There was a big party that night at the boarding school in celebration where I actually got to spend time with Ari, who I’d seen precious little of. He looked tired, but he sounded really happy.
We all dined together as much as possible, the entire place run like a well-oiled machine by Ms. Clara. Raquel, that monster, used her name whenever possible around me, since I had yet to be given permission to just call her Clara.
The next morning, Hua approached me. “We want to step up our hunting. Put our training into action on more dangerous demons.”
The triplets nodded eagerly.
“Yay! Since I’m most familiar with Vancouver, I put together a map of potential demon hotspots for just this occasion.” I showed them the areas I’d identified and let the women decide where to hunt.
They were beautifully kickass. Together, we took out some kravel demons that had been living in Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver and preying on the homeless. The women were pumped and ready for more.
I asked Baruch for permission to follow up some leads on the Ring of Solomon that Rivka and Shivani had provided. None of them panned out, though my group saw some combat action with Mandelbaum’s men and experienced another aspect of this fight. With the first lead we’d investigated, we ran into some Rasha who’d formerly been on our side and switched allegiances to Mandelbaum. It happened a few more times, no matter how stealthy we were.
We were being tracked, but no one could figure out how.
There were skirmishes, but no real injuries, and none of us found the ring.
Despite these setbacks, these were three amazing weeks, even if I missed Ro like crazy and my headaches continued. I was impatient to move on and step up the battle to win the war.
Too bad I forgot about that pesky “careful what you wish for” rule.
20
I’d never been particularly superstitious about Friday the 13th and saw no reason to start when it rolled around this September. The bond between the Rasha and the witches had cemented over these past few weeks, confidence was at an all-time high, and Mandelbaum and Sienna had been quiet.
Our idyll was too good to last.
The day started with a barrage of increasingly annoyed texts from Malik. Texting seemed so mundane for the demon, but part of me couldn’t wait to get him on the throne so I could have Satan in my contacts. The contact photo possibilities alone were priceless.
Malik demanded an update on the ring and Hellgate. In person. I agreed to meet with him later, after my all-important reunion.
Rohan and Drio came home with a location where they’d be sure to find Hybris in three days. Wearing his Torture Time smile, Drio said that Durukti had “shared” that Hybris had been methodically hunting down the demons that had gone after her for the rumors we’d planted on the demon dark web. That’s why she’d been so hard to find. She’d given up human pursuits for demon ones and, in three days, she planned to complete her final demon vendetta.
Most witches returned to their homes and their families at night. The Rasha, however, stayed on the premises, and with the boarding school as our hub, during the day it was abuzz with activity. So when the guys arrived back at the school, the number of people waiting to greet them was huge. By this point, everyone knew what killing Hybris meant to Drio and Ro and they were besieged by friends wanting updates.
Unable to wait patiently a second longer and entirely uncaring of how girly and undignified it was, I ran at my boyfriend, jumping on him and kissing him. Rohan planted an awesome smack on me, to a soundtrack of hooting and whistling. His kisses ranked second-to-none, but even better was that first hug, when I was lost in his musky iron scent with his arms circling me like the haven they were.
“I missed you,” he murmured into my hair.
I tightened my arms around him, pressing my face into the crook of his neck and inhaling deeply. As busy and happy as I’d been while he was gone, having him back made the world a little brighter. My boyfriend and I had gotten very creative with FaceTime whenever he was in range in India, but it wasn’t the same as having him with me.
“Guess what?” he said.
I slid off him. “What?”
“I finished Asha’s song. The album is written.”
“Ohmigod!” I did a fancy high-five that left him laughing and staring at me like I was a goofball. “I’m so proud of you. What about things with your mom?”
He made a so-so motion with his hand. “We’re keeping our conversations to scheduling the rest of our studio time. We’ll get there. Dealing with my fears around the dark magic, finding peace with Asha’s death, that was the hard stuff, but I tackled it.”
“Because you’re amazing.”
He winked at me. “That too. But also because I had you in my corner, and it’s ‘fate of the world’ time. Being anything less than a hundred percent for this battle? It’s not who I want to be.”
It wasn’t who I wanted to be either. I kissed my boyfriend. “I have to go see a witch about a headache.”
I veered through the clusters of people making their way through the corridor on their way to training or back from hunting and meeting to debrief, finding Rivka with Shivani and Jezebel in the computer lab, discussing some archival note in the database.
I discreetly wiped off my sweaty palms, my pulse racing, and my entire body wanting to flee. My headache had reached epic proportions, between the memories flying fast and furious of having Lilith inside me, the yawning nothingness I’d endured in the Tomb of Endless Night, and my time with Mandelbaum that had left me losing my grip on reality. Even with all that, part of me was still rationalizing that I could tough it out and keep my head off-limits. I dug my nails into my palms, forcing myself to croak out the words.
“I need help.” The three witches looked up at me. I explained about the ongoing headaches that defied both magic and medicine.
“How long have you been suffering?” Shivani asked in her posh British accent.
“Weeks. And I was wondering…” I swallowed. “If, Rivka, you could check me out.”
