Ava shook as she carried the little ones. They were so small in her arms. So cold. She stumbled as she reached Shiloh. She felt as if she couldn’t see. And she realized there were tears in her eyes, keeping her from what she needed to do. So she willed them away, knelt down, and put the babies in Shiloh’s arms.
He held them. He held them and smiled. Because he knew. Shiloh had always known.
“Worth it,” he whispered. “Worth it.” Then, he spoke over them a word that meant ‘love’, a word that never before existed in any dragon tongue. And he and Rane closed their eyes.
Cale was there. She knew he was because he took her face in his hands. He tried to get Ava to look at him but the tears had returned and she couldn’t see. She couldn’t see the way the little rider yawned. She couldn’t see the little dragon stretch its black limbs for the first time.
“Ava,” Cale called. But his voice seemed so far away.
She couldn’t hear Juliette give her last words, her back against that tree and her eyes closed for the last time. She couldn’t see the way she’d reached her hand out to Shiloh.
But Ava knew one thing. That the little ones—born from death and pain and heartbreak—they were everything. And the world could finally stop looking.
The pearl opened their eyes.
The End
Epilogue
Hush
The slick pavement absorbed the sound of her shoes against even layers of cement as she walked through the park. The trees shook their branches in the wind, and even the leaves were frozen over. She kept on until she reached the bench near the familiar old willow, but she didn’t sit down.
He watched her coming toward him. She kept her hands in her pockets, though logic told him it was not because she was cold. He sat on the bench, long legs folded, his slacks creased right where they were supposed to. He wore his maroon scarf beneath the collar of his coat and kept his hands gloved.
“You’re exactly the same,” he said to her. He wished she’d sit beside him, but he didn’t bother to offer. If she wanted to stand, she would stand.
“I am nothing like I used to be,” she answered, as chilly as the Dublin afternoon.
Her pea coat wrapped around her body to hide her slender curves. Her hair was pulled back into a French braid. She wore no jewelry, save a simple pair of pearl earrings. She was trying to be plain, though she should have known she never could be. Her deep blue eyes darted over his figure. She calculated. She deduced.
“It’s still a pleasure to see you think,” he said.
“Well, I can assure you, Declan, I’m not here for pleasure.”
He nodded and removed his gloves, folding and placing them on the bench beside him. “I thought perhaps you had come to your senses. But I see you are still loyal to the buffoon, despite his countless shortcomings.”
“This conversation is not to be about him. Is that clear?”
Declan stared at her, pursing his lips. “Fine.”
“This is to be about the great wrong we’ve committed. We need to find a way to right it.” The longer she spoke to him, the more her half-buried English accent was excavated.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Declan said. It was an untruth. He knew it and she knew it. The wrong she referenced never left his thoughts.
“We need to kill him, Declan. If we had just done it when we were meant to….”
“I am a scholar now, and rightly so. One of science and knowledge—”
She scoffed. “I have seen you tear a merfolk apart limb from limb, Rodrick. Let’s not pretend you’ve changed. If anything, you’re bored, toting around your credentials and reforming lax-minded delinquents.”
“My students are top class.”
“Your students are beneath you and me. That is a fact. Let’s not waste time refuting it.”
He repositioned himself, both offended and unsure of how to hide it. “So how do you propose we stop Slate? We don’t know where he is and we don’t know what he’s capable of. It’s been years, and we were barely a match for him then. With the amount of knowledge he’s accumulated since the last time we crossed paths….”
Karma’s lips thinned as she glared at Declan. “Are you this lazy? Or are you a coward? We are responsible for unleashing a mad man on the world. We need to fix it.”
“I wasn’t the only one at fault, Carmella, if I remember correctly.”
Karma sighed. “I assumed you wouldn’t want Mac involved.”
“Well you assumed wrong.” Declan leaned back, a devilish grin on his chiseled face. “The old gang, reunited once more. If your red dragon barbarian isn’t in, neither am I. It will be therapeutic for me to face the idiot who bested me.”
