The Wind Between Worlds

by Julie Hutchings

  She commanded everything and everyone, whether or not they knew it. Agana learned that too late, and had been banished to The Gone. By the woman I loved more than anyone.

  “Why, Mom?” I said, refusing to let my voice crack. “Why would you bother to raise me, treat me like I mattered, when you planned to kill me from the minute I was born? Power over them,” I pointed at the four women, shaking off their faux slumber, “means that much to you? Look at how you control them! What more do you need?”

  “Celeste,” she said, barely a whisper. My heart ached. “I need this to be the last time. I can’t take the lives of my girls anymore, baby.” Tears mixed with blood stains under her eyes. “Centuries of this. Finally, it can stop. You can stop it.”

  “What do you mean, I can stop it? You want me to be all excited that I’m the last girl you’ll kill? I don’t get it, Mom.”

  With a sideways glance at the Elementals and the comatose Poisons, she said, “Stop.” It was English, but dozens of other languages at once. The women froze, eyes blinking in shock, their bodies stiff. My mom came to me, her body snake-like and gorgeous in the moonlight. She put her hands on my cheeks like she’d done all my life. I put my hands on top of hers like I always did.

  “You don’t need me to tell you about prices, sacrifices. You’ve paid the price of your power for seventeen years. I will pay mine for eternity, and have for generations, with the blood of my own children to keep The Chains safe. I’m not a good woman, Celeste, but I’m a great Elemental. I do what I must to keep order.”

  “You’ll kill me. Immortality, The Chains, they’re more important, right?” I whipped her hands from my face. “I know what they are, Mom. This entire world is built on their blood. Our blood.”

  “You’re the end of this, Celeste!” she said, eyes wild with excitement. Agana started grumbling behind me but I shushed her with a glance.

  My mother turned to Lux, a smile lighting up her face. “And you. I realized what the power of the Seventh Son could do for me. For us.”

  It was refreshing to hear Lux’s voice. “I won’t help you murder Celeste or anyone else.”

  My mother’s lip turned up in a smirk. “Interesting words from a Royal Demon. That’s not what I need you for.”

  I took Lux’s hand and squeezed. To think of dying was unbearable because I’d be leaving him alone again, with no one who understood him. No matter what, I would leave him. It hung in the air like smoke.

  My mother took his other hand, and his frigid eyes that only warmed me bore through her. “Luxuria Asmodeus. With your power on my side, yes, I could end this charade with the Elementals, finish this eternal game.” She leaned closer. “The Chains would be made of their flesh and bone. The souls of the girls would be free.”

  Well, I hadn’t expected that.

  She continued, eyes hot with mad scientist gleam. “It’s too late for the Poisons, it’s Halloween. They must die. But with your healing power, Luxuria, and the stores of magic I’ll have harvested from the other Poisons, we can bring Celeste back to life.”

  “I want to live,” Cymbeline said. The Spirit Elemental’s head snapped up to look over my shoulder at her. “I know what to do.” With a nervous glance at me, her plump bottom lip trembling, she said, “I can empty The Chains of the souls that inhabit them. You won’t have to kill us, only fill the empty links with the Elementals.”

  “You can save the Poisons, Mom. We serve the magic and the magic serves us. Sacrifices aren’t necessary if we work together.”

  Agana wasn’t about to take a backseat in the plan. “You need blood.” She bared her teeth, looking at the Elementals and the Poisons in turn. None of us were safe with her. “I will suck it from their still-beating hearts and then I will be unstoppable. I won’t be banished again, Mother.” Aamon laughed darkly.

  The world was spinning out of my control, if I’d ever had control. There was no plan; I at best had the option of being killed and brought back to life.

  “Wait. You only plan to resurrect me. I want my sisters,” I blurted. “And Lux, what will happen to him?”

  It was then that the Spirit Elemental put her motherly instinct behind her. “Sweetheart, we will own him. With his power, we’ll live forever together, rule The Chains as only our family should. You, me… Agana. The power would be indescribable.”

  “I cannot be owned,” Lux said pointedly.

