IT WAS ČIČA JOVAN.
He was here, right below the threshing battle between the demon and Mara with her black-rose wings. Swaying, he stood at its brink—and if he lurched any closer to it, he’d be swept up in their whirlwind and destroyed.
I’d been too late to save Mama—again, to hell with everything—but I could still save him.
He didn’t even have his battle cane, I thought as I sprinted toward him, stricken with terror. How was he even standing up so straight?
“Jovan,” I gasped out as I reached him, my hand landing on his shoulder. “Jovan, it’s me—come, get back—”
He wheeled to greet me, and the words turned to sour ash in my mouth.
His eyes were oil in his beloved face. It even dripped from them, in rivulets, across the slack flaps of his cheeks. Blood streaked across it, had dried his white hair into tufts. He looked almost like a carrion bird, with blood and flesh lodged in its beak.
“No,” I whispered, bottoming out with dread and devastation. “Not this.”
He growled low, then shrieked at me, a grotesque, mindless hunger flowing across his face.
“Not that one, pet.” A distorted, glottal voice crashed over us, impossibly loud, enough to pierce through the crackle of the burning battlefield. “That little spy is mine.”
Black snaked around my waist, tightening like a vise. All the breath whooshed out of me as it swept me up and turned me—leaving me dangling in midair with my face inches from Herron’s.
I struggled against the grip, screaming, though even if it let me go the fall would shatter all my bones. We were what felt like a mile above the ground.
The demon peered at my face in slow perusal. His eyes strobed between green and iridescent black, and his face was threaded with pulsing black veins. Dark hair floated around him like ink in water, and he smiled at me, almost sweet, licking full lips.
“I know you, little spy-witch,” he growled, in that hellish, velveteen cadence that came from beyond his words. “Peering at me like a fawn from behind a tree, stealing glances at me like a sprite hiding in a mirror. Thank you for breaking loose my bonds.”
“You took Jovan!” I screamed into his face, enraged and terrified and beyond all reason. I could hear Mara faintly, bellowing something at me, but I didn’t know what she said and couldn’t bring myself to care. Nothing mattered but me and this thing. “You took him, and you killed my mother, and now you’re going to die!”
Amusement flared in his eyes. “Ah, so he was yours, that old man who smelled of light. I thought that it was not quite her scent lingering on him. And I’d very much like to see you try to kill me for them, pretty fawn. For you, I’ll even hold still.”
I’d never thought of using the infinite bloom to kill. I didn’t know if it even could be used for that. But I needed this perversion to die, by my hand—and the wisteria responded to my need.
It roped out of me thicker and wilder than it ever had before, pulsing with magenta and violet light. It struck at him like a spear, and then coiled around him like a carnivorous vine.
Fierce triumph shook me, and I spooled out more and still more, flinging it at him. It hurt like it never had before. I’d already used so much; I’d destroyed an entire world before I landed here. But I had to be strong, like I always did. And I would be strong enough to murder him.
Then he opened his mouth, and more bilious black came surging out. It wrapped around my wisteria like a weedy parasite, its tendrils both sticky and sharp. It clamped down on the braided flowers and branches, so hard I could feel the monumental weight as it bore down—and began sucking my bloom into Herron’s mouth.
He was eating me.
As he inhaled my wisteria, he paused every now and then to sink his teeth into its slim branches, cracking them beneath his molars and grinding the soft petals between them. The black seeped from his mouth like a hungry mist, eating away at the blooms wherever it touched them. And it hurt, oh God, it hurt like infinite agony, agony folded over and around itself into a fractal of endless pain.
With every gnash of his jaw, I could feel parts of me slipping away. The memory of a fingertip swiped lingeringly beneath my chin—Fjolar? Luka? I couldn’t remember—a low, husky laugh that I recognized as Mama’s when she was young and still in love with her twin girls. The intricate network of wrinkles at the corners of Čiča Jovan’s eyes when he smiled at me in approval over a new technique I’d cast in glass.
Going, going, going. Everything was going or gone, leaving me like a receding tide. He was still at my edges, nibbling at my periphery, but the pain grew even more intense as he sank into the meat of me—and started eating memories of my sister.
I remembered more of Malina than I’d even known, I realized. Far, far back, I remembered opening my sticky eyes in a warm, dim place filled with opaque light, only to find my sister already looking back at me. We’d held hands in the womb; we’d held them in the cradle. And when we were old enough for our fingers to be deft, we’d braided her curls and my straight hair together, tangling it into such a snarl that Mama had to cut our shared plait out.
Then the memory winked out like a candle flame between licked fingers, and the terror fully overwhelmed me.
I couldn’t do this alone. I couldn’t save myself.
And if I kept trying, I’d lose everything.
“LINA!” I shrieked hoarsely, with everything I had left. “LINA, HELP ME!”