Tav gritted their teeth and twisted the blade.
Eli groaned in agony. It was an unearthly sound, like a cliff crumbling under a landslide, like a blade breaking on an anvil. The sound rang in Tav’s ears and carried with it the memory of rusted swing sets creaking in the rain and stones thrown by older boys.
Tav turned the blade as if it were a key — and opened a door.
The hole they made in Eli’s body was clean and bright, a perfect circle through an otherwise ordinary-looking human girl (except for the eyes, of course, which had turned pure black, as if the blood vessels had all burst and bled nightmares).
Eli’s mouth closed, but the whimpering continued. The sound reverberated from the plants that covered the windowsill, their leaves trembling wildly. A succulent began shredding itself.
Tav could see a glimmer of black fire through the hole, the lights of fireflies and birthday candles and forest fires and static electricity sparking into life inside the fragile shell of a body.
The fluttering, furious flame of the Heart that had lived for generations under the Coven. That now lived in the vulnerable body of a girl whose touch kept Tav awake at night.
“What did you do?” the Hedge-Witch’s eyes burned with excitement. Her sharpened teeth emerged from her lips like a row of knives. “How did you do that? Teach it to me. Tell me.”
“Take the Heart,” said Tav. “I have cut it out for you.” They kept their hand and blade in the frail body as the lifeforce drained out of the girl. The black eyes glittered and went dull.
Tav was killing her, and they all knew it.
“I knew you were special,” whispered the Hedge-Witch, excitement pulsing through her words. “I knew when it came down to it that you would get your hands dirty. This is the revolution we need. Sacrifice. Pain. A willingness to betray. To kill. You are truly one of mine.” As she reached for Eli, the Hedge-Witch’s hands shook with excitement.
She reached her clawed talons inside Eli, seeking the power that flowed through the girl’s bones and burned her body to ash. “I can feel the power. I can taste it.”
Tav withdrew the blade suddenly and the door closed, skin and hair and stone and hawthorn filling the empty space where the Heart had begun to spill out.
The Hedge-Witch fell back, her hand severed at the wrist. The wound was perfectly cauterized.
“You made a bargain!” she shrieked, saliva dripping from her fangs. She exhaled clouds of crimson smoke that smelled of bleach and foxglove. “Whatever monstrous magic you’ve been stained with cannot keep you from the bargain you made.”
Tav’s body was shaking, both from fear and from the effort of holding open the wound without destroying Eli.
She had better be alive.
She trusted me.
“I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain,” they told their mentor, ally, and enemy. “I have delivered the Heart to your hand.” They could already feel the promise they had made fading, the oath fulfilled. The magic was satisfied.
Tav smiled, and knew it was feral. They had outwitted the Hedge-Witch, and they both knew it.
“Clever baby,” crooned the Hedge-Witch. “Such a fast learner. But I’ve been dealing in deception for much, much longer.”
The succulent had finished shredding itself and was now a collection of stubby greygreen leaves on the floor oozing lifeblood. The pieces began to twitch violently. And then they began to grow, reaching arms up to the sky and legs down to the ground, shaking out hair matted with earth and cobwebs and coffee grounds.
“I thought that was a new plant,” said Tav. “I didn’t recognize it. How’s it going, you guys?”
They tried not to let their fear bleed over their body and turned, smiling, to face their former comrades growing from the mutilated plant.
Their hand tightened on the hilt. The obsidian blade was now half its size, worn thin by the power of the Heart. It felt small and fragile in Tav’s hand.
Their eyes flicked to Eli, who had collapsed on the ground, gasping for breath. As they watched, she coughed up an acrylic fingernail.
They were unarmed and outnumbered.
Thirty-Four
THE HEIR
There was music playing.
The low murmur of a cello, the melancholy chorus of violin. Every movement under the ice, every ebb and flow of the mass of light that trembled and turned and reached and desired was an orchestra playing an eternal dirge, a melody of mourning and vengeance.
