He pursed his lips, and his fingers went limp between mine. “You’re wonderfully, horrifyingly correct. We don’t know what will happen next, and so it’s pointless to hope for more than this.”
“Also known as ‘all we have is hope!’ Lux, you’re the Prince of Lust! Let yourself want something you could actually have! We’re the ones who can make it come true!” I threw his hands from mine, turning my back on him, wanting to kick that tree stump like a child.
“Celeste, you Wish for things as a way of life! You want it, and it’s given to you! Your magic doesn’t work here, for as much as we both want it to.”
I turned back to him, the dead grass under my feet crunching like a thousand bones. “I am capable of more than Wishing. Are you capable of living with what you lust after?”
He looked so defeated already. I was angry about it, and wanted nothing more than just to see him laugh without being the Demon Prince for a second.
So I tickled him.
I came at him so fast that he couldn’t move and I shoved my hands under his stupid suit jacket and I tickled him.
“What are you—” he yelped, and then he laughed, body convulsing awkwardly, one leg kicking out like a dog getting its belly scratched. His laugh took over that terrible place, rang high through the empty air, until he begged me to stop between breaths. My head swam with the number of emotions I’d felt in such a short time, and with the horror of the place I was in, physically, mentally, with the impossibility of the tasks at hand, and with the memory of having the blood torn from my body by my sister, and I was laughing along with the boy who had probably never been tickled in his life.
Aamon and Agana stared at us across the field, sitting side by side on the dead grass.
I took my hands from under his jacket and let him catch his breath.
“What the hell—” he started, but he put his hands on his knees, and laughed hard again. “You’re not right in the head,” he wheezed.
“Flattery will get you nowhere.”
“You can change anything you want to, can’t you?” he said, still smiling.
Nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Like they saw what I could be. Not even my mother, and she knew what I could be. Instead, she drank it up like a Slurpee.
“Lux,” I said quietly, feeling myself blush under his gaze. “Look at them.” I pointed at Aamon and Agana, who were back to talking quietly as if they had a hundred years of words to share. If I were as weird as Una or as in love with art as Del, I’d have wanted a painting of what I saw. The defiled Red Queen and the black-as-death demon, sharing a hopeless love on the destroyed landscape. It was poetic, painful, pointless, and I wanted it. I wanted that love above all else, even when the world was crumbling around me. But my own conscience knew it wasn’t right.
“After all this time, they still see nothing but each other,” Lux said.
“Actually, I think they only see blood and wrath, and stomp it down so that they can see each other.” I leaned my head against his shoulder as we watched. “They may hate each other a little for it, but they battle to see each other that way.”
Lux sighed and rested his head on mine. “Blood and wrath are just obsessions, and those who command them are nothing more. This is just pretend.”
“It’s real enough for them.”
I wasn’t going to stop, and Lux knew it. I think if I had been the Lust Demon, I would have found a way to get what I wanted and keep it, but I didn’t tell him that.
Agana jumped to her feet, hot red dress circling her on the torched grass. “Time,” she said.
Chapter 29
I saw no difference in the sky or anywhere else that would tell Agana it was time, and envied the Blood Witch for what she saw. I should have seen stars. I should have felt them coursing through my veins like the blood she’d stolen from me.
I want my home and I want it now, I thought.
When Agana focused on me from across the field, it felt like tiny bugs had crawled up from the grass and skittered all over me.
But it wasn’t bugs; it was my blood. Again.
“No!” Lux screamed, running his hands over my collarbone. Blood was bubbling up there from under my dress. My hoodie sleeves trembled with the droplets trying to escape into the air.
“It’s okay,” I said, and had no idea why I would say such a thing.
“Don’t close your eyes, Celeste,” he said through clenched teeth.
“I’m okay,” I said again. It hurt, it hurt so much. “This has to happen.”
Agana’s smile was so wide it had to hurt her face, and when she raised her hands toward the sky I felt myself drain. Blood wove ribbons through the air. The blood loss filled me with heat and I might have thrown up if I wasn’t so mesmerized by the insane joy Agana showed at her power. The blood twirling in the sky, my agony—it made her ecstatically happy. And the happier she got, the faster my blood swam above us.
Lux was shouting at Aamon, insensible and muted to me, as if I were under water. Agana, though—when she spoke, there was no distance between us, our connection through my blood a solid thing. “Find the stars,” she snarled. I heard her as clear as if she’d whispered in my ear.
An image of the Witch of Wicked Words, formed of flapping Death’s Head moths popped into my head, making me dizzy and afraid and even sicker. I wanted to help her, and was so confused at that moment, stripped of my life’s blood, that all I could really think was how afraid we’d all been of Vera.
Agana was so much more terrifying. So much more powerful and dangerous. So much more malicious.
“Find the stars, Celeste,” she hissed at me again through a sick laugh. Aamon was all but jumping up and down beside her.
If Wrath and the Blood Witch went through The Chains with me, what would they be capable of? The horror of what a bad idea it had been to band with them hit me in the face.
