WHY WERE ALL THESE BASTARDS FOREVER TRYING TO steal my sister?
She was mine, goddamn it. She belonged with me.
Riss shrieked out sobs as Herron sucked up her flowers into his maw. And then she called my name, called for my help.
At that, I flooded with raw will, was suddenly made of it. My sister needed me. And I’d take care of her, like she’d always taken care of me.
“You can’t have her,” I whispered to Herron, but it must have been somehow loud. Far above, Herron froze, eyes narrowing. Riss’s bucking body stilled. The sickening rush of her wisteria into his mouth stopped too, suspended. “You can’t have my sister.”
If you lead steadily and well, little bird, reality will leap to follow, Jasna had said. And I thought I’d already learned how to do it. Except I wasn’t a little bird, no one’s songbird, nor a fledgling. I was an eagle, and if I spread my wings they could blot out the sky. Reality would follow me wherever I led. The cavern inside me was even vaster and deeper than I’d felt yet—and it shimmered with the waiting stalactites of glowing will.
If Mara was made of angels, then so was I. And when I sang this time, I willed it louder than the music of the stars.
My ankle wobbled at my step, sent a shock of pain—it must have twisted during the battle. I ignored it, ignored everything but singing. The ground lurched and rocked under my feet. My hands balled into tight fists by my sides. This was my song, mine and only mine. I didn’t borrow anyone else’s strength for it.
“MY SISTER IS NOT YOURS BUT MINE AND MINE AND MINE,” I sang at him, wrath and ownership molded into melody. “FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO EAT, YOU BLIGHT, YOU NIGHTMARE SLUG!”
He strained against my song, spewed out more dark. His hair had merged with the darkness that flooded from him, and both blotted out the stars in the night sky above. Like the corona of a full eclipse. It didn’t matter, meant nothing to me. I couldn’t destroy him—that wasn’t my battle—but I also wouldn’t let him budge until he gave me what I wanted.
I was a daughter of both light and earth.
And he would give me back my sister.
“Have her, then, you shrill harpy of a brat,” he bellowed through the battering of my song. “She’s not what I came for, anyway!”
He flung Riss down like a child tossing away a toy. She would have broken herself on the ground, if Mara hadn’t thrown out a woven hammock of roses to catch her fall. It was threadbare and faint, woven of seedlings. But it was hers, and it was enough.
She had caught Riss in her net of roses after all, just like she’d promised me. Even if it hadn’t been the way she’d planned.
Wound in them, Riss drifted down, and I reached out to catch her as she descended.
“You’re with me,” I murmured to her, pulling her half onto my lap. Her eyes fluttered—a new hazel I’d never seen before, like sunshine slanting over maple wood, bracketed with burst blood vessels. And she was so pale I could see the faint threads of veins under her eyes. But she was alive, and I was going to keep her that way. “You’re going to be fine.”
Above us, Mara had taken advantage and regrouped. The roses of her wings filled and darkened back into life, fueled by the last of her will. With a wordless echo of my song that was more a sense than sound, she flung herself back at Herron.
“You will have no more of my daughters,” she bellowed in her savage knell, smoldering and near-deafening as a bell fresh from the forge. “NO MORE!”
Something flared, blinding at the periphery of my sight. I turned—and saw Jasna leading Dunja to the golden breach that Riss had made when she arrived. Behind her, the rest of her coven still circled their altar stone. None of the creatures had even brushed them. I could almost see the dome of power they had raised from the ground. A whirling flicker in the air around them, like a school of minnows circling.
“Draw down your gods,” Jasna was saying to Dunja, and the peal of her voice carried much louder and clearer than it should have. I could see her shadow cast on the ground by the light spilling from the split in the air. It stretched many feet farther behind than her own height, and it wore trailing robes and an antler rack that weren’t really there.
“You’re strong enough to hold them, and already a vessel,” she went on. “Their world is pure love, just as his is pure nothing, with ours standing between them as the battleground. And love will always, always win. They’re here waiting—I see you see them—but they can’t cross without your invitation. So invite them, girl. Invite them in, as that befouled man invited his filthy hordes. Be a person, rather than a ghost.”
Dunja gave her an uncertain look, then glanced back at me cradling Riss. Whatever she saw in us decided her. She shot me one of her brief, savage smiles, like a descendant of the Amazons.
Then she turned back to the breach and fell to her knees in front of it, arms uplifted.
The gold poured into her as if it had been waiting like a dew-drop on a leaf, quivering with eagerness to fall.
Dunja arched her back, mouth opening wide, swallowing the light. It sluiced and pulsed, shimmering waterfalls of it running down her throat.
