Steadfast(77)

Startled, she turned to see Gage just as he grabbed her arm and towed her out of the car.

“What are you doing?” Faye struggled but couldn’t pull free; he was strong. “Let me go!”

Gage didn’t listen. No—he couldn’t listen. His eyes stared at her vacantly, completely devoid of their usual intelligence and humor. And now that he was this close, she could see, hanging around him like an aura, the sickly, red light that could signify dark magic.

Elizabeth’s controlling him. He’s her thrall.

Faye stopped trying to escape and started fighting back. She tackled him, and apparently the element of surprise was enough to get him to stagger backward. That gave her a chance to yank her arm away and leap into her car.

Gage smashed at the door, but her shaking fingers were already turning the key in the ignition. Within seconds she’d sped off, panting as she glanced in the rearview mirror to see Gage staring after her impassively.

What was it her mother had taught her? Thralls can’t do anything complicated, not while they’re being directly influenced. They love their creator, and only their creator. They can sense danger to the Sorceress. And they’ll fight to protect her.

Right now, all of them represented some danger to Elizabeth—Nadia, Mateo, Verlaine, everyone. The only question was which of them Gage would go after next.

Stop looking at it! If people see you staring, they’ll wonder what you’re staring at.

Verlaine curled into one of the plastic chairs at the hospital and tried very hard not to imagine that the pearl she now wore in the locket around her neck wasn’t warm. Or glowing. Or tingling with energy. Because it wasn’t—she’d double-checked the glowing part in the mirror. That was just her imagination running away with her, reminding her of the power she would soon help to channel.

The power that might soon kill her—

Once again the ground trembled, and people cried out in alarm. The quake wasn’t as bad as the one that morning, though; the shaking died down after only a few moments. For Verlaine it was a relief: Probably just Nadia at work, she thought.

But for everyone else in the waiting area, all the exhausted family members of mysteriously ill patients, the quake seemed to be the last straw.

“This isn’t right!” one woman cried. “This isn’t natural, and we all know it!”

People murmured in assent. Then the murmuring turned into anger. Verlaine kept her face turned away in an attempt to hide her astonishment. Were the residents of Captive’s Sound finally catching on to the fact that their town was seriously messed up?

In one way, that would be cool, because it would prove that the people around Verlaine were marginally less stupid than she’d believed them to be. But if people suspected the truth, wouldn’t Nadia’s work suddenly get more complicated? Because then people would be looking for the signs of witchcraft, looking for the witches themselves—

“That one!” someone shouted. “She’s always around when things go wrong, and look at her! She’s pretending the quake didn’t even happen!”

Verlaine glanced up to see who they were talking about, only to see the entire group staring directly at her.

Oh, crap, she thought.

“I—” What was she supposed to say? They seemed to expect her to say something. She went back on the best defense she could think of, which was a total lie: “Come on, people. There’s no such thing as, uh, the supernatural.”

“She’s always sneaking in and out,” someone else said. The group began to move closer to her, slowly, but the hairs on Verlaine’s arms rose. “She’s always poking her nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

Any other person might have been protected, Verlaine realized, just by the friendships and connections people made in a small town. This angry, upset crowd ought to remember that she was Gary and Dave’s daughter, that she went to school with their kids, that they saw her in the same stores and on the same streets where they were themselves. They should have seen her as one of them.

But Verlaine was masked by black magic. Nobody loved her. Not many people even liked her. They couldn’t.

That meant they were free to fear her. To hate her.

“You’re not yourselves,” she said as she rose to her feet. She closed her fingers around the locket on her neck, instinctively protecting the pearl charm. “You’re not thinking straight. We’re all upset. Everyone needs to calm down.”

With that she turned and began to walk out of the hospital. If she didn’t panic, they wouldn’t, either. Slow and steady, easy does it . . .

“Stop her!” came the shout, and then the footsteps pounded behind her, and Verlaine could only run.

Her heart seemed to be pounding its way through her rib cage, as though it wanted to shatter her. Verlaine’s first instinct was to run for her car, but already people were crowding the hallways all around her and blocking her way. Their eyes were wild, hardly even human. They’d been pushed to the limits of their endurance, beyond the point of rational thought. They blamed her for what was happening in Captive’s Sound, and they intended to make her pay.

Uncle Gary! she thought. They wouldn’t hurt her if she was with the patients; they’d calm down if only to protect their own loved ones. And if they remembered that someone she loved had been struck down, too, maybe that would snap them out of it.