by May Peterson
Ginger snap bucked, and we rolled to the floor. All right. Grown-up strength was starting to kick in. “This party is progressing rather quickly.” And that was definitely an artery. I pushed up, fought to control Tibario’s snarling. Each sound that blossomed from him sounded less and less human. “Cecilio. I need you. You know what to do.”
The ghost’s jaw worked. “I do? My lord, I’m happy to help, but if you’ve believed all these years that I nursed you tenderly back to health when you changed, I’m afraid you’re in for some heartbreak.”
I snorted. “Oh, shit ninnies. Food. Meat. Go to the larder and bring whatever we have left. Do we have more of that fresh beef that was so bloody? Bring that. Otherwise the other side of my shoulder is about to become ginger snap’s entree.” Cecilio hopped to. “Rosemary, go with him, please?”
With them at work, I could focus on Tibario. Vitality thrummed under his firm, golden skin, making his muscles swell with transformation.
Tibario started aspiring, slobbering blood down my shirt. Mio surged up. “That’s too much! Rhodry, it’ll hurt you.”
A chuckle escaped my throat. “No, lemon drop, this is nothing. And better me than you.” I patted Tibario’s tense neck, let him lap back up the spilled fluid. “And you can stop acting so put upon, young man. Everyone knows my blood is at least a hundred proof, so live it up while you can.”
But he wasn’t getting enough from my tissue to recover what he’d lost. He needed protein, flesh. And I couldn’t deny the depressing wave of fatigue that swept up me as he fed. His furry debut was the least of our worries. I glanced at the wreckage that had settled around us. The trace of venom from Serafina’s passing.
And the handprint of the killer, everywhere.
I glimpsed Eirlys watching. No victory or relief lay in her gaze. I caught her eye for a moment and mouthed thank you. Her frown deepened, as if taken aback, but she nodded.
Tibario was slowing, but his new virtue was attaining potency. He was beginning to smell like the Deep. The first transformation was going to be agonizing—well, more agonizing than normal—unless he got some tissue into him. Rosemary and Cecilio reappeared, after about ten million years, their carts fragrant with fresh dead animal. Mmm. Mio crawled over to assist with feeding him, and I let him hand me slabs of meat.
“You too, my lord.” Cecilio held out a plate, dark and bloody with raw beef. Oh merciful fucking blessed God. When I took a moment to collapse into bliss, he ran ethereal hands across Tibario’s head. “Any clue what beast he’ll be?”
I wiped my mouth. “The fangs rule out a bird, that’s for damned sure.”
Mio’s eyes expanded. “Are there animals that are bad to be?”
Another gulp. “Well.” I paused to chew. “No. Not at all. Just that if he’s another bear, we’ll cramp the hell out of each other’s style.”
That seemed to relieve him, but a shadow still loomed in his eyes. He’d almost lost us both. I’d hurt him in the way I hurt everyone else I loved.
I should never have kissed him.
Then Mio started. “Is that fur?”
Here came baby. A seizure pulsed luridly through him, slamming his arms against my torso. “Gah. Big boy.” Muscles swam with new fluidity. Belly must be ready for the big to-do. A moment passed in which Tibario’s voice edged back down to human, frail and shattered and whimpering. He sounded so young, like Mio, too exposed to his personal dangers. Then the beast sliced through again, cracking the last barrier.
It was indeed fur. Spreading like miraculous wheat across his supple flesh, accompanying waves of transfiguration. Spice colored, snagging fragments of light from the air. Well! Ginger snap was going to be a ginger.
The others gathered in mesmeric stillness, rapt at his rebirth. Poor Tibario. I couldn’t help but feel the change should be more private. I’d ended up unintentionally and publicly naked enough to know that privacy would be rare enough coming.
And when the fire had blazed its course, the ashes spun out a tail. Elegant paws, a glistening coat.
“What do you know.” I patted his snout and ears, calming his tremors. “Looks like we have a newly minted cat-soul.”
A ginger cat the size of a panther. Shaking and whining in my lap. Mio watched, a play of fear, wonder, and pain in his expression.