“Lux,” I sputtered, and he grabbed my hand.
“Do what she says, Celeste!” he said desperately. “Find the stars or she’ll kill you!”
“I can’t! Can’t feel them….” My throat was too dry to let me speak. Another wave of nausea hit with the effort, but Lux’s other cool hand moved up my back, an ice pack on a sunburn. He turned my body to face him. My legs were jelly, but seeing his face made me a little stronger. My blood twisted in tornadoes behind him.
“Celeste, the heavens might not be visible, but they’re never far from where you are.” His hands moved up to cup my cheeks, deliciously cold through my fever, and he murmured my name before covering my lips with his. The world spun, my heart burst back to life. Just like I’d seen the delectable parts of his soul in The Chains that night, I saw them then, in bursts of color and longing and sounds like the earth didn’t have. I saw The Gone as him and he was The Gone. I saw how beautiful it was for him, how the want of everything made him feel full. I wanted him, that feeling, forever.
But first I had to get us back to The Chains. The Blood Witch might be the strongest force on two feet, but the skies screamed for me, even when I couldn’t hear them.
Taking my lips from his was like sucking the air out of a room full of fire. He groaned in the space between us.
“I can stand on my own now,” I whispered, putting my hand to his cheekbone.
“You always did,” he said without a hint of a smile.
My neck cracked as I straightened my back up and faced Agana through the rivers of blood between us.
“Call to the stars, witch!” she screeched.
I felt my lips turn up, as bloodless as they must have been, and the look on my face made Agana’s brow wrinkle.
I’ll show you power.
Lux backed away. Aamon’s face fell, but there was still delight in his eyes. A child waiting for something terrible to happen.
“The stars are in my blood,” I said softly. Then again, louder. “The stars are in my blood.” And I don’t know if it was magic that curdled in my empty stomach or my own willpower, but when
I cried those words a third time into the red sky, I knew my eyes had gone as black as starless nights. I threw my hands into the air with a grunt of force, and molded the ribbons of blood with my fingers. The frenzy of life force that had been whipping through the sky slowed down, and began to separate, becoming something new.
It collected, shaping into hanging stars. At first just a few. Then those split and made more, and more until there were dozens. Bloody stars of every size, filling the sky that had been lifeless.
“The stars,” Lux said dreamily.
I glanced at him as he gazed at the sky, the wonder in his eyes the purest thing I’d ever seen there. I couldn’t give him enough.
“More!” I cried out, my fingers outstretched, palms upturned to the blood stars. Agana cried out in return, and with a sweep of her arms, more blood burst from my hands into the sky, transforming from thick streams into sparkling red stars, as deep as death, made of life. Hundreds dotted the sky, casting a faint pink glow over the scorched ground.
Aamon, Lux, and Agana were entranced by the beauty of it, and it was a truly beautiful sight. All that red reminded me of Delcine, the red frosting of her lips, the cherry scent, how she wore the boldness proudly.
And while they all looked at what had been conjured from my blood, I Wished.
I Wished to draw the blood from Agana just as she had me, so we could burn a bloody hole in the sky with our stars and they could carry us home. An incantation to be with those of our blood, and fueled by the lust for wrath against the same.
Still smiling, Agana began to shake. Harder and harder she shook, until she doubled over, laughing like a lunatic, Aamon calling her name and trying to stand her upright.
But the blood didn’t come.
I growled like a trapped bear and with teeth about to break against each other, I stopped Wishing, and let my imagination go. Instead of Wishing for something to happen, I pictured it already done, her blood wiggling like worms out of her skin, leaving her even more bone white than she already was.
I opened my eyes that I’d squeezed shut and saw in front of me exactly what I wanted. Straight from my imagination to reality. How long had I been able to do that? To not just Wish for a thing, but create a future and make it come to life? So much time had been stolen from me that I’d never get back. Perhaps I could Wish for its return.
And Agana, who I was stealing from at that very moment, had had more taken from her than any of us. Didn’t change that I needed to do it. Our mother had probably thought that exact same thing.
Lux had his arm around my waist. We watched blood fly from Agana’s skin like we were watching the sun set together. I’d done that to her. She’d done it to me, and we all bled each other endlessly. We serve the power and the power serves us. We were both the keepers and the kept.
I felt Agana’s blood surging to the sky like a thousand paper cuts, transforming into stars, and I knew it still wasn’t enough. Even as the sky mimicked my own back home, but bathed in red and glittering like a celestial butcher shop, I knew it wasn’t going to bring us home.
I couldn’t get enough energy in this place. The Gone was where magic went to die.
“Call on them,” Lux said. I tore my eyes from Agana to see him, and the reflection of my own desires in his eyes: Fleeting images of my coven, Lux himself with his arms holding me harder than I’d ever been, The Chains turning to ashes, then ghosts of my sisters and a thousand girls I would never know, and then myself, turning on the Elementals without a doubt in my heart, and unleashing my fury on them.
I’d show them what it felt like to be convinced that all the lies were for their own good.
