Oathbound (The Legendborn Cycle #3)

Chapter 11

11

Mariah

HAZEL GATHERS US all in Alice’s room, to my surprise. “Thank you for coming, Valechaz. I need both of y’all for this experiment.”

“Experiment? I thought you came to visit Aunt Hazel,” I say to Valec.

He tucks his chin as he regards Hazel. “That’s what I was told. You keepin’ secrets, Hazel?”

“It’s no secret; it’s just… an experiment. I have a theory. Theories require testin’,” Hazel says, sitting at the foot of Alice’s bed, settling in like she’s at a lectern and not resting on a quilt in a country home. She looks between us where we stand in the doorway and waves us inside.

Valec eases forward, brow pinched. “What can I do? I’m no healer.”

“No.” She taps her own nose softly. “But you can pick up on things that I can’t.”

“Like?”

Hazel beckons Valec over. “Can you get close enough to Alice to check something for me? Kneel down?”

Valec eases to his knees on the floor in a liquid motion, shuffling forward to sit by Alice’s bedside. “Sure, Hazel, but—”

“Let me know what you scent from her skin.”

Valec and I exchange confused glances. I shrug, and he looks back. “All right.” He gently lifts Alice’s arm from where it rests across her belly and brings her limp hand to his face. He raises his eyes to Hazel, and she nods encouragingly before he dips his nose to the back of Alice’s hand. He closes his eyes and inhales—and his spine stiffens immediately. His eyes snap open, red and bright, jaw slack. “She’s… she’s not all the way here, Hazel.”

Hazel nods. “Thought as much.”

“Wait,” I say. “What does that mean, ‘she’s not all the way here’?”

Valec takes another long draw of Alice’s hand and then nods, placing it on the bed at her hip. “She’s alive but… not. She doesn’t smell like decay; it’s more like… she’s not quite living, not quite dead. I don’t understand.”

“I think Ms. Chen is caught,” Hazel says slowly. “Close to death but not in its clutches. That is why my acquired skill with herbs and tinctures and even my entire branch of Magnifier root are not effective.”

“You can’t help her, because your branch of root focuses on the life force of the living, the truly living.” Valec stands gracefully, tapping his chin. “Makes sense—you can’t really treat me or other demons. Too much death in us.”

“You’re not dead,” I protest. “I know what death feels like.”

Valec smiles, a note of appreciation mixed with reassurance on his brow. “I hold more death in my makeup than most, but you’re right that I’m not dead. Not at my core. Goruchel, on the other hand? They’re a form of undead. It’s why they have to steal the life from the humans they impersonate. Full demons are not of the plane of the living.”

“My theory is that Alice is trapped between two worlds,” Hazel adds with a sigh, “and that she might smell like a goruchel in that way, even though she is human. My diagnosis is that she is in limbo.”

“Isn’t that what all comas are?” I ask tentatively.

“No,” Hazel says. “A healer like William would identify this as a coma, but someone who works with the dead the way we do would know the difference. Which is where you come in, Mariah.”

“Me?”

“Yes,” Hazel says. “A Medium walks the path between the living and the dead. She bridges the two naturally. She can see the connections. You can see them. A rare gift.”

I gape at her, my mouth opening and closing. Mediums are rare Rootcrafters but not unheard of. Bree Matthews is a rare Medium, special even among Mediums. What I do lets me connect other living people to death, not connect people in limbo to themselves .

I feel inadequate and bare beneath Hazel’s gaze.

“I don’t know, Auntie,” I whisper. “Bree can actually walk the ancestral plane and talk to the dead—”

“The powerhouse ain’t here, Riah.” At the mention of Bree’s name, Valec’s jaw clenched, and he turned away. “And Alice ain’t dead.”

“Mariah.” Hazel shakes her head. “Alice needs our help now , baby. I don’t know what’s happening to her life force, but what little I have sensed has grown weaker since we took her in. You can see the connections between others’ lives and their brushes with death. We need your specialty here, Mariah, not Bree’s.”

I shake my head slowly. “I don’t know.…”

Hazel purses her lips. “It’s up to you, of course.”

