Gods & Monsters

by Shelby Mahurin

  Never.

  The voices echoed her. Never, never, never. They swarmed around us, panicked and hysterical, and we sank faster still, weighed down by our heavy cloak and gown. I pulled at the former while Nicholina tried to loosen the latter. Swearing viciously, I joined her instead, and together—miraculously in unison—we unknotted the laces with stiff, clumsy fingers. She kicked at the skirt as I clawed at our cloak. Within seconds, both floated away from us through the black water, ominous and slow, before disappearing altogether.

  Still we sank.

  Shit. It was like swimming through oil, through tar. My lungs burned as I strained upward, and Nicholina finally, desperately mimicked my movements. That’s it. Keep going. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.

  We dance, we dance, we dance.

  But we weren’t dancing at all. Already, white stars popped in my vision, and my head pounded from lack of oxygen. Sharp pain pierced my ears. And . . . and something else. Something worse. Too late, I realized that Nicholina’s veil—the darkness that had shielded her subconscious—had vanished altogether. The waters had stripped it. At last, her every thought, every feeling, every fear flooded our shared consciousness with startling clarity. Faces flashed. Pieces of memories, bits of sentiment tied to each one. Fervor and affection and hatred and shame. It was too much. Too many. I didn’t want them. Her emotions didn’t stop coming, however—so intense, so painful—and the full force of her being crashed into me like a tidal wave.

  And so did my magic.

  Gold and white exploded with blinding intensity, everywhere at once. Though I tried to catch a pattern—a pattern to swim, a pattern to shield, a pattern to anything—Nicholina’s emotions overwhelmed everything. They buffeted me.

  What are you doing? What are you doing? She urged me onward, voice frantic, realizing too late what had happened. She hadn’t known her veil had lifted. Though she tried to summon it once more, the waters had shredded it beyond repair. Dance, little mouse! You must dance! Right, left, right, left, right!

  But the waters didn’t drown us now. She did. Unadulterated emotion robbed what little of our breath remained, pulling us both beneath the onslaught. We sank and sank and sank with each fresh wave. No. We sank into each fresh wave. The darkness around us pricked with light.

  And suddenly, we weren’t in the Wistful Waters at all.

  Lavender brushed my fingertips. Its scent perfumed the summer air, sweet and sharp and heady, and overhead, a single fat cloud drifted past. I glanced around warily. I knew this place. I knew the mountains all around us, the creek trickling at the edge of the field. As a child, I’d played here often, but it hadn’t been filled with lavender then, only grass and the gnarled stumps of pear trees. Manon said a grove had once grown in this valley, but Morgane had torched it in an inexplicable fit of rage before we were born. Had the lavender preceded the trees? Or had it come after?

  Something shifted beside me, and I tensed instinctively, whipping around to face it.

  My heart leapt to my throat.

  “You’re . . . you,” I said in disbelief.

  Nicholina stared back at me, her silver eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. Her skin paler. The scars on her chest shone stark and gruesome in the bright sunlight, and her black dress—tattered and dirty—seemed incongruous with this happy place. Glancing down at my own body, I lifted my hands experimentally, and they responded without hesitation. I flexed my fingers. At the sight of them straightening, curling back into my palms, a bubble of laughter rose in my throat—my throat. Not ours.

  Unable to help myself, I lifted my face to the sun, savoring its warmth. Just for a moment. I didn’t know where we were, I didn’t know how we were, and I didn’t care. Instead, I felt . . . whole. Curious sensation flowed through my limbs, as if the waters had not only restored me but strengthened me too. Empowered me. Or perhaps I’d finally died and entered the Summerland. Or was this Heaven? Neither would explain Nicholina’s presence, yet what else could it be?

  Panic sliced through my reverie, sharp and unexpected, and my smile vanished as quickly as it’d come. Because it hadn’t been my panic. No, the emotion had come from someone else. I groaned loudly in realization: Nicholina recognized this place too. Though her thoughts came too quickly to untangle, a sense of longing permeated them. A sense of despair.

  Fuck.

  I shook my head.

