Chapter 31
Thirty-One
The night of the full moon, I stood with the dancers, my body trembling as the crowd gathered and the drums began.
I waited in the shadow of the columns, my back to the path that led to the entrance of the catacombs.
There was a somber mood to the air instead of the normal celebrations.
The threat of demons kept everyone on edge, many declining the wine and exotic fruits.
The city council stood together and read out the names of the dead, those killed in the past month by demons.
We bowed our heads to pay them homage. When Sacred Mother’s true name rang out among them—Taveil—it panged me to hear it spoken.
To know that with her gone, I was truly the last of my bloodline.
How far we had fallen.
I shifted from my toes to the balls of my feet and back again. Anticipation building. Would this work?
All week long, I’d walked among the dancers, whispering, encouraging them to be bold, to join me when I broke from the old steps, promising that we would protect one another.
I told them I would dance no matter what, and to join me would be their choice.
I did not know how many would follow me, and my shoulder ached, a reminder of the last time I’d attempted the ritual.
Verena—it was impossible for me to call her Rift Mother—moved among us in her robes. She stopped at my side, and her hand shot out, closing on my wrist. “Don’t mess this up.”
We’d spoken but few words since the chains.
The loss still hung heavy on my shoulders, knowing the truth of what she wanted and what she’d done to get it.
Had we ever been friends after all? I turned to her anyway and laid my hand on her shoulder, the way I had when we were younger.
“Don’t let the archers shoot me this time. ”
Her lips thinned, but she withdrew.
The drums stopped. A hush fell over the amphitheater.
I closed my eyes, breathed, and stepped onto the bare stones. The statues of the gods rose above me; the columns towered higher still. Yet I glimpsed shadows moving in the distance, great shapes beyond the people of the city.
The Hollow Ones had come to watch, lingering at the edges, waiting to see if they should flee before the magic could trap them again.
I took the first pose. The music rose. I lifted my arms, and my thoughts went to Airen.
I recalled the feeling of dancing alongside him in his kingdom that was just beginning to spring back to life.
The way his arms felt around me, the taste of him, the magic that flowed through our intertwined bodies.
Something rose within me, a kind of power, a certainty of purpose. I felt it move through me like water, then gather as I moved, shifting into the new dance. My movements grew sure, fluid, then something brushed my shoulder.
He was there. His emerald eyes had gone a shade darker, smoldering, and he moved beside me like a shadow given form, mirroring me step for step.
No arrows fell. No shouts came.
We danced as one, weaving until sparks of power flowed between us, visible to the naked eye. Blues and greens leaped and danced, hovering around us. Then red. It rose and swirled and then flowed out from us.
Airen’s hands moved to my waist, lifting me gently. He set me down and folded me close until we moved as one.
Over his shoulder came flitters of movement.
Dancers stepped out, joining us. Moving through the motions slowly at first, then gaining confidence.
Where one came, two followed, their numbers doubled, then tripled, until almost all the dancers had joined us.
The people of the city watching stood, and a hum filled the air.
Not from the music but something deeper. The Hollow Ones. Singing. The very sound made my heart leap. I’d heard the sound of their dreaming, but now they sang.
Awake and alive, it was powerful. It moved through me, loosening my sorrow, burying the desperate untruths I’d held on to. Healing the wounds that folded around me until I felt nothing but peace.
I wondered if others felt it, too, as though the mistakes and longings of the past had been erased, and all that was left before us was hope and beautiful dreams of the future.
They appeared at the edges of moonlight, standing on the outskirts where the light didn’t shine clearly, and the shadows made them appear like eternal beings. They had weapons that glinted gold, garments that shone silver. They were beautiful and vicious, and more of them than I had ever seen.
I felt the moment Airen saw them because his hands tightened at my waist, and he drew a sharp breath.
And I felt power cross between us like chains falling free.
Not just the strongest chains, but all of them.
The Hollow Ones could come and go as they pleased.
Young and old, mighty and weak, every Hollow One freed all at once, not by broken magic, but by something new. A healing. A renewal.
They raised their hands as though paying homage, and my feet came to a stop. Airen faced them, one arm around me, our hips joined, bodies pressing together. He raised four fingers, and I felt him vibrate as melody poured out of him.
The dancers bowed their heads, recognizing the lies they’d danced to and the truth which was now quite clear.
One by one, the people on the stairs turned, and a ripple of shock and surprise passed over them. Some raised their hands and wept, others bowed and pressed their hands together. Their voices added another layer beneath the hum of gratitude.
A deep emotion welled up inside me and came loose all at once.
Everything I’d been holding onto so tightly shattered in my grasp, leaving me with a relieved sense of freedom.
The fear. The grief. The desperate need to dance, to be Lead Dancer, to matter.
Gone. It was to the end I’d always been moving, and now that it was here, now that it had arrived, I didn’t fear the lack.
Blissful magic moved around me, tugging me close. I knew who I was now. Gazelle Dakari. The last of a haunted bloodline, meant to dance the final dance that freed the Hollow Ones and sealed the demons away.
Yet amid the glory and celebration, I heard something else.
A voice rang both inside and outside my head at once. The words that had been written in blood at every death pounding through me again and again.
The dancer bleeds so the dark one feeds.
It twisted through me raw and wild, a pull, a tug, a lure. My hands tightened as I twisted around, facing the catacombs, desperate to see the dark passages from whence the Hollow Ones came.
