by May Peterson
“If you’d obeyed me, he could never have touched you!” Her shout cut the damp air. She lifted both fists, shaking with conviction. “I would have protected you from God himself!”
The night of the fire slashed across my memory. Her power over fate. The way she’d stood in the way of our doom. Her arm around my shoulder, as it had been moments ago.
Abruptly, it all made sense. Why she was so shocked that Tibario had died. Why she so passionately hated Rhodry. She had never imagined that something bad could happen while she was possessing him. As though so long as she was in his skin, controlling his body, she was the only one taking the risk. Rhodry’s killer had shown her otherwise. I had shown her otherwise. And that was unforgivable to her.
“No.” I sighed. “You couldn’t have.”
Her arms slumped to her sides. The rain was gathering force. It pattered music into our silence, filled our mutual distance with notes.
“But you could have done one thing.” I was afraid of my anger. Afraid of the secret that had freed me. But it was mine. And I would not betray it again. “You could have saved him. You wanted us to be a family again? I named my price. You refused to pay it. So I bargained. If my loyalty is the only thing that will keep you from murdering Rhodry, then you have it. But it would have cost you nothing to save him. And you’re the only one who could have.”
She surged toward me, radiant with venom. “That is a lie. You’re lying to me and lying to yourself. You called your brother back from death! You are the only person, ever, to have thwarted my occhiorosso. Am I meant to believe it would have been anything other than an afternoon’s distraction for you to suss out a disembodied killer?” She shook her head, exhaling into the rapidly cooling night. “Mio, you could be the most talented witch this country has ever seen. Why is it so wrong that I want that for you?”
There were too many answers. Because the price was too high. Because that’s not all you wanted. Because my love wasn’t enough.
Tibario was looking at the ground. Mamma paused, maybe waiting for me to speak. Then, with a ragged sigh, she went on. “Can he protect you the way I did? Is that why you’re choosing him? What can he do you for you that I haven’t already done?”
Suddenly, involuntarily, I laughed. Painfully. To her, controlling someone and protecting them were the same thing. And I had told her I hated her for it.
I took her hand. Tried to smile, through the rainfall, through the lifetime tangled in that grasp. “Mamma. Please. I need you to understand this, if nothing else. I don’t care anymore what he can do for me. What I want is to protect him.”
Sadness rose off her like mist. Maybe, behind her intentions and false beliefs, she was seeing now the error she had made. And seeing that there was nothing that could ever undo it.
She squeezed my hand once. Then let it go.
“If you go back to him,” she said, her voice obtaining a gravid calm, “I won’t stop you. But you will not be welcome again into this family.”
Tibario sucked air through his teeth.
She wasn’t done. “I will not permit any of the other families to attack you. If they try, they will deal with me. But you will be Gianbellicci no more. You will be a lone witch. Do you understand?”
Those last three words trembled. We both knew how I would answer. The rebel houses and their unity had been the best armor I could have had as a child, but I understood now what it had cost me. Street witches struggled on their own—but I wouldn’t be alone.
“Yes.” I couldn’t disguise my relief. “I understand.”
“Goddammit.” Tibario grabbed her shoulder. “I cannot believe what I’m hearing. Are you listening to yourselves?”
A cloud shifted, and a slant of moonlight hit Mamma’s face, the hybrid of bitterness, fondness, and rage in it. The night seemed to have aged her by years.
I nodded. “Then I’m going.”
Tibario swore under his breath.
“Are you—” I had to stop. My voice was starting to shake too badly. Swallowing, I forced myself on. “Are you coming with me?”
Neither of them moved. Tibario seemed not to realize right away that I was asking him. For a moment, they were just a pair of shadows.
Then Tibario’s reply struck like a bullet. “I can’t, Mio. I’m sorry.”
He looked away and buried his face in Mamma’s arm. She wound it around him, smoothing the back of his hair.
No chime of victory sounded from her. Only the same current of loss.
I took a deep breath. “I’ll miss you.”
Turning to go, I wasn’t sure if I’d meant that for him alone.
The rain hit harder as I walked away. Amidst it, I heard only the sound of Tibario crying.
I began to run.
Chapter Eighteen
RHODRY
I couldn’t stop bleeding.
My wounds tried to heal around the silver perforating me, and could not. I was skewered, with arms stretched like a scarecrow, my strength watering the soil.
The cavern had become a hellscape. Evening’s Verge had appeared over me like an omen. The ghosts streamed out, filling the space with mournful, haggard faces, cries and tears and forgotten names. They called to me, but I could not look at them anymore.
Only Rosemary remained still. In the hours of my subjugation, I had learned to bow to her, to fear her presence. She was no longer a mere ghost. Her command of the curse had elevated her to the stature of a demon. She was eternal and white, and the sheer purity of her poisoned the air. She might actually have become the avatar of Death, true foe of all living beings.
She had made me watch as the chains had dragged Cecilio into the cloud, his freedom no longer of use to her. His face swam by at times, a memory or a plea or a wound. From how she delighted in her vicarious power over the souls, I saw why she so desired to keep the incubus by her side as a tool, even if it became her fetter no more.
