Chapter 41 To Heal the Soul
TO HEAL THE SOUL
A soul in love is a torrent of desire, and is thus both divine and imperishable.
Professor Moira Graves, Cygnus Discipline of Musices
You’re alive?” Claudia whimpers. She struggles to keep her eyes open, to keep herself awake. She’s fading fast.
Or has she already gone? Is she meeting Odette just across the veil?
Odette runs her hands along the poem written in blood on the wall. “How did you do it?”
Claudia hardly knows what to say. She stammers. “I just did what I saw in your diary.”
“No,” she whispers gruffly, thumbing over Corvus. “It’s never worked for me before. It was all a theory.” Her eyes cut to Claudia, and it’s not clear if Odette’s angry or impressed. “Until now. What did you do? What makes it cast?”
“I think—” Claudia tries to sit up, but she can’t.
Her body is too stiff. “Fuck,” she mumbles, wincing.
“I think the spell must evoke the constellation in both shape and name. See?” Shakily, she points.
“I used the words Hydrus and Corvus in the poem itself. I figured that if we’re mixing celestial and linguistic magic, every form of the constellation is important. ”
Odette flares her nostrils. “I see.” She laughs weakly. “It sounds so obvious when you say it.”
Claudia blinks tightly. Is this real? Reaching up, she puts her hand on Odette’s leg, half expecting it to fall right through as if putting her hand on a shadow. “You’re real?”
“I am real.”
“Am I dead?” Her tongue struggles to form words. She holds Bishop closer for comfort. “Are you alive?”
Odette’s fingers are cold as a dead girl when she touches Claudia’s hand. “I am now.”
“How?” Her body and her voice weaken by the second. She chokes out a dry cough. “Triche, Lamour, our friends—everyone thinks you’re dead. Sidarphion told me that the bargain killed you when you failed.”
“It did, in a sense. My soul left my body, but it didn’t go into the afterlife. As punishment, it went to the Realm of Nightmares. That’s where I met you for the first time. We’re always saving each other, aren’t we?”
Claudia’s vision is fading. “What?”
“You don’t recognize me?” Odette leans in close enough that her sharp canines nearly pierce Claudia’s eye. She picks up Bishop and hisses.
“You’re the snake.”
She nods, moving closer to cradle Claudia’s heavy head in her lap. Bishop curls around Odette’s wrist. She wears him like a bracelet the way Claudia always does. Claudia is powerless to move. She’s like a rag doll in Odette’s arms.
Twisting her fingers in Claudia’s hair, Odette says, “That’s how I chose to appear to you.
I teethed through your consciousness and tried to find some sort of beast that wouldn’t scare you.
I saw you had a pet snake, and I’d hoped I wouldn’t be too frightening, but you kept fucking running.
All I wanted was to tell you the whole truth.
I was going to try something else, but you woke me up before I could see you again. ”
“I did? When?”
“That night you spilled celestial blood over my grave. You brought my soul back to my body and my body back to life.”
“But you were buried. How did you get out?”
Odette raises her hands. Her nails are shaved down to the quick. Bone shows through the skin. “I clawed.”
“Did you go to Lamour?”
Odette plays with a frayed curl at the end of Claudia’s hair. “I tried only once. He thought he was seeing a ghost. As I watched him from afar, I wondered if he was the one who trapped Sidarphion in the first place. I never thought it could be Triche.”
“Why didn’t you come see me?”
“Because I didn’t know if you would be on my side. I started slipping you more pages of my diary to watch how you responded, and then I gave you the whole thing. Though, I still didn’t know if you were going to pick Sidarphion over me.”
“I would never.” A wave of cold death washes over her. Claudia trembles under the weight of it. “He killed us both.”
“I’m going to fix it, but I can’t do it here. Triche could come back at any moment. We need to get out of here, away from Cygnus.”
“Where can we go?”
Standing Claudia up and bearing all her weight, Odette says, “Where do you think?”
Claudia can no longer keep her eyes open.
She’s reliant on all other senses to tell her where they are, where they’re going.
The air around her grows warmer, then colder, then warms again.
She takes a deep breath, inhaling petrichor and the scent of wet, crushed leaves.
They’re outside. They’re in the woods. They’re back in the same place where Claudia first arrived.
Forcing her eyes to open for one quick blink, she sees that the sun is rising over the hill, bringing the beginning of morning. The sky is a dark, powdery blue, glittering with the most stubborn stars.
Her heavy eyes close again. She hears a match strike, smells something burning.
Then, Odette carries her through a Doorway, and immediately, she feels safe. She feels like she’s home.
She opens her eyes once more with the last of her strength.
