“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Lycoris, grabbing her by the arm and giving her face a slap, not terribly hard, but enough to shock her into forgetting she was about to pass out.
She rubbed the burn in her cheek, but there was magic there too, jolting between the skin of Amma’s face and her hand. Her body was suddenly sluggish and her mind cloudy, but she remained awake.
“You need to go see the witches in the Innomina Wildwood—they’ll teach you how to not exhaust yourself every time you want to make a flower bloom. It’ll come in handy, I’m sure. That’s not why you’re here though, is it?” The smile Lycoris gave her then wasn’t full of hunger or excitement, but a gentle kindness, the kind a mother might give her child. “You’re here for my help with that little doohicky that’s latched itself onto your heart.”
Amma’s bleary eyes took in the seedling once more, but it remained still, and she nodded, head heavy.
“They tell me it’s sorta like our magic, makes you do things you don’t really want to, but it doesn’t affect your mind unlike vampiric enthrallment. Oh, how nice it would be if our thralls weren’t so damn vacant. I mean, all I want is a little fear when they’re about to get their throat split open, is that so much to ask?” She wrinkled up her nose, one of her hands brushing through Amma’s hair, fingers caressing her scalp. “But your thoughts are all your own, aren’t they? I don’t feel even a tinge of arcana wiggling around in there. Problem’s the talis-whatsit wasn’t ever meant to be inside you, and you’re sorta stuck with Zag’s boy because of it, huh?”
Stuck? Amma bit her lip then tried to nod again, the movement difficult. She’d thought she was stuck once, but she had never felt as free as she’d been in the last few days. And with what she had just done with that acorn…her eyes found the sapling again and marveled at it.
“So, you believe in at least one of them gods, don’t ya?”
Amma’s mouth went dry, blinking back to her, and her voice came out hoarse, “Uh, well, I guess? All of them, actually.”
“Aww, that’s cute.” Lycoris sat back and held out a hand, taking up one of Amma’s and squeezing it. “All right, honey, you’re gonna swear on whichever one’s your favorite that, when I ask you my next question, you’ll tell me the honest-to-all-the-gods-but-especially-your-favorite-one truth. Okay?”
Sestoth immediately came to Amma’s mind. She was her favorite, of course, as the goddess of trees who had gifted Faebarrow with the liathau during The Expulsion, and seeing as she also oversaw the domain of oaths, it felt doubly appropriate.
“Ready?” Lycoris’s fangs pressed into her bottom lip.
“I swear on Sestoth’s Roots, I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Oh, my blood, nowthatis adorable.” Lycoris snickered, thumb rubbing the back of her hand, making her that much sleepier though the arcana fought it. “All right then. There is a way for me to remove the talisman and leave you not just alive, but better than you are now. The question is this: do you actuallywantme to take the talisman out of you?”
Amma’s mind went blank. Of course she did…not. Didn’t she?Yes!The answer strained at her throat, but it wasn’t coming out, as if Damien had used that Chthonic word on her and ordered her silent. She struggled against the arcana that wasn’t there, mind reeling. Who would even ask something like that? Did shewantit out? Of course, it was obvious, they’d come all this way, risked so much, woken an ancient vampire, and now…now…now Amma couldn’t even answer a simple question!
Pain pricked at the back of her eyes, her breath hitched, and in a swirling mist, her voice finally fell out of her mouth, “Yes.”
“Liar!” Lycoris hissed, and then exploded into more of her rapturous laughter, throwing her head back. “Oh, your god’s gonna be so upset with you when you meet ‘em!”
The woman’s voice jolted through Amma, chasing away the drowsy feeling and replacing it with panic. “No, I’m not lying: it has to come out, it justhasto. Damien needs it, and if you can do it, you should. I can’t hold onto it just because I—” There was a lump in her throat, the selfish words, the ones that admitted she might actually want to keep it because that meant keeping Damien too, catching.
Lycoris recovered from her laughter, one hand on the bloodied skin of her chest. “No, don’t worry, the gods don’t pay all that much attention. And I’m a little bit of a liar too. See, I can get that thingy outta you, and, hon, would Ieverlove to have you for my own, but you’d need to, ya know,wantto be like us.”
“You could make me like you?” Amma asked, swallowing back the lump. To be like Lycoris and the rest of them meant many things: it meant being undead, it meant giving up her humanity, it meant feeding off the living to survive, but it also meant becoming something more. “You could make me powerful?”
Lycoris made an excitable sound in the back of her throat and lifted her wrist to her mouth like the vampires had done to wake her. She bit down absently then drew her fingers into a fist, willing out a drop of blood that she sprinkled over the roots of the sapling Amma had just brought to life.
Amma’s chest clenched.Death. She saw it happening all at once, the roots shriveling, the leaves curling inward, and she thought of the liathau orchard hacked to stumps, the greenhouse barren, but then the tiny tree twitched. The roots filled themselves out again, shifting to a blue-grey coloring, and the leaves spread themselves back out, this time with lacy, delicate holes throughout and covered in a sheen of black.
“Hope you don’t mind,” said Lycoris, “but it never woulda survived down here without the sun anyway. Now, though, it’s got another chance.”
If Amma were like these women, if she were powerful, she could do so much more. She could ensure Faebarrow remained in good hands, she could protect herself from anyone who wanted to touch her against her will, and no one could stop her from leaving when she was done. It might not even matter if she had the talisman, she could go wherever she wanted, do whatever she wanted, be with whoever—
“But immortality and power come with a price,” Lycoris warned. “You gotta die, that’s how the talisman would come out, and dying is no small thing. Everybody remembers it differently, and there’s risk too, sometimes the negotiations with those god folk just don’t work out, but I can get almost anybody back, better than before, but also a little worse, at first. It usually takes a couple decades to get a handle on being a vampire, overcoming bloodlust, reining in the rage, getting control of the claws.” She held up a finger that contorted into a blackened talon and back terrifyingly quick.
“So, my family and everyone I know…I would have to leave them?”
“They’d go on living and aging, yeah, but I suppose, once you’re sane enough and figure out how to travel only in the darkness, you could see ‘em again! Vampirism is a little more of a problem if there are people you love out in the world, I guess.” She shrugged. “But, listen, don’t stress. I get that favor from Zagadoth whether the talisman comes out or not, so it ain’t no blood outta my veins if it stays inside you, but changing you against your will is not my idea of a good time, and I can feel every little bit of your soul holding onto that thingamajig like it’s the only thing keeping you alive.”
Amma didn’t intend to tell her that keeping the talisman inside her meant Zagadoth remained locked away. “What about Damien?”
“Oh, I don’t really care what he wants. Don’t get me wrong, I can glean alotfrom a person by their blood, and he seems like averysweet boy, not to mention his father and I go way back, but if you are gonna be mine, I put what you want first, got it?”
It wasn’t frightening then to look back into Lycoris’s spectral eyes. There was something like empathy there, or at least a recognition of whatever was going on inside Amma, and it swirled around in the molten gold like moving stars. Lycoris may have been the eldest vampire, and that may have come with inherent evil, but putting not just Amma’s needs, but herwantsfirst? The idea was so foreign, she had to force it from her mind, leaving just enough room for another, much worse thought: Damien brought her here, and he had to know this was the solution. Had he intended to leave her?
“But I’m not—”
