I can’t find the energy to say anything, but some part of me desperately hopes so. The other part wonders if we’ve just started something else.
19
Rumi
Thecourtyardisstill.The crack in the flagstones has gone quiet. The barriers around the dormitories hold steady, and the air tastes clean for the first time in weeks. Students grip each other in the daylight, some of them crying, some of them laughing, most of them doing both.
I should feel relief. Instead I feel the darkness we absorbed in the chamber shifting inside my essence, settling into spaces between my golden light and my black threads that I didn't know existed. It sits there, and when I reach for my balance the equilibrium point has moved somewhere I don't recognize.
Dmitri's voice echoes through me, the last thing he said before the darkness dissipated. He’s wrong about the last part. We haven't become him. But the rest of it was true, and I can feel the proof of it every time I look at my mates.
Wisps of black curl through their auras, visible in Jade's hunger and Stellan's fire and the new solidity of Harlow's form. Ambrose is already examining his contract threads, which have changed color, the familiar green shot through with veins of black and purple that shift when he moves. Even Skye, barely conscious in Jade's arms, carries dark threads humming through his bonds with a frequency that doesn't belong to any of us. It belongs to the man we absorbed, and it's not going away.
I check my own balance. The golden light is still there, the black threads still present, but between them sits a new layer that responds to neither. Dmitri's darkness, finding its equilibrium inside my essence, a third voice in a conversation that was always between two. My balance has always been a negotiation between light and dark. Now there's something else at the table, and it's not interested in compromise.
Trying not to think so hard on that, I turn my attention to the freed souls reaching the surface. They've been drifting upward through the tunnel system since we released them from the pool, thousands of faint presences following some instinct toward open air and sky. I only notice them now after Dmitri’s darkness has left.
They spill into the courtyard through the crack in the flagstones and through the tunnel entrance, streams of fading color that carry the ghost of the lives they had before Dmitri consumed them. Students gasp and reach for the lights as they pass, the lights brushing against living essences with a warmth that makes several people burst into tears.
Most of them are already fading, too dissolved by centuries of compression to hold their form for long. They'll cross over within hours.
One of them turns back.
A presence at the edge of the dispersing crowd separates from the others with a purpose that doesn't match the aimless drift of the surrounding souls. Golden light threaded with something darker, a harmony of black and gold that I recognize in my bones before my mind catches up.
My hand finds Harlow's arm and grips hard enough that my knuckles whiten. "Mother?"
The presence can't speak. A century of dissolution has stripped away everything except the most fundamental core of who she was. But she moves toward me, and the warmth that reaches me when she gets close is so familiar that it breaks something inside my chest that I've been keeping sealed since I was old enough to understand she was gone.
Harlow's hand covers mine. "She's here," he says quietly. "She's real."
She reaches me and I feel her touch against my face, a warmth that presses against my skin with the specificity of fingers she no longer has. A century has taken almost everything from her, and what remains is reaching for me with a love so concentrated it burns.
I close my eyes and lean into her touch and let a hundred years of grief crack open. The sound that comes out of me is older than crying. It comes from the part of me that spent a century asking every dead thing and every divine being where she went and whether she was coming back. She's not coming back. She's barely here now. But she found me, and the hundred years between us collapse into this single moment of contact.
Harlow holds me up while my mother's spirit holds my face. My mates are close behind me, their bonds pressing warmagainst my back, giving me the space to have this without crowding it.
"She can cross over now," Harlow says, his voice rough. "Properly. Because of what we did."
The warmth against my face intensifies for a single breath, and then it begins to fade. She's choosing to move on because she finally can.
"Goodbye," I whisper.
The golden light dissolves, and she's gone. I stand there with Harlow's arms around me and tears running down my face, and I feel the loss of her like a second death, because knowing she's free doesn't make her any less gone.
"She was here," I say. "She was real."
"She always was," Harlow says, holding me until I can breathe again.
Dante finds me minutes later. He looks at my face and he just knows, tears gathering in his eyes. "Valeria?" he asks, his voice breaking on her name.
"She's free. She crossed over."
His face crumbles, long enough for me to see the century of guilt beneath the composure, the weight of knowing that his absence contributed to her death and his cowardice kept him from searching the way I searched. Then he pulls me into his arms and holds me the way he should have held me when I was a child and she first disappeared. A hundred years too late and not nearly enough. But it's what we have, and I hold him back because forgiveness isn't a single act. It's a practice, and we're both still learning.
“Go check on your mates. I’ll work with the staff to check on the students. Something tells me that this is just the end of the beginning.”
The celebration swells around us. Students are hugging faculty, laughing through tears, pointing at the fading lights ofthe freed souls drifting skyward. But I can't hold onto any of it. I move toward my mates, pulled by the bonds and by the need to be near the only people who understand what we're carrying.
