In one heartbeat, we were surrounded by a dark forest. In the next, hundreds of glowing green eyes appeared in the dark spaces between the trees. The elves—the Ancients—came forward, their steps like soft autumn rain on the fallen leaves. Until, finally, they stopped and formed an unbroken ring circling the clearing, their small shapes illuminated by the blood key’s crimson light.
The Ancients came in a variety of heights, shapes, and shades of earthy green and brown. Some carried with them bows and arrows, others were armed with small, bejeweled knives, all of which they raised at the malefactor’s approach. The line of them was four or five elves deep in places. Even the ogres, lycans, and ghouls stepped in closer to one another at the center of the circle, backing away from the new arrivals.
“Are you all right?” I called to Zachariah. The boy was still staring at his hands, watching as they slowly re-formed. Finally, he looked my way, raising a white eyebrow at my blood-soaked shirt.
“I think, perhaps, you should be minding your own imperiled, brief life,” he said.
The fiends gnashed their fangs and brandished warning claws at the Ancients. Their backs turned on the gathered witches, and my grandmother, who had never missed an opportunity to seize the upper hand, did not disappoint me.
“Now, ladies!” she shouted.
Nell and the women of the Ravenfeather coven unfolded their clenched fists, blowing out a sparkling cloud of dust toward the fiends.
“Drift deeply into dreams of night,” they chanted. “Do not falter, do not fight—”
One by one, the fiends fell, drooping to the ground in heaps of scales and fur. But not dead. Even from my distance, it was obvious that they were breathing.
“No!” Pyra howled. “No! Rise, fiends! Attend your queen!”
But the same monsters that had stormed through the barrier between the realms only hours before did not so much as stir at her words. The mist around them rose and blanketed their sleeping forms. Pyra took a step back, her paws slipping in the forest mulch. Her eyes darted between the Ancients and the coven.
Flora drew the blood key closer and made her way back toward one of the nearby Ancients. This one was taller than her, his limbs gnarled and thin like branches. Unlike Flora’s smooth, almost waxy skin, his had the texture of rough bark. The fluttering leaves of his hair had matured to reds and golds.
“This is the elder of the Greenleaf clan,” Flora explained, her voice echoing as if we stood in a cave, not open air. “He has come to your aid, Prosper Redding, in gratitude for your assistance in saving the changelings.” She turned stiffly to the Ancient again. “Elder, this is the blood key I spoke of.”
His voice creaked, moaning like the wind through the battered trees around us. “So I see. It remains incomplete.”
“Not for long,” Pyra snarled. “This realm is ours, you weed. We’ll rip your kind out of this world, just as we did your realm.”
“I think not,” he said. “We have waited centuries for this moment, when you will be made to pay for what you did to my kind.”
Alastor remained where he was, curled up on the soft ground. His form fluttered, weaker now than it had been even just a second ago. The blood key was still leeching off what little magic remained in him.
I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, and then, finally, my feet. Hold on, I told him, scrambling over the ground. If I could get the blood key away from the elder, I could smash it, somehow—
“Do not touch that key, Prosperity Redding,” the elder’s voice boomed.
“We have to destroy it!” I told him. “Alastor’s too frail. It’s going to drain him until there’s nothing left.”
“Flora has told me your tale.” The elder did not seem to understand. “Your tormentor lies there defeated by his own wicked deceit.”
“Cease this, Maggot,” Alastor called back faintly. “I have always taken care . . . of myself . . . and always shall. . . .”
“Good thing you’ve got me to help you with that now,” I said, turning back to the Ancient. The others gathered around him, looking toward one another.
The elder’s eyes flared. “You care about the one that holds a contract for your eternity? You do not wish him dead? With his magic gone, your deal is dissolved.”
“I knew what I was doing when I made the deal,” I said. “I made it. It was my choice, and I take responsibility for it. I’m not looking for the easy way out. I’m not saying he hasn’t done terrible things in the past, but he’s not as evil as you think he is. He’s . . .”
