Waterfall

by Lauren Kate

  Cat plucked the butterfly from the void in Esme's head. Its wings beat just once more between her fingers; then the insect curled up and died.

  Esme roared and flung Cat off her. The other gossipwitches gaped in horror at the back of her empty head. They touched the backs of their own heads, checking to make sure everything was still intact.

  Bees flocked to Esme's fist, coating it like a glove. She towered over Cat, grabbed the back of her head, and punched the base of Cat's skull with her bee-bound fist.

  Pain exploded in Cat's eyes. She screamed a brutal scream.

  Eureka shoved Esme aside and swatted at the bees on Cat's scalp, but they wouldn't fly away. She tried to pick them out of Cat's hair. They stung her hands and would not budge. They were a part of the base of Cat's skull now, swarming the back of her head, stinging and re-stinging endlessly.

  Esme staggered backward to rejoin the other witches. She was out of breath. "If you will carry Ovid as far as the threshold, we will take him from there."

  "The only thing you're getting is out of here," Eureka said.

  "Be gone!" Solon said, taking courage from Eureka's stand. "I've wanted to say that to you bitches for so long."

  "You're not thinking, Solon," the middle witch said. She and the old witch were supporting Esme, who looked faint. "Remember what happens when you can't afford our glaze...."

  "Nothing lasts forever," Solon said, and winked at Eureka.

  "All your little enemies will find you," the old witch said. "The big one will find you, too."

  "Solon," Ander said, "if you let them drop the glaze--"

  "Are the bad people coming back?" William leaned on Eureka. She hated that she could feel his rib cage through his shirt.

  "Don't cry," she whispered automatically as she tended to Cat's scalp. "I won't let anything happen to you."

  It was too late. William's tears fell on her shoulders, on her cheeks. Their innocence was startling, a sparkling jewel in the black rift. She changed her mind.

  "Cry," she said. "Cry it all out on me."

  William did.

  "We will give you until midnight to change your mind," the old witch said. "Then the glaze is gone."

  Solon stamped out his cigarette. He walked to where Cat whimpered woozily in Eureka's arms. He kissed Cat's cheek.

  "As you wish." Rage surged beneath the surface of Esme's weakened voice. The other two witches flicked their tongues and four bees slowly returned to orbit their heads. The rest remained with Cat.

  Carrying their crippled companion, the old and older gossipwitches lumbered back through the long, dark hall of skulls.

  20

  YET TROUBLE CAME

  Around dusk, Eureka and Ander stood at the edge of the veranda and looked down at the Tearline pond. Solon had retreated to his workshop with Ovid, and the twins and Cat were resting in the guest room. Cat said the throb in her skull had dwindled to the level of a migraine. She barely felt the constant stings anymore; that pain was easier to bear than knowing what had happened to her family.

  "Maybe it was just gossip," Ander had said, but they all sensed that the witches spoke the truth.

  They had divvied up the last of the food--two small apples, a few gulps of water, the dregs of a box of muesli. After Eureka ate, hunger churned in her more fiercely than before. Her body was weak, her mind cloudy. She had not slept since waking from her nightmare of drowning in the wasted dead. Six nights remained until the full moon--if they even survived that long.

  The rain had fallen for so long she didn't feel it anymore. It had become as regular as air. She leaned over the veranda's railing, touched Ander's back so that he leaned over, too. Two blurry shapes looked up from the surface of the pond.

  "You didn't disappear just because you weren't there in the Glimmering," she said. "And I ..."

  "You're not the face you saw, either?" Ander asked.

  "I went to high school with that girl," Eureka said. "Maya Cayce. We hated each other. We competed over everything. When we were young we used to be friends. Why would I see her in my reflection?"

  "Somewhere all of this makes sense." Ander's fingers lightly traced her neck. "The question is: do we survive the journey there?"

  Eureka turned from the reflection to the real. Her hands slid up Ander's chest, her fingers twined around his neck--and she knew she shouldn't. Her hands had murdered yesterday. They were out of food. The glaze would be gone by midnight.

  "I wish we could stop everything and stand here forever."

  "Love can't be stopped, any more than time," Ander said softly.

  "You're talking like love and time aren't connected," Eureka said. "For you, they're the same thing."

