Chapter 25 #2
On my other side, Savi is whispering with her head tilted down, the better to hide what she’s doing, I think. She glances toward me, the tape they used to gag her around her chin, and her eyes a fury.
Rain, she mouths.
I think that’s an excellent idea. I try to shift again, to let out another howl, but something isn’t right. My body won’t do it—and I wonder if it’s that paste.
They toss us up onto the rock and climb up to arrange the three of us with our backs touching, like we’re witches awaiting trial. Crone, mother, and maiden, and we all know how those trials went for the accused.
I look out at the acolytes who press in toward this rock. All of them are chanting now. All of those red cloaks are flowing as they move. Their plague-doctor masks are as unsettling as ever.
I would very much like to join Savi in some pruning. I would like fewer of these minions around if there’s a next time. If we live long enough to worry about such things.
I force myself to look beyond all that red-cloaked chanting.
I have my perfect werewolf vision no matter what form I’m in, so I look past the cone of light all around us, too.
When I concentrate, I can look farther. Up those steep sides of the crater, which explains why I thought the moon was in the wrong place.
Up on the crater’s rim, I see something flicker. It looks like smoke.
Vampire, I think. I’ve never been so happy to see one.
If the vampires know we’re here, the wolves do too.
I don’t allow myself to think about how scared I am until now. Until I know that Ty is on his way. That it’s possible he’s already here.
That it won’t be only me making sure I run with that moon tonight.
I make myself breathe. I make myself relax the muscles in my body when what they really want to do is tense themselves to failure. All I need to do is keep this moment going until reinforcements arrive.
No sacrifices until then.
“So wait a minute,” I say, when Vin?a dances back toward us, making her borrowed body move in ways that would probably make me feel sick if I thought about them too closely.
“Was that you all along? Butchering all those poor animals? Hiding in plain sight? Eating boxes upon boxes of tooth-decaying cereal?”
Vin?a is at the edge of the rock they’ve arranged us on, and for all that she is an ancient goddess with death in her eyes and nightmares skittering beneath her skin, I can see that what she really wants to do is stand here and brag.
Like every other narcissist douchebag I’ve ever encountered.
“This vessel cannot contain my enormity for any length of time,” she tells me haughtily.
“It is already woefully insufficient. Yet it was the only one available. All of the rest of these creatures are soft. Too easily reduced to useless sludge when pushed beyond their tiny capacities.” She sniffs and looks down at Briar’s arms with all their tattoos.
“At least the fae have some connection to the ancient magic. The sugar helped. Or she would be little more than a viscous puddle by now.”
“That is . . . disgustingly specific,” Winter mutters.
“So it wasn’t you,” I say, as if this is a perfectly cordial conversation. As if no one’s tied up and bleeding. As if no one is planning to use our bodies to bring nothing but death and suffering to what’s left of the world. “It was just a sacrifice free-for-all, then.”
“Many of those who worship me let me know the ways they revere me,” Vin?a tells me, looking smug. “For millennia, I have received such devotion. I do not expect a mangy werewolf cur to comprehend my might or my power.”
“They are vast indeed,” I say, soothingly, the same way I would tell a wolf like Deirdre that yes, yes, she was absolutely independent and so powerful. “You had Briar specifically kill all those things all around the places that we live. They had to be hand delivered.”
I refuse to say Connor’s name, but I know it had to be him too. The ones near the den, certainly. Maybe more. I also get the feeling I know exactly which acolyte of the Goddess of Filth turned him.
“One of the reasons this vessel was chosen was that she was so specifically and strategically placed,” Vin?a is saying, and she’s losing control of Briar’s body.
Or maybe she’s experimenting. Her tongue darts out of slack lips.
Her eyes roll back and stay that way, all white, with veins pulsing.
“I did not think that she would be required. I did not imagine that I would not rise. Yet all things happen as they should. Now I can fully inhabit this putrid little world, harness the power of the moon and the stars, and take my rightful place at last. Your unwilling sacrifice makes it that much sweeter.”
“I’m often known as something of a sugary treat,” I agree. “But I do wonder—”
“Silence,” Vin?a orders. “It is come.”
That doesn’t sound good.
Then I feel it. There are things slithering over my body. Things I do not want to identify. Things that I am deeply concerned match the horrible, wormy things I can see working beneath her skin.
As I stare at her, she still half-wears Briar’s face. But every now and again, like a flicker of static, I see that beaked, terrible other face of hers. The one I’ve heard Winter describe.
I could have lived the hundreds of years of my life without ever seeing it myself.
It makes me want to vomit. The things I can feel crawling all over me—
I can’t think about that.
I can hear Savi and Winter breathing harder on either side of me, and I know it’s not happening to only me. That doesn’t make it better. But it’s not worse, either, and that feels like . . . something.
Vin?a lifts herself up. She rises from the bottom of the crater, levitating herself high above the three of us. In another effort to pretend I can’t feel anything crawling on me, I tilt my head back, look up, and there she is. Hanging in the air, her chest pointed toward the moon.
My moon, I think, in something darker than fury. Not hers.
I can feel the creepy-crawly, horrible things moving on me, and I have a flash of insight then that I don’t want at all. It’s that paste. That’s where they’re heading.
I have to assume that when they get there, this will all get a whole lot worse.
Vin?a stretches out, framed perfectly by her dome of light. All around us, the red cloaks sway. The priests call out their chants and the acolytes repeat them. Over and over again.
I can hear Savi muttering out her spell. Winter is shuddering and makes a low, miserable sound.
“This would be an excellent time to be saved by that vampire king who supposedly will kill anyone and anything that touches me,” she grits out. “As I’ve been repeatedly assured the past few months.”
“I don’t need Ty to save me,” I growl. “I just want him to hurry up and free me so I can start collecting heads.”
Up above us, Vin?a is starting to . . . expand.
At first I think it’s a figment of my imagination. An unhappy hallucination.
I stare up at her and I see her bones stretch, breaking to stretch more. I know what that looks like. I can feel it in myself every time I switch forms.
Another shot of pure ice washes over me.
I think about what I know for a fact. Vin?a is in Briar, but she wasn’t fully inhabiting Briar. Not until tonight.
Whatever she plans now, she clearly has to use Briar’s body to achieve it. Whether she will be bursting free of it and creating her own with the pieces that are left or fully taking over the body of the dark fae, I can’t say.
But it’s clear that every word that’s chanted makes another gristly, hideous break or stretch happen. I can hear the joints pop, the bones crunch, and that awful cracking sound. Vin?a whips around and around as if she’s writhing on the floor, though she’s hanging in midair.
My only comfort is knowing it must be extraordinarily painful. I love that for her.
Come on, Ty, I think, reaching down deep inside of me and trying to find that link. Trying to pull on it as hard as I can, telling myself that it won’t matter that we’re not mated yet. That I’m not fully claimed.
What we have is bigger than any of that.
Ty, I think and feel and scream from deep inside of me, I need you.
Then I do it again, so hard it feels like something rips deep inside me, but I don’t care. Now.