The sword had to accept her offer. It was too powerful an artifact to bend to her will — unless Kite used the newfound powers her mother had gifted her. Unless …
No. I won’t turn into her. I am nothing like her.
Brilliant turquoise hair coiled tightly around her neck as the witches’ teeth bit at her feet. Strange shapes of light and dark stretched from all around her. Kite felt her own light starting to diminish. She was starting to feel like a shadow cast by someone else. A candle being put out.
She waited.
If she was going to die here, she would die like a child of the walls, not an Heir scrabbling for revenge and blame. A clean, honest death, with the brutality bare and unashamed.
Kite caught her reflection in the surface of the blade: her eyes were bright with fire and life, and in the reflection her hair swam around her face like a school of fish.
And then she understood: the sword had accepted her offer of a dance.
Raising the blade with two hands, staggering under the weight of its magic, which thrummed through her body to its own alien rhythm, Kite turned in a slow circle, letting her eyes rest on every flickering essence emerging from underground.
“I’ll lead,” she whispered.
Thirty-Five
THE HEART
The hole in her body had closed, but Eli could still feel it. She didn’t have to look down to know that her spine was fighting to remain corporeal, that her body wanted to disappear. The ache in her joints and the shock spreading from her chest to her fingertips begged to be relieved. To slip into pure light. To leave this clumsy, messy flesh behind.
Stay, she begged the Heart. I can’t leave them here. Please.
Eli didn’t need the cough that wracked her lungs and choked her breath to remind her that being ripped apart and sewn back together by magic was fucking hard on a body. But she had been made to withstand trauma. She had learned how to carry pain. And she wasn’t ready to give in to the demands of her body.
Just a little longer.
After a moment, the feeling of being stretched thin — like an old T-shirt worn by sun and bleach — passed. This time, she didn’t vanish. She was still here. Still sore, tired, and angry as hell. But here.
Eli’s fingertips rubbed the pollen-scented sprig of purple flowers she had tucked into her pocket. A trinket, a charm, a superstition. Something to give to a valentine in the schoolyard or to press between the pages of a heavy tome. Something to tether her to Tav. To keep her in her body. And it was working.
Excitement and pleasure shuddered down her forearms like a pinched nerve. The café came into sharp focus, and she whipped her neck around to assess the danger and plan her attack.
Tav was exhausted. The effort of creating a door, of holding it open, and closing it without destroying Eli had eaten up every store of energy, every moment of sleep and twitch of caffeine. Eli could see it as clearly as she could see the malicious magic crawling up the windows and blocking out the moonlight.
“I can’t believe you let her plant you,” Tav was saying, biding time. Stalling. Hoping for a miracle. “What was that like?”
There were seven of them. Eli vaguely recognized a man who had been hanging on to Cam that night when she first agreed to the impossible task of capturing the Heart of the Coven. One of the women — brown eyes, perfect eyebrows, purple lipstick — she thought might be the Hedge-Witch’s lover. The others were nobodies, cardboard faces, like all the humans she had smiled at or stalked since she was a little girl.
Skin for ghosts, or just empty skin. That’s how she used to see humans.
But she was part human, too, and if she looked at her feelings under certain lighting, at just the right angle, she might admit to being maybe, just a little, in love with one.
Maybe.
“You look a little green,” Tav was telling the Hedge-Witch’s girlfriend.
The purple mouth twisted. Dirt crusted the corners of her lips. “Just give it to us, Tav, and we don’t have to fight.”
“Where’s Cam?” one of the men asked, visibly shaking. “What did you do with Cam?”
“Humans aren’t meant to be plants,” Eli told the Hedge-Witch. “This will hurt them.”
“I don’t bargain with made-things,” she said, and turned back to Tav. “Why are you so worried about this thing? We’ll save the most important pieces for when we repurpose her.”
“You don’t understand,” Tav told their former comrades. “We’re trying to fix things. The Hedge-Witch has lied to you.”
“You lied to us,” said a woman. “You left us.”
“Where’s Cam?!”
Tav’s voice lowered and sharpened. “You need to listen to me. You don’t understand —”
They were wasting their time; even Eli could feel the waves of fear and anger that always meant blood. But not from everyone — some were still panicking over their time as a succulent conglomerate. At least one had lost their sense of individuality and was struggling to remember who they were.
But someone was desperately afraid, and Eli had learned enough about humans to know that fear made them dangerous. Anger could be used to build, to remember, to change, to love, or to kill. Fear meant only one thing.
She should know — she had lived in fear for years.
But who was it? Which one was the threat?
“— the mission —”
“— with the enemy —”
“— dying, it’s fucking dying —”
Smoked citrus and vodka, the signature scent of fear fermented into destruction — there!
Eli moved. Her body was fast, reflexes honed through years of training. And even weakened, even damaged, her materials came together to create strength. She was stronger than the humans. Stronger, even, than witches. She was Circinae’s greatest achievement.
She moved so fast that she blurred out of existence, and the Heart took over for
