to Jefferson Street for a bit of professional companionship. I was aching to take this body for a test drive, see how well it handles the curves.” Sam’s tongue shot out and moistened his lips, then he laughed and advanced on us. “Crack whores carry such an exotic aroma, you know? Something like sweet burnt plastic. Or maybe candied ballpoint pens.”
“How could you have taken control of Sam’s body?” Iris asked.
“How could you have taken control of Sam’s body?” he mimicked her.
Rivkah beamed him between the eyes with the stopwatch. “You two bring Emmet back now. I will deal with this weakling son of a bitch.”
Ellen ignored Rivkah and scrambled around me to examine Oliver. She raised a hand and caught a towel as it jumped into her grasp. “Oli,” she said. “Open your eyes. We need you.” Oliver gave no sign of hearing her.
“Weakling?” A venomous laugh the real Sam could never have produced burst from his mouth. “No. Not anymore, and given your help in this little experiment, that is partially thanks to you.” He slapped his hands together, and a ball of dark energy, a force so black it seemed to devour light, shot from them. “In return, a gift from Gehenna.” Rivkah screamed like an enraged banshee and braced herself, but the burst of concentrated darkness hit her, lifting her and slamming her against the wall. Sam’s lips twisted up. “Oh man, I could do this all day.”
Ellen rose to confront him. “Sleep,” Sam’s sharpened voice commanded, and Ellen fell limp over Oliver’s prone frame. “I always liked that lush. I’ll take it easy on her.” Sam walked toward me, and as he did, the room’s periphery rolled back further and further. It was like his stride pushed the rest of the world away, and Rivkah and
my family with it. “You, though, I do not like at all.”
I focused on Emmet, placing a hand on each side of his head. I willed the tub’s drain to open, and the frigid water began to work its way out. Time to come back to us. I willed his heart to begin beating. I felt a bit of an electric shock myself when I realized I had succeeded. Still, he didn’t stir.
Iris’s sobs faded as her image slid yards, then miles away. Rivkah faded almost as quickly on my other side. I tried to sense Emmet’s essence. I could feel it, dimensions away. Come back. Another force, strong, stronger than my own, was pulling him back in the opposite direction.
“You don’t need to worry about the golem’s body,” Wren said and chuckled. “It may be vacant, but now that you got it ticking again, it may live forever, or at least until Gehenna goes out of business. And we both know that is as good as forever.” Wren poked a finger into Emmet’s chest.
Emmet. You have to fight. I need you. I kept trying to get a strong enough hold on him. Ellen and Oliver had now disappeared beyond the horizon.
“It’s just you and me now, princess, and thanks to the circuit you have completed, I’ve got all the power of Gehenna behind me.” He flung his arms out wide, and sizzling bits of darkness danced along his fingers. Bile caught in my throat as the air around us took on the scent of rotten eggs—no, sulfur. “That’s the smell of power. Not blood magic. Not witch magic. This here is the real stuff. Soul magic.” He lifted his nose, and breathed in. His face took on a maniacal expression, his eyes nearly bulging out of his head, his brows lifting comically. “Breathe that perfume in. You can learn to love it, you know? I sure as hell have.” He laughed. “Get it? Sure as hell?”
“How can you be here?” I said. “How can you be inside Sam?”
“You can thank your little brother, Josef, for both of those things.” He folded Sam’s arms across his chest. “Josef caught Iris’s new toy here and carried us out to Sapelo. That corpse of your Jilo, it’s rotting away underground, but it still had enough of Tillandsia’s magic to power one more tiny spell. Left me with this nice package, and made sure that high yellow cousin of yours would come knocking. We knew if Jessamine came, one thing would lead to another, and you all would end up finding out that poor sweet Adeline was trapped in Gehenna. Once you knew that, you would be stupid enough to try to get her out.”
I slid my hands down Emmet’s sturdy neck to his shoulders. They were growing warmer to the touch. I risked taking my eyes from Sam only long enough to confirm Emmet’s chest still rose and fell. “So this was all another one of Emily’s tricks?”
“I wouldn’t say it was so much of a ‘trick,’” Sam said and shook his head, “as a well-timed disclosure of truths. Your mother, she played her cards close to her still-perky little tits. She’s held on to these tasty tidbits for decades now. Nice, huh? I knew your granddad had trouble keeping it in his trousers, but damn! Not only sowing his seed in that dark soil, but buying the field he plowed. I cannot tell you how much I love it that your prissy stuck-up bitch of a grandmother was never even legally married to your grandfather. Imagine. You all were born on the wrong side of the sheet. Illegitimate.” He sounded each syllable out as if it were a separate word.
My emotions blurred. I had begun to grow fond of Sam, but I detested the creature who had taken him over. “What happened to Sam? Is he in there with you?”
“Sam? Sam, you in here?” Wren called and rocked from side to side, rapping his knuckles against his temple. He stopped and shook his head. “Nope. He isn’t home.”
“Then where is he?”
“The little bitch has been buzzing around me all day, trying to get back in, but I got things locked down in here. He won’t manage to hold out longer.”
“That’s all I’ve been waiting to hear.” Maisie’s voice came from nowhere. She stepped sideways from nothingness into my field of vision. My eyes caught the flash of a knife’s blade slicing up through the air, and twisting into Sam. Sam’s hand moved to cover the wound, but Maisie slapped it away. Her lips began moving silently at first; then her voice built to a whisper. I knew her words to be an incantation, but they were in a language I didn’t understand.
She dropped the bloodied knife to the floor, where it bounced and slid beneath the tub. Sam’s body stood rigid, frozen in place by Maisie’s spell. She stiffened her fingers, and placed their tips against the hole in Sam’s abdomen, wiggling them back and forth until her hand disappeared all the way to her wrist beneath Sam’s skin. Sam’s mouth fell open, and a horrible sound, something lost between a scream and an angry teakettle’s cry, escaped his lips.
Maisie pulled her hand back, a small tarlike orb struggling within her caged fingers. She tightened her grasp, and her chant grew in intensity. The struggling substance in her hand caught fire. “That’s enough of him,” she said and wiped what was left of Wren from her palm on her jeans. Sam’s body went limp, and Maisie used her magic to guide it gently to the floor. The room’s walls rushed back into their customary positions, but my family had not returned with them. Maisie knelt next to Sam’s limp form, pressing her hands over the wound she’d put in him.
