Damien didn’t look to know what to do, holding his breath and staring back, and then he swallowed. “Dame Lycoris, it is an honor to be in your presence.”
“Aw, shucks, honey, it ain’t that big a deal.” She pinched him then released his face, bringing color to his pallid skin, then glanced about. “I gotta say, though, I did not expect to ever see you again—I shoulda out-slept your whole life. Somebody wanna tell me what’s going on?”
The five vampires who had initiated the ritual surrounded her, Damien backing away as she listened to their telepathic thoughts. Shining eyes darted from one to another. Amma could hear it again, the whispers, like their voices were echoing off the walls even though they were completely trapped in their own minds. Not a word could be understood, but there were feelings, some sharp, others dulcet, until finally it seemed things had been explained.
Lycoris’s golden irises swirled about like they were filled with liquid metal. She walked up and dropped a clawed hand onto Amma’s shoulder, the other thrown upward, breasts bouncing. “Everybody out!”
The grip on her told Amma she was not meant to follow the vampires in their mad dash from the cavern, but gods did she wish she could. Lycoris wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, and she knew how angry her own mother could get if roused too early, but Constance Avington didn’t have fangs nearly as sharp.
The others had abandoned their instruments and drinks to flood out of the rounded chamber and back into the tunnel. Amma watched them go, Ivory and Asphodel amongst the rushing crowd. She would have even accepted Rapture sticking around, but she was helping to usher the last of them out.
“And you too,” said Lycoris, a long nail pointed at Damien.
He looked very much like he wanted to protest, but the fact it would be pointless was as thick as the arcana in the air. Amma nodded at him to urge him on, not wanting to further upset the woman who had talons resting on her shoulder. Ivory had said she was allowed to live, and Amma had to believe that would remain the case.
Damien finally went, and Lycoris flicked a hand at the cavern’s opening. A thick wall of black smoke rose up to cut off the rest of them from the room, Damien’s form blotted out just on its other side.
The cavern went very hollow, and even next to Lycoris, Amma felt alone. An echoing wind bounced around somewhere high above them, the pop and flicker of flames in the braziers too loud, but then Lycoris filled up the silence with a sigh as she wandered over to her quartz tomb-turned-throne and sat on the ledge that jutted out of it.
“Come here, honey. Idobite, but I’m full now.” She laughed in that piercing way again. “Let me take a look at the reason my beauty sleep’s been interrupted.”
That had to be a joke, of course; Lycoris had skin as smooth as marble complete with blue veins that ran like delicate, meandering rivers about her temples, over her jaws, down her neck, and across her chest, each as beautiful as the rest of her.
Even sitting, she was imposing, and Amma did her best to not stare at the breasts right in her face, cleavage still bloodstained, but Lycoris’s face was equally challenging, her light eyes both frightening and alluring, and her fangs glinting as they hung over the edge of a dark lip.
Clicking her tongue, she reached out cold palms to cup Amma’s face. “Oh, don’t you just feel so warm, so alive, so—” She cut herself off, face pinching in thought as her voice lowered. “Well, that’s strange: it wasyouwith the old arcana. Mmm, yes, I like that very much.”
“You can feel the talisman?” Amma asked, trying to keep her teeth from chattering.
“Oh, yeah, that’s in there too, but this is something else. It’s the kinda magic you humans used to have, what the witches dabble in out in The Innomina Wildwood, making the trees bow and the earth rumble, all that. Show it to me, would ya?” Lycoris leaned back, releasing her face, and gestured for her to go on.
Like it were what she was meant to do, though she didn’t know how she knew, Amma slipped her hand into her hip pouch and pulled out the acorn. It stared back as if mocking her, no difference between its smooth seed and coarse cap against her numb fingers. Had it really been the same one that bonked her on the head that first day in the forest, somehow following her? And had she really heard it speak?
“Well, we don’t get a lotta living things down here, but that’s not what I meant exactly,” said Lycoris, grin playful. “Showme the magic.”
“I don’t know how.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I’m not blessed by the gods, it doesn’t run in my family, and I’ve never been taught.”
Lycoris shook her head and stuck out her tongue. “Yeah, and nobody ever lived likethis,”—she gestured to herself—“before I did either. There’s a different way to get there, honey. Find it.”
If it were only so simple, thought Amma, grimacing at the acorn. Damien had been hinting at this too, that there was something inside her she was refusing to access—he didn’t understand either that shecouldn’t. Just like doing what she pleased as a baroness, just like being stuck in Faebarrow forever, just like choosing who she would marry, just like—but then, she had escaped Cedric, she had left Faebarrow, and, for a little while at least, she was doing,sort of, as she pleased.
Hey, you can hear me, can’t you?she asked silently, eyes narrowing on the seed.
There was a rustling of leaves in her mind, like the memory of the sound, but it was clear.
If ever it were important, I think I need to be kinda impressive here seeing as we’re in front of the plane’s first vampire, so do you think you could…or, um,wecould do something?
Heat bloomed against Amma’s fingertips, and even numb, she felt it. The acorn split, and from the crack in its shell, she saw the briefest flash of a golden glow. It was like Lycoris’s eyes, the metallic glint, but like that time in Anomalous’s tower too and the box of yellow goo, and, strangely, like those flickers of silver she had seen when Kaz crawled out of the infernal plane, and when Damien had opened the fissures over the ballroom in her home’s keep.
But then the light was gone, and in its place translucently white tendrils poured out of the seed, growing and expanding as they crawled all over her hand, her wrist, her arm. The acorn’s top shattered, and a stem blossomed out of it, skinny at first, and then growing thicker. Amma’s voice caught in her throat, the seedling coming into existence in an instant, hot and wet as it covered her hand, the weight of it suddenly justthere, its roots pulsing with life, and at its very top a group of three maple leaves unfurling.
“Now, that’s more like it!” Lycoris clapped.
“Uh, what do I do with it?” Amma asked, voice quavering, heart beating hard. The roots were still squirming up against her skin, and the edge of the leaves curled up and down as if it took a breath.
With a chuckle, Lycoris pat the armrest-like protrusion off her crystal.
Amma spilled the seedling forward, and it crawled off, wrapping its roots around the crystal and falling still. In the same moment her knees went weak, and her vision tunneled.