I couldn’t use the word good, or even really better, but Alastor wasn’t the same malefactor I had known in Salem. Over the last few days, something had changed. He’d saved me, even knowing what losing the magic would cost him.
The elder held out his gnarled arm, unamused. “These are wicked creatures by their nature. That cannot be altered. We removed the glamour over the residents of Redhood to prove as much, to allow you to better protect yourselves from their onslaught. Search your surroundings, Prosperity Redding. See the damage they have done in such a sliver of time. Imagine it happening all the world over.”
So that was the snap of magic we’d felt before the fiends had swept through Main Street.
“So then you’ll allow us to be destroyed?” Pyra shouted as she swiped a claw at the elder, her voice breaking. With a wave of his hand, the roots of the nearby trees rose from the ground and ensnared the malefactor. She struggled and tore at the restraints, but they only built and built, until she was well and truly caged.
“Insolent fiend!” the elder hissed. “Your kind had over three centuries to understand why the Void was upon you and to save your collapsing realm. Fiends killed our elders, our brothers, our sisters. I do not see why you deserve our mercy now.”
Pyra growled, slashing at her cage once again. Every time she broke through a root, another took its place. Still, she refused to give up.
“The others and I had hoped that you might be different from your family,” the elder said. “In the end, you merely crowned yourself with the blood and misery of others and proved you were no better than they.”
“I punished those who had ruled cruelly over other fiends!” she protested. “Only those who deserved it!”
“You still do not see it, do you? You drained your brothers of their lives and magic and spent centuries gathering the other components of the blood key. You perpetuated a vicious cycle, merely changing the players. Rather than looking inward, and truly examining how thoughtlessly the fiends devoured all available magic, you sought an outside solution: the gathering of more power not meant for you.”
“No,” Alastor said weakly, struggling to rise. “No . . . that is not true, O great Ancient. She did the one thing my brothers, my father, and even I did not. She took responsibility for what was happening to Downstairs.”
“Oh, don’t grovel, brother,” Pyra snapped at him. “They do not deserve such respect.”
“No,” I said, “he’s right. The fiends did try to change. Maybe it was too late, but they showed that they were capable of giving up their magic. Of helping one another.”
“Only to save themselves,” the elder said. “It was hardly a sacrifice done for the right reasons.”
I stood straighter, catching sight of Nell as she crept forward through the trees, trying to get closer. “What’s ‘right’ in this situation? You wanted to make things easier for yourselves when dealing with humans, so you accidentally created the fiends. Then you cast that glamour curse so no human would see them, except it backfired on you. Then you lost control of the fiends because you never tried to accept them for what they were and work with that. And now, instead of being accountable for the creatures you created, you’re letting your experiment implode.”
“What would you have us do, child?” the elder asked, almost mocking. “Fiends and elves cannot coexist. They have proven as much.”
“Are you sure about that?” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure a witch, a fiend, a
n elf, a human, and a shade all teamed up less than twenty-four hours ago and successfully worked together. If we can do that, why can’t you try to start over? Why can’t you . . . You don’t have to live together with the fiends, but you could try to teach them how to cultivate magic in their own world—how to balance its use so they’re never faced with this problem again.”
“Think about it, please,” Nell said, darting through the sleeping fiends to stand beside me. She gave me a once-over, quickly checking to make sure I was unhurt. I did the same to her. “No one is perfect, but it doesn’t mean the fiends can’t learn. In fact, you have to fail in order to grow.”
Alastor pulled on that tether between us, like he was trying to draw on my strength—or feed on my fear. He turned, looking out over the forest, taking in the sight of its rot and ruin.
It began here, I thought. It has to end here.
“Do you not see?” Alastor continued, finally rising to his feet. The shape of him solidified just enough for him to take a trembling step forward. “We are all guilty of choices that have taken us far from the roads we intended to travel. I made a bargain with a desperate man in this very forest, a man whose only desire was to save his family from hunger and blight. We begin with the best of intentions and make compromises. When a castle is crumbling, you do not stop to find the crack that began it all, you try to hold all the fracturing walls together in any manner you can, to the best of your ability.”