  "Some people measure time by how they fill it. Childhood is time, high school is time." He touched her lips with a fingertip. "You have always been my time."

  "I would puke," a voice said behind Ander, "but it might attract starving locals."

  Someone stepped from the shadows of the cherry tree. The witches must have dropped their glaze early. He had found them.

  "Brooks," Eureka said.

  "Atlas." Ander lurched forward. So did Brooks. Eureka was caught in the middle, both of their bodies against hers.

  They would fight now. They would try to kill each other.

  "Get out of here," Eureka said quickly to Brooks.

  "I think he's the one who should get out," Brooks said to Ander.

  Ander's lip curled in disgust. "You're going to lose."

  Brooks's face became a gruesome flash of rage. "I've already won."

  Ander drew the long orichalcum spear from its sheath at his hip. "Not if I slaughter that body before your world can rise."

  "Ander, no!" Eureka spun so that her body shielded Brooks. For a moment she felt the familiar heat of his chest. "I won't let you."

  "Yes, please, Eureka, save me," Brooks said. Then he lunged forward with all his might and sent Eureka tumbling. When Ander bent to check on her, Brooks rammed him hard. He grappled for the spear.

  Ander's back arched over the veranda's rail. He couldn't right himself. He grabbed hold of Brooks's forearm and took him down with him. Eureka tried to stop them, but they were already gone.

  She ran to the edge of the veranda. The spear had slipped from Ander's hands and out of Brooks's reach, too. The boys clutched each other and swung desperate fists as they tumbled through the air, each blow missing its mark, forced into truce by chaos and gravity. Then they splashed through the surface of the Tearline pond.

  During the stillness that followed, Eureka couldn't help imagining that both boys had disappeared from her life forever, that love was gone, that it was easier that way.

  But the boys' heads surfaced. They spun in the water until they spotted each other. Twenty feet of tears separated them. Brooks dipped back underwater and became a black blur. He swam toward Ander with ferocious grace.

  Ander's body rose in the water, which quickly turned red around him. Then he was dragged beneath the surface.

  All was eerily quiet again. Eureka paced the veranda for an hour-long minute before she remembered both boys had gills that allowed them to breathe underwater.

  She dove in.

  Water engulfed her. The thunderstone shield bloomed around her. She couldn't see them. She plunged a few feet deeper, moving toward the opposite shore.

  She sensed movement below her and slipped to the bottom of the shield. Brooks had Ander pinned to the floor of the pond and was tearing at his chest with his mouth, as if he were trying to eat Ander's heart. The pain on Ander's face was so severe that Eureka feared he would lose consciousness.

  She dove toward the boys, swimming as hard as she could. She drew within five feet of them, balled her hands into fists to use against Brooks. This wasn't her best friend; it couldn't be. Then she remembered the shield. There was no way to reach Ander as long as it protected her. Did she have time to race to the surface, throw off her thunderstone, and swim back here again? As Eureka paused, Ande
r turned his head and exhaled.

  A powerful wave sent Eureka tumbling backward, spinning end over end. She and her shield spun horizontally in the water, trapped within a swirling vortex. She felt herself lift up.

  Higher and higher she spun, catching dizzy flashes of Brooks and Ander. All three of them moved in different orbits, caught in an underwater whirlwind made of Ander's Zephyr.

  The light above Eureka grew closer, more intense, until ...

  She shot out of the water, spinning upward. Her thunderstone shield evaporated. The whirlwind had surfaced to become an enormous tornado. Beneath her, Ander reached for Brooks. Blood flowed from his chest and entered its own orbit, splattering Brooks as he spun by.

  Then Eureka was out of the wind spout, hurtling through the air, toward the nearby cliff that stood above the pond. As she fell from the sky, she was amazed by the sight of an enormous sloping rainbow that stretched beyond the horizon.

  She heard a guttural cry and looked over her shoulder. Brooks was flying far into the distance, still a hostage of Ander's Zephyr. She didn't see Ander anywhere.

  Eureka landed on a rock with a deep and painful thud. Her bones throbbed as she rolled to her side and cradled herself for a moment, shivering in the rain. She touched her thunderstone and Diana's locket and the yellow ribbon, and she breathed. Eventually she struggled to her knees.

