by Nazri Noor
Her image wavered as she knelt, her spirit imbued with enough strength that I could feel her fingers trailing against my hair, her hand pressing on the back of my neck. “You’ve always obsessed with right and wrong, you know. Since you were a kid. And you never were perfect. You never had to be, Dust. All your dad and I expected from you was to try.” She pulled herself back, the cool skin of her fingers lifting my chin. I gazed into her eyes, mirrors of my own. They were wet, too. “And you’ve tried so much, Dust. You’ve tried so very, very hard. I couldn’t be prouder.”
My insides wrenched, and I couldn’t say anything back, only sob. As much as I hated her, Izanami was right. I was holding on to an image, just an echo of someone I loved. It wasn’t right to have her in a box on my dresser, to look at whenever I felt like it. This wasn’t just a picture, or a memento. It was the essence of my mother. Asher had the purest of intentions, but even then, somewhere on the inside, I knew it was wrong to keep her to myself this way.
I had to hope that Dad would forgive me.
Mom lifted her head, a tear slipping down her cheek as she smiled at Herald. “I’m pretty sure you’re the one his dad was talking about,” she said. “You seem like a perfectly lovely young man. You take care of my idiot son here. Make sure he eats his vegetables.”
I didn’t turn to look, but Herald made a sound somewhere between a sniff and a “Yes, ma’am.” Was he crying, too?
“Make sure he doesn’t do silly things to get himself hurt,” Mom said, softer this time. “He has so much more to do. You always had so much to do, Dust. And I want you to follow your heart. Do all of it. All of the things. Be the very best human you can be.”
“Mom?” I panicked. This was goodbye. Her specter was trailing away from me, as if being slowly pulled in by the portals.
“Tell your father not to drink so much damn beer,” she said, wagging a finger. “And to cut down on red meat. It’s not helping his blood pressure.”
“Not yet, Mom, please.” I knew I was on the verge of wailing, my voice cracked. I didn’t care. I didn’t want her gone yet. The world could burn.
“I’ll always be with you, Dust,” she said, her smile fond and sad. Her fingers were still laced with mine, the rest of her body floating in midair, pulled relentlessly by the rifts, which had begun to spin faster, harder. “But now you have to let go.”
Never, a voice inside me said, cold, defiant.
“You have to let go, Dust,” Herald said.
“It is time,” Izanami said. “Surrender the breath of the dying.”
“Mom?”
“You’ll always be my little boy. I’ll always love you, Dust. Always.”
Her fingers rushed away from me, her eyes and her smile the last features I could make out before she faded into nothingness. And just like that, with a long, slow sigh, like sea foam vanishing on the shore, she was gone.
“It is finished.” Izanami closed her fingers, and the light dancing in the center of her palm winked out. “The circle is complete.”
The pendant at my chest glowed with its crimson fire, this time stronger, brighter than before. And it kept on burning, the light of it building into an inferno that rose from the garnet itself. But I could feel it burning inside me, a wreath of flame whirling around my heart.
And with it came the pain. The sheer, white-hot pain of my heart being thrust into boiling oil.
I threw my head back, and I screamed.
Chapter 33
The world around us was shattering. Fine hairline fractures were appearing everywhere: the walls, the floors, even the strange, roiling sky of the Dark Room. And out of those cracks came trickles of light, as if from some outside source. Herald and I were in an earthenware box, and it was crumbling – fast.
Izanami was nowhere to be seen. Fair enough, because I’m the kind of stupid who still would have wanted to exchange one or two very choice words with her. But all that would have to wait, not that I was looking forward to seeing her again so soon.
We had much bigger problems, like the huge chunks of obsidian masonry tumbling from the vaulted ceilings above us, the Dark Room’s architecture finally truly revealing itself in its imminent destruction. The pillars supporting the five rifts at the Dark Room’s heart were tumbling over as well, falling into so much worthless debris.
Into dust. Dust. I chuckled to myself, then choked on a mouthful of blood.
“Dust?” Herald’s eyes were huge with terror, with concern. They flitted towards my chin, where I could feel my blood dribbling.
