by S. M. Beiko
No. I couldn’t go there. The bright orange flame felt like it was scorching me down to my bones. Maybe I’d see my own skeleton, winking bleached white back up at me if I broke Killian’s eye contact, but I hazarded my own hysterical grin.
“You put this thing in me. In the stone. It’s just a matter of time before I get it out.”
Embrace it, Roan, said that unbidden voice, crawling out of the dark.
“Ye canna eject yer own soul, my wee girl,” Killian said, and his gentle voice surprised me. He moved back a step. Then another. What? I looked down, and he’d let go.
And the flames licking my arms were dark, purple. Quiet.
“No!” I shouted, and I charged for him, but I didn’t get far. Beneath me, three red rings incised in the obsidian began rotating, and I was trapped inside their revolutions.
“Tell me. Are ye hurting now? Are ye in pain?”
“I —” Whatever smart-ass remark was at the back of my throat died. I brought my arms back up, looked at my fingers. The fire acted as it had, once, when I’d first pulled control of it to me. Languid and ribboning, as if it had a mind of its own. My skin felt comfortable. A warmth but a dry one. A wave of nausea crested, abated. The sweat beading down the back of my neck sizzled away.
Killian’s face was impassive, calm.
“You did this,” I said, but I already knew it wasn’t true.
He leaned back against the soaring glass. “I was in a prison for the entire duration of your life. Ye know that?” He surveyed me from under heavy lids. “I’m no stranger to the dark. But eighteen years is long enough. And I didna enjoy a second of it. Yer no’ a prisoner here. I’d never do that to ye.”
I took my eyes off the black flames and looked down to the ground, made a show of trying to step out of the glowing red rings, foot sparking an invisible barrier. “Oh, so this is your idea of freedom? Maybe you lost the definition of prison since then. You don’t seem ready to let me just walk out that door.” It hadn’t been lost on me that this echoed our first conversation in the Conclave, when I’d woken to him. I should have trusted my gut reaction then, that immediate suspicion, but I’d let him convince me he was an ally.
Killian’s sardonic smile returned as he sighed. “Ye can go anywhere and do anything ye like. Though I’m not sure where it is you think you’ll go. What refuge is there, anywhere, that isn’t just another sort of prison? Ye know it just as well. It’s not me keeping ye in those rings. Or even here. It’s you.”
“Stop putting this on me!” I screamed, boiling over, and the black fire jettisoned out from the bottom of me, through my boots, flashing over the floor. “You did this to me! You put this . . . this thing in me. You corrupted the stone!”
He shut his eyes as if he was letting a toddler see its tantrum through. “The stone was already corrupt. I’m trying to set ye free.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I slammed my fist into the barrier keeping me from leaving the circles. My arm was a dark comet, a drill, and red jets surged around it. Killian opened his eyes then.
“You think you can make me trust you? You think you’ll brainwash me into being your friend?” Killian was standing straighter now as I bore down with all my weight onto that fist, a red bolt careening into the floor, a deep crack rising. “I had parents. A mother and a father. They’re dead. You’re just a goddamn sperm donor. You’re nothing to me!”
The rings beneath me juddered, flashing. I let the fury do the work — I needed what I could draw on, and it was the surest thing to hand. It didn’t matter what Sil had told me, about not letting anger be my source. Everything she’d told me was a lie.
I needed anger right now. Not just aimed at Killian — for what he’d done to me, for what he’d done to those kids as Seela. Because I could hear that one singular voice again. Yes. Take this power. With it, you can best the stone. You can best anyone. It sounded so much like Cecelia, and now how could I doubt it? She wasn’t the hero I had been trying to shape myself into, all this time. She was selfish. She was sloppy. She’d broken every rule, even her own. She left Ruo behind. She let Ravenna die. She’d left me.
The black fire climbed higher, and it took hold of me, but this time I could temper it. The barrier of the rings shattered, the floor of the very chamber split, and I allowed myself to feel every bit of grief and betrayal and misery, because while the stone had taken so much from me, I’d come to rely on it. Deep down, Killian was right. All of it, always, had been about power. I felt the mask of bone pressing over my face, growing out of it. Becoming it.
