by May Peterson
Amidst the glow, between the extremes—the souls and their slayer, me and Mio—stood the incubus. Its shape had become stable, like Mio yet not; it could have been a lost sibling, a distant possibility.
It clasped hands over its chest. “You sing for them now, when you would not sing for me. But you can do nothing to redeem them. Unless you can heal every heart from which the curse bleeds, even your powers cannot deny the Deep its right. Their chains are forged in eternity.”
The incubus spoke as if it were talking not about them, but itself. Nothing could save it. The incubus’s fingers moved toward Mio’s throat, the mark that had bound them together.
It wasn’t wrong. These chains were my job. My power was made to undo the terrible weight of her work. Yet I could not. I had lost the grace needed to cure it.
“Rosemary said you cannot tell me what I am. I now understand why—because I know.” On its stolen face glowed a pale smile. It looked over the swarming ghosts. “I am their pain.”
Somehow, its confession moved me. That was exactly what it was. The collective voice of every poisoned needle and gas strike, every limping dream that Rosemary had strangled to death.
“There is no song for you.” Rosemary’s words lanced over the hill, a rattlesnake slipping through a thicket. Even now, bound and subdued, she had the strength to terrify me. Mio was stronger than she. He could also not destroy her, and time favored her against all beings. Yet she did not address me. “You crave the great lie of hope, that any power exists that can save you from your nature. None does. I exist. I alone can give you life. I have chosen the vessel for you, as only I could have done. You are naught without me.”
It said nothing. There was the crux of Rosemary’s quest; she wanted to rid herself of her incubus and its chain upon her, yet keep it—and its dominion over the souls—as her greatest creation.
Carefully, Mio took the incubus’s hand. It became solid and material in his palm. In that instant, I understood.
He may not be able to purify the curse or heal the ancient wounds of this place. But he had called me from the depths. He had resurrected his brother. He could demand peace even from Rosemary herself. If he turned the voce de cielo on the incubus—
Silver tendrils spiraled around the incubus where they touched. His song increased tempo. It changed tone and direction, darkness and weight entering it. Whatever lay dormant inside the incubus now roared across possibility, clawing its way to reality—through Mio. Before the light consumed them, the incubus fell into Mio’s arms like a child seeking refuge.
Thunder split the atmosphere. Music became wind, scattering the corpses of flowers.
Mio was kneeling on the cavern floor. The incubus was gone.
And every trace of Mio’s magic had vanished. Silence fell. Rosemary was unbound, evaporating up through the branches to look down. Anxiety contorted her face.
I ran to him. Limping, heaving, but I had been healed enough to run.
Mio grabbed his throat and coughed. Halfway across the mound, he looked up.
His eyes were wide with shock.
I stopped, catching my breath. “Mio?” Please. No. Let me be mistaken.
His gaze took me in, crawled along the dirt, over his own hands. He patted himself as if in awe that he still existed.
“So this—” His voice came woodenly, awkwardly. “This is what a body feels like.”
The incubus hadn’t gone anywhere.
Chapter Nineteen
MIO
“Lemon drop?”
My nickname had been the first thing he’d called me. It was something I’d treasured in the moments before sleep, before I believed he could love me.
Now it was the sound of Rhodry seeing that, with hope having given its last great stand, he was well and truly alone.
Rosemary began to laugh with disbelief.
I wanted to go to him. When I’d walked into the cavern, Rhodry had looked like a war trophy, disfigured with violence. I’d knitted those wounds. It had been like healing Tibario, each agony brushing my own nerves. The way she had tortured him had been beyond tolerance.
I wanted to cover him, hold him close, sing each slash of pain away. Kiss him, promise that this time his hope would not betray him.
Except it had.
I could not move.
Though move I did, or my body did. With awareness but not choice, I examined my palms, the veins tracing down my arms. “Does this mean...that I’m real?”
The incubus. We blurred together in my body, our thoughts melting into each other.
Rosemary floated, upside down in insectile fashion, to peer into my face. “Welcome home, my dear.”
“He’s still alive!” Rhodry scrambled over the hill, sounding like his throat had been flayed raw. “I hallowed him. You can’t—”
“Yes. Alive.” Rosemary flashed colorless teeth. “To think that with only this, it could be accomplished. Had I known the voce de cielo could produce a cambion without death, piercing the virtue of hallowing, I would have hastened to make use of it.”
Cambion. The bodies under me became overwhelming with significance. Rhodry preserving their flesh against decay, against possession. These were each the progenitors of the incubus, that Rhodry had given everything to ward from Rosemary’s hunger.
To sing for it—in it, like I had with all the other hearts I had chained—had required what no other song had. On the eve of Tibario’s resurrection, I’d felt its core. Nothingness, like a bubble of vacuum in a universe of souls. There was no distinct self for me to link to. I had to enter that null space and place my own heart where nothing else beat.
I had been wrong about it. This was not nothingness; it only resembled it at a glance, just as perfectly smooth metal might appear to not exist in the right light. The incubus was the opposite of heartless. It was a being of pure passion, gyrating and given shape only by its constant movement. It simply lacked a center, a fixed point in the chaos.