“I think I’m fine,” I burbled, lying through a mouthful of red.
“We have to get you out of here,” he said. “Which way? Tell me, which way?”
Bad enough that the entire world was quaking around us, but my vision was getting blurry, too. Everything was spinning. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, somehow confident in my answer. “You see all these cracks? Every one of them will bring us back to Valero.” I fell on my ass, threw my hands up, and laughed wetly, the taste of metal coating the inside of my mouth. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll get home even if we just sit here and wait.”
Herald lifted his hand, his teeth gritted as he conjured a shield of solid ice, deflecting another falling chunk of debris. “Well if we don’t make a move right fucking now, you and I are going to get home flat as pancakes. Move your ass, Dustin. Now.”
I chuckled as I stumbled to my feet. “Ass,” I said, my chest still awash with fire, my mouth a mess of blood. I spat out a mouthful as I ran, as Herald tugged me through the crumbling corridors of the Dark Room. I sighed as purple tendrils of magic crawled from his fingers around my wrist. I wasn’t sure what the spell was meant to do, but it cleared the delirium from my head, and I think it stopped wherever I was supposed to be bleeding. I think.
“Come on, Dust,” Herald shouted. “Through that gap. We’re jumping, okay? One, two – ”
Three. It was like the ultimate scene in one of those action movies, where a massive explosion, one you’re not supposed to look at, triggers behind you in an enormous fireball. In this case, it was more like an implosion, really, the cracks and fractures in the Dark Room contracting, the broken pieces of its puzzle slipping back together as it spat us out into the real world, shortly before it compacted into nothingness.
We sprawled headlong into Latham’s Cross. I coughed as frigid air entered my lungs in huge gulps, wet blades of grass sticking to my face. Beside me, Herald lifted his head from the earth, his glasses in disarray, grave dirt on his cheeks.
“Dust,” he said. “Look. It’s working.”
The edges of the Overthroat’s portal were sparking, like something failing, a technical fault. And the Overthroat knew it was happening, too. It looked around itself, shrieking its eldritch scream. Shtuttasht pushed itself out of the portal, finally finding the strength and will to move its heaving bulk into our reality despite the endless onslaught of the mages.
Then it happened. The portal’s whirring noise stopped, leaving only the Overthroat’s panicked cries. The borders of the rift wavered, then all at once snapped shut, the portal shrinking to absolute nothing within the span of a second. The gate sliced cleanly through the Overthroat as it closed, like a guillotine, severing half of its monstrous body. Shtuttasht yowled, then shuddered. Then its body fell motionless.
Scores of black, wriggling things crawled from out of the Overthroat’s ruined corpse, glistening slugs the size of a man’s forearm. They looked very much like the White Mother’s larvae, the precursor to the shrikes themselves, huge black maggots that sped for various corners of the graveyard. The Lorica showed no mercy, stomping, burning, slashing at the abominations wherever they appeared.
The Overthroat’s serpentine neck wavered in the air before its head finally came crashing to the ground. A cheer went up from the mages. I thought I saw Sterling with his arm draped over Royce, the two of them thrusting victorious fists into the air.
Yet it wasn’t over, not exactly. As the Overthroat’s h
ead collided with the ground, it snapped right off its neck, then came rocketing through the air. Shtuttasht’s screaming skull raced towards me like a cannonball, just one, final “Fuck you!” to me from the Eldest. Easy enough to dodge, I figured, as I knocked on the Dark Room to let me enter, as I allowed my body to sink into the shadows –
Except I wasn’t sinking. I stared down at my feet, horrified, stamping them, but nothing. I couldn’t shadowstep anymore. The door wasn’t budging, and I wasn’t going anywhere.
Herald smashed his shoulder into my chest, shoving me clear out of the way. He fell to the ground, slamming his palms into the earth. Streaks of violet energy streamed from his fingers, and a wall of opaque frost sprang from the ground, two feet thick and several times as tall and wide.