  She didn't know where she was, or where Ander or Brooks had ended up, but from the rock, she could see most of the Celan valley. It looked like a picture of the surface of the moon. She saw the orchid-ringed Glimmering to the south. She saw a thousand silver circles dotting the landscape, bodies of water born of her tears. She saw the white caps of far mountains, the elbow-shaped Tearline pond in the valley between the caves, and, not fifty feet away, Solon's veranda.

  She climbed toward it. The center of the veranda was where the rainbow ended. Ruby blended into vivid orange, then into gold, then into a verdant ivy green, then indigo, and, finally, into the toxic-lovely purple Eureka had come to associate with the gossipwitches. The rainbow stretched into a night now black as coal. Neither sunlight nor moonlight had made it.

  Looking closer, Eureka saw four upright silhouettes inside the rainbow, floating toward the veranda. A buzz made Eureka think the gossipwitches had arrived, but she heard no laughter, saw no flash of orchid. And this buzzing was different, more like a rasp than the contented song of bees.

  The four approaching figures were motionless--except for their heaving torsos. Eureka realized that the buzzing in the wind was the sound of labored breathing.

  Seedbearers.

  Each one was intensely focused on keeping another's body aloft. They worked their breath as if they were wings beating for one another.

  Eureka was finally close enough to see a figure at the base of the rainbow, alone in the dark on the veranda. He looked like someone's great-grandfather. The rainbow streamed from his mouth like an endless puff of smoke. His back was arched uncomfortably, as if the rainbow began somewhere deep inside him. He wore a silk robe and a strange black mask.

  The old man breathing the rainbow into the sky was Solon.

  But it couldn't be. His body looked ancient. The skin on his hands and his chest was mottled with age. His back was stooped. How had Solon aged a century in the space of an afternoon? When he explained the Seedbearers' aging process, he'd said feeling nothing had kept him young for decades. What--or who--had revived Solon's feelings, his capacity for love?

  As Eureka hiked over rocks and approached the back of the veranda, the first silhouette stepped out of the rainbow. It was a boy about her age, wearing a baggy, mud-splattered suit. The suit was familiar, though the body wearing it looked vastly different from the last time she had seen it. The boy faced her and narrowed his eyes.

  Albion had killed Rhoda, abused the twins. He was the mind behind Diana's murder. He looked eighteen instead of sixty, but Eureka was certain it was him.

  Three more Seedbearers stepped out of the rainbow. Chora. Critias. Starling. All of them were young. They looked like teenagers dressed in their grandparents' clothes.

  Eureka hauled herself over the rail. She was sore and bleeding. Solon had brought the Seedbearers here on purpose. Why? The rainbow broke off at his lips. What remained hung in the air in colored particles, then drifted to the ground like psychedelic leaves.

  The hooded mask he wore looked as pliant as cotton, but was made of tightly woven black chain mail, so thin that up close it was transparent. Beneath the mask, Solon looked a million years old.

  "Don't be alarmed," Solon said, his voice muffled. "It's merely a mask over a mask over a mask."

  "What's going on?" Eureka asked.

  "My masterpiece." Solon looked into the night sky, now darker and more dismal without the glorious light. "Those colored rays of breath pave a Seedbearer highway that connects us anywhere in the world."

  "Why would you do this?"

  He patted her cheek. "Let's greet our guests." Through the mask, Solon's smiling eyes surveyed the figures before him. "Eureka, I think you've had the pleasure of meeting these four tubes of crap."

  The Seedbearers stepped forward, as bewildered as Eureka.

  "Hello, cousins!" Solon bellowed merrily.

  "It took three-quarters of a century," Chora said, "but the fool has finally come around. To what do we owe the pleasure, Solon?"

  Solon's laughter echoed behind his mask.

  "Take off that ridiculous mask." Albion's voice was startling in its youthful timbre.

  "Your bitterness seems to be treating you well," Solon said.

  "We have grown strong on hatred and revulsion," Albion said. "Whereas poor Solon walks like an autumn leaf in its last throes. Don't tell me you've fallen in love again?"

  "It has always seemed to me that hate is a form of love," Solon said. "Try hating someone you don't care about. Impossible."

