Captive Heart

by Anna Windsor

  Dio was sitting in her bed in a small room with solid crystalline walls and a floor-to-ceiling window looking down the mountainside. Her wispy blond hair spilled around her face like a child’s curls, and she had pulled her single white sheet all the way up under her nose.

  “Get up,” Andy told her without holstering the dart pistol. She’d shot Dio before, and by God, she’d do it again if she had to—and Dio knew it. “You’re coming with me.”

  Dio’s gray eyes flashed. Her fingers gripped the sheet tighter and a steady, menacing breeze filled the tiny space. “Go away, Andy.”

  Andy blocked the breeze with a wall of water energy sans a ton of moisture—for now. “If I have to wash this crystal palace all the way back to New York City, I’ll do it.”

  Dio blinked at Andy, clearly aware that she had crushed her air energy with the ease of a Mother who had years of experience. “Well, well. Somebody’s been practicing.”

  “Somebody hasn’t had a choice.” Andy strode over to the bed, grabbed the sheet, and yanked it aside.

  Dio had on jeans and a short-sleeved blue shirt with the left arm tacked shut. She wrapped her remaining arm around her knees and glared at Andy. “Touch me and I’ll blow you the fuck away.”

  Andy cocked her head. “Okay, good. That’s better. But I have to touch you, Dio. It’s the best way for me to read emotions and restore flow.”

  Dio hit her with a major blast of wind this time, almost hard enough to make her stumble before she countered it with a full shot of water energy.

  Almost.

  Water splashed across Andy’s arms, cool and familiar. A fair-sized wave doused Dio and her prissy white sheets, too.

  Dio jumped up on the wet bed, slinging droplets in every direction. “Can you grow my arm back?” Thunder blasted across the mountain and lightning struck about a foot from the sickroom window. “Can you? Because that’s the only damned thing I want from you right now. It’s all I want from anybody!”

  Andy stood fast in the sudden rush of air as the sharp tang of burning ozone clogged her nose. “You know nobody can give you that.”

  “Then piss off!” Dio’s sharp, high scream barely punctured the next barrage of thunder.

  Andy’s heart ached, but she didn’t move an inch. “No.”

  She waited for a fresh round of lightning to cut her in two, but the weather never came. Dio threw herself down on the bed and the air in the room got scary-still as she sobbed.

  “Are you upset because I’m wanting to meddle in your emotions, or are you upset because I’m refusing to give up on you?”

  Dio raised her tear-streaked face, still furious, and Andy knew the answer to her own question. So did Dio. Andy could tell even if Dio didn’t grace her with an answer.

  “I won’t give up. Not ever.” Andy dared to take a step closer. “So you might as well let me do what I have to do.”

  Sunlight bathed Dio’s pale face in yellow and gold as she glared at Andy. “It’s not like I can fight you off with one damned arm—and my weak arm at that. Go ahead. Grab hold of me and read whatever you want.”

  This time the pain in Andy’s chest and gut made her wince. “I won’t. Not unless you tell me I can. I want your permission, Dio.”

  Silence.

  More glaring. It wasn’t such a sharp glare, though. More like a nervous, worried stare. More like Dio trying to decide what she really wanted, what she really needed.

  You need us. Andy wished Dio could read her mind and hoped that reading the love and determination on her face would be enough. You need yourself, your quad, your life.

  Dio’s glare softened another fraction. “If I let you touch me and read my emotions, what are you going to do with them?”

  Andy had asked herself this a few times and she still didn’t have a solid answer. “I have no idea.”

  “Oh.” Dio looked more scared than angry now. “So, what’ll happen?”

  Andy pulled off her sunglasses and tossed them on the little table beside Dio’s bed. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a big goddamned comfort, you know that?” Dio sat on the bed and dripped, but at least the thunder and lightning didn’t start back.

  “Trust me enough to let me try.” Andy heard the plea in her own voice, but she wasn’t sorry she sounded desperate. She was desperate. That was honest and right and true. She was desperate to do what she should have done when Dio first got hurt, desperate to help, desperate to start making things right, if that was even possible.

  Dio tried to press her lips into a fierce frown, but her whole mouth trembled. A few seconds later she closed her gray eyes, and with a body-deep shiver, she nodded.