In a grand, light blue sitting room, there are Alistair, Angel, Marcherie, and Cassius. They blur together as Claudia strains to keep her eyes open.
“What the fuck?” Alistair exclaims.
“Odette?” Marcherie cries at the same time Cassius yells, “Claudia!”
Odette expels a sharp, quick breath. “I can explain everything, but I have to save her first.”
Claudia’s vision finally goes completely black. She falls out of Odette’s grasp. The last thing she feels before slipping out of consciousness is the familiar, strong hold of the man she loves.
When Claudia regains consciousness, she’s lying face down on a blue damask chaise. She’s wearing a satin robe. Her back stings; her chest stings more. Over her heart, Odette has carved Phoenix, Ara, Cygnus.
To heal the soul.
It’s the spell Claudia invented to help Lamour.
Lamour. The images of his death flood her mind—his body, the blood, the heat, the smell. Her professor, her mentor, is dead, and Claudia can’t help but feel that it’s all her fault.
Forcing down her grief, she sits upright and clutches her chest, surveying the room.
Odette sits across from her, a black marble table between them covered in a spill of academia: half-written spells, diary entries, textbooks, and the grimoire of celestial spells.
Odette must have disenchanted it to take it out of the observatory.
She was hiding in the school for so long. Waiting, watching.
Marcherie sits beside Odette, her hand on the shoulder of her resurrected lover. To her right is a Roe grandfather clock, ticking through the silence. Alistair and Angel are on a white sofa to her left. Alistair is holding Bishop. At the other end of the chaise, cradling Claudia’s legs, is Cassius.
All five of them are looking at her like they’re staring down a ghost.
Her eyes land on Cassius. “Hi.”
At the sound of her voice, a visible wave of relief crashes over him.
He releases a harsh breath, swiftly and gently pulling her into his lap.
As he takes her face into his hands, his eyes well with tears.
“You’re alive.” He kisses her like he’s testing her tangibility, making sure she’s a real person in a real body and not some distant dream he can’t touch.
“So are you,” she whimpers with palpable relief. She throws her arms around his neck, then rests her head on his shoulder and turns her face to Odette. “What happened? How long has it been?”
“A few days.”
She looks at Cassius. “How long until—”
“Not long,” Alistair says, stroking Bishop’s head with his thumb. “You have until tonight to kill him, or the bargain takes you.”
Claudia swallows. “You all… you all know everything?”
Marcherie nods and says, “Odette told us.”
She stammers, looking up at Odette. “Can’t we just let the bargain take me? You can bring me back the same way I brought you back, right?”
“No,” Cassius snaps, tightening his hold on her. “I won’t risk that. I will not let that monster have you.”
“He’s right,” Odette says. “There’s no guarantee I’d be able to do what you did. I’m not as strong as I used to be, and Sidarphion never gave me the same amount of power that he poured into you.”
Claudia feels a twinge of shame remembering all those times she let Sidarphion touch her, all the desire she took from him. She couldn’t help herself.
Odette shuffles through the papers on the table. “We’ve been working on a different plan.”
“I can help,” Claudia says, wincing when she leans over.
“You need to rest.” Cassius lays his hand on top of hers.
“I need to fix this. I know there’s a way out.” Speaking to Odette, she says, “Lamour told me there was some way to unbind Sidarphion from the stars, but I don’t know what it was.”
“I think I do. Think about this—Sidarphion is trapped because he’s bound to Dracoemagyl’s stars. What happens if we kill Triche, the witch who bound him? If Triche dies, so does his magic, and so does Sidarphion’s trap.”
“Just because it sounds right doesn’t mean it is,” Cassius says. “A simple syllogism isn’t—”
“It’s not just a syllogism. It’s spellwork.”
Claudia wipes her sleepy, swollen eyes. “If that would work, why didn’t Sidarphion tell us to kill Triche in the first place?”
“I have three theories. The first being he knew we weren’t strong enough to kill Triche on our own, but we’re not on our own anymore, are we?” Odette smiles at the group. “The second theory: He wants to kill Triche himself.”
“What’s the third?” Marcherie asks.
“That this plan won’t work.” She sighs. With resolve, she says, “But we have to try.”
“So, we’re just going to let Sidarphion go free?” Claudia asks, leaning back on the chaise. “After all he’s done to us?”
Odette nods.
“That’s mad.”
“Maybe so.”
Claudia’s jaw drops. “You don’t care because he’s not after you anymore. You’re not afraid of his freedom because you know he doesn’t want you the way he wants me.”
“And do you want him, too?”
“Of course not. I want Cassius.”
Odette shrugs. “Who’s to say you don’t want both?”