by S. M. Beiko
“Yeah, speak for yourself.” Barton scowled. He had a big splintered piece of wood jutting out from his shoulder. I recoiled.
“Shit.” I ran to Phae. “You’d better —”
Natti was already ten steps ahead of me: She’d cobbled together a set of ice stairs from a leaking pipe, and Phae was skittering down them.
“You idiot, you stupid idiot,” she was half grumbling, half crying. Her antlers shot up and she ripped the wood out, the wound searing together as soon as it was discarded.
“Gah!” he winced. “Heal, don’t hurt!”
“I’ll do more than that, you moron,” she muttered. “I had everything under control.”
“I don’t think any of us did.” I smiled. “Just hope there’s insurance on this place . . .”
Then I sprang back up. “Sil!” She was buried in this, somewhere.
“What happened?” Phae croaked, leaving Barton for the moment and finding Arnas in the corner.
“Sil, she just . . . she got out of control. Then she collapsed.” I didn’t want to give away anything else yet, especially that my mentor and trusted semifamiliar had been my grandmother all along, invested in this personal mission as much as I was.
“Yeah, your granny got pretty out of control there, too,” Natti sniffed. “She was pretty much on fire. I didn’t want to risk the ceiling to caving in on her or the machines burning, so I sort of, um, put her out.”
“That’d do it,” I muttered. I pulled aside plank after plank, but I couldn’t find her. “Sil!” Please don’t let her be dead. Not now. I couldn’t keep the sob out of my throat. “Sil!”
“Here,” she said. She was still the Fox-woman, though now she looked ashen and cold. Her nine tails drooped and dragged behind her, her shoulders were bent, and her cowl looked soaked. She held a body in her arms. Deedee.
I swallowed. “Is she okay?” Sil had her cradled close to her chest, feeding what warmth she had left into my aunt.
“She’ll live,” she sighed, like a candle going out. She put her down gently beside Arnas. Phae had her hands on him, but she hadn’t gone to the trouble of healing him yet. She just stared up at the beautiful, beaten Fox goddess that was my grandmother.
“What will we do with him?” I asked Sil, who regarded Arnas through hooded eyes that had seen far too much. She sneered at first, but Arnas didn’t look at her. He just reached a broken, bloody hand out to his wife’s face and sobbed uncontrollably.
“He’ll live,” she grunted, and she nodded at Phae. Phae rested both hands on Arnas, and his myriad wounds were righted. He didn’t stop sobbing through the ordeal; the more his bones refastened, the closer he edged to Deedee until he could pull her totally into his arms. Once she was there, he was quiet.
After a long pause, he reached up to his neck, patting it absently. He sucked in a breath.
“Looking for this?” I dangled the brass-encased bauble between my fingers.
“D-don’t!” He reached out then recoiled. “They’ve d-done something to it. They made me . . .”
“No one made you betray your own brother,” I spat. “This is him, isn’t it? Or what’s left of him. He’s dead, and you’re here, and this is your prize, right?”
Arnas cast his eyes down, clutching his unconscious wife tighter. “I never had a right to it. I’d never use it for ill. I just . . . I didn’t want them to hurt Deidre. I just wanted to live. But I’d . . . have to live with the shame. That was my prize.”
Sil reached up and grasped the bauble between two large fingers, which were sharp and deviously clawed. She cracked it between her nails like a walnut, and something black and foul sludged out. It hit the floor with a hiss, then slimed across the concrete.
“An old spell,” Sil murmured absently as she crushed it beneath her boot. She discarded the shell and passed what was inside to me. It was dry and small. A bone, maybe. Delicate and frail and tiny. But it was warm.
“Bring the boy. It’s time you made good on your shame.” Sil’s knees buckled, and she steadied her huge body with a fist to the ground. She was wavering.
I tensed my arms, which were growing sore as the adrenaline of the last hour wore off. “And what about . . . Cecelia?” I had to crunch my teeth down on saying you before it slipped out. But with the power off, and her great flame snuffed out, seeing Sil in this state made me wonder how much longer she had left.