  Andy saw Dio steel herself like she had done back at the brownstone what seemed like a decade ago, the first time she let Andy get a real sense of what she was feeling.

  That was all the permission she’d ever get, so Andy knew she had to act. Trying to be definitive, trying to be confident, trying to trust herself as much as she’d asked Dio to trust her, she sat on the wet sheets beside her sister Sibyl. She let herself take one centering breath, then she wrapped both arms around Dio’s slight shoulders and opened those floodgates deep in her essence just like she’d done in the infirmary—only without calling water to fill the empty space inside.

  Feelings rushed in, a torrent of rage and pain and misery—and wonder and curiosity—and hope. Heart-gripping hope. Soul-stirring hope.

  Andy closed her eyes, and that’s when the images started.

  Little Dio, running away screaming as older adepts chased her and pelted her with rocks and sticks …

  Dio, older, in her older sister Devin’s arms, her hands blistered and bandaged from lightning burns, sobbing her guts out to the only person who gave one damn what happened to her …

  Andy saw it all rapid-fire. How hard Dio had worked to gain acceptance at Motherhouse Greece. How brutally other adepts had treated her because of her fearsome weather skills. How much Devin had loved Dio, and how the two had been each other’s comfort and stability as the Mothers went about other business, leaving them to fight through the chaos on their own.

  And finally, Andy saw the worst part.

  Dio standing alone in the Motherhouse’s bright little chapel, crying over her dead sister with not a single soul there to comfort her.

  Oh, God. Andy let go of Dio and sobbed out loud, as much from fury as grief. At least when Sal died, Bela had stood beside her. Bela had given her a hug and a shoulder. Motherhouse Greece had given Dio exactly nothing. Fucking nothing at all.

  Andy shoved herself off the bed.

  Those Mothers she knocked out the window might have made it back up the mountain. If they had, she’d wash them every one straight to hell.

  Dio caught her wrist and held tight, leaning back to offset Andy’s weight and momentum. “Not necessary. It’s old stuff—and no Mother and no Motherhouse is perfect. I get that, and you should, too, since you’re running your own little operation at Kérkira.”

  Andy stopped pulling against Dio and sat on the bed again. When Dio let go of her wrist, she swallowed and took slow breaths until she stopped crying, until she could choke out what she needed to say. “I’m sorry. All that invasion—for what? What good did I do you?”

  Dio’s voice sounded unusually light when she answered. “Somebody else knows. That’s good enough for now.”

  “Sorry.” Andy wiped her face with her palms. “Not following.”

  “Before she died, my sister knew everything about me, what we’d gone through together and apart, and that helped me feel sane.” Dio touched Andy’s wrist again, two fingers this time, the slightest of contact, but so unusual for her that it made Andy stare. “Devin sharing everything with me helped me feel strong, because she knew, and I knew, and we had that bond together. I don’t have Devin anymore, but I have you—and that matters. It doesn’t heal the pain, but it makes everything hurt less. I’m not alone.”

  Andy shifted her stare from Dio’s fingers to
Dio’s face.

  Dio was … smiling.

  Sort of.

  Her gray eyes had a clarity Andy had rarely seen, and Andy realized Dio’s burdens had been lightened. Not removed, no—but definitely shared, like she said. Andy’s energy had flowed through the hollow spaces and made them less empty. The water had gone where it needed to go and done what it needed to do.

  “You’ll never have to be alone again if you don’t want to be,” Andy said, making sure Dio understood she was giving a promise. “Motherhouse Kérkira isn’t much to look at, but I don’t plan for us to stay there long.”

  Dio’s smile got a little wider. Kind of lopsided and cute, left mouth up and right mouth rebelling. “A crazy old fire Sibyl, an ancient water Sibyl, a bunch of water babies, and now me with all my thunder and lightning. It’ll be a party, right?”

  They got up together.

  “Need to pack?” Andy grabbed her sunglasses and put them on.

  Dio wiped water streaks into her blue shirt and jeans. “Nah. There’s not a damned thing here I want.”

  By the time Andy and Dio got to the hallway, all seven of the air Sibyl Mothers had indeed managed to get themselves back up Mount Olympus and into the hallway between Andy, Dio, and the exit from the little hospital. The Mothers stood silent, dripping and glowering as Andy once more drew her dart pistol and took aim, this time at the nearest Mother.

