“Are you able to monitor what’s happening?” Winter asks Savi. “Assuming something is happening?”
I figure that’s the nervous energy talking. We all know what’s happening. We have to sit right here. We have party time with Briar to attend to tonight. At least this keeps us tucked away and hidden from any rising death goddess attacks. Or her gnarly minions who might have a hard-on to murder all three of us in what I assume will be the most revolting sacrifice yet.
Meanwhile, with Crater Lake parched and desiccated and Vinca’s temple nowhere to be found, the rest of the powers in this valley are spread out. The wolves are patrolling the hills, waiting for moonrise in a couple of hours or so. The vampires have the valley floor, and they’vestretched out their patrols to cover halfway to Roseburg. Savi’s minions are less weaponized, maybe, but they’re everywhere.
“Let’s hope that this time it takes.” Winter smiles, but it’s forced. Her eyes are shadowy. “I don’t have another grandmother to lose.”
“The magic on Halloween was sound and should have held for another thousand years,” Savi says, fiercely enough that it sounds like she’s been arguing about that. With herself, with others, I can’t tell. “The only thing I didn’t factor in was the particular celestial situation we’re in right now. A conjunction of—”
Clearly Winter and I are looking at her with the same expression, because she stops. She blinks. “All we have to do is get through tonight, and that’s done. No more celestial interference. When she goes tonight, she’ll stay gone.”
She crosses her arms, and I notice yet again that she’s a far cry from that smooth, perfectly polished Savi who moved into her cottage here with a series of gleaming white roller-bag suitcases, not a hair out of place. Tonight she looks significantly wilder. Her flowy clothes look like they annoy her. Her eyes are flashing. Even her dark hair seems to be doing as it wishes, tumbling this way and that and even flirting with a wave when I’ve never seen it anything but straight.
I don’t want to tell her that I notice. That feels like a calamitous course of action on a night that needs no extra calamities.
Winter is not studying the sorceress for clues to her mental state. She looks rough. “Even if we manage to beat her back again, I want to know how we can keep this from happening again. If the stars align down the road, what’s keeping another set of acolytes from trying this all over again when that happens?” She looks from Savi to me, then back again. “Is there really any way to fully defeat a god?”
“Of course,” Savi says, matter-of-factly. “If no one believes in them, what power can they have? Gods, especially gods who have been shunted off into the deep and no longer affect people in any meaningful way, are ideas more than anything else. Tomorrow morning, I believea little judicious pruning of her red-cloaked followers is in order, and we’ll nip her next attempt to rise in the bud.”
“What I like,” I say then, “is that we all seem pretty certain that we’re going to make it through the night.” They both frown at me. “I know thatIam. I have shit to do.”
Winter laughs at that. Savi only frowns more. Still, we all turn when we hear the noise of Briar’s cottage door slamming open.
She’s standing there, her head tilted slightly to one side as if she’s listening intently. The music from her cottage is so loud that I can’t imagine she’s listening to us. Or anything.
Savi draws herself up and sweeps toward her. “Do you really wear that beanie inside your own house? Are you cold-blooded?”
Briar laughs a little bit. “No, I’m not cold-blooded. I’m not even cold. I just ...” She lifts her hands up and puts them on either side of her head, where her ears ought to be if they weren’t concealed in the beanie. “The way I was raised, you neverproveanything. You let others draw their own conclusions, because they will anyway.”
“If you want to keep your pointed ears hidden away forever, you should,” I tell her. I even reach out and put my hand on one of her tattooed wrists. “Though, Kind woman to Kind woman, I’ll tell you that not hiding yourself away, for any reason, is always it. I had to hide who I was for a long time, obviously. We all did. I didn’t realize that it felt like amputation until I didn’t have to do it anymore. I didn’t know that I could be all of me. Using all of my limbs however I want.”
“I’m not hiding,” Briar snaps back at me, yanking her wrist back. By then we’re all gathered at her front step, and as she looks wildly between us, I feel like there are emotions behind her eyes.Right there,and yet I can’t quite grasp them.
I canalmostsee them. I canalmostcomprehend her.
Though I think, very distinctly,She doesn’t want you to comprehend her.
Another blink, and she smiles. “Okay, New Year, new me, right?” Then she tugs that beanie off her head at last.
I remember the fae I saw in New York. Tall and lithe, gleaming a terrifyingly compelling gold that we all pretended not to see. Just as we all pretended not to see their obviously fae ears pointing up high, announcing who and what they were to anyone and everyone who might have some doubt.
Briar does not gleam. She’s not golden. But something about her seems to shift as she stands before us and pushes her black hair back so we can fully comprehend the high points of those ears of hers. That she, naturally, has pierced in multiple places.
Apparently faecanwear metal.
“There aren’t a lot of your people in this valley,” Savi says. “Or are there? Normally dark fae make themselves known.”
“It’s like I told you,” Briar says. She runs her hand through her hair as she turns, then leads us into her cottage. “I move around a lot.”
I look over my shoulder and I take a deep breath, pleased that I can scent pack—and not too distant. I’m also pleased that as far as I know, there were no sacrifices found today.
From what Ty said, the goblin clans—usually violently opposed to unifying with each other and certainly not with anyone else—have all volunteered to help in whatever way they can tonight in response to the sacrifice of three of their females. Once the goblins were in, word got out to many of the other Kind clans. They’re all banding together, and I have to think that means only good things.
I want it to mean only good things.
I can’t see the moon yet, but I can feel her. I can feel the tug inside of me, even more insistent than usual. I know that thebittenwill be getting restless now, already pacing. Already feeling that change coming in, hard and relentless.
I pull in another breath, then follow my friends inside.
