Still, Tav held on.
“How are you doing this?” The anger clouded her eyes with silt.
“I make doors,” said Tav. “And I close them.”
THE HEART
The Witch Lord’s servants were everywhere. Eli was surrounded. As she watched the witches close in, her heartbeat returned like a roar, thrumming to the melody of panic that raced through her body. The intense emotion rattled a rosebud in her chest cavity, and she felt it open.
The Coven had found her. She would never escape them. They would force her back into a prison made of paper chains and darkness. They would tear her apart and feed her to the walls.
Not again. Never again.
We are the Heart!
The first witch was foolish, drunk on orchid wine and sugared centipedes, and when she reached for the delicious Heart, the aorta of a star, it burned through her veins and she collapsed onto the floor in a pile of sawdust.
The other witches drew back. A few looked over at the Witch Lord. Only she had the power to overthrow the world. But she was still held in the embrace of something that was not quite human, not quite witch. Something they were starting to think they should be afraid of.
Eli was still an assassin, still a made-thing, and she wasn’t ready to give up. She drew two blades — pearl and bone — and turned in a slow, deliberate circle. One eye black, the other yellow.
“The Witch Lord will not save you,” she said. Her voice was strange to her — richer and deeper, the sound of wings fluttering and leaves shaking in the wind; the timbre of tree branches cracking and lightning striking. The voice of the Heart.
Punishment or mercy?
“Leave now,” she told them. “And we won’t kill you.”
Mercy, then.
I want to hurt them, Eli thought.
They are my children, the Heart thought back.
The floating lanterns of the first ring were coming nearer, hovering just out of reach.
“Capture her,” they told the room. “Capture her and we will never go hungry.”
The audience stood, unsure, shards of glass reflecting the pink bordello lighting. Masks of feathers and scales, computer chips and drywall, all turned toward the girl with her blades, the eyes underneath glittering with curiosity.
And then the wall cracked. The great stone slab of the war room that had once been a place of healing broke open. Water leaked from the crack, dripping down the walls. Streaks of salt like lace patterned the grey stone.
First a trickle, and then more. Water gushed through the crumbling stone. Soon the crack was a chasm, the stone falling apart. Pages poured through the gap, forgotten books falling from the sky and climbing out of the bedrock of the Coven. A flood of ink and water and paper.
The Witch Lord’s second body climbed through the gap.
THE HEALER
Tav watched the Witch Lord’s face as Kite climbed through the jagged crack in the wall, scraps of damp paper stuck in her hair, a starfish clinging to her thigh. There was no emotion, only calculation. There had been much more feeling in the Witch Lord’s body when Tav had burned her.
“She can’t hurt me. I am her,” whispered the Witch Lord. “Our fates are twined together. When I die, so does she. Will your made-thing be happy with you when her playmate is dead?”
Tav’s grip slipped for a fraction of a moment — but that was all it took.
“I’ll come back for you,” breathed the Witch Lord, and then she was gone, and Tav was holding an empty sac of skin and bones. They saw a fiercely glowing light, dark and green as the bottom of the sea, and then her essence was gone.
“Fuck,” said Tav. They yanked their mask off and tossed it into the growing puddle on the floor. Then they went looking for their motorcycle.
Sixty-Two
THE HEIR
A prism of light circling her head.
You will die if I die, it told Kite.
“I know,” said Kite.
A pause, and the light circled her body once, as if inspecting it for damage.
I understand. I would have done the same in your place. You have my ambition. But you were only another body for me. Your mistake was thinking you were a person.
“I am a person,” said Kite.
The essence of the Witch Lord ignored her daughter, and instead drove another blade into Kite’s heart, having discovered in her inspection the only weak spot in an otherwise perfect creation.
Will she still love you now that she knows what you really are?
Kite looked over to where Eli was cornered by the floating heads of the first ring. Fear boiled up in her body, and the water steamed and bubbled around her waist. A piece of sodden paper caught her eye, a fragment of forgotten poetry floating at the surface of the water. Something about love and pain.
“I —” She turned back to the light, but it was gone. The Witch Lord had escaped.
Kite felt guiltily relieved that she was still alive.
THE HEART
Chaos.
The Coven was drowning in ink and salt. Children chewed on the necks of witches, daughters cutting through flesh and magic with weapons cobbled together from junk and desperation.
Some of the witches fled, shedding their skins and retreating farther into the Coven, trying to outrun the bloodlust of the children. Others stayed and fought, using the shattered pieces of their costumes as makeshift weapons, using magic to ensnare and mislead their kin. Glamours of monsters and ghostly sandcastles and silk slips danced with spears and sharpened fingernails, bodies coming together and apart, ebbing and flowing like a tide crashing against a cliff.
Drops of blood were left behind from each encounter on the checkered floor — there a piece of amber, there a fleck of neon paint. Golden dew, cumulonimbus clouds, and mouldy pennies were shed as the magical armies threw themselves against each other again and again.
So much death.
The Heart couldn’t watch. It was breaking Eli, the pain of
