Kite felt the laugh taking flight from her chest like a murmuration of starlings. The human was comforting her! No wonder Eli had fallen in love with one. They were so different from the daughters of this world.
Her grip tightened on the blade, and her hair whipped across the back of her neck. “I’m ready.”
The portal opened willingly.
In Between
THE LABYRINTH
The Labyrinth was angry.
For millennia, the Labyrinth had lived only to eat, ravenously hungry for magic and flesh. But as the years wore on, it grew sick of the taste of blood that was spilled in its halls. Then it had offered shelter to the lost and lonely. It had nurtured little witches and strays of all kinds, keeping them safe from the prying eyes of their parents.
The Labyrinth was growing weary of being forgotten. Of watching little witches turn their backs on it.
Cam felt its loneliness. As he fell through the darkness of the portal that had opened up in the wastelands, through the very mantle of the planet, images crowded his mind.
He watched a witch girl with flashing eyes and a devilish grin step through a shadow door and leave forever. He missed this girl and wondered what happened to her. The iron masks of the Coven overlaid the image of the young girl stepping through the door, forever leaving.
How they hurt us, he thought. How they abandon us.
The images changed, and he saw his grandmother’s face. Cam felt a pang of remorse that he had never learned to speak Vietnamese fluently. The Labyrinth felt this pain with him. Flashes of streetlights and broken glass and running shoes collided with images of dying bodies trapped in the wall, slowly rotting, caught in the stone like a bone caught in a throat.
What do you want? he thought, and already the question was changing to What do we want?
A glittering world, bleeding into the galaxy.
A body pressed against his.
A wall, stretching across the City of Ghosts, reaching outward to the stars. A body of stone. The spine of the planet.
We, too, desire to be free.
Cam felt the blood slow in his arteries, magma cooling and transforming into andesite.
All magic requires sacrifice.
The portal through the core had asked a lot of the Labyrinth, and the living stone needed something in exchange.
Something, or someone.
Part Two: Homecoming
Forty-One
THE HEIR
The portal led back to the Children’s Lair. There was an affinity between the strange hoarding of the children and the junkyard. Between the children themselves and the discarded magics of the wastelands.
The sword glowed like a burning ember in Kite’s hand, scaring away a few shadow spiders that had gathered to greet her.
“Hush,” she told the sword. “Leave them alone.”
She looked around her at the collection of things she had brought from the forgotten side of the world: puppets and playthings, shoes and arrowheads. She had brought an armoury for the children, living shields and weapons longing to destroy. The thirst for revenge was palpable, and the walls around her shrunk back, trying not to touch the sharp edges of broken dining sets or the toxic chemical fumes of banned toddler toys.
“What’s happening?” Fear broke through Cam’s voice, and she reached out for him instinctively.
Her hand met stone. “It’s okay,” she whispered, luminous eyes watching a boy turning to stone. “You’re still beautiful.”
“Kite! Help me!” But the stones were growing, stretching over his skin, pulling him into the wall. “Don’t —” His words faded to the sound of gravel on sand, and then there was silence.
Cam was gone.
The walls had claimed him.
A sense of dread gathered in her essence, making her hair lie flat and sticky against her forehead. She hung her head, wondering if Eli would forgive her for misplacing her friend.
“That’s where he belongs,” she murmured, trying to convince herself. He would be happier as part of the Labyrinth. It had freed him once, and it was right that it should reclaim his body.
“Where did the strange boy go?” asked Clytemnestra, who burst into the room with dirt on her chin and a velvet cape draped across her shoulders. “The sharp one who glitters? I wanted to play with him.”
“He’s gone home,” said Kite. She looked at the mischievous child who was also the devious Warlord.
Kite had grown accustomed to the frayed hems and yellowed lace, the dirty knee socks, and scuffed Mary Janes. She wasn’t sure what to make of Clytemnestra’s red-and-gold costume. It looked like she had interrupted playtime. The scent of baby’s breath and hemlock was overpowering, and Kite slithered away from the girl, turning back to the comforting taste of found things.
“We don’t need him,” said the Warlord. “We have our army.” She picked up a rusted Campbell’s soup can and then yelped. “It bit me!” She stuck her finger in her mouth and threw the can back on the pile of junk — now treasure.
“All things bite, little one.”
“They don’t bite me.” She scowled.
“Are the daughters ready?”
The Warlord’s eyes sparkled with wickedness. “We have many daughters now. More came when they heard of our cause. So many bad girls, runaways from home!” She adopted a sing-song voice. “They’re going to be in so much trouble. They’re going to be so much trouble.”
Clytemnestra waved her hand and the wall behind her melted away. Made-daughters and dirty children entered the chamber.
“Finders keepers!” cried Clytemnestra, diving headlong into the collection of things from the wastelands.
“You have to ask their permission,” Kite told the soldiers. “They have their own spirits and thoughts. Some will want to fight on their own. Others will mould themselves into arms.”
“We are already armed.” The unnamed stepped forward, her pale eye like milk froth.
“Then don’t make a bond with a wastelands survivor.” Kite’s fingers skittered up and down the moon sword. “But there is … power in it.” She hadn’t meant to say power, she meant something like companionship or maybe love, but the words slid off her tongue like oil and left her with the only word burned into