Karma’s cheeks flushed blue, but she remained calm. Mac and Declan working together would be torture for her. “Very well. But he is still my husband, Declan. You can’t change that.”
He shrugged. “Marital status means nothing in my world. You should know that.”
“Well, it means something to me.”
“We’ll see, Carmella.” He bit in his lip, as if he held in a secret. “I know you better than you think, you see. And you—for all you mothering and spousal obligations—are bored out of your brilliant mind.” His blue eyes laughed at her. “That is a fact. Let’s not waste time refuting it.”
And as Karma walked away, she kept her shoulders squared so Declan couldn’t see how very right he was. She was a lot of things. But the most dangerous thing of all had not been reconciled. Karma couldn’t tell her husband or her children or her friends. She was starving for new life, dying to catch a glimpse of who she used to be. She hated herself for it, but she couldn’t deny it.
Karma needed out.
Lace
A Grey Novella
Sneak peek of the second novella in the CORE SERIES
The marble halls were a soft, smooth white, a steady glow against the sweet black of the night sky that surrounded the court. The candles shone in a thick, pulsing silver light, the purity of their flames disappearing through the open windows.
The altitude brought gusts of frigid air through the gaping windows, and as Ima’s glass slippers sounded off through the halls, she embraced the slicing chill on her skin. Her gray eyes closed to it, and she smiled as the pain of the cold crept its way through her.
Behind her, one of her little sprites flitted up. She bowed, her tiny eyes downcast within her blue-skinned face. She stood before her mistress, her gossamer wings hovering.
“You are being summoned, My Lady.”
Ima turned to the sprite and patted the wisps of her blue hair. She was careful to be gentle with her. She liked Sylphie.
“At this hour? Who would summon me now?” It was a colloquialism. There were no hours for Ima anymore. No days, no years. She remembered the beginning times when she was new and she kept count of those things, of special days and happy moments. But no more.
“Sirce is calling, Lady Ima.”
Before the shot of pain left her, Ima took her hand from her sprite and placed it on the icy windowsill. She stood there, her neck long, her back and shoulders straight and sure, her jaw arched in regality. However, her mind wandered far from noble thoughts. Sirce. The Accuser calling a meeting without warning was never a good thing.
“There must be an imbalance,” the sprite said, her little voice nothing more than bells in the wind.
Ima pursed her lips. “I had hoped he might not have noticed.” But she felt it. The shift that meant the world was turning off kilter once again.
She gathered her skirt within her flawless fingers and made her way to the Requiem. As she went, she thought of another age, perhaps one where she might not have been so young and perfect. Sixty five should do nicely. And when she walked through the blackened marble door that separated the Requiem from the rest of the court, she might have been someone’s grandmother. Her face was clouded with wrinkles, her gray eyes tired, her silver hair—usually thick and winding—worn thin and frail.
/> Sirce frowned at the sight of her. He had always preferred his sister to appear the way she was when they’d first met. Bright and filled with ambition, with zeal, with pain. Slippery in her thin dress, barefooted and fresh and alive. It was precisely why she wore herself tired and old and withering when she knew she’d be seeing him. Unless, of course, there was something she wanted.
“Have your seats,” he said as the other judges filtered in. “We must begin immediately.”
The table, all marble, had been centered in the Requiem since they had all arrived there, nearly nine one millennium before. No one knew who had placed the table there. No one ever questioned it. It was where it was, just as they all were where they were.
Rasha, with her frown so deep, it had carved grooves deep into her face, sat down and slammed her palms onto the table top. “I have work to do,” she said, her voice lacking all inflection.
