Everly #2
Somewhere past Ren, Felix's cards hit the floor.
I hear them go, a small percussion under everything else, and I know without looking that his hands came apart on their own the same way mine did—know it because a second later his fingers are on my other arm too, adding his grip to Ren's, his knee cracking hard against the stone as he lunges to get there in time.
Atlas is already moving, a shape breaking away from the door too fast for something that big.
Callum's voice cracks out my name once, raw, before Helena's cuts over the top of it.
"Everly Grey." Helena's voice cracks across the room like a slap. "You are a door. Not a guest. Close."
Nothing closes.
I can feel it not closing—the working still open, still pulling, my hand another inch nearer the rim despite Ren's whole weight thrown against it, despite Felix's fingers digging in hard enough to bruise on top of the bruise already there. The room understands it's losing this. I can feel that too.
She's already moving.
Ninety-six years bound above this thing taught her exactly what it sounds like when it picks someone. She crosses the candlelight faster than a body that old has any right to, gets both ruined palms flat to the rim of my circle, and pulls.
It doesn't give.
She sets her whole weight against it, both arms shaking with it, and for one endless second nothing happens at all—the circle holding, the Well holding, Ren's grip failing by degrees under my hand—and then something in Helena's palms tears instead of the ring.
Blood wells up dark between her fingers where the old scars split open again.
That's what does it. Sacrifice, not strength.
She doesn't close it. She rips it. The way you rip a stitch from a wound gone wrong.
The working comes out of the stone with a wrench I feel in my own teeth. The cold goes out of them all at once and leaves a raw socket where it lived. Every candle dies in a single breath of wind with no door to come through.
And the pull—the deep, enormous, reaching yes—lets go of me so completely that I fall back into Ren and Felix both, my body forgetting in an instant which way it had just been leaning.
Blood down my chin. My whole body shaking with the size of a thing I'm horrified I wanted, hard enough that my teeth click together, and I don't try very hard to stop it.
For a long moment the dark is total, and no one breathes in it.
I hear them find their way to me in it anyway.
Felix's hand closes hard over my ankle, like he needs the proof of me more than he needs the light.
Atlas's breath comes out of him in one ragged rush somewhere close by, the first sound I've ever heard fear make in him.
Callum's shadow pulls back off the threshold all at once, gone slack with relief.
Then: a match. Brittany's hand not quite steady around it. The little flame shows me Helena on her knees, palms still flat to the dead ring, head down, breathing like she ran the whole way here from 1930.
"That," she says, when she has the air for it, "is why you hold and do not reach."
"I held." It comes out cracked. "I held the whole time."
"You held. And it reached anyway." She lifts her head. In the matchlight her eyes aren't afraid for me. They're afraid of me, a little. "Because you are what it's gone hungry for. And a starving thing does not wait to be asked."
"I had it." My voice won't quite work. "Brittany. The thread. Did we lose it?"
Brittany's got a second candle lit now. Herbert nowhere I can see, which means somewhere I'll find in a sleeve later. She looks at me over the flame, and her face does the thing it almost never does. It forgets to be deadpan.
"We didn't lose it," she says. "That's the problem."
"What does that mean?"
"It didn't reach a memory." She swallows. The candle shakes. "A memory's somewhere else. In her head, wherever her head went. This one's here. In the building."
"Brittany."
"It's not a thing that happened to Enya." Her voice goes very small for Brittany, which is to say almost normal. "It's where Enya is."
The room stops.
Ren goes still in the exact way he goes when his blood sense has already confirmed the thing the rest of us only just thought.
"She's alive," he says.
And it isn't relief. Nothing on his face is relief.
The cold ghosts back through my teeth, one beat of it, there and gone.
***-
The cell is off the Hollows. None of us knew it was there.
The thread takes us to it fast and without any mercy at all. Down a side passage that shows on no map. Behind a door that was never locked, because no one who built this place ever imagined someone would want in.
Ren reaches it first. He stops with his hand flat on the wood and doesn't open it.
When he turns to me, his face is wrong. In all the months I've known him, I have never once seen Ren's face be wrong.
