Chapter 34
CHAPTER
Thirty-Four
Heloise’s cropped blonde hair was ragged, her fury evident as she glowered at Zofka, tugging her sharply tailored suit back into place. ‘You are growing rather tiresome.’
Gretel pushed Zofka behind her as Thea splayed her fingers, preparing to take on her sister, but Heloise’s words were directed at Pan Novak. With a twist of fate’s threads, Pan Novak was immobilised.
Heloise sauntered over to him, grasped the back of his collar and yanked him up onto the toes of his boots. His coat flapped, his wig and sides of his cheeks bloody from his burst eardrums.
‘What are you doing?’ Thea asked, her heart quickening. She never knew what Heloise would do next and that uncertainty, that quiet fear, had always left her unsettled. Now, amidst the people she cared for most, it was downright terrifying.
‘He is my puppet,’ Heloise said. ‘Would you like me to make him sing for you?’
Thea shook her head.
‘What’s the matter, sister mine?’ Heloise asked. ‘Do you not like my new toy?’ She smiled. ‘I thought you liked playing with him.’ She drew a nail down Pan Novak’s bloodied cheek. ‘Or did you play with him too hard?’
‘Leave him. Leave this Quarter and talk to me in the forest, just ourselves,’ Thea offered.
‘I remember now, and I know I pushed you away when we were children.’ Guilt coloured her tone.
‘I am sorrier for that then you’ll ever know, but let me make it right; we’ve both made mistakes, done things we regret. It’s never too late to make amends.’
Heloise’s smile widened, scenting blood.
‘How unlike my perfect sister to admit making a mistake. But you’re wrong.
It is too late.’ She gave a bored sigh. ‘I’m done playing now.
’ She shoved Pan Novak away, sending him careening over to the void, where he teetered on the edge.
His eyes were the only part she had not bound in threads, bulging wide as he confronted the black nothing before him.
By chance, he stabilised, and Thea let out a sigh; she had no wish for violence, even for those she detested most. But she’d forgotten the golden rule when it came to her sister: never show your emotions.
Heloise kicked out a heel, sending Pan Novak straight into the void. He fell, long and slow and silent.
‘Oops.’ Heloise giggled.
The remaining Hunters fled.
‘Good riddance.’ Heloise stalked towards Thea. ‘I’m ready for the end now. When I say the end, I mean the end for you, your precious Jasper and all your little friends.’ She sneered at Talibah and Paní Dagmar, since Gretel had forced a still-weakened Zofka back from the fray.
Paní Dagmar surveyed her calmly. ‘Well, you’re a nasty one, aren’t you? I can see why you ran away from home, Thea.’
Heloise ignored her, stealing closer and closer until she came to a stop, facing Thea.
Thea stared at the sister she’d once fled from.
‘I’d often wondered what seeing you again would feel like,’ she mused.
‘I pushed you away, but it was your choice to turn that distance into cruelty. We could have grown closer again, been allies against the coldness of our parents. Instead, you were colder and crueller than they ever were.’
Heloise smiled to herself.
‘The truth of it is, I pity you,’ Thea said quietly. ‘You’ll never know what it feels like to be surrounded by people who love you, who would stand in a broken street, surrounded by your own missteps, and fight for you. You’ll never know true love, and for that, I feel sorry for you.’
Heloise’s smile flickered.
‘That’s why you were so desperate to destroy me here, in the Quarter, wasn’t it? You wanted to shatter all the things I have that you never did. Destroy the home, the family I built for myself. Your envy is your greatest weakness.’
Heloise reached out and grabbed Thea’s necklace.
‘Wrong,’ she snarled, tossing it down onto the iced cobblestones and stamping a heel on it.
‘I wanted to destroy you here because your gods-cursed husband warded you. I’ve been wondering where you disappeared to for centuries.
Imagine my surprise when you suddenly popped up in Prague and vanished into a protected hiding place.
I tried to follow you down here, but I couldn’t, of course.
So, I paid off a couple of shape-shifters to investigate for me.
Tell me everything about your new life and your little apothecary. Oh, and your new beau. Malek.’
Jasper stiffened, raising his hands to weave fate at a second’s notice. ‘You can do this,’ he growled. ‘End her, Thea.’
Thea reached for fate, but too much emotion was surging through her as she stared at her sister’s face again for the first time in hundreds of years. And Heloise took advantage. Spinning her own web, she sent Thea flying back.
