Chapter 14 Swallow the Stars #2
I breathe that power into myself now and feel it flood my lungs with lustrous molecules.
I’ve been here before, in the gloom of the grave.
I know the hush of death. I know the brooding seed buried within the black earth.
I know the clash of stars against the night sky.
I know the stillness. And I know what beats at the heart of it.
There is power in surrender. I know because I have died once already.
When I open my eyes again, I do not see the inky black of the underground but a constellation of light sparking off every surface, illuminating every downy barb of the dove, every spot marking its wings in the shape of little skulls.
It ignites a way forward that was always there for me to find, like the sky has descended into the belly of the earth, and I have swallowed the stars.
My mind races ahead, pitching me toward an end.
I clamber past the boarded-up front of an old store and through the left-behind traces of an illegal bar, now ironically buried beneath a pub just behind Arla’s building.
In the corner, past the overturned chairs and empty kegs, I see the rickety makings of a staircase leading to a drab if sturdy door.
I start toward it, but the dove dives for my head, drawing me back to the old sidewalk, on toward a looming corner.
It’s only as I round it to the other side that I begin to understand. The dove is not leading me away from something, but toward something. Something that must be near Arla’s basement because surely we’re getting close. But what?
Her.
The word is as startling as a sudden spotlight. It stops me in my tracks, bringing another wave of fear, icy in my veins. I’m not sure it was even mine. Did the voice whisper it to me? Or someone else?
A renewed need to get out pushes up, green as fescue in the summer. I worry about what has been captured in the Pandora’s box of Arla’s basement, what fresh pestilence waits down here in the underground.
Another corner looms and I realize I am close. Around it is the gate I first came through, Arla’s strange basement with its stranger room, sealed off from all of this. The bricks rising beside me must belong to Medusa, or to what’s below it.
I pick up my pace when the dove dives for me again, mussing my hair and battering its wings against the wall next to me before clumsily alighting on a rafter.
A broken bit of old sign drops, painted block letters that spell out U-N-D-R-Y—LAUNDRY?
SUNDRY?—catching and bruising my ankle as it hits the ground.
I curse and glance up to give the dove the finger when I see it’s exposed something on the wall beneath the sign, something that’s hung here for the last century at least.
The thin paper of a lithograph is glued crookedly to the wall, faded in places, tattered at the edges, but remarkably intact.
It has the camp of a circus poster, but not the innocence.
At its center, a woman sits among waves, her lower half scaled like a mermaid’s, the tail split many times over, coiling around the image at impossible lengths.
Her head is crowned with curling ram horns, wreathed by fire.
Her teeth sharp and red with blood. Her eyes burn into mine.
The letters are blocked in around her, offset, and printed in a handful of catchy fonts, unmistakable.
RUDZITIN’S EXTRAORDINARY PIT SHOW
PRESENTS:
THE FATHOM
Oracle of the Pacific
The face of a WOMAN, the body of a MONSTER, the power of a DEMON.
WANT TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE?
COME AND SEE FOR YOURSELF!
IF YOU DARE
The breath dies in my throat. Her.
A single downy feather drifts down before the poster, resting at my feet.
But the dove has disappeared when I search, its soft sighs a memory in my ears.
Eerie stillness descends, the image on the poster and I alone in this urban hell.
THE FATHOM—the words stare out at me, bold, undeniable. Body of a monster … power of a demon.
But the face … The face of a woman.
Who is Arla? I wonder not for the first time. What is this game she’s playing at?
What does this poster have to do with it?
I damn the decision to leave my phone in her living room if for no other reason than I can’t take a photo.
But I commit every centimeter of the lithograph to memory, from the spelling of the names to the primary, cartoon colors to the quirky lettering.
And especially the woman, a curving contradiction at the core, intricate as nautical knotwork.
I can’t help seeing her horns superimposed with crab claws, her hair slick and black, then wild and bright, the sun, the sea, the same in so many ways. She is like my painting of Thalassa, but she is darker, devastating in a way I can’t look away from.
I leave the poster behind, but not what’s on it. When I get out of here, I know who to ask.
The sharp tines of the gate in Medusa’s basement at last come into focus, Twig’s magic prowess left behind, and I am relieved to see they left it open for me.
Gripping one of the bars, I let the weight of my head fall over as my other hand grasps my knee, breathing deeply until my lungs feel at capacity again.
Lifting up, I hear a wet, muffled splash, the sound of something large turning over in a body of water.
It came from the chamber at the center of the room.
My eyes dart forward, starry vision fading as the real world encroaches, and a strange light gathers along the bricks of the chamber, pooling between them and sparking off imaginary angles and slashes, the glint of unread words in the mortar, just like before.
One dragging step at a time, I make my way toward it, the monotonous pattern of brick upon brick restored as the words fade.
I blink as my fingers make contact, expecting the warmth I felt from the door earlier, but it’s replaced by an eldritch slime, cool as mucus, the bricks damp as if leaking from the inside, a weeping wall.
Slowly, I move along it, leaning closer to hear. But whatever made the splash is now dormant.
I turn and trail along another blank wall before turning again to the side where the door waits and sidling up to it.
I’d have to crouch to enter, if I had a way to get inside.
But the latch and bolt are locked fast, probably requiring another key that Arla has tucked in the ample recesses of her bra.
My fingers brush the metal, it, too, now somehow quizzically cold.
“Hello?” I whisper, lips inches from the seam. “Is someone in there?”
The voice that answers is not the one I expect.
“I told you,” I hear Arla say from behind me. “Not. Yet.”
I rise and spin to see her silhouetted against the basement stairs like a dark angel, pale light filtering down. She is sitting on the second to bottom step, the sclera of her eyes dully gleaming.
“You abandoned me,” I growl.
