Black Heart

by Christina Henry

  The Cimice were well armored, with shiny green carapaces everywhere except at the soft joints. I remembered killing one before, in Chicago, under the Southport El. That creature had known I was coming, had fought me to the point of exhaustion. But I had managed to kill it by shooting electricity through it at the vulnerable exposed flesh just under its head. Using electricity now would attract a lot of attention. In any case, I needed the creature’s blood, and frying it wasn’t the best way to achieve blood loss.

  What I needed to do was use the sword to slit the thing’s neck. There were a couple of logistical issues I needed to work out first, though.

  For one, the Cimice were tall—like, NBA-player tall. I am decidedly un-tall. I could fly up behind the insect in order to reach its neck, but it’s a lot harder to be stealthy that way. The Cimice might sense my presence behind it—feel the breeze from my wings or something like that. It seemed better to do it from the front, especially if the insect was distracted into looking up. Which gave me an idea.

  Sheer rock rose above the Cimice’s cavern, and above the place where I stood. If I very carefully caused a small piece of rock to break off and tumble down . . . Yes, that could work.

  I moved into position. I was close enough to where the Cimice worked to lunge forward and slice its neck. It was kind enough to help me in this regard by suddenly deciding to work on all fours, which made it a lot easier for me to reach the soft throat with my blade.

  Now the tricky part. I needed to hold the veil over myself and over the Cimice while using a very small, focused amount of power to dislodge an eensy bit of the rock wall above. I didn’t want to start an avalanche, although that would have been better suited to my skill set.

  I took a deep breath, focused my magic and my will to hold the veils steady, and then shot a tiny amount of nightfire at the rock wall. A chunk the size of a potato was dislodged, and it tumbled down in front of the Cimice. It then immediately did the logical thing and looked up.

  And when it did, I pounced. The blade sliced through the Cimice’s neck. I put a lot of force into it, nearly taking the thing’s head off entirely. As it was, the creature’s head flapped backward, bending the remains of its neck in an unpleasant way and exposing the cut muscle and veins.

  Blood spurted, covering my sword. And my arm and chest and face and hair. This thing had a lot of blood. But at least I had what I hoped was enough of the stuff to perform the necessary spell.

  I was congratulating myself on a job well-done when a nearby Cimice let out a high-pitched cry of alarm. And then pointed one of its pincers right at me.

  The veils still held steady, so I couldn’t figure out what had given me away. Then I noticed the blood spatter all over the rock. Ah. Yes. That would attract some attention, wouldn’t it?

  I raised the sword up, ready to take down any Cimice that came for me. But the creature who had raised the alarm wasn’t actually pointing at me.

  It was pointing at the splattered blood, which was behind me. My veils were holding. The insects gathering now could see neither me nor their fallen brethren. They saw the blood, and didn’t understand where it came from. It frightened them.

  Good, let them be scared, I thought. It was such an un-Maddy-like thought, such a dark-side impulse that I shook my head immediately. No, I was not going to enjoy their fear. I was going to get the job done and then make sure Puck got me out of this place.

  Puck had been adamant that flying was a bad idea, but it was the fastest way for me to get out of the corner I was boxed in. More Cimice were gathering, pointing at the spattered blood and chittering among themselves. I really needed to get away before they approached the wall. They would bump right into me, veil or no veil.

  I lifted off, debating whether or not I should drop the veil on the dead Cimice’s body. There were already on to the fact that something was amiss. I would have an easier time with the blood spell if I could focus all of my attention on it. That settled the question.

  I dropped the veil on the dead one and flew away. Behind me was an explosion of noise and activity as the body was revealed.

  I went straight to the spot where Puck waited, still hidden behind the rock. He laughed out loud when he saw me.

  “I told you to get blood, Madeline,” he said, his eyes crinkling with merriment. “I didn’t tell you to roll in it.”