We all froze as the sound of sirens and shouting grew nearer. I glanced at Sil when she spoke: “The machines Cecelia is hooked up to have a phone line attached. If the power goes out, it puts out a 911 call directly. She’ll be all right, if they’re quick about it.”
We didn’t have much time, then. I saw what happened to Sil when she was too far away from Cecelia . . . from her body. The ambulance would take her straight to a hospital, especially with the house in the state it was in.
Sil read me easily. “The summoning chamber,” was all she said before I started mobilizing the troops for the trek underground.
Arnas moved to pick up Deedee, but Sil stopped him. “Leave her.”
“But —” he said, and I stepped in front of the still-menacing Sil.
“The paramedics are coming,” I said, and I could hear them pulling up on the front lawn, coming in through the door. “It’s better that they find her and care for her now. Right?”
Arnas hesitated, but as soon as he looked down at his wife, he nodded grimly and rested her comfortably in the debris at the bottom of Natti’s ice steps, which were nearly melted away.
After that, Phae, Natti, and I managed to assist Barton and Arnas down the earth-hewn steps to the secret chamber below the house. I felt strange about bringing so many strangers there, since the chamber had always felt like Sil’s and mine, like a fortress against doubt and the disappointment of those counting on us. I had no idea what would happen next, but I hoped Sil did. I was helping her gingerly down the last of the steps, as though she really was the old woman in the bed I’d stood over so many times. I tried to summon up the fire she’d lost in her tirade and warm her with it. She sucked in a breath, but was unable to act grateful yet. Too many regrets hung between us, and we weren’t about to explore them now. This crisis wasn’t over.
We reached the chamber’s entrance. I’d forgotten about the candle-lighting. Sil was able to push herself off from my support but, without even thinking of it, I sent flames eddying from my pores into the air, and the baubles of light found their candles. I shuddered. I’d made my own fire. But no one else seemed in a celebratory mood as they put down their injured charges on the obsidian floor amidst the silver circles. No one knew I’d changed drastically in the last hour except for me and maybe Sil. I caught her eye, and she nodded at me.
Arnas joined Sil in the great circle, and he and Sil sat cross-legged on either side of Barton. The rest of us stood aside, steeling ourselves for the show. This was the circle through which I’d passed into the Veil. I wondered if that’s where we were going now.
After a long silence, Sil spoke. “Bring the relic forward.”
Natti and Phae looked at me. I had the bone of my father clasped protectively in my palm. It was still warm. I placed it in Barton’s hand and tried to smile, knowing I was giving him the only piece left of the father I didn’t really know. Barton didn’t smile. He just nodded, gravely.
“We find ourselves in a difficult situation,” Sil spoke again, voice low. “A severed Rabbit in need of restoration. The neutralizer who performed the severing has no power left to reverse it. But we have the boon of the bone. We are going to need the assistance of the Veil and the Old Powers . . .”
“You mean the original Ancients, don’t you?” Natti scratched her cheek. “Do you think they’d help us? The Matriarchs?”
Sil shivered, her muscular, goddess frame seeming more human and fragile as each moment passed. “We’ll need to appeal to the First Ra
bbit to restore the connection to Ancient for Barton. If she doesn’t help us, no one will.”
“Better plan than nothing,” I exhaled. “But it sounds pretty lofty. More like something a Paramount could accomplish than a ragtag gang of Denizens.” I looked straight at Sil, arms folded tight into my chest to keep my nervous heart from bursting out of it. Knowing who Sil was now, that she was Paramount of all Foxes, their champion and conduit for the other realms, the onus should be on her to fix this mess. I had no right to be angry or bitter with her, but I couldn’t help it. She deserved some reparations for lying to me this whole time.
Sil regarded me from heavy eyes, the colour of them faded and barely lit. She glowered. “My powers are now severely limited, thanks to a well-intentioned oversight.” Natti raised an eyebrow, but Sil didn’t elaborate. “And I don’t know how long my body will last off medical support. I’ll need your help, Roan.”
