by May Peterson
The epiphany gathered steam and power, began to turn like wind. Behind me was a wake of hearts, as many or more than the souls the incubus had trapped. Hearts I had made into songs. Hearts I had scoured for their pale, quintessential elements. What had the incubus heard about me, in that moment I let my silence go?
“I can’t,” I signed by reflex. It seemed the surest expression of myself. I can’t.
“You lie, Mio.” The shock of it speaking my name so intimately was like a whip crack. “But that is your art, is it not? You are concealed from me. You are illusion. But that is why I care!” It fumed urgency, a strange, alien sincerity. The thickness of emotion around it was something innocent and violent, unreal and yet unable to deceive me. “Because I, too, am lies. That is why I have come to you. You must sing for me. Tell me if I am real underneath the lies.”
Epiphany became horror. It shook me from my numbness. I wasn’t dead. No—my body was the only one unscathed. Tibario was cold under my hand. Rhodry had been devoured. Eirlys was waging her eternal war, unable to put down her arms.
“You—” The signs almost wouldn’t come. “You had him killed so that I would speak again?”
None of the emotion it glowed with showed on its face. Its movements were doll-like.
“You and I have something very, very important in common, Mio.”
It was like the incubus was pulling a thread. One centimeter at a time. I had no choice but to see.
“We both want to stop lying. We both want to become true. And there is only one thing you have to do to accomplish that.” The incubus leaned in, sympathetic in its borrowed expressions, as if sensing and sharing my thoughts. “It’s a very simple thing. You’ve done it a thousand times before.”
I could no longer make out anything Eirlys said, because she had given up words for howls, straining to keep the door open. Already having collected its soul, the Verge was moving to shut again. Somehow, she was enough to fight it. One panel of the gate remained still. But she could not hold it forever. Rosemary and Cecilio held each other; the others uttered cries eaten by wind.
“All you have to do,” it said, “is speak.”
That struck a spot in my memory. Mamma standing over Donatello, saying, All you have to do is listen to my son sing.
“Just one word. Let’s say two, shall we? It’s not hard to say two little words. How about ‘good night’? Seems fitting somehow.”
Of course it was. Because it would be my last performance. I’d proven that I could lift the silence, at least temporarily, if I found the courage. If I let myself believe that the need outweighed my terror at my own capacity for harm. The last curtain would fall, and the silence with it, and the incubus could curse my final breath. The soul that could not be touched, until the very end.
Deliberately, I waved my hand in front of its face and signed, “No.”
I couldn’t look at it anymore. In a sense, I knew the incubus instinctively. It was the exit wound. It was the hiss and whir of time taking over. I pulled Tibario against me. This was just my life running its course, whispering, It’s okay. You were never going to make it anyway.
Tibario had walked me home from my tutor every day, and after the streets had quieted we could look up at the sleepy sun and feel like the whole sky was open. And believe better days lay ahead of us.
Those days had never come.
We’d never escaped being small, hungry animals, imagining the breeze to be full of gods.
“Mio. I know you’re hurt.” The incubus hummed on, mesmerically. “I know you’re scared. But you can fix it. Make it mean something. You only have to speak.”
Tibario was dead. Mamma hated me. And Rhodry—wild, wine-sharp Rhodry, who’d descended like a god himself in the hollow of my loneliness—was gone.
“Speak.”
It still looked like me but streaked with stains of Mamma. Both eyes streamed with ruby fire as it commanded, voice an eerie mix of mine and hers—
“Speak!”
I should have had an answer, but all that remained were sounds. Tibario in the emptiness, the down beat between the labors of Rhodry’s heart. They thrummed a rhythm under the voices, cries, regrets, broken shells.
All right. All right.
Fatalistic calm filled me. That rhythm was my chain. I heard the ghosts crying their long pain. I heard Eirlys, her thunder growing thin, her heart breaking all over again. The incubus glared into my tear-stained face. It seemed to believe that my magic had potential for more, that I could speak new possibilities into existence. And I had produced unexpected miracles before. I could still hear the incubus’s urgency—a murmur, pleading, Please, speak. Please, be true.