I tightened my arms around the kitten’s squirming. Transformation was a fucking task. “Good kitty. Hand me those chicken livers. God, those smell good.” The abundance of tender meat snacks seemed to calm him, at least. He wailed sad little begging noises in between snaps of now supernaturally powerful jaws. Heh. Good kitty indeed.
Mio’s fingers seemed to flirt with petting him before retreating. It would be strange, acclimating to the sight of him as an animal. “Is he...going to be safe?”
“He’d be a hell of a target now.” I smoothed the fur at his ears. “Despite what mortal meatballs want to think, you need much more than a well-placed silver bullet to take out a moon-soul. Even a kitten.”
Thunder spanned the room. All eyes turned to Eirlys. Her arms crossed, brow severe. She probably understood the incubus—and its servant—better than anybody.
But I flailed. “Mio? I—”
He’d raised one finger while she finished. “Yes. Her Ladyship says they will not strike again so soon, regardless. They only need one death. And the incubus has fled.”
Anxious responses broke out among them, but I tuned them out. Hmm. Of course. Because it achieved the vaunted goal, the entire purpose of this farce. Exposing Mio. But...why not kill him next, then? Even with a plan so badly undermined by a resurrection, the course should have been clear.
I glanced at Mio. He seemed concentrated on Eirlys, her beats of thunder gently breaking the din. The killer was afraid of him. Perhaps just as afraid to kill as to permit to live. But no one had known Mio had concealed this trick up his sleeve, and it seemed he was only beginning to show what miracles he could make of his witchcraft. And Tibario had been a tear that begged closing since he’d arrived. Because he’d brought with him a threat the murderer dared not leave unanswered.
Serafina. Destroying cover was practically her raison d’etre. The red intrusion of her power could disintegrate all my killer had built. Because—
My laugh escalated, low at first, until I could barely contain it. The conversation abated, their attention falling on me. I bent over ginger snap, holding my stomach with one arm.
Rosemary blanched. “Are you well, my lord?”
“It’s fine. Just. She’s right. She has to be. He’s not trying to just increase a kill count. Every death has been for a reason. We just have to know what his reason for the next one will be.”
Cecilio’s brow wrinkled. “He? How do we know the murderer is male?”
My grin all but singed my face. “Because I know who the killer is.”
Eye widened, every other sound in the room grinding to a stop.
I wiped a tear from my eye. “It should have been simple, but the clues were confused. I’d believed you, Eirlys, to be the killer for so long, forced by the curse. When we saw it couldn’t have been you, it’s like my mind went backward. Trying to imagine someone alive. Someone from outside of all this. But that’s wrong. There’s only one person it can possibly be.”
Rosemary’s sigh was eloquent. “My lord, you have a miserly tendency to keep us all in suspense.”
“Oh, you’ll see it. It’s in the order of the deaths, and the nature of the curse. I created it...but not alone. And after I died, that is when the incubus’s power revealed itself. When it took possession of the souls of the victims. An incubus curse becomes a fetter when the bearer dies, ensuring a ghost. But it had needed two dead to blossom. One: me. But before me?”
Oh, he had hidden it very cleverly.
“General Piero Santonino.”
With that, I may as well have stricken the roo
m dead.
Cecilio found his voice first. “But how? We never saw his ghost.”
Rosemary pinched the bridge of her nose. “Which is exactly what we should have found suspicious. The likelihood of his death not having resulted in a fetter is infinitesimal.”
The implications were drowning. Splayed in diorama around me, until Eirlys’s look of shock, Mio’s wide-eyed dismay, all seemed to fade into the background. “There isn’t a ghost that could so much as float over land I’ve hallowed without alerting me. There’s only one explanation. The incubus. It can conceal him, because I’m cursed by it too. We’ve been working under the assumption that he serves it. But it can serve him just as well. Its power over the curse lets him hold the souls hostage.”
“And hides him from your virtues,” Rosemary finished.
