Page 80 of Be the Serpent

“Still, you’re right about one thing,” I said. “Oberon cares how this turns out. And he’s not going to let you hurt the Brown kids.”

I raised the bottle to my lips and downed the remainder of the contents in one large gulp. The blood burned as it traveled down my throat, and my head spun with the bright power of it all, leaving me reeling. I’d been taking sips of the stuff all day. This was the first time I’d drunk deeply, and it was intoxicating and horrifying at the same time.

This wasn’t safe. This wasn’t easy. This wasn’t for me.

As if in answer to that thought, the red veil of blood memory descended around me, wiping the world away. I had time for one last, desperate thought—Oberon promised me he’d pulled his memories out of the blood—and then I was gone, swept away by the raging tide of his recollection.

I am.

That is enough of a surprise, for I have never been before. I am something new. What that thing is, I cannot possibly say. I raise my hands—I have hands, grasping appendages that I instinctively understand as a way to interact with the world—and look at them, turning them over as I try to understand their shape. How is it that I can know so much, and so little, all at the same time?

Normally in blood memory, there was a sense of duality, of being both myself as an observer and the person whose life I’m taking the smallest sip of. This time, there was only the singular “I,” and the “I” in question was Oberon.

The sky is black as I turn my eyes toward it. When I see its vastness it bursts into stars, bright as anything, dazzling me. I turn away. To be able to turn is a wonder, to be able to look back at where I came from is a joy.

There, the only thing that existed before me: the great crystal spire that is my mother and my father and my family. All these things are new concepts, and every response they spark in me is equally new. I am drunk on newness. There is a crack down one side of the crystal, and this, too, is a new thing; this is what I was born from, when the Heart broke.

The Heart? Yes, the Heart. That is what I stand before. This is a new world, a world that begins in this moment, with me and the ground beneath my hooves, scant and shallow as it is, and an entire sky strewn bright with stars.

Motion, from the Heart. Motion, and a presence, and then they emerge.

Two of them, hand in hand, blinking in the blend of starlight and the aurora that pours from the Heart, incandescent and glorious. Both of them are beautiful. One, whose hair matches the light from the Heart almost perfectly, leaves flowers and green grass growing in her footsteps, setting this whole new world to life; where she walks, it blooms. The other, whose hair is as dark as the sky above us, and equally spangled with points of light, leaves patches of dampness behind her. They deepen after she has passed, until a rill cuts through the dust, flowing onward, surrounded by a wild splendor of flowers.

They are perfect, and they are mine, and I am theirs, and we come together in exultations at the very notion of life, the very concept of living. This is our world now, this is our place, and where we walk, it will grow, and when we hunger, it will feed us, and we will be eternal, and perfect, and forever.

And the light of the Heart will blanket and soothe us, always, and we will need for nothing.

I gasped, the memory shattering around me, leaving me only with the feeling of Oberon’s blood suffusing my system. I could taste my heritage on my tongue like wine, every inch and angle of it; I could see Janet’s ancestors, and my human father’s, and see how both those bloodlines still fed into my own, even if the strength had been stripped out of them. Nothing ever truly disappeared. The ghosts were still there, too faded and attenuated to call back to life, but present all the same.

Titania wasn’t screaming anymore. She was clutching her injured shoulders, blood sheeting between her fingers, making a high keening noise that set my teeth on edge. I closed my eyes.

There was no red blood haze this time. Only the tangle of spellwork spreading out through the darkness, and everywhere. We were inside a knowe, after all. It was so bright that it should have been blinding; looking at the world this way when I was standing inside a space that was also technically a spell in its own right was not good for my brain, which still wanted things to make sense for some ridiculous reason. But with Oberon’s blood in my system, there was nothing I couldn’t look at directly.

Including the reason I’d been hungry all week, and why the smell of cooking onions was so upsetting. I dropped the empty jar and drew my knives, watching as Oberon’s shadow approached through the spellwork lines, a dark silhouette against the brightness.

Half of Titania was as dark as he was, a black velvet recreation of a woman. The rest of her was wrapped in glowing lines the color of deep forest moss, a green that verged on black but was verdant and alive at the same time. It was beautiful. It was intricate and terrible and beautiful, all at the same time, and ripping it out was going to hurt us both. I flinched in anticipation of the agony ahead. I didn’t back down.

Turning my face toward the outline of Oberon, I nodded. So did he, the gesture visible mostly in the motion of his massive antlers, and I gathered all the strength I had borrowed from his blood, letting it sing through my magic, letting it fill me to the top, and I reached out, and I pulled. Pain blazed through me, almost enough to make me let go; it was like I had thrust my hands into a blazing fire and was trying to collect the coals. But I wasn’t burning, not really, and so I kept on pulling, and I didn’t let go.

Again, Titania screamed, in agony and misery and bewilderment, all at the same time. Midway through the sound, her voice modulated into Stacy’s, and she wailed, “Toby, Toby, you’re hurting me! You’re hurting me! Please—please—don’t stop.”

My eyes snapped open, my mental grip on Oberon’s spell nearly slipping. I caught hold of it at the last possible second, reeling it back toward me like I was pulling on the leash of a runaway dog. It was almost too strong for me. It would have been too strong for me if it had been any fresher, but the same time that had allowed it to sink its roots all the way into Titania’s heart had weakened its cohesion. This was a centuries-old working. It was tired. I could keep pulling and let it exhaust itself.

In front of me stood Stacy, arms covered in blood, shoulders still bleeding, staring at me with wide, heartbroken eyes and a look of shattered hopefulness on her face.

“Don’t stop,” she repeated. “Please. If you ever loved me, you won’t stop.”

I stared at her, not letting go of the spell. Part of me admired how much better I’d gotten at doing this; not long ago, any distraction at all would have shattered my concentration and left me fumbling to recover. Now, while I was straining, I was holding on.

Stacy walked toward me, tears in her eyes. “I can feel what you’re doing,” she said. “And it’s going to free her, and it’s going to mean I’m not here anymore. I won’t say you’re killing me, because you’re not. You’re letting me go. You’re saving my children. You’re saving the only thing that ever mattered in the entire world, and you’re doing it because you love me. Well, I love you, too. Remember that, October Daye: remember that I loved you from the time we were children, and I disappeared still loving you, and no matter what she says, it was always my choice. I chose you over and over and over again, even when you weren’t a very good friend, even when you didn’t think you deserved to be chosen. You did. You do.”

The working was almost entirely gone now, unraveling in my hands. All I had to do was yank one more time and it would fall away, and Stacy would be gone.

I held it tight but didn’t pull.

“This is where you let me go,” she said, softly. “This is where you save my babies. I love you, and I will always love you, and I’m sorry I won’t be joining the night-haunts and coming back to pester you endlessly.”

I laughed dourly, the sound strained and thick with snot. “Doesn’t work that way,” I said.