Chapter 24 #2
“So are we immediately invisible to all trackers?” I ask. “Or do we have to be holding hands and braiding each other’s hair?”
“If you touch my hair,” Savi tells me with a smile, “I will use your intestines as macramé.”
“I can tell how much I’ve changed in the past couple of months,” Winter says. “Because honestly? That sounds like arts and crafts, not a murderous, psychotic threat.”
“Welcome to the Reveal,” I say grandly. “The true reckoning is never with the monsters without, but rather with those within.”
Winter keeps walking over and Savi comes forward, and then we’re all sort of standing there by the side of my car.
“Are you able to monitor what’s happening?” Winter asks Savi. “Assuming something is happening?”
I figure that’s the nervous energy talking.
We all know what’s happening. We have to sit right here.
We have party time with Briar to attend to tonight.
At least this keeps us tucked away and hidden from any rising death goddess attacks.
Or her gnarly minions who might have a hard-on to murder all three of us in what I assume will be the most revolting sacrifice yet.
Meanwhile, with Crater Lake parched and desiccated and Vin?a’s temple nowhere to be found, the rest of the powers in this valley are spread out.
The wolves are patrolling the hills, waiting for moonrise in a couple of hours or so.
The vampires have the valley floor, and they’ve stretched out their patrols to cover halfway to Roseburg.
Savi’s minions are less weaponized, maybe, but they’re everywhere.
“Let’s hope that this time it takes.” Winter smiles, but it’s forced. Her eyes are shadowy. “I don’t have another grandmother to lose.”
“The magic on Halloween was sound and should have held for another thousand years,” Savi says, fiercely enough that it sounds like she’s been arguing about that.
With herself, with others, I can’t tell.
“The only thing I didn’t factor in was the particular celestial situation we’re in right now. A conjunction of—”
Clearly Winter and I are looking at her with the same expression, because she stops. She blinks. “All we have to do is get through tonight, and that’s done. No more celestial interference. When she goes tonight, she’ll stay gone.”
She crosses her arms, and I notice yet again that she’s a far cry from that smooth, perfectly polished Savi who moved into her cottage here with a series of gleaming white roller-bag suitcases, not a hair out of place.
Tonight she looks significantly wilder. Her flowy clothes look like they annoy her.
Her eyes are flashing. Even her dark hair seems to be doing as it wishes, tumbling this way and that and even flirting with a wave when I’ve never seen it anything but straight.
I don’t want to tell her that I notice. That feels like a calamitous course of action on a night that needs no extra calamities.
Winter is not studying the sorceress for clues to her mental state.
She looks rough. “Even if we manage to beat her back again, I want to know how we can keep this from happening again. If the stars align down the road, what’s keeping another set of acolytes from trying this all over again when that happens?
” She looks from Savi to me, then back again.
“Is there really any way to fully defeat a god?”
“Of course,” Savi says, matter-of-factly.
“If no one believes in them, what power can they have? Gods, especially gods who have been shunted off into the deep and no longer affect people in any meaningful way, are ideas more than anything else. Tomorrow morning, I believe a little judicious pruning of her red-cloaked followers is in order, and we’ll nip her next attempt to rise in the bud. ”
“What I like,” I say then, “is that we all seem pretty certain that we’re going to make it through the night.” They both frown at me. “I know that I am. I have shit to do.”
Winter laughs at that. Savi only frowns more. Still, we all turn when we hear the noise of Briar’s cottage door slamming open.
She’s standing there, her head tilted slightly to one side as if she’s listening intently. The music from her cottage is so loud that I can’t imagine she’s listening to us. Or anything.
Savi draws herself up and sweeps toward her. “Do you really wear that beanie inside your own house? Are you cold-blooded?”
Briar laughs a little bit. “No, I’m not cold-blooded.
I’m not even cold. I just . . .” She lifts her hands up and puts them on either side of her head, where her ears ought to be if they weren’t concealed in the beanie.
