Kissed by Midnight

by Cate Corvin

  Josephine and I, the last of the Lockes, were the only ones who would never join our ancestors. Unless I could burn Josephine’s remaining bones on the cornerstone.

  “Here,” she said. “She can bring me home.” Her dark gaze flicked to Lucrezia’s soul, which was silent and still.

  A small object rested on the cornerstone’s surface; a fetch sewn with shining auburn hair.

  Dominic let out a ragged breath. “The fetch. Locke, when I’ve brought her back, you must destroy that one and its counterpart in Life, as soon as Lucrezia is free of the pentagram.” He slammed his rowan knives back in their sheaths, rolled his filthy sleeves up over his elbows. “Get them out, and… come back for Simon’s body, if you can.”

  “Of course I will,” I said, wrapping my arm around Josephine’s shoulders. I wanted to hug her and remember our old life for these last few minutes before she joined our ancestors.

  Dominic took a step forward without further preamble, breaking the line of the pentagram.

  Simon jerked him back, putting all of his force, which wasn’t much, into stopping any part of Dom’s body from coming into contact with the pentagram. “I don’t think so.”

  Dom gripped Simon’s pale hand, glaring at him furiously, but the spirit just punched his arm with a faint smile. His spirit was young enough that there was still some of his original self left.

  “I’m already dead, Dom. I’ll get her for you.”

  “I will not let your soul be eaten by it. I’ve spent years looking for your spirit so you could rest-”

  “This will be rest for me,” Simon said. His voice was growing fainter, strained by the energy he was expending to argue. “I’ve spent so long wandering in the dark, fighting off all the hungry ones… I’m tired now, Dom. I found you and you found me, and becoming part of the ether just sounds like a long, pleasant sleep.” He forced another crooked smile. “I want this. You’ll know I’m resting for good this way.”

  Dominic gritted his teeth, every fiber in his body strained. “Simon…”

  The spirit fell backwards as the Warden reached for him, plunging into the pentagram up to his knees like it was a pool of water. “Too late.”

  Simon waded forward, the sigils tearing at the flesh of his barely-corporeal form and rising around him. He was almost up to his chin by the time he reached Lucrezia’s spirit and dragged her from the bars of the little prison, floating in the middle of the pentagram like an island.

  The boy’s spirit slung her over his shoulder she flopped there limply. When he turned back to us, his face was tight as he pushed against the hungry sigils. They were leaching him away more quickly now, consuming as much of him as they could get and siphoning his energy through the Cage.

  “Have a funeral for me, will you, Dom? With lots of pretty girls. Tell ‘em I was a war hero or something. Make me sound really awesome.”

  Dom’s smile was more of a grimace. Bits of Simon were vanishing, swirling through the sigils, as he shoved himself forward, and his voice had grown thin. “You were always really awesome, Simon. Nothing’s changed that.”

  The spirit grinned, much thinner now than when he’d entered the pentagram.

  He shoved Lucrezia’s pale spirit over the side of the pentagram into Dominic’s hands, and sank back into the circle, floating on the surface like a leaf on a pond. Simon’s features were a vague blur now. “Bloody hell, I got to save the princess. Guess I really am a hero, huh?”

  “Sir Simon Wicke,” Dominic said, his throat working. He pulled Lucrezia’s faded spirit from the edge of the pentagram, out of reach of the searching sigils.

  I squeezed Josephine’s hands and plucked the fetch from the cornerstone. It was surprisingly heavy, a palm-sized bag embroidered with Albrecht’s hair and inscribed with sigils that matched some of the marks in the pentagram.

  Josephine’s eyes looked huge in their sunken sockets. “Burn it, Elijah,” she whispered. “Burn my bones. Even when I’m on the other side, I’ll always be with you.”

  I touched her cheek as Dominic spoke softly to the fading soul in the pentagram, exchanging the last goodbyes they’d ever share.

  “I will always love you, Jo. We will see each other again, I swear it.”

  She smiled at me and faded with a sigh. With so little of her mortal remains left on earth, and a refusal to feed on fresh souls, she had no strength left. She was little more than a shade now.