The wall shuddered and crunched as the Overthroat’s skull struck it, then rebounded, making a horrible gonging sound. Splinters of dislodged frost rained around me, falling in my hair, melting against my skin, like snow. I kept still on my back, panting. Herald fell against the grass, too, and the both of us stayed that way for a while, staring up into the sky, aching for breath.
“It wouldn’t have killed you to move your feet,” Herald grunted.
“The Dark Room,” I said. “I thought it would open for me. It was instinct, okay? I thought I could escape through there.”
“It’s gone now, Dust. The enchantment worked. You sealed it away, and it’s gone.”
“Gone,” I echoed, my eyes searching the stars for answers, finding nothing. My chest ached as I took huge, deep lungfuls of air. My heart churned with a curious, leaden sense of loss, but somewhere in there I thought I felt the stirrings of hope. “Then who am I now?”
All the many names that the denizens of the arcane underground had used for me ran through my mind, flickering with glimmers of truth, all these facets of my identity. Thief. Sacrifice. Hound. Sweetling. Dog. Fleshling. Shadow beast. Darkling mage. All these names and more.
“You’re Dustin Graves,” Herald said. He reached for my hand and clenched it. “And that’s more than enough for me.”
I squeezed back. Maybe it was enough, after all. Maybe I was enough.
Chapter 34
We found the Overthroat’s skull embedded in the side of a mausoleum, the light of horror faded from its eye sockets and from its mouth. Vanitas was still stuck through its forehead.
It took a little bit of elbow grease and planting my foot squarely in the Overthroat’s dead, stupid face for leverage, but with some effort I managed to wrench Vanitas out of the skull. His garnets flickered back into life as I did. Relief came flooding into my chest.
The first thing I heard in my mind was V gasping for air. I realize that makes no sense – I was pretty sure Vanitas didn’t breathe – but to him it was like breaking the surface of a lake.
“I thought I was dead,” he gasped. “I couldn’t see, I couldn’t feel. Where were you, damn it?” He jerked in my arms, waving about to show his displeasure. I noted that, for once, he didn’t immediately demand that I let him go.
“I was right here, V,” I said. “I told you not to be so damn brash. If you think it’s easy going around to demon princes and begging them for favors to reforge you from leftover pieces, you’re damn wrong.”
I retrieved his scabbard from my backpack, gently sliding both blade and sheath together, then attempted to deposit Vanitas back in his pocket dimension.
“No,” he said, wriggling in my grasp. “Let me breathe. Out here. Just – hold me a little longer, would you?”
Whatever happened to Vanitas when the Overthroat’s influence forced him into dormancy, it couldn’t have been pleasant.
“Sure thing, buddy,” I said, securing him to my hip, leaving my hand on his hilt. “Take as long as you want.”
He settled into position, then said nothing more. I recorded that firmly in my mind. If he gave me shit in the future, I was going to remind him of the time he asked me to hold him.
Odessa showed up to retrieve the Overthroat’s head, accompanied by a number of what I assumed were Hands. Her demeanor towards me was chilly, though after what I’d done to the Heart, I really wouldn’t have expected any friendliness from her end.
“Probably not the best idea to keep that thing at the Lorica,” I said. “I’d suggest smashing it, burning it, then sending the ashes to another dimension.”
“That is not for you to decide, Dustin,” Odessa said curtly.
She waved her hand, and a gleaming bubble of pure force appeared around the skull, securing it and lifting it in the air. She pulled on it with an invisible leash, and the Overthroat, a gargantuan menace to our reality mere minutes ago, was no more threatening than a child’s toy.
“I’m glad you could join us,” I said. I knew that being so snippy wasn’t helping, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I didn’t think the Scions would show up.”
“At least half of us were present at the battle with the Old One,” Odessa said coolly, gesturing at her retinue. I should have known those faces were familiar. She gave me a sidelong glance. “More would have joined us, but there was that small matter of repairing the crystal focus – of keeping the Heart under control and avoiding the arcane equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.”
“We should arrest him,” one of the Scions said. “No one has ever attacked the Heart and endangered the Scions so directly.”
