by Zoe Chant
Daniella was standing in front of the Christmas tree. “No one watered it,” she observed dreamily. If anything, she seemed more dazed than she had the day before. The needles were falling off of it in sheets and many of the branches were already bare. “We should take it down.”
Robin? Tadra signed at her, full of dread.
Daniella only looked at her blankly. Did she not remember the sign, or had Robin become one of those topics that their minds slipped away from?
“I have the box for ornaments,” Trey said from behind her.
Tadra woodenly helped pack away the decorations, listening as Ansel went into the kitchen to help with breakfast, both of them going along with the flow of things because they weren’t sure what else to do.
The glass avatars were wrapped up last and placed at the top of the box, and no one seemed to give them any kind of significance. They were just ornaments, with no more meaning than the plastic Santa Claus or the hedgehog with a candy cane.
While Trey and Daniella wound up the strings of lights, Tadra went prowling for Robin, trying not to be obvious about her search as she poked around in corners. They weren’t in the dollhouse, or in any of the places they liked to perch and watch things.
She was startled to run into Cerad as she walked the hallway to the media room where she could hear the television going, and wondered how successful her bland expression was; he looked at her a little longer than usual, furrowing his brow.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asked casually.
Tadra shrugged and nodded, keeping her eyes lazy and her motions slow as she passed him.
He didn’t follow, and Tadra breathed a sigh of relief.
Robin was watching television with Heather, some kind of rowdy game with many pauses called football. The sight of the fable made Tadra halt in dismay.
If Robin had been diminished before, now they were moreso, barely the size of a fist. Where they hadn’t been able to fit through the dollhouse doors without ducking the night before, now they were almost too small a scale for it.
They looked up at Tadra’s entrance and grinned. “Can you believe this game?” they asked. “They call it a contact sport, but stop the play the moment there is a hit, even though they are wearing ample armor!”
Was it part of their ruse? Tadra wondered. Or was nothing left of Robin behind the joviality?
She signed their name, but they were already looking back at the screen, watching a noisy and bright commercial for a car.
Tadra took a seat on the couch nearby and waited until Heather left to refill her coffee to close the door behind her and face Robin. Robin, she signed. Good?
Their vacant expression remained, despite the fact that they were alone. Robin, she tried again. Shieldmate. Magic.
They glanced at her, then back to the screen.
There was a whiteboard in the room and Tadra took it up. You are under a spell, she wrote frantically. But you can break it if you try. Purge yourself of influence. Ansel had convinced them to do that once, would it work again? Robin was so much smaller now, so diminished. Kevin is Cerad.
Robin looked at her skeptically when she held it up for them to read. “I wonder if we’ve got some of those pizza rolls in the freezer.”
Tadra gazed at them in dismay; they were engrossed again in the television. For a moment, she wanted to snatch them up and shake them in her hands, desperate to awaken them again.
Robin, her mentor and her crown, was lost. Only Ansel was on her side now.
She hastily rubbed the words from the whiteboard with the side of her hand and left it with the marker on the couch.
She paused in the doorway of the kitchen and met Ansel’s glance. Robin lost, she signed.
He balled his hands in frustrated fists and then signed, Sorry. Next?
What did they do next? How could the two of them, powerless, hope to defeat Cerad?
Tadra had to drag her gaze away from Ansel, because she knew the answer to that question and she knew that he would try to stop her. Wait, she said, letting no hint of her intentions reach her face. Then she repeated herself firmly, tapping her wrist. Wait here. She walked into the living room where Trey and Daniella were closing up the box of decorations.
I’ll take, she signed, smiling cheerfully at them, and although she didn’t think they remembered the meaning of her gestures, they didn’t protest when she took the box and went to the garage with it. Fabio trailed her curiously and she carefully nudged him back with a foot and shut the door behind her.
The garage was quiet, compared to the house, and starkly lit.
Tadra walked slowly towards the shelf that the Christmas box had come from and set it down on the concrete floor, lifting the lid with a heavy heart.
