The crones’ voices rose together, along with their magic. The pixies dashed themselves against an invisible dome just inches from where Avery laid prone and vulnerable. The bubble nearly filled the Cavern. It was so thick with flying things beyond the dome that Avery could barely see through the swarm, but something definitely moved through them. Something larger, with trailing vines.
“Don’t lay there like a lump, boy,” one of the crones said. “Get on your feet!”
“Y-yes ma’am,” Avery muttered, and did so with some effort. Aiden and Boris had both gotten to their feet as well.
“We can’t let them leave the Caves,” Aiden said.
“That’s not our job,” Rita told him.
Aiden and Avery both turned to look at the old woman, shocked.
“Well then what is?” Avery asked.
“Our job is to protect the Throne,” an elegant Chinese crone said calmly. “This is not the true battle.”
“It… looks a lot like the battle,” Chloe said.
Rita snorted. “No. This is barely a skirmish. Bailey’s fighting the real fight.”
“What?” Chloe asked. “Do you know where she is?”
Avery looked at the mandala. “Is she in Faerie?”
“No,” Rita said.
“Then where is she?” Avery demanded. “We should go after her. We can help—”
“No, you can’t,” Rita said calmly. “And you don’t need to. I assure you, she has plenty of help on the way.”
Avery began to press for more, but Rita turned her eyes upward, and her lips moved as she rejoined the rest of the crones in keeping the protections around them alive.
“There’s nothing more we can do,” Chloe said. “It’s never a good idea to ignore the advice of the crones. Especially Rita. Just… try to recover some strength while you have the chance.”
“What about the people out there?” Avery asked, pointing toward the entrance and the weakened army of practitioners beyond it. They’d be fish in a barrel.
Chloe shook her head. “Rita’s right. That’s not our fight. We have to trust them to do everything they can.”
Frustrated, Avery balled his hands into fists, gripping his wand until his knuckles ached. But Chloe was right, of course. And if the Crones’ magic began to fail, it would be up to the rest of them to take up the slack. So he found a clear patch of ground to sit down on, and did his best to drive out the buzzing, clinking sound of armored pixies around them, and the shrill sound of their high pitched battle cries. He turned his attention inward, and tried to gather his strength.
Come on, Bailey, he thought, hoping that wherever she was, she might hear him. I know you can do this—whatever it is you mean to do.
Chapter 48
Piper’s eyes grew wide as the entrance to the Caves erupted with faeries.
The first to come were a swarm of glittering… bugs of some sort, that immediately dove for those nearest the entrances. Wards flashed and frigid wind tore into the swarm almost immediately as everyone able to wield any degree of battle magic brought that power to bear.
Piper had none of that power. Instead, she watched the world around her with two views—one that her eyes gave her, of an ensuing chaos as larger creatures, including faerie sorcerers like Mr. Dove, and whip-thin knights wielding glass-like swords; and one that her mind provided, a field of lights still diffused by the effects of the opened breach but nonetheless still accessible to her.
That second world she used to her advantage, as best she could.
“There’s an opening to the right… I mean, north, of the Caves,” she told the hunter—the hunter, for God’s sake, she could barely look at the man—so that he could relay the message over his walkie-talkie.
“Shore up north quadrant,” he said.
“From the back—close to us, I mean,” Piper said.
“Pull from east line,” the hunter relayed.
She didn’t know his name. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. Maybe, after all this was over, if they didn’t immediately resume their attack on everyone with any degree of magic, she’d find out.
There was a distracting cluster of people with magic far to the east, behind her—well away from the Caves. Gavin was with them. Those people barely had any magic to speak of. They wouldn’t be able to protect him, and he had no defense against things like what she was seeing.
For the moment, the lines held. Between unrelenting magic and a hail of iron tipped bolts and iron lined bullets, there were injured people on the field, but if there were any dead she couldn’t tell yet. That wasn’t likely to last. More and more Faerie creatures entered the fray, leaping almost carelessly over the fallen ones. They seemed endless—and there were only so many bullets, so many bolts, and so much magic.
“We won’t be able to hold out long,” she said, more to herself than anyone else.
But the hunter next to her put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t even think like that. Just focus. Tell me where the holes are.”
Piper blinked at the man, shocked, and then nodded once. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Uh… its thin on the left and toward us… south east.”
He relayed the message, and people began moving.
Piper licked her lips, watching with both sets of eyes. After a moment, though, she asked him, “What’s your name?”
The hunter glanced down at her briefly. A second later, he answered. “Bruce. Bruce Lordes. You?”
“Piper Spencer,” Piper said. “Are you afraid?”
“Of course,” he told her.
“Me, too.”
“I figured.”
Funny, Piper thought. She hadn’t expected he would be, for some reason. He didn’t show it. Then again, neither was she—or at least, she was trying not to.
At that particular moment, she had the crazy thought that they were, somehow, not all that different. It was oddly… hopeful, given that they were standing together facing the end of the world.
Chapter 49
Maybe this world was more under Bailey’s control than Mab’s—but that didn’t mean Mab was weak here.
