by Lana Popovic
Amusement rilled through him, alien after its long absence, more welcome than chilled wine. Perhaps this little doe fancied herself a horned buck. Perhaps she styled herself after the warriors of her clan.
And then she tilted her head and spoke to him, lifting a hand in question.
The words were garbled nonsense, no language he’d ever heard—at least before they filtered through the viscous lens of the Lightless in his mind. His constant companions fell upon the words like carrion birds, gnawing away the useless flesh of sound and leaving only the clean skeleton of meaning behind.
“Are you hurt?” she was saying to him. “Do you need help?”
If the rest were anything like her, this new world was much softer than it had any right to be.
Smiling, he advanced on her.
“I need no help, little sweetling,” he replied in his own tongue, and he could see her fear finally catch a proper hold, like brushfire breathing oily smoke. “But a powerful many years have passed over me since my last sup. And I do need all that light you hold.”
She couldn’t have understood him, but whatever she heard in his voice must have been warning enough. She whirled on one fleet foot, preparing to launch herself back into the trees.
But she was just a girl, and he the living dark.
He caught her easily by that thick, healthy braid—marveling at its density as it slid silky through his fist—and with a brutal yank whipped her back against his chest. Her bracelets flashed silver as she flung up a hand to fend him off. Through his eyes, the moment stretched languorously long, and he had ample time to count the little dangling charms. A kitten, a ribbon folded into a loop, and round, twin somethings the Lightless called boxing gloves.
Then he snaked an arm around her to pin down her own flailing arms, leaving her time for one shrill shriek before he clamped his other hand over her mouth. For a moment he simply held her as she strained to break free, her panting breaths damp against his palm, her skin sun-warmed from her walk. She felt so sweetly female, curves and softness merged with muscle. With his cheek pressed against her hair, he could finally smell true skin and sweat beneath the miasma of perfume.
It reminded him of Mara, and for a savagely bitter moment he wondered if he would ever shed the memory of her scent.
“Shh,” he murmured to the struggling girl. “It won’t hurt like anything you fear.”
Brushing her earlobe with his lips, he exhaled a long, slow breath. Borne along it, black tendrils of smoke extended like inky tentacles, quivering with hunger as they quested the air.
Then they plunged into the whorl of her ear, and the Lightless began their gnashing feast on this woman’s assorted joys.
She loved to dance, he saw; she loved to spar. Those boxing gloves that swung in miniature around her wrist were made to protect the fine bones of her fists, as she jabbed and struck with fierce abandon. She brought stray cats home whenever she found them, made them her own or found them other homes. And at night and in the early morning, when the water was the coolest, he tasted how much she loved to swim.
She was no saint, this girl, as no one was. Searching deeper, he found a baser kind of love, for rumors she invented and then fanned gleefully to life.
In the meantime, the Lightless had ramped up their all-consuming clamor, until his head felt full of hordes of bats shrieking for more, and yet more still. But he was them, and they were him; to nourish them was what he wanted, just as much as they demanded it. He tipped the girl’s slack head back, unresisting, until he could angle his mouth over hers. Parting her lips into something like a kiss to let the Lightless surge madly down her throat.
Then the culmination of the feast began.
The faces of her beloveds were eaten, one by one. The joy she took in anything, from cool drinks to flushed, impassioned couplings, was chewed and crunched and swallowed whole. He and his companions cracked her soul open wide, and like the jellied marrow from a bone, sucked out all its light.
And with that, she was wholly snuffed.
The Lightless left her in a snaking rush, coiling back into his mouth and settling, sated, into his blood. Full to nearly swooning, he released the girl, turned her around to face him. She swayed on her feet but didn’t fall, though her jaw hung slack and her eyes drooped heavy-lidded. Her braid had unraveled into wisps and waves, and her face gleamed slick with the first wash of tears she’d cried, while she’d still been capable of shedding tears.
In body, she remained alive and hale—as much so as any other mindless, starving thing. But there was no soul left where she had been.