She unwrapped each of her shieldmate’s avatars, and then her own, holding it aloft to gaze at the cool reflection of her firebird. Every seam and broken place caught the light.
It looked so fragile.
It was so fragile.
Tadra curled her fingers around it and yanked, breaking the string that held it to the white outer ring. All she had to do was shatter her firebird and she would drag Cerad into death with her, release her shieldmates, and fulfill her duty as a knight. That was the only possible ending to this story now, and she had to do it now, before Ansel realized what she was doing and tried to stop her.
Knowing how Ansel would hurt was the worst of it. She was not afraid to sacrifice her own life; she had always been prepared to fight to her own death in the name of light. But she had never loved the way she loved Ansel, and he loved her back with the same intensity. Losing her would break his gentle heart and Tadra flinched at the thought of it. He would know why she did it, but he might never truly forgive her and the pain that she would cause him made her hesitate, turning the red glass in her hand.
Tarda had read the stories of the phoenix in the faery tale books of his world, but she knew that there would be no rising from the ashes for her. This was a one way choice, her final charge of duty.
She set her jaw and lifted her arm, only to find that she could not complete the move—or make any motion at all—as the door behind her opened.
She didn’t have to see him to know that it was Cerad, and she realized in despair that she had delayed her destiny a few moments too long.
Chapter 30
Ansel waited in the kitchen, pretending that he cared how the dishwasher was loaded, until he thought that he could follow Tadra out into the living room without looking too suspicious. He stopped in the doorway for a moment, trying to decide why things looked wrong.
“You guys took down the ornaments,” he realized. The Christmas tree, which had been shedding needles at an alarming rate for days, was bare of decoration.
Most alarmingly… “Where are your ornaments?” They hadn’t been moved back to the kitchen window, out of reach of the pets.
“They’re in the Christmas box,” Heather said, as if they were nothing more than Hallmark collectibles. She was knitting, and the clack-clack of her needles droned in Ansel’s head like she was deliberately trying to hypnotize him.
“Where’s the Christmas box?” Ansel pressed, as a terrible thought occurred to him. “Where’s Tadra?”
“She took the box of Christmas to the garage,” Rez said. He was lazily sweeping up the drifts of needles beneath the tree, knocking as many more off as he was picking up. “Perhaps the sucking machine that the dogs hate?” he suggested.
“We should take the tree out first,” Daniella said, from her seat on the couch next to Trey. But no one actually stood up and offered to make it happen. If anything, they all looked more mechanical and out of it than ever. Gwen and Henrik were sitting on the loveseat opposite from them, and Gwen was looking at her hands with a frown, as if she was expecting them to do something, but she couldn’t remember what.
Had Robin had some small success in chipping through Cerad’s spell, even if they hadn’t been ultimately successful? Were the others trying to brea
k free, struggling beneath the increasingly glassy surface of their enchantment? If Ansel could shake them the rest of the way out of it, maybe there was still a chance.
But first he had to stop Tadra from doing something terrible. “Where is Kevin?” he asked in alarm.
Rez shrugged one shoulder at the garage door. The same door where Tadra was...with the Christmas box that held her own fragile ornament.
Ansel wasn’t sure which part of this equation dismayed him the most. He abandoned his charade in full and bolted for the garage door, pushing a protesting Rez from his path. He had to vault Fabio, who was confused by having people on multiple sides of a door, and he crashed into the garage to witness a tableau of his worst fears.
Tadra was kneeling by the open Christmas box. Her firebird was clenched in one fist, held high above her head. She was stone still, baring her teeth at Cerad, who was standing above her with a smug, lazy smile that Ansel wanted to strike off his face. He was holding a bleak’s black sword, turning it thoughtfully in his hands.
Cerad looked around at Ansel’s noisy entrance, but didn’t look alarmed. “Why Ansel, are you here to help pack up the Christmas decorations?”
