NIKO WAS STILL CURLED DAMP AROUND ME WHEN I SCRAMBLED awake, heart shuddering in my chest. For a moment, I couldn’t even pinpoint what was wrong. While she slept on, I propped myself up on my elbows, eyes narrowing as I listened hard.
And there it was. A rasping, slithering hiss. The hungry prowl of something just beyond our windows—that same sound I’d heard through Mama, beneath her winter gale. The sound that meant Herron, faint and distant, as if carried on the wind from miles and miles away.
But it wasn’t distant now. It was nearly here, slouching over our threshold.
I leaped out of bed so gracelessly and hard that my soles stung when they met the parquet. The thunk of my landing startled Niko awake too. “Lina?” she mumbled, grimacing. “What is it?”
Instead of answering, I flicked on the ornate stained-glass lamp on the vanity table and nearly tumbled into the mirror, terrified I’d find both eyes suddenly brown. Leached of winter.
But the gray in my hourglass eye was exactly as it had been when I went to sleep.
“Lina,” Niko said again, and now she sounded properly afraid, wings ruffled in readiness for panicked flight. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, tugging on the clothes Niko had tugged off me and tossed to the floor. “But something’s outside, I can hear it. I have to go wake Mara.”
Niko scrambled off the bed, winding the sheets around her. “I’m coming with you.”
“No, princess.” I crossed over to her and caught her little face, pressed a fierce kiss onto her forehead. “If something’s out there, I can’t be worried about you next to me. You stay here, and bolt the door. I’ll come get you as soon as I’m sure it’s safe. Okay? Please?”
Whatever she saw in my face convinced her, for once. She gave me a shaky nod and let me go. I heard the bolt slide into place once I shut the door behind me, and I allowed myself a moment of deep, low-pitched relief that whatever happened, at least she’d be secure.
Outside, I nearly ran into someone, stifling a scream. But it was only Izkara, prowling the chalet in her nighttime rounds, partly shifted to brown bear.
“What are you doing out here?” she barked at me. “It’s late. I could have clawed—”
“I think something’s out there,” I began, frantic. “I think—”
As if on cue, the screams began.
WE’D THOUGHT WE had so much more time. Mara had been so sure Herron wouldn’t strike while still vulnerable, before the last of the winter in Mama thawed.
But even she couldn’t know everything, just like Luka had suspected. She hadn’t sensed Herron coming because he hadn’t come.
But his soldiers had, and they were what I’d heard.
Now they swarmed in through the Great Hall’s windows and skylights, shattering them all. Opening us up from every side. The screaming blotted out any other sound. Blood-curdling as it was, it was almost a mercy. It left room for nothing but survival, and even before I started singing it’d whipped everyone into frenzy. With Izkara and Amaya on either side, I roamed the balconies circling the atrium, my heart knocking against my chest like a battering ram as I belted out the fighting song.
“Rise up, rise up, defend your blood!
Rise up, rise up, defend your blood!
Rise up, rise up, rise up!”
Even with Mara’s help—I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her bolstering me—the chanting quality of it didn’t seem loud enough, or anything enough.
Nowhere near enough to stave off the chaos raging around us.
There weren’t so many of them, from what I could tell, not compared to two hundred of us. Maybe eight or nine. But they were strong, and so wrong, beyond hideous. All of them looked like they’d started out human, but they moved like they’d been spliced from grafts of hell. In stutters and spurts, here and then there, black streamers trailing behind them.
Clinging to balustrades and flinging themselves from the balconies, landing like they had no weight.
Joints bending at angles that should have snapped both tendon and bone.
The jellied, smoky black of their eyes flitting from one target to another.
By the time I reached the Great Hall, the fixture that had hung from the eaves lay in a sparkling glass ruin at the center. The stink of the room was worse than terrible. Blood, sweet rot, and a reek both sharp and feral. Some of the daughters had already fallen, lying crumpled like bloodied, broken dolls.
The others were even worse—they had black eyes themselves now, and they trailed behind the invaders like lost shadows.
I couldn’t see Mara, but her roses crept everywhere. An airborne tangle of thorn, flower, and branching roots, carefully cradling the taken daughters so they couldn’t do any harm, and seeking out the invaders to strangle. But where they touched the creatures, her will burst into flame on the vine. It hurt them, too—they let out monstrous, bellowing shrieks at decibels that would have shredded still-human throats—but it didn’t kill them.
Like a force dashing up against an equal and opposite force.
One of the creatures had Naisha pinned to the wall, a bulge-veined hand around her neck. She was shuddering against its grip like a strobe light, snatching desperately at my song. I could see her straining to grasp the serpent form, but she couldn’t sustain it. Not with something oil-eyed and ravenous bearing down on her.
I almost turned away, couldn’t bear to look, sure we had lost her. But then a snarling Izkara materialized behind them in her panther shape and sank massive yellow jaws into the creature’s neck. Ripping its head nearly halfway off in a spray of blood and black smoke. I was so close I felt the spatter of its blood, its strange, wrong smell. Acetone, mold, and burning rubber.
