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“Let go of him,” I said. “It’s me you want.”
Slowly, painfully slowly, Thea turned her head in my direction, the bottomless pits of her eyes seeming to focus on me with some difficulty. She tilted her head, and when she smiled, harsh light poured out of her mouth, radiant, and terrible.
“Dustin Graves. It is good to see you again.” She blinked once, the alien emptiness of her eyes sweeping across the gardens as she regarded each of us. “And here are your companions, old and new. Some from the Lorica, and – are these your new friends? Men of the Black Hand, perhaps? My, Mr. Graves. How the virtuous have fallen.”
“Again with this Black Hand nonsense,” Carver said, his fingers already streaming with amber energy as he stalked closer. Some part of Thea’s fractured mind must have led her to believe that the organization was real, convincing her that the Black Hand had always been responsible for my murder.
The reality of it drove an icy shard into my chest. In her heart, she believed that she was doing the right thing, always, that her actions were just. She only wanted to bring her children back – whatever the cost. That only made things worse. Her delusion had transformed into zeal, and she was all the more dangerous for it. Just as unsettling was her physical metamorphosis. She was human only in shape, so much of her altered and warped into an insectoid monstrosity. Was this the Eldest’s gift?
“Let the boy go,” Carver said. “Your quarrel isn’t with him.”
Thea’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I have no quarrel with him. In fact I only mean to befriend him.” She scrutinized him carefully, her head angling as she took in his face. “Asher, was it not? We’re going to be friends. Yes, the fastest of friends.”
“Don’t think we believe that for a second, Thea,” Bastion said, his hands in fists. “You’ve killed enough people to get your way already. How many more?”
“Enrietta Boules.” Thea looked up into the night sky, then chuckled. “Oh, of course. Arnaud as well. The poor boy was only scratching out a living. But how else was I going to get closer to the Boules woman? I needed access to the Codex without drawing attention to myself. It’s a simple matter of bending the light.” The corner of her mouth twitched as one of her eyes swiveled down to stare at me.
Thea had been playing us all along, right from the very beginning. How could we have known it was her? She’d used a glamour as camouflage, to change her appearance, and if what Carver said about cloaking enchantments held true, then we never stood a chance of detecting her hand. All we had left was to ensure that this didn’t end in more bloodshed.
“Please,” Asher said, his breathing ragged. “I don’t understand. Please let me go.”
“It’s very simple. You help me with your magic, Asher, and I’ll let you live.” She grinned, light spilling out of her teeth, which had grown sharper, finer, less than human. “Show me the fullest extent of your power, and I’ll be gone. You needn’t fear me ever again.”
“Enough of this.” Carver slashed his arm forward, a jagged beam of amber light launching from the tips of his fingers, a spear of energy aimed straight at Thea’s head. Without looking, without flinching, Thea raised her hand, caught it, then hurled it back. I whirled around as Carver groaned i
n pain. A hole had been bored straight through his shoulder, the edges of it ragged. I gaped in horror, though I didn’t have time to question why he didn’t bleed.
“Enough is correct. I’m tired of these interruptions.” Thea sent out one hand, and the golden-bronze rod of the thyrsus shot out of the grass, careening towards her outstretched fingers.
“Stop,” Bastion cried, attempting to wrest the thyrsus away with the force of his power, but Thea was too quick, or too strong. She wrenched Asher even closer, her talons digging into his skin, then pointed the wand’s tip at the ground.
The soil burst open to reveal a spire of vines, a furious mass of tendrils rushing out from a breach in the earth. Under the moonlight I could tell that these were different, not the green of the vines that Deirdre had summoned when she’d used the thyrsus, but something slick and crimson, like veins surging from some hellish pit in the earth, like great, glistening coils of intestine put forth by an unseen, screaming colossus.
I leapt away from the crater, Bastion helping Carver from its epicenter, the others hurrying to the edges of the garden. Upward the vines went, rocketing into the sky, taking Thea and Asher with them on a platform made out of so many smaller, wriggling coils. She smirked at me as she went, the thyrsus in her hand glowing an eerie reddish gold, her eyes jet black, glimmering with sinister glee.
“What about the Veil?” Bastion murmured, his eyes fixed on the massive twist of vines now dozens of feet in the air.
“Fuck your precious Veil,” Carver snarled, clutching at the gaping hole in his shoulder. “Do you truly think she cares? I’d like to see your precious Lorica explain this.”
“I can burn it down,” Romira said, her voice trembling, suffused with uncharacteristic panic.
“It wouldn’t work,” Gil said. “That thing – whatever the hell it is, it’s too damp. Both inside and – oh God – outside.”
He was right. It was slick with – well, something. Amniotic fluid, or blood. However darkly Deirdre and the Viridian Dawn could corrupt magic, Thea would always come out on top. The stalk had grown to the size of a skyscraper, and only then showed signs of stopping.
“Too big to take down now.” Carver’s feet thrashed against the earth, his teeth gnashing in pain, but he fixed me with a look hard enough to convey his meaning. “Follow her. Find her. Destroy her. And bring him back.”
Easier said than done, but I nodded. What choice did I really have? And where the hell did this leave me? The Viridian Dawn had been quelled, but Enrietta was dead. I shook my head. What the hell was I thinking? The headline was that Thea had another innocent grasped in her claws. I didn’t know what she had planned for him, but it couldn’t be so far off from what she did to me. We had to save him.
But where to start? I looked up at the beanstalk from hell, its leaves like ragged red moth wings. The length of the hideous, massive stem pulsated, as if the whole infernal structure was coursing with blood. The noxious liquid coating the stalk gathered at specific points along its length, points that I then noticed were growing into nodes. Wait. Not nodes. Buds.
“Carver?” I drew Vanitas again. “What’s happening?”
He forced himself up, Bastion helping him to sit. It was strange to see them working together, and stranger still to see the pulsing amber fire emanating from Carver’s hand weave the bloodless flesh of his shoulder back into being.
“Stand back,” he said, his voice still, and cautious.
“Bastion,” Prudence called, from somewhere out in the garden. “Help me up, I can do this.”