Then she lifted her arm, like inviting a child into an embrace. The incubus slid out of the air, Mio’s face decorating it.
With her fingers playing in its hair, it looked doll-like. None of its acid and power remained; that had all been Rosemary’s from the beginning. Now it looked small, fake, and aware of its emptiness.
“Look upon your new self.” She patted its head with lurid affection. “This body will be your home. You will have a soul, and life everlasting. Come only sunrise.”
The worst was yet to come—when Eirlys appeared. Rosemary exchanged vague words with the sounds of thunder. I nearly wept at the sight of Eirlys. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for everything, and I was glad she was here. That I was dying at last, and that I wished it meant all the things it should have meant.
She drew near. No sword flamed in her hand, no fight radiated off her brow. She just looked at me, ice trails marring her face, and for all the howling of thunder that rose up, she must have been crying.
“You, Eirlys, resisted me the most beautifully.” Rosemary drifted around her, and the chains began winding her in their coils. Eirlys did nothing to escape them. “Likewise your destruction must be beautiful.”
The proof of our defeat was the way Eirlys slumped down under the weight of the chains. The way her thunder and rage dwindled, the chorus of ghosts coming to usher her away until she was indistinguishable from them.
I couldn’t hold myself up anymore, not even to keep the blood from dripping into my eyes. Just let my weight drop painfully against the chains, the barbs holding me in place, and listen to the sweeping, unearthly wail of our collective skid toward finality. This was how I’d die. A slip into the gaps of half hopes, of ten thousand maybes that could have once been the answer.
Then the din of the ghosts receded, as if they were straining to listen. No—as if Rosemary were straining to listen. Quiet flooded the room. She aimed a swordlike glare at the door of the cellar.
Something was coming. In spite of myself, I aligned every aching plane of my mind to hear it.
It sounded like humming. Like someone pacing the hall with a song under their breath.
“Don’t say anything.” Rosemary’s voice was like a clenched fist. “Don’t even move.”
A weight thumped into the door.
The cursed chains wreathed tighter over the portal. Rosemary drifted down, shoulders set as if preparing for battle. “He will not enter here.”
He—My breath quickened. Another pound on the door. Someone was trying to force it open. But nothing budged the chains. The trickle of song grew stronger, sharper. If there had been words, I might have been able to pick them out.
Rosemary turned on me, as though I were causing the disturbance. “I will kill him.”
Then, a word emerged.
“Open.”
The door burst inward as if blasted with cannon fire. Chain links scattered across the ground. Slowly, a light as warm as a candle’s glow spread inward from the threshold.
Mio stood at the opening.
Time stopped. His voice, without question. Rhodry. Come back. Gentle and damp with tears, his eyes found me. Music flowed off him like sunlight.
Horror widened his eyes. “Rhodry?”
And I started to cry, then, uncontrollably. Because the incubus could have imitated his face, even his sound, but not his power. Power that caressed the agony from my limbs. Mio. You’re here. Simply hearing him speak infused me with energy.
“You have come to the place of your death, sorcerer.” Rosemary sounded tinny and flat within his penumbra of music. “Your lord belongs to me. No power of yours may now save him.”
His brows knit as he took in the sight of her. “The incubus didn’t want you to kill me. You lost control of it.” His gaze cut a line, a line growing bright with realization, between me and Rosemary. “You—you wanted me to summon Mamma.”
Rosemary’s laughter was so heavy with venom it all but dragged on the ground. “So easily you might have spared him this, had you exercised your mighty voice. Will you try to do so now? Rip the secrets from my heart? Surely for one practiced at the rape of minds, it would be a small matter. But trust in this: you will find nothing within me over which to exert power. Sing away. I fear none of my secrets.”
She may not have been bluffing; the limit of Mio’s magic was unclear, but it seemed foremost a theurgy of healing. What could he do to fight her, except give in to the trauma that had silenced him in the first place—by using sorcery to control her?
I shouldn’t have been happy he was there. He should never have come. “Mio.” But I wanted him to look at me.
When he did, it may as well have been full moon. A small, slow smile took shape on his face.
“Are you real?”
He nodded, carefully, as if aware of how broken I was, how much I needed to have him near. Then, as though in prayer, he knelt in the dirt, hands pressing through the dead flowers.
She was going to kill him. Kill him and probably not even leave a whole body left for the incubus to covet. But still he had eyes only for me.
“She’s right.” His voice was like lapping water, shimmering in self-harmony on all sides. “I could have spared you this, if I’d dared. If I’d used the voce de cielo to seek out who was hiding. I certainly used my power when it was almost too late. The silence didn’t do anything to protect you.”
I sniffed back tears. But he’d needed that silence so badly. It had been the only thing that’d let him escape his mother. The only thing that had let him heal. It had protected him.
“But I’m here now.” The music became filigree, physically stroking my cheek. “This is the decision I made. You are not being left alone to face this again.”
“Yes!” Rosemary boomed, as if slowly gaining strength against him. “You have finally committed yourself. One wondered if you were capable of anything but cowardice. But, alas! This opera has a tragic ending. You have only committed yourself to the chain!”
