“I have to. There are too many. Ouro, you’re in my way.” Colin’s wings spread impossibly wide, then beat downward, lifting him a foot in the air before he drops awkwardly back down. He releases the cane. The next beat lifts him again, and he has both hands outstretched, casting his glow as far as it will possibly reach. He is a pillar of fire. Behind him, the broken stalagmite that holds the Chalice is dark and empty; it doesn’t matter. Colin is incandescent. His glow touches Verity like a childhood blanket or a summer wind.
His warmth fills her chest with that particular, perfect clarity, and she could weep for it. Verity wants nothing more than to step forward and wrap her fingers around his. Instead, she tells him, “There are one thousand and six outsiders here.”
“And they’re poisoned. And they’ll spread that poison. Oh, Chrissake, I can’t reach them all. The ones at the back—Ouro, help me.”
The snake’s eyes narrow, but it’s Santiago who answers: “They’re not worth it!”
“Of course they are.” Colin’s wings beat again; it’s awkward, arrhythmic, and does little to gain him any height. He almost loses his balance when he comes down, booted feet sliding. “I’m sorry, Stefan. We were going to get out of here, weren’t we? I wanted it too. Ouroboros, you brute, if you’re going to be this big, make it good for something.”
All Verity wants to do is look at the angel flapping like a wounded moth; he is searing and soothing all at once. He is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. The sounds around her have become silent; the world is still.
In that last moment of Colin’s perfect grace, Verity is utterly aware of those nearby: Alan standing well back, holding his smiling granddaughter; Privya, kneeling with her hands around her own throat and her eyes savage; Jihan, half-turned, her steel gaze on Colin and her smooth features touched with rare, regretful lines at lip and brow; Ouroboros, its great curves looping loosely around the space where Colin struggles to rise aloft; and Santiago, the dark magician, now just a plain man with thinning hair and a soft paunch, his attention locked on the angel and his mouth a study in despair. Verity saw Santiago break once; now she sees it again, deep and raw, as the snake ripples.
Colin’s attention is all on the crowd. They’ve gone silent now, except for the sounds of choking, and beneath that, someone weeping. “Hang on,” whispers the angel, his arms open and his wings beating. “Hang on. I love you all. Even you, Alan—you asshole. Sacrifice your own damn self. Ouro, please.” Black feathers whip the air. His is the only light left, apart from the impossible starlight now glittering above, and the equally impossible glow of bobbing cell phone screens as they film. He illuminates a hundred faces.
Santiago covers his face and the snake dives downward, flowing and stretching, impossibly vast. For a breathless second, it seems as though Ouroboros will simply swallow Colin; its gaping maw yawns, and the stage goes pitch dark as the living shadow strikes, as vicious as a real snake hunting a trapped bird.
Someone screams.
Verity takes a breath.
Colin explodes from blackness like a silver sun, soaring upward, his wings spread vast and strong. Shadows cling to his feathers, building and stretching; shadows are his feathers, the span of them nearly brushing the sides of the walls-that-aren’t. Two golden eyes mark the joints of his wings, symmetrical and slitted, like the markings of a moth. Ouroboros bears the angel upward; Colin’s light casts down and reaches all the way to the back of the pavilion hall. His light illuminates a thousand.
Verity doesn’t want to take from him, but she can’t help it; she, too, turns her face to his glow and feels her blistering feet soothed and her aching hand healed. She can trace the lines of the places Alan has brought together: the terrible space of the cavern and the narrow old walls of the pavilion. They are faced with a screaming crowd. They are alone. Both of these things are true, and the weight of it is easy on her bones as long as the angel shines down.
The little dragons leave their perches on the rafters and swoop delightedly around Colin. He flaps his shadow-wings once, twice—there is joy in it, the joy of a dandelion seed in the wind, or a small boy leaping finally from a cliff over the ocean. Colin flies, and where his light passes, the people below stop coughing; they take their hands away from their bloodied noses, and blink, not only able to breathe, but suddenly, blissfully safe. Verity sees faces, smiling upward; she sees childhood dreams. She herself tastes cotton candy and remembers, quite abruptly, the startled ecstasy on her father’s face the very first time she learned to say his name.