“I see no proof of this change in the fiends you all speak of,” the elder sneered, leaves shriveling and falling from around his head.
Alastor turned to look at his sister. Pyra remained crouched and ready to pounce, her eyes on the key hovering between the elder’s hands. “You have my sister right before you, elder elf. Pyra recognized something the rest of us could not see—that there were many goodly wicked fiends dismissed and scorned simply for what they were, not upon their merits. Tradition should not stand if its roots are rotten.”
Pyra looked toward him. “I have only ever tried to protect the fiends, not just our kind.”
The elder shook his head.
“She is a good queen,” Alastor insisted.
“Brother . . .” Pyra tried to cut in. “It is no use, they will not hear us out—”
Alastor pressed on: “She has gone too far in this instance. But she is a good queen, who thought of herself second and saving her realm first.”
I turned to watch for the Ancient’s reaction, my heart pounding at the base of my throat. He turned, fixing his glowing emerald gaze upon me. “Even if we desired to repair the realm, the fiends have ensured that we no longer have the magic to do so.”
“You have the blood key, don’t you?” I asked, nodding to it.
Inside the cage of roots, Pyra stood, sucking in a sharp breath. I felt a flash of hope when the elder didn’t immediately reject the idea. In fact, he seemed to be considering it.
“It is too unstable in its current state,” the elder said finally, looking to Flora. She nodded in agreement.
“It is likely to explode if we take it through a passage again,” Flora said. “And tear the boundaries of the realms apart. We would need to redistribute its power into smaller, balanced segments.”
Zachariah floated forward. “I would like to humbly submit myself to your service. Could I not absorb at least some of its power?”
“What?” I said. “Hold on, that sounds dangerous—”
“Still deceased,” he reminded me.
“That very well may work,” the elder said, his eyes glowing brighter. “Shades are the essence of magic that humans carry within them. The power would accept you as a vessel because of it.”
“Or,” Flora said, her voice darkening, “it may incinerate you entirely, never allowing you to pass on.”
“No, that’s too much of a risk,” I began.
“I am still willing to try.” Zachariah turned to look down at me, losing the sour twist of his mouth. If anything, he looked peaceful. Certain. “You promised me a favor, Prosperity Redding, and now I call it in, for I tire of your whinging. Allow me to make this choice for myself without your protests.”
I had to physically bite my tongue to keep from saying anything. My stomach began to churn and churn until a clamminess settled over my skin. This didn’t feel right. Zachariah should be guaranteed safe passage to the afterlife.
“I miss my family,” Zachariah said quietly. “I long to see them and know their faces once more. Surely, you can understand that. I wish to be free to move on. To break from this cycle I never asked for.”
Break the cycle. Those three words echoed through my mind. Break the cycle. The wheels of fate weren’t just moving us forward, they were crushing us under them. We had to stop this. Something had to change.
“You aren’t going to get to see your family if this goes wrong,” I said. “It’s too much for one shade to take. There has to be another way.”
“Yes, it is too much for one spirit. It is not, however, too much for a family.”
The breeze carried the hollow voice toward us, wrapping it around my senses like a sudden chill.
“What in the realms . . . ?” I heard my grandmother say. But even her words died off as the air around us began to brighten. The elves surrounding us shuddered as dozens of shades passed through them. The line of the glowing, ghostly beings extended all the way back to the Cottage, where they’d clearly come from. There were hundreds of them, maybe even thousands.
I sucked in a sharp breath and heard Alastor do the same.
“Holy . . . crap,” Nell managed to croak out.
The shades were garbed in an assortment of dresses, bonnets, hats, and buckled shoes. Some wore more modern clothing, others wore nothing more than the thin nightshirts they had likely died in. Memories, stories, photo albums all burned through my mind like a film reel.