“Harken!”
I staggered, hands up. From behind the screen of boiling flame, I saw the sky. But not the sky outside the windows. A different sky, higher up. The wind screamed past, and the air was filled with black feathers. I felt it whistling through my hair, cutting my skin. Felt his wings over me, pushing the dark fire back down like a damper.
“Eli?”
The flames fell, and Killian was close at hand, catching me as I tipped forward.
“Easy,” he said, and I didn’t even have anything in me to argue with him as he guided me down to my knees. The summoning chamber was a ruin, but he was sweeping a hand over the floor, and it shivered back into place, a faint glow at his clavicle where the Serenity Emerald flared.
“If you killed me,” I offered, “you could just take the Opal. You could be closer to whatever it is you want.” I was weak. He’d let go of me, but even the effort of sitting up was too much.
“I want family,” Killian said, just as Saskia had in the pit. “I want ye to trust me. I know it’s hard for ye to conceive. By now the stone may have shown ye the truth, as ye’ve been seeking it. Cecelia lied to ye. Kept too many secrets and left her ghost to be the one to reveal them. She was a braw woman, but it was cowardly.” He sat back on his haunches, staring up at the sky. “I seek to be open with ye in every regard. Ravenna tried to do the right thing by ye, but she’s gone. Cecelia thrust this all on yer head then departed as quick as her daughter. But I was always there. Waiting in the dark. Ye were the only thing that kept me going.”
He got to his feet, took a cursory survey of the room. “We were both abandoned by those we trusted. But I am here now. I mean to create an equal world out of the ashes of this one. But I need your help.”
My breath was regular now. I followed his eyes to the dome and felt the ghost of the stratosphere on my face.
“I’m still going to kill you,” I said to the sky. But I couldn’t help shake that I felt better than I had, even since the Conclave of Fire. Further back, since before the floor of Cecelia’s summoning chamber opened up, and I took the stone that promised to bring everything I missed back to me.
“Later,” Killian said, extending his hand. “Now up with ye. We’re going out.”
I slanted my eyes at him. “Out?”
His hand was still there but he wasn’t about to give me an answer. I got up on my own steam, squeezing the feeling back into my fingertips. I couldn’t fight him — not yet. He’d been toying with me before. I needed to be smarter, to bide my time. I could only do that if he thought I was playing by his rules.
“I told ye. I want a world of equals. An end to this struggle for power between the select few who have it. To do that we need to make this world a bit more aware of that imbalance.” He let his hand drop. “The Owl Paramount. He’s got free, which was a slight hitch in things. I wasna strong enough to take his stone on my own. Even I have my limits.” Why he’d let this slip was beyond me, and I didn’t want to imagine it was a show of trust. “But he will come to us, I think. And we can strike while the rest of them are looking the other way.”
I was having a hard enough time following him with the accent alone. “What? Strike?” Maybe I was better off throwing myself out the window, but Killian had already grabbed hold of me, yanking me close, his flames spinning their tight web of solid, rippling
ink.
“Call it a wee family outing.” His insidious grin widened into that horrible crimson slash, body and face contorting into the visage of Seela. “I’ll show you the world that I see. And I will show you that this is your family now. We will embrace you. You will be your best self with us.”
The black choked us both in its grip, and the summoning chamber in its unholy castle was gone. When the darkness parted again, we were standing underneath the garish, iconic digital screens in the British capital’s West End.
London. And not just Killian and me. He’d brought the children with us. The force of the teleportation made me feel like I’d left my guts behind, and they were only just catching up. Suddenly Saskia had her hand around mine, keeping me steady as I clutched my stomach.
She was smiling up at me. “You’re okay.”
I looked around us. I did not feel okay. I felt like I had a target painted on my back. I felt like something unforgivable was about to happen. “What’s . . . how did we — ?”
Her smile was so utterly wretched. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing you could have done to stop him. There’s nothing any of us can do now.”
