Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Give her time, Selene.
Fiona released the magic, and relief flooded Joan.
Give her time, she mouthed to herself. It had always stuck with her.
Merlin showing patience. Her memories were a muddy wasteland of lost concepts, things she hadn’t realized she still remembered until Fiona took over and Joan’s panicked brain tried to compensate.
She was eight and she was twelve. It was last year and a decade ago. Her first day of college, walking into the architecture building and knowing it was home.
Molly’s sweet sixteen. They’d stolen a bottle of wine out of the wine cellar and gotten drunk together later that night, swigging straight from the bottle. Sometimes I think this is all going to crush me, Molly had said. Joan had such a headache the next day.
Fiona was casting. This was old news. Any second now Joan would channel the magic, and the pain would be so great, she couldn’t even reach out to try and talk to the city. It looked past her. If it tried to call to her, Joan was sure she couldn’t hear it.
She was dying. She knew that with a distant certainty, in the slowing thud of her heart, the piercing pain of her kidneys.
She knew it in the wheeze of her lungs and the wetness in her chest. Death bent its head toward Joan, and some moments she begged it for release.
Kiss me and end it, she thought. And some moments she was so hopelessly afraid, and she cried before her tear ducts ran out of water, and she begged, Not yet, not yet, give her time, Selene.
She had no idea how much time had passed; she only knew it was too long. Too long, and no one had come for her.
Fiona’s latest spell settled on Joan like a coat, and she barely even jerked when Fiona waded into her mind, took control of her body, and forced her to channel again. She waited for the pain, and it erupted across her skin like starbursts, supernovas grinding her to ash.
Then it faded, smoothed over. The sores healed across her sticky, bloody skin. Her senses all returned, and clarity reached her for the first time in eternity. She was—free. She was—Joan. She could—see.
Fiona’s eyes were shining in triumph. Joan was still channeling, but without pain. She was weightless, like gravity had reversed, and there was a blue sheen to her skin.
“Finally,” Fiona breathed. “A loophole. And just in time, they’re close.”
A patch of runes, chalked to the wall, was glowing, slowly degrading into dust. A new patch lit up.
The clarity started to fade as the spell on her ebbed. All things were temporary in this world. Joan’s thoughts began their slow slide back into the mud, and she scrambled for purchase.
“Let… me go,” she whispered. Her mouth tasted like pennies.
What a stupid thing to say. She skated further into the well of memories that stuck to her like grains of sand on a wet body.
She was untethered from the earth, something in her slipping from her body.
She had no power here. Her demands went unanswered.
Once upon a time, everything Joan had done had been to keep Mik from this very fate: being brutally experimented upon to reverse engineer their magic.
She wished she were dead already. She wished she were a ghost and magic would never touch her again.
“Maybe a few more hours before Astoria Wardwell hunts her way to me,” Fiona said to herself, ignoring Joan. She turned to the desk and fished through the papers and books. “We’ll leave her a present. She’ll be a problem if I let her keep going. I can turn her into a message instead.”
She pivoted back to Joan, a necklace of some sort in her hand.
Her eyes were unusually kind as she draped it over Joan’s head.
“I wasn’t sure you’d survive,” she said.
“It’s strange, I’d have expected your ability to wane, but the more damage you take, the more magic you channel.
What an odd dance between pain and power.
I want to thank you, for everything you’ve given up. ”
“Fiona,” Joan whispered, soft, needy. “Don’t—” What, leave her? She should be praying for her to go. Don’t what—do this? It was already done. I’ll be a villain to many, but a hero to many more. Joan had never stood a chance of reasoning with that.
The thought of it made her so viciously angry.
It was the first emotion in days clear enough that Joan could hold on to it.
She’d never had a chance or a choice. She wanted—she wanted Fiona between her teeth, wanted to grind her to nothing, chew her to gristle.
She wanted Fiona to feel even a fraction of what she’d made Joan feel.
Fiona was waiting, still pretending that all this had been done against her will. Forced into kidnapping and torturing by some higher calling, by some greater system. Did she think this was mercy, letting Joan utter her final words?
“Don’t… look back,” Joan ground out. “Don’t stop running. If I catch you, you’re dead.”
Fiona jerked away as Joan’s voice gained strength. She strained against her bindings, leaned forward in her chair, until her wrists screamed louder, until she thought her fingers might dislocate. It was all nothing to her now; pain was an old friend, death its strange and close cousin.
“Fiona,” Joan growled, her voice half in singsong, and blood wound between her teeth, spilling over, out of her mouth. The necklace dangled from her throat, a heavy chain. “I’m going to ruin you.”
Fiona’s wide eyes betrayed her, even as she adjusted her shirt and brushed off her pants. Joan was a world-class expert in this woman’s microexpressions now. “I thought we were coming to an agreement,” Fiona said.
“Fuck. You.”
Fiona withdrew, started gathering the things on her desk to pack them into a backpack. She was really leaving, and Joan was going to stay stuck in this chair.
Oh, Joan was all rage now, all frothing lips and gnashing teeth. She wasn’t going to be left here; she’d break every bone in her body before she let Fiona get away. Her fingers popped.
A new patch of runes lit up, faded.
Then the whole wall burned white.
Fiona’s attention snapped to it with a curse. She was messy now, throwing stuff into the bag, slinging it over her shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” Joan called, her laugh a garbled curse. “Time running out?”
Fiona closed the bag in front of her. She didn’t look back at Joan, just twisted her fingers together, still facing the wall.
Her shoulders were slumped in a downward line.
Joan wished, absurdly, for her sketchbook.
She’d catch the dim light on Fiona’s burnished hair and the manifold details of the abandoned room.
It would be haunting, and beautiful, and on the cusp of something new.
The spell took shape, magic vibrating through the air. “Go to sleep, Joan Greenwood,” Fiona said, voice heavy and resigned.
“Never wake up.”