“The way I was raised, you never prove anything. You let others draw their own conclusions, because they will anyway.”
“If you want to keep your pointed ears hidden away forever, you should,” I tell her.
I even reach out and put my hand on one of her tattooed wrists.
“Though, Kind woman to Kind woman, I’ll tell you that not hiding yourself away, for any reason, is always it.
I had to hide who I was for a long time, obviously.
We all did. I didn’t realize that it felt like amputation until I didn’t have to do it anymore.
I didn’t know that I could be all of me. Using all of my limbs however I want.”
“I’m not hiding,” Briar snaps back at me, yanking her wrist back. By then we’re all gathered at her front step, and as she looks wildly between us, I feel like there are emotions behind her eyes. Right there, and yet I can’t quite grasp them.
I can almost see them. I can almost comprehend her.
Though I think, very distinctly, She doesn’t want you to comprehend her.
Another blink, and she smiles. “Okay, New Year, new me, right?” Then she tugs that beanie off her head at last.
I remember the fae I saw in New York. Tall and lithe, gleaming a terrifyingly compelling gold that we all pretended not to see. Just as we all pretended not to see their obviously fae ears pointing up high, announcing who and what they were to anyone and everyone who might have some doubt.
Briar does not gleam. She’s not golden. But something about her seems to shift as she stands before us and pushes her black hair back so we can fully comprehend the high points of those ears of hers. That she, naturally, has pierced in multiple places.
Apparently fae can wear metal.
“There aren’t a lot of your people in this valley,” Savi says. “Or are there? Normally dark fae make themselves known.”
“It’s like I told you,” Briar says. She runs her hand through her hair as she turns, then leads us into her cottage. “I move around a lot.”
I look over my shoulder and I take a deep breath, pleased that I can scent pack—and not too distant. I’m also pleased that as far as I know, there were no sacrifices found today.
From what Ty said, the goblin clans—usually violently opposed to unifying with each other and certainly not with anyone else—have all volunteered to help in whatever way they can tonight in response to the sacrifice of three of their females.
Once the goblins were in, word got out to many of the other Kind clans.
They’re all banding together, and I have to think that means only good things.
I want it to mean only good things.
I can’t see the moon yet, but I can feel her. I can feel the tug inside of me, even more insistent than usual. I know that the bitten will be getting restless now, already pacing. Already feeling that change coming in, hard and relentless.
I pull in another breath, then follow my friends inside.
“Did you really go to Times Square for New Year’s?” Winter asks me as I come in. When I nod, she makes a face. “Was it horrible?”
“Hideous. Packed in like sardines for hours in the cold.” I shake my head in remembered outrage. “And if you bite someone it’s a felony.”
I laugh at the expression on her face, then I look around at the inside of this cottage that I never expected to see once Briar moved in.
I’m expecting some kind of junkie’s nest, not that she has exhibited the faintest sign of addiction.
It’s just that she doesn’t come off as a person who prizes order or neatness.
So I’m deeply surprised to find that the place is sparkling.
Clean as a whistle. Shockingly spartan, even.
Her music is kicking, the expected punk rock shouting and posturing.
There are no particular decorations, only black curtains over her windows, which is also .
. . not entirely unexpected, but done in a much nicer way than I’d imagined from the outside.
I watch as Savi looks around, expressionless, though I somehow know she’s as shocked as I am.
“I was expecting a little more black sabbath,” Savi murmurs.
Winter nods. “The band?”
Savi blinks. “There’s a band?”
“Anyway,” Winter says brightly, and lifts up the bottle that she’s been holding at her side, “I brought wine. Not sparkling, sadly. Ariel claimed he could get me some if I really wanted, but it sounded very dramatic, and possibly dangerous. So plain old wine it is.”
Not to be outdone, Savi waves a hand and a plentiful charcuterie plate appears, piled high with cheeses, fruits, chocolates, and more. I can feel my mouth watering.
