by Ryan Graudin
I watch the lazing soul feeder, my mind scrambling for my next move. No magic. There are too many mortals around. Binding her is out of the question.
“Sit over there,” I murmur in Breena’s ear, and gently push her in the opposite direction. “I’m going to try and talk to her. If there’s trouble, you can come help.”
I move away before she has a chance to order me back. The Green Woman snaps her neck around, pale eyes trying their hardest not to widen as they watch me approach. Her drink shivers against tightening fingers.
“Good evening, sister. Mind if I have a seat?” As I yell I gesture to the empty seat next to her that no human has been brave or drunk enough to claim.
She watches me. Her look suggests she minds my company very much.
I let myself down into the chair, never tearing my stare away from her. Even a crowd of mortals isn’t enough to guarantee my safety from this creature’s magic. Laws of concealment mean much less to those who hunt humans.
“What are you doing here?” Her shout manages to sound like a normal irritated question. The gleam behind her eyes speaks of suspicion and barely contained magic.
“I was hoping you and I might have a little chat.” My fingers drum against the leather armrest in constant half-time beat. “You see—I’m searching for someone—two people, actually. And I think you can help me find them.”
Bony shoulders grow rigid beneath the gauze of her dress. Even in the ever-changing light of the club, I can see that she’s paled, lips pressed together in sheer nervousness.
No response.
“They go by the names of Jaida and Cari. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.” I begin to grow slightly at ease. Although she is freshly replenished by her gruesome meal, the Green Woman across from me is younger. I sense the authority growing between us, all of it placed on my side.
“They don’t come here.” Her words are flash and fire. Like bullets. “You won’t find them.”
“Where are they?” I lean closer to the Green Woman, making sure she tastes my magic, what it can do.
She’s silent but breaks her corpse-like stillness to sip her drink.
“I haven’t even asked your name, sister,” I remind her. “There’s no way they’ll know you helped me. Besides, they won’t really care. All I want is to talk with them.”
“I want something in return.” The final dregs of her drink braid green down her glass, disappear into her throat. “A little bite of royalty perhaps? We’re all dying to know what His Majesty tastes like.”
She’s toying with me, the way a house cat pricks claws into its master’s leg. I know this and still I can’t keep the rage from rising, becoming phoenix and flame in my very core. The thought of her teeth in Richard’s neck, tearing and mauling, is enough to make me want to kill her.
I swallow most of it back. Not for her sake, but because right now, she’s my only answer.
The Green Woman, seeing what just passed behind my thin veneer of human eyes, begins to edge away. I lurch out of my chair and move closer, pinning her into the supple black leather.
“Now tell me, where can I find Jaida and Cari?” Every word leaves me through a fence of clenched teeth. My fingers dig hard into the Green Woman’s skeletal shoulder, wanting to break her.
“Highgate,” she spits out, her lower lip all atremble. “They’ve taken up residence at Highgate Cemetery.”
“Do they ever leave?” I loom, an angel of death over her chair. It would be so easy to just let it all out, unmake her here and now.
“They don’t come into the city. They have food brought to them.”
“That’s not what I asked.” My hand tightens into her. Nails break through skin, creating five crimson moons. “Do they leave the cemetery?”
“Sometimes they go north. There’s a magpie that brings messages—one of them leaves every time it arrives.” A thin film of sweat has sprouted on the Green Woman’s forehead. For all the pain in her shoulder, she hasn’t cried out.
“And what happens when they return?” I ask.
But the Green Woman shakes her head lightly, begging me not to ask any more. Blood seeps down her arm, carving crooked trails through snowy skin. I pull my hand away, see the redness of her under my fingernails. This is all the information I’m getting from her tonight.
No magic, I tell myself. Keep things simple. Walk away.
I ease past the chair, keeping my stare on the Green Woman. Resentful slits of eyes glare back, betraying the withered ugliness beneath. Her killing face.
