11. Max
Max
Ileft the Oracle’s scorched skull where it sat and took the stairs down so fast the heirs had to push to stay with me.
Below us, the mages were still shouting, still throwing spells up the stairwell, and every spell burst against the eleventh floor’s boundary and came apart into smoke.
The noise down there kept building, though. More elites arriving. Waiting for us to come back down.
We ignored them and ran for the dark mass turning at the center of the eleventh floor like a slow black cyclone.
Nikolai outpaced me, flung an arm out across my path, and stepped into the dark first.
It threw him back. He hit the glass floor, rolled, and came up snarling. Caspian tried next and got the same welcome, and both of them stood with that look on their faces that meant they were about to go in together.
“No.” I stepped between them and the dark.
“It’s like the fucking DarkVeil,” Caspian growled.
“It’s nothing like the DarkVeil, wolf.” Nikolai didn’t take his eyes off the swirl. “It’s a door into a pocket realm. Got it?”
I left them to it and pressed my palm against the dark.
It tasted my blood, and the black peeled back off a shape.
A snow globe, enormous, wrapped in a forcefield that spat electricity. Inside it, on a floor of white snow, stood a gilded cage.
Missy was in the cage.
The Collector had put my sister in a cage, inside a globe, inside a pocket of darkness, on a shelf.
My vision went red at the edges. Copper flooded my mouth where my teeth had found my cheek. Everything hot in my blood came up my throat at once, wanting out, wanting to take this tower and the palace and the whole kingdom down to rubble.
I slammed both palms against the globe. Then I was pounding it.
The forcefield didn’t give. It didn’t shock me either.
Inside, Missy lay curled on the floor. Small and thin and too still.
Then she heard me. Her head came up, her eyes went huge, and she scrambled upright with something clutched to her chest.
“Max! Max!”
“Missy! Hang on!” The tears came, streaming down my face. “I’m coming! I’ll get to you.”
The thing in her arms poked its head out, and something in me turned over.
Not a normal lion cub. A mutant one, a month old at most, with a scaled nose, two nubs of horn, and a ridge of soft spikes running down his spine. He was the single cutest thing I had ever seen, and one day he’d be something else entirely.
A problem for another day.
“You came!” She threw herself at the front bars, tears cutting down her dirty face. “You kept your promise, Max. You came for me!”
“Always, little viper. There’s no place on this earth I wouldn’t come dig you out of.”
“I almost got away. I got out of the castle, Max. I was stealthy, I had a plan like you taught me.” It came out in a flood, days of terror emptying all at once.
“But they tracked me with big magic. And then the Saint put me in here so I can’t slip away.
I knew you’d come. I told Ross every day: my big sister’s coming. And he believed me.”
She pressed the cub tighter. The little mutant growled at me over her arm.
Caspian raked the globe with his claws. Nikolai buried his ax in it. The surface didn’t chip, didn’t so much as spark.
My Coldiron flowed into a chainsaw. Missy’s eyes went wider still, and the cub whimpered. She bent over him to soothe him.
I put the teeth against the forcefield and held them there for ten full seconds.
Not a mark.
Sera’s words came back exactly as she’d said them. I had to ask the entity in my head for help, and I had to choose. My sister or myself.
I’d spent my whole life walking around that door. There was no walking around it now.
Missy couldn’t wait while I hunted for an answer that didn’t terrify me.
But first I had to confess.
“It’s time.” I turned to the heirs with the blood draining from my face. “I have to come clean.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Caspian didn’t even pause. “We already know you slept with Aelindor.”
My face heated. “What?”
“You’re ours.” Nikolai’s voice didn’t move at all. “Whatever you think you’re about to confess, it doesn’t touch that.”
“I have a demon in my head.”
There. Out.
“It’s been in there as long as I’ve known my own name, and now I have to let it take over, because it’s the only way through that ward.
” My throat closed, and I forced the rest through it anyway.
“Once my sister’s out, if I show the slightest sign of turning on either of you, kill me.
Put your blade through my heart and don’t hesitate.
And promise me you’ll take care of Missy. ”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Caspian didn’t blink. “I was a disaster when my wolf first came out. Maybe you’ve got some other kind of animal in there. I’ve never scented one on you, but Lady Vaelith turns into an eagle with Fae magic, so what do I know.”
“I’m not a shifter, Caspian. I’m demon-possessed.”
“Caspian’s wolf is his demon,” Nikolai offered. “The endless hunger in me is mine. Every one of us carries something in the dark and calls it by a nicer name.”
These two couldn’t see a single fault in me. So I’d have to show them what I was and take whatever came after. For my sister, I’d take all of it.
“Promise to end me.” I made myself breathe. “Promise you’ll never let me hurt anyone. If it comes to that.”
“Never.” Fury cracked Nikolai’s cool straight down the middle. “That’s the one thing we won’t give you.”