I bellowed out for Fire to make the red stars hot, for Air to fan their flames, for Water to boil inside them without ever putting them out, for Earth to fill them with life, and for Spirit to make those stars have radiant souls trapped inside them.
That part shouldn’t be hard for you, Mom. What with all your practice.
I turned my eyes to Aamon and begged him silently to let his wrath become my own. I was desperate for it. I lusted for it.
Aamon swelled from the monster of a man he already was to one whose head touched the stars we’d made. He didn’t have to reach to tear the sky with his hands like it was a piece of paper. The elements I summoned flooded through the gash he’d opened, and shocked the stars into swollen, wild things teeming with brute vitality.
I don’t think Lux realized he whimpered at the sight of Aamon at his full power. Hatred radiated from the Wrath Demon in sick waves. Agana looked ready to fall to her knees before Aamon in worship.
“This much power can only cause insanity,” Lux whispered.
“I think that ship has sailed for Agana and we’re probably not far behind. You’re schizo already, right?”
He laughed and I could breathe easier. The stars had become pulsing, swollen ticks, engorged with the elements. We were ready.
Instinct moved my arms out at my sides into a Jesus Christ pose, fingers upturned in claws. I didn’t feel it when ten tiny stars emerged from my fingertips. I held them high over my head and with a swift sweep I raked them through the air like knives.
I heard the collective screams of the Elementals.
Blood rained on us from the bulging stars, and as it did the barren land fizzled away. Aamon shrunk down to his usual giant self. Agana stood up straight again, catching blood drops on her tongue. Lux stood still as stone. We waited for the screams and bleeding to stop.
The end of that would be the beginning of our battle for The Chains.
Chapter 30
When the dust settled, I already knew that I’d succeeded. Even with my eyes closed, I knew I was back home, and I knew I’d succeeded in bringing back the other three with me. I did not know when I opened my eyes, who or what I’d be facing. I had no plan.
Apparently, I was the type of leader that dove in head first, and hoped she’d get her people out alive on the other side. I could Wish for us all to make it, but I had a distinct knowledge in the pit of my stomach that my wishes wouldn’t make a lick of difference when it came to winning. I wanted it too much.
And those of us from The Gone—Agana, Aamon, and my Lux—I felt their vulnerability in The Chains like a sheen of sweat. I couldn’t count on magic to keep them safe.
“Celeste?”
My eyes flew open to see Cymbeline inches from my face, her dinner plate eyes as transparent as always. I couldn’t have appreciated her before that moment, not enough. I threw my arms around her neck, and she gasped before her wisp of a body relaxing against me.
But when I looked over her shoulder, I nearly Wished I was back in The Gone.
It was the same field we always celebrated our birthdays in. The dream version of the nightmare one from The Gone. The scent of Halloween hung in the air, even on this far side of the woods; rotting pumpkins, cold, dead leaves, apple peels and candy. It was too far to hear the shouts and laughter of candy-stuffed children.
The Elementals stood in a half-circle, facing me. Waiting for me. My own mother, the Spirit Elemental in the center, flanked by her inferiors. And they were her inferiors, despite all the talk of their equal importance. The four lesser Elementals were glassy-eyed with spell casting. A cauldron the size of a kiddie pool was between them, bubbling with foul odors.
Delcine, Vera, and Una knelt by the cauldron in a magical trance. A bright silver, heavy chain hung on their shoulders like an anaconda. It was new. Unused. For now.
“Cym, why aren’t you with them?” I whispered in her ear. I had seconds to make sense of it, but I was terrified.
What if I do the wrong thing?
“They needed me,” she said. “I have to fill the empty spot.” Her voice cracked, and I squeezed tighter when I sensed her tears rising. And then I let her go.
My mother lifted her head slowly, her body bare for all to see, while the other Elementals wore the colors of their elements. She said nothing. When her eyes met mine, there was nothing to say.
She glanced at Lux, then Aamon, and finally rested on her daughter, Agana. My mother’s lips parted ever so slightly. Anyone else wouldn’t have realized that meant she was hurting. But I did.
“Celeste,” she said. “You’ve done this?”
I didn’t answer her.
“A second demon, Celeste, across The Chains, and—”
She couldn’t finish her sentence. Her hand flew to her throat as if she could hold down the tears that gathered there.
“Agana,” my sister said, voice clear and cold like the October night. “Your little girl, Mom.”
My mother let out a strangled cry. Blood rose to her cheeks in a sweet blush that quickly turned to seeping blood. It ran down her face in rivulets until I leaned over and slapped Agana in the arm, hard.
“Ouch,” she said, red-ringed eyes gleaming.
“You don’t move until I say so or you’ll be right back where you came from, Agana.”
Aamon bristled, but didn’t oppose me. He owed me and he knew it.
The other Elementals were getting their wits about them, pulling themselves from the depths of the spell they were casting. I hated being proud of my mother in that moment. She never fell under trance when doing spells. The magic always worked through her, made her more alive. She commanded it.
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