When he was within arm’s reach, Eli grabbed him and pulled him close. Blood was dripping from his nose.
Kite licked the blood from her face. “The wind will have to fight me for you,” she whispered and stroked Eli’s hair.
She half led, half dragged him into the truck. He climbed wearily inside, pulling the rod with him. Eli followed.
It was only once they were safely inside that Eli noticed there was no dust on the metal rod. It gleamed silver, as if newly polished. Cam was shivering uncontrollably, and Eli knew if she didn’t calm him down, he could go into shock and die.
She gripped his arm and squeezed. “Tell me how you found the Hedge-Witch. Tell me why you’re here. Tell me everything.”
His eyes found hers. They were red as blood and he smelled of desperation.
“Cam. Tell me. Tell me why you’re here.” She kept her voice calm and even, her eyes trained on his. Her thumb pressed against his wrist and she felt the moment the panic in his body started to subside.
Twenty-Four
Cam’s father was born in Vietnam and his mother was born in Canada. When the white people in his suburb asked, “Where are you from?” Cam liked to say, “A galaxy far, far away.” As a kid he had dreamed about other worlds, read every science fiction book in the school library, and worshipped NASA astronauts. But his research didn’t bring him to the Coven. A boy did.
A witch boy.
A boy with blueblack hair and silver eyes. He had come to the world to steal a name, but instead he stole Cam. Cam willingly became one of the human spies the Coven used to keep tabs on renegade witches and assassins. He did it for love.
“He didn’t glamour or enchant me; I wanted to help,” he told Eli as they waited out the storm. He could tell she was suspicious. “How often do you get offered a chance to be a part of something so fantastical?”
“What was he like?”
Cam ran a hand through his hair. “He was … strange. Quiet. Kept to himself. But magnetic somehow. You knew he had secrets, and if he told one to you, it meant you were special. He made me feel special. He wrote me —”
Cam cut himself off and shook his head.
“Cam?”
“It just sounds so stupid now that he’s gone. He wrote me love notes with fireflies at dusk. With falling leaves. He used to get excited about the most ridiculous things — like listening to my heartbeat or cutting my hair. Everything that was human about me was so new to him.” He tried an easy smile. It almost worked. “Once he asked if he could shave my moustache off. I said no. I said, ‘Love, I will do anything for you — but two things about me will never change: my sexy moustache and my even sexier jazz collection.’ He got on board with it. Eventually.”
“What happened?” asked Eli.
“I don’t know.” Cam chewed his lip. “He either joined the Coven or died. I don’t know which. One day he left. I never heard from him again.” The words shimmered with pain.
Eli imagined Cam watching the fireflies at night, waiting for a sign. Staring up at falling leaves and snowflakes trying to read his name.
Her heart ached for him.
A few months after the boy had left him, the Coven had tasked Cam with investigating a runaway witch who had come to the world for a name and stayed. It was rumoured that she was stealing all kinds of earthly things and sharing none of that knowledge and power with the Coven.
Cam discovered that they were right, but he was won over by the calm healing magic of The Sun, the Hedge-Witch’s passionate speeches about peace and harmony, and the other humans who truly believed. Cam wanted to be a part of that. Heartbroken and lonely, Cam found family in the group that claimed freedom from the Coven’s tyranny.
“They never came after you?”
Cam shrugged. “The Coven doesn’t really care about the humans it uses. We die easily. They forget us. It’s not like anyone would believe me if I told them about ghosts and witches — and even if they did, so what? The Coven isn’t scared of the human world.”
“And your parents?”
He shrugged. “They think I’m an Uber driver. Not too happy about it, to be honest. They really thought I was going to be an astronaut.” He tapped on the window and laughed, a little wildly. “I never made it to the moon, but this is pretty cool, too, right? A galaxy far, far away …”
“We’re in the same galaxy,” said Eli.
Cam laughed. “I’ll loan you my DVDs sometime.”
Cam fell silent then, turning away from Eli. He traced a few lines in the dirt on the window. Outside, the storm was quieting, and in the new silence, his words seemed to hang in the air. “You think Tav found a place to hide?”
“I’m sure they did,” Eli lied.
“How did you fail?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either.” Eli chewed on the inside of her cheek. She wanted to tell someone, and maybe Cam would understand. He had worked for the witches. His heart had been broken by one, just like hers.
“The last ghost I killed …” Eli tapped on the broken steering wheel. “It was supposed to be a ghost. It’s always a ghost. But it was a human.” When she spoke the next words, the frost blade rang out, and she knew it was the truth. “The Coven sent me to kill a human.”
Once she started confessing, she couldn’t stop. “I splattered his brains on the bathroom floor and left him lying there in his own blood. He was scared, in the end. I can still see the look in his eye when I took the knife —”
“Stop.” Cam’s voice had a strangled quality to it. “Please, just stop.”
“I’m sorry.”
There was a long silence.
“And you think the next mark is also a human?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Why are they killing humans?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to tell Tav?” he asked softly.
She should have said yes. Tav deserved to know they were travelling with a murderer. But what if they looked at her differently? Eli looked away, staring at her smudged and blurry reflection in the window. Is that what the man with the Clark Kent glasses saw in the end? The lost eyes of a lonely girl desperate to please? Desperate enough to kill without question?
Anger filled her veins and blackened her vision. Cam didn’t say anything after that. He left her to her dark thoughts.
The storm raged for hours as they huddled fearfully in a metal shell. Cam’s eyes would never get rid of their redness, and the dust patterns on Eli’s body would become permanent scars.
But they would live.
Twenty-Five
A few hours after the storm abated, they reached the centre of the junkyard. Eli could tell this was the core from the strands of magic that ran together here and touched, like they were standing at the centre of a spiderweb.
It was also the biggest mountain of needless things she had seen.
“Let me guess,” Cam sighed. “We have to climb this monster.”
“Or tunnel through,” said Eli. “I don’t think this thing is coming down anytime soon. It’s the junction of lost magic.”
“I’ll take my chances going up. Not much for small dark spaces,” said Cam.