  “Shut it,” I said. The Cimice’s blood was drying stickily all over me. I felt like I’d been dipped in a vat of caramel sauce. Except I didn’t smell that good. “Okay, obviously I’ve got the thing’s blood. Now what?”

  “I’m sure if you think about it, a solution will come to you,” Puck said.

  “You . . . are . . . useless,” I said.

  “We could renegotiate our deal,” Puck said.

  “No way,” I said. “I’ll sort it out without you.”

  “Just as I thought,” he said, but he looked a little disappointed that I hadn’t changed my mind.

  I studied the grayish-green substance clinging to the blade of the sword. When I had called the vampires to me I’d used the magic in their blood, the traces of magic Azazel had left on the serum the vamps had swallowed.

  But there was no magic for me to latch on to here. All the Cimice had in common were their genes.

  Although creating life is its own kind of magic, isn’t it? I thought. And magic always leaves a trace of itself behind.

  I touched the tip of my finger to the blade, brushed some of the blood onto it. Then I sent my power through that drop of blood, just a little questing thread looking for a spark of magic. And I found it.

  Deep inside the blood of the Cimice was a minuscule remnant of magic, the magic that was life itself. And this magic bound all of the Cimice together. I knew it with the same certainty that I knew my own name. My power welled up inside me, knowing instinctively what to do.

  It surged through the magical spark in the Cimice’s blood, searching for the next connection, the next link in the chain.

  It touched that Cimice, and sped through its bloodstream. And then it stopped the insect’s heart.

  Once my power had done that, it looked for the next link, and the next. And the next. And so on and on.

  The Cimice’s voices rose as one as they screamed their anguish to the sky. The spell plowed forward, knocking the Cimice down one by one, squeezing their hearts until they stopped.

  I felt them die, their agony in their final throes, and the pain brought me to my knees. I hadn’t calculated this. I hadn’t considered the possibility that I might feel sorry for the monsters. But there was no stopping it now, and in any case my purpose was still clear. They meant to kill innocent humans at the behest of the Faerie Queen. I couldn’t let that happen.

  This was preventive medicine. It was necessary.

  The spell went deep into the heart of the cavern, to where the vast majority of the Cimice were. I gasped as I felt the presence of all of them. There were not hundreds, or thousands. There were millions, stacked up on one another in a vast hive.

  My spell was killing them all, and I could feel every one. I closed my eyes, covered my ears, tried to drown them out. But I couldn’t drown them out. They were inside me, their screams and their pain. I couldn’t escape the truth of what I had done.

  I believed I had done this for the right reasons. But there was no disguising this darkness. This was a shadow on my soul, and it would stay there forever.

  I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I thought my body was numb to what was happening. Then the spell hit the hatchlings.

  They were just little monsters, I told myself. They weren’t children screaming.

  If I hadn’t done this, there would be children screaming—human children. The Cimice hatchlings would grow up to be just as ruthless as their parents.

  “They’re just monsters,” I said over and over. “Monsters.”

  But what are you? a voice in my head asked, and that voice sounded a lot like Beezle’s. You keep justifying what you do, but
when do you draw the line that’s not supposed to be crossed?

  “I’m still myself,” I said as the spell ravaged the Cimice, worked its destruction on them. It seemed to take a long time, but then, there were a lot of the creatures.

  I don’t know how long I kneeled in the dirt, muttering to myself, hands over my ears, tears running down my face.

  Eventually the spell found the last of them, every last insect out on patrol, every creature hidden in a cavern in the darkness. I opened my eyes and dropped my hands.

  The spell was over, but I could still hear them screaming in my head. I could still feel them in my heart.

  I felt weary in a way that I had never been before. I had pushed my body to the limit on countless occasions, gone past the point of pain and exhaustion. I had suffered in my body and soul—when Gabriel died, when Ramuell had torn my heart out, in the Maze. But this was worse than any of that.