"Don't," he says. Low. "You don't have to see this. Let one of us—"
"I noticed the kitchen went quiet." Three days of no humming over the kettle. I'm the one who climbed to the grad floor and found the bare ticking and the cleared shelf, the chipped blue mug gone from the sill. "I started the count. One. It was always going to be me who opened this door."
"Everly—"
"Move, Ren."
He moves. Whatever's in his face when he does, I'll see it again in dreams. So will he.
She's been kept.
That's the word that arrives whole, standing on the threshold with Felix's light coming over my shoulder and shaking. Kept. The way you keep a thing you haven't decided what to do with.
The cell is small. And clean. The clean is the worst of it—because someone comes down here. Someone sweeps the floor. Someone keeps the body breathing in a stone box under a building, and that's a kind of care, and it's the most obscene thing I've ever seen.
Enya is on a low cot against the far wall. Her chest rises. Falls. Rises. Fed exactly enough to keep doing that and nothing past it.
Her eyes are open. There's nothing behind them. Not sleep. Not absence. Just rooms with the furniture taken out.
I knew her face.
The good coffee slid down the table without my asking. A cup of tea left outside my door once, no note, the steam still on it. Her numbers fell fastest of anyone's in Wheeler's notebook, and now I understand what the falling was, all the way down to the floor of it.
They didn't take her at once. They took her in pieces. Week over week, name over name, a little less each session, until what was left could be called an illness and grieved as one.
And then, when the taking had nearly finished, they brought the almost-nothing of her down here. Kept it warm. Kept it breathing. Because the Well takes only the willing—and a husk can still be walked to the lip of the thing on its own feet, if you starve it long enough to make it want the stair.
"God," Felix says behind me. Barely a sound. "Oh, God, Everly, what is this?"
Nobody answers him. There isn't an answer that fits in a sentence.
Her head turns toward the light. Toward us. Toward the nearest warm thing.
Something moves behind her eyes—not Enya, Enya is long gone. The part under Enya. The animal part. The same part that leaned me toward the Well an hour ago, that knows when a thing has gone on too long.
Her arm comes up off the cot. Slow. Fingers spreading. Reaching.
Then the sound starts.
It comes up out of her—out of the body, out of the open mouth, dragged from somewhere far below where words are made.
Deep. Raw. Too deep for the small wrecked frame it's tearing out of, like the floor of her is scraping itself to make it.
Her jaw works. Her throat works. The sound bends and breaks and barely holds its shape.
"Please."
No one breathes.
It costs her everything. I can see what it costs, the whole ruined body bearing down to force the one thing it has left to want up through a throat that's forgotten how.
"Please." A rattle of breath. Then the rest of it, low and torn and primal, more animal than girl, the words surfacing out of the deep wordless roll of the sound: "Kill me."
Felix makes a sound behind me, low and broken.
I know exactly what she's asking. An hour ago I wanted the same thing, and was ashamed of it. She has nothing left to be ashamed with. There's just the asking now—primal, scraped up from the bottom, the only words her body has kept.
Please. Kill me.
No one moves.
Ren ends suffering for a living. I watch him try to lift his hands. I watch his hands refuse him.
"Ren."
"I can't." It comes out of him wrecked. This man who knelt forty minutes on motel tile putting Felix back together. "There's a—there's a difference. Between a mercy and—" He can't finish it. "My whole gift says no to this. I can't make it say yes."
Atlas turns away. Just turns. Gives the dark his back, his shoulders gone to stone. I don't blame him. Some of us can look and some of us can't, and his turning away is only grief with nowhere to put itself.
Felix has gone the gray of cooled ash, the deck dead in his fist.
"Felix. The odds. Is there a—"
"They all end here." His voice is nothing. "I've looked. Every branch I've got. They all end in this room."
It's Callum who steps forward.
Of course it's Callum. Mors is the discipline of endings, and he's the only one of us with the cold, exact courage this needs. The courage I've watched him pay for all year, one degree at a time—raised by a woman who taught him love is a transaction and death is a column in a ledger.
He crosses the little cell. Goes down on one knee beside what's left of Enya Halstone.
And his face—
His face isn't cold. That's what I'll keep, after everything.
The Frost King kneels in a cell his own family built, and his face comes apart, every careful degree of it sliding off at once.
And he lets it. Where I can see. Where she can't. Because she can't grieve herself, and someone in this room should do it with their face uncovered.