“Lina!”
I wheeled away from the carnage, terror ripping through me. Niko was racing down the left wing of the spiraled stairs, something clutched in her hand.
Vials, I realized. She was bringing me those oils she’d made, to try to help me sing.
She was trying to help me, like everyone always did. And now she’d die for it.
Because one of the creatures was a half step behind her. Something that had once been a strong, pretty, tan-skinned girl, now demon-eyed and webbed with black veins bulging across its face. It caught Niko, whipped her around, let its jaw unhinge horribly wide. Oily black poured from its mouth, reaching for her with snaking tendrils.
My entire world flared impossibly wide and then narrowed, in a single moment, needling to a focal point.
Funneling into “no.”
No, there was no one to help me. Not Mara, not Riss, not Niko. Especially not Niko, who needed me most.
No, I wouldn’t let this happen. This wasn’t the world I wanted. And so I wouldn’t allow it to exist.
NO.
I didn’t realize I was shrieking “NO” at the very top of my lungs until I heard the hall reverberating with the sound of my own voice. I abruptly, thoroughly understood why the full-gleamed could do what they did, why they left an imprint on the world. Why Mara could weave a spell into the fabric of the universe with her infinite bloom, knot it into reality with her black roses. And why Iris could undo it, tear it down with the force of her wisteria.
Their gift was the gleam made flesh, by the shattering, torrential cascades of their powerful will.
That cavern inside me suddenly loomed so large I couldn’t believe I’d ever failed to find it. I was in it, just like it was in me. All those stalactites, all that sharp—it was mine to use, to inflict on the world. To chisel it to the shape of my will.
My far-mother and my sister might have had flowers for will, but I had sharpened stone.
This time when I let loose the song, it echoed inhumanly loud, as if we all stood inside a cave. My cave. And it swept up Kisuna—Bee Girl, who stood nearest to Niko and the demon—in its colossal, thundering wave of sound. Her swarms took vivid shape, burst into winged, buzzing life. They surrounded both the monster and Niko, lifting them up like a levitating chain.
Then some parted from the swarm and flew free, to gently set Niko down in one of the atrium’s empty balconies, hovering around her like a living shield.
The rest ravaged the demon, stung it as close to death as it could get.
Once it finally dropped, I could see from its misshapen, bloated face how badly they’d devastated it.
Kisuna wasn’t the only one fighting back, spurred by my stony song. Oriell guarded Luka in the eastern corner of the Great Hall, with strikes of a chitinous scorpion tail that had fleshed out behind her. A drop glistened at its barbed end, and even in the middle of the wreckage and the gore, I felt a burst of fierce pride for her.
She’d managed to turn her gleam into venom.
And Ylessia was glorious. Her fiery firmament had turned to blistering weapons whipping in orbit around her. There was a strange distortion near her, like an absence of light in midair, as if that specific place was crushing into itself, wadding up into a ball. It wasn’t until one of the creatures lost an arm, a leg, and then simply disappeared into it that I realized she’d somehow conjured a tiny black hole.
But the things were either fearless or too inhuman to bother much with fear. From what I could tell, their own fallen meant nothing to them. One of them stutter-stepped under Ylessia’s defenses, and before any of us could react, gripped her head and wrenched it sideways.
Snapping her neck.
I watched the defiant light ebb from her eyes, and remembered how she’d come to me to offer her friendship what felt like years ago. How hard she’d worked to teach herself to gleam. How much I’d liked the deep dimples in her cheeks when she smiled freely and not just prettily.
How she’d started to feel like actual family.
One of the creatures leaped from an upper balcony and landed on top of the pile of shattered glass—almost right on top of us. Even with the blood smeared all over her and the hanks of sweaty, marigold hair plastered across her face, I would have recognized Nev anywhere.
She angled her head at me, and for a helplessly hopeful moment, I thought some part of her recognized me, too.
Then she hissed at me through blood-smeared teeth, narrowing those oily eyes that had been so blue and bright with mischief. She did recognize me—enough to see that I was the source of the daughters’ newfound power.
And that I should be the next to die.
Nev, my Nev, was coming to kill me.
My song faltered, sputtered, and then dissolved, even as Amaya stepped in front of us and spooled out her sapphire flame to drive Nev back.
Izkara caught me before I could collapse. “You have to keep singing,” she hissed into my ear. “We won’t be enough, not without you. Azareen—Malina—fight for your kin and sing!”
I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. There was nothing left in me.
I sank down, barely feeling my legs fold under me. If it had still been up to me then, we would all have died. There were only three of the creatures left, including what-was-once-Nev, but we’d lost so many.
But they didn’t have their king with them. While we still had our queen, with her knights by her side.
Mara stalked down the length of the hall, all in billowing black. Her hair looked longer than it had been—but maybe that was just the corona it made, borne up by her briar. Dunja and Mama walked on either side of her. Dunja in her snowy white, Mama tangled black with roses.
All three of them drew to a stop, and Mara began to sing herself.