He tipped her chin up until her blank gaze met his, only because the angle demanded it. Dark blots swam across her eyes, jetting from one to the other like black jellyfish.
“It was just as I said, was it not, my sweet and salty Vera?” She’d loved her own name, too—it meant faith—and so now it belonged to him along with everything else. “What’s lost is lost. And if I lied about the hurting, at least you won’t suffer the burden of the memory.” He patted her cheek, fitting his thumb to where her favorite dimple showed when she smiled. She would not smile anymore, but that was as it should be. He remembered exactly where it had been. “Now let’s see if you’ll break some of that bread with me, and share a nibble of your fine meat and cheese.”
Seven
Iris
“SO WHAT DO YOU CALL ALL THIS?” I SWEPT MY FREE HAND out to indicate the sandstone cliffs and buttes that hunched over the shimmering boneyard around us. My other hand was knit loosely through Fjolar’s. I’d found that as long as I maintained skin-to-skin contact with him, I could walk his world comfortably without being overcome by it.
Fjolar didn’t like it, and that was a savage little satisfaction in itself. On the one hand, it galled him to have to tend to my frail mortal self when I wasn’t even properly filling the role he’d brought me here to perform. I might have given him the single gift of those bloomed bones, but even that had drained me quickly. I’d lost his bright smile almost as soon as I won it, once the bloom withered away.
On the other hand, he still enjoyed touching me. Every once in a while, he’d slip up, forget himself, and lightly sweep his thumb over my knuckles as we walked, before remembering what a dull disappointment I was turning out to be and nearly dropping my hand in a snit.
What was worse, even with the full knowledge of all that was wrong here, and despite my forcefully banked fury at him, I couldn’t thwart the slight surging in my belly toward his touch.
But that was all right, I told myself, quelling jabs of guilt. Whatever I betrayed while I was here wouldn’t count if it meant he kept talking to me, even if grudgingly, showing me the true workings of this world until I could find my own way out.
I had to do this. I had to be the courtesan I would have been anyway, to find a way to free myself. Luka would understand. He would.
“It’s called Wadi El Hitan,” Fjolar replied, startling me out of my thoughts. “The Valley of the Whales. And I didn’t call it that; that’s its proper name. Where you come from, it’s in Egypt, a hundred miles or so south of Cairo. It’s where whales lost their legs, where they turned from creatures that walked the dust to ocean-dwellers, eons ago.”
I scoffed. “There’s no way a place on earth looks like this. Everyone would know.”
His mouth quirked a bit, eyes glinting cobalt. “Well, I took some artistic license, of course. I picked the best of it for this replica, and chose what kind of sky I thought you’d like best above it. Was I somehow wrong, yet again?”
“No,” I murmured. “You weren’t. Bones that don’t make sense—but do now that you’ve explained it—and under a sky as impossible as this? It’s perfect.”
It was. I couldn’t have asked for a better kind of morbid.
“I thought you might think so. Do you remember the bone nest?”
I hadn’t thought about the nest for years, but as soon as he mentioned it, the memory sprang so vivid it might have been made ye
sterday. Lina and I had been fourteen or fifteen, maybe, roaming around the little bayside park across the street from our house. That day, we had been foraging for ferns, leaves, and early spring buds. Before I took them to the studio to diagram the fractals they would become in glass, we liked arranging the plants together based on ikebana designs we found online. It was always a stealth operation between us; Mama interpreted any striving toward Japan as a frantic squirming away from her.
I was picking through a still-frosted viburnum shrub, my cheeks glowing with cold—that winter had been unusually chilly and lingering for Cattaro, hanging over the city like a misty hand—when I found it. A nest had tumbled down from one of the surrounding trees, dislodged by a gust, and had tangled with the base of the shrub. Gingerly, I picked it out. It was brittle to snapping from cold, and would have dusted apart like dried flowers from anything but the lightest touch.