“Honestly, Odessa, the leeway you give this one, and for no real reason,” said another Scion. He grinned. “Smash him, burn him, then send the ashes to another dimension, I say.”
I stiffened, lifting my nose and puffing my chest out, but said nothing. Herald tugged on the sleeve of my jacket, sensing my defiance.
“We leave him be for now,” Odessa said. “But another false step, Dustin Graves, and you will have to answer to the full fury of the Lorica.”
The Overthroat’s skull floated in the bubble beside her, exactly like a balloon, making her look even more childlike, but I knew better than to make light of Odessa’s warning. I’d abused her hospitality enough. I nodded firmly, watching her and the other Scions fade out of existence as they returned to the Heart.
Beside me, Herald finally breathed. “You got off lightly,” he said.
I scratched the back of my neck. “I guess. Didn’t realize I made such a mess of the Heart.” I sniffed, trying not to show Herald how pleased I was with myself, and failing miserably. He smacked me.
“I see you both survived the encounter,” Carver said, striding up to us with the rest of the Boneyard in tow.
“Just barely,” I said.
Carver raised his eyebrow. “What did you have to give up, Dustin?”
“Everything,” I said, struggling not to sound so melancholic.
Carver pressed his lips together, then nodded. “We shall discuss that later, then. For now, I think I need to take Asher back to the Boneyard and put him back together.”
Asher wasn’t in the best shape. Sterling and Gil stood to either side of him, barely holding him up. His body was drenched in sweat, so damp all over that it looked like he’d just been pulled out of a shower. I glanced across the graveyard, noticing that none of the shattered skeletons that Izanami had usurped from Asher’s control were in sight.
“Returned to their graves,” Carver explained.
“All about respect,” Asher chirped. “Had to put them back.”
“He’s delirious,” Carver said. “But he should be fine after a day’s rest.”
Asher reached out, booped Carver on the end of his nose, then giggled.
Carver frowned. “Perhaps a week, then. Will the two of you be wanting to travel separately, or shall we adjourn to the Boneyard?”
I briefly considered the idea of staying to check on Team Lorica, but looking past Carver’s shoulder was enough to tell me what I needed to know. Prudence and Bastion were supervising cleanup. Royce was sitting on his haunches, his head in his hands. Romira bent over him, patting him on the shoulder and rubbing circles in his
back.
“They’ve got their work cut out for them,” I said. “Yeah, Herald and I will hitch a ride, I think.”
Without another word, Carver flicked his wrist, sending the grass beneath us burning in a blaze of amber fire. The touch of his magic was so welcome after what felt like an endless string of ordeals. It was familiar, comforting – words I might have once used to describe the act of shadowstepping, a part of me that was lost forever.
Chapter 35
Back at the Boneyard, Sterling and Gil escorted Asher to his room. Later I found out that Sterling, the good friend that he was, had personally stripped Asher down to nothing and scrubbed him in the shower before pouring him into a pair of pajamas and putting him straight to bed. See, now that? That was friendship.
Carver took me aside, and without exchanging words it was as if he knew what I had done within the confines of the Dark Room. He placed a hand on my chest, his false eye pulsing with energy as it looked through my skin, past muscle and bone. He blinked, and his eye stopped glowing.
“The shard remains,” he said. “Truthfully, removing the star-metal from your heart would likely kill you at this point. Quite like a bullet. But it seems as if the shadows no longer haunt your bones, Dustin. I don’t sense the menace of the Dark Room about you.”
“I had to let it go,” I said, thinking back to what my mother had said. She was talking about herself, but she might have meant the Dark Room as well. “I don’t feel it anymore. When I call, it doesn’t answer.”
Carver placed a hand on the side of my head, the pads of his fingers pressing through my hair. He gave me a small, sad smile. “Perhaps it is for the best, Dustin. You still have the gift of fire, after all.”
“I do?” I looked down at my palm, curling my fingers, making a pleasantly surprised noise when a small plume of fire bloomed from the center of my hand. “Hey, neat. I guess I still have that.”