The silver shards stood to attention. No. They became airborne, whirling into a metallic cyclone. Mio. I pushed forward on my spikes, but even had I been free I would have been too weak to reach him.
I should have been able to do at least that. It seemed there should come a point where even the harshest fate would agree—this, if nothing else, should not be permitted. A fucking line somewhere on the march toward hell. Keeping my tender, mortal Mio from being eviscerated should have been that line, if nothing else. Silver flew at Mio, the blur stretching the seconds beyond recognition, packing eternity into the spaces between the blades.
But in that space, something changed. Mio’s humming burgeoned, rising to fill all of my nerves. The change was as gradual as snow—and then swift as lightning. A high, clear note rang out.
None of the blades struck.
There was no lyric of command. Only a chord, shivering with its own nacreous glow. And against it, the blades shattered.
A chorus of awe rippled through the ghosts. If I had not already been on my knees, I would have fallen to them.
“No!” Rosemary staggered back. Metal shot through her, patterning the spoiled earth like a sacrament. She struggled, but as Mio’s verse gathered, she lost ground.
I knew the song. “Midnight Air.” He had changed its tempo, rhythm, and thousands of echoes harmonized with him. His voice filled the cavern, rumbled through the earth under me. This was the song he had chosen.
Rosemary’s scream built through white jaws as she threw up clawed hands. The ghosts coiled above. She commanded her storm of violence, the legacy of lives she had violated. It wasn’t enough that she had ended them, taken away the possibility of life. She had to defile their memories and will, reduce them to the instruments of her murder. Her cry became a shriek, colorless and inhuman. The cloud of spirits plunged toward Mio.
He opened his palm upward, as if fending off the assault. As he spread his fingers, the music detonated into light.
I couldn’t cover my eyes. I never seemed to be able to cover anything from him. My heart had been pounding inside my grave for years, sounding the last heartbeat, and Mio alone had heard it.
The second passed, and my sight returned. Rosemary careened into the bulk of the ghost tree as if blasted by lightning. No physical force should have been able to compel her, and yet she was struck down. Mio sang bright tangles to engulf her against the bleeding bark. She was white and ephemeral and furious, and she could not win free.
She shrieked for her slaves, and they did not answer. The ghosts had stopped moving, Mio’s glow streaming softly through them.
They held out their hands for relief; I could no longer tell if Rosemary was torturing these cries from them, or if they wept at Mio’s song. But it made no difference—they would not fight. With their slaver subdued, no desire must remain except to simply die.
It didn’t matter how many times I saw their suffering, I would never be ready for it. They were my burden and my purpose, and I wished I could lay them down.
But this was why I was still alive.
With silver searing my palm, I gripped the spike and tried to stand.
Rhodry.
Mio spoke to me through the harmony, his voice rising from my heart. It was like how his mother had communicated with me, but as different as Mio and Serafina themselves. A presence alien yet familiar as a childhood taste.
I understand you don’t want this. You don’t want salvation. So I’m apologizing now. For not staying away, even though I would rather die than stay away. Because I want salvation for you.
Warmth bloomed in my chest. I gasped, my lungs whole and aching. The tear was closing, unseen fingers massaging the violence out of it. He was healing me, fighting the effects of the silver.
I will never obey a law that holds you to deserve this.
Th
e blade that skewered me to the dirt shifted. It ripped free, leaving behind a chaos of red sparks. Then, without warning, the spike through my arm slipped out. I bellowed with fresh agony. But notes swarmed to soften the pain in an instant. Wherever the burn of silver receded, my virtue of regeneration resumed strength, sped along by Mio’s power. He pulled out Rosemary’s spikes as though performing surgery, singing me back together as gently as possible. When the last spike rolled away, I hit the ground, gulping for breath.
“Why? Why now?” A voice marred with grief. The incubus. It had risen from its cowering, awakened by Rosemary’s suppression. It shifted shape like a grease stain on the air, a mix of Mio and the demons of its birth.
I was sobbing into the damp soil, for all I tried to sit up. Even if he stitched me back together, it would help little without blood. I was nearing empty and my head blurred as I moved.
His inner voice continued. I think the worst part of it all was the disappearance of my self. My identity became something I had no choice in. I couldn’t even understand how to choose what to be anymore; no choices could be trusted. Yes. I understood well that unique torment. Not only suffering, but becoming the cause of suffering. I only learned new choices because of you. Because you let me choose them.
I was finally able to lift my head. His power had elevated him above the ground; beneath him, the slain ghost flowers were blooming again. In the air, he held back the wave of lost souls. Though they were mourning their own deaths, the logic of the curse would not let them go.
This curse took that from you. It remade you against your will. The last thing I could want is to take away the identity you have left. I know you wanted not to be the hero. And you didn’t want to live through it.
But I did want to live through it. I wanted it and hated that I did. Maybe it wasn’t my incubus. But it had become my curse. With it, Rosemary had tainted every worthy thing I once could have been.
But Rhodry, please. I have taken so much from you and you kept giving. But if there is anything you will take from me, please. Take this. Let me find a way to give you back your life.
