The Price Guide to the Occult(58)

“Nor, please,” he sputtered. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? A few weeks ago, your mother’s power started to weaken, and I woke up and found years of my life suddenly gone, vanished without a trace or a memory. I found loved ones buried, dreams long dead. Let me go. Please.”

Nor tried to imagine what it was like to drown. Perhaps it was peaceful, as if all you had to do was surrender and let death wash over you, like watercolor paint saturating a piece of paper.

Or maybe it was something else entirely. Perhaps a death by drowning was eerily quiet because the water had stolen your voice. To scream, you had to be able to breathe. Under that serene facade was violence. Under that mask of apathy was terror.

“Let me be free of this hell,” he begged.

Nor looked into his pleading eyes. With quiet irony, she noted that out of all the things Fern had told her about her father, she’d never mentioned that Nor had his eyes. “Not like this,” she said.

Mara, the third Blackburn daughter, wasn’t spoken of very often. This was most likely because her Burden had terrified the fellow islanders.

Mara’s mental capacity and disposition had never evolved beyond those of a child, a sweet child who could hold death in her hands as gently as a flower. And like a bouquet, she’d gifted death to ailing neighbors and eased them peacefully into the afterlife. For those in agony, Mara’s Burden was truly a blessing, a gift of mercy. For the mourners left behind, it was more difficult to view it that way. Their lack of appreciation and understanding became clear when sweet Mara was found floating facedown in the waters of Celestial Lake.

No record existed of exactly how this wide-eyed Angel of Death had aided her neighbors’ passings, and Mara wasn’t known to be a particularly communicative or intelligible young woman.

As Nor leaned over Quinn Sweeney, however, she instinctively knew exactly what Mara had done. Tenderly, Nor leaned over her father as if to kiss him farewell and filled her lungs with his last breath, like sipping air through a straw. Then she let him go, and the water slowly pulled him under. The serenity in Quinn Sweeney’s handsome face told Nor with utter clarity that at least in death, her father had finally found some peace.

Nor waded through the doorway and down a hallway. At the end of the hall, she climbed a flight of stairs that was still just beyond the water’s icy reach. It wouldn’t be long, though, before it reached up here, too. Suddenly Nor couldn’t stop shaking. What had happened to the other people in the hotel? Had her mother really killed all of them? Or had they, like her father, simply given up first?

“Well, that sucked,” Savvy said when Nor caught up with them. She shivered and pushed strands of wet blue hair off of her face. Sena Crowe helped her to her feet.

Gage pointed out a window. Nor could see Charlie’s skiff rocking up and down on the restless waves, a tiny beacon of hope. “Thanks to you,” Gage said, “we might actually be able to get out of here.” Instead of making Nor feel better, though, it made her feel worse. Every step they took to reach that boat would be a fight. And even then, there was no guarantee they’d make it back to Anathema in the storm. All thanks to me.

The sky was so dark it was as if someone had extinguished the stars, had wrapped the moon in a shroud and buried it deep underground. The rain pounded against the window.

“You should go,” Nor said to the other three. “Before the storm gets any worse.”

“What about you?” Savvy protested.

“Someone needs to stop my mother.”

“Nor . . .” Gage said quietly, shaking his head. He looked at her and that was when Nor realized that, until now, she’d never seen him afraid. She put her arms around him. He froze, and then he slid his hands around her waist and pulled her closer to him.

“I want to say you’ll be okay,” he said quietly, “but I’m not sure if that’s true.”

“I’m not, either,” she whispered back. His hands moved up into her wet hair, and for a mere fraction of a second, Nor pressed her lips against his.

“I’ll go with you,” he murmured.

“No.” She pulled away and saw she’d left a smear of her blood on his neck. “Get the others home. Keep them safe.”

Nor squeezed her fingers together into a fist, and blood bubbled up through the gash in her palm. There wasn’t time to stay and argue. There wasn’t time for her to do anything now but to keep going up — to the roof where she was certain to find her mother pouring her wrath down on the rest of the world like the blood from so many wounds.

But that was the thing: Nor had stopped being afraid of blood a long time ago.

Nor pounded up the stairs to the hotel’s roof. She reached the door and pushed her way into the gale. The storm nearly knocked her back inside.

Fern had her back turned. A black veil was wrapped around her head. “Did you think you had beaten me?” she called to Nor. “Did you think you’d be lucky enough to defeat me?” She turned then. The black veil whipped in the wind like a wild animal. She finally looked like the harbinger of death and destruction that she was. Another roof. Another night of darkness and blood, of pain and anguish, like the one Nor remembered as a neglected little girl.

“Tell me, daughter,” Fern asked darkly, “do I seem defeated to you?”

She lurched at Nor and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Look at me!” Fern screamed. “Even the almighty Rona Blackburn would bow before me. She would tremble at my feet! I can bring the dead to life. I summon the shadows, and the shadows come! I am Hecate, Goddess of Storms, Lady of the Underworld, Enemy of Mankind. I am doom and death, misery and blame! I am the thing even the darkness fears!”