Chapter 23
No.
I reach for the cord at my wrist without deciding to.
Find the bead. Three breaths. In for four.
There's a down. There's a down. The whole hall has gone still around me, two hundred beautiful monsters leaning in for the remembrance, not one of them understanding yet that the name in his mouth is mine.
"Titus Dellaby. Age forty-one."
Dad.
The heat behind my sternum sits up.
"Catherine Dellaby. Age thirty-eight."
Mom.
In for four. Out for four. Don't. Don't give it to him. He wants this, he wants you to come apart in front of all of them, don't—
"Lila Dellaby." Leopold lifts his eyes off the page, finds mine across the gold and the candlelight, and holds them while he says it. "Age nine."
Lila.
And something in me that has been holding for twelve years lets go of the rope.
It's not a decision. It was never a decision—that's the thing none of them ever understood, not the council, not Balcour, not the men who kept me flat for a decade because flat was the only safe shape.
The heat doesn't ask. It floods up out of the place I keep it, up my throat, out along my arms—filling me past the brim, pressing against the backs of my eyes and the undersides of my fingernails, more of it than my body was ever built to hold—and the bead is just a bead, and the breaths are just air, and there is no down. There was never a down.
There was only ever this, waiting.
"And Calypso Dellaby," Leopold says, and now his voice has the smallest curl of warmth in it, the satisfaction of a man watching a long plan arrive exactly on schedule. "Age thirteen. The source of the event."
The candles gutter.
All of them, at once, the whole hall lurching darker—and then the witchfire in the iron candelabra flares the wrong way, too bright, too blue, straining toward me like the herbs in his lair, like everything magic does when I lose control.
Glass starts to sing. Somewhere a coupe shivers off a tray and bursts on the floor.
The conjure-flowers have all turned their heads to me and frozen.
The crowd understands now. I feel the understanding move through them like a current—it's her, the source, the one who, she's going to—and they begin, all of them, to pull back.
Two hundred immortals, the apex of everything, stepping away from one twenty-five-year-old witch with the names of her dead family hanging in the air.
"Cal." Nellie, at my elbow, her hand closing over the cord, over my wrist, her face white. "Cal, look at me, three breaths, baby, find the down—"
"There's no down," I tell her, and my voice doesn't sound like mine. “There’s no fucking down, Nellie!” It sounds like the air before lightning. "Nellie. Get back."
She doesn't get back. Of course she doesn't. She grips harder, and I feel the heat reaching for her too, indiscriminate, hungry, and I wrench it away from her with everything I have left and it costs me the last of the holding.
And now I can feel it the way you feel a scream you can't swallow—rising, doubling, boiling up the back of my throat with a will of its own, mine to contain a breath ago and already wearing me like a glove.
The pressure crests.
White licks in at the edges of everything.
The heat under my skin has gone past bearing, every nerve in me lit white at once.
The hall goes far and bright and roaring, my pulse a drum the size of the room, and I am back in a hotel in Baton Rouge with my hand still warm from Lila's, watching the world tip into light, and I can't stop it, I have never once been able to stop it, I am the thing that cannot be stopped—
Calypso.
The voice arrives the way it always arrives. Down through the roar, into the warm low place that isn't on fire yet, steady and close and here.
Calypso. I've got you. Breathe. Come back to me—follow my voice, just my voice, nothing else. You can do this. You've done it before. Come back.
I can't, I tell him, and I'm crying, I think, somewhere far away my body is crying. It's too much, it's the hotel, it's happening again, I can't hold it—
You don't have to hold it. Give it to me. Reach for me and give it to me. I'm right—
And I reach. With everything left in me I reach for that voice in the dark, for Emric, for the one presence that has ever found me in here where I can't be guarded, and I think please, and I think help me, and I think don't let me—
Hands close on my arms.
Real hands. Warm, solid, here—and I open my eyes and it's him. Of course it's him. Emric, his face inches from mine, dark eyes wide and certain and unafraid, his mouth already shaping my name, his hands closing over my arms the way you'd grab someone at the edge of a cliff. He felt it. He felt me go under and he came, the way he came on the levee, the way he came every time the night went wrong. He’s put himself between me and the rest of the room and he’s reaching for me with both hands and his face isn’t afraid.