  "You betrayed us, and now you are pathetic," Chora said. "Our business is with Ander. Where is he?" She glanced around. Eureka did, too, fearful of what had happened to Ander, to Brooks's body, to Atlas.

  "Ah, there they are!" Starling grinned. Her long braid was now a lustrous blond. "The little streaks of piss we should have killed when we had the chance."

  Cat and the twins emerged onto the veranda. Cat's head was still abuzz with bees.

  "Go back!" Eureka ran toward them.

  "Speaking of Ander," Solon mused, pausing to cough into the sleeve of his robe, "I've been wondering just how does he stay so young? I've never seen a boy more swallowed whole by love--yet since he arrived at the Bitter Cloud he hasn't looked a day over eighteen. Don't you think that's odd, Albion?"

  Ever since Eureka had learned what love did to a Seedbearer, she'd found new evidence of age on Ander every hour. But now, observing Solon's shocking old age and the other Seedbearers' return to youth, Eureka saw how extreme the changes in them were.

  Did that mean Ander didn't really love her?

  "Where is Ander?" Chora repeated. "And will you please take off that ridiculous mask. My God," she said, getting an idea. "Do you require oxygen to breathe?"

  "He always was a heavy smoker," Starling said.

  "A Seedbearer with emphysema," Critias said. "What an idiot."

  "It's true my lungs are as black as the blues," Solon said, "but I wear this mask for quite a different purpose. It is loaded with artemisia." His finger hovered over a silver dot on the side of his mask. "To activate it, all I have to do is press this button."

  "He's lying," Chora said, but her fearful voice betrayed her.

  Solon grinned behind his mask. "Don't believe me? Shall I demonstrate?"

  "What are you doing?" Eureka cried. "You'll kill Ander, too."

  Albion's head snapped toward her. His eyebrows lifted. "Going to weep again?" He drew near, holding a vial the same shape as the lachrymatory Ander had used, but a far less intricate one made of dull steel.

  Eureka wasn't going to cry. She slapped at the lachrymatory in Alb
ion's hand and grabbed him by his throat. She tightened her grip. The Seedbearer wheezed. He tried to push her off, but Eureka was stronger.

  Albion looked different from the last time they faced each other, but Eureka had changed even more. She saw that he feared her. She snarled at him, dark rage in her eyes.

  William began to cry. "Don't kill anyone else, Reka...."

  From the corner of her eye, Eureka saw William standing with Cat and Claire, sad and skinny and filthy. He wasn't the same boy who used to catapult into her bed every morning, spilling action figures across her sheets while she picked clumps of dried maple syrup from his hair. Eureka loosened her grip.

  "Albion?" Solon snapped his fingers. "The show's this way. I'd pay attention if I were you. I used to agree with you. I used to think we had a reason to stop her." He turned to Eureka. "But nothing can stop her. Least of all us."

  Chora stepped slowly toward Solon. "The game has changed. It's not what we would have wanted, but we can still use her tears to improve our position. If you were to come back to us ..."

  "Take the mask off, Cousin," Critias said.

  Solon's finger moved toward the silver button on the side of his mask. Eureka imagined the poison filling Ander's lungs in the distance. She imagined his shock becoming defiance as he gagged, his magnificent breath going out of him. The painful resignation as his body stilled. His soul rising. She wondered what his last thought would be.

  She thought of the way his voice always sounded like a whisper. And the scissoring motions his fingers made when he ran them through his hair. The way his hand fit inside hers. The shade of blue his eyes took on when she walked by, even if he'd just seen her a moment before. How he kissed her as if his life depended on it. The person she became when she kissed him back.

  Solon placed his hand over his heart. Then he grinned and pressed the button. "Bombs away."

  Poisonous gas, as green as the aurora borealis, glided over his face.

  21

  ILLUSIONMENT

  The artemisia spooled over Solon's face, shrouding his wrinkled brow, then his eyes, then his cheeks. The last thing to disappear behind the vapor was an extraordinary smile.

  The Seedbearers circled him. Starling chewed her nails. Chora gulped as if drowning. Albion's face wore the expression of someone about to be beaten. Critias's cheek shone with the trail of a single tear as he turned to the others. "Do we have any parting words?"