  The darkness filling all of us was palpable. We each wanted to be the last one standing. Being who we were to the worlds we kept had made us fierce survivors.

  Survivors made hard choices and survivors were ruthless when they needed to be.

  I stepped closer to my mother, nose to nose with her. “You’re my mother, and I love you. I know you love me. But your love has a price that too many have paid. It’s time for the world to change, Mother. Wake up my coven, and let them join me. We’ll stop this cycle and make The Chains a place worth protecting again.”

  Spirit is a powerful thing. It feeds the very soul that nourishes you. And it can tear it down in a fraction of a second.

  She tilted her head, warm eyes drawing me in. “Celeste, you’re not strong enough. You’re strong enough to lead these girls,” she said, waving a hand behind her at my slumped coven, “but your power is in wishing. Wishing, baby. Your imagination is something vivid and beautiful, but Celeste, you can’t make a utopia and keep it up with wishes alone.” She tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “Even with your girls, it couldn’t be done. The Witch of Sweets? How can she help you keep a world together?” She looked with a loving sadness at Cymbeline. “And her frailness would buckle before you left the woods.”

  In a voice louder than I’d ever heard from her, Cymbeline said, “I could fill the emptiness in people with kindness, and generosity. I could do that.” And she believed it. I believed it.

  “You could never do it without guidance from the Elementals. Never alone.”

  “Enough talk!” Agana shouted. She bounded forward, dress billowing around her regally. She was taller than our mother, and stared down her nose at her. “We all know the real power here is mine. There is nothing that doesn’t bow to blood. In the sacrifice and in the kin,” she finished in a sort of incantation. “I will have you kneel for me.”

  The Blood Witch raised her hands high, and clearly, nothing good was coming next.

  “You came here to fight with me!” I shouted at her, but not before the long hair of each of the Poisons began to rise as though someone were pulling it up by the ends. From each strand came a thin stream of blood, and it drained from their faces just as slowly, but noticeably.

  I screamed at her to stop, but Agana was an explosion of hatred, and had the wrath of Aamon in her corner. His presence did for her what Lux did for mine—made it matter more.

  I had to use Lux just as much if I wanted the world to become mine.

  Grabbing Lux by the arms, I held him close and whispered in his ear, “I want this place and I want you by my side.”

  He pulled me slightly away, a smile playing on his lips. “Do you Wish for it, Witch of Stars?”

  “I wish for it. I lust after it,” I hissed.

  He leaned forward and gave me a lingering kiss on the cheek. “Make your wishes come true.”

  The ground felt like marshmallows underfoot. The air took on a hazy, surreal feeling. “I Wish the Poisons would arise,” I murmured. Delcine, Vera and Una stood as one, eyes closed, mouths agape, blood streaking through the sky from their hair.

  I waved my hand and Wished them awake without a word.

  “What the—” Una’s voice was always first. I smiled as wide as I could. “Del. Del,” she went on, shaking the Witch of Sweets’s shoulder. “Snap out of it.”

  Delcine awoke and pushed Una away, taking everything in as fast as she could. Everything was fast with Delcine. She leaned down and looked into her mother, the Fire Elemental’s eyes. The Fire Elemental blinked, but was still frozen under Spirit’s spell.

 
; “What were you going to do to me?” Delcine spat at her mother. The Elemental could only blink in response.

  Vera, bedraggled and filthy in her old sundress in the cold October night, only had eyes for one thing: Agana. The Witch of Wicked Words went to the Blood Witch, who was still drawing blood from the tips of Vera’s hair, and smiled through her war paint, that red hand that looked like it could strangle me as it reached for my help. I couldn’t see the little girl that had been the Witch of Whispers at all under that.

  “We will do terrible things together,” Vera said. The pasty blood queen cackled high and loud, letting the horror of it echo through the trees, sending bats flying.

  None of them said a word to me. I felt invisible.

  As if she could sense my moment of weakness, my mother broke the spell on the Elementals with one harsh word that sounded like poetry from her goddess lips. The Elementals banshee-screeched in one voice. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen them furious with her.

  It would be the last.

