Now, the tree spirits I’m talking about are the quaking aspen spirits. You might know them as trembling aspens or just plain old aspens. Aspens aren’t like other trees. Oaks, maples, pines—they’re all individual organisms with individual spirits. Aspens, though, are different.
Each aspen tree is a tiny part of one giant organism. The aspen stand, which can be thousands of acres large, with millions of trees, is all one being. The vast root system can lie dormant underground, waiting years for the right conditions, before shooting through the soil and sending clones of itself up to populate the earth. The aspen, while having the appearance of many, is, in reality, just one organism.
When I met my first aspen spirits, there were fifteen of them all huddled together, wispy, transparent, and shaking in the wind. They moved at the same time. They spoke at the same time. They were fifteen clones, all moving toward the same goal—which, at the time, was finding a patch of grass in the full sun (aspens love sun).
Anyway, that’s what being a mine feels like. Jagger’s root system stayed buried in me for years. Then, after my ninth death, I came back. A bit like an aspen. His will didn’t subsume mine. It just . . . was mine. I felt his will in me because I’d reformed and shot up from the same roots.
My will was a clone of Jagger’s.
Could I fight it?
Maybe.
But Justice had warned me not to try. So instead, I spent my time growing accustomed to having a rocklike heart, poisonous blood, and an unquenchable hate for everything good and everything kind.
I burned with his hate. I lived his will. And I knew, without a doubt, that I would do whatever he wanted.
I’d buried all my good and all my memories so deep inside myself that Jagger couldn’t find them or burn them up. It was a bit like having a locked room in a darkened house. I knew the room was there, I knew what was in it, but I wouldn’t open the door.
I once read about a woman whose son died young. She left his room exactly as it was the day he passed. She locked the door and never went back inside. Fifteen years later, when she died, her extended family finally opened the door. Everything was exactly the same as it had been years earlier. Dusty schoolwork on the desk. A half-finished peanut butter and jelly sandwich long turned to blooming mold, then to dust. A basket of laundry next to the dresser, folded but not put away. And over it all was a layer of dust, a blanket of cobwebs, and the dead bodies of dozens of bugs that had been drawn to the empty room and had died in its tomblike stillness.
Well. Everything good that was in me had been locked in a room the day I became a mine. I remembered who I was and what I was, and I remembered who I loved and what they meant to me, but for now, it stayed hidden. It stayed safe. I knew if I opened the door, Jagger’s blood would destroy it—or I’d destroy it myself, because there was a new part of me that very badly wanted to destroy.
Lastly.
The final way I was different?
I was faster, stronger, and more powerful.
But here’s a secret. Keep it, please.
While being a mine made me faster and stronger, it wasn’t what made me more powerful. My brother had made me more powerful when he unlocked the power inside of me. Being a full-blooded, second-born conjurer was what made me powerful.
Tonight, I might die my final, true death, but not because I was weak. Like Rou said, it would be because I liked dancing with death.
Even though, no, I really didn’t.
I drained the last of the iced tea. There were only crumbs left on the cookie plate.
A slipshot, Harry, hurried into the kitchen. He was my favorite slipshot. Mostly because he’d only tried to kill me twice, unlike the rest of them, who’d tried countless times during my childhood.
Slipshots were funny creatures. They were born, I think, from greed turned to murder. They sprouted up from the clink of money hitting blood. The money was relative. It could’ve been murder for a car, a parking spot, a watch, or a pair of shoes—it didn’t matter. All that was needed was an immense amount of greed and murder. And then a slipshot was born. They came out as adults and didn’t live more than twenty or thirty years. Greed wasn’t an emotion that could sustain life.
Slipshots were a bit like magpies or packrats. Anything shiny, anything valuable, anything someone else loved—they wanted it. So they stole it. If they got to kill in the act of stealing, even better.
Jagger used them when he wanted something stolen that didn’t require subtlety or skill. Slipshots weren’t known for either.
You’d think they might’ve considered me a kindred spirit, since I was Jagger’s thief too, but most slipshots hated me.
When I was little and a slipshot tried to steal my rubber ball and shove a knife through my throat, I asked Rou why. She said, “Asking why a slipshot steals and murders is like asking why water is wet. Don’t desire them to be what they’re not.”
So when Harry hurried into the kitchen, I palmed a knife and turned my attention to him.
He grinned, reached over, and tugged on the end of my braid. His fingers were so fast that when he held up the black band I’d used to tie my hair, I only raised my eyebrows.
“Are the tables all set? The plates laid out? Everything ready?” Roumelade asked, holding out a platter loaded with chicken, new potatoes, and sprigs of rosemary and thyme.
Jagger had requested swan, because in centuries past, swan was a delicacy eaten by the aristocracy. But Roumelade had gone fiery-red and said, “If you wanted a cannibal for a lover, then you should’ve pulled a mermaid from the sea. This house only eats creatures of the land, never beasts of the sea.”