  “When Mother Anemone gets back from the States and we’ve all had a little time to heal and cool off, we’ll be talking. Dio’s going to fight again, and you’re going to allow her to train to use her weather making in battle situations.”

  “Andy—” Dio nudged her in the back, but Andy gave her a look.

  “Don’t fucking argue with me. You been lying up here whining and worrying about how you’ll pitch knives with one hand when you can aim lightning like a spear and drop tornados on people’s heads. I’ve seen you do it.”

  The tallest of the blue-robed Mothers, a woman who looked a little like Mother Anemone, only not as elegant, especially with her dripping hair and torn robes, cleared her throat. “It’s impossible to control that skill for combat.”

  “Hey.” Andy got right up in the tall mother’s face, bringing down a rain of mountain water on both of them. “Nothing’s impossible. My life’s been proof enough of that.”

  Water dripping off her big sunglasses, Andy used her dart pistol to nudge the Mother aside. When the woman got out of the way, Andy motioned for Dio to follow. “Come on. I need a huge cheeseburger and a milkshake, some stitches in my left thigh, and about a week’s worth of sleep.”

  They pushed through the crowd of Mothers, this time heading for the communications platform in Motherhouse Greece.

  Ona was waiting for them when they got there, and Andy figured she’d done that melting-from-place-to-place thing Camille had learned from her—especially when she saw the four air adepts and the scrawny fire adept that tended Motherhouse Greece’s communications room cowering in the corner.

  As they climbed onto the platform, Dio asked, “Did you really make a waterspout on Staten Island big enough that people saw it all the way in Jackson Heights?”

  Andy rolled her eyes. “Man, news travels fast around this place.”

  “I’ve been making the Mothers keep me informed. The ones afraid of storms were especially helpful.”

  Ona appeared on the platform in front of them and did a few movements, clearing all the smoke out of one of the large projective mirrors on the wall.

  “The spout was big,” Andy admitted.

  “If I’d been there to give it some wind, they could have seen it in Eastchester and Co-op City.” Dio plunged into the mirror, making tracks to Motherhouse Kérkira.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” Andy muttered as she jumped through the glass after Dio, not at all sorry to leave Motherhouse Greece behind.

  A little over a month later, Andy sat in the conference room of a long, old-fashioned frigate ship with Dio, the two of them in front of a long table populated with Mothers, some frowning, some smiling. Mother Keara, Mother Anemone, Mother Yana, and Elana—Mother Elana, Andy reminded herself—fell into the latter category.

  Bela sat on Andy’s right, and Camille gripped the chair on Andy’s left, looking slightly green, like she had since they set sail from Sri Lanka three days ago, moving like the salt- and flower-scented wind thanks to all the air Sibyls on board. Andy and her group all had on casual clothes—jeans and tanks and sneakers—eschewing the formal robes of their orders absolutely on purpose. Now, somewhere south of Tahiti and west of the Pitcairns, out of French Polynesian territory and deep in uncharted international waters, floating in the calm, quiet sea Andy had dreamed about so many times, the Mothers in their oh-so-formal browns and greens and blues (and one godawful yellow) had finally fought their way to decisions on the matters laid before them.

  “It is decreed,” Mother Yana said in serious tones, “that Dionysia Allard may train to use her veather making in battle. Ve shall support her in all ways possible, and in due time, offer children born vith such abilities to her for consideration of apprenticeship. Ve vill, in fact and here forward, apprentice all adepts born vith projective powers to those Sibyls vith the talent to advise them.”

  The sunlight exploding through the frigate’s rows of round windows lightened the heavy words, but nothing could take away the monumental nature of that ruling. Andy felt like her fighting group, the quad that had once been considered a collection of hopeless, weak losers and misfits, had finally been validated.

  Not that they needed validation to kick ass, take names, and save the world. They had already done that three times, by her count.

  Andy sensed the powerful links between herself and her sister Sibyls, the pulse of happiness traveling through all four hearts, and the easy flow of earth, fire, air, and water joined as one for a common purpose. Together again, and strong, maybe stronger than ever.

  Look out, New York City. We’ll be back soon, and we’ll rule.

