“Who?” I whispered. My heart clenched.
Mr. Alvarez turned to face me. He closed his eyes briefly. “Verrick. He’s alive, and he’s loose.”
“She knows,” Leon said.
My voice broke. “He’s Gideon.”
His face flashed before me. His crooked little grin, the dimple that sometimes appeared in his cheek. His brown eyes were warm, full of humor. I heard him say my name. I heard him scream.
Shane had warned me, I thought. When he’d still been Shane. The choice is yours, if you wish to plummet off this cliff, he’d said. I’m merely pointing out the edge.
But he’d been wrong. I’d left the ledge far behind without even realizing it. There was no ground beneath me. There was nothing left to do but fall, and keep falling.
I swallowed, feeling tears on my face. My whole body felt hot. I couldn’t seem to draw in enough air.
“How long have you known?” Mr. Alvarez said.
“Is that relevant?” Mom asked.
There didn’t seem any point in hiding it any longer. “Since the day we killed Susannah,” I said, stumbling over the words. “When I figured out who the Remnant is. Was.”
“Three months.” Mr. Alvarez sighed. “Well, we can’t do anything to change that now.”
I made an effort to brush the tears from my face, then grabbed one of the couch pillows and hugged it against me. “Will you at least tell me what happened?”
“He attacked Camille,” Leon said.
I bit my lip, looking at Mr. Alvarez. “Is she okay?” Camille was Mr. Alvarez’s ex-girlfriend, and even though they’d broken up—which may or may not have had something to do with him using her as Harrower-bait—I figured he’d be visibly upset if she’d been seriously hurt, but I didn’t let out my breath until he nodded.
“He doesn’t seem to be at his full strength,” Mr. Alvarez added. “He retreated when she fought back. But he told her who he was, and she called me.” He turned to Mom. “We don’t know where he is now. Camille said she didn’t think he’d gone Beneath, so we need to search the streets. We can’t rely on him retreating next time. Our window of opportunity here is brief.”
Their opportunity to find him and kill him. Panic surged. Fresh tears streamed down my cheeks. “It’s not his fault,” I choked out. “He’s not Verrick any longer. The Circle did something to him. It changed him. It made him into something else. He’s not just a Harrower, he’s human.”
Mr. Alvarez’s voice was gentle, but his words sliced into me. “Regardless of how he’s been living the past seventeen years, Verrick has been unsealed. Gideon is gone.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t believe that. I don’t believe that. There has to be some way to save him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t deserve to be saved,” Leon answered.
My eyes snapped to his. He was looking at me finally. His face was hard and angry.
“What happened at Gideon’s house?” Mom interjected, sinking down onto the couch beside me. “How is it that he got released?”
The scene replayed before me—Gideon’s fingers clasped in mine, our hands separating, the two of us flying apart, the look in his eyes in that final second before the world dimmed around me. If I could just rearrange events, I thought, reverse and rewrite them. This time, Gideon would stand, lifting himself up from the ground. He’d walk to me, take my hand. Shane would not appear. We would reach the stairs unhindered. We’d run.
“Audrey?” Mom asked.
“It was the Beneath. It unsealed him. I don’t know how.”
Mr. Alvarez gave me a quizzical look. “What do you mean, the Beneath?”
“It was the Beneath that killed the elders,” I said. The words came out in a rush. “Iris found me just before I went to Gideon’s. She said—she said the Beneath got woken somehow. And that it’s been growing in strength. That’s why there wasn’t any sign that Shane had stopped being neutral. He didn’t. It just…sort of took him over, I guess. And Gideon—the Beneath can’t inhabit him, so it unsealed him. That’s what Iris told me.”
Mr. Alvarez blinked. “A physical manifestation of the Beneath?”
“I don’t know that you want to trust anything Iris has to say,” Mom said.
I shook my head. “No. She wasn’t lying about this. It’s what she’s been trying to tell me, the whole reason she came out from Beneath,” I said. “And she’s right. I felt it, Mom. At Sonja’s house. And at Gideon’s. It was the same thing I felt when Iris and I went Beneath.”
I didn’t know how to explain it. How to describe the abyss given form, a black hole that walked and breathed. And it wasn’t just sense or feeling, either. It had a smell. A taste. I could almost taste it now, in the stifling air of the living room, with the windows open and the humidity sticking in my lungs. Rancid and sickly sweet. My stomach twisted.
My face must have conveyed what my words couldn’t, because Mr. Alvarez said, “If that’s true, I’m not sure how we’re meant to fight it.” He sighed, tapping his fingers against his leg. “The elders might have had a solution, or at least some idea if anything like this has ever happened before. Maybe the other Circles will have information.”
“We fight Harrowers,” Mom said. “As many as it takes.”
“It may take a lot,” Mr. Alvarez said. His voice was grim. “That could be why there hasn’t been any Harrower activity at the other Circles. It could be they’re all converging here.”
I thought of Susannah’s army, the demons she had gathered just beyond the edge of the Circle, waiting to surge forth once the barrier was opened. That had been bad enough. Now I imagined all the Beneath teeming with Harrowers’ bodies, a sea of scarlet and silver clawing toward the surface.
Mom must have had a similar thought. “That’s not good,” she said.
“I don’t have any evidence to back it up,” he added. “It’s just supposition.”
“A worrying supposition.”
Leon’s eyes narrowed. “And so, just like that, you’re going to forget that Verrick is running free? Do you remember what Verrick did?”
“I’m not forgetting anything, Leon,” Mom answered. “But if what Audrey says is true, we may actually have bigger problems.”
“Audrey is not an impartial source in this.”
I hopped to my feet. “You think I’m lying?”
“You’ve been lying for months.”
“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t say anything.”
“It’s the same thing, and you know it is,” he shot back.
“Argue about this later,” Mom said.
But I didn’t stop talking. I had to make Leon understand. My hands balled into fists. “I couldn’t tell. The Kin would have killed Gideon. The elders would have killed him, the way they killed Brooke.”
My words hung in the air. There was a long moment of silence, broken only by drone of an engine from outside.
Finally, Mr. Alvarez said, “Brooke Oliver’s powers were sealed.”
I shook my head. “I asked Esther. She told me the truth.”
“Audrey…” Mom said. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Jesus.”
Mr. Alvarez stared at me. He looked as though he’d been slapped. Or like he was about to be sick. His dark eyes were huge in his face. He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. Though I’d grown accustomed to seeing him outside of school, I still had trouble separating Ryan Alvarez, leader of the Guardians, from the stern, no-nonsense math teacher he always presented in class. Now, abruptly, I remembered how young he actually was. Too young to lead the Kin, Esther had told me. Too raw.
Too innocent.
He swallowed. A muscle in his jaw twitched. Then, without saying another word, he turned and left the room.
Mom rose from the couch and followed him. “Ryan—”