The Beast nipped at her hand, and she stroked him gently. “We’re getting closer,” she said. “My ankles sing with sorrow.”
The air was sweet down here and smelled of lavender and sugar. Kite felt lulled by the scent. The Beast kept trying to take bites out of the air. Kite’s fingers trailed through a net of verdant lace and came away wet and sticky. She stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked. The taste was sweet as honey, but with the bitter aftertaste of soured tears — the kind held in too long, and shed years too late, raw pain fermented by regret and denial.
The Beast whined.
Sighing at his impatience, Kite offered him a handful of moss. He shied away from her outstretched hand and refused to eat it.
“Clever boy,” she whispered. “You don’t want to eat the dead.”
She ate the handful of moss and contemplated the garden of a prison. The caverns here were covered in yellowgreen vines and leaves. Blossoms the size of dinner plates studded the lush walls. It was a different world.
There were no guards down here.
She walked along, feeling the moss break down in her body. Something about ingesting it made her feel closer to the furred stone, to the damp pools of stagnant water that welled in leaves impossibly growing underground. Fed by materials no longer needed by the Coven.
Fed by the bodies of shadow assassins, failed daughters. Repurposed by violent magic and fed to the Coven, life giving life. There was something beautiful about the cycle, even as its brutality registered like a faint feather brushing the back of her neck, or a voice whispering in her ear. My sisters …
A sudden sickness twisted her stomach, and Kite vomited the tangled mass of green. From beneath the wet, darkened strands, a single rose petal burned red as a morning sky.
Wiping the bile from her mouth, Kite’s eyes flashed with electricity and wonder. She reached down and grasped the petal, letting it rest in her palm. It glowed at her touch, as if waking up.
A smile snaked its way across Kite’s face.
Sometimes the dead don’t stay buried.
Twenty-One
THE HEART
The beasts prowled on four paws, their iron bodies creaking with age. A few sheets of metal peeled away from one’s haunches, curling into a sharp, rusted edge. Teeth like saw blades. Nails protruding from the spine. Weapons meant to harm.
Eli stumbled to her feet, releasing Tav’s hand. She could still feel the beat of their pulse — a rhythm that was dangerously compelling, that made Eli want to bite their wrist and send shivers of electricity through the boi’s body. They could be electric together.
Eli took those bright, strange feelings and channelled them into her attack. She launched herself without warning at the closest beast, her limbs rejuvenated by Tav’s touch — perhaps they had healed her, too — losing herself to the familiar bloodlust of a good fight.
“Wait!” Tav cried, but their voice was lost in the winds. Another crack of thunder rang out like an omen of death.
But Eli was lost in the dance of battle, muscle thrown against metal, hawthorn tearing at rust. The crocodile tooth, still stained with Tav’s blood, punctured the metal torso again and again as Eli wrestled with the creature, hands slippery with blood and oil. Sweat dripped into her eyes, and she could smell the stink of old iron and mouldy gears. She would tear it apart piece by piece, she would fashion a new blade from its corpse —
She was sitting in a pile of scrap metal.
Eli blinked and looked down. Blood pooled under her nails. Four had been ripped clean off. She could feel the scrape of metal in her throat and suddenly felt sick.
She had eaten the creature whole.
Eli didn’t remember it happening; she remembered nothing but the fight, the surge of power, the magic of her body that told her she was built to kill. Was there a moment when she had dematerialized and rematerialized inside the creature, tearing it part from the inside? She was more dangerous now than she had ever been.
Nausea roiled through her stomach. Eli leaned over and vomited up a handful of rusted nails.
Then she drew the frost blade and went looking for something else to kill.
THE HEALER
“Wait!”
But Eli was lost to the taste of violence, to the promise of death. Tav pressed their back against Cam’s, circled by three of the monsters. Strange magic sparked and hissed inside the metal husks, black as night edged in fiery gold.
“They’re animated by some kind of spell,” Tav told Cam. “There might be a witch nearby.”
“What’s our strategy if they show?”
“Don’t die?”
“Got it. Great plan, general.”
One of the beasts lunged, a paw studded with razor-sharp gears clawing at Cam. He deflected with the great stone blade that was both a shield and a weapon. The sound of metal on stone crashed over the steps. Cam stumbled back. One edge of the blade had cut a ragged gash in the beast’s side.
To Tav’s horror, the animal was bleeding. The wound dripped black, like ink pooling on the asphalt.
Another darted forward, jaws overflowing with rusty nails for teeth. Tav tried to dodge the attack but felt searing pain as a canine grazed their forearm. Twisting, ignoring the pain, Tav quickly stabbed with the obsidian blade, in case there was an incorporeal trapped in the metal body. The black-and-gold glowing heart of the creature shrunk back at the touch, and the creature let out a ghostly wail, as if Tav had pierced its very soul.
And then Tav knew the truth, and their heart broke with the weight of empathy.
“They’re witches,” they whispered. These creatures had once been the essences of witches, torn from their bodies and housed in skins