  Elana took over from Mother Yana, announcing, “I formally accept the position of eldest Mother at Motherhouse Atanua, and I will assume primary responsibility for the accelerated and basic training programs. As recent events have made obvious, there is little of greater urgency than preparing our young water adepts to take their places among fighting groups all across the world. The importance of water can never be underestimated, and we have much to learn—and to remember—about its flow and power.”

  Andy saw the sideways looks Elana got, not because of her accepting the title of eldest water Sibyl Mother despite her demon infection, or because she mentioned accelerated training or feeding young adepts into fighting groups even faster than they had first planned. No, the looks came from her announcement of Motherhouse Atanua.

  The name had come to Andy after they sailed away from civilization. Atanua, the Polynesian goddess of the dawn, maker of oceans and mother of humankind. Andy couldn’t think of anything more fitting. The fact that Motherhouse Atanua didn’t yet exist—that was what caused all the funny stares.

  What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Not yet, anyway.

  Bela gave Andy her own version of the funny stare, as if she sensed Andy might be up to something, but Andy ignored her mortar. If everybody was just coming to that realization despite being on a boat full of Mothers, water babies and water adepts, young Sibyls of all varieties with projective talents, and an odd assortment of Bengal fighters who just needed to be away from the mainstream world, Andy didn’t know how to help them.

  The Council of Mothers wasn’t finished yet, and this next part … well, this next part made Andy squirm a little bit.

  Mother Anemone took the lead, fixing Andy with her misty green-blue eyes. Her unusually stern stare and deep frown said a lot, and Andy fidgeted with the sunglasses in her lap.

  “As for our consideration of your situation, Andrea Myles, you submitted yourself for judgment because of your negligence of your quad and the safety of the ch
ild Neala.”

  Bela shifted in her chair and glared at the table full of Mothers. So did Camille. Dio grumbled under her breath. None of them liked this, but they weren’t Mothers. Andy knew she had a greater responsibility, that lack of experience was no excuse, and that she had done the right thing by following the code of justice the Mothers adhered to among themselves. This ruling would do its part to continue setting the flow—her flow—to rights again.

  Mother Anemone pulled a packet of papers from the folds of her light blue robes and placed them on the center of the long table. “We have collected statements from your peers, your friends, your associates—thorough testimony, if not all of it serious and helpful.”

  Andy stared at the pile of papers, a new level of disquiet forming in her chest. She hadn’t expected this. What did the old hags do, perp-style interviews with everybody she knew?

  “This from a Mr. Jake Lowell, police officer and Astaroth demon,” Mother Anemone said, a note of affection in her voice. “ ‘Andy’s the best cop I know and a kick-ass Sibyl, too.’ ”

  Andy swallowed, her throat suddenly dry as Dio and Bela put their hands on her knees. She felt the soft touch of Camille’s fingers on the back of her neck, and the quiet, powerful rush of blended elemental energy surrounded her, supporting her, holding her upright in the chair as Mother Anemone kept reading and turning pages.

  “Cynda Flynn Lowell, mother of the child in question, says, ‘No better friend and no better goddess-mother. I’ll kick her teeth in if she puts my daughter in danger again, but I know Andy would have died to save Neala.’ ”

  Paper rustled as Mother Anemone flipped to the next paper. “ ‘Fight with her any day.’ ” Mother Anemone glanced at Andy. “That was Nick Lowell, Neala’s father, though the sentiment was closely echoed by his brother Creed; by Creed’s wife, Riana Dumain Lowell; by Jake’s wife, Merilee Alexander Lowell; by Sheila Gray’s Ranger group; and by any number of Sibyl triads and OCU patrol squads.”

  Mother Anemone waited as if wishing to see if Andy had anything to add, but Andy couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to try. So Mother Anemone went on, this time with a disapproving frown. “A Mr. Saul Brent opined, ‘She’s hot. Nothing more to say.’ From Dio Allard in your own quad, ‘She’s a bitch and I love her,’ with ‘Ditto’ signed by Bela Argos Sharp and Camille Fitzgerald Cole.” Mother Anemone moved all the papers aside then, focusing on the very bottom page. “And Mr. Jack Blackmore, a man with a most colorful past and at best a questionable history in his relations with the Dark Crescent Sisterhood, wrote, ‘I’m still here.’ ”