by Lana Popovic
Lovely Mara all alight, surrounded by the constellation of her own living stars.
No, this particular glowing linger betokened something else—traces of the gleam still wound around mortals that someone of Mara’s blood had loved. He recognized it as an echo of the protection she’d cast over her clan, like a fluid sheath of light. Her people had all bathed in its reflected glow, the way the moon basked in borrowed sun.
As far as he could tell, there were only two of them, and not so far away. Somewhere close to his grasp, sheltered by Cattaro’s blackened walls.
And he wanted them both, for his own. It was only fair that she see familiar faces turned against her, as he had. The treacherous eyes of someone that her blood had once trusted and loved.
He called Vera over to him, gripped her by the shoulders, and met her clotted gaze. “I have one last thing left for you to do, pet,” he told her. “Let me use your eyes again. I’ll show you the way to them, and you’ll show me what you find. And then after that, perhaps we’ll have our very first taste of something sweet.”
NEV STILL VISITED the café every other night, missing the cocoon of its kitchen. Maybe it was macabre of her, given the brutal way Jasmina had died here, but it somehow still felt like the safest place she knew. And the only place where she still felt close to them, even now when baking too many macarons barely made a dent in her pain. If that wasn’t the very fucking definition of rock bottom, Nev didn’t know what was.
It had been weeks, and Riss and Lina were still nowhere to be found. Then to make matters worse, Niko and Luka had up and vanished too. That they had gone without bothering to tell her where—or at least Jovan, for fuck’s sake, and he was practically the girls’ grandfather—had left her permanently stranded between helpless fury and devastation. She couldn’t even imagine how their father felt.
How dare they, she fumed to herself, whipping batter into a lacy froth. How dare they pretend that Riss and Lina had been theirs to save alone? As if Nev hadn’t spent years with them and Jasmina, laughing and arguing and fighting over scraps of sweetened dough.
They had been hers, too, damn it. They had been like family, and she missed all three of them so much.
Not even tugging her father’s network of strings had yielded a single useful lead. Every morning, she visited Jovan for news, but there was none. Watching him flounder so badly, lose himself to grief, broke her heart over and over. He had been so stalwart before he lost his girls, craggy as a mountain. And now more of him crumbled away each day.
Damn it, why couldn’t they just fucking call?
Cursing, she flung the wooden spoon against the counter so hard the handle snapped in two. Immediately chagrined to have marred Jasmina’s perfect kitchen, she bent to pick up the chips that had splintered off.
And all the hairs on her neck stood up in unison.
Someone was behind her, she was sure. Someone standing very still.
She straightened slowly, heart leaping to her throat. Her mind flashed to the image of Jasmina left bloodless on the floor, the tiles around her violently scarlet. What kind of reckless idiot was she, to keep coming back here alone? What had possessed her to come here at all?
But that wasn’t how she was going out, she decided in the next instant. Absolutely fuck that noise.
Instead she lunged for the stand of butcher knives, sliding one out and brandishing it as she whirled around.
It was just a girl, and the pounding fear left her like a receding flood. Just a girl about her age, looking more than a little ragged around the edges. Her eyes were cast down, her hair lank and loose, and her yellow spaghetti-strap top was torn and smeared with dirt. Concern crept in to replace the fear. Maybe something bad had happened to her. Maybe someone had hurt this girl. It wouldn’t have surprised Nev a bit.
It was so hard to be safe in this world.
“Hey,” Nev said, lowering the knife and tucking the hand that held it behind her. “Sorry about—this—you just startled me. How did you get in here? Are you okay? I can call—”
The girl lifted her head and looked at her with eyes that swam with oil. And as she lashed out at Nev, the knife clattered behind her to the floor.
JOVAN HAD FAILED all three of his girls. And each night he plumbed the depths of the failure, until it ate away at him like an acid no amount of fine brandy could dilute.
Perhaps if he hadn’t spent so many years chasing Jasmina’s love, it might have turned out differently. He could have kept the three of them close, sheltered them from all their daily storms. But she had been so singular, such an artwork of a woman. Irresistible to even the untrained eye. And he had been a man long unaccustomed to accepting no.
Even once they had settled into being friends—to the extent that a man could be true friends with a woman he had never learned how not to love—he could feel that she held back. Some days he could barely stand to see the toll that life took on her, and the one she exacted in turn on both her daughters. Especially his deft and darling Iris, so much more like her mother than she knew.
And now one of them was dead, and the other two—who knew? He couldn’t imagine that they would abandon him like this, without even a farewell word. Not his devoted Iris, not Malina in all her sweetness. If they hadn’t reached out by now, he didn’t think they ever would.
Another slug of brandy, more liquid fire down the gullet. On the better nights, it did burn away the roughest of the edges, and fill his mind with too much smoke to think.
If only he could see them just one more time. He had thought he’d have what was left of his life to teach Iris, to pass on both the gallery and the studio to her if she wanted them. That much would have been enough.
And instead he hadn’t even had the chance to say good-bye.