They had clashed with cosmic forces. Raw, untamable magic that neither of them so much directed and controlled as unleashed toward the other. Bailey had the home ground advantage—if she hadn’t, she was certain it she wouldn’t have lasted as long as she did.
Time and time again, Bailey attempted to simply eject Mab from this world and back into Faerie. It wasn’t possible. As long as Bailey was here, the door to this place was open, and pushing Mab out became a contest of raw power, where they were evenly matched. Bailey wasn’t going to win this by arm wrestling.
Instead, she attempted to change the rules of the contest.
Every fundamental essence was in this place—not merely elemental powers, but the distilled natures of existential experience. When she reached into the fabric of the place and grasped for a new weapon, she found the sharp longing for a far away lover that made the heart ache, and struck with that. Mab was thrown off balance, but not for long. She cloaked herself in the first kiss of a lover returned, and then countered with innocence lost too young. Bailey barely managed to parry with trust regained after a betrayal.
In time, Bailey lost her sense of form. Once she was deeply engaged in the chess-like fight of one-upmanship, and no longer was able to be distracted by her physical presence here, she simply didn’t have one—she became a formless, fundamental current of raw causality. Mab, likewise, was no longer the beautiful figure, but a raging storm of power and darkness.
In this timeless plane, it was impossible to say how long they fought. Maybe for seconds; maybe for centuries. All that Bailey knew was that it became clear at some point that there was no way to win, even if she didn’t actually lose. They were, at best, stalemated eternally. There was no principle in creation without it’s opposite. There was no essence available which couldn’t be subverted and transmuted into something else.
When Bailey eventually called the draw—
merely be remembering herself and finding, in the next moment, that she was again (or, maybe, still) standing in the white forest—Mab didn’t press an advantage, but rather resumed her place before Bailey. She was as beautiful as before—almost.
The clash had taken it’s toll on them both. Bailey’s weakness wasn’t structural in nature—she didn’t have aching muscles, and she wasn’t short of breath. She didn’t even feel the fatiguing burn of too much magic. Instead, she felt the slightest sense of… being less-than, in some indefinable way. As if she’d used up part of her essential self in the duel.
It was alarming. If they went on long enough, would she be spent entirely? And if that happened, what became of her?
“You… are beginning to see,” Mab said. “There is a cost to this place. Timeless and eternal as it is, if you linger too long, it will consume you.”
Time, Bailey thought. It’s always a matter of time. Of never having enough of it.
In the midst of the thought, though, she heard Anita’s voice.
If you rush—if you feel as though there is not enough time—then our enemies will have the advantage.
Was it possible Anita had seen all of this?
Something Itaja said came back to Bailey as well. About how… before Itaja had tainted Faerie, it had been a formless world. One of unity, until they began to crave separateness.
Bailey blinked slowly as she realized what Mab was distracting her from. Bailey didn’t need to fight her at all.
“It’s a distraction,” she sighed. She wanted to laugh. “All of this… this isn’t real. It’s another ruse—just like Faerie. It may as well be another Coven Grove.”
“A bold assertion,” Mab crooned. “Can your world spare the time it will take you to prove it? My children overrun them even as we speak. See—I will show you.”
Part of the landscape around them took on color, and then new shape, and ultimately resolved itself into a battlefield seen from above. Faerie creatures ran rampant before the entrance to the Caves. There was a cloud of something that looked alive. All along the path there were fallen creatures alongside fallen people.
“No,” Bailey said. She looked away from the image. It may as well have been an illusion. “If this place is truly timeless… then that can’t be happening now. There is no ‘now’ here. Isn’t that right, Mab?”
Mab’s laugh was like glass breaking. “Is it, little queen?”
“You always answer my questions with questions when you don’t want to risk being unable to lie,” Bailey said softly. “I believe that will happen, or… did happen, maybe. But the moment I came to this place, I stepped out of time. It’s not real. None of it… not time, not… the place itself… not you. Not really. This isn’t the real you, Queen Mab.”
Bailey closed her eyes.
“It is too late,” Mab breathed down Bailey’s cheek, her breath icy and electric.
“No,” Bailey whispered. Not as a response—but as a command.
She sat on the Throne. This was her world, for the moment.
And for the moment, she told it, “No.”
Chapter 50
She didn’t need to open her eyes, but it felt familiar and comfortable, so she did.
The snow, the tall trees, and indeed, Mab, were gone. In it’s place was the white emptiness she’d first seen, before Mab chased her to the place and convinced her of what she was seeing. It had a different quality now, like an empty canvas.
This was the real place. She could sense it, somehow, as if this was always what it was meant to be—the only thing it could be. A beginning. A blank page.
“Itaja?” She asked, tentatively. She wasn’t quite sure what made her call out to the ancient sorceress. Instinct, maybe.
“What will you paint?” Itaja asked. She was beside Bailey, but formless, as Bailey was, now that Bailey had embraced the truth of where she was.
“It’s perfect as it is,” Bailey said. “It’s the way it should be. It’s… the rest that’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“Right… wrong. What are these things to you?”
“I have to undo what you did,” Bailey said. “I think it’s the only way to put things back like they were—the way they were meant to be.”
“If you must,” Itaja said. “It is none of my concern now.”