I am their pain.
Its song was a song of woe. Of a hundred simple dreams, dreams of full bellies and safe places, crushed by the tides. Of hunger and war everlasting, of delirium and disease without cure, all drawn up the neck of a syringe.
“Mio, you can hear me.” Rhodry was on me, pulling my face to him. The incubus recoiled at the intensity of his touch. “You’ve got to still be in there somewhere. Listen to me. You’re not beaten. Please, please, show me that you can hear me.”
He crumbled into sobs, repeating please, please. He pressed my body to his chest. It all registered on my senses. I tried—with all the self-determination I had learned—to embrace him back. To touch him.
Comfort him. The incubus, at least, could hear me. Put your arms around him.
“N-no. I can’t.” My head began to shake. The sensations were dizzying. Rhodry’s nearness felt good, and hard, and too real, and the incubus resisted.
Rosemary smiled up at the slowly closing Verge. “Mio hears you. The cambion is the perfection of all its elements. None of him will be wasted.”
Horror flashed across Rhodry’s face.
“Personality, memories, knowledge. And if my theory is correct—even his power.”
A force stirred in me. I—the incubus—stood, turned to Rosemary. A flutter of sharp intentions grazed my consciousness, like claws finding purchase. She did not command it as my mother did her victims. There was no direct compulsion. It responded to her spirit as I might respond to hunger or fatigue, and it had no strength of will to deny her.
She smiled. “Sing.”
Power gathered in my throat. “Open.” The word flew, charged with magic. The doors swung back apart, lighting the cavern like an organ exposed on an operating table.
A sorcerer as skilled as Mamma could not tap my magic that easily. The incubus drew it from the body we shared, magic threading its imitation soul
to mine.
Rhodry covered his face like a child.
I could see it now—when the incubus had experienced inner conflict, Rosemary had always been there to direct the outcome. The incubus was a diamond hardened by unique, controlled pressures. It could only have come about this way, poised to be her perfect tool and, in time, her release.
Until it had come to me. Until it had demanded I sing.
Then Rosemary nodded like the slice of a guillotine.
I’m begging you. Please. My terror must have been choking to the incubus now. Good. Let my body exact a price. Let it have a reason to hear me.
Still the music escalated—the power that had grown within me. Phosphorescence held Rhodry up, arms splayed, light hot and damp on his face.
“I know it doesn’t mean anything now, if it ever did.” Rhodry grinned, rough and naked and noble in his humor, wisps of smoke in voice. “But I love both of you. I hope you remember that.”
That should have been it—the moment of grace. The moment I broke through my own limits, once and for all, and saved him. I had come so, so close to saving him.
Eirlys wasn’t looking at Rhodry, but at me. Ice marred her face like leprosy. And her eyes widened as if she were seeing me for the first time.
“Be gone,” said my voice, from within the private universe I shared with the incubus. Music flung Rhodry like a doll into the Verge.
It swallowed him instantly. He was still smiling his half-moon grin as the void ate him.
I screamed. An atomizing scream, echoing in the new silence of my prison. If the scream had reached my throat, with my power behind it, it might have displaced the foundations of the house.
The incubus convulsed, sending me to my knees. It raked fingers across my face as if clawing for a way to turn off its new senses. My emotions were drowning it. Our link was too strong for it to resist.
Enough.
Eirlys. She was a delicate strum through the corridors of the incubus, having lost none of her power to reach me. She was bent over her manacles, ice scabbing the dark links.
I have had enough. She cast one clear glance at me, molten ice streaming down her face. She picked up the chain at her throat, held it in one palm.
And snapped it in half.
Her eyes radiated might and scorn.
The incubus and I fell back on the dirt. Rosemary seemed stunned. “You cannot,” she breathed.
Eirlys ignored her. Her boreal glow was returning, catalyzing the ice that patched her body like scars. Perhaps hopelessness was where she found her strength. Or Rhodry’s loss had simply reminded her how passionately she could hate.
Crystals congealed into her sword, gleaming like a promise. You tried to crush my heart. But my heart is too cold to break.
Rosemary invoked the chains to snare her. But crystal split the iron like wood, covering the mound with scattered prisms.
Now I will crush you. I will slay what you’ve dreamed for, what you’ve fought for. Without Rhodry, you will be locked here forever.
The incubus couldn’t look away from her.
My mistake was hoping there could be any other outcome. But my vow was not to save anyone. It was to destroy you as completely as possible. Now I will.
She flew, like a bladed snowflake, not at Rosemary. But at me.
To kill her cambion. So Rosemary would never be free.
This should not have happened to you, Mio. You deserve better. But I’ll be damned if I let that thing keep you.
Rosemary’s reaction was instant and silent. Chains snarled into being out of the air, but where they coiled around her, Eirlys sliced through their black arms, leaving a trail of iron. She was the beam of the north star, unrestrained by steel or hope.
I wanted her to succeed. I missed Rhodry. Let it end.
But something new and potent ripped through the incubus, startling as a flood.
Fear.
