“You made a deal with a witch,” said Eli. “Their concept of time is … flexible.”
“When?” The flowers were starting to blur together, turning into the faces of ghouls and monsters. Tav blinked several times, trying to clear their vision.
“Tonight.”
“Okay. Okay.” Tav waited for the dizziness to pass. “We have time to strategize.”
Eli laughed, and it turned into a cough. She turned around and spat out a single bee. “It’s already night.”
“No, it’s not.”
Eli tapped the glass in an insistent rhythm. Tav reluctantly walked over and looked out into the sky that was already turning a deep indigo.
“I don’t understand.”
“The world is dying,” said Eli. “Already the stars are coming out. The witches’ world is infecting this one. Time is sliding out of alignment.”
Panic raced through Tav’s entire body like an electrical shock. They leaned against the glass, fingers splayed like wings. They could see the faint brush of constellations appearing on what should be a bright afternoon sky. Fuck.
“There’s only one thing to do.” They glanced at Eli, wondering how much they could tell, calculating how much they could get away with. “We have to give her what she wants.”
Thirty
THE HEIR
Cam turned around. His eyes were red. The skin on his knuckles was dry and flaky.
“Kite?” Cam’s voice wavered. He took a step toward her, and then hesitated. “You’re not with the Coven, are you? Did she ask you to find me?”
Kite’s eyes roamed over his body. He was agate. Graphite. Quartz. Shale.
And underneath him, a continent of obsidian. The voices of the dead called to Kite from beneath the black glass, and she suddenly understood where she was.
The Witch-Killing Fields.
Her eyes blazed. Had they sent him to harvest the stone?
Is one blade not enough for you, Eli?
“Kite?”
His voice broke the silence like a pebble in water. But it was a small sound, an insignificant ripple, lost in the vast darkness of the ocean.
She met his eyes. Greybrown. Long, artful lashes, like the feathered legs of a millipede. The whites of his eyes stained pinkred from the killing wind. He had come to this world and survived. He had come to this world and been transformed. He had evolved. He had negotiated with the sentient stone that made up the Labyrinth and under-labyrinth, the living wall of the world. He had escaped the Coven. He had found his way here, to the fields of sorrow.
He was dangerous.
She had underestimated Cam. Maybe he did belong here, with the stone that stretched endlessly into the sky. It was Kite who didn’t belong. It was her essence that would be torn apart by black glass.
Panic swirled through her body like a riptide pulling her out to sea. She clutched the Beast’s tail and he whined in protest.
She had never faced true death before, although she had slept next to Eli and her blades since she was small.
She never truly believed that Eli would kill her.
Did she not understand my message? Does she truly think I betrayed her?
Hurt cut through the fear and woke her from her reverie.
“Did she send you to kill me?” Her voice sang across the space between them. Kite stared at the boy and contemplated the engineer of her death. He was strange, and mostly human, but she was learning the worth of human bones and spirits.
“What?” Confusion swirled in his eyes, and he raised a hand to push back the tangles of his hair.
“Did she give you the blade? She must care deeply for you.” Kite could understand Eli’s attraction — the sharp chips of breccia, the crust of lime. He was magnificent.
His eyes widened. “Oh, fuck. I still have it! What if she needs it?” He held up the knife.
Kite flinched, but she had no lids to shield her eyes from the cruel edge of the assassin, the obsidian needle.
Only it wasn’t the assassin. It wasn’t a blade aimed at Kite’s essence. Cam held out the shield — the stone blade. A blade that could protect as well as harm — but not a witch’s essence. Not a magic soul. She was safe — for now.
Kite’s seaweed hair relaxed over her shoulders, a few strands stroking her skin. She had self-soothed this way ever since she was born.
“She didn’t send you for me,” said Kite wonderingly. “She didn’t send you here at all.”
“What? No, of course not. What are you talking about?” Cam’s arm dropped to his side. “Make sense.”
Kite ignored his question and walked forward, dragging the heavy sword behind her, its point scraping on the glass and casting a haunting wail into the atmosphere. But Kite wasn’t afraid of the music of the dead.
She was afraid of the dead themselves.
“Are you a discarded thing that needs to be found? I will collect you,” she promised. “And we will make a home in the ruins of the city for your beauty.”
Cam twisted the hilt of the blade, but didn’t move away. Humans spooked easy. Kite knew this. When she was close enough to feel the heat of his part-human body, she stopped. The Beast did not, and ran right up to Cam, tail wagging. Cam stiffened, and then extended a hand and let the Beast smell him. The Beast tried to bite a piece of quartz, and then withdrew, whimpering.
“Serves you right for trying to bite me,” said Cam.
“He just wanted to taste you,” said Kite. “How else do you get to know someone?”
Cam’s eyes fell to the sword in her hand, the gears now turning, the iron spokes writhing madly.
“My staff!”
Almost as if it had a mind of its own, his hand reached out for the blade that had awoken when it tasted his blood. The blade that had shielded him from the red wind. The blade that had been traded away for shelter, stolen by the Warlord in the Labyrinth.
Skin touched alloy. Sizzling, then a shriek.
He drew his hand back to his chest.
“It bit me!” A burn mark in the shape of a circle was pressed into his