It was nothing like my own song—it had no nuance, no emotional range. Instead it was a simple, indomitable demand, like a gushing geyser. It sounded like an essential summoning, the very pinnacle of a command.
To love her, to come to her, and to obey.
Mama wasn’t singing, but I could see her hand bruising under Mara’s grip, though her face didn’t even flicker with a hint of pain. Whatever they were doing, they were doing it together. Maybe all that sheared-off will keeping Mama alive still belonged to Mara somehow, as a reservoir that she could tap into and use to strengthen her own gleam.
The three remaining creatures lifted their heads, twitching. Along with the daughters who’d fallen and risen again, they dropped what they were doing and began a slow skulk toward Mara, irresistibly drawn by the bugling of that goddess-song.
Once they reached the trio, they froze in their tracks, heads tilted to the side like curious dogs.
That was when Dunja sprang to life.
I had forgotten my aunt’s ferocity. Her gleam so finely honed by Death, like a freshly whetted blade, that it didn’t need any sharpening.
I’d also forgotten what she had done the last time this hall had been a battlefield. The hypnotic dance that had held the daughters captive while she attacked Mara. The fierce stomp of her little foot and the shock wave it sent out, tumbling them down.
While the creatures and the fallen daughters stood enthralled, Dunja flung herself into motion like a whirling dervish. She cut her way through them like a scythe, landing blows that cleaved them limb from limb.
It must have been such a heartbreak for her, even with so little heart left to break. The creatures were just things, but the fallen daughters were her family—the upline of mothers and sisters she had known and loved.
She couldn’t afford to spare any of them.
Not even Nev.
THERE WERE SO few of us left. Of Mara’s two hundred daughters, only about forty were still alive. Amrisa had made her rounds, doing what she could for the wounded. But some of them had been beyond even her help.
It was impossible to imagine how we’d ever mourn them all, and we were far from being safe enough to even consider sinking fully into grief.
I should have felt at least an inkling of victory, now that I’d finally found my will. It meant we had hope, that Mara would be free to fight Herron when winter finally broke.
But we’d lost so much, too much for me to feel like we’d won anything at all.
We couldn’t stay at the chalet. It was all upended from the inside, as if a hurricane had blown through it. Every time I found the strength to lift my head from where I sat bundled up with Niko—Luka in between, with his arms around both of us—I kept having near-hysterical thoughts of Tasmanian Devil cartoons. Everything that could be broken had been mangled, and all the windows gaped like mouths with shards of glass for teeth. Tatters of the Turkish rugs that had lined the mahogany floors were spooled around the splintered furniture. All the wall hangings had been torn, hanging askew on shattered frames or in pieces on the floor.
And anywhere you stood, you could feel the mountain air gusting through the house. The most bereft feeling, being so open to the elements with a roof still above your head.
That was how we all felt too, I could hear it. The unique desolation of a home stripped bare of doors and windows, so empty it whistled with the wind.
We couldn’t stay.
“Why would Jasna agree to take us in?” I asked Naisha as I piled into the last of the caravan of cars that had begun trundling up the road from Žabljak this morning. Driven by silent, stone-faced locals who’d clearly been paid enough not to ask questions. “We’re dangerous. He’ll follow us there, come after her. We could go somewhere else, one of the other coven strongholds. Shimora said . . .”
Shimora, our grandmother.
Who was one of the dead.
“Because Jasna wants to protect you,” Naisha said gently, running her fingers through my hair as I bit back burning tears. A score of welts ran down one side of her narrow face, where one of the creatures had raked her with its nails. They looked inflamed, but nowhere near enough to bother Amrisa for healing. Not today. “And besides, if we fall, nothing will be safe from him.”
Before we pulled away, I twisted in my seat to watch the chalet disappear from view. Amaya had stayed behind, and I could see her burst into flame like a phoenix. That near-sentient flame she commanded looped around her body, raced up the auburn wick of her hair. She walked toward the chalet, dripping with amber-and-sapphire fire. Sparks fell from her, little licks like molten gems. But none of them caught on grass or pine needles like they should have. They burned only where she willed them, reined in by her gleam.
“What is she doing?” Niko whispered beside me. She was on her knees on the supple leather seat, like a little girl. Her cold hand nestled in mine—she hadn’t let go of me since the battle’s aftermath. Both of us knew how horribly close we’d come to losing each other. She still sounded like aftershocks of panic, a maddened thrash of flapping wings.
“Burning everything down,” Luka replied from the front seat. His voice was hoarse from the steady patter of comfort he’d rained down on us both. And from tears, I thought. Oriell had fallen toward the end, protecting him. I’d seen him on his knees beside her, baring his teeth at the sky. Now I could hear his guilt and the devastation, like a fault line cracking thunderously open.
Another lover he hadn’t been able to protect.
“Why?” I choked back tears. “It’s just broken things. It could all be fixed.”
“Because of the bodies, Linka,” he said gently. “There’s too many to bury, and there’s no time for it anyway. They can’t leave them for someone else to find. So they’re letting Amaya light their pyre.”