  Though our bodies had separated, it seemed our consciousness had not, and no god would ever be cruel enough to saddle me with Nicholina for eternity, which meant—which meant this wasn’t Heaven at all. I glared up at the crystal-blue skies. The single cloud there seemed to mock me, and I couldn’t stop a harsh chuckle. It took the shape of a burning cross.

  Worse—now I couldn’t feel my magic at all. Cautious, curious, I tried to summon the golden patterns in my mind, but they didn’t rise. Though the veil between Nicholina and me hadn’t re-formed, they’d simply . . . vanished. Whatever magic fed this place, it clearly wasn’t like mine. It wasn’t like hers either. It was more powerful than both, and it’d stripped us equally bare.

  When a familiar voice crooned a lullaby behind us, we turned simultaneously. Nicholina’s panic deepened to dread, interlaced with my own morbid curiosity. “Who is that?” I asked, watching two figures approach. A slender, dark-haired woman—perhaps my age—bounded hand in hand with a sallow-faced little boy. Deep shadows drained the life from his eyes, yet still he laughed, breathless, and tried to keep up. Sensing his struggle, the woman swept him up in her arms. They fell to the ground together, still laughing, rolling amidst the lavender. Neither of them noticed us. “Sing for me, maman,” he begged her, sprawling across her chest. He wrapped frail arms around her neck. “Sing me a song. S’il vous plaît.”

  She squeezed him gently. In her pale eyes, adoration and anxiousness shone in equal measure. My heart twisted in response. Beside me, Nicholina had stilled, her attention rapt on the little boy’s face. “And what song shall I sing, mon bébé?” the woman asked.

  “You know the one!”

  Her nose wrinkled in distaste, and she smoothed the hair from his forehead. Black like hers. “I don’t like that one. It’s too . . . grim.”

  “Please, maman.” His pale eyes sought hers earnestly. Indeed, he could’ve been the woman’s miniature. “It’s my favorite.”

  She scoffed in fond exasperation. “Why?”

  “It’s scary!” He grinned, revealing a chipped front tooth and dimples. “It has monsters!”

  Rolling her eyes, the woman sighed. “Very well. But just the once. And don’t—don’t sing it with me this time, all right? Please?” I would’ve frowned at the odd request if I hadn’t felt her unease echoing through Nicholina. If I hadn’t known what would happen three weeks hence. This little boy . . . he wouldn’t get better. He’d die a slow, painful death in the days to come, and this—this wasn’t my hell, after all.

  It was Nicholina’s.

  But she hadn’t always been Nicholina. Once, she’d been Nicola.

  I couldn’t look away.

  Closing her eyes, the woman leaned back into the lavender, and the boy nestled his face in the crook of her neck. I knew the words of the song before she sang them. They resounded in my very bones. “Beneath the moon of harvest, a ripple stirs the leaves.” With a high, clear soprano, she sang the eerie lullaby slowly, still stroking the boy’s hair. “The veil is thin, the ghouls a’grin, rattling the eaves.”

  He giggled as she continued.

  “A bridegroom hears them calling, wakes from eternal sleep, to seek his love, his Geneviève, who married her Louis. Beyond her glowing window, fair Geneviève doth sing”—despite his mother’s request, the boy began humming along—“to the babe upon her breast. The bridegroom starts to weep.” She hesitated now, her hand stilling on the boy’s hair as he continued the song without her.

  “The dead should not remember. Beware the night they dream. For in their chest is memory—”

  “Of a hea
rt that cannot beat,” the woman said softly, no longer singing. The boy grinned, and together, they finished the disturbing lullaby. “Beneath the moon of harvest, a ripple stirs the leaves. The veil is thin, the babe a’grins, and even ghouls shalt grieve.”

  The boy let out a loud, delighted cackle. “He was a zombie. Right, maman? The bridegroom was a zombie?”

  “I think a ghoul,” she offered, her eyes unfocused. She still clutched the boy’s head to her chest, tighter than necessary. “Or maybe a different sort of spirit. A wraith.”

  “Will I become a wraith too, maman?”

  She closed her eyes as if pained. “Never.”