This medley assailed the last quiet region of my heart. Where the pulse of heartbeat and void surrounded me with an unbreakable string of pearls.
That place responded. And found its voice.
I got up. I obeyed. I said two little words.
“Go. Away.”
The incubus’s face lit with naked joy, almost childlike. Then it understood the words, and its eyes widened with shock.
And it vanished.
Eirlys stopped. Her lips parted with awe as she saw me. Even though I had done no more than croaked those words, they resounded through the frail air. Two beats that pierced me through the heart, stripped back my silence like the leaves of a calyx—two beats with the force of an explosion. Pain flamed silver and clear to every corner of my senses. That pain became music, resonating with my magic to give it new strength. If my own passions were not enough, then every spark of feeling I absorbed would be the material I worked with now. All that the silence had entombed, rushing forth to turn back the tide of the Verge.
Resonance lit the wind as if I were burning. Just as I let the song emerge when I listened to my victims, so this melody took form, catching motifs of suffering and death, rage and need. Only now it became more than knowledge. It kindled like a star within my chest, converting music into force. My own witchcraft, woven from the grief of the lost. The unanswered sobs of the ghosts. Eirlys’s storm. Rhodry’s pulse. Every new note of the song I had chosen.
Eirlys fell to her knees as I became bright with power.
If conviction was to be my medium, this was the form it would take!
“Tibario.” Tears shattered my voice, and I did not try to stop them.
The chains rippled in the thrum of the song, shimmering like ribbons. The house shook; the Verge itself trembled.
“Rhodry!”
I wove the intimacy of my own need through his heartbeat. I bound his to mine. I reached through it and took hold of that chain. And would not let it go.
“Come back!”
Six lyrics of my song, and more notes than there were thoughts in the universe. With them, I called Tibario and Rhodry from the void.
And they answered.
Every lost soul answered. Myriad shining eyes turned to me. Their chains had already dragged them back to the Verge as the gate closed. One by one, they began to strain against the curse to heed my call. If I knew the right song, I might have been able to craft a spell to release them all. But I didn’t know what names to call for them, and six words alone were nearly beyond my strength.
The throng parted. For as many moments as the breaths of my lyrics, the Deep illuminated. Over the distance, I could see Tibario turn around. Rhodry lifted his head.
Gently, I sang Rhodry back across the threshold. The music flowed from me like a new appendage, the burn of my collected emotion granting me the power to lift him in arms of song. Frustrated tears I wiped away with notes of care.
The Verge quaked with resistance, its quarry disturbed—the force that restrained Tibario, however, could not bind him against my command. His spirit appeared beside me instantly. In this moment, I was stronger than his fetter.
I likely had mere minutes before my power failed. Alr
eady my fully opened nerves were dazzled, and I was shaping magic toward purposes I’d never tried before. I turned that power on to Rhodry, spinning chords through the membranes of his mind. I might be able to shield him from Mamma with something like my own silence, another impromptu spell, if my power lasted. Survival meant nothing if he was not safe from her. Magic took shape around Rhodry like a physical force.
Every other light within me was for Tibario. I had no choice. He had already died, and his spirit beside me twisted against fate. The wind of the Deep renewed its suction into the void. “I can’t!” Tibaro cried, his chain dragging him back to the threshold.
With the other hand, lambent with song, I grasped the chain. I held it as if I had taken on Rhodry’s virtue for myself. The throb of his need awakened in my breaths. Closing my eyes, I matched them to the lost warmth of his body. This, too, I would take within myself, and let the new magic of lost heartbeats emerge.
It would be quite a performance to reverse death.
He cried my name, over and over. The links tore the skin of my hand, wound like a noose around my brother and me.
Come back. Please come back.
His heart began to beat again.