His face is kind.
No—
I see it the way you see the half-second before a car hits. My father's hand on Lila's shoulder, pulling her behind him, his body a wall against a thing no wall could stop. The heat of my power went through him like he was made of paper.
Emric is reaching for me.
The heat goes out of me all at once.
And the world ends.
There's no gentler word for what it does—it detonates, everything I've swallowed for twelve years blowing out of me in every direction at once, a wall of white fire and force that leaves my body like a bomb.
The sound comes a half-beat behind it, one enormous concussive crack that I feel in my teeth and the marrow of my ribs, that I will go on hearing in the quiet for the rest of my life.
The tall windows blow outward in a single sheet of glittering ruin.
The candelabra tear from their chains. The whole hall heaves.
And the room full of immortals—the oldest, fastest, deadliest things on the Gulf Coast—moves on instinct quicker than thought.
They throw up arms. They throw up power.
They throw themselves behind overturned tables and each other, shielding, scattering, every last one of them taking cover from me the way you take cover from an explosion.
Every one of them but Emric.
Emric doesn't take cover. Emric is still holding onto me.
“No, no, no,” I scream.
He's the closest living thing to the heart of it—he put himself there, between me and all of them, both hands wrapped around my arms—and when the fire comes out of me there is nothing between us at all.
He doesn't shield. He doesn't run. He never came to save himself; he came to catch me.
So my magic slams into him at point-blank range, with his hands still on my arms and my name still in his mouth and his face still unafraid.
—Calypso, I'm right h—
The voice stops.
And he burns.
I watch it.
God help me, I will have watched it every day for the rest of my life.
The fire catches him the way it catches paper—instant, greedy, total—and it climbs him in a roaring column of white-gold light, and for one unbearable breath he is still there inside it: the dark eyes, the red ears, the mouth still shaping the first soft sound of my name.
Then there isn't enough of him left to hold a shape.
He doesn't fall. There's no time to fall, nothing left to do the falling—he comes apart, burns through, the way my power burned through my father, except this time I am close enough to feel the heat of him break across my face, close enough to watch the gentlest person I have ever known go to fire, and then to light, and then to nothing, in the space of three heartbeats.
The flame collapses.
And what's left of Emric Vane sits in a pile of ash—soft and grey and weightless, on the floor, on my shoes, on the hem of the dress the girls zipped me into a few hours and a whole life ago.
Emric…
No.
He was kind.
He was so fucking kind.
That's what my mind keeps crashing into, even now, even with the ash of him still drifting down onto my shoes—he was kind.
In a building full of old cruelty and ancient appetite, full of people who looked at me like a problem to be contained, Emric Vane looked at me like a person every single time.
He wanted to know me, spend time with me, make me feel accepted.
And I liked him.
Carefully, the way I've learned to let myself like anything—a little at a time, braced the whole while to lose it—but I did.
I had my head on his shoulder and I was happy, stupidly, for the length of a few songs.
I will never get to ask the question. I will never get anything back from him again, because there is nothing left of him to give it.
I killed him.
I… murdered him.
The grief that comes for me rivals the worst thing I have ever felt.
It doesn't eclipse the hotel—nothing will ever eclipse the hotel—but it reaches down into the exact same place, the pit they kept me sedated flat for twelve years to keep me out of, and tears the lid clean off.
All of it comes up at once: the guilt, the shame, the black bottomless fear, and worst of all the one thing I've been more afraid of than anything in the world, finally, actually true.
I did it again.
I reached for the gentlest person I have ever known and I turned him to ash.
My single worst nightmare, made real, with my own two hands.
And my magic does what it always does—it drinks every drop of it.
Grief, horror, shame, terror, all of it pouring down into the place behind my sternum, and the heat comes roaring back up to meet it, higher than the first time, so much higher.
The white floods back in at the edges of the world, sparks jumping off my hands, arms, shoulders.
The pressure stacks and stacks. A second wave is building, bigger than the one that just killed him, swelling with nowhere left to break but out—and it won’t stop at one person this time.
Nellie, three feet away on her knees.
The girls.
Every soul pressed to the walls. The whole hall about to become a whole new column of names in my file—