With her concentration shattered, the Anemoi broke apart like smoke in a heavy wind—including the four surrounding Xander. Medea’s wounded skin attempted to heal over, as it had from my earlier strikes. It crawled and roiled, but the shadowed wedge in her body prevented her from recovering. With a weak voice, she said, “Take this from my body. Heal me.” Her hand worked over the darkness within her chest, but she couldn’t grip it to remove it.
I stood on trembling legs and tottered toward her. I leaned over and gripped the shadow—it was substantial in my hand. I extracted it from her body, pulling away the blackened veins that had webbed across her skin.
Medea gasped, collapsing into the fetal position.
I held the shadow. It looked like a railroad spike. What the fuck? How had the shadows warded the lightning blasts? How had I wielded them like a weapon? What was happening? I shook those questions from my mind. Those answers didn’t matter in the moment.
“Why did you kill my daughter?” I asked, focusing on what was important.
Medea lay in a ball on the cold stone ground. She trembled. I don’t think she cowered from me. I think I’d severely hurt her, and she hadn’t recovered.
“Answer me!” My voiced reverberated off the chamber walls, followed by six quick gunshots. Footsteps casually approached me, and I felt Xander’s calming presence at my back and saw the radiant glow of his guns.
“My Nephil told me to,” she whimpered.
“Hecate?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I—I don’t know. I never asked, I never question her.”
Same answer as before. That left me with one more. “Where do I find Hecate, then?”
Medea remained silent for a moment. She screamed like a banshee and threw another spiked blast of air at me. It gouged through my stomach and exploded out of my back, dropping me to the ground like cement through water. My blood spilled onto the stone. Medea collapsed beside me, and we lay like that, side by side, panting our last breaths for a moment. I looked up and saw that Xander had raised both his guns and centered them on Medea’s chest.
“Don’t,” I wheezed. “I get to kill her.”
Again, without my comprehension or consent, shadows crept over my body and stitched my wound back together and snapped my wrist bones back in place. It was a crude restoration, and the injury didn’t heal completely, but the darkness had staunched the bleeding. I groaned as I rolled onto my ass and into a kneeling position. Holding the spiked shadow, I pressed it against Medea’s head, the tip breaking the thin layer of skin across her temple.
“Where can I find Hecate?” I asked.
“In fucking hell.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled the spike downward as she drove her head upward, impaling herself. Medea’s body went limp, and she sagged onto the stone floor—still as Mel’s corpse.
With her dead and now useless, I only had one thought on my mind. Using my elbows, I crawled toward my daughter. Before I made it into the chalked circle though, the darkness enveloped me, and I fell unconscious.
13
I woke up who knows how much later. My head ached behind my eyes and at the stem of my neck, and my eyes stung, as if I hadn’t slept in days. To top it off, the adrenaline from battle had faded, and my acquired wounds sang a raucous tune. My left wrist had swollen to the size of a softball and had bruised to a smudgy, faded black. The side of my body, where Medea had tore into me with her claws had stiffened. My stomach, where she had thrown her spike through me, simmered with a low heat—as if in the early stage of an infection. The wound had opened again and was bleeding, despite the shadow’s measly effort to close it.
Xander sat near me, against the stone wall of Medea’s chamber, with his eyes closed. The sconces that burned around the room lit his face and the wetness of his cheeks. I had a joke on the tip of my tongue—something about his masculinity and crying… blah, blah, blah. But I didn’t have the heart or the humor to utter it. Not with Mel—
Still lying on my back, I rolled my head to face the chalked wheel. A handful of lumps rested on the ground where Xander had laid to rest the small army of Empousa. They had returned to their human form, and the scene resembled a mass cult suicide rather than a shootout.
Highlighted beneath the glow of hundreds of melting candles, I saw Mel’s small body resting in a puddle of dark blood. Her lungs didn’t expand, her chest didn’t rise or fall.
I coughed, and nausea overwhelmed me, but I didn’t vomit. Turning onto my hands and knees, a spat up a string of saliva that dangled off my lips. It tasted sour on my tongue. I gagged and splashed all the alcohol I had consumed that night onto the floor. Crawling away from my mess, I bumped into Xander. I rose off my hands and onto my knees, shuffling around to face him, and then I embraced my old friend.
Together, we sobbed. Not only for Callie and Mel. We sobbed for each other. For our losses. For our brokenness and suffering. For the fact that we had to continue forward without hope to guide our way. What was this world without anything or anyone to share it with? So, we—or at least, I—sobbed knowing that we were all we had left. There were no words exchanged, no judgments given. Just two broken humans holding one another together as the darkness overpowered the fading torchlight.
I stood inside Dr. Tacet’s death shop, staring out the far window as the rain pattered against the glass. The morning sun yawned awake in the east, breaking through dark clouds and painting the sky orange and