Rhodry looked up. Eirlys seemed to pray. Tibario gasped. Not his spirit. His body. Through our link screamed every dead nerve, flaring back to life.
The voce de cielo had shown itself capable of healing before. My own wounds, the vitality given to the flowers in Rhodry’s forest. Tibario was not a flower—but I would sing life into him if it slew me.
A flush of new air invaded his damaged lungs. That first breath was a more sublime agony than any I had ever tasted, even in the minds of all my victims. It filled everything, shocked his brain and heart. He could not bear it. He could not possibly endure life again—blood drained, organs exhausted.
Only my fading refrains led him forward. Every fiber of him was a slash against my own senses, and I felt music working in him like fire. I strengthened his wounded veins, his broken chest and bones. I swallowed the cruelty the killer had poured on him. I could not endure it, either. If I could not sing through it, transmute it into healing, the pain alone would slay us both.
I released the song into the last strains, because it must end here. Radiating silver, his body became light in my arms. The chasm in his chest closed, fused back into one. Mending notes pulsed through his lungs, brain, steadied his pulse.
Tibario’s ghost’s outline blurred, the pain tying him back to his body. Their gasps united in rhythm. Before outreached fingers could touch me, he faded.
His eyes opened.
At that, my voice failed. He needed more. He needed every converged chord of my song, but repealing death had already exceeded my limits. I and my verse collapsed.
For a moment he only blinked, breath returning to a soft cant. Then his pupils shrank, and a seizure burned its angry current through his body. Even with my magic doused, our link persisted. The empathic reaction knocked me to my side. He needed food, energy. Blood. Hunger as dark as a cavern ravaged my senses.
That hunger did not spring from Tibario alone. A presence materialized at our feet like the cross-weave of a nightmare. The incubus. Only my song had enforced its exile.
The sorrow I had felt from it was now a chorus of hate. Outrage. It fell like a rain of blows.
“Why? Why will you not sing for me?”
I could do nothing as it snared my neck, sobs wracking its false body. Despair and vitriol all but drowned me.
Obscene strength slammed me to the floor. I heard Rhodry say my name.
For a moment, its spirit engulfed me, just as if I had sung for it. And it was empty. A whirlwind, the eye of which was nothing.
“Mio!”
Darkness covered me like water. Rhodry, huge and black. In his wake, the incubus washed away, vanishing like a cloud of fumes.
But pain chimed in my throat, where it had strangled me. There, a point burned as fierce as a venomous sting. A radiation of wrongness seemed to pulse from it.
Its work was done.
The curse was in me.
Chapter Twelve
RHODRY
The incubus smeared under my paws, dissipating like smoke. But Mio’s stolen face lingered in afterimages between my claws. I roared, pounding the floor where it had been. Violent energy erased everything but my desire to crush the parasite.
I slumped to the floor, heaving in the dry scent of its passing. My virtue could expel it for now—but it scarcely mattered. Because the deed was already done.
To Mio. My head shot up.
The oblivion sloughed from my senses. The sound of ice breaking was all around me. Cecilio recited my name, as if in appeal. And Mio. Silent. Curled in on himself, grasping his throat as if choking.
I was on him, turning him aside more roughly than I intended. “Let me see!” He flinched away, eyes staring wide and liquid up at me.
He looked like he was teetering on the edge of catatonia. I forced gentleness into my tone, my fingers, as I stroked his hair. “Hey. I’m here. Just let me see. It’s all right.”
Mio softened, teardrops gathering light at the corners of his eyes. His arms relaxed. I knelt over him, holding his wrists. It felt like I was brutalizing him, compelling his self-exposure.
And there it was. Gleaming and dark as a slash of ink. The curse mark, right over his throat.
I almost fell on him, shut out the rest of the collapsing night and held him close. Oh, Mio. His last and only protection, gone.
I had never seen his power before. Not like this, reared in its fullness. He had told me it was something to be feared. And yet it had shielded me in the midst of my doom, and stricken that doom away.