  “Your matches, Dom.” I strode through the dust, sending it billowing into the air. Simon was almost fully sunken into the surface now, all his defining features melted away. “We must burn the fetch.”

  “A nothingness like a long sleep,” Simon said, no louder than a sigh. “I’m ready.”

  Dominic gently laid Lu’s spirit on the ground and rose to his feet, rummaging in his jacket for the matches. His eyes, bright with life against the gray of Death, widened when he looked up, focused over my shoulder.

  Cold pain slashed at my shoulder. My blackened blood trickled over my shoulder and back to drop into the dust. Dominic shoved me aside, the venom in his bloodstream lending him unnatural strength and sending me flying almost ten feet away.

  Albrecht’s spirit was still strong, as corporeal as a living body after being fed by hundreds of souls.

  It was also twisted, his form in Death warped by his unnatural life-span and cruelty. Long arms extended into the dust and his skull was domed, ridged with spurs of bone like horns. His eyes were clouded, but they flicked between Dominic and his target, the one vulnerable soul left outside the pentagram.

  His massively deformed jaw scooped open as he charged, aiming for Lucrezia’s limp spirit.

  Dominic had his knives in his hands before I blinked, one dagger burying itself in Albrecht’s chest- and the other trapped between those massive jaws, driving the knife into Albrecht’s skull.

  I rolled to my feet, too slow to cover the distance between us.

  Albrecht bit down and ground his jaw, blood spraying between his pointed teeth.

  Dominic didn’t make a sound, but the cords and muscles of his neck stood out starkly as he ripped out the rowan dagger and punched it back into Albrecht’s heart over and over, sending black ooze sluicing to the dust underfoot.

  I didn’t think as I lunged forward, charging towards my oldest enemy and piercing straight through his rib cage.

  The revenant howled, several ear-piercing tones layered over each other, but he released Dominic. A disembodied arm, still twitching, fell out of his mouth.

  His insides writhed over my fist and I heaved Albrecht away, pushing him into the pentagram. Black fluid spurted over my hand as he fell, snatching out with his long, claw-tipped arms, but I stomped on a creeping hand and heard bones shatter underfoot.

  The swirling surface of the pentagram began writhing as half-absorbed spirits woke up, sensing their tormentor caught among them.

  Albrecht’s dead eyes focused on me, and he went down howling and clawing, dragged beneath the surface by his victims.

  Dominic fell to one knee next to Lucrezia’s spirit, his arm ending below the elbow in a ragged stump. “Burn the fetch,” he whispered. “Trap him in the pentagram.” He’d gone ashen with shock and blood loss.

  I scrabbled in the dust, finding the dropped matches. My hands didn’t shake, with my body incapable of feeling adrenaline, but the matches were bloody and didn’t want to light, and he was bleeding out in Life with every second I failed…

  One of the matches flared, a bright spot of true light, and I touched it to the fetch. The stink of burning hair and blood washed over us as the bag caught fire, curling into blackened remnants.

  The pentagram’s light dimmed and winked out as the last of the fetch was consumed, dissipating into the mist of the deadside.

  I wrapped my arms under Dominic’s arms and lifted his spirit, dragging him to the one tiny spot of light left in the deadside: the hand mirror he’d come in through. “Not without Lucrezia,” he grated out.

  “You need
to go back. I’ll bring her.”

  I had to force his spirit through, cajoling and pushing, and as soon as his weight vanished, forced through to the other side, I turned back to Lucrezia.

  Like Simon, her features were drained, the light sustaining her form pale and flickering. Albrecht had bled too much from her.

  But I still had the Cage. It wasn’t burned yet.

  I stared up at the legs of the machine, converging on the leylines that could power eternal life into someone. If I left a lock of her hair, a makeshift fetch, here on the cornerstone… we could be together forever.

  I touched her cold cheek, sick with the battle within myself.

  She would never accept it. She would hate every moment of living a half-life torn from other people, and me for causing it most of all. Although I knew that every day brought us a step closer to her death, there was no future using the Vita Machina.

  Still, the idea called out to me, seducing me with the promise of a second life worth living, one where my deepest love was always with me.

  She would say… that is not you, Elijah Locke.

