Kite looked down, letting her hair cascade over her knees and onto the glass. “I can’t promise that. I’m not here to help you. I’m going to the junkyard and then I’m going to end my mother’s reign.” She looked up again through a pool of bluegreen. “Will you help me?”
Cam turned his back on her and stared up at the sky. She wondered if he was looking for his home planet. Finally, he turned back, all the stones on his body shaking as if an earthquake was tremoring through his bones.
“I’ll help you, but if you betray us again —”
“Then you will take me back here and trap my essence in the ice. I understand.”
He reached out a hand. Kite stared at it for a second, and then grasped the tip of the stone blade instead. A single bubble blossomed from her palm and hung in the air.
“Now you.”
He reached out and tentatively touched a piece of hair that had been creeping toward him. It cut like barbed wire, and he hissed in pain. Kite blew on the bubble, and it swam toward his bleeding, burned hand and popped on it. Then she pressed her own wound against his. When she drew her hand away, both were healed, but she could feel the strangeness of blood and sediment in her magic body.
“So.” Cam cleared his throat. “Why are we going to the junkyard?”
She smiled, and her eyes glowed with the light of a pulsing jellyfish swimming through an undersea universe. “We are building an army. The unwanted are wanted again.”
Thirty-One
THE HEART
Tav’s shaking hand managed to find the keyhole and turned the ignition. They leaned back for a moment against Eli’s chest, and Eli could smell honey.
“Do you trust me?” Their voice was rough with worry.
Eli felt the prick of a thousand thorns as her throat undulated with the lie she wanted to regurgitate. The world around them seemed to freeze; leaves hanging in midfall, the moon pausing its rotation for a single moment, tides arched in spikes and curves across the globe.
Their mouth on her shoulder blade. Their hands on her lower back.
Eli remembered the fervor in Tav’s voice when they spoke of using magic to take back the city, the way their eyes had burned with hunger when they stared at her glowing body. The Heart of a world.
They would use you. You know they would. They would make you their tool.
But they haven’t, not yet.
There’s still time. Everyone lets you down, in the end.
“Do you trust me?”
The pain in Eli’s body whispered louder than the street. The frost blade burned at her hip. She swallowed.
“Yes.”
THE HEALER
Tav felt the surge of caffeine mingle with adrenalin and anxiety. Their hands were shaking. Their heartbeat was amplified in their ears, a heavy bass pounding out the last few seconds between safety and danger. Only this time it wasn’t their life they were putting in danger, but Eli’s.
She trusts you. She believes in you.
Fuck.
The path was so familiar they could have followed it in their sleep. Their chosen home. The place where they found hope. Love. Power.
No bells rang when they opened the door to The Sun.
The jitters intensified. Tav could hear their teeth rattling in their jaw, and wondered if Eli could hear it, too.
Eli went first. She was, after all, Tav’s bargaining chip. Tav’s property. Tav clenched their jaw, hating that they had to do this to her. They wanted to apologize, to beg for her forgiveness. But that would come later — if there was a later.
Tav watched as Eli let the tendrils of furious plants wind themselves around her legs, arms, throat, torso. She didn’t resist.
She trusts you.
Their eye started twitching. Their heartbeat was deafening. Fuck fuck fuck.
“You’ve been keeping a secret, Tav. I taught you well.” Pride laced the Hedge-Witch’s voice like arsenic in tea.
“A bargain is a bargain,” they said shortly. “You shed blood for us, and I give you the Heart.”
The Hedge-Witch’s eyes swirled black and white, mixing into cement grey. She stepped forward to inspect the assassin, strands of light blossoming along Eli’s veins and the cracks in her chapped lips. “Fascinating. It merged with her organic body?” She walked a slow circle around the girl. “So this is why I couldn’t find her. Why my daughter struggled to find her — she’ll be punished for the failure, of course. The Heart would blot out any other magic signature. It’s more than her.” She smiled. “I wondered what would happen when you touched it. It was smart of you to use her as a vessel. The weight of the Heart might have shattered the one who wrenched it from the Coven.”
“Did you think it would shatter me?”
The Hedge-Witch raised her gaze to meet Tav’s eyes. “You are extraordinary, Tav. I never doubted that you would come home.”
The vines tightened their grip on Eli, who still said nothing. Just watched Tav with those yellow reptilian eyes.
The weight of faith was heavier than loss, heavier than pain, than sleepless nights and waking nightmares.
Tav felt the sharp edge of obsidian against their forearm.
“The Coven —”
“I don’t want to hear it.” The Hedge-Witch raised a manicured hand. “You’ve been caught up in delusions, Tav. The real battle is here. And it’s just beginning. I will lead your people to victory.”
“My people?” Tav frowned.
“The humans,” she amended. “The humans need to be shown the error of their ways. I will make a new world for you. For us. With the Heart, I can —”
“You can?” Tav interrupted. “You used to say ‘we.’”
Eli laughed shortly. “There is no ‘we’ with witches,” she said. “Only one can rule.”
“We are not all the same,” said the Hedge-Witch. “I am sorry we will have to destroy your body, daughter of the Coven. You were so useful.”
Eli glared at her, and then let her eyes slip back to Tav.
“Why are you so tense?” The