“You are probably the reason we’re hear, Rasha. People are dying every day. It’s too much. I hear them through your window while I try to sleep. Perhaps we should send you on a mandatory vacation.” Lor grinned at the Death Judge as he scraped his chair along the floor, pulling himself closer to the table. He tapped his fingers against the its surface, unafraid of meeting Rasha’s hardened eyes. Lor wore himself older than any one of them, his hair brittle and too long, his face a catastrophe of wrinkles, creases and liver spots—a beard that met with his bellybutton. His voice came out croaked, caked with age. It was almost disturbing, especially since none of the other judges liked to be reminded that they were much older, even than that.
“I am too loud?” Rasha asked, gathering her hand into a fist. “He thinks I am too loud. How can you stand your own destruction? Your wars rage so loudly, the clanking of iron and the booming of cannons.”
Lor leaned forward. “No one uses cannons anymore, Rasha. If you paid attention to anyone besides yourself—”
Sirce stood at the head of the table and tapped his scepter against the cool marble. “Quarreling is unbecoming.”
He is young today, Ima thought. He was as he had been centuries before. Fair, silver haired, stern eyes—crystal gray to match those of his siblings—and his teeth in little points, each one of them. He was not handsome. But he commanded attention all the same.
“We are here because there is an imbalance in the world. I trust you all have felt it. And though we have just quelled the troubles, a new imbalance means we must begin again. We will go to our windows, and what was once crooked will be made straight.”
“Amen,” they all said in a unison that had lasted a thousand years.
“Which of us feels it is their window that is unbalanced?” Sirce asked. “Pride aside, if you can bear it, brothers and sisters. Confess.” His beady eyes flicked over to Lor, whose frail, wrinkled chin pursed in response.
“Fine,” Lor said. He leaned back in his chair with a huff. “War is brewing, much greater than need brew. I don’t yet know from where, so there is little I can do to balance it.”
“And I,” Rasha admitted with a sigh. “The deaths are too many. The sirens are taking too many dragon and human lives. It makes no sense to me. No such thing has ever happened before.”
Hiru and Ulani, their dark gray hair pulled into matching braids, their eyes lined with weary smudges, both nodded. Their fingers and their hearts were clasped together in an embrace they had not broken for nearly seven hundred years. Hiru, Judge of Fear, and Ulani, Judge of Sorrow, looked into each other’s eyes, as if speaking a silent language.
Hiru faced Sirce. “We too, are not in balance. But this is like nothing we have faced before,” he said. A long careful hesitation. “…Perhaps, we ought to let it be. Our interference seems to be effective no longer.”
Sirce’s face contorted at the thought. Their purpose was to keep the world balanced. Until then, it had been the case that good was not good at all. Good was a temporary solution. Peace was a bandage of sorts, over a festering world that was prone to fall into greater darkness if left unchecked. And so, the greys acted as vaccines. They spurted sustainable doses of fear, sorrow, war, death, hatred, pain, and….
“Where is Papu?” Ima asked, turning toward her brother’s empty chair.
Sirce pressed thin lips together, gripping his scepter too tightly in his hand. “I’m sure Papu is out making a fool of himself. We will carry on without him.”
Ima stood, scraping her chair against the floor. “I’ll find him.”
“No,” Sirce said, positioning both hands, and his scepter, on the table. “We will carry on.”
But Ima left the Requiem anyway, returning to her younger self as she went. She took her time walking up the spiral staircase of the west wing that led to Papu’s room. But before she entered it, her hand against the blackened wood that Papu had always preferred, she turned back and headed to the north. Once she was outside of the handhewn carvings that littered Sirce’s bedroom door, she shuddered. It was, without a doubt, her least favorite place to be.
But Papu was her favorite person to be with. He was, of course, where he didn’t belong. He lay in Sirce’s massive bed, muddied boots atop the scarlet silk sheets, his hands behind his head and his eyes closed.
Ima tiptoed forward, going close enough to peer over him. He peeked one eye open and then closed it again, pretending he hadn’t seen her.
“You are very late,” she said.
“And?”
“And Sirce is cross with you.”
He grinned at that, and opened both of his crystal eyes. “I thought seeing him out of sorts might cheer you up a bit.”