I swallowed. Since she’d thrown her fiery self into my life, Sil had never asked for my help, not directly. She’d never said anything to me directly, come to think of it. She’d spoken in glances and riddles and withheld secrets. I realized suddenly that this wasn’t Sil the Spirit Guide beseeching me now, but Cecelia, my grandmother.
“I don’t . . . what do you want me to do?” There was no use in hesitating, I thought. If I wasn’t ready now, I’d never be.
Sil turned away from me and shut her eyes. “I need you to open the gateway. We will not be going through. Instead, the Veil will come to us. I will summon the First Rabbit. Her name is Heen. What happens to Barton will be up to her.” She opened her eyes and let them bore into Arnas. For once, he didn’t look away. “You will speak for the boy, and use your actions against him as a bargaining chip for mercy. Do you understand?”
Arnas only nodded again, numb. What else could he do? He was culpable for Barton, and he’d done other terrible things for which he’d never fully atone. Sil glared at him, weighing his reliability. While there’d be a satisfaction in really bringing Arnas to justice for what he’d done to Ravenna and Aaron, I had finally come to terms with the knowledge that killing him would only make the loss inside me, and inside Sil maybe, too, linger larger and more infinite.
But that still didn’t help me. “Sil, I . . .” I choked, uncertain. “How am I going to know what to do?”
She closed her eyes again. “Use your spirit eye. Look into yourself. You’re more capable than you give yourself credit for. The words will come, and you will be able to bring the two planes together. I trust you.”
Stunned, I could only swallow. I put a hand on Phae and Natti, directing them to stand aside. I came forward and stood on the edge of the centre circle, closing first the eye that saw the Rabbit visions to begin with and directing it deep down into the place I’d probed before. I felt a vibration from the cold obsidian under me shimmer up my boots and through my legs, a murmur into senses newly opened and flexing. I forced myself to breathe as I held my hands out over Sil and Arnas, forming a triangle around Barton, and opened my mouth. “I call now to the flames that started this world, that they might hear my petition and rise.”
Was it Sil’s fire, now in my blood, that called the silver rings so easily? They flashed awake, and a wheel of fire crawled up from their crescents. I heard Phae yelp and Natti try to silence her, but I didn’t stop as the blood rushed in my ears. Sil’s words, or maybe the words of all the Foxes before me, tumbled out of my mouth.
“Spirits of the core, of the heat of creation.” I raised my hands, palms up and fingers twitching. “I implore you to consign our spirits to the hands of the Veil and those that walk there. Open the door, and let your world into ours. I place the fire on my name.” The flames were high around us now. In the heart of them I perceived Sil’s utter calm, Barton’s wavering nerve, and Arnas’s sheer panic, but I let the blaze tower in my control. “Yield now.”
A bright flash quivered inside me, the reverberation of a gut punch threatening to bowl me over, but I kept my ground. The summoning chamber was gone; instead, we were inside a wavering mirage of light and colour and nothingness. I looked down at my hands, or what I perceived as my hands: they moved and shifted each time I lost the requirement of them, and I remembered that any form I had here was of my own making. My body solidified once I recognized how much I still needed it.
I turned to look at Phae, but she and Natti had vanished. Only the four of us in the circle remained. I looked down at Barton and Arnas; they looked the same to me as they would without the Veil filter, but maybe because I was projecting my memory of them onto their spirits. Out of the two, Barton seemed the most solid, still clutching the frail bone close to him, with Sil a beautiful inferno of body parts, a fire still and quiet.
Her flames jumped with her words. “Well done.” She smiled at me from the heart of the heat.
I swelled with pride, but I shrugged. “It runs in the family.”
But there was no time left for commendation. She reached out her blazing hands and placed one gently on Barton’s arm. He gawked at her.
“Where are we?” he whispered, the words ricocheting around our shifting, uncertain landscape.
“We are in Limina, the Place in Between,” the flames of Sil said. “This is where you will be one again.”
She folded his palms together over the Rabbit bone, encircling his hands with her own. “I call now to the authority of Rabbits, to the First Matriarch. Heen. I commend to you a lost leveret.”
