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24

Luna

Ican’t sleep, so I walk the museum in the dark. The fact Lucien has an entire suite of rooms hidden out the back doesn’t really surprise me. It’s almost like a hotel; bedrooms, bathrooms, a study, a weird-ass door he says goes to a ‘storage’ area but which sounds highly suspicious.

Kim and Lucien are asleep curled around each other but, as much as I enjoyed watching them, I needed to think.

Every time I close my eyes, I see Steven coming apart. I see what I did and I feel what I did. And it scares me.

Lucien’s museum is a strange place to feel safe. Occult manuscripts. Magickal artefacts. Seventeenth-century pamphlets about drowning women to see if they float. Humans have always been so frightened of magick, and so much crueller than anything they are frightened of.

I stop in front of one of the main exhibits. I’ve seen it before. I visited this place many times before I ever knew Lucien. But I look at it differently now.

THE ORIGINAL SIX, the title card says.

Below it, behind glass, there is a scrap of scorched cloth, a ring worn thin as wire, and a painting so old and dark I have to lean close to make it out. A woman at the centre. Five men around her. The artist has painted them all touching her – a hand at her shoulder, her waist, her hair – and painted her looking straight out of the frame, as if the six of them knew something the viewer didn’t.

Everyone who’s ever studied magick knows the story – the woman who loved five men and was loved by all five, openly, in an age when that was enough to kill her. She was accused of witchcraft – of course she was – and was burned in front of her lovers.

I’ve read many different versions of the story over the years, but all agree on one thing:

Magick enters the historical record after her death. Not before. Several traditions hold that it was not sorcery that condemned her, but the burning that created sorcery – that what her five mourners felt, watching, was the first magick, and every witch since is descended from that grief.

I press my fingers to the glass. I’m crying, which is ridiculous, but I don’t stop.

I’m still learning what I am. But standing here, with two men asleep in this building who I couldn’t possibly choose between, I whisper, “Whatever is in me came down a long line from a woman like you.”

“She would have adored you,” says a voice behind me.

The voice does not belong to Kim or Lucien, and yet it feels familiar. I turn around slowly, and immediately know who I’m looking at because he is exactly what I knew he’d be; Lucien’s height, Lucien’s stillness, a beautiful dark-haired man in a beautiful dark suit, staring at me.

Nix.

“How did you get in?” My voice comes out steadier than I expected it to.

“Doors open for me.” He smiles. “It’s a talent. When you know the right people.”

The shadows in the exhibition hall are already moving. I feel them the way I feel my own pulse, gathered at my back, pouring along the walls, waiting. Even though I’m not sure I’d know how to control them – to replicate what happened to Steven – I feel safe.

I feel confident nothing will hurt me. Or Kim. Or Lucien.

I don’t think about what I’m about to do, and I don’t give Nix a chance to speak. The dark comes off the walls in a tidal wave. Every shadow in the room sharpens to a point and drives at him at once. I brace for the unravelling. The way I unravelled Steven.

But then I feel it stop.

An inch from his skin, the whole black tide comes apart. It doesn’t break against him. It peels away to either side like water round a stone, and Nix stands untouched in the middle.

I try again. I reach for him with everything I’ve got. The shadows surge then, at the last moment, they turn aside.

My legs are shaking. I raise my hands, inhaling deeply, determined to try again, but Nix shakes his head and leans back against a glass case containing weapons that look like daggers.

“You can’t kill me, Luna.” He waves his hand. “No matter how hard you try, even you can’t kill me.”

I frown and look at the shadows, ebbing and flowing around him but not touching him.

He leans toward me conspiratorially. “I’m not sure Lucien has even realised what he did when he fell in love with you and gave in to his need for you.”

A shiver vibrates down my spine.