by S. W. Clarke
We did. Loki’s commands came quicker now: five steps, turn left. Twenty-eight steps straight. Another root at the twenty-ninth step. Fifteen more steps, right.
Every time I took a turn at a fork, I scuffed my boot through the dirt to mark my path. I didn’t know if it would matter, but it didn’t hurt.
“Is the key glowing?” Loki asked as we walked.
“No.”
“Is it tugging at you?”
“I’ll tell you if it does.”
“When it does.”
I sighed. “When it does.”
But after ten more minutes, Loki’s feet stopped.
“What is it?” I said.
“A scuff mark from your boot.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Tell me you’re just being you.”
“That’s not mutually exclusive with me telling you the truth, Clem. There’s a mark.”
I ground my teeth. “I thought you were headed away from bad scents.”
“Well, apparently every time I came across a bad scent, it took us back in this direction.”
I didn’t know how long it was until sunrise, but I knew Umbra had to have brought us here after the witching hour. Which meant it had been at least 4 a.m. when we’d started, and we had been walking for most of an hour.
Sunrise would come within the next hour or two, most likely. And then we’d have failed.
“We have to do better,” I said. “Let’s take the other path.”
“The other path doesn’t smell right. It’s boggany.”
“Well, if the boggans are guarding the rod, then the only way to it is through them. Right?”
He sighed. “Follow me. Left turn, thirty-three feet.”
At the end of thirty-three feet, Loki paused us. “This is different.”
“What is it?”
“This turn doesn’t have a harsh angle. It curves.”
“So we’re entering a new area.”
“For better or worse,” he murmured, his feet starting into motion again. “Hand out to the left on the vines. Follow the curve until I tell you otherwise.”
Just as he’d said, the hard angles of the labyrinth had given way to softer ones, and I followed a sinewave for some time, waiting for Loki’s next instruction.
In the interim, I tried not to think about the dream from my childhood. The silhouette in the doorway, the man standing on the threshold to my bedroom. But I couldn’t help it; not in this kind of darkness.
He’d stood there for a time, as though the force of my will had stopped him. Slowed him. Kept him at the door.
It didn’t.
He started forward, came to my bedside. Stared down at me with his leg against the frame, a foreign scent curling into my nose.
And then, by degrees, he’d bent over, inhaled…
“Clem,” Loki said. “Stop.”
I stopped, my left hand still out. “What is it?”
He didn’t answer. I could tell every ounce of him strained to perceive something—with his ears or nose. Probably both. “The scent is stronger. And…”
When he trailed off, my heart started a staccato beat. “And what?”
The cackling hit the air with all the force of a firecracker, a falsetto spreading the darkness and clawing its way into my ears. It resounded all around.
Two seconds later, silence.
Something touched my leg, and I nearly kicked it away before Loki whispered beside me, “It’s me.”
“I know that laugh,” I breathed. Apparently it was common to their species.
“boggan?”
“boggan.”
I didn’t know if it was aware of us. I didn’t know if that was a normal nighttime boggan noise. And I didn’t know—
White light flared ahead, offering a brief view of the sky and walls around me. It was coupled with a crack, like lightning, not far off.
“Umbra?” Loki whispered.
“I don’t think so.” I paused. “I didn’t hear a whistle. Did you?”
Loki didn’t answer, which I took as a no.
Liara. It must have been her.
“We can’t head back,” he said.
“You read my mind.” But forward was toward the cackling, toward the light. “Loki?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember: I may be your witch, but I’m also your owner.”
“Is this some weird ploy to make me sacrifice myself for you?”
I took one step forward, then another. “Just the opposite.”
Together we continued on, following the curving walls of the labyrinth, Loki giving instructions so quiet I could hardly hear him.
A second round of cackling broke our quiet, freezing me to the spot. It didn’t stop after two seconds. It went on and on, everywhere all at once, just one voice.
One voice with an incredible set of lungs.
Finally it trailed away into nothing, and Loki whispered, “Clem.”
“Yeah?”
“The key.”
I forced my eyes down, found I could finally see something. There, in my hand, the key glowed a faint green.
“We’re near,” I said, lifting it up. I could swear I felt the faintest pull straight ahead. “The damn thing actually works like Terry said it would.”
I began to follow, the key my guide, Loki beside me.
We hadn’t gone ten feet before footsteps sounded ahead of us. They were coming toward us. Fast. They were running.
Before I could react, a flash of white-blue light blinded me, and I caught a split-second glimpse of a hard-eyed creature pelting straight at me.
Chapter Forty-Six
“Liara?” I whispered.
A second later she blasted right into me, all elbows and knees. We both nearly went over before I caught her arms. “Hey. It’s me.”
“Clementine?” she breathed, her voice hoarse and raspy. “Get out of my way, idiot. I nearly incinerated you.”
I opened my mouth to salvage my ego, but Loki whispered, “Something’s coming. It’s fast. boggan, I think.”
Liara twisted under my hands just as chalkboard nails scratched over the walls and vines in the darkness ahead. She began backing away, trying to wrench herself from my hands, but I knew what a boggan was like.
If it was this close, we couldn’t run. They were too fast.