“My lord.” Rosemary. Her cool presence descended, precise hands slipping Mio from me. He turned and hid his face in her embrace. “I will mind him. But there is aught at hand.”
Yes. It was coming back to me. I nodded at Rosemary and pushed to my feet. Thank God for her.
The Verge was closing in again on its gravid somnolence, the ice that had sealed it melting away. Eirlys stood, gazing at me. She had done this. She had fought for the chance of my survival against the gates of death themselves.
The last sliver of light hit Tibario, not far from where I had sprawled. His body was whole, thrashing with new animation.
And alive.
I hadn’t known this was possible. That any magic could restore the dead. I only knew of one thing that could—the noble spirits.
Seizures wracked him, moving him to tear at his face and skin, squirm at impossible angles. This was the first time I’d seen them on someone else, but I recognized the hell out of those convulsions.
I wound one arm under him to keep him bashing his head on the floor. He flailed reflexively, eyes blank and staring. The way he grasped at my arms was like a child rooting. Teeth flashed, snapping at my fingers. They were already looking longer.
Poor ginger snap. He was going to feel this.
Cecilio approached, readjusting his cuffs. “Poor fellow. Does he yet live?”
I constrained him, let his teeth graze my arm. “Oh, he fucking lives. I daresay he’s going to be doing a whole mess of living from now on.” I yanked open his shirt so hard the buttons popped free. Cecilio moved to help.
A ghost trying to restrain a moon-soul was an awkward thing, even if just because of the irony. When Tibario snapped and lunged, I pulled him close. In seconds he was gnawing on my shoulder, teeth scrambling for purchase. Teeth—no, these were fangs. “Hey there, handsome. Nice to know I taste good.”
The worst was still coming, and the biggest challenge would be all the blood he’d lost. His resurrected flesh had to be practically screaming from need. When his fangs began draining my shoulder, I let him drink deep. He’d need it more than I did.
We were about to have a newborn ba
by moon-soul on our hands.
Mio was upright and shivering now, watching his brother like he was dying all over again. His signs were quick and timid. “What’s happening to him?”
“He’s quickening. Changing.” I softened my expression. He shouldn’t have to see this. Rebirth was painful and gruesome at the best of times—which right now was not. “You...brought him back to life, lemon drop.”
Mio didn’t seem able to look away. His tears hadn’t stopped, only slowed to a silvery trickle. Rosemary, calm as ever, patted his back. Cecilio had joined them with a hand clasped over his mouth.
“And—” I winced as Tibario’s jaws tightened “—when you said ‘come back,’ we weren’t the only ones to hear you. Looks like a noble spirit considered that a request to officialize.”
So human hearts were not all that responded to Mio’s voice. Why the noble spirits bestowed their gift was a mystery. But Mio’s command had filled the Deep, transmuting the airless void into lucid color and warmth. Notes of gold still chimed gently in the back of my mind, as if protecting me. Surely anything that was concerned with resurrection would have been moved to answer him. If he could command the incubus, surely his burgeoning magic could handle calling the attention of a noble spirit. Mio had made his body whole again, and the spirit had come to bless that transformation with immortality.
Hell. I’d bet that if he hadn’t specified me and Tibario by name, every soul in the Deep would have strained to fulfill his call.
I’d not expected to hear his voice again. And I wasn’t hearing it now. It caught up with me that he was signing again. “Mio. You...your mutism is back.” Just as it had happened before, when he’d spoken my name, and immediately fallen under the silence again. As if its very purpose was to keep him from regaining his voice—and thus, his power—for long.
I couldn’t keep the sorrow from my tone. But his tight smile deflected me. “It—it doesn’t matter. I only wanted...”
His brother not to be dead. And he probably would have liked it if I hadn’t run headlong into the same demise, leaving him almost alone with the rising pile of bodies. And with a sorcerer who had likely just shifted from pissed off to homicidal. My love affair with self-destruction had—just maybe—not been the impulse to indulge just then.