Gasping for breath, flinging her hands out to break her fall, Thea realised she’d been bound: her hands refused to answer her call.
The street rushed up too quickly. Thea met it with force.
She lay there for a moment, winded, unable to move, to speak, to breathe, even as she heard Jasper’s roar of vengeance and saw the familiar tell that someone was weaving: the air undulated.
He appeared at her side seconds later, fury shining out of his eyes as he unpicked Heloise’s knots, freeing Thea.
‘Thank you,’ she gasped as he yanked her back up to her feet. Just in time to see Heloise rising, too, a gash across one cheek where whatever Jasper had done to fling her away had hit its mark.
Heloise widened her eyes at them. ‘How curious that you took it into your own head to begin courting Malek.’ She sidled a glance at Jasper, lingering on the tightness of his jaw with no little amusement as she wiped the blood from her face.
‘I knew then that it was the opportune time for my revenge. That something had happened between the pair of you, severing that once indestructible bond and leaving you, dear sister, all helpless and alone.’ Her voice tightened on the last word.
She raised her arms to attack once more.
But Thea had been watching her intently.
And she’d heard her sister’s weakness, the moment Heloise had revealed herself.
‘I am never alone,’ she said. ‘Even without my memories, I found a home, a family. Even when I didn’t know myself, didn’t love myself, others knew and loved me.
’ She leant in closer. ‘You could have killed me on the bridge two days ago,’ she whispered.
‘When I was still missing my memories, my heart, and couldn’t fight back.
Perhaps then you would have achieved your vengeance.
Instead, you let your jealousy win. You were watching my life from outside the Quarter, never permitted inside, hungering for what I had yet again.
You can lie to yourself, but I see straight through you. ’
Heloise’s fingers twitched in a familiar pattern, but Thea had rattled her, she knew from the way her sister’s hands fumbled.
It mattered not. Thea was stronger. Thea was faster.
And she’d spent the past seven years believing her power hadn’t belonged to her, that it was smaller, less consequential than she’d liked.
Now she knew otherwise, she flexed that old familiar muscle and threw up the skeins of fate, shining brightly all around them.
Her thoughts and fingers a blur, Thea located Heloise’s thread before her eyes spotted it, something within her knowing where it would be, instinctive and primal.
It would be all too easy to toss a couple of years away and snap that thread, cut Heloise’s life off at the strings like a collapsed marionette.
But Thea was not cruel. Instead, she configured an advanced knot, ensuring it would be impossible to pick apart, and leashed her sister, banishing Heloise back to her realm, to Orion. Where she could never leave again.
Heloise gasped, her hand flying to her throat as she stared at Thea, a sliver of disbelief, of doubt, betraying that confidence.
‘You’d better hurry back to the Crossroads,’ Thea told her. ‘Before your time runs out.’
Heloise attempted to snag her own threads, reaching for her own power. But they slipped through her fingers.
Thea smiled at her. ‘That’s not going to work any more. You are banished from this realm, from any realm other than yours. If you want to use your power ever again, if you want to be able to breathe, I suggest you go home and leave me, and everybody in this Quarter, alone. Forever.’
Rasping for breath, Heloise pivoted on one heel and staggered in the direction of the Old Town.
The magical folk watched her leave before they erupted in glee.
Thea bent to one knee and picked up her necklace.
Smashed by Heloise’s heel, it revealed the pictures inside.
She’d been wearing a locket with Jasper and their daughter’s miniatures inside for the past seven years without realising.
It was the first time she’d looked on Violet’s face since her memories had returned; she’d always loved how her daughter looked like Jasper but now she realised that Jasper’s dark blue eyes and raven hair would serve as a constant reminder of Violet.
Jasper’s hands closed around hers as she stood. ‘I shall have it mended for you.’
She did not release her hold on it. ‘I have no other pictures of Violet,’ she whispered. That grief she’d pushed down, refused to acknowledge while battles were being fought, suddenly broke free, overpowering her.
‘I have.’ Jasper’s hands were solid and warm and reassuring as they slowly took the locket from her. ‘I will fetch one now, if you like?’
Zofka and Talibah and Paní Dagmar all hovered, kindnesses on the tips of their tongues, but Thea shook her head, tears running down her cheeks. ‘First, I need to do something.’