“The best offense,” I told her, rising shakily to my feet. A good defense. “And the one part of me you still don’t possess.”
The power she’d returned to me hadn’t just ferried me back to her. It’d done so safely. The madness in Solange’s gaze seemed to suck the rest of the heat from the room as she leered close, fists clenched. “It didn’t do that for me.”
No shit. If it had she wouldn’t look like an ebonized Jack Skellington. “That’s because it’s mine. Just like him.” And you could never really take away something that truly belonged to another.
Bearing cracked teeth, Solange lifted Mackie’s shining blade. “But this is mine now.”
And the blade screamed as it raked forward to claim my life.
I dodged, I even felt Hunter trying to pull me to the side, but I knew it was too little and too slow, even were I not trapped and kneeling before her. Solange swung her arm down like a lumberjack, but her body suddenly disappeared and the blade jerked. Instead of finding my body, it imbedded itself in the cocoon. Hunter’s grip on my fingers released as struggle sounded somewhere on the floor to my left. The smoke had cleared enough for me to make out two solid forms, writhing bodies locked in a fight to the death, one clearly Solange’s, but the other belonging to someone I hadn’t even known was there.
And that’s when Hunter came to life.
Careful to avoid the tip or underside of the poisonous blade, he pushed the flat edge downward with his index finger. It didn’t take much. Mackie’s knife continued its confounding habit of annihilating everything it touched, and the webbing sliced open like linen. Once it touched the floor, Hunter reached out and reversed it, and began hacking at the shell. Using a weapon, he looked more like himself than he had at any other time since entering Midheaven.
A few moments more of skillful whipping, and he’d circled the blade around my hands, cutting them free. It was a hasty job, they were still bound snugly to each other, but at least I was able to back away. That alone was how I avoided a direct hit to the jaw from a newly enraged—and suddenly bloodied—Solange.
The blow still tossed me to my back. She was atop me immediately, more mantis than woman, and snarling into my face like a rabid dog. “I don’t care how long it takes to dismantle this shield from your body. You will die at my hands.”
“Okay.” Swallowing hard, and noting that one of her protective earrings was missing, I gave a short nod. “One question, though.”
“What?” Spittle, and someone else’s blood, rained down over me.
I winced. “Was your marriage to Hunter ever consummated?”
Her jaw clenched, visible bone flexing, and she glanced away, giving me my answer.
“Good.” Acting fast, I yanked at her other earring. “Consider yourself annulled.”
Mackie’s blade, now Hunter’s, entered her neck smoothly, turning her charred banshee cry into a protesting gurgle. She arched and tried to whirl, but the blade found bone, then bone again. Apparently all the souls trapped in the knife hadn’t been released into her malformed child, because they emptied themselves into her too, though instead of their features forming on her as they had the soft putty face of the chimera, they cracked through her ribs, their tortured screams mingling with her own. Her voice went utterly silent as the gristled muscles of her neck bulged, before it literally burst with a fresh scream from some undead soul. Singed, black flakes fell like ash, and a clump of marrow hit me hard enough to hurt. Cringing, I looked back up at her face to find the only softness in that body—her eyes—fixed hard on me. Then they too exploded in bone and soot, and Solange finally toppled. The handle of the most feared weapon I’d ever seen rolled to a stop at my boot. The blade had disappeared, just like everything created in this world eventually did. By the time the air had cleared, I saw too that there was nothing recognizably human in the pile of black bone and ash.
Solange was finally gone, dead in a world of her making.
I closed my eyes to the carnage. Although the talking head fashioned after my sister, using pieces of me, had long stopped, Olivia’s voice—that initial scream—echoed one last time through my brain. I knew it for an illusion, but another shudder struck me, and this time it zapped all my strength. Solange had known what to use against me, from the first time I entered Midheaven to the last.