Watching, Riss stirred against me. “I almost did that,” she whispered, awestruck. “I was there, before I made it to his kingdom. I crossed through it too, on the way back. It’s beautiful there. I think—Lina, I think that’s home.”
“This is home,” I told her, blindly fumbling for her hand. “But I know what you mean, and I think you’re right.”
The cascade finally subsided, and Dunja swept up. Both Iris and I shaded our eyes. For the first time that night, a hush fell over the vineyard. Above the sear of fire and the sweet-wine smell of burned, crushed grapes, a heady perfume tide rolled out in waves. I recognized it as Mara’s scent, the Garden-of-Eden lushness of ripest, sweetest fruits. The nectar of ambrosia born from a tree of everlasting love.
A kind of love that didn’t grow on earth.
Dunja didn’t look like she had grown from earth anymore, either.
She towered over the battlefield, swathed in folds of gold. Like light incarnate. Something like wings rippled behind her, if bat wings could be made transparent and cast from a precious-metal mold. She also had more arms than was the norm, I noticed. Definitely more than she’d had before, but they seemed natural as all the rest of it. Her hair ran with honeyed runnels, her features shone, gilded and glittering. Marks scrolled across her forehead and down one cheek, looping letters of some alphabet I’d never seen.
And her eyes had grown so huge, pupils twisted into cloverleafs like crossed infinity signs.
So tremendous.
So beyond beautiful.
Our aunt turned to a goddess of light.
Two steps took her to where Herron tussled with Mara. Next to her, their mortal combat had all the scale of toddlers playing tug-of-war over a toy.
With immense, delicate fingers, she lifted Mara from Herron’s grip and gently deposited her next to us. I shifted Riss next to me and lifted Mara’s head onto my lap.
“You can rest now, sorai,” I murmured to her, combing my fingers through Mara’s sweat-drenched curls. “She’s got it from here.”
Mara let out the deepest, most careworn sigh, then closed her eyes. I would have been afraid we’d lose her, too, but though her chest rose and fell only slightly, breath was breath. And I could still hear the ringing of her bell. Mist-shrouded, dampened, and so far away.
But there.
Our far-mother was made of courage, too much to just die before she saw us safe.
Above us, Dunja reached for Herron. He shied frantically away from her, the dark around him scrabbling away from her gold. But there wasn’t anywhere for him to go. She cupped him in her hands and brought him to her chest, then engulfed him in a fiery embrace. Everywhere he touched her, he burst into instant flame. Her face placid above his struggle and shrieks, she pressed and pressed him against herself until he simply burned away.
What was left of the devils followed in his stead. They went up in yowling showers of sparks, burning to cinders wherever they stood.
Watching her and watching them, I could understand.
How humans who’d caught glimpses of these warring worlds had seen both salvation and damnation in them. It probably wasn’t that simple—nothing ever was. Maybe there was something to Herron’s dark that none of us would ever know, something that had drawn him to it.
But now, looking at Dunja, who could resist that clarion light?
Sweeping her liquid gaze across us all, Dunja bent and gently held out a giant, glowing palm that could easily have cupped both me and Riss. Her light fell over us, a loving solar flare, cauterizing any lingering shadows.
“Baby witch,” she crooned to Riss in a behemoth voice, like whale song played by an infinite number of violins. “Where is the rest?”
Her hand trembling, Riss pointed to the lumpy, glinting thing she’d brought with her and dropped beside us when she ran. I still couldn’t tell what it actually was, something silvery and black that glistened like meat. But I knew it had to be Herron’s soul.
Dunja smiled in thanks, showing teeth that beamed painfully bright—then lifted the lump and promptly dropped it in her mouth. A little grimace rippled across her serene face as she swallowed, like a baby tasting a lemon.
Then she lifted easily, turning to where Jasna stood haloed by the breach. The older woman hadn’t moved, but she dipped her head when Dunja touched two fingers to her heart in a salute.
“Thank you, lady,” Dunja said. “They—we—I owe you a debt for your help.”
“You owe me nothing,” Jasna replied. “He trespassed on my soil. Do you know what to do next?”
Dunja tipped back her head and laughed. A rich, rolling sound like a sunrise turned to song. “Oh, I’m going home, of course. And after that, who knows, who knows? Perhaps . . .” A platinum tinge of wistfulness crept into her face. “Perhaps after that, I’ll find him again, somehow.”
She turned back to me and Riss, blew us each a kiss. “Tell sorai good-bye, when she wakes. And my baby witches—don’t forget your aunt.”
I shook my head furiously, choking on tears. I knew it was right, knew she had to go. But why did they all have to leave?
As she turned her back to us and stepped daintily through the breach, it sealed shut behind her with a blowtorch hiss.