“Loki,” I whispered, “come.”
He didn’t answer. He just did as I asked.
The moment I felt his body press up against me, I lifted the edge of my cloak and swept it over all three of us.
Please work. Please work. Months of callus-inducing stitching came down to this moment.
A second later, I had a cat and a fae pressed jostling for space around me where there was none to be had. Well, the cloak wasn’t as roomy as I’d hoped—but we were definitely not in the labyrinth anymore. We weren’t anywhere on the Earth.
Technically, we were inside the veil.
“Ow,” I hissed as one of them kicked or pawed me in the shin. “Would you two stop?”
Liara kept struggling. “What the hell is this thing? It smells like witch.”
“Really? We’re doing this already?” I held in a sigh. “Listen, not all of us can smell like flowers. Humans have body odors, a fact which you’d quickly get used to if you’d ever spent an hour in a middle school locker room.”
“Why in gods’ names would I ever enter a middle school locker room?” she snapped.
Loki clambered his way up my prone body, his claws digging in the whole way. “Hm. You’ve done pretty good. A bit tighter than I’d like.”
“I wasn’t planning on a panicked fae,” I groused, fending off another of Liara’s exceptionally pointy limbs.
Loki settled on my chest. “Tell her to cut it out.”
I cleared my throat, catching another of her elbows to my side. “Liara, even my cat’s telling you to chill. Listen, you’re inside my cloak. We’re safe—I think. At least, it doesn’t seem like any boggans are messing with it. We�
�d know.”
A pause, in which Liara stopped moving. I could hear her frantic breaths. “The cloak you were making all semester in Goodbarrel’s class?”
“Bingo. Now if you’ll scoot a little this way, and I scoot a little that way, we can both fit without touching. I know that’s killing you right now.”
She released a huff, but acquiesced in silence.
We readjusted ourselves until we were both seated with our knees pulled up, a hair’s breadth away from each other. I flicked my hand, and a small flame came to life in the tangibly manipulated space.
Liara’s glare was heightened by the flickering flame. Somehow her glower had deepened to almost ghoulish proportions—and she was, of course, looking at none other than me. “This is your fault.”
Her unmitigated hatred for me was almost funny. It was so pure, so undiluted, couldn’t actually take it personally.
So a witch had killed her family. I wasn’t that witch, and if I ever made it down to Hell, I’d take out another witch. But of course, I couldn’t tell Liara any of that.
Instead, I said, “Saving you from the boggan? Yeah, I’ll claim fault for that.”
Her head shook incrementally. “You know what I’m talking about, smooth brain.”
I snorted. “Your insults are on point. Too bad your assumptions aren’t, because I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The boggans. They attacked me.”
“Got a little happy with the pointer finger again?”
“Not once. I hadn’t for a second used my magic.” Her chin lowered, eyes large. “This didn’t happen last year. It’s because you’re here.”
Man, a good part of me was just grateful to be able to see something, even if it was Liara’s hateful face. “Let me get this straight. The boggans attack you and that’s got something to do with me?”
Of course, I suspected she was right. I had suspected it since the moment I’d entered the labyrinth. But Liara made it exceptionally difficult not to argue with her.
“It’s always to do with you,” she hissed. “Now let me out.”
“You want to leave?” I nodded left. “The exit’s that way. Mind the boggans as you re-enter the labyrinth. I’m sure they’ll be as glad to see you as they were when we left.”
Her pretty lip curled, and she blew out air. Began fitfully readjusting her ponytail and didn’t otherwise move.
“So you’re staying,” I said. “Wise. Now you have time to answer my question.”
She kept toying with her hairband. “And what’s that?”
Now it was my turn to lower my chin, fix her with my stare. “What have I ever done to you?”
She shook her head, shifted her eyes off me. “Does that really matter right now?”
“Yeah, because you’re taking your feelings out on me right now.”
Her lip curled. “It’s what you will do, fire witch. We all know fire is a consumptive force.”
“So I’m already guilty?”
“That’s right.”
I nodded at Loki. “How about my familiar here? He’s not so bad. I bet he’d purr if you let him onto your lap.”
“Now wait a second,” Loki began.
Liara’s face turned perplexed. “What?”
“Loki’s my familiar, so he’s got to be destined for evil too, right? But I can see it in your eyes—you’re a cat person. You don’t think cats can be evil.”
“I don’t care one way or the other,” she spat. “Just stop.”
I shrugged, snuffing out the light. I couldn’t bleed water from a stone.
We remained in silence for a minute, and then Liara began fumbling. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.
Outside the cloak, nails scratched over the ground. Nostrils sniffed. boggans, tracing our scent.
A cackle sounded, so loud it might as well have been right inside the cloak with us.
But it wasn’t. We were the only ones inside here.
I reignited my flame, trying to keep my hand from shaking. “As long as they don’t mess with the cloak, we can wait them out.”
Liara turned her face to me in a rare moment of uncertainty. Maybe even fear. “And if they do?”
“Then we fight.”
She nodded, pulling herself back up to a seat, her knees tight to her chest. Finally, we’d agreed on something. It was the tiniest inroad: our mutual love of fighting our way out of tough spots.