“No!” The incubus threw out its arms, the word vibrating with power. A light-bubble formed around me, snow spraying as her sword hit it. But she didn’t flinch, only struck again, and again, a biting wind of blows. Rosemary cried at her back, summoning her army of death; the chains mounted to bury her. Had she been physical and mortal, the metal’s weight alone would have shattered her arms.
But now no force on earth could stop Lady Bedefyr. Save one.
The incubus wielded that force, desperately shaping any song that would defend it. Sobs rose from our chest. My mind slipped numbly between the strokes of the sword.
“Help me.” It whimpered, sliding back in the dirt. “I don’t want to die.”
It wasn’t pleading to Eirlys, or Rosemary. It spoke to me.
Its one terrified paean ravaged me to my heart. I don’t want to die. No. Of course not. Such a simple wish, held by a being born of death. Now it could be killed. Its secret wish was draining away like blood on a snow-slicked sword. The wish had come from it alone.
The long battle of the two women—their curses of death and vengeance like crossed swords—was reaching its culmination. This was all that remained. Bracing myself, I touched the incubus’s fear. Insight opened quietly inside me. Its fear became light. The incubus wanted, its own unique wish, perhaps unlike any incubus before it.
It had made its choice, long ago, buried under Rosemary’s will. Yet that choice moved within it like a captured star, gently radiating light into the emptiness. I had been there, the moment the incubus had defected inside itself.
You can tell me what I really am.
I was not possessed. That was why Rhodry’s hallowing had not prevented this. I had created this union with song. I could disconnect us—if I could accomplish what I had come to do.
Find the pearl. The choice.
Snow scattered from Eirlys’s blade like butterflies. Ghosts fluttered at her arms, pleading with her, trying to seize her sword, crying that it was enough. Eirlys was stronger than them all.
Her sword fell. For a moment, it was as if time stopped.
From within the incubus, I did the only thing I had ever been able to do. I sang.
I chose nothing, from all the wishes I could have made, to shape what the incubus would become. The melody was a mere thread fed into the pearl, bathing it in undersea light.
It rang like a bell into the endless space. I sang for all who had loved me, who had died alone, who would never be heard again. Invoked them to witness this new heart becoming real.
The change sent ripples across the void. Every ghost stopped in unison—save one. Eirlys’s sword struck. But in the moment it took for the arc of the blade to complete, I regained myself, the incubus’s new anthem on my tongue. The crystal halted against magic, just short of my throat.
Cecilio’s face, naked with awe, shone through the crowd. The souls turned to watch me as if moved by a telepathic signal. Music struck each ghost like a key, nacre spreading through their transparent forms. Eirlys’s eyes widened. The sword fell from her hand. Mio?
“You...missed me.” My voice trembled. Tears dropped off my chin.
Her smile was touched, childlike. She and Rhodry looked so much alike when they smiled.
The incubus congealed in the airy light as we disentangled, taking shape between me and Eirlys. It hovered in the circle of ghosts, lit with the same pearl shimmer. How it must have been for it, to look into so many fragmented mirrors.
Rosemary approached, her lidless stare fixed on me. “What have you done?”
When the incubus looked to me, something like recognition passed over its features. Then its eyes went glassy with panic.
It screamed.
I felt it only from the outside, as I could with Eirlys’s voice. It had its own heart now, awakening from a slumber that had protected it from a hundred moments of death. The pain of those moments all at once must be catastrophic.
The chains pulsed; it seemed as if the cloud of ghosts should go mad from writhing. But they only rode the current and looked on, faces naked with empathy, sorrow, scorn.
I should protect and heal the frail new heart that I’d unleashed on the world. But there wasn’t time. The Verge was nearly closed. I pushed past the throng of souls. Eirlys called my name. I kept going. Shaking, I passed Rosemary and went up the hill to the gates.
Through gritted teeth, I commanded, “Open.” And my waning power did not fail me. The gates reversed their march.
Mio. Eirlys’s breath was cold at my back. Don’t. Please.
I gathered as much air as my lungs could hold. “Rhodry!”
The echo made the gates quake. Please hear me. He had to hear me. Surely only minutes had passed. I’d called him back before.
You did more than anyone else could have done. But he’s gone.
I felt nothing. No stir of power bringing him back to me. Just the flawless obsidian of the void.
If you leave this place, Rosemary cannot harm you. She’ll be trapped here.
She spoke gently, as soft as thunder permitted. I could have listened. Eirlys could keep any living person from ever entering here again, if she froze the land and never let it thaw.
But my choice, too, was already made.
I didn’t want to die. But I wasn’t leaving him alone again.
I smiled at Eirlys. At the souls clustering around the incubus, at its cries rocking the foundation of the cavern. Then, deliberately, I signed, “Thank you.”
Before she could answer, I ran to the threshold. I was calling his name as the darkness took me.
Chapter Twenty
RHODRY
I didn’t much remember dying. But it’d probably been something like this.
It was less like falling than being dragged. As if a force far more carnivorous than gravity had finally found me and was scraping me cruelly over the final moments of my existence. With nothing to breathe, no warmth, immortality could only remain meaningful for a brief span. Hell, I was surprised I was still conscious.