She wasn’t Esther and she’d never hold the same importance as Esther had for me, but Rivka was her sister, and she’d become an ally and a friend of sorts. I’d trusted her with my parents, now I had to trust her with myself.
My headache pulsed more insistently, like it was weighing in.
Dizzy, I braced a hand against the wall.
“Maybe you should wait until the pain lessens a bit,” Jezebel said.
Rivka nodded. “Even the magic to examine you could make things worse.”
“There’s never going to be an ideal time to do this, and I want to be at my strongest for the fight ahead.” I’d dealt with my demons in making this choice; I’d handle any pain.
The three of them escorted me to my second-floor dorm room. Now that I’d made my decision, it was as if the last bit of my reserves snapped. The pain became so overwhelming that the tiniest bit of light was a red-hot needle piercing my skull. I kept my eyes shut and let them lead me. I couldn’t even muster the energy to be annoyed at Jezebel practically breathing down my neck as we walked.
“Nava,” Shivani said. “We may have caught a break with that End Zone message. There is no start or end to the Zone. However, we’ve unearthed a very old tale of an unfinished corner of creation. A dark and barren place of earthquakes and bitter cold that God left unmade to challenge anyone who asserted that they were divine. The message may well refer to that.”
“Doubting it’s on Google Maps,” I said.
“The belief is that it was originally part of the Zone but early witches buried it in a kind of subsection,” Jezebel said. “No one knows for sure. We’re trying to verify it.”
Rivka was already going to examine my head. We could do a more thorough poking around and see if I had Lilith’s memories.
I took a deep breath and trusted: in Rivka, in the universe, and most of all, in my own ability to stay strong in the face of all this. I wasn’t at anyone’s
mercy. This was my choice.
“My brain is your brain and may also have echoes of Lilith’s brain. See if you can find any memories of hers,” I said, cracking an eye to see their reactions.
The women exchanged a glance.
Jezebel pursed her lips. “I’m surprised you’re volunteering. You didn’t strike me as willing to die for the cause.”
You and I are never going to be friends, lady. “It’s war. I’m doing what has to be done. Which, FYI, does not include dying.”
Rivka sat me down and told me to keep my eyes closed. There was silence and then some rustling and the sound of the door shutting.
“It’s just you and me now,” she said. “Can you open your eyes?”
The room was dark. It helped. Kind of.
Four iron frame bunk beds flanked the single, wide window, now covered with an ugly curtain. Three of the beds were stripped bare, but I’d claimed a lower bunk. A poster of Taylor Swift hung by a single corner of tape above the scratched desk, a remnant of a former student, and one wall was covered in quotes written in black marker, like “We never really move on. We just get used to the pain.”
Emo Snowflake would love it.
“Lie down and get comfortable,” Rivka said
Comfortable was relative on the thin mattress. I’d named every lump in this bed after sleeping on it for almost a month, but I found a position that worked.
She spoke in a low, gentle voice, guiding me through a series of relaxation techniques to ease the examination. Should that prove successful, she’d attempt to pull out any memories Lilith had of the ring.
I yawned a lot, but I also fixated on whether all the magic fuckery in my life was going to end in a brain aneurism.
“You’re not relaxing.”
I shook my head and then gagged. Note to self. Don’t move.
Rivka sent a warm, comforting pulse of magic into me.
I screamed, a cross-hatch of ward lines inside my skull flaring like exposed nerve endings. They burned against my cerebellum and if they took root, my brain would be redrawn, irrevocably fractured.
Dimly, I heard her call for help.
Ready to go scorched earth, I coaxed my internal flame into an inferno to eradicate the wards before they could rearrange my synapses. While my fire didn’t hurt me, the ward lines hissed, burrowing faster and deeper in response, so I extinguished the flames.
The ward lines retracted, pulsing faintly.
I had all my motor functions, could think clearly, and didn’t appear to be missing any memories, but I had freaking wards in my brain. Why? How?
I opened my eyes to find Rivka, Catalina, Raquel, Elena, and Shivani hovering over me. No Jezebel, thankfully. The headache had subsided, but my anxiety hadn’t. “Seriously? Wards?”
Rivka nodded grimly.
“Can you get them out?”
“I think so, but we’re going to have to induce a magic coma,” Catalina said.
“And if you’re wrong?” I twisted the blanket. “Will I be a vegetable?”
“We won’t be.”
My apprehension must have shown, because Shivani lightly touched my arm.
“Do you want me to get Rohan?” she said.
“Please.”
Raquel sent me into the old, creaky shower to wash with unscented products and remove any trace of hair gel or make-up.
Clean and slightly damp, I returned to the dorm room to find Rohan waiting for me on my bunk.
I snuggled into the crook of his arm. “Welcome home.” I started laughing, then winced because my headache flared for a second. “I’m broken.”
“That’s not really a new development though, is it,” he said.
I laughed again and then swatted him. “Ow. Quit it.”
Ro moved over and sat on the floor next to the bed. He held my hand as I assumed my relaxation position on the mattress and Raquel put me under. There were no dreams, no fire. I woke up, certain it had failed.
The women were gone and the smudgy rays of dawn streaked the sky.