Then I raised my head, and there was Seela standing before us all. And the children were singing, red eyes and flesh glowing.
And I felt the dark thing turn over to its master’s call.
~
The scream nearly ripped Eli out of the sky, tearing the wind from under his wings.
No, he thought, eyes sharpening. Everything was moving so fast — the air around him, the earth beneath him. He’d never flown this high before, and the ice was cleaving in tiny barbs to his feathers. His skull was expanding, the fine bones of it coming apart. Faster, he begged anyone listening. The Moonstone, the wind itself, maybe even Phyr. Or Mother Death, if she wanted him any sooner than he was coming.
Eli could feel himself getting closer now. How many hours? He banked, the ground approaching at an alarming speed. FASTER. He was a spear, an anvil. A comet. The clouds parted over an enormous, sprawling city. London. He was coming down over the West End, and he felt it before he saw it — the heat from the fires. The toppled buses, the car wrecks, and the black shapes stabbing the air with their branches. And the hulking dark mass in the centre of it all, casting black flames of its own. Eli stretched out his claws, and the thing with the skull over the shadow of its head turned as it felt the rush of him, then faltered. Faded.
Eli pulled up short and carried the full force of his descent, smashing headlong through a parking lot mid-evacuation.
There was a person at the core of that hellish thing at ground zero of the carnage, and it wasn’t Seela. It had been Roan.
~
How could this be happening?
The screams were all around me. The screams were mine. Killian had been proselytizing to the children, and people on the sidewalks stopped, gaped, curious about the nut job cosplayer standing in the street, holding up traffic with his gang of orphans. Not only Mundanes but Denizens, too, my spirit eye told me. I tried to shout, warn them away, but I couldn’t move. Roan, the voice asked gently, let me do this for you, and I was too tired to stop it.
I watched Seela’s mouth open wide, as I caught my reflection in a boutique window, turning into the dark fox warrior that mirrored him.
Where was Cecelia, my guide and my partner? Where was the line I swore I’d never cross? The Mundanes fled around us, but the Denizens flew into the fray as the cinder children leapt over each other, nails and teeth reaching. Foxes and Rabbits raging, and I realized I didn’t know what they were fighting for. What I was fighting for. The stone was already corrupt. Killian had been right about that, too. Even if I died, the stone would choose another. No matter who had it, there would just be more death in the name of the Narrative.
Seela upended the roads, cars careening over us and smashing into buildings, power lines coming down in a rain of sparks.
This was my chance to escape, out in the open. But part of me didn’t want to. Killian had said it. Where did I have to go? Back to the Conclave, to a different kind of prison? Back to Winnipeg, where the people I loved would die the longer I stuck around?
Memory was a fragile, dying ember — Eli was free, at least. Maybe I was done being the hero. Maybe there was no good side, just the dark in every heart. Maybe I’d worked my way through the versions of me that could do any good, and all I had now was the devil who had always been there.
I looked down at my arm, at the place where the chain scar might still be, beneath the blood-matted fur and the jet-black fire. Then the bone black sword was in my hand, and it was hungry.
A rising wind. A talon scraped along the back of my neck, catching the flesh over my cheekbone and my eye. The dark thing inside snarled and staggered back, and the Opal gained purchase.
An explosion. A storm of feathers, sizzling around my feet. I saw Seela turn.
“The hero of the hour.” Seela’s harsh bass thrummed in the back of my head, but the rubble parted and a headwind sent him lurching on his scuttling insect legs.
Eli was the massive Owl Therion, barely enough of him there to recognize. But somehow, impossibly, it was him. His golden eyes caught me, but the children were pressing their smouldering bodies to me, keeping me back and screaming in my ears.
Seela struck out, and where I thought he was merely trying to bat Eli away like an insect, he’d grabbed hold of him hard, a gnarled hand latched to the Tradewind Moonstone. Bolts of gold slithered off their dark, thrashing bodies.