Amazement and disbelief tore at me from all sides. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t speak. These were the faces in the portraits that covered the walls of the great hall.
These were my ancestors.
Of course . . . Inside my head, Alastor’s voice was tinged with realization. With wonder. Honor contracted the souls of all Reddings who came after him. While I slept, they could not be retrieved and taken Downstairs. They remained here, all these years, trapped in the land of the living.
The shade at the front was a woman in colonial dress, holding the hand of a toddler. The child’s shade looked up at me, and I didn’t see death there. I only saw life.
“Silence?” Prue whispered, coming closer. “It couldn’t be. . . .”
But it was. Her shade was nothing like the stiff, miserable portrait of her in the Cottage’s great hall, the one that had remained in a small unadorned frame beside Honor’s grander one. The shades gathering around us looked to her, waiting.
Silence smiled warmly in my direction, her eyes soft with fondness and her long hair loose around her shoulders. Silent no more. “We wish to be freed from this accursed land. To be granted the chance to move on. May we assist with this last task to bring an end to this tale?”
Even the elder’s eyes were wide. “You may; however, even the blood key’s magic is likely only to be enough to restore a fragment of the realm.”
“Then, perhaps, we might give a part of ourselves to it?” Silence asked. “We shall help them plant a seed to nurture and grow for the future. We only ask for two things.”
I shifted from foot to foot, giving Alastor’s flickering form an uneasy glance.
“Go on,” the elder said.
“First, thou must make an unbreakable vow to help rebuild the realm to the best of thy ability,” Silence said. “And second, we would like the malefactor queen to give the full extent of her own innate magic. As a sign of good faith.”
“What? No!” Alastor cried out. “She will not be able to manifest her animal form, nor open mirrors, nor enter into contracts—it may never return to her!”
The elder’s hard expressi
on and glowing eyes turned on Pyra. “I accept these terms on behalf of the Ancients. If you do the same, I shall ask the witches to create a mirror for our return to the realm that was once ours.”
Pyra let out a low, mournful sound. “Those fiends gathered here . . . they will not suffer the same fate as me?”
“No, they will not,” the elder said.
“Yes . . .” Pyra’s claws dug into the ground. Despite the terrible beauty of her form, and the strength of it, she began to shake. “Yes . . . I humbly submit myself to be punished.”
She bowed her head before Silence.
“Then,” the elder said, motioning to the coven, “begin.”
I gripped Nell’s arm as Barbie stepped forward and threw down a similar vial to the one that we had used to escape the Tower of No Return. The power congealed on the forest floor, crackling as it hardened into gleaming silver. Flora strode through the sleeping fiends to touch the shimmering surface, opening a portal.
The elder turned to Zachariah, holding out the blood key. “The shades must gather around as one. I shall help guide the magic into you to carry forth.”
A shade floated through me, making me shiver as I stepped back, allowing more room in the clearing for them. One by one, they linked arms, creating rings upon glowing rings, like the lines inside a tree trunk. One by one, their expressions eased into something that might have been peace. All except for a single shade, the last to step forward.
Honor.
He, too, looked nothing like his smug, proud portrait, the one that gazed out of the canvas and dared you to deny his success. This was an old man, broken by a small eternity spent wandering a town that bore his name and the weight of all his dark secrets.
Alastor looked up, meeting the shade’s gaze as Honor stopped beside him. For a long, silent moment neither moved, nor spoke. There was no anger. There was no grief. I couldn’t understand it, and maybe I wasn’t meant to.
Honor bowed his head. “My heart was weak, and my faith, shaken.”
Alastor nodded, closing his eyes as Honor went to join the others. He did not watch as the shades reached out for the blood key in unison. Within the span of a breath, its luminescence swirled from crimson to a purer emerald. Magic splintered from it, flying toward the shades like the sparks of a wildfire. They whirled around, faster, faster, until the stone cracked down its center and the remaining magic, trembling with the built-up pressure, exploded out like stardust.
The Last Life of Prince Alastor Page 28