His hand curled around the cut-glass tumbler, arthritis spearing through his knuckles. Please, Lord, he prayed, I know we don’t speak all that often, nor do these old feet carry me to your house as often as they should. But if you’d spare me just one more moment with them, I swear I’ll make it up to you. Some fine new glass, whatever needs repairs. Whichever of your monasteries that could use these old man’s hands can have me.
And when a hand landed on his shoulder, his last thought was of awestruck wonder that his prayer had been answered.
Twenty
Malina
NIKO WAS STILL CURLED DAMP AROUND ME WHEN I SCRAMBLED awake, heart shuddering in my chest. For a moment, I couldn’t even pinpoint what was wrong. While she slept on, I propped myself up on my elbows, eyes narrowing as I listened hard.
And there it was. A rasping, slithering hiss. The hungry prowl of something just beyond our windows—that same sound I’d heard through Mama, beneath her winter gale. The sound that meant Herron, faint and distant, as if carried on the wind from miles and miles away.
But it wasn’t distant now. It was nearly here, slouching over our threshold.
I leaped out of bed so gracelessly and hard that my soles stung when they met the parquet. The thunk of my landing startled Niko awake too. “Lina?” she mumbled, grimacing. “What is it?”
Instead of answering, I flicked on the ornate stained-glass lamp on the vanity table and nearly tumbled into the mirror, terrified I’d find both eyes suddenly brown. Leached of winter.
But the gray in my hourglass eye was exactly as it had been when I went to sleep.
“Lina,” Niko said again, and now she sounded properly afraid, wings ruffled in readiness for panicked flight. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, tugging on the clothes Niko had tugged off me and tossed to the floor. “But something’s outside, I can hear it. I have to go wake Mara.”
Niko scrambled off the bed, winding the sheets around her. “I’m coming with you.”
“No, princess.” I crossed over to her and caught her little face, pressed a fierce kiss onto her forehead. “If something’s out there, I can’t be worried about you next to me. You stay here, and bolt the door. I’ll come
get you as soon as I’m sure it’s safe. Okay? Please?”
Whatever she saw in my face convinced her, for once. She gave me a shaky nod and let me go. I heard the bolt slide into place once I shut the door behind me, and I allowed myself a moment of deep, low-pitched relief that whatever happened, at least she’d be secure.
Outside, I nearly ran into someone, stifling a scream. But it was only Izkara, prowling the chalet in her nighttime rounds, partly shifted to brown bear.
“What are you doing out here?” she barked at me. “It’s late. I could have clawed—”
“I think something’s out there,” I began, frantic. “I think—”
As if on cue, the screams began.
WE’D THOUGHT WE had so much more time. Mara had been so sure Herron wouldn’t strike while still vulnerable, before the last of the winter in Mama thawed.
But even she couldn’t know everything, just like Luka had suspected. She hadn’t sensed Herron coming because he hadn’t come.
But his soldiers had, and they were what I’d heard.
Now they swarmed in through the Great Hall’s windows and skylights, shattering them all. Opening us up from every side. The screaming blotted out any other sound. Blood-curdling as it was, it was almost a mercy. It left room for nothing but survival, and even before I started singing it’d whipped everyone into frenzy. With Izkara and Amaya on either side, I roamed the balconies circling the atrium, my heart knocking against my chest like a battering ram as I belted out the fighting song.
“Rise up, rise up, defend your blood!
Rise up, rise up, defend your blood!
Rise up, rise up, rise up!”
Even with Mara’s help—I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her bolstering me—the chanting quality of it didn’t seem loud enough, or anything enough.
Nowhere near enough to stave off the chaos raging around us.
There weren’t so many of them, from what I could tell, not compared to two hundred of us. Maybe eight or nine. But they were strong, and so wrong, beyond hideous. All of them looked like they’d started out human, but they moved like they’d been spliced from grafts of hell. In stutters and spurts, here and then there, black streamers trailing behind them.
Clinging to balustrades and flinging themselves from the balconies, landing like they had no weight.
Joints bending at angles that should have snapped both tendon and bone.
The jellied, smoky black of their eyes flitting from one target to another.
By the time I reached the Great Hall, the fixture that had hung from the eaves lay in a sparkling glass ruin at the center. The stink of the room was worse than terrible. Blood, sweet rot, and a reek both sharp and feral. Some of the daughters had already fallen, lying crumpled like bloodied, broken dolls.
The others were even worse—they had black eyes themselves now, and they trailed behind the invaders like lost shadows.
I couldn’t see Mara, but her roses crept everywhere. An airborne tangle of thorn, flower, and branching roots, carefully cradling the taken daughters so they couldn’t do any harm, and seeking out the invaders to strangle. But where they touched the creatures, her will burst into flame on the vine. It hurt them, too—they let out monstrous, bellowing shrieks at decibels that would have shredded still-human throats—but it didn’t kill them.
Like a force dashing up against an equal and opposite force.
One of the creatures had Naisha pinned to the wall, a bulge-veined hand around her neck. She was shuddering against its grip like a strobe light, snatching desperately at my song. I could see her straining to grasp the serpent form, but she couldn’t sustain it. Not with something oil-eyed and ravenous bearing down on her.