And though I felt physically sound—if not entirely fine—I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d succeeded in destroying something inside me with this last trick. If, perhaps, she’d delivered a cut deeper than even the soul blade could manage, shattering my sanity, turning it into shrapnel. Wouldn’t she love that? I thought, feeling the room spin, and then myself begin to drift alone. I thought about just letting go, if only to get away from the resonant tone of that pitched death cry.
“Joanna?”
Shock had me sucking in a deep breath—I wasn’t alone—and I opened my eyes to the most amazing sight: Hunter—thinner, but alert; hollow-eyed but sharp; covered in his own sweat, armed, and standing on the other side of Solange’s corpse. Safe.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
If I hadn’t already been down, it would have been one hell of a swoon. I sucked in a deep breath to fight off the light-headedness, pushed carefully to my elbows, though I couldn’t manage more than that. All this time, all the battles over my life and my soul, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the moment—success, freedom . . . a smile growing on the face of a man I hadn’t been sure I’d ever even see again.
I opened my mouth to ask the same of him, but all that eked out was a breathless, shaky squeak. Normally I’d have felt stupid for freezing up this way—normally it didn’t happen—but right now I was just happy it hadn’t happened sooner. I glanced back down at Solange, destroyed by souls she’d coveted, and shuddered.
Hunter drew my attention back to him by stepping over the ash and bone, and looming above me. “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand.
I stared at it, squinting like it might disappear if I blinked. Feeling sweat trickle over my brow, I found myself thinking that if this moment wasn’t real—if something tried to pull me back into another world to reveal this for a dream—I might just lie down here and never get up. I simply couldn’t fight anymore.
“Joanna,” Hunter said. “Just take it.”
His own weariness snapped me back into focus. I reached out and felt warmth reach to me. Yet unlike my most recent brush with fire, this didn’t burn. I buried my nails into his flesh, the soft palm, and though his eyes squeezed tight in a wince, Hunter didn’t pull away. Swallowing hard, I leaned just a little closer and breathed in the faintest scent of wood smoke and musk. But even more than that, I scented desire—familiar and much longed for—as heady as ripe greenhouse blooms. “Hi,” I finally said, sounding shy.
“Hi,” he answered, and pulled me close, wrapping me in all that warmth. His arms tightened when I sagged, and I closed my eyes again, this time in relief.
I did it, I thought, over and over again.
“Yeah, you did,” Hunter said, which was how I knew I’d been whispering it aloud. I leaned back to look up into his face. He pulled back too, but only far enough to plant the Universe’s softest kiss on my lips. “Thank you,” he said, his own whispered mantra.
And that’s how my breathing steadied, and my heart recovered its beat.
Finally I shook my head, which actually helped to clear it this time, and sucked in deeply of Midheaven’s air. It was tinny and clouded with residual smoke from fire and wasted souls, but I wasn’t complaining as long as I still breathed. “What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter said, pulling back, but not releasing me. “Something attacked her.”
“What?” I asked, looking around, before gasping. “They’re . . . all dead,” I whispered to Hunter.
Every single shrunken head sagged on its strings, heads drooped forward, jeweled eyes closed.
“They already were,” he whispered back, though there was no one around to
hear. “Their animation was tied to hers.”
Yet another reason to be glad Solange was gone, on top of so many already.
So how? Who?
A memory flash of the creature, the chimera, reared in my mind, but no—I was sure Carlos had seen that thing dead. Holding hands, Hunter and I skirted Solange to edge toward the staircase.
The scent of blood hit us first, and there was a lot of it. The body, though turned away and shadowed, was identifiably human. Yet for some reason it was the shoes I recognized first.
I remembered admiring how quietly they slipped into Vegas’s underground tunnels. And now they’d slipped into Midheaven the same way.
“Vanessa,” I said, and rushed to cradle the dark, still head.
It turned out Hunter did know which exit led back to the Serpent Bearer entrance, though it wasn’t either of the two lanterns studding the far wall, as I’d originally expected.
“Are you sure?” I asked, still knelt and clinging to Vanessa as he pointed at the bright red door. The damned thing had been rimmed in light and heat in my previous visits here, so I’d thought it led closer to the earth’s core, not away.