Finally, the dead witches had found someone to gift their revenge.
Kite.
Not just any witch, but the Heir Rising.
They would devour her body and steal her essence. They would take their revenge on anything and everything in their path.
Sometimes trauma blotted out all hope, all futures, all belief in change. Sometimes suffering only wanted to make more suffering, spreading like a virus. Sometimes destruction was just destruction, and there would be no rebuilding.
The trapped and broken essences of witches long dead were not interested in a new world. They couldn’t imagine it. They no longer loved.
Kite could feel their desire to destroy her in their touch.
“Poor things,” she said, as she watched the fingers crawl up her leg like a caterpillar, “I can’t take you back with me.”
But they couldn’t be reasoned with now that they had been submerged into rock; they needed and hated the obsidian desert, just as they needed and hated themselves.
“The Witch-Killing Fields were a nursery rhyme we used to sing whenever one of the children went missing. Dead or junked and good as dead. Street myths. Legends. We understood they were true, and we didn’t forget you, I promise we never forgot you.”
The hand wrapped about Kite’s leg and began to pull her into the stone. Kite’s essence flared up, hot as molten glass, but the hand was too strong, the fury too great.
Kite wasn’t a fighter.
The memory of Circinae’s touch prickled up and down her body. A red storm coming to obliterate her light. Fire scorching her soul. Falling, falling forever out of the sky. No. Not again. Never again.
She looked desperately toward Cam, but he was still unconscious on the ground. They would vivisect him, too, when they were done with her.
The stone blade was lying beside him on the black ice. If she could only reach it —
Pain seared through her body; the witches were pulling her out of her skin, forcing her into her most powerful and vulnerable state. Without her body holding her together, it would be impossible to resist the resting place of the stone field, impossible to resist the cry from her dead sisters. If they succeeded in drawing her out of her skin, she would be lost. She would forget her mother, Clytemnestra, the library, and Eli.
There was no coming back from an obsidian grave.
Eli. The reckless, confusing, passionate girl that Kite had known and loved all her life. Eli was brave, and Kite could be, too. She could fight back.
She had to try.
Kite pulled back, hair lashing the air, sparks burning from the tips. They scattered across the blackness and continued to burn, casting an eerie bluegreen light over the smooth surface.
Wrenching a handful of strands from her head, Kite whispered a spell over her own dying cells and threw the hair onto the disembodied hand. The appendage released her, as if burned, and a discordant wail broke through the haunting song. Stepping back, Kite could see that each individual strand had wound itself around the hand, lashing the fingers together. The hand collapsed in on itself and fell back into the chasm. She was safe — for now.
The reprieve was short. Looking across the circle, Kite could see other body parts emerging from the lacerations in the stone. Like sickness leached from a wound, the remnants of flesh and magic were oozing out of the cuts in the ice.
And in the middle of the circle, free at last, its bond broken by ritual — the sword.
Kite ran.
The music grew louder and more urgent with eve
ry step, the tempo racing to catch the lost princess, who had nothing but teeth and nails and volumes of history to keep her alive.
Fear bleeding into her heart like water damage spreading across a page, Kite hurriedly cast an ancient spell of courtesy. It was one that princes used to cast when they courted the silver trees that grew in a distant galaxy. According to the records, it was like asking someone to dance — they could choose to take your hand or not; they had the power of acceptance or refusal. It made it impossible for Kite to touch the other being without agreement.
The sword had to accept her offer. It was too powerful an artifact to bend to her will — unless Kite used the newfound powers her mother had gifted her. Unless …
No. I won’t turn into her. I am nothing like her.
Brilliant turquoise hair coiled tightly around her neck as the witches’ teeth bit at her feet. Strange shapes of light and dark stretched from all around her. Kite felt her own light starting to diminish. She was starting to feel like a shadow cast by someone else. A candle being put out.
She waited.