“No, it ain’t!” Valec interjects, scoffing. His eyes are still crimson, flashing against his brown skin. “We all agreed to take Alice in for her sake, but we did it for Bree, too, who might be facing the Hunter right now. All on her own. Facing our biggest threat, next to the Order itself. Might even be foolishly thinking she can win against him, because we”—he swallows, shaking his head—“because I told her about him. And me and Lu asked her to take on our boogeyman.”

Hazel sighs. “Bree inherited great power, but she also inherited a haunting—several, really. From Arthur, the Order, the Hunter. And she inherited her own maternal ancestors’ well-founded fears about them all. Her path was always going to intersect with the Hunter’s, Valechaz.…”

“Bree would do this for one of us. You know she would!” He thrusts a hand toward the sleeping girl. “Helping Alice is… is… balance —”

“Valechaz! You forget yourself!” Hazel says sharply. “No ’Crafter has to do a single thing against her will.”

Valec bows his head, his red eyes shifting to brown and back, then brown again.

“No, he’s… he’s right,” I say quietly. “Bree would do it for any one of us, without question.”

A smirk tugs at Valec’s lips, barely visible beneath his bowed head. “Damn straight she would.”

I push my glasses up on my nose and take a breath. “What do you need me to do?”

Hazel studies me for a moment, then nods and stands. She wipes her hands on her apron and heads for the door and the kitchen beyond. “I got something for you to drink.”

“I can do that,” I say to her as much as to myself. Valec tilts his head to eye me. “I can drink something; that’s easy—”

“It’s not gonna taste good,” Hazel shouts back. “Gonna be pretty bad, in fact.”

“Oh.” I frown. “Well, that’s okay—”

“Valec, move the second bed close to Alice for me, please!”

I blink as Valec blurs into motion. “The bed?” I call to Hazel, concerned. “Why do you need a bed ?”

“Don’t need to know the plan to know the extra bed’s not for her,” Valec says as he gets both hands up under the twin bed frame and lifts it easily, setting it down beside Alice like it weighs nothing. “It’s for you.”

The forest is filled with ancient trees. They tower over me, their canopy higher than my eyes can see and dense enough that light from the full moon has to claw its way down to the earth. The ground ahead of me is bathed in shimmering blue, gray, and silver, like the sheen of oil atop Hazel’s root-enhanced tea.

The effects of Hazel’s tea had hit me before I could properly settle onto the covers of the bed beside Alice’s sleeping body. I’d fallen after the third sip and felt Valec catch me and lower me to the mattress. Thank goodness for cambion speed.

Pungent, rich flavors. Earth and fire and air elemental scents. The taste of the tea lives at the back of my throat and floods my nostrils, even here—cinnamon for a power boost, cypress for its ties to the dead, sweet cicely for spiritual connection, patchouli and parsley to strengthen my own Medium abilities.

When I look down at myself, I am wearing a heavy black gown with a tight bodice that I’d normally never pick out for myself. Definitely not something in my closet. Black boots strapped against my shins feel like leather cages around my legs. But I march forward, compelled to move ahead. I move as one does in the unknown dark, swiftly toward the light and away from the shadows.

A small hill sits up ahead in a clearing. Crowded at its base are wild, curving roots that arc like black snakes, twisting up and around themselves as if to restrain the hill from growing any wider or higher. I look to the left for a path around the curled mass and, seeing none, walk quickly to the right.

Nothing there either.

I’ll have to climb the twisted mass to move forward. And forward is the only option. I can’t turn back. Something deep inside stops me from even turning my head to look over my shoulder. So. Forward. I lift a heeled boot toward the first thick briars rising from the ground and hear the crunch of dead leaves as I step.

It is as if that first step triggers a release from the forest, as if the dark woods have been waiting.

“Wind” is really not the best word for what surrounds me now, whipping the skirts of my dress and pressing the thick fabric against the backs of my thighs. It picks up behind me too, blowing my braids across my eyes. This force isn’t wind at all but a powerful mist, damp and black and reeking of mold. The darkness soaks me, plastering my hair against my cheeks and throat.

I scramble forward frantically, clawing at the brambles, but the heels on the ridiculous boots slip through the open gaps. The thicker roots make for easy handholds, but moving quickly means they tear the palms of my hands. The higher I climb, the greater the swirling force at my back bites at my spine and neck. The stench makes me dizzy.

In the distance, a howl pierces the air.

