by Kat Howard
“Are you safe right now?”
“I’m at Bluefin. I’ll be fine. I used the necklace charm. And I told him I hoped a dog pissed on him.”
Sydney stifled a laugh. “Are you going to be okay? Do you want me to come get you?”
“No. Hideo will put me into a cab himself if I ask. I just wanted to let you know.” She paused. “He said he was going to use my bones. To kill you.”
“Madison, I’ll be right—”
“No, really. Don’t come. I am safe, and about to consume my own weight in spicy tuna and wash it down with sake, and if you show up, I will probably cry, and I don’t need to do that right now. I just—you be careful tonight. And don’t hesitate tomorrow. I know he’s your brother and Laurent’s friend and whatever, but don’t you hesitate for one second before ending him.”
“I won’t, Madison. I promise. Enjoy your spicy tuna, and call me if you need me. I’ll be there.”
“I know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sydney stopped by House Prospero on her way to the challenge. “Grace, do you want to be there tonight?”
“No. I appreciate you asking, but I don’t want to be in a room with him. I don’t want to see him, even under these circumstances. I don’t ever want to see him again.” She fisted her hands, then wrapped her arms around her stomach, hiding her scars.
“You won’t have to.” Sydney reached out, set her hand on Grace’s shoulder. “I’ll call the House when it’s over.”
“Sydney.” Grace put her own hand over Sydney’s, squeezed. “Thank you.”
Sydney paused on her way out the door and spoke to the mirror. “If . . . if I don’t come back, keep her safe from him. Be her House, okay?”
Yes.
Come back.
“That’s the plan.”
• • •
Sydney walked the rest of the way with Laurent. “I’m really sorry about all of this,” he said. “I feel like you got way more trouble than you were signing up for in this thing when you decided to work for me.”
“Please. You know me well enough by now to know that I am perfectly capable of causing my own share of trouble.”
Laurent laughed. “That is true.”
“Besides, Grey would have come after me whether I was your champion or not. I chose to work for you, and I have exactly zero regrets about doing it. You’ve done nothing but given me kindness and support this entire time, above and beyond. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“Thanks,” he said. “And—I know what I said. Keep him out of things and all that.”
She nodded.
“Just in case I haven’t made it clear—that’s gone. Don’t hesitate tonight. Fight hard, Sydney. For them.”
“Absolutely,” she said.
Miles Merlin was waiting just inside the door. He took her hand in both of his. “Now, Sydney, you can always forfeit.”
“Take your hands off of me or I will remove them from your wrists.”
“There’s no need to be hostile,” Miles said, still holding her hand.
Sydney spat a word that hissed and sparked in the air. Miles yanked his hands away, both palms visibly red and blistered. She smiled and kept walking.
“That was worth the price of admission right there,” Laurent said.
Sydney laughed.
Miranda arrived then, causing another wave of whispers through the growing crowd. Merlin stood in front of her, temporarily halting her progress, but made no move to stop her as she walked around him.
More and more people crowded in, until it seemed the entirety of the Unseen World was crammed into the concrete warehouse.
Ian’s hand slipped into Sydney’s, squeezed. “I look forward to you knocking on my door later.”
She squeezed back, for just a breath holding on to the warmth, the comfort.
And then it was time.
Grey brought his hands up to begin casting.
“Please,” Sydney said. “Try.” She flicked her fingers with the casualness of shooing a fly, and his hands were yanked out to the sides, held.
He struggled but couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.
“Do you see the scars on my hands, my arms?” Light now, silver and shimmery, rising from her skin. “This is what remains when you carve the magic from someone’s bones.”
She bent her hands to sharpness, and lines of red slashed through Grey’s hands and arms, an echo of the scars on hers. Blood dripped into the silence of the room.
“Of course, I still have my bones. Mine were carved again and again. But you, you took theirs, didn’t you?” A terrible cracking and a wet pop and the bones of Grey’s fingers and hands rained to the ground.
“And then you killed them.”
Sydney raised a hand, bent her fingers into unforgiving shapes. The scent of ashes and dust rose into the room. Grey was frozen in place—unable to move, to speak. Sydney gestured, and the room went black and silent, all except for a small patch of light were Sydney and Grey stood.
From the darkness, ghosts. Pale and white, their faces terrible and unforgiving, their hands, red with blood. Scars glowed silver, the shapes of a ritual meant to steal magic.
They were the ghosts of the women Grey had murdered. Rose Morgan. Hayley Dee. Lena Hermann. Mariah Blackwood. Allison Glass. Sounds of weeping and shock traveled through the crowd as they were recognized. As their names were spoken in whispers and cries.
They converged upon him and, like maenads, tore him limb from limb. Stripped his flesh so that all that remained was a pile of bones, the finger bones left separate, scattered.
The ghosts faded.
The lights came up.
Sydney spoke into her phone: “You’re safe now,” her voice clear in the echoing silence of the room. Then she stepped over the pile of bones and left.