There. Verena stood rigid, her face set, yet I caught the tremble in her body. She was trying to figure out what had just happened and what to do, fixed on what stood before her, blind to what crept behind.
A horned shadow. A clicking of claws. Distinct, as though the world had gone quiet around it. The same sound I’d heard the first night I’d met Airen, when I stood in the dark, and his shadow crawled along the wall.
It was just like this now, except I heard and I knew. I felt it. A shiver went through me, and I opened my mouth and screamed. There was no chance she’d heard me over the hum or the weeping, over the music which still played and the low thud of the drums. But I had to try.
“Verena,” I screamed. “Behind you—”
Her gaze snagged on mine. Her nostrils flared. And for one moment, she was there again, my friend, the girl I’d known, looking at me the way she had across a hundred practice floors.
The music died mid-phase.
I was still screaming as the blood came down over the heavy robes, black in the moonlight. My eyes held hers while the life went out of them. I knew the moment her soul left. Her body went slack in the devil’s arms, and it whipped its tail around her and gathered the blood on its fingertips.
I was still screaming when it dropped her and started to write on the stones. But I already knew what the words would say.
Airen’s hands closed on my shoulders, dragging me back against him. “Look away, Gazelle. Don’t bear witness to this.”
But I couldn’t.
A ringing came to my ears as I watched the devil scrawl the creed across the stones with her blood, and beneath it, drew the mark. Not the full moon sprouting thorns but something else. A music note turned inside out. A hollow at its heart. Airen’s mark.
The mark of the Hollow Ones.
“Airen.” My voice came out strange and flat. “What is it saying?”
“That it is free.” His breath was hot against my hair. “You burned the book, didn’t you? The tether. There is nothing holding it to anyone now.”
“Can we seal it? Send it back beyond the rift?”
“No. It’s too late for that.”
The devil lifted its head and looked at me across the bloody stones, and it smiled, and it had far too many teeth.
Then it came.
It crossed the floor faster than anything that size should move.
The crowd broke, screaming, scattering up the stairs.
But Airen stepped in front of me. He appeared to grow taller, darker, and then something dark and shadowy with a crown detached from his body.
Dark as night, just as invisible as a shadow, it moved. Not mirroring but apart from him.
His shadow came off him like a beast unchained.
It rose and kept rising, past the columns, the statues, blotting out the moon.
It fell on the devil with a horrible sound.
I felt it in the stones under my bare feet and in my bones.
There was a shriek, a terrible sound of gnashing, thrashing, and then nothing.
No devil. Nothing at all where it had been but a smear of scorched black across the amphitheater floor, the scent of sulfur and silence.
Airen swayed. He caught himself on my shoulder, then straightened. His shadow came back home to him and lay flat and ordinary at his feet. He was breathing hard, and his eyes, when they found mine, were pure black with a hint of emerald around the edges.
“It is done,” he said.
I turned back to Verena.
The stones were bare, and her body was gone.
There was a long, wet arc of blood, and the creed scrawled through it and the mark. But no body. No robes. They must have taken her already, that was all, in the chaos, when I’d been watching the shadow come down on the devil.
I forced myself to turn and face the people of the city.
Every eye was on me. Hundreds of them, wide, wet, and waiting, the way they had once looked at Rift Mother, and again at Sacred Mother. But there was no one left to speak. I was the last of the bloodline, the last dancer standing on those stones. I opened my mouth to give them something, anything—
Nothing came out.
It was Betta who came forward.
She came down the steps slowly, and it struck me, as she walked past the scorched stone and past the blood, that she also wore long robes.
The garments of Rift Mother. When she reached me, she took both my hands in hers and turned to the city.
When she spoke, her voice was loud and rang out like a bell.
“The dance is finished,” she announced. “The rift is sealed. The Hollow Ones are free, and they are not our enemies. Any who says otherwise will answer to me.” She let that stand a moment.
“Commander Tiberon and I have discovered that a book was taken from beneath this palace and used to summon a devil, who caused this chaos. Unfortunately, we did not find it in time, and many lives were destroyed because of it. But hear this and hear it now. The Lead Dancer is innocent of every death she was blamed for. Every one.”
A sound came from the crowd, whether it was a cheer or weeping, I couldn’t tell. For a moment, there was silence, and then the final drums started. The people started to move, understanding that it was over, time to go home.
Betta turned back to me, and her voice dropped. She squeezed my hands. “Your time is over,” she said gently. “That was your last dance.”
“Betta—”
“Listen to me.” She squeezed. “I release you. Not for what they think you did. For your own sake, child, because I have watched you carry this dance for years. It has taken nearly all of you, and I will not stand here and watch it take the rest. Gazelle Verena Dakari. Your service to the rift is ended. You are free to go.”
My full name.
I hadn’t heard it spoken aloud since the day Rift Mother came for me. It rang in my ears oddly and settled wrong. The way a word is spoken and not understood. I didn’t understand it now.
Betta watched my face while she said it; she’d been watching my face the entire time.
And then Airen was beside me. He took my hands out of hers.
“I will care for her,” he said.
Betta looked up at him. She did not flinch, and she did not look away. “See that you do,” she said.
“And your people will be watched over,” Airen added. “All of them. That is a king’s promise.”
Betta stepped back and inclined her head. It was not a bow, but it was enough.
Airen turned and lifted my hand, pressing his mouth against my skin. “Come with me to my kingdom,” he said.
I went. And I did not look back.