“You don’t like me,” I said into the silence that ensued. “I get it.”
She shifted her dark eyes onto me. “What’s your point?”
“Sometimes I don’t like me, either,” I admitted. “I can be standoffish and too sarcastic and weird around sincerity. Especially around sweet sincerity. I’m a fire witch, which I wonder every single day about. Am I turning into a worse person? Am I going down the bad path?”
She was listening. I could see it in her hardened face.
“I know a witch ruined your life,” I said. “And you’re going to say, ‘How could you possibly know anything about my life?’ Maybe you don’t know that I’m an orphan, too. My mom and sister disappeared one day. I was twelve years old, and I don’t even know what happened. Sometimes I used to wish someone had killed them, just so I could have an answer. Then I could have a person to blame.”
She stared at me, her breath lifting her chest in small, soft inhalations. “So you think it’s easier for me, knowing who did it?”
“No. I think it’s awful in a way I can’t even begin to understand. And if I could bring your parents and my mom and sister back, I would do it like I can snap fae rolls into existence. But I can’t.”
Her arms tightened around her knees, gaze lowering. She remained silent a while, and then, finally, “The boggans aren’t leaving.”
I listened, heard the nails skittering. The edges of the cloak had begun to jostle as they inspected it; soon they would discover the secret. “Yeah.”
“Clementine,” she said.
“Yeah?”
Her eyes shifted up to me, different now than I’d ever seen them before. Distinctly human in their faeness, finally hinting at another—softer—emotion. “We’re running out of time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We are.”
Her eyebrows lowered as she looked at Loki. “Your familiar up for a fight?”
“Am I fighting her or the boggans?” Loki said. “Either way, I’m in.”
I glanced at him, back up at her. “Absolutely.”
We emerged from the cloak in a roar of flame and lightning. Behind me, Liara’s electric bursts crackled out through the labyrinth, her slender body touching mine.
I shot off wave after wave of fire in the opposite direction, searing the path behind us as Liara followed Loki’s flaming body. Behind us, my flames lit up a slender-limbed, long-nailed creature as it skittered with wild speed up the vines to the top of a wall.
They were as fast as I remembered.
I followed Liara, kept my back to her as I threw arc after arc of flame. “There’s one following us,” I called over my shoulder.
“You don’t want to know how many are in front of us,” Liara shot back. “They really do hate your magic.”
Or they know I’m close to what they’re guarding, I thought but didn’t say. In my pants’ pocket, I could feel the tug of the key. It was pulling in the direction we were headed.
I shot a burst of flame up the wall. Above, I caught the briefest glimpse of the boggan tracking us, its spindly limbs like a spider’s as it deftly navigated from twenty feet up. “Loki,” I yelled, “what’s up ahead?”
“More labyrinth,” his voice called back. “But…something’s different.”
I threw my arm out, another arc of flame warding off the following boggan. “What’s different?”
He didn’t answer. He only yowled, screamed as though he’d engaged someone—or something. What sounded like a scrabbling, screaming fight ensued.
Liara kept moving us forward, her lightning
sizzling. She turned us as we reached a bend. “What the hell’s going on with your familiar?”
I kept my back pressed to hers. “Loki?” I called out, trying to keep my voice from breaking.
A pause, marked only by the sound of lightning and flames as we kept up our barrage against the boggans. Then, nearer than before, Loki’s voice saying, “One boggan down. Come on, this way.”
Relief and secret pride swelled in me. “Are you okay?”
“That’s a loaded question with a loaded answer,” he called back.
He’s okay.
As we came around the corner, Liara gasped.
“What is it?” I said, not daring to glance over my shoulder. Not even daring to pause for one second in the firestorm I was sending out behind us.
“There’s one on the ground. Dead, unconscious—I don’t know. Gods, it’s hideous.”
“Loki’s doing. Keep following him.”
I could feel her slow. “Your familiar took it down?”
“He’s one pissed cat.”
We kept on, skirting the downed boggan. As we passed it, I took a split-second glance; Liara was right about the hideousness. I remembered that massive mouth, every tooth an incisor, from my first encounter in the cave. Apparently that was another trait of their species.
After a time, Liara paused. “There’s a fork.”
“This way,” Loki said ahead of us. “Left smells less boggany.”
When Liara started moving again, I didn’t.
The key in my pocket wasn’t pulling in that direction. It was pulling right.
“Clementine?” Liara said from behind me.
I reached behind me, retrieved the key from my pocket. In my palm, it glowed green, tried to practically float out of my hand in the other direction—the one Loki didn’t want us to go down. The direction that smelled of boggans.
I was close. Very close.
“Clementine!” Liara yelled, her lightning crackling again. I heard real fear in her voice. “They’re still on us.”
I turned in a wave of flame, facing her and Loki. They were illuminated by the palest gray light.
Morning was coming.
“They won’t be on you,” I said. “Loki, lead her to the exit.”
For the first time, I caught sight of Loki’s flaming body. My flames rose two feet off him, and he was the size of a fiery, spectral tiger. “I’m going with you,” he said. “I’m always with you.”