  I forced myself to scoop her spirit into my arms, turning my back on the Cage. She was far too light, like a feather that I carried back through the mirror with me. I opened my eyes to blackness pressing down on us without the light of the pentagram to fill the cavern.

  Shane worked feverishly to staunch the flow of blood from Dominic, whose severed arm was curled on the floor next to his sprawled body, still gripping his knife. His injuries had carried over into Life, mirroring the carnage wrought in Death.

  His heartbeat was weak. I heard it struggling in his chest, faint as a whisper.

  Roman held off the last of Gilt’s misbegotten sisters, who crouched over her siblings’ bodies, eyeing Dom, her nostrils flared from the smell of fresh blood.

  I carried Lucrezia’s spirit back to her body. On this side of the mirror, her spirit would only be visible to myself and Dominic, the mirrorwalker and the walking dead. I let her incorporeal self slip back into her living body. It was like watching water pour into a vessel.

  Without her spirit, she still lived, but it took shallow, automatic breaths, with no color in her face. As soon as she fell back into herself, a hint of life touched her, her breath hitching and deepening.

  Roman bolted to the cage, heedless of the last living Gilt, threw the locks open and ripped the bars off. He pulled her out, scattering tiny seed-pearls all over the black, inert sigils. “Lu! Oh hell, please wake up, please be alive.”

  “Locke.” Shane’s voice was tight with strain. As much as I wanted to hold Lu for myself, I joined him, crouched over Dominic. “Can you turn him?”

  The Seer had tied a rough tourniquet on Dominic’s arm. “No. He wouldn’t wish to live like this, and we would never be able to coexist.”

  I touched the mangled flesh where Albrecht’s teeth had sheared right through muscle and bone, and my mouth filled with saliva.

  Shane made a sound of mingled disgust and understanding as I ran my tongue over the brutalized stump, sealing the wound with new skin, healing the bone.

  It wouldn’t be perfect, but he might still live.

  “He needs blood,” Shane muttered. “Shit. Fuck. I can give him enough of my life force to hold on a while longer, but we need to get upstairs and call for help now.”

  Shane forced Dominic’s mouth open and leaned in, almost close enough to kiss him, and exhaled, transferring his own energy with his breath. A little sing-song rhyme from my past came back to me in a fragment, Jo flipping through a witches’ nursery rhymes book: blood or breath, a drop or a kiss, to keep you outside the mirror.

  Dominic’s heartbeat steadied. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  Shane cast a burning glance at Lucrezia and Roman. One of her hands rose to touch the waterwitch’s face and he kissed her, exhaling as he did for her what Shane had done for Dominic.

  “Get him on my back, Locke,” Shane grated out. “We can’t waste a single minute or he’s lost.”

  He shifted, becoming a wolf, but Lucrezia’s weak voice rang through the cavern. “Wait. Don’t go. We have to finish what we started.”

  Roman helped her to her feet, supporting her as she gained her footing. Lucrezia scrubbed at her face, wiping away the white powder and rouge, and the last of the Gilt sisters made an incomprehensible sound at the sight of her. The poor thing was completely out of her mind.

  Lucrezia gave her what was almost an apologetic look and stepped out of Roman’s arms, holding out her hands to the witch. She hadn’t yet seen what had happened to Dominic. “Aunt Annabelle, you can come with us. You don’t have to stay down here. Albrecht can’t torture you anymore.”

  It was an empty offer. The witch had fed on human flesh. She was a lost cause.

  Lu’s gaze met mine, then Shane’s… and saw Dominic’s body on the floor and the pool of blood around him. She went even whiter than the powder had made her and became luminescent as her wildfire exploded into life.

  Chapter 18

  Lu

  Every fiber of my body ached, fire nibbling away at the edges of my cells. My inner self was a black abyss.

  There was no such concept as peace anymore. Only a deep, heart-crushing agony and tempestuous rage.

  My guardians were bloody and bruised. They looked like they’d crawled through every level of hell, Shane’s face tight with strain and Locke taut as they crouched over Dominic’s lifeless, pale form.

