Page 79 of The Scarlet Ball

I forced myself up to my hands and knees, and then up to my feet. I wavered, dizzy and nauseated, and I could barely manage a step toward the open door. It might have been whatever was in the syringe she’d stabbed me with, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it was Mr. Howard, human face gone, deforming the world. We weren’t supposed to be so close to monsters like him, we weren’t supposed to love them but we did, and—

Lightning flashed at the window, more searing than the fire that took Mrs. Howard, and stepping on its heels was the boom of the thunder. The lightning came again, the thunder right behind, and on the third strike, they came together, light and sound, the storm arrived.

The dining room windows blew in with a shower of glass. I might have been blinded if I hadn’t thrown up my arm to ward off the shards, but then I dropped it again because it was Sebastian at the window, and this time, he came through it. He vaulted into the room, coming straight for me, and something in my chest opened for him, because he had come, from Saratoga, from Hell, from some confluence of air over the Atlantic, it didn’t matter, he had come.

I threw my arms around him, buried my face in his chest. He smelled like cold and the air before the storm strikes, and I sobbed with relief. Then the relief turned to alarm when he sagged against me, and I found myself holding up his weight.

“Sebastian?”

Before us, the flames danced, casting long, laughing shadows on the wall, and the air grew hotter, not cooled at all by the wind rushing in the open window. Sebastian shuddered, and with growing dismay, I pushed him back so that I could look at him.

“What the hell.”

In the terrible orange light, Sebastian’s face was stiff and drawn, masklike, but it had nothing to do with what he was pretending or what he wore. Instead, as I stared at his hollowed cheeks and the way his eyes seemed sunken in his head, I recognized what was wrong with him.

“When did you last eat?” I asked, and I saw the answer in the look of bleak despair he gave me. He was starving, and whatever he had given to get to me, it had exhausted him. I could feel his bones straight through his clothes. He trembled with fatigue, and behind me, I was aware of a keening noise, the first sign that the wildfire’s meal had ended and that it realized that there would be no more, forever.

The fire’s whine turned into a roar, and from that roar came a word: No. It was grief, it was a blind negation, it was the end of the world. The house shuddered underneath us, and there was just no time left, we were going to die.

Sebastian held me tighter—if we died, we’d die together, but to hell with that. I shoved him away, and he went easily enough that my belly tightened with fear. I shouldn’t be able to move him like that. I needed to come up with something right now. Would he take my hair, what parts of my past could I spare, I liked my hands and my feet and my eyes, so what else—

My hands flew up to my face in frustrated panic, and I jerked them away again at the nauseating touch of hanging skin. The Howards’ face hung lopsided from my jaw, some of it still clinging to my cheek. It wasn’t just the stitches any longer, it had been sinking deep, taking root. The thought turned my stomach with fresh revulsion, and then I choked on a laugh, because why not?

I grabbed the loose flap of skin, tugging sharply. I must have been too angry and terrified to notice the pain before. Now it was like a shovelful of hot coals thrown against my face, it was a shriek roaring between my temples echoing the one I voiced. My vision went gray, but I knew I had to see this through. I took a tighter grip, and then a firm hand pushed mine down.

“Allow me.”

Mielle grabbed the Howards’ face and ripped it clean away from me, the same motion a market girl uses to skin a rabbit. The pain was a lightning bolt across my flesh, hot and then wintery cold as the nerves caught up. I imagined a waterfall of blood, though it was really only four or five fast trickles, running wet down my collar, soaking the dress.

“All right, my lord,” Mielle said. “Are you hungry?”

Never in a million years would I have thought that Mielle could taunt a demon lord, and a half-hysterical laugh caught in my throat. Sebastian, exhausted as he was, growled with fury, taking a step toward her, and she pitched the Howards’ face straight at him.

He didn’t shove it in his mouth as I was half-convinced he might do, and he didn’t burn it up as Mr. Howard would have done. Instead that shred of bloody skin, my entry into the Howards’ world, that mask, that trap, disappeared between his hands as if he had made it a part of himself. It was his now just like it had been mine, and I knew with a fierce surge of triumph that I would never wear it again.

When Sebastian stood up, the gauntness had left him and nothing in the world could move him if he did not wish to be moved.

He took my injured hand, kissed it blood and all, and I yanked it back from him.

“I am not playing that stupid game now, let’s—”

And then the wildfire of Apollonia noticed us at last.

It had been a man for decades. It remembered that form still, and now in its moment of deepest grief, it remembered me, or at least, it remembered it was meant to consider me dear.

“Ginny,” it said, dropping the name like a stone. “Ginny.”

It dropped to all fours, stalking forward, and I pressed myself back against the wall in panic. After everything that had happened, it was unfair that I should have any new fear left, but here it was, and it froze my limbs, locked me in place. There was no reasoning with a wildfire, no argument or bribe that could be made, no seduction or appeal that would work. I was out of escapes, but Sebastian was there.

“Command me,” he said softly.

“Kill him,” I replied.

Sebastian surged forward, losing his human shape with every step. When storm struck wildfire, it sent a cyclone of flame straight up, smashing a hole in the ceiling and raining plaster and timber down upon us. It was Mr. Howard’s library directly above the dining room, and suddenly the air was filled with books, volumes as heavy and numerous as bricks falling all around us.

I might have died there, under some book the size of a dinner table, my real face broken by a handsome collection of Shakespeare’s plays, but Mielle grabbed me by the scruff like a recalcitrant kitten, and dove for the window. She bloodied us both going through it, but we were spared the avalanche of Western literature, tumbling down a good dozen feet into the yard. She turned us neatly so that I landed on top of her and then shifted me off her with a grunt, sitting up in the snow.

Outside it was as bright as day, and I rolled to my back to see the sky painted with wheels of fire. They spun madly, gorgeously, fireworks if fireworks knew they were alive and therefore could die.