“It’s done,” she said, as she thought about Tyler and her father, the grounds where the wicked congregated each year, and what happened there in winter.
She left her room, moving down stairs, smelling pine from wreaths they’d hung on doors and windows earlier. Nicky was there, waiting at the foot of the stairs, young, smiling.
“Are you ready?” He asked.
“Haven’t I always been?” She tipped her head.
He nodded, taking her hand when she reached the landing.
“You’ve been crying,” he wiped a tear from her eye.
“I’m glad it’s over.”
“For now,” he told her. “Drifters had to leave in spring, finish up what they’d left undone, but it’s winter solstice, so we’ll welcome them back again—like every year at this time.”
She fought back more tears, straightened her shoulders, slipped her arm beneath his, and they moved to the door. He threw it open, and snow flurried inside. Someone shook a tambourine and voices sang out in the night. Grifters, cons and thieves moved past her, smiling at her with dead-white faces. Tyler was the last to enter the LaNeau. He nodded slightly when their eyes met, his lips curling when their shoulders touched—so familiar and intense.
Now they all stood in a circle, chanting to the olden Gods—calling those who resided deep beneath the sea and on the city’s highest hills. Their bodies began to change—sinewy with beastly eyes, and others with spiraling fish tentacles. They howled as the flames rose—as demons came up from hell and dark angels beat their wings.
Diana wasn’t afraid, and it wouldn’t be long before the women were resurrected, becoming beautiful creatures from a world of fire and smoke.
****
Tyler touched her tenderly, and then he said, "I'll always come back in winter...always."
“I’m so sorry,” she told him.
“I am, too,” he whispered.
She slipped her hand into his, and then gazed into a shining glass mirror atop the LaNeau’s highest spire. And an image manifested in the sparkling glass, a beautiful woman with lush hair, and one yellow-green eye. A fire burned behind her and bodies lay at her feet, cut, bleeding, with eyes and mouths stitched.
Red droplets trickled from her lips, and she held a jeweled dagger in her hands. She smiled, and a serpentine tongue licked those bloody lips. She raised her arms to a black-night sky.
The image faded, sand flurried from a darkened sky, covering an aged graveyard where mystics and murderers laid. Time unfolded again, winter spread its icy fingers over Talbot's Bay and the nomads waited outside the LaNeau murmuring invocations to the mammoth hotel, blood on their hands, murder in their hearts, and an inferno rose higher each time a sharpened blade cut through flesh...through the winding, spiraling corridors of the past, present and future, and through murky dreams.
Diana stepped closer to the looking glass, and touched the patch where her right eye had been, drops trickled from beneath it, and excruciating aching assaulted her. She whispered, “I’d give anything so that Tyler can live.”
And then she stepped on the spire’s ledge, turning for a moment to gaze once more into the shining glass. She was majestic, a dazzling queen, with one perfect eye, and black down over her sylphlike body, and she cried out as a blizzard pummeled her city at the edge of the earth, its ice mixing with the churning sea and its wind touching those who knelt in her honor…the olden one.
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City at the Edge of the Earth Page 12