Yet it was etched with the same whorling loops and symbols that lined Joaquin’s underground passageways, and when Hunter glanced at me, his face betrayed no uncertainty. “Solange confided the door’s purpose to me on one of her ‘trust me’ days.”
Unwilling to even entertain what else those “trust me” days might have included, I simply nodded and turned back to Vanessa. She was alive, but her face was scrunched in pain, and her bloodied legs were bent and curled in, like something vital had been removed. I didn’t know what Solange had done to her, but from the blood already pooled at her waist, it was likely catastophic.
“Help me lift her,” I said, still cradling her.
Hunter positioned himself at her head, but a soft utterance stilled us both. “No.”
“Just hang on a bit longer, V,” I said, gently cupping her cheeks with my hands. “I know a woman who can help. She’ll keep you going until you begin to heal.”
She laughed at that, spattering blood. Then she winced. “Please don’t move me.”
I glanced back up at Hunter. She was clearly dying . . . worse, it was obvious she didn’t wish to live. Given those two factors, it seemed cruel to cause her more pain just because it was the right thing to do.
“Besides,” Vanessa continued, in a voice that would have been dreamy if not so strained. “It’s nice here. I can see the stars.”
She gazed at the ceiling like it was the broad night sky, but I looked up and only saw softly swinging heads.
“Did Tekla ever tell you what a supernova is?” Vanessa asked, out of nowhere.
“Yes.”
“She loves them. Her violent, exploding stars . . .”
“I know. She told me that one of the stars in the Serpent Bearer constellation would soon explode.” I frowned at the memory, thoughts shifting like icebergs in my mind, slow but forging new terrain. “She said when something goes supernova, it turns into the thing it was meant to be all along.”
Gee, Tekla, I thought wryly. Trying to tell me something?
Despite her agony, Vanessa managed a small shake of her head. “She romanticizes it. It’s not the inferred meaning behind a supernova that’s so amazing. It’s the hard science. She never got that.”
“What do you mean?”
Vanessa’s eyes rolled, not derisively, but like she was going to pass out. I leaned close, stroking her head and murmuring her name, but after a moment, eyes still closed, she just picked up the conversation where we’d left off. “I mean us. Not just agents of the Zodiac, but all of us. Mortals. Animals. Plants and insects, even. Most of the atoms in our bodies—the oxygen we breathe, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our hemoglobin—all of it is from supernovae that blew billions of years ago.”
“So?”
She opened her eyes. “It means we are all, literally, children of the stars.” Then she gave me a consoling smile, as if I were the one who lay injured and dying. Softly she said, “It also means that good things can come from something that looks like total destruction.”
“Is that what this is, Vanessa?” I said, in a tone my mother would use. “Not a sacrifice, but suicide? Is that why you came after me?”
Because only now, removed from the literal heat of the moment, did I realize there’d been too much smoke for Solange’s nascent fire. Yet her flirtation with pyromania had masked Vanessa’s entry perfectly.
She half shrugged. “Had to make things right. No matter what. ’Member? Felix loved that about me . . .”
“Stop it! You could have returned to the Light, Vanessa. I know it.”
She raised her brows. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Well, sometimes? When darkness surrounds you? It’s the approaching light that’s most brutal.”
I swallowed hard, shaking my head. “Then the grays.”
“Nah.” She smiled. “Can’t be tied down . . . not anymore.”
Damn her stubbornness. “He wouldn’t have wanted this, Vanessa.”
“This was destiny. Every life and death—”
“No. No!” I almost slammed my fist into the floor, but caught myself before I jostled Vanessa. “It is not written in the stars. These things are not fated. We change them daily, with every choice.”
She tilted her head toward me. “And I made mine.”
I winced at that.
“Shh,” she said, slowly lifting her arm and placing one bloodied hand on my cheek. “It’s okay, Joanna. Love is a damned good reason to cross worlds.”