Santiago whispers, “Oh, god.” It is likely louder than he intends, on the stage, in the sudden stillness.
The angel banks and swoops. He is a star with wings, and then he is a supernova. The light grows brighter and brighter. Verity has to close her eyes, and something inside her weeps even as it flowers.
The world shifts again, and everything goes silent and black.
Verity almost reels back, but she is uncertain of the slanted stone footing, and she stands unmoving. She is bereft. Her boots are pinching her toes again, and her legs are cold. The old coat she’s wearing smells of sweat and citrus bile. Still, she has the last taste of Colin’s grace inside her, and she holds it beneath her ribs. She wants to hold it forever.
Someone is cursing, hoarsely and steadily. It flashes red and blue in Verity’s sight, vivid with the darkness as backdrop.
She waits until she’s quite sure, and then she ventures, “Privya.”
The cursing stops, then is replaced with a bitter laugh. “Is this what you wanted? The Chalice is empty—and worse, wasted. Your damned angel died for it.”
“No,” says Verity, softly. “It isn’t what I wanted.” She can’t taste the stage anymore. The crowd leaves only a vibrating memory. The cavern stretches invisibly around her, and she hears a stone rattle. “Who’s here?”
“Is it just us? I think we lost Alan. Which is for the best ... I could strangle him myself.” Privya’s rasp is growing closer. Verity hears a skidding footstep; another stone skips across the floor. She is acutely aware of the emptiness between her shoulder blades.
“What happens now?”
“In the wider scheme of things? I expect the last of the weak will die, slowly. I don’t know how much longer I have left. Being myself, I mean. You know, I used to go months without taking a mind. Now it’s days. No one even understands I do it to be kind.” Privya chuckles. It’s an old sound; too old for the girl with the ragged skirts and the quick, sunny smile. “Speaking of. Listen, it’s not personal. I’m furious at you, sure. But if I don’t do this, it gets a lot worse for some pretty random people. At least, judging from past experience. Nice people. Jerkoffs. Kids. Whomever. The monster doesn’t care.”
“If you don’t do what?” Verity takes two careful steps to the side. A thin column of stone barks her shin.
“You know, he actually tried to fix me? Just now. I felt it. It’s a shame; I wish he had.” Privya’s voice is closer. It is acetone and sugar on Verity’s tongue. She wishes it were lilac and coal; she thinks of Santiago. Another breath and all she wants is Jacob’s hand in hers. “I at least wish he had killed me,” continues Privya. “For real, I mean. For good. For a second, I thought maybe he could, and I was glad. How sad is that?”
Verity takes a breath to answer and feels Privya’s hand come around her throat in the dark—a small hand, short rough fingers. The girl’s grasp is hot and unyielding, like an iron poker left too long by the fire. It sears Verity’s nerves as Privya pulls her closer from behind. Questing fingers slip through her hair.
Verity throws back an elbow and feels it crunch against thin bone, but the hands holding her don’t waver, and she pitches herself forward with futile desperation. She reaches up, clawing at Privya’s wrists, and Privya murmurs only, “I’m so much stronger than you think.” Her regret steams against Verity’s shoulder.
Verity drives her heel back and encounters only stone. The fingers in her hair are settling, pressing light
ly but firmly, finding rainbows in her skull. A twist of her shoulders gains her half a breath. She thinks of the shy grin of Jacob’s secrets. Tell me something true. “If you want to die,” she chokes, and feels the arm barring her air give, just a little, “why fight? Why any of this? What do you care if Jihan destroys us all?”
Privya hums, low and raw and too close, but her hands are on Verity’s skin now, tight enough to bruise, and she answers: “I’ve tried death. It just gets worse. You don’t know what agony is. You don’t know what it’s like to have all your pieces scattered and screaming. It doesn’t ever stop. Maybe the world ends and I don’t. I can’t bear that. Not the cold alone forever.”
Verity swallows vinegar and grief. “You aren’t afraid for them. Only for you.”
