Chapter 30
Ezra Bright was finally flying.
It was his first time in the sky, yet it felt like his thousandth, between all the daydreams and stories and his mother’s memories.
He knew just how to arc his arms to catch the wind.
He remembered the skylight tucked away at the top of Anubis’s chamber, just wide enough for his wings to fit through.
He soared up into the stars and felt the breath of their light on his neck as he scoured the wadi maze below.
Canyons looped and swirled, and as gold dust fell from Ezra’s feathers, they reminded him of the illuminations in that very first medieval manuscript—the one he’d nearly drooled on.
But he wasn’t asleep now. He was very much awake.
Power surged through his veins as he scoured the sands for signs of Vincent.
Both of the camps had been overrun by ghouls—camels scattered and tents gutted. Ezra also spied a canyon that looked darker than most, even as his wing dust scattered over it.
The dead were hunting Vincent.
The magician hadn’t gotten far; he was too busy throwing spells over his shoulder and beating back bolder ghosts with the Heka-ib.
He held it all wrong, gripping the top end as if it was a police officer’s truncheon.
Ghouls were starting to clamber up the sides of the canyon, as if planning to launch at him from above.
Ezra reached for the dead’s shadows to clear his way.
They were surprisingly easy to bend, parting like a drawing curtain.
He flew into Vincent’s path, showering the ground with glowing gold motes as he landed. The canyon’s ghouls shrank back.
Vincent froze too.
Despite the gold masque, the man’s eyes were so dark that Ezra could make out his own blazing figure. He saw something else too. Something he’d never seen on Vincent Cain’s face ever before: fear. The pinch of it around the magician’s expression made him look so much older.
It helped, understanding that the man he’d loved had been a mask.
It hurt, all the same.
“I would have done anything for you,” he spoke slowly, trying to navigate these broken-glass pieces inside him. “The world tried its best to tell us we were wrong, but I knew, in my heart, that we weren’t… I knew… I loved you, Vincent.”
The fear on the other man’s face softened.
“That love didn’t make me less. Even now… now that I know you never truly wanted me.”
“Bright—”
“My name is Hekamaat. I am the son of She Who Soars. I am the child of this place you have pillaged. I am the brother of the woman you murdered in cold blood.”
Vincent raised the wand then—a movement so swordlike that Ezra could see the knight beneath it all. “I keep telling you, we can bring Elizabeth back!”
“She won’t stay, without someone to take her wound.”
“Use Hugo, then. It’d be more merciful than castration by a thousand toothpicks.” His tone—how could it be so light? So flippant? As if this was just another joke.
Ezra wasn’t laughing. “Hugo didn’t shoot her. He didn’t curse Celia’s father either.”
“Oh, so it’s a matter of maths now, is it? Shall we start counting bodies? You’re in no position to be so self-righteous, Bright. There’s a darkness in you too. I’ve seen it.” Vincent jerked his chin up at the overhead ghouls, still knotted up with Ezra’s power. “I feel it. Even now.”
Some of the spirits behind the magician’s shoulder began to creep closer. Ezra started to see faces among them, bent into vaguely recognizable features. Far more familiar were their uniforms. Their saw-toothed screams, the kind of German phrasing that punched a hole in your throat.
Ezra swallowed.
Were these the soldiers he’d killed in the trench?
The dark canyon bore an uncanny resemblance to those days, except where the light of Ezra’s wings revealed the rosy hue of the surrounding stones, as he bound the Germans’ shuts with the flick of his wrist. It was so simple now…
His mother had learned shadow-stringing to protect this world from the dead…
and then she’d passed it to him through birth… The reflex itself wasn’t evil…
“I am the only one who will ever understand all of you,” the Apex said.
“That was war.”
“And this?” The man stepped forward so that the clawed end of the Heka-ib was once again poised over Ezra’s heart.
The power of want thrummed between them.
Vincent wished for Ezra’s love to be a weakness.
A wound—just as his had once been.
Ezra wanted more.
He’d always wanted more.
“This is the way things should be,” he said as he grabbed the sharp part of the wand. His breath was a razor’s edge. “I know you too, Lion Unbowed. You’ve destroyed so much, all just to be with your king…”
Vincent, for all the terror in his eyes, seemed unable to release the wand.
“Go and be with him.”
The ghosts of the Germans had fallen silent.
They watched, eagerly, as Ezra pushed forward and tapped the Heka-ib into the magician’s chest. He wasn’t sure the healing spell would work at this distance…
with Biz suffering back inside the tomb, but as he pressed the tusk to Vincent’s breastbone, his masque began to glow.
The Apex struggled, but Ezra drew closer, close enough to see crow’s feet spreading faster than spring vines.
These furrowed into frown lines, then sagged into jowls, age spots appearing like unwanted fruit.
A wound that looked exactly like Biz’s began to bleed through his safari shirt.
“Oh, Bright…” He sounded as shocked as his fiancée had, after that first bullet.
Vincent’s eyes stayed a drowning blue, as the rest of him decayed.
All the centuries he’d lived came crashing back on him at once.
Lips shrank past leathery gums. Fingertips around the Heka-ib turned into twigs; they snapped before they could reach Ezra, breaking off into the same ashen pieces his mother’s body had.
The rest of Vincent Cain followed suit, collapsing into the sandy canyon floor at Ezra’s feet.
Even his safari suit had turned to dust. But there—in the middle of the pile—winked something solid.
A gold signet ring.
Ezra knelt down, swallowing back bile as he sifted through the ashes that were once his closest friend. The piece was almost identical to the one Thomas Ellington and Hugo Pratt wore on their pinkies—engraved with a tiny triangle.
Ezra stared at the shape for a long, long while, wondering at how close it had been all along. Vincent must have kept it in his pocket…
He lifted the ivory wand and scratched a hole through the magician’s ashes.
With a tip of his hand, the ring tumbled into the sand.