A great trembling engulfed us then. I felt it in my marrow, but I was not shaken by it. The Veil and the world we came from intertwined and flexed, both reasserting themselves in a unified matrix. When the pieces clattered into place, I saw a deep forest, trees as old as time and scratching the surface of a heaven we couldn’t see. At the heart of a tree with roots that reached into the chest of the universe, there emerged hundreds of small, inquisitive forms. Rabbits, or the fleeting memory of their spirits, flitting around us like camera flashes.
“You took us to the Warren,” Arnas seethed. I’d almost forgotten he was there. “I can’t . . . believe . . .” He looked around, seeming like he was about to rise and look for someone he was expecting.
“Break this unity we travelled here in, and I will break you,” Sil snarled. “You won’t find your family here. They can’t see you anymore. And they wouldn’t look on you if they could.”
Arnas thumped back down, expression hollow. This must be a sort of afterworld for the Rabbits, I guessed. My stomach dropped when I realized that Arnas would never see any of his family again, because of what he did. Harsh punishment, and even I was doubting that it fit the crime when I said, “Does that mean that my father . . .”
Sil shook her head before I could finish the thought. “He was fed to the river. He is one of hers now.”
I tried to focus on Barton again instead of my kindling anger.
He was spellbound, taking it all in with a childlike awe I’d never seen on his affable face. I remembered then that he’d never been able to see any of this, had never been a part of it. He’d only ever trusted us, that we were really and truly surrounded by a world of talking foxes and river mud demons. And now he could see it.
But he still did not have legs. I don’t think he’d even noticed yet. Sil gripped her hands tighter over his, matted muzzle peeling back over her gleaming, crackling teeth. A smile.
“This is the legacy of the Rabbits. Your Family.” Barton finally looked at her, clamping his slack jaw shut. “And the mother of that Family is here. The first Rabbit.”
I hadn’t noticed until Sil ducked her head in that direction, but the roots of the great tree before us were moving aside, revealing a massive hole in the spirit earth. The smaller Rabbits shifted and sniffed the wavering air, but they did not flee in alarm as a massive brown creature emerged from the heart of the tree. No, not emerged — came into existence from the dark earth itself, the tree roots her
ears, topsoil her fur, loam her paws. Her eyes were white glittering quartz, and they were not turned on us, but the Rabbit spirits flocking to her. She nuzzled them, sniffed them, as she pulled herself fully into the open. Hers was a benevolent energy, and I felt my spirit sigh as she came closer, behind Arnas.
She ignored him completely, even though his lamenting whimper could be heard across the Veil. I couldn’t understand why he’d be frightened of her, until I saw that he was crying. I couldn’t help but pity him.
“Dear daughter of the fire, creation-sister.” Heen spoke in a voice that was a whisper through the grass. “You are my sister’s walker in the world? And you have brought me a child of earth?” Her great head entered the circle, nose snuffling Barton carefully. She surveyed him this way for a long while, taking special care to note his severed legs, until she drew her head back, curious. “The scent is faint. There is more blood here than earth. How are you sure he can be mine?”
Sil turned her burning eyes on Arnas. Stung back into usefulness, he reached around Barton and placed his hands over his and the bone cradled there.
Heen didn’t move, but her ears flattened down hard with a whip-crack of willow bark. “You were once mine.” She thrust her head at Arnas and bared her long file teeth. “But my gift was taken from you. You will tell your mother why.”
“I deserved my shame,” Arnas said plainly, eyes on the ground. For once he didn’t stammer, despite the tears. “I severed this boy from your gift before he was born. So he might never be sacrificed to the Darkling Zabor. Then I betrayed my brother. The punishment was just.”
Heen’s eyes widened. She sniffed Barton again to verify Arnas’s truth. She pulled herself up on her massive hind legs, lifted one up, and beat it rapidly against the ground. The sound was thunder ripping through my senses. The Rabbit souls popped and flashed until the warren was full of them, large and small, old and young, their empty eyes shining on us.