by S. W. Clarke
My lips opened, and the Spitfire pressed words for the paralysis hex out: “Pairilis síoraí.”
It was as though I hadn’t spoken. The nightstick connected with my thigh in a blistering spike of pain, my own flames eroding away as numbness set in.
As my leg buckled and I dropped to a knee, Tamzin broke into a pitying little laugh. “The paralysis hex? Ora told me you would try it, but I’d never quite believed you would go that far.”
Ora Frostwish had trained her in hexes. Or, more specifically, she’d trained Tamzin to resist the very hexes she’d taught me. Because Frostwish knew I would come, and she served the Shade.
So she did train her to fight me.
Which meant my enshroudment, my hexes, and my flames were useless against her.
I used my hands to push myself back, away from her, and as I did, I felt myself cross an invisible, almost palpable barrier, the candlelight on my back. I’d come to the far end of the room, and everything seemed to clear. The concussion dimmed, my sight sharpened, and my muscles buzzed with energy. Foul, potent energy.
And I knew at once: this was the leyline crossing. And it was corrupted. This was why the labyrinth had been constructed. The Spitfire knew it, too; inside me, it swept up to twice its size, palpating with power.
It was easy enough to stand. To erupt into fire.
Tamzin saw it. This wasn’t part of her plan; it had happened accidentally, in the frenzy of battle. Her eyes narrowed. When her fist came toward my face, I didn’t just evade. I swung under it easily and dropped for a roundhouse kick. As I came around, my heel caught her in the cheek.
She staggered back, the back of her hand rising to her cheek, staring at me with blazing eyes as her hand slipped behind her back, and she unleashed another set of those tiny blades at me.
At this range, I could only avoid two of them. The third lodged in my shoulder, and the Spitfire roared inside me as the pain drove home. And when I say “roared,” I mean fire erupted so large and loud from my hands, it consumed them in roiling flames.
I won’t lie: I was pissed, too. My own sister had kicked me, punched me, stabbed me.
The Spitfire brought my hands together by instinct, all rage focused on the face in front of me, a growing ball of fire forming between them. More, more, the Spitfire said, and it was so easy to give into that desire, to make that fireball into an inferno. To unleash it on her.
She wouldn’t have been able to move, to dodge, to avoid this. And I suspect whatever training she’d been given against my fire, it wouldn’t apply while I stood here.
And she knew it. For the first time, Tamzin took a step back. Her eyes flashed with something besides anger. Fear. She felt fear.
The Spitfire loved it. Wanted to show her why that fear was justified. Kill her now, it hissed. Before she kills you.
Because she could—would—kill me. She had already proven that. Every strike had been to maim, and ultimately to kill.
No, Rational Clem said. Not her. Not like this.
I stood in place, the fireball growing in my hands, magnificent and huge and capable of sending my sister to outer space. It trembled with the desire to be released, and I could imagine the way this room would light up, every corner of it wild with flame.
But then Tamzin would be dead. She would be dead again, and this time for real.
I met her eyes as Rational Clem and the Spitfire contended in me, her face orange-white behind the fireball.
She had our mother’s eyes. And her bravery.
Killing her would be the greatest regret of my life.
I sidestepped away from the power, and as I did, the fireball dissipated, and the fog of my injuries returned. Gravity felt more intense, the whole world now pressing down on me. I fought the urge to double over, to drop to the floor.
She stared at me, stunned. I could see how terrifying I’d been to her.
“Tam. I won’t hurt you,” I whispered. “I need the blade to kill the Shade. To end her.”
My own flames danced along the nightstick as she stood before me. Her shock had begun to fade, replaced again by that mask of hatefulness. “I know.”
She knew? She knew. “Why protect it, then?”
“You’re a fire witch. You can’t encounter power without wanting it. Needing it. You may think you want to kill the Shade—maybe deep down, you think you have a noble heart—but I know you, Clementine. It’s all about getting what you want.”
With a pang, I realized my sister had finally said my name. And it was then, hearing it from her lips, I saw a flash of the little girl she’d been. Afraid. Needing me.
I knew what she meant. She knew, too.
That night.
The memory of it came back to me, whether I wanted it or not.
You’d think a fire witch’s childhood would be full of flames and dire portents.
Mine wasn’t.
We grew up in Virginia, across the river from the district. Our mother worked two jobs to keep us fed and clothed: daytime, as a receptionist at a dentist’s office. Nighttime, she stocked groceries until after midnight. She was too smart for answering phones and lining cans on a shelf, but I never thought to ask why. I accepted it as kids accept all realities of their life: as final, irrevocable, a fact.
By some miracle, my mother was always present when I needed her—to help, to hug, to soothe. She loved my red curls, always told me they were a gift. She liked to run her fingers through them when I lay my head in her lap. My mother was good. Without her, I would have floated away into some godforsaken ether when child protective services came for me on that awful morning after.
So why, the night it happened, didn’t I do what she’d asked?
She asked one thing: after I turned ten, I had to look after Tamzin while our mother worked.
My sister wasn’t hard. She liked every food, every game I put in front of her. Mostly she was easy because she loved me, like I was some kind of goddess who’d come to live in Northern Virginia with her. Even when I was twelve and she was ten, she always wanted to be in my room, reading my books, watching me do my homework.