I turn and look for Breena in the darkness, searching through the line of pale, moonlike faces. A knife-sharp cry jolts every fine ginger hair on my body. Magic shreds the air around me with its sick electrical current. I whip around and crouch by the closest lounge chair.
The Green Woman looms in her corner, like a shadow drawn out by a spotlight, eyes blazing in her dead gray face. Her spell is white-hot lightning in the air between us, searing and tearing. There’s no reservation in her curse. No mercy. This magic is meant to kill.
The countercharm is quick to my tongue, but not fast enough. The terrible force lances through the air like a fast-growing vine, intent on tearing the life out of me. And then it stops.
I blink, at first uncertain of my spared life. There’d been no other magic, no other shield to save my soul. Then I look down and know.
The girl’s body lies close to my feet. Her dress of tangerine silk is only slightly rumpled over bent, milky limbs. Her eyes are open—but there’s nothing behind them. She must’ve walked in front of me, caught the brunt of the blow meant to silence me.
In this moment of reflection passes another chance for me to be extinguished. Fortunately Breena is doing her job. My friend leaps from the crowd, arms outstretched with a spell much quicker and effective than mine. The Green Woman doesn’t even have time to shriek before the flames envelope her. The balcony, so draped in shadows before, is now lit with terrible whiteness. Every corner is exposed. Every flaw on every stunned face jumps into sight. The dead girl glows like a broken angel at my feet.
And then it’s dark again.
Breena glances at me, her eyes wide with nervous energy, and then faces the shocked, motionless crowd. Forgietaþ slides off her lips and into their minds. Fifty-two pairs of eyes blink at once as a new reality takes shape in their memories. The girl clutched her chest and fell. A young man gave her CPR, but her eyes glossed over, stripped of life before an ambulance could even be called. A freak accident. Heart failure.
“Come on.” Breena’s words are wavy with fear, or disgust, or both. “We’ve got to go.”
The dead girl’s hand reaches into the edge of my vision, its fingers curled like the petals of a withering flower.
“Let’s go.” Breena’s dress flashes like a sterling signal fire as she pulls me toward the stairs. “Two death spells aren’t going to go unnoticed. We have to get out of here now.”
She’s right. We have to leave before the scene starts swarming with Banshees, drawn by such a fresh passing of souls.
“We have to get to Highgate, before they’re put on the alert,” I call to Breena as we wind back down the iron staircase. With the death of a girl and a Green Woman on our heads, there’s no other choice. We have to go to Highgate Cemetery and collect the information we need before it’s gone forever.
My friend stops on the last step. I halt as well, nearly stumbling over her in the suddenness of our movements. Breena slowly turns and looks up at me.
“Is it worth it?” Her voice slices through the swell of the DJ’s track.
“What?” I grip the railing extra hard.
“If we go to Highgate—it could be one of us that dies. Is it worth it to you? All of this just for a name?” Breena’s gaze slips up to the balcony, where several screams have already erupted from the crowd.
“This could be it, Bree. We can root out the snake before it strikes. They know where the Old One is.” Dread wells up in my throat. The stranger’s d
eath has changed things. The price is now too high for Breena to pay.
“Would you have done this for King Edward? Emrys, your emotions are blinding you! It’s far safer to go back to the palace and barricade ourselves. Let Mab and her scouts do the dirty work.”
“It’s not safer for Richard!” I snap back. “There’s already been one attack on his life. We can’t afford to wait anymore.”
Breena stares at me hard, the look behind her eyes as immovable as a wall of granite. I return her glare. Another scream from upstairs cuts through our standoff, reminding us that exiting the club is in our best interests. My friend plows straight through the tangled crowd of dancers. I follow, breathing lightly for the reek of alcohol.
Air waves cool and fresh in our faces as we burst out of the club, back onto the street. I trail Breena down the block, out of the hearing of the long queue of mortals waiting to get inside.
“I won’t stop you,” she says as she comes to rest against a lamppost, “but I’m not coming with you. You’re on your own.”