The laugh huffs again in her ear. “I forgot what this was like. Alethea in my arms and my whispers in her hair. No lies between us, hmm? I live because I must. I would have kept them with me, if I could. Now I only hope to fade with them. If not—well, I suppose the world will still be here, even if it’s cold and grey. Oh, you’re right, I am afraid. You don’t know what I could become. Hold still. I will show you the pressure points that best foment the transfer of thought.”
Light blooms somewhere behind them, unexpected and soft. It brings with it the promise of flowers and new beginnings. It is Colin on Verity’s skin, and hope flares in the exact instant she makes out a river of perfect shadow leaping past her and high, a line of pure canine purpose that knocks her ear and tears a claw into her shoulder on its way past, driving into Privya. The arms around Verity release her, but the force of it pulls her back; she falls roughly on an elbow, feeling her shoulder crack against unyielding stone.
Privya howls, but the dog is silent. Verity twists, frantic, and in the newly blooming glow, she sees Privya lunging back through the dark cavern toward her. The girl is wizened, her teeth bared; the whites of her eyes have gone dark-veined. It’s only a flash; Ouroboros leaps from the side, yellow glare and white fangs in a sea of black fur, hurling itself into Privya again as they both fall back, rolling from sight.
The light is still soft and forgiving. Verity staggers up and would run to the angel, but she sees no black wings or starlit eyes. Instead, Jihan stands perhaps ten feet away, behind the broken stalagmite at the top of the cavern’s mounded floor. The glow comes from the stone pool at the top of the shattered pillar. It grows with slow, steady warmth that plays across Jihan’s aquiline features and reflects from her steel eyes with more affection than she herself has ever shown. Colin’s love shines from her face, and even refracted, it makes Verity pause.
“The Chalice is empty,” says Verity quietly—not to Jihan, really, so much as just testing the sound of it across her lips. It buzzes like a gnat, and she shakes her head. “It isn’t empty,” she corrects. “He filled it. He filled it again?”
Jihan looks at her—once more, straight at her, and Verity looks back. There is no shattered darkness in the other woman’s eyes; nothing is lost, or alone. Jihan sighs—a human sound, palpable, rich with sorrow and weighted by infinity. Then she plunges her hands into the pool.
Light rises in tentacle beams; possibility shifts in the pool’s impenetrable depths like a kraken awakening.
The ground rumbles.
From somewhere in the darkness, Privya screams like a wild thing.
Verity, shivering, takes several hurried steps forward and up, to scramble to the side of the column across from Jihan. She realizes it’s where Alan and Sanna stood moments before.
“Don’t. Don’t—it isn’t—we promised Colin.” That gnat buzz pricks her skin again. “I promised him.”
The tentacles shift and twine. They are smaller than before, and at first only Colin’s white gleam, but as Verity watches, she can find traces of colour—blue, green, purple—that remind her of an oil spill, or the highlights on the angel’s wings. They’re emitting a sound that rumbles off-key somewhere just at the lower edge of her hearing. It tastes like wet earth.
The ground shivers again. Verity grips the edge of the stone column with one hand and finds it cool and rough to the touch.
Tentatively, she reaches one fingertip forward and nudges one of the beams of power just slightly to the left. She can touch the light. It almost curls around her finger, a feather brush as the discord of the harmonics eases slightly.
When Verity looks up, Jihan is smiling.
Verity says, “This isn’t safe.”
In response, the other woman takes her bloodied hands away. The pool of light flares alarmingly, tendrils shooting up toward the cavern’s hidden ceiling. The ground shakes harder; a cracking sound echoes sharply from somewhere to the left. Verity is forced to grab the stone with both hands before Jihan puts her own back.
Verity swallows. “It’s too late. Again.” She doesn’t need the hint of apples or cinnamon to tell her that she speaks the truth.
She hears a wet rending, and a shriek that melds anger and pain. She knows Privya and Ouroboros are still behind her somewhere. There’s nothing she can do to help the dog.
She says only, “He didn’t want this.” But there is nothing to be done, so she looks at Jihan and strokes her hand across another questing strand of light. She feels it shift and settle.