  This was not the weight of my own pain. You can carry your own suffering, learn to adapt, learn to live with it. But this was not my suffering. This was the hurt of another, of many, many others, and I was the one who had deliberately done them harm.

  The burden was tremendous, almost incomprehensibly huge. I felt broken inside.

  I stood slowly, like an old woman. Puck sat on top of a large boulder, his legs dangling down. He looked like a child who had just seen a wonderful show.

  “That was excellent,” he said, clapping his hands together. “They never knew what hit them.”

  “No, they didn’t,” I said wearily.

  “Are you not pleased?” Puck asked. “You have done what you set out to do. You have destroyed the Cimice utterly.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking out over the place where the creatures had built their colony.

  Everywhere I looked there was death. Death, my constant companion, the truest friend I had ever had. There was no point in denying my true nature any longer. I was now, and always had been, an instrument of Death. As I thought this, something shifted inside me. The mantle of darkness settled more comfortably on my shoulders.

  I opened my arms wide, and rose up into the air.

  “What are you doing?” Puck called, and there was real alarm in his voice.

  “Burying them,” I said. “If you don’t want to be buried yourself, you’d better get the hell out of the way.”

  I threw my head back, let the power flow through me, the power of the sun tempered by shadow, the power of Lucifer that I had tried for so long to suppress, to deny. Now that I was no longer holding it back, it burst forth in a great array of light.

  The ground beneath began to shake, and I rose up, higher and higher. Puck shot into the air as the rock he perched on began to crumble.

  He did not have a visible pair of wings, but I’d long suspected he could fly anyway.

  Puck came to my side as my power hit the mountain before us and the whole thing started to fall. First rock sheared off the sides and crashed hundreds of feet below. Then the mountain seemed to cave in, collapsing inward upon itself.

  I rose higher in the air as giant clouds of dust billowed upward. The sound was tremendous, like the earth itself was being rent to pieces. And in a way, it was.

  Puck said nothing as the final resting place of the Cimice was covered with the remains of the mountain. Then we both turned in the direction of the forest, because we could feel him coming.

  The dragon.

  “I told you it was dangerous to fly,” Puck said, cursing. “You’ve attracted his attention.”

  I shook my head, closing my eyes. I felt his approach like fire in the blood, a blaze that spread throughout my body, all-consuming. “That’s not what draws him here. He felt my power when I brought down the mountain. It pulls him to me.”

  “Great,” Puck said, obviously disgusted. “The two of you are connected.”

  I opened my eyes again, looked toward the forest. The dragon was coming for me with all speed. Smoke and flame trailed behind it.

  “Who is he?” I asked Puck. “I know you know. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

  Puck appeared more annoyed than I’d ever seen him. “You know yourself. You do not need me to give the knowledge to you.”

  And just like that, I did know. My heart had known him from the moment I’d see him.

  “Daharan,” I breathed.

  “Yes,” Puck said. “My brother.”

  Beneath us the ground shifted and settled as the last of the mountain crumbled to pieces. I flew away from the Cimice’s graveyard, toward the dragon. Toward Daharan and the strange pull I could not deny. Inside my body, my son fluttered his wings in welcome.

  I had never felt this way about Lucifer or Puck or Alerian. With them there was always dread and repulsion and annoyance and fear on a sliding scale, depending on which brother I was dealing with. But Daharan—he was the one the others feared the most, yet from the moment I’d met him I’d felt a sense of safety, of coming home.

  “Daharan,” I said.

  The dragon curved its body as I approached. I landed on its neck, on the smooth expanse in front of the ridges that covered his back. I laid my head there. The dragon snorted in response and flew off in a different direction.

  My mental map of this world told me we were heading toward the ocean. I wondered what Batarian and the other fae would make of the collapse of the mountain and the destruction of the Cimice. Maybe Batarian would finally realize he’d dodged a major bullet, and that he should never have messed with me in the first place.