I take a deep breath. “We promised to protect the crown—”
“This isn’t protecting the crown! This is a witch hunt! If you want to protect Richard, go and be with him. No more innocent lives are going to be lost on my account.”
Breeze lifts my hair away from my face, whips it back. Fiery strands wave into the night, flags of no surrender. Everything in Breena, her stance, her eyes, the crinkle of her mouth, tells me this—nothing I say will sway her. She’s leaving.
“I can’t just sit back and wait for the Old One’s final move,” I say.
“Why not?” It isn’t really a question, but a gauntlet thrown on the ground between us to see if I’ll rise to the challenge—tell her what I’m certain she already knows.
“I love him.”
There’s very little change in Breena’s expression. Silence grips her as she takes in my words, ingesting their blunt truth.
“So you’ll die for him either way,” she says finally.
The wind turns, lashing my hair back into my face.
“So be it.” She turns so I can only see the diving back of her glittering gown. “Good-bye, Emrys. I hope the Greater Spirit brings you back alive.”
She drifts up into the night sky, not looking back even once before she disappears into the jagged row of rooftops.
Twenty-Five
Although it’s still in the city’s grip of cement and electricity, Highgate Cemetery is a territory unto itself, a jungle of gravestones and corpse-fed vines. There’s a strange stillness in the air, as if the wind refuses to enter this sweltering forest of death.
At the edge of the cemetery, I kneel behind a cross-shaped grave marker and peer into the night. The moon is newborn in the sky, its whispering, watery light far too weak to rely on. But what mortal eyes won’t see, my magic senses well enough. The spirits here in Highgate are powerful, their magic strengthened by such an overwhelming presence of death. I feel both Jaida and Cari—old and powerful enough to be queens in their own right. Maybe they were, before the Old One roped them in.
There are other soul feeders here as well. Sentinels, guards, messengers. Highgate is a fortress.
I stay still against the cross, gauging my options. Without Breena, this entire mission is much riskier. One stupid mistake and I could get unmade.
I’ll need a disguise. My aura is distinct, impossible to alter, but I can still change my appearance (something to afford me at least a few seconds of escape). My limbs shorten, peach hair and creamy skin spoil into a Black Dog’s shadow-eaten fur. The paws feel heavy, webbed. I stumble even after a few practice steps—it’s been years since my last shape-shift. The flame-haired girl has become like a favorite dress I hate to shed. Anything else just feels awkward, itchy.
I lope along the nearest row of gravestones. My run grows smoother, swifter, with each passing marker. I slink between headstones that slant and crumble like long-neglected teeth, relying almost as much on my new, keen sense of smell as I do on my magic.
Something about these graves unnerves me in a way it hasn’t before. Death feels closer than it ever has.
You’ll die for him either way. Breena’s words are haunting, inescapable here. She must have thought I had made my choice. That I’d decided to leave her and so many other things behind for Richard’s sake.
But that’s what I’m doing. Isn’t it? I’m here, slinking through weathered, lichen-stained stones, without Breena, ready to get exposed and unmade, all for him.
So it’s not the death that terrifies me. It’s the change, the unwinding into something I’ve never been. How can I live without magic?
There are no answers as I wedge my way deeper into the cemetery. Stones shift, take stranger shapes. There are crops of crosses. Angels and cherubs lounge in long, weeping grass, the curves of their faces worn away by hundreds of polluted rainfalls. Other faces, less heavenly, more skull-like and leering, gape under stony starlight. Each step past these markers pulls me farther into the sphere of the soul feeders’ magic. Combined with the dark, eerie spell of the cemetery, it’s almost intoxicating.
At last, I come to a place where I can go no farther. I huddle behind an unmarked grave and peer through overwhelming clusters of grass. Before me, in a clearing, is an entire crowd of soul feeders. Signs of a semipermanent camp litter the area, both visible and not: a smoldering clump of wood and charcoal by the foot of a larger gravestone, the unwinding structures of old spells, the pile of bones shoved into the far corner of a crypt.