It’s not something she can explain later—how light has a life and a texture, or how Colin’s last breath inflects a radiant pool, or the soothing ways in which she knows precisely where an ancient pattern should fall, because this goes a little to the right, and this one is first, and this one smells like peaches, but the other one whistles like the wind in winter. But she knew it when Sanna was doing it, and now she does it herself, with exquisite care, crafting a braid of silver and shifting jewel tones. This one is smaller than the first, but infinitely more intricate. She can’t follow the pattern with her eyes. She only knows.
“It was very old,” she says once, much later, fumbling for words. “We’re very new. The context changed. It had to be re-shaped.” It is just before she burns her first page.
Verity loses track of time and the shivering of the ground. She forgets about the dog and the girl in the dark. She is crafting perfection. She thinks she should be frightened, but an angel’s forgiveness is curled warmly around her, and she only knows precision and need.
When the pattern in front of her resolves, it shines atop the stone as though it were sculpted of glowing crystal. She can hear it singing. Its points extend in a circle; it is an impossibly delicate star. Light pulses in a tiny marble at its heart. Verity doesn’t dare breathe on it.
Jihan reaches down and cups the braided ball of light, somehow without touching it; it rises just above her palms, and when she lifts it, the column of stone beneath is left barren and plain. She looks once at Verity, and the star is twinned in the mirrors of her gaze.
Jihan lifts the pool of light to her mouth and breathes it in. At first, it only stretches, each tiny strand like a spider’s web caught in a breeze. Then the gleaming twists vanish between Jihan’s lips, and the cavern would be dark again except that now the glow blossoms in her eyes and at the base of her throat, travelling somewhere deep down in her chest before it spreads, following the lines of her veins, tracing her as she is: the outline of what used to be a woman. Brightness stretches out gracefully from her shoulders, just briefly, painting the momentary shapes of Colin’s wings.
For a moment, she is purest possibility.
The cavern rumbles again, more drastically than before. Verity is almost thrown to the ground before she can grab at the shattered stalagmite. She finds herself choking on a cloud of dust.
She whispers, “No.”
A stalactite falls from somewhere above and shatters, narrowly missing Verity. Another falls just behind Jihan, who stands alight, arms spread as though she were Colin offering his benediction to the pavilion.
“Stop her.” Privya is a panicked face in the dark, all sharp teeth and a reaching, clawed hand, before blackness bowls her over and she’s l
ost to a dog, or a snake, or whatever shape faces her in the shadows. A crack opens in the ground and ripples toward Verity’s feet. A crack opens somewhere above, and rocks fall, bringing with them unexpected moonlight and the snapping electric doom of the city.
Verity, stricken with horror, stares above and sees, somehow, the lights of Ottawa screaming.
She knows the star was as perfect as she could make it.
She coughs on dust and looks frantically toward Jihan.
Jihan stands calmly. Colin’s light spills from beneath her skin. It is darker, bolder—spiced with his love, still, but also with iron peace, focused into something rife with a hundred thousand possibilities. The other woman smiles, still—truly smiles, slow and bright with joy—and reaches forward with one glowing hand to brush her fingertip to Verity’s lips.
Everything
Stops
She sees nothing and everything, feels feathers across her skin, hears a hundred bells chiming a thousand different notes.
She swallows whiskey and coal and a butterfly’s song.
Verity clutches the last of Colin’s gift within her and feels, solid against her leg, the knife in her pocket.
She knows exactly what she is supposed to do; she has the precise scar herself, invisible, a memory edging above her hip. She knows the angle and the depth and the weight of the blade.
She doesn’t think.
Sliding her hand into the pocket of the coat, she grips the hilt of the knife and draws it forth, driving it in one smooth motion into Jihan’s body. Just above the last rib, on the right, angled up and toward the centre. She knows.
Turning the knife, she opens the door.
[IMAGE: Jihan and Verity, in the dark. They are close together, each leaning into the other, and Verity is driving a knife between Jihan’s lower ribs. Verity is shocked. Jihan is smiling very slightly. They are staring into each other’s eyes.]
In Veritas Page 39