“Happy New Year,” she intones. “May this odd Gregorian calendar moment be meaningful for us all.”
“I didn’t bring anything,” I tell the group. “Save, of course, my boundless enthusiasm that is a centerpiece of any decent party.”
“I can’t decide if you three are the closest thing to friends that I have,” Briar says after a moment. Her rainstorm gaze touches all of us in turn. “Or if I actually hate you.”
“Fair,” I say.
Then she turns the music up, and we get festive.
There’s eating. Lots of eating, because Savi can conjure up pretty much anything and we take advantage.
We drink. At a certain point, I realize that Savi is probably doing something to that wine bottle too, because it never seems to be empty.
There’s nothing in this cottage but a twin bed on one wall and pillows on the floor, so that’s where we sit.
I’m lounging there, thinking how odd it seems that somebody with Briar’s bare-house aesthetic also has a mandala-patterned area rug in the center of her floor.
I tell myself this is why people are interesting. This is why it’s important to try to get to know them. You never really know who anybody is.
Except, I think, Ty. He is the person I know best, aside from myself. That makes me feel warm.
Not only that, but he’s not hard to know. Hard to know well, yes. But Ty is always Ty to everyone he meets. It’s part of what makes him so powerful.
It’s part of why I love him the way I do.
The music changes from punk rock classics to something else. Something I’ve never heard before. It teases and beguiles. It’s like a seduction of sound and suddenly, I don’t feel like lounging around.
All I want to do is dance.
Stranger still, everyone else is dancing too.
If asked, I would have sworn up and down that this was a non-dancing kind of a group. But here we all are, dancing around and around in the center of that throw rug on Briar’s floor. I’m spinning and spinning, except at some point I realize that I’m not spinning, it’s like the room is.
Holy hangover, I think, but it doesn’t feel drunk and sickening. I don’t either. It’s wilder than any drink I might have had.
It’s in me, and I can’t stop.
I think, Stop dancing, but I don’t. I can’t. My body is moving. My hands are in the air. My feet are going this way and that like I could do this forever.
I wonder if I ought to be frightened, but I’m not. Not yet. More than anything else, I’m trying to figure out what on earth is happening. But everything is spinning and spinning, and I try as hard as I can, but I can’t seem to focus.
The only thing I can manage to focus on is Briar. She has her head thrown back, her arms spread wide, and she’s only wearing a tank top tonight. I can see that the place where she likes to put her hands on her chest isn’t an empty, normal span of skin. There’s a medallion hanging there.
That flash I saw of its chain comes back to me now, because it’s a medallion I recognize.
Winter used to wear it. Augie gave it to her. If I’m not mistaken, the purpose of that medallion is to keep the wearer’s power under wraps.
It’s why Winter not only thought she wasn’t an oracle but didn’t believe that her grandmother was either.
As I stare at Briar, still caught in the dance, her eyes open and she looks straight at me.
But it’s not Briar anymore.
I know this the same as I know Ty. As I know myself.
It’s not Briar anymore.
Other things poke at me that feel random, but can’t be.
Like all those minions in the lumberyard last night.
It seemed like such a funny coincidence that the skirmish was just down the road from Briar’s bar, but was it?
And how effective was Savi’s privacy bubble while we were talking about tonight, anyway?
It makes me wonder about Savi’s ward on the three of us.
I try to shout. I try to warn the others. I try to do something, but the snare of this dance and this spin is too tight all around us.
I have the feeling that whatever protection spell Savi did on us no longer applies.
I can’t look away from Briar. I think she knows it. When she smiles, everything in me goes cold and dark. She rips the necklace off her neck and throws it.
Yet I don’t hear it fall.
Because we’re not in Briar’s cottage anymore. We’re not dancing, either.
We’re somewhere cold and dark, and everything around us feels harsh and frigid.
And when the spinning stops, my heart does too, for a second.
Because it’s clear to me immediately that wherever we are, wherever we’ve landed, we’re stuck here.