  The conversation drifted from there. Nausea churning in my stomach, I watched as they eventually stood, walking hand in hand back the way they’d come. Nicholina did not blink. She stared at the boy’s back with naked longing, unwilling to spare even a glance at the woman. At the boy’s mother. Nicola. “What was his name?” I asked quietly.

  She answered with equal softness. “Mathieu.”

  “Mathieu le Claire?”

  The boy grew smaller and smaller in the distance. “I was only seventeen,” she whispered instead, lost in her memories. I saw the events in her mind as clearly as the field of lavender: how she’d loved a man—a fair-skinned, ginger-haired man from their mountain village—and how they’d conceived a child who they in turn loved without question, completely and unconditionally. How the man had died unexpectedly from the cold, how their son had fallen ill shortly after, how she’d tried everything from magic to medicine to heal him. She’d even taken him to a priest—or the closest approximation to one—in a distant land, but he’d explained Mathieu’s sickness as “divine retribution” and turned them away.

  Nicholina had killed him. His had been the first life she’d ever taken.

  She hadn’t known La Voisin then. If she had, maybe Mathieu would’ve—

  “Out of my thoughts, little mouse,” she snarled, jerking her head back and forth as if to dislodge an irksome fly. “We don’t want to see it, no, we don’t want to see—”

  “You were seventeen.” I repeated her words slowly, pivoting to look around us again, studying the silhouette of the mountains. When I’d played here as a child, one crag had resembled a crone’s crooked nose. The rock that had formed its wart, however, wasn’t visible now, and that couldn’t be right. Mountains didn’t simply move. “How old are you, Nicholina?”

  She hissed through stained, too-sharp teeth, anger sparking like kindling. And I pitied her. Those teeth had once been beautiful. She had been beautiful. Not just of face and form, but also of spirit—the sort of spirit that drove a mother to the ends of the earth to save her child, the sort who loved with everything in her being. The sort who held nothing back. Yes, Nicola had been beautiful in all the ways that counted—and all the ways that didn’t too—but beauty faded with time.

  And Nicholina had lived too long.

  How did you become like this? I’d asked her the question once, sitting in the dark and dirt of Léviathan. She hadn’t given a proper answer then. She didn’t need to give one now. I knew without her opening her cracked lips, without her lifting her girlish, uncanny voice. She’d lived too long, and time had ravaged her to a withered husk of the woman she’d once been.

  Rage washed through her at my pity, or perhaps at the memory of her dead son. Like a wild animal, savage and trapped, she spat, “You wish to be in Hell, Louise le Blanc? We shall oblige you. Oh, yes, we shall drag you down, down, down—”

  When she lunged, wrapping skeletal fingers around my throat, black waves crashed upon us once more. They flattened the lavender, enveloped the sun, swept us up into their treacherous current. My lungs screamed in agony as our situation resolved with knife-sharp clarity.

  We weren’t in Hell, and we weren’t in Heaven either.

  Ears bursting, vision pitching, I scrabbled at Nicholina’s hold, but those fingers pressed into more than flesh now. They dug into consciousness, ripped through memory. The two of us foundered, tossed mercilessly through the waves, until Nicholina regained purchase, nearly crushing my windpipe. I felt that pressure everywhere. In my head, in my chest, in my heart. White exploded all around us as I tore free, and we pitched headlong into another memory.

  Through a curtain.

  A hush fell over the audience as we crashed onto the stage, and insidious fear bloomed at the sight before us: Reid caging me against his chest, my body deathly still in his arms. My hair long and brown, my face bloody and bruised. My dress torn. I glanced, panicked, to the right, where the Archbishop would step out in mere moments. And the crowd—who lay in wait, watching me? Would they recognize me? Would they find me at last?

  Nicholina took advantage of my terror, seizing my hair and wrenching my face upward. “Look at yourself, mouse. Smell your fear even now, so thick and delicious. So lovely.” She inhaled deeply against the scars on my throat. “And you fear so much, don’t you? You fear your own mother, your own father. You fear your own husband.” When she licked down the column of my neck, I twisted from her grip, smashing my crown into her face and staggering forward. She wiped a hand across her bloody nose before bringing it to her lips. Her tongue flicked out like a snake’s. “But you should feel lucky you tricked him, oh yes, because if you hadn’t tricked him—such a tricky little mouse—he never would’ve loved you. If he had known what you are, he never would’ve held you beneath the stars.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to where Reid and I still stared at each other, frozen. From the wings of the theater, Estelle moved to help me. Nicholina laughed. “You burned her, Louise. Your fear burned her.”