Ima smiled, then buried it. “It’s unwise of you to make him angry the way you do.”
Papu shrugged. “I am not known for my wisdom, Ima.” He patted the bed and put his hand back behind his head.
Ima sat with a sigh. She had never seen Papu look any older than when she’d first met him. Still lean, still smirking, still with glittering eyes and shocks of silver through his unruly hair. She wanted to say something hurtful, something that might cause him pain and at the same time make her feel better. Because, to Ima, everything was about pain. But she knew it was difficult to offend Papu.
She hovered a long finger over his boots. “How did you get so filthy?”
He wagged his eyebrows at her. “Went out on an adventure.”
Ima gasped. “Papu!”
“Should I be worried?” he asked, changing the subject. “Or is this another of our brother’s ‘ego Requiems?’”
Ima traced the lining of her dress, leaning one arm on the bed beside Papu. She could not behave naturally with him, no matter how much she tried. “I think we all should be worried. There is too much bad coming from the people. If we do not lessen the doses we give them, we will overrun the world. That will be an imbalance we will not be able to adjust.”
Papu sat up, and doing so made his leg move just slightly enough for his knee to touch against Ima’s fingers. It was comforting. She hated it.
“We must stop then. At least for a time, so the good people can replenish the earth. If the people don’t need us to add our darkness, we are not needed.” He met Ima’s eyes, a brilliance in his that unsettled her. “Ima, we are not needed.”
“Papu….”
“We’re not needed!” He sprang up from the bed. “We can leave. We can go. Ima, it is finally happening!”
She shook her head, glancing at the door and hoping Sirce’s goblin would not overhear them. She stood up and tried to grab hold of his arms, to get him to calm himself, to listen to her.
“Papu, we cannot leave. We must correct the balance. From here, from the courts.”
“How?” he said, talking too loudly, his eyes flashing. “The people are overflowing with darkness. Shall we give them more? It’s light that they need, Ima and we cannot bring that to them. So what use are we here?”
“Sirce will not let us leave.” She licked her dry lips. She wondered whether Hiru could sense the fear growing in her. Papu had
always been reckless. And yet again, she was afraid she might lose him to it. “Perhaps…” she said, “perhaps, Sirce will call on the phoenix. She has pledged to him. Maybe she can bring more good into the world for us. Maybe she can change things.”
Papu broke free of Ima’s touch. “The phoenix? Phoenixes are tricksters and deceivers. She will do nothing to help us. She will find a way to manipulate Sirce into letting her leave, and then we will have done nothing but waste our time.”
Ima already knew it was true. They had faced other phoenixes before, all of which, superior as they were, had done nothing to help them. They were selfish creatures—free of rules and purpose—independent and ruthless. The phoenix, a girl named Ava, had begun to upset the balance nearly a month before. She’d already weaseled her way into a stay of execution for her foolish red dragon. She would, indeed, prove to be a waste of time.
“Papu, Sirce will not let us shut our windows. He simply will not.”
Papu balled his hands into fists—hands that were so often employed in mischief, hands that were created to wield revenge from his own window. “Sirce, may be the Accuser, but he is not the only judge. And he is not God.” He made his way to the door. “Mark my words, Ima. I will see what the grey book says for myself.” And the door closed behind him with a hollow, echoing finality.
Ima stood in the room where she had spent too many nights with Sirce. She’d poured her time into studying the way his hatred flooded from his window and to the people—dragons and humans and sirens alike. She had been plotting, hating and hating him, just like he wanted, waiting for the day Sirce’s hatred consumed his core.
But now that the day drew near, all Ima felt was dread. For Sirce’s undoing would mean Papu’s demise as well.
From the Author
HEY YOU! Thank you for reading Vane! I’m so honored you decided to spend some time with my work. First, please leave me a review on Amazon. Reviews are everything to authors. They make it possible for us to keep writing for you.
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