I almost turned away, couldn’t bear to look, sure we had lost her. But then a snarling Izkara materialized behind them in her panther shape and sank massive yellow jaws into the creature’s neck. Ripping its head nearly halfway off in a spray of blood and black smoke. I was so close I felt the spatter of its blood, its strange, wrong smell. Acetone, mold, and burning rubber.
“Lina!”
I wheeled away from the carnage, terror ripping through me. Niko was racing down the left wing of the spiraled stairs, something clutched in her hand.
Vials, I realized. She was bringing me those oils she’d made, to try to help me sing.
She was trying to help me, like everyone always did. And now she’d die for it.
Because one of the creatures was a half step behind her. Something that had once been a strong, pretty, tan-skinned girl, now demon-eyed and webbed with black veins bulging across its face. It caught Niko, whipped her around, let its jaw unhinge horribly wide. Oily black poured from its mouth, reaching for her with snaking tendrils.
My entire world flared impossibly wide and then narrowed, in a single moment, needling to a focal point.
Funneling into “no.”
No, there was no one to help me. Not Mara, not Riss, not Niko. Especially not Niko, who needed me most.
No, I wouldn’t let this happen. This wasn’t the world I wanted. And so I wouldn’t allow it to exist.
NO.
I didn’t realize I was shrieking “NO” at the very top of my lungs until I heard the hall reverberating with the sound of my own voice. I abruptly, thoroughly understood why the full-gleamed could do what they did, why they left an imprint on the world. Why Mara could weave a spell into the fabric of the universe with her infinite bloom, knot it into reality with her black roses. And why Iris could undo it, tear it down with the force of her wisteria.
Their gift was the gleam made flesh, by the shattering, torrential cascades of their powerful will.
That cavern inside me suddenly loomed so large I couldn’t believe I’d ever failed to find it. I was in it, just like it was in me. All those stalactites, all that sharp—it was mine to use, to inflict on the world. To chisel it to the shape of my will.
My far-mother and my sister might have had flowers for will, but I had sharpened stone.
This time when I let loose the song, it echoed inhumanly loud, as if we all stood inside a cave. My cave. And it swept up Kisuna—Bee Girl, who stood nearest to Niko and the demon—in its colossal, thundering wave of sound. Her swarms took vivid shape, burst into winged, buzzing life. They surrounded both the monster and Niko, lifting them up like a levitating chain.
Then some parted from the swarm and flew free, to gently set Niko down in one of the atrium’s empty balconies, hovering around her like a living shield.
The rest ravaged the demon, stung it as close to death as it could get.
Once it finally dropped, I could see from its misshapen, bloated face how badly they’d devastated it.
Kisuna wasn’t the only one fighting back, spurred by my stony song. Oriell guarded Luka in the eastern corner of the Great Hall, with strikes of a chitinous scorpion tail that had fleshed out behind her. A drop glistened at its barbed end, and even in the middle of the wreckage and the gore, I felt a burst of fierce pride for her.
She’d managed to turn her gleam into venom.
And Ylessia was glorious. Her fiery firmament had turned to blistering weapons whipping in orbit around her. There was a strange distortion near her, like an absence of light in midair, as if that specific place was crushing into itself, wadding up into a ball. It wasn’t until one of the creatures lost an arm, a leg, and then simply disappeared into it that I realized she’d somehow conjured a tiny black hole.
But the things were either fearless or too inhuman to bother much with fear. From what I could tell, their own fallen meant nothing to them. One of them stutter-stepped under Ylessia’s defenses, and before any of us could react, gripped her head and wrenched it sideways.
Snapping her neck.
I watched the defiant light ebb from her eyes, and remembered how she’d come to me to offer her friendship what felt like years ago. How hard she’d worked to teach herself to gleam. How much I’d liked the deep dimples in her cheeks when she smiled freely an
d not just prettily.
How she’d started to feel like actual family.
One of the creatures leaped from an upper balcony and landed on top of the pile of shattered glass—almost right on top of us. Even with the blood smeared all over her and the hanks of sweaty, marigold hair plastered across her face, I would have recognized Nev anywhere.
She angled her head at me, and for a helplessly hopeful moment, I thought some part of her recognized me, too.
Then she hissed at me through blood-smeared teeth, narrowing those oily eyes that had been so blue and bright with mischief. She did recognize me—enough to see that I was the source of the daughters’ newfound power.
And that I should be the next to die.
Nev, my Nev, was coming to kill me.
My song faltered, sputtered, and then dissolved, even as Amaya stepped in front of us and spooled out her sapphire flame to drive Nev back.
Izkara caught me before I could collapse. “You have to keep singing,” she hissed into my ear. “We won’t be enough, not without you. Azareen—Malina—fight for your kin and sing!”
I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. There was nothing left in me.
I sank down, barely feeling my legs fold under me. If it had still been up to me then, we would all have died. There were only three of the creatures left, including what-was-once-Nev, but we’d lost so many.
But they didn’t have their king with them. While we still had our queen, with her knights by her side.
Mara stalked down the length of the hall, all in billowing black. Her hair looked longer than it had been—but maybe that was just the corona it made, borne up by her briar. Dunja and Mama walked on either side of her. Dunja in her snowy white, Mama tangled black with roses.