Somehow, the speckled eggs inside hadn’t shattered in the fall. And twined through the bramble of grasses, twigs, and caked mud, tiny bones held the structure together like a truss. Some were sharp and slender as toothpicks, and others had the rounded edges of what might once have been minute, hollow skulls lined with little teeth. I couldn’t tell what small animal they had come from. But seeing them there, part of the nest’s essential fabric, chased away the chill. Even as I acknowledged how morbid it was—and kind of cheesy, even—to be so happy to hold the dead nest in my numbed hands, I couldn’t help my joy.
Lina had come to lean over my shoulder then. “Ooh, Riss,” she breathed. “Do you think the eggs are still alive? We could take them home. We could wrap them—”
“No,” I broke in. “I shouldn’t have disturbed it. Let’s leave it all right here.”
Lina had squinted at me, skeptical; I’d never been the one to let scruples get in the way of bringing something scavenged home. But I didn’t want to find out if the eggs were alive. Because they almost certainly weren’t, and knowing for sure would have burst the moment’s fragile magic. It was the potential of it that gripped me, the beauty of new life cupped inside a cradle knit from death.
“How do you know about that?” I whispered to Fjolar, my throat thick with swallowed tears for that moment, for my missing sister. “I never told you that.”
For just a heartbeat, his eyes lingered over my features in that heated way I remembered from when we’d met. “I know many things about you that you never had to say out loud. More than anyone else could know.”
“So does that mean”—my cheeks flared—“does that mean you could read my mind before? When we were connected?” An even worse thought occurred. “Can you still do it?”
His face iced over in an instant. “Not since you fractured the spell. And even then, it wasn’t like I had some script of you. But I could see you, like a collage, or a mosaic of the images that had shaped your mind over the years. There was so much more in there, of course, but I sifted for what I needed to help me build the perfect world for you.” He snorted scornfully. “For all the good it’s done either of us.”
So much more in there, of course. It made me want to unwind my fingers from his—the idea of him roving through my mind like a child with grubby fingers, as if he had the right to be there. Like an invader, or a colonizer.
“And what about Malina?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even, as if the question stemmed from simple curiosity rather than revulsion. “Did you do the same to her?” Somehow, the idea of him rummaging through my sister’s thoughts offended me even more, knowing how she had felt about him from the start.
He shook his head, and I relaxed a fraction. “She was the one who caught my notice first, when she fell in love,” he said. “But when I came to find you both, she was already spoken for. I could have had her anyway—if I had chosen her, the spell would have ousted her earlier love—but I wanted you from the start. Since that silly party, when you tasted like trash brandy and offered to make the Christmas lights into a galaxy for me.” He cast me a barbed glance through pale lashes. “Formalities needed to be observed, but you were always the one I planned to choose.”
I couldn’t help softening slightly at that—until I remembered the cleaving between me and Malina, when we believed the choice of which of us would be sacrificed was truly ours to make. The pounding exhilaration and driving terror of the contest Mara had put us through when we couldn’t decide. The look on my sister’s face the morning she’d found me on the beach, spent and shivering from having given Fjolar too much of what he’d asked for.
And the unselfish way Luka had offered himself to me, the mutual claiming of each other that night in the forest. I’d only started learning what it felt like to love Luka before Fjolar tore me from him. But if I wanted to see him again—to have him back, and my sister by my side—I needed to muffle the rising mutiny inside me.
I forced my shoulders to relax, smoothed my face into earnest openness. “I might not like the way all this was set up, that’s true. But I do like knowing you would have picked me regardless, and spun all this glory up for me. And I . . . I know I’m being a burden, but I’m getting better, I think. And I’d love to see more. Will you show me?”
The fawning, he liked. His eyes lit like candles sparked to life in a dark room, reined-in excitement spreading over the devilishly stark, handsome lines of his features. So that was what it took to wield him. Lies, half lies, and the heart note of a pure truth.
The same things he had done to me, I realized with a start. Well, I could do it too, if it meant he’d trust me enough to tell me whatever he was holding back about this place.