Thinking back on it, she was lonely for Mom. She was starved for her. But that was impossible for me to understand. So mostly I humored her. Sometimes I couldn’t stand her. Hell, sometimes I couldn’t stand myself. Isn’t that kind of a requirement of being a pre-teen girl?
That night was one of those nights. I’d gotten a bad grade on a test, my least favorite food—pot loaf—was in the refrigerator, and Tamzin wanted to put barrettes in my hair while, after dinner, I lay on the couch with the remote out in front of me, pushing the button over and over to find the right show. Mostly I just liked pushing the button.
Finally, when she’d yanked my hair for the third time while trying to brush it out, I flung the remote away. Pulled all the barrettes out and threw them on the floor. I’d said something angry—we never remember the mean things we say, only what’s said to us—and stalked out of the living room and into my bedroom. I slammed the door, closed myself in my cocoon of pixelated movie-star printouts pasted to the walls and a mirror over my dresser that, from the age of ten, I examined myself in at least three times an hour.
My sister complained, knocked a few times over the next hour, but I told her to go away. Every time, I told her to go.
Finally, she did. Until, late into the night, I woke up to her frantic knocking. When I looked at the clock, it was after two. That meant Mom was home. But Tamzin had come to my door.
“What is it?” I snapped, groggy and still remembering the barrettes.
“Open the door.” Her voice was strained, afraid. “Please, Clem, open it.”
I didn’t open it. I didn’t even move. “Go to bed.”
“Clem.” Her voice was a whisper in the crack. “There’s someone else in the house.”
That wasn’t the first time she’d said that about shadows in her room. Sometimes she said it just as an excuse to climb in bed with me. And though she sounded differ
ent this time—almost a little hoarse—all I could remember were the goddamn barrettes. “Go to bed, Tam.”
A pause. “I can’t.”
And then I was past the memory I had told Maeve Umbra in the meadow to pass her test. With Umbra, I had stopped there—at “I can’t”—and then, like a fast-forwarded film reel, I’d woken up the next morning and she and my mom were gone, and a black cat waited for me in the doorway.
I didn’t lie to Umbra. I didn’t omit anything.
That was all I could remember.
Only here, with twenty-year-old Tamzin standing over me, staring down at me in the vaults, did my brain allow the rest to unlock.
My mom and sister hadn’t just disappeared. I hadn’t woken up and found them gone. A sob rose in me, pressing up my throat as the memory unspooled in my mind.
I had sighed, gotten out of the bed to open the door for her. I’d taken two steps when footsteps sounded in the hallway. Not my sister’s, and not my mom’s.
Big steps. Hard steps. They had to be a man’s.
Someone was in the house.
I froze as Tamzin shrieked, banging for a half-second on the door and then not at all. As though she’d blipped out of existence. And then I was outside myself, like a ghost watching from a corner of my room as twelve-year-old Clementine dropped to the floor, her eyes searching. Searching for a place to hide.
The bed. Under the bed.
I watched as she slid herself under, disappearing into the shadows. And shrank farther back as the doorknob turned. When the door opened, my eyes shifted to the doorway as a man stood wreathed in shadow.
Tall, so tall. Almost as wide as the door itself. A long sword at his hip, the toe of his metal armor gleaming in the moonlight from the window.
It was him, the reason I hated the dark.
Now, ten years later, I finally knew who he was: Lucian the prince.
Chapter Forty-One
In my memory, he advanced into the room, and I kept watching from the corner as he paced toward the bed. When he stopped, her face—my face, if I’d been able to watch the scene from inside my body—was just a foot away from those spiked sabatons, though I hadn’t known the word for them at the time. I’d only known they seemed completely out of place. Wrong. Eerie.
He’d stood there a while as if surveying the room, not otherwise moving. And then, after ten or twenty seconds, he walked back out, disappearing into the hallway.
He should have looked under the bed. Anyone would have looked under the bed, in the closet if they were looking to capture a twelve-year-old girl. And it was obvious that my room belonged to a twelve-year-old girl.
So why didn’t he?
Maybe he knew I was there. Maybe he didn’t want to take me.
But that made no sense, to take Tamzin and my mother and not me. It made about as much sense as my own blood, my sister, standing over me in the vaults beneath Edinburgh, hating me, wanting to kill me.
“He took you,” I whispered, barely able to hold on to my voice. “He took you and Mom that night.”
And I hid.
And I hid.
Lucian the prince—William Rathmore—had taken my mother and sister and I hadn’t fought. I hadn’t chased after them. I hadn’t even called the police. I’d just hidden under my bed as his footsteps receded, he passed down the stairs, and out through the front door. I stayed under the bed the whole night in a daze. And it was in the morning I’d finally crept down, found the door wide open and a black cat sitting in the doorway.
They were gone. My family was gone.
How had William Rathmore known where to find us?
It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was the toxic fallout, my sister’s bitterness filling the air between us.