Caspian stepped in until barely an inch stood between us, and for once there was no laughter anywhere in him.
“We’d slit our own throats first. Demon-possessed or not, sweetheart.”
I wanted to shake them both. I wanted to stand inside that warmth for the rest of my life.
No time for either.
I closed my eyes.
Do not hurt them, I asked it. My last prayer. If you must kill, kill our enemies.
“Max?” Missy’s voice went thin behind the glass. “I’m scared!”
“Don’t be scared, little viper. I’m coming to get you.”
Then I took down the wall in me.
All my life I’d built it, brick by brick, and reinforced it with steel, laying fresh barriers every year since before I had words for the ancient, terrifying thing I was walling in. I pulled it down in one breath, opened the last door in myself, and stood aside.
It came up through every cell I had.
I braced for teeth. For claws. For drowning. For the moment my own hands stopped answering me and something else began using them.
None of that happened.
The power went through me like lava poured into ice water, burning out every block I’d ever set, and my reflection came apart on the curve of the globe.
My eyes went pitch black. Then crimson. Then green.
Then molten gold, the colors turning over one after another, before they settled into midnight sapphire.
No invasion. Nothing to fight. Nothing in there but me, arriving.
I was never a demon.
The voice came out of the middle of the burn, and it was already thinning at the edges.
I am the Dark Grace in you. Your own magic. Your birthright. Only like this, only when you take me, do I become yours.
My hands shook against the glass.
You don’t diminish. A pause, and something in that pause I would think about for the rest of my life. I do.
“Wait—”
You’re absorbing me. A few more seconds and there won’t be enough of me left to speak with. No voice. No I. Fainter. Fraying like cloth. I could have taught you. Had you let me in sooner. We wasted so much… The power is yours. Dark Grace is yours.
And then the pressure that had lived behind my eyes since before I could speak wasn’t there anymore.
My veins burned once and cooled. The magic kept running in my blood. Just magic now. Nothing arguing, nothing mocking, nothing warning me.
I didn’t feel less. I felt lighter, and larger, and unbearably alone.
Hello? I tried.
Not even an echo answered me.
All my life I’d called it a demon and spent everything I had holding it away from me. It had guarded me and taught me and mocked me and saved my life, and I’d never once thanked it. I’d let it in one moment before it ended, and only because there was no other way to reach my sister.
I didn’t know what to think anymore.
I didn’t have time to find out either.
My sister was still behind bars with all her trust sitting on her face. I shoved my hands flat against the globe, and inside it, snow was falling on Missy.
The Dark Grace left my palms before I’d finished the thought, and the snow globe dissolved like salt in rain.
Then it was only gilded bars between us, and they weren’t going to last.
“Step back, Missy. Cover your eyes.”
“I don’t want to cover my eyes.” She scrambled back anyway. “I’m not a little girl anymore.”
My sister had always been a spitfire, and there was no time to argue.
My Coldiron flowed into a dagger, and I jammed my thumb down on its point. One bright bead welled up, and the metal sucked it in like a starving thing. Then I cut a gap in those bars wide enough to walk through.
I reached for my sister as she reached for me.
The cub struck at my hand, growling, all three pounds of him ready to die for his charge right there.
“No, Ross!” Missy caught his paws. “This is my big sister.”
“Behave, cub.” Caspian dropped the alpha stare on him, the one that puts any grown animal belly-down on the floor. “Here, you’re the lowest rank.”
The cub whined and buried his face in Missy’s chest.
“Like he knows what lowest rank means,” Nikolai snorted, watching our six.
“Oh, he knows he’s among bigger predators,” Caspian said.
I lifted my sister out of that cage and crushed her against me, Ross squashed and rumbling between us, and Missy broke, both fists knotted in my jacket like she’d never open them again.
I kissed the crown of her head. “It’s okay, little viper. You’re okay.”
Then I pulled back to look her over properly, and there were a thousand words crowding my sister’s wet eyes.
One came out.
“Ross needs milk.”
“Then we’ll find him some milk.” Caspian grinned. “I know how. I’m a wolf.” He thumbed at Nikolai. “And he’s a vampire.”
Missy turned and stared straight into those crimson eyes. “Like a big, bad vampire?”
“Yes,” Nikolai deadpanned.
“You don’t scare me.” She pulled Ross tight against her chest.
“I expect no less, little viper.”
“Don’t use my special name, vampire. Only Max gets to call me that.”
“That’s the spirit, Missy.” Caspian was grinning at her like she’d hung the moon. “Smart not to trust the vampire. And brave.”
“He might look like a monster,” I told my sister over whatever was happening in Nikolai’s eyes just then. I’d called him one myself, out in the Scorched Wastes, the first time I ever saw his face. “But he’s our monster, and he’ll protect you with his life. So will that big bad wolf.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Nikolai said.