And I couldn’t argue it. After all, that’s what I’d done. And knowing I’d probably fail, Vanessa had followed. My eyes widened at another realization, and catching it, Vanessa nodded. “Tekla’s premonition,” I whispered.
Tekla told me long ago that it was my fate to sacrifice myself for life’s greatest gift.
But she hadn’t been talking about Felix as Vanessa initially thought.
Vanessa’s eyes glowed in her sweaty face, and her rattling breath slowed in her chest. “Don’t let it have been for nothing. Please.”
I managed a nod while Hunter leaned close, his lips and the corners of his eyes pursed tight as he bent and kissed her forehead.
“That’s nice, but I can still smell Felix, you know. Just like before . . .” She inhaled as deeply as she could, then winced, her breath catching so long I wasn’t sure it would start again. But then her whole body relaxed, and one corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. “I would smell him everywhere—on my skin, under my nails, in my hair. Sometimes he slept, and lived, the whole night inside of me. I loved that,” she whispered. “I liked to think of him disappearing in me, so fully he was coming out my pores. I loved that,” she repeated, another tear streaking over her cheek.
After a full minute of nothing but the rattle of her breathing to punctuate the silence of the room, her head lolled my way. “Remember when you were telling me about your power? How you’d like to be able to create a world where loss like this couldn’t happen? One where none of us had to wear masks?”
I nodded.
“All you talked about was what you didn’t want. But creation is about what you do want. Maybe you should focus on something the world needs more of . . .”
I looked at Hunter, still awed by his presence, and knew exactly what she meant. Vanessa’s eyes crinkled knowingly when I dropped my gaze back to hers. Then she closed her eyes. “It’s a good reason to cross worlds . . .” she slurred, and finally dropped away, where we couldn’t follow.
21
It was over quickly, passage gained, crossing made. There was no smoke or fire as with the tunnel passage, no sacrificed soul required for entry. In fact, this time the passage was remarkable for being unremarkable. For a moment I felt a surge of relief. Not contentment, not with Vanessa weighing down my arms, but a feeling that there was still some sort of hope to salvage in t
he world, if only because I’d made it back to this room alive. And so had Hunter.
Then came a moment where I felt a kind of psychic pause, an unexpected hesitation so brief I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it. It was like being plucked mid-step from my feet and suspended in the air. Silence pulsed through me, thudding in my ears, like a gong was planted at the base of my skull. The reverberations sent a metallic thrust buzzing across my tongue, and my sight clicked to black like a changing slide show before snapping back to white, obliterating sight, though not the gritty, slinking sensation of the Serpent Bearer emblem uncoiling from my legs.
The sensation oddly repeated itself along my arms to dissolve in my fingertips too, as if each of my limbs was tingling back to life after a long sleep. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone, and I stood swaying in the center of the mountainside stupa, fighting for my bearings.
All of this was why I was late in noting we weren’t alone. Strong hands yanked Vanessa from my grasp, pushing me back into another unyielding grip as my sight returned in static grains of black and white. Shock traversed the room on a zip line, a half-dozen voices crying out at the same time, and I was abruptly released. Stumbling, at first I thought I was literally seeing stars, but then the black tapers in Joaquin’s precious underground chamber snapped back into three dimensions, and my gaze moved from their lighted wicks to follow the movement clustered around Vanessa’s supine form.
“You killed her.”
Warren blocked the door, but Gregor and Micah had Vanessa folded between them, and Riddick and Jewell flanked them. As when I’d met him just over a year earlier, Micah’s size was the first thing I noticed. But the tears staining the healer’s eyes were a close second, and they were echoed in the gazes of the other agents of Light.
They were all there, I noted. Briefly ignoring Warren, and Tekla beside him, I thought of the last time I’d seen the others, converged on a rooftop to mourn and honor another of their own. As each of their gazes touched mine, I knew they were recalling the same—remembering too that the woman they now knelt around had been alive; that they had watched her walk away; that they had just let her go.
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