It begins as a single high-pitched call that sounds nearly like laughter. The sound whips around my head in stereo, starting from the right, crossing my face, and continuing around my left shoulder, then fading. On the second pass, the laughing sound seeps into my body like water into a sponge, settling into the deep space behind my heart, quickening my breath.

Then the sound doubles. And triples. A pack of hounds is near.

I make it to the top of the hill and have just caught my balance when the dark mist circles me again, rotating in faster and tighter rings—and I recognize it for what it is.

This is Alice’s death. Howling at my back. Clamoring for my attention. Seducing me away from the light.

Valec didn’t smell decay on Alice in the real world, but it is here. Cloying and thick and eager.

Then, I see Alice.

She is dressed as I saw her when we were last at Volition. Jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, her iron knuckles looped around her right hand. But there are shadowy figures around her, and her left hand is held high, a small black device clenched in her fist.

The figures around her are still, like statues—mid-step, mid-flight, and mid-strike. It’s only when I recognize those figures for who they are—the Mageguard—that I understand what I’m seeing.

Alice isn’t just frozen in stasis in the real world. She’s frozen here, too, in a moment from the battle at Volition.

I clamber down the hill, holding my skirts up high, and shout for her. “Alice!”

She doesn’t move.

“Alice!” I try again. I reach the bottom of the hill, breathless, still yelling for her attention, but she does not respond to my voice.

This is not my ancestral plane or Alice’s, not a place where she is in communion with her ancestors, but a precipice. A type of purgatory. Half in, half out, like Valec said.

By the time I reach the level ground of Volition, I see Bree-Arthur in their own fighting stance. Bree’s face, a grim and determined expression, and aether armor are all in full color, and so is Selwyn Kane, caught leaping in the air. The people we harbored at Volition are drenched in color while the Mageguard are a dark, muted gray and indistinguishable from one another. Even the leader of the Mageguard, Erebus Varelian, Selwyn’s opponent, is nothing but a dark shadow against the early morning light of this captured moment.

The hounds outside the valley yip and howl. They sound as if they’re circling.

Or waiting.

“Alice?” I whisper. Her eyelids flutter, and she squeezes the black device. The sound of it reanimates the shadowed Merlins. The supersonic weapon Alice had held that day lasted ten seconds, but here it lasts twice as long.

The pain drives all but Erebus to the ground, just as it did that day. Selwyn has fallen, curled into a ball with his hands clasped to his bleeding ears. Alice tosses the weapon and jerks forward, moving as if through thick, invisible liquid, each step silent as she approaches Selwyn’s prone body. Behind her, I see the Volition barrier open—and see my own image step through. See my mouth wide and shouting at her.

I remember what I’d said in those frantic seconds. Hurry. Hurry!

Alice heaves Selwyn up. He’s too heavy.

Erebus trains his sights on them both.

I watch myself watch it all, as helpless now as I was then.

Bree-Arthur dashes forward to intercept Erebus’s attack, punching him into the shining Volition barrier. Bree-Arthur stands panting, watching their foe fall to the earth.

I know what happens next.

Alice reaches for her friend, relief written on her face—and Bree-Arthur reacts without looking, throwing Alice into the van.

The sound echoes here—the crack and crunch of bone hitting metal.

“ALICE!” Bree-Arthur yells, and the echo goes on and on and on. Spiraling high in this valley that Alice has created, louder and louder—

Until the scene resets.

Alice stands in the middle of the fray, hand held high, eyes darting over the scene. This time, she triggers the sonic weapon and runs as it blares. The Merlins go down. Selwyn, on the ground. Erebus sees her, moves before Bree-Arthur can react, conjures a blade that slices her belly open.

The scene resets.

Alice stands before the barrier, hesitating. Eyes moving as if calculating her odds. Like the memory of this moment is a chessboard, and she is devising a new strategy before she ever moves her pieces.

My heart twists.

I don’t know if any Medium has ever witnessed someone negotiate their own death.

“Oh, Alice…”

At my quiet whisper, Alice’s eyes turn to meet mine. Her dark eyes are red-rimmed and frustrated. She shakes her head. Her voice reaches me through gritted teeth. “One more time.”

I don’t know what to say. Don’t know how to tell her that it’s already happened. That the only way forward is to leave.

She looks back at the scene. “One more time—”

And I am thrown back into my body.