But he didn’t trust me, not yet. He turned away, swallowing, wiping at his mouth with the back of his free hand. “Let’s go, then. We’ll have to walk to the boundary that leads to the next piece of the realm. If you were here only in soul, I could whisk you along with me with just a thought.” His mouth twisted ruefully. “But with you as you are, it’ll have to be a trudge.”
“Sounds about right, doesn’t it?” I teased. “A marathon of trudging: the Iris experience.”
Yet despite his casual disdain, I thought I felt his hand tighten slightly around mine.
WITHOUT THE INDICATORS of reliable shadows, clocks, or a mutable sky, it was almost impossible to keep time as we walked through the bone desert. Every moment blurred into the next in smeary succession.
Then the black gates reared up from the sand as if they had every right to be there.
The strangest part was that until the gates leaped out at us, I hadn’t seen them in the distance. They should have started out as a speck on the horizon, growing larger as we neared. Instead, they simply hadn’t been there at all, right up until they were—wrought-iron both linear and ornate, worked into a gridded framework like a maze, and twined through with ivy vines, elaborate padlocks, and snakes with flicking tongues.
“‘These plants can kill,’” I read from the two signs inlaid into each gate, the stark lettering arranged around a leering skull and crossbones. “Fjolar, what is this?”
“A poison garden.” I heard the hint of a smile in his voice. He was particularly pleased with himself over this one; I’d have to remember that, I thought sourly. Ply him with compliments on his special poison ivy. “Full of the most unruly, tricky plants—ones that burn and maim and prick, that still the heart and steal the breath. All while looking like such pretty things.”
“Oh, I love gardens,” I breathed. “The deadlier, the better. I hope this one has flowers.”
He tipped a wink at me in the daredevil way that still had an effect, deep in the pit of my belly. “Of course it does. Even ones that like to bite, like you.”
I don’t know what I had been expecting as he swung the gate open—a rusty squeal, maybe, or an ominous creak lifted from one of Niko’s favorite horror movies—but instead there was an absolute absence of sound that felt somehow even more unnerving. As if whatever noise the gate should have made had been swallowed by some gaping void.
And over hi
s shoulder, through the opening, I could see the spreading expanse of sparkling sand and jutting bones, a streak of ultraviolet sky pinwheeled with stars. Looking at the mirrored desert beyond the gate made me queasy in a deep-down way, like my mind had been carved up into puzzle pieces and shuffled just slightly out of alignment.
Frowning, I turned to him. “But that’s just more of the same.”
“Only because we haven’t passed through yet. We’re still in this piece of the world, not the neighboring one, and on this side of the seam, this piece is all that exists. Ready to see something else?”
“Ready, sir.” I snapped off a crisp salute. “Lead the way to the bitey flowers, sir.”
He rolled his eyes, fighting a smile. “The mouth on you,” he muttered as he stepped through the gate, tugging me behind him. “Almost enough to make me miss the old days.”
What old days would those be, I wanted to snap, the ones where your brides were too force-fed with love to even think of talking back?
Instead, I swallowed the venom and took a step to follow.
And lost everything with it.
There was no sight, or touch, or smell, or sound. I couldn’t even taste the inside of my own mouth. And now that I couldn’t feel it in a chest I no longer had, or hear it rushing in ears that were long gone, I knew that I’d always kept the fondest company with the beating of my heart. I had to be somewhere, because there was still an “I” to think so in the first place. But beyond the fact that I existed, there was simply nothing else.
I had never imagined such a loneliness.
When Fjolar finally pulled me through—it might have been seconds or lifetimes, or the cascading rush of near-infinite eons later—I was sobbing so hard I thought my heart would burst, and my throat was raw from screams stolen by that void.
For a moment, he watched me guardedly, something close to panic flickering across his face. And I realized, through the tears, that for all the lives he’d culled since the birth of time, he’d likely never seen a living girl cry like this in front of him.