Should he bother to try to continue to bluff? They were out of time, and whatever Cerad was planning to do, he was clearly planning to do it soon.
While Ansel was still deciding what to do, Fabio realized that Tadra was down at a height he could reach with his tongue. The dog barged past Ansel, straight for the kneeling knight.
Cerad made a little growl and twisted one hand. Fabio was suddenly tumbling back with a yelp of pain and protest. He shook his head as he regained his feet, tucked his tail between his legs, and fled the garage, confused and upset. The door slammed behind him with a flick of Cerad’s fingers.
They were definitely past pretending.
“Let her go,” Ansel said. He was good at odds and he could taste the futility of his statement.
Cerad only smiled. “You’ve been biding your time, hoping to find a weakness. I knew that Robin couldn’t have broken free of my will without outside help.”
“Robin told me what happened,” Ansel said as evenly as he could manage. Could he circle around to the wall where the weapons hung? Did he have a chance against Cerad with a blade? And what would happen to Tadra? Ansel felt like his lungs had forgotten how to breathe. A real hero would be in motion, making something happen now.
“They told me what they did to you,” he continued, trying to buy himself time to figure out what to do. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. You were a decent person once. Maybe you could be, again. You could have that back.”
For one brief moment, Cerad didn’t answer and Ansel had a flash of hope. If Cerad wasn’t irredeemable...
Then the wizard laughed and the sheer hollowness of the sound made Ansel feel like someone had doused him in cold water. There was no soul in Cerad, no warmth at all. It was like there was a well of invisible darkness there, oozing out of his glacier-blue eyes. The garage seemed to chill by several degrees.
“I wouldn’t want it back, even if it were possible. I am a better person now,” Cerad said easily. “Not so distracted by petty things like love and mercy.”
“Love and mercy aren’t petty,” Ansel said with conviction.
“They are weaknesses,” Cerad said dismissively. “You could have stopped me long ago, if you had not been so afraid of hurting her. She could have destroyed her firebird long ago, if she had not been afraid of hurting you.”
Tadra was still, not even blinking. She still had her firebird aloft, as if she’d be caught right as she planned to dash it to the ground.
She probably had, Ansel thought, and his chest hurt so badly that he almost believed that Cerad was right: it really would be better not to feel so keenly in order not to suffer so badly.
Then he had to smile, because he wouldn’t have given a moment of his pain in exchange for the joy of loving her.
Cerad looked puzzled at his smile, then frowned. “It doesn’t matter, hound-keeper, you’re too late now.” He lifted one hand and made a grabbing motion.
Ansel, knowing what was going to happen before he even heard the sizzle of a portal, dived for the nearest thing that could possibly be a weapon, the lid from the Christmas box, and he swung it desperately, even as Cerad heaved Tadra, unprotesting, to her feet and dragged her through the brief portal.
Ansel got one chilling glimpse through to his warehouse, crowded with dark figures, as he flung himself after Cerad.
Chapter 31
Ansel staggered through the space the portal had been into the garage wall, holding a perfectly sliced half of the lid from the Christmas box. The rest of it had gone through, but he hadn’t been quite fast enough, or started soon enough. He wasn’t even sure if it was a mercy that he hadn’t himself been caught halfway between places when it closed.
“No! No, goddamit, no!” He smashed a fist into the drywall. It cracked around his blow, leaving a crumbling crater.
Ansel flung what was left of the lid away, detoured far enough to pick the first ornament he could grab from the open Christmas box and skidded back to the house, letting the door slam against the wall behind him. The dogs exploded into barking panic, but Ansel had no time to soothe them.
“Robin! Robin, dammit, where are you!” But Robin was lost again and no use now.
The knights were all lounging in the living room and they looked up at Ansel's noisy entrance with lazy expressions of disinterest that were the last straw to Ansel’s serenity.
“Damn you all,” he snarled. “Kevin isn’t Tadra’s key, he never was. He was Cerad, and he’s been playing all of you.”
Just as it always did, the information merely slid off their placid faces.