I lay motionless, barely able to breathe as I watch the gathering. Real, massive Black Dogs tread a well-worn path around the camp. The grass under their paws is broken, wilted, exposing the dark, fertile soil of the cemetery’s underbelly like wounds. Green Women and Banshees form a strange, almost unintentional circle around the ringleaders, as if they don’t want to get close. The sight of them together, in peace, is unnerving. Like cats and dogs shoved together in a crate, keeping eerie harmony.
Jaida and Cari. It must be them. The two spirits, beautiful and regal in their borrowed bodies, rest on a hulking marble tomb at the center of everything, flecked by the fire’s dying light. Not a word passes in the group. They sit, as silent and almost as still as the tombstones around them. It isn’t a meeting I’ve stumbled on. It’s a messaging center.
I study them, noting the numbers of their guard. There’s no way I can slip unnoticed through that ring of restless spirits. I’d half expected Jaida and Cari to be holed up here on their own, waiting discreetly for words from the Old One. But this, the presence of so many soul feeders, shows me the truth. It’s not a single death they want. It’s a war. A war against the mortals and those protecting them.
A mournful, jarring cry calls my attention to the skies. For a fleeting moment, the white slice of moon is blocked out completely. I crouch close to the ground, praying that the bird doesn’t see me. The animal flies on, unconcerned. It lands, a ruffle of white and black feathers, and struts proudly in a little circle. A magpie. The Old One’s errand-bird.
The Banshee retrieves the scrolled message from the swaggering bird, her glare unyielding and calculating as she reads. It’s the Green Woman, Jaida, who betrays her emotions. Her tongue runs along the edge of her berry-red lips, looping in a nervous repeat. Her eyes leave the paper, straying into the shadows beyond her guard. Something’s changed. Her body seems stiffer. The midnight hackles of my back bristle as her stare passes over my broken grave. Her eyes are terrible, green searchlights, uprooting every vine and blade of grass in their path.
“I’ll take care of it,” Cari tells the Green Woman, her voice as emotionless as her face. “You should accompany the bird back north.”
Jaida’s eyes snap back out of the bushes. “I’ll leave at once.”
The Green Woman is flying straight where I need to go. All I have to do is follow. My body quivers, too full of excitement and fear.
Jaida stands; her spring-green dress falls flawlessly i
nto place. Then, with the speed of a shooting star, she’s off.
I force my paws into inching slowness, despite my urge to chase the soul feeder. It’s only when several trees are between me and their camp that I launch into the sky, melting into its velvet canvas as a sleek raven. Like the Black Dog, the bird’s form is jerky at first. My wings are tentlike and clumsy. Jaida and the magpie have a decent head start; their bobbing silhouettes are already fading into the far-off darkness. If I let them go too far, the trail will be lost.
I cast a spell: a tiny bit of magic to propel me forward. The words, the small spark of light, hurtle me through the star-spangled sky. I realize too late that this was a mistake. The spell wasn’t as subtle as I thought, for on the ground, someone was watching.
Another’s magic shoots under me, past me. It catches the tips of my feathers, singeing them into nothing. I try to move my wings, but they’re lead. My flight becomes a sickening plummet; the heavy earth lurches forward to meet me.
A clump of vines breaks my fall. I blink through this new hammock of leaves. Nothing seems hurt. Apart from the smoke wisping out of my wings, I’m fine.
“Track her!” Cari’s command carries through the night, blanketed by heart-wrenching howls.
The Black Dogs are searching, seeking to root me out of my fragile hiding place. I struggle to sit up, but nothing happens. Not even a twitch of my dark raven legs. Then it hits me. The spell, Cari’s magic, wasn’t supposed to fry me. It was meant to freeze me, to rob my muscles of their will. I’m paralyzed, trapped.
There are distant snaps, howls, and sniffs—signs of approaching hunters. Time for me to produce a counterspell is fading fast. I repeat spells frantically in my mind, feeling the force of the magic swell through numb limbs. None of them click.
“It’s a woodling. I feel her. She’s close. Keep searching!”