Fifty-Four
THE HEART
Eli felt the coiled fury in her body start to unwind, sending tremors down her limbs. Her teeth ached from the vibrations that rocked her body like a heavy bass, a pulse that sounded like life.
She had been built to be a tool, a weapon, a machine. She had spent her life in cages made of blood and fear and promises. But she had broken free from the Coven, free from her mother, and she wasn’t going to leave one form of bondage for another.
“You can’t stop me,” she told the Warlord, and the humming in her bones grew stronger.
Clytemnestra sharpened one fingernail on a glittering canine and then winked. “Didn’t your mother teach you it’s bad manners to tell lies?”
Eli was on her like a cat on a bird, her bloody mouth on the hem of Clytemnestra’s skirts, dragging her down, down, down. Sheet-lightning pain burned electric and hot against her skull, and fingernails like razor blades carved patterns into her skin. The skin there was so weak, so fragile, and the blood dripped into Eli’s eyes, obscuring her vision. But her magic eyes saw through the blood, through the pain, to the scared, trembling essence of her enemy, and before Clytemnestra could complete her victory, Eli tore a piece of fabric from her dress and swallowed it.
“You’ve ruined my dress.” The little witch pouted. “I hate you! I hate you!” The temper tantrum made her essence boil and steam, and the scent of sulfur and kerosene filled the room.
“It was delicious,” said Eli.
She tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ear, getting blood on her hands. It was rust orange and dried immediately on her palms, rough as sandpaper. Eli rubbed her hands together, sending flakes spitting like sparks. She noticed that Clytemnestra flinched when one landed on her ankle.
“Hate you,” Clytemnestra whispered, her Cupid’s bow lips barely moving.
And then the little girl exploded.
A piece of cerebellum landed on Eli’s face, still animated by the girl’s essence. Eli realized in horror that it was sucking at her eyes, at her magic sight, trying to devour her ability to see her attacker. Desperately, Eli wrenched at the dark-grey mass, trying to ignore the feeling of wet intestines as they wound their way up her ankles.
No one used magic like this. It was forbidden.
There was a reason Clytemnestra was the Warlord, a reason she had lived so long as a child, a reason the Coven had never repurposed her.
She was hard to catch, and harder to kill.
Panicking, hands slippery with blood and meaty flesh, Eli stuck out her reptilian tongue and licked Clytemnestra’s brain matter. With a shriek, the cerebellum released and fell to the floor, where Eli stomped on it ferociously (not that it mattered to the magic essence inside, but it felt really good, anyway). Then Eli set about chewing through the intestines that were ensnaring her body, using her crocodile teeth to tear and bite.
At her feet, two eyeballs lay on the ground. They looked like they were made of porcelain, with painted irises and pupils. A doll’s eyes.
“Maybe I’ll wear you as a pendant,” Eli told the left eyeball, as she tossed a piece of intestine to one side. “I seem to have misplaced the last one you gave me.”
The eyeball rolled away quickly.
“You know why this is forbidden, don’t you?” Eli asked, recalling Kite’s lullabies as they fell asleep together on the island, the legends and myths Kite recited from memory. The stories she brought with her from the library, from the Coven’s archives of history and knowledge. “A witch is weaker when her essence is torn.”
She knew this to be true; she had felt it in the thinner, frailer magic that touched her body, as if Clytemnestra had been watered down with tears and rain. Another word rose to mind, like the drifting waves of Kite’s hair brushing across her stomach.
Gestalt.
Her belt of blades lay on the floor, stained with something dark and wet. The frost blade rang out — a single clear, high note. It was time to end this. The pieces of Clytemnestra hurried to join together, liver and tongue squelching over stone.
Eli waited for the Warlord to put herself back together.
Clytemnestra, mostly reconstructed but missing a few parts, lunged at Eli with teeth and nails. Lacerations etched themselves into Eli’s back and legs and shoulders — but wood and stone are strong, and the witch’s magic was weakened.
Eli flickered in and out of existence as the adrenalin from pain merged with the excitement of the fight, the pleasure of giving in to a body that was strange and wonderful and monstrous.
Catching hold of Clytemnestra’s hair, Eli pulled the little witch close to her. Eli’s body glowed with the power of the Heart. She was a girl lit up from the inside, like a glass jar humming with fireflies. She looked down at her body and could see through her skin to the thorns and granite and black pearl rustling and glittering and growing inside, illuminated by a power greater than any single being.
The Heart didn’t need a blade. The lights crawling under Eli’s skin swarmed over Clytemnestra’s body, and then delicately, the way a lover plucks a flower, Eli reached out and tenderly tore the witch’s essence from her body.
Clytemnestra’s screams would echo in the room for years to come.
The tension broke like a storm breaks over the horizon, flooding the sky with darkness.
The crumpled mess of hair and keratin stained the floor, while a ball of white light shivered in a corner, shuddering wildly.
“I’ll give you privacy to dress,” Eli told the ball of light. “And don’t wait up — I’ll be back late.”
She retrieved her blades from the floor and buckled them around her hips. A smile split across her face like stitches breaking over a wound, and then she was gone, running through the Labyrinth, looking for the door. She would find her way back into the Coven. She would be there
