Jodi Meadows: Asunder

“Sam will free us.” Cris looked hopeful.

“No, he won’t.” The temple had no temperature—not too hot or cold—but chills raced across my body, and I shivered. “He won’t save us, because he won’t be able to. It was a mob out there. I don’t even know if Sam’s okay.” The last words choked me.

Both of them wore pinched expressions, and Cris touched my elbow. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably working out a plan to take the key right now.”

I shook my head and described what I’d seen. No need to go easy on them. I didn’t see how our situation could get any worse.

“Ana!” Stef jabbed a finger toward the archway we’d come from. It was gone. “He locked us in. Now we really can’t get out.”

“We wouldn’t have gotten out anyway!” The constant pulse of the temple made my head throb. “What about that is so confusing? No matter where we are, we’re not leaving. Sam can’t rescue us. Deborl wouldn’t free us if his life depended on it. No one else knows how to use the key. We’re stuck.”

“All right!” Cris rubbed his forehead as though to press a headache into a smaller, more manageable size. “Both of you, please. We need a plan.”

“Like what? Escape?” I scowled and gestured around the room. “The only thing I see is the hole under the altar, and I don’t recommend it.”

“We’re just as bad off as if we’d left,” Stef muttered, just loud enough that it was meant to be heard.

I shook my head. “If we’d left, we would be stuck in a tiny box.”

“You don’t know that. You’re guessing on all of this.” Stef loomed over me. “You’ve been leading us nowhere the whole time, with no idea where you were going or what you wanted to accomplish.”

“At least I was doing something.” My fingernails dug into my palms, carving crescents into my skin.

“You’d have just stayed there all confused. Did you even try to escape Deborl? Or were you too busy being mad because Sam and I didn’t tell you what had been going on?”

“Don’t pretend like you know anything about me or the way I feel.” Her face was pink in the red glow, and I had pushed too hard.

I didn’t care. “I know enough.” She kept antagonizing Sam about his closeness to me, but she was the person keeping a stash of his photos and letters. I wanted to hurt her. “I know how you disguise your feelings for Sam. You fooled him, but he’s used to your flirting and never took it seriously. But I know you meant it.”

She stared at me like I’d said she had chicken feet or hands growing from her head, but that was Stef.

Pretending even now she didn’t really care.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I said it anyway, my voice low and too calm. “I told him that you love him.”

Her face went blank.

A wiser person would have stopped there, but I went on anyway. “If you were as brave as you claim, you’d have told him lifetimes ago.”

“And I suppose you have? No, that would ruin your tortured newsoul existence.” Her voice grew stronger, angrier. “You can’t let yourself be happy, can you? Well maybe this will fix it: you’re not coming back. There’s no skeleton in here with your name on it, so when you die, that’s it. Gone. I’ll still love Sam, and thanks for telling him, by the way. Now he’ll have time to figure out a response in our next lives when you’re not here. Are you happy now? You really are as tragic as you think you are, butterfly.”

She might as well have stabbed me; it hurt the same.

There was a whole list of things I shouldn’t do, including asking if she could find his skeleton among all these—I could—and telling her about his reaction when he found out how she felt. But I didn’t do any of them, because it would be cruel and petty. Not that I’d been much above cruel and petty so far, but I didn’t want her to hate me forever. And, romantic feelings aside, she was still Sam’s best friend.

“There’s no point in arguing about it, Stef.” My voice was more level than it had ever been, but surely she could hear the strain. “Because we’re trapped. We’re never leaving this room.”

AFTER STARTLING STEF and Cris into silence, I marched over to Meuric’s skeleton and kicked the skull.

Whatever magic had been holding it together must have failed when the shackles came off. The skull skittered across the floor and dropped into the pit beneath the table.

I kicked an arm, and several bones cracked against one another, the floor, and a table leg. Pieces of Meuric dropped out of sight, making no sound on their way down. If they ever reached an end, I didn’t hear the clatter.

Still angry, I kicked his ribs, hips. Smaller bones turned to powder as my boot hit them. “I hate you,” I hissed, as the last of Meuric vanished.

Stepping around the dust, I almost felt bad for kicking Meuric down a pit again.

“Okay,” I whispered to myself, and knelt by the skeleton now caught in shackles. Deborl. I hated him, too. More than I hated Meuric. The hate twisted inside me like a snake, uncomfortable, but clean and sharp and determined.

I reached for the tarnished silver cuff to search for a lock. If Janan didn’t have a Hallow, maybe he couldn’t ascend on Soul Night. It would make being trapped in here worth it, if I could save everyone else from the fate hurtling toward them.

As I touched the shackle, electricity zapped through me. I screamed, and lost feeling in my right side.

My arm hung uselessly.

“Ana?” Cris hurried toward me, looking around for whatever had attacked me.

I shook away the buzzing in my head. “Don’t touch the chains.”

He sat with me until feeling in my fingers returned, and then, more carefully, I climbed onto the table and tried to kick Janan off.

He might have been a human-shaped lump of silver himself. He didn’t move. Cris even joined me, but no matter what we tried, we couldn’t budge him.

The knife, however, did come away when we worked together. Cris pried Janan’s grip off the handle just enough so I could slip it out. The blade was silver at the base, but the end looked as though it had been dipped in liquid gold. Janan’s hands returned to their original position, but now they held only a memory of the knife.

I didn’t have anything to do with it, though, so I left it on the table.

“You will die!” shouted the walls, incorporeal Janan.

“Why don’t you lick my shoe?” I propped my boot on dead-Janan’s face. “You won’t do anything to us. Not here.”

Red light swirled around the chamber, and Janan’s screams resounded through the room as he called me names I’d never imagined could be put together like that.

But he was without substance, and we were already trapped.

“You’re just a human, like us!” Not quite true—he was powerful, incorporeal, and consumed and reincarnated souls—but he’d started out human. Reminding him of that was satisfying. “Just a short human!”

“Is that your plan?” Stef asked when the screams faded. “Annoy him until he kicks us out?”

“No. I’m working on a better one.” I flashed a tight, fake smile. “This is just the beginning.” I kicked dead-Janan’s head, but numbness rushed through my toes as though I’d kicked a block of ice.

I hopped off the table and marched around the perimeter of the room.

A few minutes or an hour later, Cris fell into step beside me and I said, “If you’re here to chastise me for being mean to Stef, I don’t want to hear it.” I twisted my scarf in my hands, hating my obvious fidget, but I couldn’t stay still.

“No, I thought you’d probably done enough of that yourself.”