  I settled more comfortably on Daharan’s neck, glancing behind only to see what had become of Puck. He followed several feet behind. If a person could fly resentfully, then Puck was definitely doing it. He obviously didn’t want anything to do with Daharan, and he was glaring at his brother like he’d just taken Puck’s favorite toy.

  I turned back, smiling to myself. I have to admit that it was enjoyable to see Puck being thwarted.

  Daharan flew over the forest. It was even wider and longer than I had thought. Even when I’d done the tracking spell to find the portal, I hadn’t fully conceived of the size of this place. It made me realize just how difficult it would have been for me to reach the portal, even with my wings.

  I was so warm and comfortable. I didn’t feel like I could fall, even though I wasn’t holding that tight to Daharan’s neck. My exhaustion caught up with me again, and I drifted off to sleep, waking only when Daharan nudged me with his nose.

  The sound of waves rolling to the shore filled my ears. I could taste the salt in the air. I opened my eyes and slid off Daharan’s back to the sand below. Daharan took off flying again, and I covered my eyes to watch him circling above, expelling flame.

  “He wants to change to his human form, but he’s got to get rid of some of the fire first,” Puck said behind me.

  He’d done some kind of magical quick-change act with his clothes and was wearing a pair of leather pants with a black T-shirt. His hands were stuck in the pockets and he was glaring at Daharan, his jewel-blue eyes bright with anger.

  “What are you so pissed about?” I said. “Aren’t you happy to see your brother?”

  “We don’t get along,” Puck growled.

  “So why don’t you just leave, then?” I said.

  “I can’t,” Puck said, and there was a wealth of frustration in his voice. “I cannot show such disrespect to the eldest.”

  I looked thoughtfully up at Daharan. “He’s the eldest, huh? Who’s second?”

  “Alerian, then Lucifer, then me,” Puck said.

  “That explains a lot,” I said. “Lucifer seems like he has middle-child syndrome.”

  Puck snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s his problem. Middle-child syndrome.”

  “Wait—you told me that Lucifer was the firstborn,” I said. “You told me that in my apartment, when you revealed yourself as Nathaniel’s father.”

  “He is the firstborn of his kind. But Daharan is the eldest,” Puck said.

  “Aren’t y
ou all the same kind, from the same parents?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Puck said, grinning. He was enjoying my confusion.

  His smile disappeared as Daharan slowly descended in lazy spirals until he landed farther down the beach. I’d never seen Puck look so genuinely unhappy as he did now, not even when he’d discovered that I’d accidentally undone the spell he’d put on Nathaniel at birth.

  Daharan’s claws touched the sand, and for a second he looked blurry. Then the dragon was gone, and in his place stood a man made of fire.

  He walked down the beach toward us, and the flame gradually receded until he looked like an ordinary man. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and work boots, and he looked a lot like a guy headed to a construction job. His hair was as black as mine, a little shaggy and overlong.

  But when he reached me I realized he would never look normal. He would never be able to disguise those eyes. They blazed with the fire that he could not bank completely.

  “Madeline,” he said, and he took my shoulders in his hands. He kissed both of my cheeks very gently, like I was something precious to him, and tears came to my eyes.

  This is what it feels like to have a father, I thought. This is why he makes me feel so safe.

  Then he turned from me to look at Puck, standing with his hands still shoved in the pockets of his pants.

  “Brother,” Daharan said. “Will you not greet me?”

  Puck gave Daharan the barest of nods, then dropped his hands to his sides and approached his eldest sibling. The two of them embraced, with much stiffness on Puck’s side and, I think, amusement on Daharan’s. It was very apparent that Daharan was the more powerful of the two, and they both knew it.

  “I was surprised to find you here, in this place,” Puck said when they parted.

  “As I was surprised to find you, and Madeline,” Daharan said.

  Some unspoken undercurrent passed between them, and they stared intently at each other. I wondered whether they were communicating telepathically, or whether they were just trying to stare each other down.