  Chapter 31

  “You’re back,” the Elementals said to me in chorus, each wide-eyed. I got goosebumps to see the Earth Elemental lucid, and staring at me.

  “You,” was all I could say to her. She’d done too much to put into words.

  I expected her to lash out at me, her arms to become moss-coated swords as she grew to reach the sky, but instead she turned, gasping to Vera. She was absolutely terrified, not of her daughter, but for her.

  What threat did I pose to Vera? “I’m going to protect her,” I spat. “Like you should have done her entire life.”

  “Your presence is an abomination. You should never have returned from The Gone!”

  The Fire and Air Elementals looked at her with confusion, but they couldn’t hide nervous glances at their own daughters as well.

  Lux figured it out first. “You all planned to take me and resurrect your daughters. Isn’t that right?” None of the immortals would answer him, but they didn’t have to.

  “No!” my mother yelled, the air crackling in a tiny thunderstorm around her. “I’ll slice each of your throats first.”

  “Yummy,” Agana breathed.

  “Mom?” Delcine said. She sounded like such a little girl, the confident vixen, gone.

  The Fire Elemental straightened her back, and flames rose around her head in a halo. “You’ll not touch a one of us, Spirit. We will smite you down before you can breathe.” Her skin was heating up, darkening in shades of hot pink. “With the Lust Demon under our power, we’ll control The Chains with our daughters, the way it should be!”

  “Between us we have enough spirit to tether The Chains. Without you, Damaris.”

  The Elementals were nodding their heads in agreement, murmuring, and I wondered how long it would be before the Poisons broke and swore allegiance to their mothers and left me.

  I spun to face my coven, the Poisons all in a state of shock. Del couldn’t take her eyes off of her mother, engulfed in flames. Cymbeline was crying; I couldn’t bear it. Una and Vera, their damage written all over their faces, the years of abuse and tortures, were so captivated by the idea of their mothers saving their lives, the very ones they planned to take, that they looked like they might fall to the ground and crawl to the Elementals’ sides.

  “You’ve lost control of the crowd, little sister,” Agana said with a wicked laugh.

  “Shut up.” But she was right. I had to show them all what I could do.

  I had only to glance once at the stars above and Wish to hover over the mayhem of witches, demons and Elementals. Rising above them all, I called out to the Poisons. And they looked. They wanted to hear me.

  “This night? Halloween? Wasn’t about celebrating your birth, it was to bring your death, at any cost. I know you want to believe them, to listen to them, but listen to yourselves first. Do they look prepared to resurrect you?” I cried out, pointing at the Elementals. “You’re seeing an act of desperation. They see you and they see their own end. You know what they’ve done. Don’t forget what The Chains are. Don’t forget how happy we were together.”

  The Water Elemental showed her teeth at Una, as if Una had done something by just standing there. “You want to be together so much, with your friends?” She belted out a wild word, one that felt like rivers boiling, and Una screamed, writhing. Then Delcine next to her, and Vera. The chain link in Una’s lip grew bigger, until her head was dragged down, unable to support its weight. Then lumps formed under her skin, then the others’, until chain links burst out of their arms, necks, bare legs, the sound of flesh tearing overwhelming their screams. The links wound toward each other, circling the other girls until they were in a knot of agony. Cymbeline cowered beside me.

  “No!” I screamed, stunned, horrified, paralyzed, more like a little girl than I had ever felt. And I Wished they were free of those chains.

  The chains disappeared from the Poisons’ skin with a brutal rip, and in a flash, were wrapped around the Water Elemental, dripping with the Poisons’ blood.

  “You’re a beast, Celeste,” Agana said through a smile. I grimaced.

  With one more vicious word, the Water Elemental was free. Then again, she always had been. Had she ever felt the weight of The Chains like we had?

  “This stops now,” I said, low to my mother. “The stars will—”

  “The sky won’t save you! It’s the same air from which vultures descend!” the Air Elemental hissed, cackling after.

  “You can’t protect the Poisons, not enough. Not yet,” my mother said. “Celeste, you’re not ready to oversee your coven. Look at how you ran from them the first chance you got.”