But I had finally sniffed out his trail. And he wouldn’t be able to hide from me for much longer.
My eyes closed on Mio. So that was why. The curse hadn’t been the last step before murder. It was a ransom note.
Piero now had the perfect hostage.
Mio only watched his brother, appearing smaller and more delicate with each dying second.
Chapter Thirteen
MIO
Tibario slept through the morning, a gold-spattered ball of catnapping.
He and I had survived much. We’d scavenged for food with Mamma during the hardest times; later, for junk to sell, for marks, informants, all leading up to my use as the canary that would sing out the magic ore of our victims. We rolled through years without structure, schooling, or concept of the future.
The war had not been distant to me. Yet it had been invisible, surrounding and clear as hot water.
I hadn’t seen it, naked and hungry like a lion in the streets, until the fires during the battle for Vermagna.
The forces were falling back; the edges of Vermagna were burning, stricken with ballistics. Tibario was with the scout network, finding Papa, who hadn’t returned from the outskirts. Mamma stood with me out on the stones, fixated on the horizon. I could never have imagined a fire like that—like a sunset that had started eating a hole through the earth. It looked like hell. Ash clouds clenched like fists took over the sky, littering the breeze with sparks.
To my young eyes, the entire world was burning, as if all existence had revealed itself to be flammable. All things would eventually char and rise into that ember-lit sky. Mamma wrapped her arm around my shoulder, and that alone quelled my terror. She did not soothe me, or speak, only held me and watched. She watched with reverence, as if only such extremity could move her witch’s spirit.
But I’d had a conviction that no matter what, the fire could never have gotten to me through her. I had been completely sure of it. If the whole city had burned up, not even the debris would have touched me. Her presence was a charm against any doom she did not allow. That was my strongest memory of my mother.
I wondered if Mamma knew. I wondered if she’d cried like I had. I wondered when she would come—and what doom she would allow for me now.
I must have slept hard, because suddenly fingers were stroking my hair, tenderly pulling me from the depths. “Mio. Are you awake? There. There’s my lemon drop.”
Rhodry. His smile was melancholy but warm. Firelight haloed him from behind.
I took his hand instinctively, and he accepted it. Held it. Then let go.
He had been gone. Like Tibario.
Tibario.
I spun, his absence suddenly striking. No more soft cat coat under me. But Rhodry touched my arm again, brought my gaze over to the table. Tibario’s coppery lines swirled there in harsh, disintegrating motion. It hit me again how huge he was. A man-size tabby cat, great bright leaps of change scaling his back like lightning bolts.
Cecilio, Rosemary, and Eirlys were nearby. Eirlys watching at a distance, away from the fire in the hearth. Rosemary hovered over Tibario with a blanket, and Cecilio looked like he was holding a ewer, splashing with something nauseating.
Rhodry embraced Tibario abruptly. Feline jaws widened and snapped into Rhodry’s biceps but fell away again in whimpers. There was something wild but surgical about the transformation. It was like he was coming apart.
Finally, the boy came into view again, clean limbs slick with sweat, throat thick with human-sounding agony. Rosemary covered him, and Rhodry kept him still. I wanted to go to him. To hold him, hold them both, take them in my hands the way I had at the Verge. Come back. But they were ash. The incubus had taught me that.
“You’re doing marvelously, ginger snap.” Rhodry was smoothing back his hair, almost affectionately. “The first one is always the worst.”
Tibario hacked, but when Cecilio lowered the ewer, Tibario pulled it to him, sucking its contents. The dark stains that leaked out confirmed—blood.
“Oh my God damn piss-drinking vomit.” Tibario sounded half drunk, but hearing him speak again sent a wave of relief through me. “Why in hell does this taste so good?”
“All blood is very rich in vitamins,” Rhodry related, as if reciting something he’d learned at school.
Tibario stared up in horror, eyes blowing wide, memories of the night perhaps coming back to him. But either way, he was naked in Rhodry’s grasp, being fed blood by a ghost. The drying smears of body fluid on his chin made him look comical, like he’d been caught in a prank.