If she was going to die here, she would die like a child of the walls, not an Heir scrabbling for revenge and blame. A clean, honest death, with the brutality bare and unashamed.
Kite caught her reflection in the surface of the blade: her eyes were bright with fire and life, and in the reflection her hair swam around her face like a school of fish.
And then she understood: the sword had accepted her offer of a dance.
Raising the blade with two hands, staggering under the weight of its magic, which thrummed through her body to its own alien rhythm, Kite turned in a slow circle, letting her eyes rest on every flickering essence emerging from underground.
“I’ll lead,” she whispered.
Thirty-Five
THE HEART
The hole in her body had closed, but Eli could still feel it. She didn’t have to look down to know that her spine was fighting to remain corporeal, that her body wanted to disappear. The ache in her joints and the shock spreading from her chest to her fingertips begged to be relieved. To slip into pure light. To leave this clumsy, messy flesh behind.
Stay, she begged the Heart. I can’t leave them here. Please.
Eli didn’t need the cough that wracked her lungs and choked her breath to remind her that being ripped apart and sewn back together by magic was fucking hard on a body. But she had been made to withstand trauma. She had learned how to carry pain. And she wasn’t ready to give in to the demands of her body.
Just a little longer.
After a moment, the feeling of being stretched thin — like an old T-shirt worn by sun and bleach — passed. This time, she didn’t vanish. She was still here. Still sore, tired, and angry as hell. But here.
Eli’s fingertips rubbed the pollen-scented sprig of purple flowers she had tucked into her pocket. A trinket, a charm, a superstition. Something to give to a valentine in the schoolyard or to press between the pages of a heavy tome. Something to tether her to Tav. To keep her in her body. And it was working.
Excitement and pleasure shuddered down her forearms like a pinched nerve. The café came into sharp focus, and she whipped her neck around to assess the danger and plan her attack.
Tav was exhausted. The effort of creating a door, of holding it open, and closing it without destroying Eli had eaten up every store of energy, every moment of sleep and twitch of caffeine. Eli could see it as clearly as she could see the malicious magic crawling up the windows and blocking out the moonlight.
“I can’t believe you let her plant you,” Tav was saying, biding time. Stalling. Hoping for a miracle. “What was that like?”
There were seven of them. Eli vaguely recognized a man who had been hanging on to Cam that night when she first agreed to the impossible task of capturing the Heart of the Coven. One of the women — brown eyes, perfect eyebrows, purple lipstick — she thought might be the Hedge-Witch’s lover. The others were nobodies, cardboard faces, like all the humans she had smiled at or stalked since she was a little girl.
Skin for ghosts, or just empty skin. That’s how she used to see humans.
But she was part human, too, and if she looked at her feelings under certain lighting, at just the right angle, she might admit to being maybe, just a little, in love with one.
Maybe.
“You look a little green,” Tav was telling the Hedge-Witch’s girlfriend.
The purple mouth twisted. Dirt crusted the corners of her lips. “Just give it to us, Tav, and we don’t have to fight.”
“Where’s Cam?” one of the men asked, visibly shaking. “What did you do with Cam?”
“Humans aren’t meant to be plants,” Eli told the Hedge-Witch. “This will hurt them.”
“I don’t bargain with made-things,” she said, and turned back to Tav. “Why are you so worried about this thing? We’ll save the most important pieces for when we repurpose her.”
“You don’t understand,” Tav told their former comrades. “We’re trying to fix things. The Hedge-Witch has lied to you.”
“You lied to us,” said a woman. “You left us.”
“Where’s Cam?!”
Tav’s voice lowered and sharpened. “You need to listen to me. You don’t understand —”
They were wasting their time; even Eli could feel the waves of fear and anger that always meant blood. But not from everyone — some were still panicking over their time as a succulent conglomerate. At least one had lost their sense of individuality and was struggling to remember who they were.
