“What are you after? One last frolic in the sand?”
“Merulo!”
I didn’t like draining the joy from him, or seeing the hard downturn of his mouth. “I’ve earned us a head start. I must use it to complete my end of this, now.” The sorcerer’s shoulders hunched, and he half turned from me. “This has been good, though, Cameron.”
I spoke around the lump in my throat. “It has, hasn’t it?”
“Very good.”
“Yes.”
“Now, if that’s settled . . .” The sorcerer’s grin had returned. “I have a God to kill.”
Following his shouted directions, we spread the white bed-sheet across the ground, piling sand in the corners to keep the breeze from catching it. My role complete, I stood to the side and watched as Merulo painted the sheet with blood. It rusted as he worked, the interconnected sigils darkening from a fresh scarlet to the maroon of Hydna’s scales. For once he did not work from memory, instead heavily referencing his clutched notebook. I worried at the time spent on this, extended by his frantic paging in search of specific glyphs, but managed to direct my energy into rehearsing a set of drills. Sweat soon drenched me, dripping down my brow and pooling under my armpits, but it felt good to swing about a long, sharp piece of metal.
A joyous yip came from Merulo, the sound a coyote might make with something fresh and squirming in its jaws. His pentacle was complete. He stepped into its center, straightening to his full height and smoothing down his robes—dirty and torn now. I felt a pang for how they’d looked upon our first meeting. Granted, I hadn’t been a fan, but they’d grown on me. As had their owner.
Merulo thrust out his thoroughly defrosted eyeball in a fist. Far from easing into the spell, he erupted into a complex recitation, thick with anger and sniping accusation, howling the guttural vocabulary as if it were his native tongue.
Rippling outward from him, a bubble ofsomethingrushed toward me. I stumbled back with a cry to avoid it, and saw—
Nothing.
No desert. No evening chill. No toying wind, not the scent of baked sand nor the metal of painted blood. No sweat trickling down my neck, no hunger in my gut, nothing.
There was nothing.
Nothing.
CHAPTER 53
In Which the Mongrel Witch Has Shifted from Her Dragon Form, Which Is Hard to Maintain, and a Bit Embarrassing Too, with Its Missing Wing Leather, and In Which She Has Straightened Out Her Floral-Patterned Dress a Few More Times than Necessary, and Cleared Her Throat, and Re-Adjusted a Shoe, but Cannot Afford to Procrastinate Any Further. In Which, if She’s Honest with Herself, She Dearly Wants to Turn Around and Go.
Domitia was not having a good time.
She stood in an underwater city, in a bedroom defaced by pentacles and cluttered with devious little notes, staring at the wall into which the two men had vanished.
Why, to begin with, had she left her comfortable cottage that swayed with its gentle passage through the swamp, and left her job—or herhobby, as her father liked to call it—where she could channel the deviation that had cursed her from birth into something beneficial, something that took suffering from the world?
All it had taken was a pretty little elf with wet eyes, and she’d been off, barely pausing to pack. And now what?Now she found herself in pursuit of a malnourished man who appeared to be down multiple limbs, and a basket-case of a knight who had all the defensive power of a wet kitten. They had ‘help me’ written all over them, and here she was, intending to do the opposite.
But the sorcerer threatened to do something terrible. All the magic, all around the world; he wanted it destroyed, and said so proudly. He had already turned back time—what a day that had been, starting with a miserable, lightly pregnant elf rapping at her door, covered in the swamp mud she’d slipped and fallen into more than once, asking to be relieved of her condition. Of course, Domitia provided that service. How could she be cold enough not to? But the elf had believed it necessary to disclose the long, wretched circumstances of the conception. She’d cried a bit, and Domitia had made cup after cup of herbal tea while desperately offering biscuits. Then—with the deed finally done, and the elf back on her way, refusing to stay the night—something hadwrenchedin the air with the sharp smell of magic, and Domitia found herself back at her front door, standing before the mud-covered and thoroughly baffled elf, sunlight streaming down upon them. That day, having to put that poor woman through the ordeal a second time, Domitia had trembled with a rage she attributed to her dragon half. It had burned through her like a fever.
It was thatanger, paired with the soft vulnerability in Glenda’s face, that convinced her to bring down the sorcerer.
Ah, Glenda. As much as Domitia resented it, she had a weakness for beauty. For beautiful women, more precisely. Tall women, short women, women with full lips and roundedbodies, women with bird-like angularity and chiseled cheeks. All sorts of women! And look how that turned out.
For a while, she’d excused away every stinging remark that left Glenda’s lips.She’s been educated differently, Domitia told herself.She doesn’t know. She just needs gentle argument, and a slow introduction to new ideas.
But still it had built up, and still she had snapped, that dragon fury surging in her again.
Even if they hadn’t gotten on, Glenda’s absence now left Domitia quite alone. But that was alright. She’d always been alone, even in the company of other people. Even with her elven family—especially with her elven family. She could wear her solitude as a cape and take strength from it.
She could do what needed to be done.
She could . . . “Kill an anemic double-amputee,” she said, and clapped a hand over her face. “God, what am I doing. What am I doing?”
She drew breath deep into her chest and straightened. “I’m doing the right thing. That’s what.” And the right thing didn’t always feel clean, or good, or leave her warm and glowing. Like with that poor elf woman, the right thing sometimes left her with sleeves stained with tears and the snuffing of a tiny life. The right thing was something you had to be strong enough and sure enough to commit to; the right thing was what wasnecessary.