  When Reid flung me away, I winced, watching as my battered body hit the stage once more.

  But there—in his gaze—

  He was frightened too.

  He was frightened, yet he rose with the stagehands when they came. Though his hands shook, he didn’t fight them, didn’t cower or plead or flee. And I wouldn’t either. Fear was inevitable. We all made our choices, and we all suffered our consequences. We all felt fear. The trick was learning to live with that fear, to continue forward in spite of it. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” I murmured, longing to reach out and touch his face. To smooth the furrow between his brows. To tell him everything would be all right. “But I’m glad it did.”

  Squaring my shoulders as Reid had done, I turned back to face Nicholina. Her eyes burned with silver light, and her chest rose and fell rapidly. Like me, she struggled to catch her breath, yet this strength in my limbs was hers as well. The waters had healed us both. And suddenly, I understood.

  The Wistful Waters healed.

  They didn’t exorcise malevolent presences.

  I’d have to do that myself.

  Gritting my teeth, I launched myself at her.

  What It Is to Drown

  Lou

  As soon as I touched her skin, she rolled, and the waters swept us up again. Nicholina snapped at my throat. Prying her mouth open—keeping it open—I swam with the current this time instead of against. But so many currents swirled around us now, some warm and some cold, some familiar and some foreign. Hundreds upon thousands of them. And I still couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, as images rushed past in the water: fragments of faces, bits of skyline, sights and scents and sensations. Each beckoned and threatened simultaneously, like crooked fingers in the dark. They pulled me in every direction, clawing at my hair and tearing at my chemise. My panic became a living thing as I struggled to swim, to fend off Nicholina’s gnashing teeth. How could I exorcise her without drowning myself in the process?

  On the heels of that thought came another, swift and sudden and sure.

  I could drown her instead—if not in water, then in emotion. Perhaps both.

  Instinctively, I kicked down an unfamiliar current, and we spiraled into the temple by Chateau le Blanc.

  Blood still coated the mountainside, and there, in the center, Nicholina stood with her maw dripp
ing like a wild animal’s—Nicholina, not Nicola, because in her hand, she held a human heart.

  Triumph flared through us both, hot and heady. Triumph and hideous shame.

  I encouraged the latter, fanning it higher as we grappled. Hotter. It became a weapon in my hands, and I wielded it like a knife, cutting through the quick of her. Piercing her very heart. This shame—it might kill her, if I let it.

  “What did you do, Nicholina?”

  “What was necessary.” Her teeth finally sank into my fingers, and I cried out, tearing skin as I pulled them away. She spat blood. “We killed our sisters, yes, and we feel no shame,” she lied, continuing on a single breath. “We would’ve killed her too. We would’ve killed for our mistress.”

  “Who—?”

  But Nicholina attacked me with new fervor as we watched La Voisin drag an unconscious woman from the temple steps. I sidestepped, craning my neck with a powerful, inexplicable urge to see the woman’s face. La Voisin obliged by tossing her to the ground, but past-Nicholina sprang toward them, obstructing my view. The present one wheeled and charged at me once more. I thanked any god listening—the very waters themselves—for rescinding our powers in this place. When she lashed out, I caught her wrist and twisted. I had skill enough without magic, but it would’ve been impossible to fight a wraith.

  Will I become a wraith too, maman?

  The thought made me hesitate, made me sick, and Nicholina spun, her elbow connecting sharply with my chest. When I doubled over, unable to breathe, she seized my throat once more. This time, she didn’t let go.

  She knew the rules of our game had changed.

  Kill me, I whispered to her mind, unable to utter the words aloud. Goading her further, even as agony crescendoed in my lungs, pressure built behind my eyes. The capillaries there ruptured in little bursts of pain before healing once more. It didn’t matter. I gripped her wrists and pressed closer with lethal purpose, staring into those sinister eyes. Kill me, or I’ll kill you.