  There was so much blood. My eyes skittered away from his ragged wounds, my mind refusing to accept them. He couldn’t die. I wouldn’t allow it.

  Roman held out his hands, a shield of frosted water swirling between us. “He’s still alive, Lu. You need to pull it back in.”

  I dimly realized that the fire wasn’t eating me away from the inside. It was everywhere, billowing around me in a cloud of flame and ash, gnawing away at the wedding dress and blackening the seed-pearls.

  But I didn’t want to pull it in. I wanted to let it go and burn the people responsible alive, inch by inch, and show them no mercy.

  Albrecht had done this. Albrecht, Mallory, Ivy, his fucked-up children…

  Bits of charred silk flaked away as I took a step closer to Dominic. “You’ll burn him,” Roman said, throwing himself between me and the Warden’s limp body, so close that his shield of witchwater was billowing into steam. “You have to stop.”

  I forced myself to take a breath that shuddered in and out of my lungs, and tried to pull some of the pulsing magic back inside myself.

  The wildfire was furious, but even its devouring hunger flinched away from the idea of hurting Roman. He released his witchwater shield and let it trickle to the ground as I wrestled the flames back into embers, tucking them away in the wellspring of my chest.

  Roman breathed a sigh of relief as the last of the flames died, but he didn’t come any closer. Wisps of smoke drifted off the singed dress. I was still throwing off waves of heat.

  “Which one did this to him?” I looked over Roman, the shadows under his eyes, scars that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him tracing his dusky skin in a silver patchwork, so that he now looked more like Shane than ever. “How long…?”

  Locke wiped at his face, scrubbing away a crackled-glaze mask of dry blood. “You’ve been under Cimmerian for half a day,” he said, his voice soothing despite the insanity of gore and death around us. “Half of the Vita Machina is broken. Albrecht is dead, and we’ve all survived, but… not without great injury.”

  I wanted to touch Dominic and reassure myself that there was still a pulse in his veins, and Shane had risen to his feet, gazing at me like all he wanted to do was lunge forward and wrap around me.

  The only thing holding them all back was the shimmer of heat rising from my limbs, the blackening edges of whatever silk hadn’t been burned in the flames, and I couldn’t go any closer to my broken Warden. Roman was right, even though my chest ached with a physical agony to touch Dom, to feel
his heartbeat for myself.

  “You must finish what he started, sunlight. We must cleanse the cornerstone, destroy Albrecht’s fetch and… ensure that the Cage can never be used again.”

  He looked down, a different, secret sort of pain in his amber eyes.

  The cornerstone. I was here for one reason: to purify the cornerstone with fire and release the mansion and its endless spirits from their torment.

  My gaze ran over Dominic as I clung to the swirling embers in my heart. “Take him out of here,” I said. My voice was scratchy but hard. Shane’s eyes narrowed. “I need to finish this, but I’ll be right behind you.”

  A chittering noise echoed through the cavern and I looked over at Annabelle. Knowing what she was and what she’d done horrified me to the marrow, but she hadn’t asked to be born to this life. I wondered if she’d ever even seen the sun, even for one minute.

  “You’re free to go.” I pointed to the door. Annabelle just stared at me with bulging eyes, kneeling among the twisted bodies of Patricia and Eleanor. I thought I understood a little of how she might’ve felt in that moment.

  The pentagram beneath the Cage was scorched black. Shane shifted with a ripple of fur, and Locke carefully lifted Dominic and draped him over the wolf’s broad back. I bit my lip, watching as he loped away, trying his hardest not to jostle his cargo.

  A muscle twitched in Roman’s jaw as our eyes fell on the shattered mirror and Dominic’s severed arm. One of his rowan daggers was still clutched in his fingers. I walked over and knelt to pull the dagger from his grasp, cradling it in my swollen left hand. The pain was dulled by shock for now. I’d be paying for this numbness later.

  The edges of his arm were ragged and blackened. Locke was suddenly at my side, as close as he could get without getting burned by the heat I was throwing off. “Albrecht did this. No healer could fix this wound.”

  I touched Dominic’s arm and sent a spark of wildfire into the dead flesh, consuming it within seconds. I wanted no part of him left to rot down here in the darkness.