In seconds he’d rip it free like a swollen wood tick — like it was nothing. But Seela released him, and Eli curled around himself in pain. A cyclone kicked up around him, and a shockwave that knocked me down blasted through the city. People fell but thankfully they still got up, Denizens coming round to leap back into the fray as the deservedly freaked-out Mundanes took for the hills.
Eli wasn’t dead — was barely hurt even, just staring straight ahead as if he’d been stunned to stillness — and our eyes locked across the shattered block, asking each other the same question: What the hell just happened?
Then, with a savage reel, that seven-foot monstrosity that called itself my father was in front of me, snatching the breath out of my lungs in those suffocating ribbons that grew out of him, tearing reality and distance apart like tissue paper and taking me down the rabbit hole with him.
The wind rose. A terrible roar, and I saw Eli reaching for me as he had through the geyser tearing a splitting cliff apart —
But I was no longer there. Yet we still felt each other — me now too many miles away, having left him behind in the rubble-strewn street filled with people-shaped trees as the smoke cleared.
The sirens were screaming. The world had seen it all. And it wouldn’t be the last they’d see.
The Cold Road
They’d been staring at the map for days before this, but trying to negotiate with two polar bears, one of whom was down with a demon sickness, was proving useless. And they’d been holed up in this house outside of Fort Mac for so long they must have overstayed their welcome before arriving.
“Can’t you get how huge this country is?” Natti bristled. “We went in the complete opposite direction of where you wanted to go in the first place. Besides, most of Nunavut isn’t passable by road. We’d have to . . . like, fly you there! Last I checked you two are literally bears.”
Maujaq snarled. “We trusted you to take us to the Empress. And she is here.” The great paw slammed down on the white space that comprised the territory of Nunavut, which seemed like it was in another solar system.
“If you could only be a bit more specific,” Phae urged gently, drawing a hand up Maujaq’s paw, sparking blue, trying to calm him. He pulled back.
They’d been at this for a while, stuck, cut off since the attack at the tar sands. The Denizens there were happy to put Natti and Phae in a safe h
ouse, with the bears away from prying eyes, as a thanks for their part — however minuscule — in beating the monsters back that had climbed out of the earth’s crust to level them. Siku and Maujaq had their theories of what those monsters were — creatures stirred up by the Gardener of the Bloodlands itself, Urka.
“We have no money,” Natti said, watching Aivik slump by, guzzling down a Coke. Phae’s phone went off, and after she checked the screen, she left the room. Probably not good news. Natti sighed. “We’re at the end of our ropes. We dragged Aunty all the way out here only to get our asses nearly handed to us. Unless you have a way of teleporting there or any other convenient abilities you’re hiding . . .”
Siku raised his head, eyes narrowed at Natti. She was certain it had been the two of them, in some other form, that had come to their aid using the river and the ice. Had to be. But neither one seemed interested in imparting that, and after the attack they’d seemed diminished somehow, as if they were more bear than Inua. It had taken days for them to decide to start talking again, and when they did it wasn’t at all helpful.
Siku turned away from them, paws crossed. He was the protector, the quiet negotiator. He’d known the risks coming on this journey. “The Ice Road.”
Maujaq twisted. “No, brother. We must both return to the Empress or not at all. You said this yourself!”
“That tenet is one that you and I have kept to for survival. It was never forced upon us.” His smile was wan.
“Has to be another way . . .” Aunty cringed, sitting up. She had been declining, too, refusing to eat, let alone smoke. They were running out of time. “We aren’t that desperate yet, are we?”
“Unless you know anyone with a private plane willing to dump us off there for free,” Natti said. She glanced up as Phae re-entered the room. Her face was twisted, as it had been lately, in anguish. While they’d been stuck out here, they’d been powerless to affect everything that was happening overseas. And enough had happened. Phae had sent Barton a photo of the tree that had once been the Owl, Evan, and it turned out it wasn’t an isolated incident. It’d happened to Eli, but with Barton’s help he’d managed to get free. And the thing that had caused it — Seela — had taken Roan. The last they’d heard, Eli had taken off to go after her — at least, to go after the Opal, before it got corrupted as the Rabbit stone had. But this was the first they’d heard from Barton since then.