“And they taught you their anger, and they sent you to kill me.” Furious tears burned in their eyes. They could face down the Witch Lord, they could watch themselves and their loved ones bleed and break. But to see Cam turn against them? “We let them take you,” they confessed, forcing the words out with a heavy tongue. “It was our fault. It was my fault. I’m sorry. I should have come after you. I should have saved you.”
“Thank you,” said Cam. “You know I don’t love being left behind.”
“Cam —”
“It’s okay.” A wry smile, a spark of light in his eyes. “You can be a dick when you’re in love. Work on it, okay?” He nodded at the prone body before him. “Are you going to help her or not? Thought you were the Healer.”
“Now they’re the Witch Lord,” Kite added helpfully.
Suddenly Tav understood. They understood that although trauma was real, it could also lie to you, that fear could colour the edges of your world in darkness. Sometimes nightmares were just nightmares. Sometimes the people who love us don’t hurt us. Sometimes our made-families deserve our trust.
Tav realized that they had never admitted how scared they were.
Not when the bottle was smashed over their bike.
Not when the ghost killed the two boys from their school.
Not when they met the gaze of the Witch Lord for the very first time.
But it was okay to be scared. It wasn’t a weakness, and Tav let the feeling flow through them and then dissipate into the air, until there was only the stars and the feathers and the familiar face before them.
“I missed you,” they said.
“I’ve been busy,” he told them.
“Tell me over drinks sometime.”
“I promise.”
Kite flowed forward and placed a hand on his torso. “You get more interesting every time I see you,” she said.
“I missed you, too, Kite.”
Kite glowed.
Dropping the feather dagger, Tav stepped forward and knelt beside the made-girl. “She’s breathing,” they whispered.
“I told you.” Cam gathered his long hair into a ponytail. “Just because I was pissed at you didn’t mean I was going to kill you. The Labyrinth took care of the children for generations. All we wanted was to be heard and loved and remembered.”
“The quartz —” Tav traced the lines of new stone that stretched across ribs and calves. They looked up. “You healed her.”
“I told you that already.” Behind him, the small chasm was slowly closing, the ice moving as if unfrozen, purpleblack glass smoothing out into a perfect mirror.
The obsidian blade trembled in Tav’s hand and made a keening sound like the singing stones of Cam’s hybrid body.
The body had been healed, but something else was needed to animate the spirit of a girl made from thorns and glass and pearl.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Tav, frustrated. “She’s not injured.”
“She needs blood,” said Kite. “Lifeblood will wake her.”
It was a mark of how strange their life had become that Tav didn’t question Kite. And part of them remembered finding Kite pressed into the wall like a fossil — and how Eli had cut her own hand, had fed her own blood to the witch, to wake her and give her strength.
Tav held the blade to their palm and pressed it against the skin, closing their eyes and willing the blade to cut. Blood beaded along a thin red line, and some of it was oxidized red, and other droplets were inky purpleback.
“How do I —?”
Kite flowed forward, resting Eli’s head against her distressed skirts. Gently, she coaxed Eli’s mouth open.
“That’s a good girl,” she whispered. “Take your medicine.”
Tav held her hand over Eli’s open mouth and watched as a single drop of redblack witch-human-lunar blood dripped into her throat. They expected Eli to choke or spit it out, but she only swallowed and then sighed, a sound like a cloud losing itself to snow.
Tav, Eli, and Cam watched the sleeping girl. One, two, three breaths; a gust of summer air ruffled Tav’s hair and they felt the ice beginning to melt. The season was reclaiming the land. Soon everything would be brown and dead and dry, and the cicadas would shriek. Already the fireflies were coming back, burning the night like children’s sparklers.
Somewhere in the city, people were dancing. Someone was falling in love. Someone was falling out of it. A child pulled a slip from a clothesline and drew it around her shoulders like a cape. Two boys had climbed onto the roof of their school to stargaze but were kissing instead and didn’t notice the rift in the sky. A young woman, sitting on a deck that smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey, looked up into the fractured cosmos and decided to quit law school and become a painter.
An eternity passed in three heartbeats.
Eli’s eyes opened.
Seventy-One
ELI
She hadn’t minded dying.
She hadn’t minded being buried. The weight of all those books on her body had been soothing, the pages soft against her skin. Eli had read fragments of diaries and letters as the Heartblood drained from her body, as the light left her veins and returned to the mantle of its origin.
Then there had been only darkness.
But in the darkness the Labyrinth had found her, had repaired her broken body. It had come to her in the fretful dreams of a dying person, and its voice had sounded like Cam’s. Its touch felt like a stone dagger returning to its sheath.
Somehow, her mortal body had been revived. She had freed the Heart and survived.
Images slowly came into focus, faces and colours and lights.
Where was she?
Why was Kite crying tears of seaglass over her face?
Why did her tongue taste of blackberries?
The first thing she noticed was that she couldn’t see Kite’s essence. She switched eyes, letting blackness spill over her irises. Swirls of bluegreen rippled through Kite’s body. Then she switched back. It was nice, not having