“It is,” Bailey countered. “If it wasn’t, why else would you leave the trail for me to follow?”
Itaja laughed quietly. “Perhaps I am a consummate housekeeper.”
“I want to make the world better,” Bailey said after a moment.
“Then do so,” Itaja said. “It is your right. What you paint upon this canvas will become the very laws of creation.”
“How did you come to it? The first time, I mean?” Bailey asked.
“I followed the one who came before me,” Itaja answered. “How else?”
“Who was that?”
“His name is long lost, even to me. When I met him, he did not speak. Or she. Or… it. Does it matter?”
“I suppose not,” Bailey sighed. “I just wish I had those mistakes to learn from.”
“Are you so certain that you do not?”
“I…” Bailey frowned, and realized that she was alone. If Itaja had ever been there to begin with, she was gone now.
What she painted here would become the laws of creation. She could, if she wanted, change anything. She could do it right. As Mab said, whether she’d meant it as an honest suggestion or just a temptation, Bailey could if she so chose make the world perfect.
But Itaja had tried to change the world. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to envision the consequences. Was Bailey any wiser? She didn’t know.
It was lonely here.
Maybe she did it on purpose or maybe it was an accident—a call from a deeper part of her heart. But as Bailey ruminated, even for that short moment, on the emptiness of the place, a warm, familiar hand took hers.
She knew it just from the touch. And her heart keened with aching.
“Mom?”
“Bailey,” Wendy Robinson said. “My beautiful Bailey-Bee. Look at you.”
Bailey turned, and the act of doing so granted Wendy form. She was as Bailey remembered her. Plain to most people, perhaps, but perfect to Bailey’s eyes. “Mom… I… I miss you. I miss you all the time.”
“I know,” Wendy said, her eyes sad even as they sparkled with pride. “I do, my little one. I’m here now.”
Maybe she was, or maybe she wasn’t. Bailey wasn’t sure that she cared about the difference. Except…
“I don’t know what to do, Mom,” Bailey said. “I thought I did but… what if I choose wrong?”
“What does your heart say?” Wendy asked. “Have you listened?”
“My heart?” Bailey laughed. “My heart is the problem. I want… I want to bring you back. You, and Daddy. I want to make things like they were before, when we were together, and I was happy. Before all of… this.”
Wendy regarded her with those eyes that could never have conveyed anything but kindness. If she told Bailey to follow her heart, then Bailey would do it—she would rewrite the world and bring her parents back. Make it so that they never died, even.
But Wendy didn’t tell her that. “Little one,” she said, her tone gentle, as her warm, soft hand squeezed Bailey’s, “that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. You know that. I’m still here. So is your father.” Wendy looked over Bailey’s shoulder, and smiled.
Bailey’s hear leapt, and she turned to see Ryan there, hale and healthy, his hands in the pockets of his kaki pants, his plaid shirt pressed, his hair as thin as it was when he’d passed. “Hey, Bee.”
Bailey ran to him—flew to him, and threw her arms around him. “I’m so sorry I was gone, Daddy.”
“Shh.” Ryan put his arms around her and held her for a moment. “Now, now. You said what you needed to, and I heard you.”
“I didn’t,” Bailey said. “I didn’t say enough.”
“No one ever does, Bee,”
Ryan said. He held her a moment longer before he let her go and held her at arms length. “Look at you. A sight for sore eyes.”
Bailey basked in the warmth of them. There was so much she had to say, and she had an eternity to say it if she wanted.
“This… isn’t a place people were meant to come to, Bee,” Ryan said. “You’re here to do something, aren’t you?”
“I have time,” Bailey said. “All the time.”
Wendy’s eyebrows pinched together, and she brushed Bailey’s hair behind her ear, smiling sadly. “Little Bee… you can’t stay here. Neither can we. We only came because Anita showed us the way, and the door was open. It still is, Bailey. You do have time. But do you really want to spend it here? Back there you have your friends, and that young man who’s so fond of you. Anita says he’s rather handsome.”
“Aiden,” Bailey said. She smiled. “He is handsome.” She glanced at Ryan. “Daddy’s met him.”
“He’ll do,” Ryan admitted. “He’s got a fine heart.”
“And there’s Chloe,” Wendy said. “And your… your other father.”
Bailey’s throat grew tight. If she willed it, that pain would go away, but she realized she didn’t want it to. Not because she liked it, but because she knew it was a good feeling—something from the heart.
And that was her answer.
The world wasn’t perfect. It hadn’t been, perhaps, even before Itaja pushed it out of balance. There was pain. But there was love, too. Maybe all of that was because of whoever had painted the canvas before Itaja did. Maybe it was because of the one before him, or her, or… whoever it had been. Maybe, in a place without time, or space… there was no difference.
“I’m always going to miss you,” Bailey told her parents. “I feel like it’s going to hurt forever.”
“Not everything that hurts is bad for you, Bee,” Ryan said.
“And it won’t be forever,” Wendy added. “We’ll see each other again. Not soon, I hope—not for you, at least. But one day.”
“How do I know you’re really here?” Bailey asked.
Her parents smiled. “You don’t. Not yet. But you will.”
Witching for a Miracle (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 7) Page 20