  “I never ran from them! You’re wrong!”

  “You did. You went all the way to The Gone,” a tiny voice said. Cymbeline. “You brought demons back with you.” A sob broke from her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you went there for him, and you left us here. Without you.”

  “I came back for you! We need him!”

  “No, you need him.” Watching Cymbeline pull away from me made my heart pound, and I was losing my ability to concentrate on staying in the air. If I fell, it would be as good as saying I wasn’t strong enough.

  “I don’t care if she needs him,” Delcine said, and my heart nearly burst. “We all need something. Celeste, tell us what to do.”

  “I just need you to remember. Remember that The Chains—they’re our sisters. They all died on their seventeenth birthdays, just like we would have tonight. Our mothers are only immortal because of the power they steal from the witches they create!”

  “And from the blood that flows through them,” Agana said, in a surprising show of solidarity.

  It was when Agana spoke that Cymbeline made her choice. “My mom wanted to save me. She would have done it. You brought back three demons. What would you make this world like?”

  “Agana isn’t a demon, Cymbeline. She’s my sister, the Witch of Blood. My mother banished her to The Gone when she tried to stop this very ritual. Not everything down there is what you think, please, Cymbeline.” I couldn’t stop from crying, and it made me angry, the flood of feelings. My best friend was leaving me, all of us.

  Cymbeline ran like a frightened rabbit to her mother’s side. The Air Elemental wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and it was as good as a blood pact.

  “Celeste, take care of this now, there’s no more time,” Lux said.

  “Take care of us?” Una said. Panic rose in my throat. I couldn’t lose her, too.

  A black wind hit me with such force I was thrown down to the ground, knocking the breath out of me. The Air Elemental, of course. The wind smelled like her—old cigarettes. My face on the ground, I felt the soil shimmy, readying to pull me in. I leaped to my feet, only to be knocked back again by a crash of freezing water against my chest, stealing any breath I had left. Una’s mother cackled.

  Delcine and Una rushed to me, lifting me up. Delcine planted a kiss on my cheek and Una quickly said, “We got this.�
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  “You’re sure?” I asked them.

  “We won’t leave you,” Delcine said. Una didn’t look away, and that was all the reassurance I needed. Vera came silently to stand with to them.

  “Celeste, you can’t survive this with them, only with me,” my mother called out. “If all five Poisons aren’t together, it means nothing. But you, Lux and me—“

  She couldn’t finish because Agana was on her with impossible speed. The Blood Witch plunged her hand into our mother’s chest, pulling out veins and holding them like puppet strings.

  I screamed with as much breath as I could muster, until my throat had nothing left.

  Agana whipped her head around, teeth bared as our mother dangled from her fingers, gasping. “They’ve had eternity to change the world. Look at what they’ve done.”

  It was the most stunningly obvious and pure thing I’d heard in the nightmare I was living, from the least likely person. Aamon stood behind her, gripping her waist, gazing at her, feeding her fury with his love.

  My mother reached out for me but I didn’t take her hand; a choice I would live with for the rest of my life.

  “Your sister’s right,” she choked out. Agana twisted the veins in her hand. “Take this place and make it yours. End eternity as it was, make a future with that beautiful spirit of yours.” She smiled, and Agana twisted.

  “Mom,” I sobbed, falling to my knees.

  The Elementals saw their opening. They may have fought amongst themselves for centuries, but they knew each other better than the Poisons and I did. There was no guessing about whether to destroy the Poisons in our weakness or finish off Spirit first.

  They all took their turns with their powers, until my mother was barely a whisper of a person.

  But I left my mother’s side. As defenseless as she was, the Spirit Elemental would stay alive without me. She didn’t need me. She never had, even though she’d taken my power for as long as I’d lived.

  The air was a flurry of exploding fireballs, tsunamis that cut between trees to attack Spirit, spurned on by vicious winds. The earth ate up all the attacks when new ones arrived, and my mother’s body was tossed around the length of the field along with the autumn leaves. The leaves seemed to belong to the Earth Elemental even more when they were dead.