“He’s got your shieldmate!” Ansel shouted. “He’s going to use the last of her magic to open a portal to your world for his dark forces so that he can take over this one, too.”
Was there the barest flicker of interest in Henrik’s eyes? Did Trey hesitate just a moment before taking another sip of his coffee?
Knowing Tadra was in danger wasn’t quite enough to crack through their enchantment. Knowing the invasion of his world would start soon wasn’t sufficient. But he knew who they cared for even more than that. Ansel held the ornament aloft and looked at Gwen. It was Henrik’s glass prison. “If you don’t snap out of it, I will break Henrik’s gryphon.”
Everyone else smiled at Ansel in amusement, as if they thought he was making a joke. Even Henrik was chuckling.
Gwen alone seemed vaguely alarmed and Ansel pried into that crack in her armor of indifference. “If I break this, he dies, and you know it. I’d do anything to save Tadra, even shatter your knight’s avatar if that’s what it takes. He’ll die and it will be your fault!”
Ansel was not sure that he actually had the guts to dash Henrik’s ornament to the ground. But Gwen didn’t know that and Ansel had spent weeks in the most intensive acting crash course imaginable, first pretending that he wasn’t falling desperately in love with Tadra, and then that he was under Cerad’s enchantment. He made his words and face convincing and raised the ornament over his head as Gwen got to her feet.
When Gwen’s fist connected with his eye, much faster than he expected, Ansel thought wryly that he probably should have picked a different key to try to enrage. Daniella and Heather were both mediocre fighters at best, but Gwen was a black belt in Tang Soo Do.
Ansel staggered back into the naked tree, knocking it completely off the base as he struggled to protect the ornament in his hands. Henrik rose to his feet, fire in his face for the first time since they’d come back from Ecuador.
“Yes,” Ansel hissed as he struggled to stay upright, backpedaling over the fallen Christmas tree. “Fucking feel something at last!”
“I do!” Henrik roared. “I do feel! Gwen, my key!”
Gwen was staring at Ansel in horror and astonishment, the first genuine expression he’d seen on her in the whole long w
eek that Kevin had been controlling them.
“You were going to hurt Henrik!” she exclaimed.
Ansel held up the undamaged golden gryphon in its glass ring. “I hoped you would believe that I was.” He put his other hand over his throbbing eye. “Ow.”
Henrik was looking at his shieldmates now, both of them watching, slack-jawed, from the couch as if they were merely viewing television, each of them with a casual arm around their keys. He shook his head like a dog with a bee in his ear.
“What has happened to them?” Henrik asked in horror. He and Gwen clung to each other, looking a little like they’d just both been drenched in cold water.
“The same thing that happened to you,” Ansel said. He might have wept in relief, but all he could think of was Tadra. “Kevin is Cerad. He’s using Tadra’s magic, and he’s going to open a portal to your world and let all the darkness over.”
“How long? What day is it?” Gwen asked in alarm.
“New Year’s Eve,” Ansel said. “In the morning. We’re cutting it a little close.”
“Why did you not awaken us earlier?” Henrik wanted to know.
“You think we didn’t try?” Ansel snarled. “You think we haven’t been doing every goddamn thing we could imagine to get you to snap out of it?”
“What we?” Gwen said, still looking at the oblivious knights and their keys on the couch. “Were we all like that?”
“Tadra and I haven’t been affected,” Ansel said impatiently. “And Robin was free...for a while. But Cerad got his claws back into the fable, and he’s got Tadra now. Those weak spells? Those were him.”
Henrik furrowed his brow. “Weak spells?”
“You and Tadra?” Gwen said sharply. Of all of them, Gwen knew Ansel most of all.
It was too much to explain, too much to fill in. “We don’t have time for this,” Ansel said impatiently. “We’ve got to get these guys out of their trance and back on our side and go get Tadra.”
Would Cerad kill her once he’d opened the portals? He didn’t care for any life, his purpose only for his own power. When he had no need of her…