Rohan was slumped against the mattress asleep, still holding my hand.
“Ro?”
He yawned. “How do you feel?”
“Exactly the same.”
“Wait here.” He scrambled to his feet and hurried out of the room.
I sat up gingerly, but nothing hurt. I prodded my skull and swore because a patch of hair over each ear had been shaved off.
“We required bare skin to work with.” Catalina said. She was followed by my witchy healers.
“Did you fix it?”
“Yes and no,” Raquel said.
“We removed the wards.” Rivka ran her hand over my head. “They were like a net cast over your brain. Underneath we found a veil of sorts.”
“Is that veil hiding Lilith’s memories? Did Lilith put it there? Did she place the wards?”
“It doesn’t seem like either were placed recently. Both the wards and the veil are so entrenched that they’ve probably been with you your whole life,” Rivka said.
“We won’t know what’s under the veil until we dispense with it,” Elena said. “We want you awake so you can speak or cry out if you’re in distress.”
Frustration simmered in Raquel’s eyes. “Why is everything about you so difficult?”
“Just lucky.” I pulled my knees into my chest.
Ro crossed his arms. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Rohan.” Shivani said a few words to him in Hindi.
“No. She’s been through enough.”
Removing the veil might reveal key information to finding the Ring of Solomon via Lilith’s memories. It might also unleash them, flooding me and destroying any sense of myself.
It was a testament to how nuts my reality had become, that my fears about Lilith’s memories overtaking my own weren’t even my biggest concern. What if some knowledge, some part of me had been kept from me my entire life? There was no way it would be something good like a genius-level I.Q. You know what got warded up because they were too scary for the light of day? Monsters like Gog and Magog.
Is that what I was?
I could be happy not knowing. I just wouldn’t have the stupid ring. I finally had a life I wanted, why would I fuck with that?
Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
“Do it,” I said.
Rivka ordered me into the center of the room.
Rohan kept a respectful distance but stayed in visual contact with me.
The women linked hands and settled them on my head. Elena said a few words in Romanian, and they pulled their hands away with a snap, like they were pulling a tablecloth off a table without disturbing the dishes.
The veil shriveled into a black wisp of smoke, curling upwards inside me before exploding into flame, hot and violent, on the cusp of burning me to ash exactly like in my dreams. A rushing noise filled my ears.
Magic welled up inside me, rushing out from newly formed cracks to fill me up, washing away my headache. It buzzed behind my eyes, in my toes, in my gut, humming with a familiarity born of homecoming. My fingers twitched, longing to dip into that endless pool. I braced myself for the razor-sharp edge of dread and anxiety, for my body to shut down in the wake of all this glorious power, but the magic settled into place with a feeling of irrevocable rightness. The rush was sweeter than the night in the compound when I’d tasted Lilith’s power, because this was mine, a gorgeous gold color.
I waved my hand and a shower of jewel-toned flowers fell from the ceiling, their crushed petals releasing a sweet perfume.
A pink cloud wove and bobbed in the early morning sky in a dance too languid for the normal human eye to follow and the sun twinkled at me with a private smile.
“Eema.” I pressed my fist to my mouth with a gasp, images flooding my brain.
“You want your mother?” Rivka said. It was a reasonable question since I’d called for her in Hebrew.
“Yes.” I caught her wrist when she pulled out her phone. “No,
not my mom. My mother.”
“You’re not making sense,” Elena said.
“My name is Nava Liron Katz and I am a direct descendent of the first Liron.”
“Who was her mother?” Shivani said.
“Oh no,” Rohan said. “No fucking way.”
I nodded. “Lilith.”
“I don’t suppose you mean some other Lilith?” Raquel sighed. “No? Oh well, worth a shot.”
“Explain,” Rivka demanded.
“Lilith stole King Solomon’s ring because it was too dangerous, too powerful for one man to possess,” I said. “Given how his father had stolen the magic to make more Rasha, she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable towards him.”
“No kidding,” Rohan said.
“The king was furious and sent a team of his most skilled assassins after her.”
“Hold up,” Rohan said. “This was the research that Markovic burned. It’s dangerous.”
“Why? Because people might come after me? That ship has sailed,” I said.
Rohan glowered at me. “Or the magic is too dangerous.”
“All magic is dangerous. Your concerns are noted. May I continue with the story?”
“By all means,” he said sarcastically.
“Lilith returned the assassins to him in pieces, but coincidentally, she also learned she was pregnant.”
“She suppressed the baby’s magic so no one would go after it?” Rivka said.
“Yes. She put these wards in Liron’s brain so no one would know she was a witch of immense power and then she gave her to a wet nurse to raise.” I sank into a chair; the pain of a thousand years of loss swamped me. “Lilith sang her song of sorrow into the wards so the story, like the suppression, would became part of our genetic make-up. She was doomed to watch generation after generation of her line move through the world with no awareness of their true legacy. Who they were and what they were capable of.”
An entire future unfurled itself in front of me.
“I don’t buy it,” Rohan said.
Don’t harsh my buzz, dude. “Do I register as Lilith anymore?”
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