Then he found me. A shimmer of panic and need replaced the horror.
I approached tentatively, kneeling. “You died, brother.” He smelled like something newborn.
The panic was sloughing away, paring down to only the need. “I know. That had to be what that was. And you... You were there. Somehow. You said—”
Come back. A light clove through my mind, falling on the fact that just as I had spared him death, I had thrown him into hours of unbearable pain. And I was the reason he had died in the first place.
I searched his face for signs of those scars. But I didn’t see any. Only tears occluding the now catlike gem tones of his eyes. He surged up, grabbing me in his arms. The shock of it almost sent me sprawling under him. I patted his back, still damp with the sweat of rebirth. He was crying, heavy and childlike, into me. Even a head shorter, I encircled him.
It didn’t surprise me that the silence had reasserted itself. Just as the last time, it seemed possible to step out of it in the moment, when even my self-reproach was not as strong as my need to protect those I loved. But it didn’t last. I wasn’t sure if I could even try to speak now if I wanted. Maybe because the silence’s purpose wasn’t yet accomplished. Even in the wake of my greatest works, I created ruin and pain. The instinct to minimize that couldn’t be overridden for long.
Rhodry’s eyes met mine over Tibario’s shoulder. He was still here, all warmth and shadows and acid and bravery, and the dearness in his gaze was as stark as a wound.
“Mio.” Tibario took a deep breath, wiped his nose on my collar. “Mamma said she wouldn’t interfere. I... I’m so sorry for being such a fool.”
I held him and did not let go. Mamma had turned on us both before. That hadn’t changed. The only difference now was that we both saw it. Translucent shackles, carving bright red lines on his moment of death. That I had seen it first, that I had cracked mine, was strange to me. Tibario had always been my hero. And now I was holding him, and Mamma could still reach him.
Rhodry was chuckling to himself and unfolding something made of cloth. “Here you go, handsome. Time to cover up.” It was his robe, falling darkly over Tibario’s shoulders. My brother started for a moment before pulling it around him. “It’s not that I mind seeing more nubile Gianbellicci backside. Only you are going to get tired fast of being naked.”
He released me. If my powers had been open to me now, I may have heard Tibario taking in Rhodry, his mordantly gentle face, the fondness of his grin. As he stiffened, cinched the sash about his
waist, maybe he was thinking of how little Rhodry was like the predator he’d imagined. “You tried to save me.”
Rhodry’s fangs peeked out. “Let us wisely emphasize the word tried. And you tried to shoot me—with dubiously greater success—but I’m willing to call that forgiven. Especially given your recent death. And the aforementioned nubile backside.”
I laughed softly at his wicked humor. I had the feeling I may not be able to for much longer.
Tibario’s cheeks flushing. “So that night—” He swiveled to me. “That he came to see you. It’s because you asked him for help?”
I nearly denied it. I hadn’t done anything quite so clean, so orderly and careful. But it made no difference. I nodded.
His gulp was audible. “Then that conversation...” Back to Rhodry. “How long has this been going on?”
The question filled the room, crowded the rest of us together. I became exquisitely aware of Eirlys watching her husband, watching me. Of Rosemary and Cecilio’s uncomfortably closed hands. It settled it in my mind—yes. This was an affair. It had been going on.
Rhodry rallied first. “Too long. It’s not what you’re thinking. Not exactly. If you’re going to say that I should never have let Mio get involved, with me, with...well. You’re right.”
Hurt wrangled up its wings, gathered air under it, and lifted through me. Then Rhodry cast me an apologetic smile, and the pain crashed back down. Because his expression said, But I’m glad I did anyway. Tangled in the wrong places, where we should never have been. And I was glad too.
Tibario was nodding, rhythmically, as if in a trance. He took my hand, pressed a moment of sad understanding into it. “So you really do care for him.”
Rhodry looked down. Eirlys did not. I nodded again. “Yes. More than almost anything.” That secret just tumbled free, because I had no more room for it. “I know I’ve disappointed you, brother, I—”