But someone was desperately afraid, and Eli had learned enough about humans to know that fear made them dangerous. Anger could be used to build, to remember, to change, to love, or to kill. Fear meant only one thing.
She should know — she had lived in fear for years.
But who was it? Which one was the threat?
“— the mission —”
“— with the enemy —”
“— dying, it’s fucking dying —”
Smoked citrus and vodka, the signature scent of fear fermented into destruction — there!
Eli moved. Her body was fast, reflexes honed through years of training. And even weakened, even damaged, her materials came together to create strength. She was stronger than the humans. Stronger, even, than witches. She was Circinae’s greatest achievement.
She moved so fast that she blurred out of existence, and the Heart took over for a sliver of a second. Eli ran through Tav, rematerializing in front of them, and snatched something out of the air.
Running on adrenalin and instinct, Eli grabbed a blade from her belt and sent it in a perfect line after the taste of orange peel and acetone, acid sharp on her tongue.
The handle cracked the skull of someone in the crowd — Eli couldn’t see, and didn’t care to — and he fell, unconscious, to the floor.
Silence.
Eli opened her hand. Inside lay an arrowhead carved from obsidian. A witch-killer. A weapon that was forbidden in the City of Eyes. Only the Coven held these arrows and used them to discipline wayward citizens.
The trajectory would have taken it through Tav’s heart.
The Hedge-Witch knew that Tav was part witch. She had known, and had never told them. Eli’s head snapped up, eyes bleeding blackness. She turned to the Hedge-Witch, glowing with the power of the Heart.
The Hedge-Witch stepped back.
“You —” The accusation took over her voice and dried up her words. The light around her body intensified, reaching into the darkest corners of the café, showing the rot under the windowsill — and in the hearts of creatures.
“You saved them,” said the Hedge-Witch in disbelief. The plants on the windowsill had frozen. An air of uncertainty settled over the room like a heavy layer of dust. “You put yourself at risk to save them.” Colours passed over her irises like sun sliding over oil stains on the road. “You’ve changed. You —”
Frost blade through the eye. It wasn’t made for wit
ches, but it was only the conduit. Eli had new powers, now, and so did her blades. The Heart burned with hunger, flaring up in exaltation.
The Hedge-Witch’s drained body fell to the ground in an undignified heap.
“Obsidian!” She reached for Tav, who unsheathed the assassin, the small, thin needle of a dagger that could rend even a witch’s essence.
“I’ll do it,” they said, and walked toward the slippery, silvery essence that was uncurling from the corpse like a snake shedding its skin. They hesitated for a moment, flashes of regret pulsing through their body. Then they raised the blade and plunged it into the essence, not just once, but again and again, until the smoky creature dissipated, falling to the ground as a handful of dried herbs and lavender.
Tav was shaking.
“You … you killed her!” The Hedge-Witch’s human lover cried out as if she, too, had been stabbed through the eye.
Tav stared at the dead petals on the floor, grief and anger pooling under their skin.
“Yes,” said Eli, stepping forward and placing a hand on Tav’s shoulder. They didn’t seem to register the touch. “She’s dead.”
The humans assembled in the room had lost their nerve after the death of their leader. Eli suspected many of them hadn’t actually wanted to hurt Tav. They wanted to play with magic, play at a rebellion, but they weren’t willing to kill for it.
Part of her felt envious of them. What would it be like, to be able to walk away? To put down her blades? To hide under the bed and close her eyes and wait for the storm to end?
She had been born into violence and had never had a choice.
Neither had Tav.
They were in this together.
“What do we do now?” a wavering voice cut through the silence.
“I don’t care,” said Eli. “But you might want to dispose of the body before the cops find out. We’re leaving — and we’re taking the plants with us.”
As she gathered up the magical creatures, a twinge under her left eye reminded her of an unsettling truth.
She had absorbed the Hedge-Witch’s hand.
Part of the Hedge-Witch now lived in her body.
The Boi of Feather and Steel Page 14