• • •
The day after, Sydney made official pilgrimage to Madison’s office at Wellington & Ketchum. Madison’s secretary checked her in, then paused in the hallway. “I went out with him once. He creeped me out so bad, I made a friend call and fake an emergency so I could leave in a cab. I never said anything, because he was a Prospero, and I’m not even strong enough to be in a House, and all I had was a bad feeling. I don’t know if I feel better or worse, knowing I was right and that I wasn’t the only one. But, anyway, thanks.”
Sydney nodded. “You’re welcome.”
“News travels,” Madison said. “Was it really their ghosts?”
She shook her head. “I’m not a necromancer, and it was more important for him to see them at the end than for them to have to interact with him again. No, just an illusion.”
“Sydney!” Harper rushed through the door, then kept going and hugged Sydney hard. Sydney went stiff, then relaxed into toleration of the embrace. She carefully, gently, put her arms around the other woman.
“Thank you,” Harper said, and stepped back, scrubbing tears from her face. “I’m going to her grave tonight. To tell her what you did.”
“Tell her what you did, too,” Sydney said. “She was lucky to have a friend like you.”
Harper left, still sniffling.
Sydney sank into a chair.
“How are you?” Madison asked.
“Tired. I’ll be glad when this is over.” She could feel the magic like a weight in her veins. Her joints ached, her fingers were the white-cold of frostbite. There would be a reckoning, at some point, for the power she had contained. But some point was not now, and there were still things to be done. “I need to name an heir.”
“Did someone challenge you already? Is it Merlin? That bastard,” Madison said.
“No, but I realized as I left last night that if Grey had managed to cheat his way into winning, Miles could have given him the House. He’s the Head of the Unseen World, and I don’t have any blood family left who have magic. So he could just give it away.”
“He could try,” Madison said. “I’d tie him up in filings until the next Turning.”
“Which is why I’d give it to you, if I could.”
“Bite your tongue!” Madison said.
“I think you are technically my biological cousin. Regardless, you’re the closest thing I have to family. If you hadn’t renounced your magic, it would be yours.”
Madison reached across her desk, held Sydney’s hand.
“But since you did, I can’t leave it to you, and it’s a Turning. Plus, you know, I could get hit by a bus. I want the House safe, and I want Grace safe, so for now I want to do what I have to in order to name her my heir.”
Madison pulled pages off her printer. “If you’re willing to bleed a bit, we can do this now. This is our most bare-bones template. So the only thing that you are directly disposing of here is the House. If you want to do something more involved, come back after all this nonsense it done, and you can make a full will.”
“Perfect.” Sydney cut her thumb, let blood fall to the paper, then pressed her index finger down. She said the word that rendered the action binding, and the fingerprint turned gold.
“So now what?” Madison asked.
“I’m expecting a challenge from Miles. Which I am not expecting to go well, mostly because he’s smart enough to challenge House Prospero instead of Laurent, and set up a duel between Ian and Lara. And I’m contemplating a challenge of my own, though I think the magic may be complicated.”
“Anything I can do to help,” Madison said.
Sydney leaned forward, then slammed her hands down on Madison’s desk, bracing herself.
“Sydney?”
“Basket,” she said through clenched teeth.
Madison passed the recycling bin over just in time to catch the vomit—flecked with blood, with bright green—that Sydney coughed up. The stench of a rotting garden filled the room. “Sorry. The consequences are getting worse.”
“I know you said you came here today to make your will because you could get hit by a bus, but Sydney, is there anything I should know? I am asking as your friend, incidentally, not your attorney.”
“I’ll be fine,” Sydney said, and wiped blood from her mouth. “This isn’t anything different than I’ve been through before, not really. It’s just more intense because the magic has been bigger, and I’ve used more of it than I normally do. I just need to get through the end of the Turning, and then this will be over.”
“I’m going to pretend like I believe you and ask you one more thing: Are you sure what you’re doing is worth it?”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sydney shrugged herself deeper into her coat, and—as the wind knifed through layers of down and scarf and gloves—wished that there had been any place other than here on Bethesda Terrace where this meeting could have happened. The snow had melted and refrozen enough times that it was no longer picturesque. It was hard heaps in alternating shades of yellow and dinge, with rocks and cigarette butts and worse frozen into it. The air was as bitter as the day.
The Angel of the Waters hadn’t been repaired yet, the lily still missing from its hand. The statue itself was cracked in places—the decay of the magic that had been grounded in it for so long also causing decay in the physical world.
Ian and Lara, both flushed from the cold, walked down the promenade, Lara’s hair the one bright spot in the dull grey of late winter. “Why did you need to see us?” she asked.
“Your father has challenged House Prospero,” Sydney said.
“Of course he did,” said Lara. “I’m only surprised that he waited this long.”
“I’m not killing my sister,” Ian said.
“No, you’re not,” Sydney agreed. “Nor is she killing you. But I am accepting the challenge.”
“I assume you have a plan,” Ian said.
“So long as you’re both willing to go along with it,” Sydney said. “To start with, your father doesn’t have any magic of his own.”
“Are you sure?” Ian asked.
“You don’t seem surprised.” Neither of them did.
“I’m not. But are you sure?”
“I am. When he took my hand at the duel with Grey—”
“He still has blisters, by the way,” Lara said.