My eyes met Tamzin’s, and her gaze pierced me. Betrayer, those baby blues said. You betrayed us. She had carried that hurt, that anger, for ten years. She’d molded, used it as fuel, no doubt came to believe I was the evil witch Rathmore and Frostwish told her I was.
And she had become marvelous. Marvelous and terrifying, full of the same fierceness I had, but for different reasons. She was faster than me, struck harder, didn’t ever hesitate.
Rathmore took her.
“Of course he did.” The nightstick came down, lashed me across the face. I didn’t have the right to move, so it was only the Spitfire that protected me. The flames rose to meet the nightstick, but she swept through them like butter. It struck me across the face, temple to chin, and I dropped to the stone. The Backbiter fell from my hand, rolled across the ground.
Her boots moved into my view. “Get up.”
I didn’t know what stopped me, whether it was my body or my brain. One of her boots swept out of view, connected with my stomach. The Spitfire tried to block it, but I didn’t, and I sensed if neither of us had done anything, that would have broken a rib or two.
As it was, it sent all the air out of me in one massive go. “Tam,” I said, hollow, “I should have let you in.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.” Her boots tapped across the stone, the flaming end of the nightstick appearing as she passed. She was agitated. “William Rathmore saved me from you. From what you became.”
William Rathmore was her savior. He’d raised her, in one sense or another. That was why Callum had known me as the sister the first night he’d met me. Because Tamzin had talked about me.
“What about Mom?” I whispered.
She scoffed. “Don’t you dare talk about her.”
“Where is she, Tam?”
Her boots reappeared, and the nightstick came down on my arm in one white-hot slash. “A bit late. You abandoned her.” Another slash, this time against my hip. Then somewhere lower, like she was swatting at a disobedient dog. And finally she rolled me over, the Backbiter’s chain clinking as she lifted it from the ground and held it above me, breathing hard.
She dropped to her knees, straddling me, the nightstick discarded for the weapon, both hands at far ends of the rod, still glowing green. “This is all that matters to you, isn’t it? I can see why.”
The green reflected in her eyes, wet with anger and hurt. And I sensed she was debating with herself.
Not whether to take the weapon, but whether to kill me with it.
Warmth trickled into my ear. My blood. I stared up at her through the veil of my hair. “There’s nothing I can say to you,” I said. “Except this: I never stopped looking for you.”
She hissed, her face contorting as though she was trying to hold back, but couldn’t quite. “Liar. You’ve always been a liar.”
She knows. She knows you’ve always lied.
I swallowed the blood in my mouth. Cleared my throat. “Then kill me. I deserve it.” And with stinging slowness, I leaned my head back, exposing the length of my neck.
When my eyes caught sight of the upside-down ghosts, I realized they’d been jeering us on this whole time, but I’d stopped hearing them. And I saw something else, too: the outlines of furniture. Of beer glasses. Of the ghostly world that only they saw.
The valerian was wearing off.
“Look at me,” Tamzin said from above me. “I want you to look at me.”
My eyes drifted back to her, and I saw her as though through fog.
She hovered over me, the Backbiter at the ready, her face wet from her eyes to her chin. At some point she’d gotten a cut at her hairline that bled in a tiny line down her forehead. Her hands shook, the chain clinking as they did, and suddenly a small form flashed into view, landed on my chest, hunching down as though to take the blow.
Loki.
He wouldn’t move, his claws digging in, and he growled, low and protective.
A moment later, a familiar voice said: “Stop!” Then his little face appeared beside Tamzin—Thom the soldier boy—but he looked even more real to me than she did. Where before he’d been hazy, semi-transparent, now his face had color, contours. “Don’t hurt her.”
Loki had gone to get the boy.
O
ther faces appeared, all the children from Mary King's Close. They gathered around us, plucking at Tamzin’s clothing that they couldn’t really touch, their voices overlapping each other:
“She’s nice.”
“Let her go.”
“The red-haired miss is funny.”
“I want to play with the cat.”
Tamzin’s eyes went wide, first on the cat and then on the soldier boy and, in a sweep, the other children.
Jonet came forward, hands clasped, eyes on Tamzin. “She said she would get us out of the trap.”
In a blink, Tamzin’s chin crumpled in the same way it used to when she was overcome with emotion, but now she had learned to fight it. Correct it. Her face took on that fierce mask as her eyes returned to me.
She squeezed the Backbiter, fingers turning white, even as Loki remained warm and solid on my chest, refusing to move. With a snarl, she sat up, flung the weapon across the room. It clanged against the far wall and hit the floor, rolling hollowly until it came to a stop near the candles.
When her eyes found mine again, she pressed them shut. Forced herself to stand, swiping the nightstick up as she did. All the children watched her, faces lifting. “One Rathmore’s down here, and the other knows you’re here. You have ten minutes before the madness takes you or he does.”
“Tam,” I whispered, a frenetic sort of wildness pulling at my mind. It was the madness Milonakis had talked about.
She’d already half-turned away. When she paused, it was the first time she’d stopped to listen to me.
“Come with me,” I said.
Her head gave the slightest shake, chin lowering. I may have heard her scoff. “Don’t you ever come back to Edinburgh, witch. I’ll kill you if you do.”
And then she was gone again, her bootsteps tapping over the stone as she left.