“I left you,” she counters. “There’s a difference.”
“It was dark,” I shoot back.
“Yes,” she says, smiling a little. “Twig’s magical affinity. I think you’ve encountered it before? You have her to thank for the damaged security footage that night at your job.”
Calvin said it had been obscured. “You told me you had that footage, that you could use it to turn me in.”
“I lied,” she says, shrugging it off. When I scowl, she adds. “Well, it worked. Besides, I didn’t take you for someone who was afraid of the dark.”
I thrust my chin forward. “I’m not.”
“Good,” she says, sighing. “Because I have a job for you.”
I tick them off my fingers. “Electricity. Fire. Nightmares. Darkness. What next? Hurricanes? Sharks?”
“Don’t give me any ideas, kitten.” She smirks. “Yes, everyone has tried you. It seems you keep passing our little tests. Is there something you can’t do?” She studies me from her place on the stairs, proud and perturbed at the same time, as if she both wants me to succeed and fail.
“Cadence—” I start to say, fear escalating. What will the oracle have planned? The poster from the tunnel looms large in my imagination—Oracle of the Pacific.
But Arla only chuckles. “Surely, you’ve realized by now? If you get an invitation, you’ve already passed Cadence’s trial.” She stands, coming to my side, staring at the metal door that is just perceptible in the light wafting down the stairs.
“So, what’s your test?” I ask, even though I’m afraid to know.
“Not a test,” she insists. “A responsibility. My test is yet to come.”
I won’t oppose her because I’m not done here, much as I want to be.
Not after seeing the poster. Not while this door remains locked.
Not until I know what’s behind it. But I’m starting to feel like a tiger in a circus, jumping through one flaming hoop after another thinking freedom is on the other side, only to find a new cage.
“Do this,” she says, “and you may pass my test yet.”
I cross my arms. “This is the last thing.”
“Sure, kitten,” she whispers.
“What is it?”
“Brennan,” she says to me.
“Brennan?” Brennan who lay on her lap this morning? Who called her “Momma” and “Your Majesty”? What could she want with him that she needs me for?
Her hand finds mine, and her fingers wrap around it. “I suspect he’s been disloyal. To us.”
I pull my hand away, not liking where this is going. “What do you mean?”
She looks down, and for a moment I see vulnerability in the press of her lashes against her cheeks, the silky sweep of her bangs. She is suddenly so unbearably feminine it’s as if she could break from a word.
“People see what they want to see when they look at me,” she says quietly. Her eyes find mine, searching. “They see money. They see sex. They see power. But not you. You see … what? Madness? Arrogance? Or maybe delusion.”
“I don’t—” I start to argue, but it’s true. I’ve been suspicious since the beginning.
“Maybe that’s what you want to see as well? Maybe that keeps you safe.” Before I can respond, she goes on. “Brennan doesn’t see someone he wants to have—a mother, a sister, a friend. He sees someone he wants to be. That wouldn’t be so bad, but … There are rules, Jude.”
“Rules?” The word hunches over me, dark and ominous. So many years I lived in the shadow of my mother’s rules, not understanding until it was too late.
“You don’t think people like us can just exist in this world, do you? You’re not so naive as that.”
I swallow. “No.” Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. “History is not lost on me.”
“Good,” she says. “In one another’s presence, we are safe to be as we are, to be who we are. But apart from that, we don’t cast. You understand? We don’t use the magic. We don’t reveal our power. Not unless we’re alone. There’s a reason your trials were at night, in secret, at desolate locations.”
“The Space Needle?” I question cautiously.
“A calculated risk,” she answers. “No one would have thought there was anything supernatural about one light going out. We never expected … Well, it blew over anyway. Something I’ll have to keep in mind.”
“A miscalculation then.”
“Perhaps,” she admits. “In any case, I have reason to believe Brennan is not being so careful.”
“How would you know?” It’s been the same with Calvin and my job, the same with Solidago.
Somehow, she knows things. The poster in the tunnel screams at me again—Oracle of the Pacific.
Is Cadence the one informing her? But I don’t believe she’s to blame.
She seems too gentle, too star-crossed for Arla’s cunning.
“I have my ways, kitten,” she responds, a bit of her usual swagger slinking in.
For a split second, the spell is broken, and I don’t trust that she’s bringing me into her confidence.
I remember being dragged through the cemetery, drugged in her club at her request, left in the darkness of the underground to find my own way back.
That just happened. But then, her eyebrows pinch together, a concern that’s hard to imagine on her radiant face finding its way into my heart. “What do you want me to do?”
“He likes you,” she says, biting her bottom lip. “He trusts you. Get close to him. Spend time with him apart from the rest of us.”
“See if he’s going on a magical rampage?”
“See if he’s putting us in danger,” she says.
My mother’s pinched expression as she dyed my roots for the hundredth time drifts back to me.
If only I’d known then what became apparent the night of the fire.
After I’d let my real color grow out, let my mother’s distance distract her from what I was old enough to keep up with on my own.
After my grandfather found me in the room she swore me to never step foot in.
After he called me Aurelia and reached out to stroke my hair, pet my cheek, grab my neck.
Suddenly, in that moment he stood over me, a manic desire overtaking him, I understood.
She was trying to keep me from resembling her, trying to keep that beast of a man from seeing my grandmother when he looked at me, trying to prevent this very moment from unfolding.
The rules are there to keep us from danger. I didn’t believe that before, but I do now. And I can’t refuse Arla.
“Here,” Arla says, handing me my phone. “You’ll need this. I put his number in for you.”
I take it numbly, surprised but also not that she cracked my passcode. Of course she did. “And what if he is?” I ask her. “Putting us in danger. What can we do about it?”
“I don’t know,” she says, staring so intently at the door to the chamber that I think her eyes might incinerate it. “I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”