“Good. When he took my hand, I could tell. Shadows makes you very good at sensing magic. He has none. At all.”
“Which means he can’t hold a House,” Lara said.
“Which also means he can’t officially make a challenge, either, which is how I plan to get everyone out of this alive. But I need it to play out in public,” Sydney said. “And that’s why we’re meeting here. I assume you both are familiar with the spell anchored in the Angel?”
“House Merlin is responsible for it being there, and its upkeep on this end, so yes,” Ian said.
“Good. Could one of you please—very carefully—check the Angel for magic?” Sydney asked.
“I’ll do it,” Lara said. She peeled off her neon purple mittens and handed them to Ian, then stretched her hands toward the statue. She spoke a phrase that rose at the end, questioning, then yanked her hands back. “What the fuck was that? That’s not how it should feel at all.”
“I need to tell you what happened to Grace Valentine,” Sydney said.
As she spoke, Ian swore, viciously and fluently. Lara’s face closed off further and further, until she might have been a statue herself by the time Sydney finished. “I think what happened is that the spell that was supposed to allow him the use of her magic—his own sacrifice that he’d brought in—somehow got tangled up with the other spell that was already anchored in the statue. And that the more Miles’ magic failed, the more the spell tried to compensate, by pulling magic from everywhere else to feed itself. I think I can stop it, but I need the link to Shadows to be completely broken for it to work.”
“Do it,” Ian said. “Do whatever you need.”
“I need one thing from you in particular, Lara—as heir to House Merlin, you’ll become interim Head of the Unseen World. I’ll need you to verbally break the agreement with Shadows.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That should be enough,” Sydney said.
“Then of course. There is one other thing, though. If he were siphoning off magic somehow, keeping it somewhere, could that have increased the problems in the spell? Turned it from whatever it was supposed to be into that?” She waved a hand at the statue.
“Possibly,” Sydney said. “I don’t know what the magic would have felt like when it was healthy—our perspective, from inside Shadows, is a bit different from what you feel out here. But it could—if that was the part of the spell that misfired, I could see how something that was supposed to act like a siphon turned into something that’s acting like a vacuum.”
Lara looked at Ian. “I think I know what Dad’s been keeping in that locked cupboard.”
• • •
Sydney stood on the edge of the Central Park Reservoir and steeled herself against the edge of fear that even now crawled in her gut. Her hand automatically reached for her pocket, for the three wooden matches that used to be the requirement of the journey.
Not today. Not for her.
She spoke a word that froze her breath before it left her mouth, and a path of ice crackled and solidified across the reservoir’s surface. She stepped onto it and crossed once more to the House of Shadows.
It could barely be called a House anymore, this collection of darkness that slumped over a whiteness of bone—all of the sacrifices who had died in its service, fragmented and heaped in the freezing water. A flame lit, hot, in the center of Sydney’s heart: this place was unmade, diminished, rendered almost into nothingness. She had done this. And she would make sure that no more bones were added.
“Have you come back to gloat?” Shara looked like the place, all black and white and grey. Stark now, and now bleeding together in a slurry. She sounded like a wraith, like a remnant.
“I’ve come back to set you free,” Sydney said.
Hung
er flashed across Shara’s face. “If that is a joke, it’s in poor taste.”
“The binding between the magic that came from here and the magicians of the Unseen World is almost gone.”
“That is not something I need you to tell me, here as I am, my House breaking around me.” Shara’s voice as sharp as her knife had been.
“I need it completely broken. And one part of doing that is to sever your connection to this place, to this”—she looked around and decided the old word was still the only one that might fit—“House.”
“And if I say no?”
“You’re welcome to try to stop me,” Sydney said. “I almost wish you would.”
“Do what you came here for, then.”
It was easy. A word that snapped like a twig being stepped on, like the crack of ice on water. The final breaking of the magic a spark across Sydney’s skin. The remaining shadows fell, all but those cast naturally by the February day.
Shara shook once, hard.
“There,” Sydney said. “You have your life back. Go where you want; do what you please. Though you may want to do it quickly, because I doubt there’ll be much left here soon.”
“Is it that easy, to destroy your home?” Shara asked. “To turn your back on me? All I ever did was make you stronger. It’s because of me you are what you are.”
“This was never a home. And I made myself what I am.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Perhaps you’re confused,” Miles said. “But this is a challenge against House Prospero. You are not that House’s declared champion, and so you aren’t allowed to participate in the duel. As I’m sure you’re aware, interference can be grounds to have your magic stripped.”
Sydney stood in a room full of magicians, almost all of the remaining members of the Unseen World. She stood between two of them, Ian and Lara Merlin, her physical presence there preventing the duel from taking place. “I’m very aware. But I’m not here to participate in the duel. I’m here because the duel shouldn’t be happening in the first place. You have no right to hold your House, and therefore House Merlin has no standing to challenge House Prospero.”
Miles forced out a laugh, the sort of thing that was meant to show how unimportant her words were, the sort of thing that would have worked had it not been so anemic. Had his hand not gone to his pocket, as if to check for something, reassure himself it was there. “This is ridiculous. Explain yourself.”