Alek wrapped warm, human arms around me and I opened my eyes. I was no longer glowing and the woods were quite dark. We'd brought flashlights, but they were in a black bag by a tree somewhere.
"The others?" Alek asked.
"The Fomoire are gone," I said, sure of it. "Yosemite finished the ritual."
Alek turned his head even as I spoke, listening to something I couldn't hear. My ears were still ringing from the forest's voice. Ghostly grey and brown wolves appeared and lined the edge of the clearing. They parted and Harper came through, followed by a small herd of unicorns, Lir at their head. The unicorns' coats gleamed like moonlight in the growing gloom.
She limped right up to me as I stood there, my mouth hanging open.
"We won," she said, making it both a statement and a question.
"We won," I confirmed as I tightened my grip on the silver bag.
Harper looked past me. "Who's the kid?"
I turned and saw Ciaran holding a little girl in his arms. She had thick red hair and a confused look on her face. She was tiny, no more than three or four years old. He was whispering quietly to her, the words too low to make out. There was no sign of Brie or her two doppelgangers. He looked up and nodded to us, then disappeared in a puff of gold smoke, taking the odd child with him.
"No idea," I lied. I had a pretty good idea who that girl was, but finding out the truth would have to wait.
"Anyone hurt?" Alek asked.
Ezee and Levi limped out of the trees, both in human form and each favoring a leg. Yosemite followed. He seemed more solid to me, standing even taller. I wondered what the soul of the wild had done or said to him. Whatever it had been, I had a feeling he'd leveled up as a druid.
"We're good," Levi called.
"Is that…?" Harper said, noticing the body crumpled on the ground behind me.
"Tess," I said. "We need to take her back."
My friends looked at me, then at each other. Wisely, they all just shrugged. I knew I'd have to explain Tess's betrayal—or rather, her not-betrayal. Explain how I'd known that Balor's Eye was just a distraction, that Clyde was after me, so I'd baited him and Tess by separating myself from the ritual, guessing correctly that the sorcerers would come after me. They didn't care if the druid won his fight or not. The deaths of the unicorns had been Clyde playing around, taunting the druid, taunting me. It had helped give away the game, in the end.
"Jade," Alek murmured. "She betrayed you."
"She needs to be laid to rest in a graveyard, a Christian one," I said. "She did what she thought was right. I'll explain later." Hopefully later I'd have figured it all out myself. There was a lot to think through now.
Alek frowned at me, but nodded. "I'll carry her," he said.
I'd been mostly healed by the soul of the wild, but it was still a long, slow journey back to the Henhouse. Levi, Ezee, and Harper were all still hurting, but refused Yosemite's offer to ask the unicorns to carry them home. The forest spirit had healed them enough that they wanted to make the journey. Harper also pointed out that Max would never forgive her if she got to ride a unicorn when he'd been forced to stay behind.
We ran into Max on the way back. Rosie had realized Tess was missing, and Max was trying to track her. He crumpled when he saw her dead body in Alek's arms. I didn't have the heart to tell him she'd betrayed us. It wasn't wholly true anyway. We wrapped Tess's body in clean sheets and laid her in the barn.
All I wanted was a hot shower and a million years of sleep. Tomorrow I would figure out how to break into a graveyard and bury a body. I didn't know any priests, so I asked Yosemite if he would help bury her. He said he knew many Christian prayers and would see if he could find something right to say. Levi overheard us and mentioned he knew a priest and would make a call.
"How tired are you?" I asked Alek after we'd taken a chaste shower together. Mostly chaste. There had been a lot of clinging, as neither of us wanted to break the sheer comfort of skin-on-skin contact.
"What do you need?" he asked, pushing my wet hair back behind my ears as he cupped my face.
I pointed to the silver bag. "Take that; hide it somewhere far away from here or my shop. Don't tell me where it is."
"You didn't kill him," he said.
"I don't want his power. I don't want his filth in me. I know that power is power, magic is magic, that it is all a tool to be used, but this is a tool I don't want. It's an atomic bomb, waiting to destroy me."
"Why have me hide it?" He tipped his head to one side, looking down at me, his expression unreadable.
"I think Samir will come for it." Tess thought he would. I felt her in my head, her memories and thought patterns fresh in my mind. "I think the end game is coming."
"You do not seem afraid," Alek said. "Why not use the heart as bait?"
"I'm too fucking tired to be scared," I said. "But I'll be scared tomorrow. And honestly? I don't want the temptation. If things go poorly, I don't want to have that thing in reach. I don't want to make that choice."
He bent and kissed me softly, his lips warm and slightly chapped. "I will do this for you," he said. "Go to bed."
That was the best suggestion anyone had made all week, so I did exactly as ordered.
Tess was buried properly; an owl-shifter priest from a church over on the Nez Perce reservation presided. Levi and Ezee had a lot of friends. We still had to sneak into the graveyard, a pioneer cemetery, and borrow a grave, but at least we had a real priest. The ghost of Tess in my head was grateful, her churn of memories stilling and her voice going silent for a while after the prayers were spoken.
Rain started to fall as my friends turned away from the old grave. It was one of the most ancient here, the stone worn down nearly to nothing, the grave barely tended. Yosemite had re-grown the grass along the seams of sod where we'd had to displace the earth to lay Tess down. Looking down at the grave, I almost couldn't tell that anyone was buried here at all.
It wasn't right. I shook off Alek's hand as he tried to gently lead me away.
"Wait," I said. "There is something I must do."
I walked around the grave to the headstone and knelt, ignoring the freezing water that seeped immediately into my jeans. I didn't know how to do what I wanted, but I believed I could manage it. Belief would have to be enough.
I called on my magic, thinking of Tess, not as I'd last seen her with blood leaking from her mouth, her chest a gaping wound, her eyes full of the universe. I thought of her smiling, beautiful and delicate, surrounded by my friends. Her memories, what I'd seen of them, told me she had walked a lonely road. While I'd spent my life running from Samir, she had spent hers stalking him, learning what she could while trying to hide in plain sight.
I closed my eyes and sent my magic into the stone, pressing, sculpting, listening to its rhythm and coaxing it beneath my hands. When I finally looked, the light in my talisman revealed new words, carved delicately into the stone, and filled with silver light that only I could see.
RIP Tessa Margaret Haller. She is remembered.
I'd looked up her last words online. They were from the Last Supper, part of the ritual of Communion. She had chosen her sacrifice, believing that I was stronger, that I had a better chance to win against Samir.
She had, in essence, placed her faith in me. Wholly. Irrevocably.
I was going to do my best not to fuck that up. No pressure, right?
After days of neglect and a couple of hexes, my shop was cold and dusty-feeling when I opened it back up two days later. My morning was surprisingly busy for a weekday as regulars came by, asking after my grandmother in a way that had me confused—until Harper showed up and explained she'd spread the story that I'd been out of town most of last week caring for a sick granny. A little cliché of an excuse, but it seemed to work.
Brie showed up with cupcakes and coffee in the early afternoon. I had changed out all the light bulbs and gotten my computer to boot up finally, wondering just how full my work email was now, and dreading finding out.
She looked her normal self, her hair in two braids coiled on her head, her apron dusted with flour. Crow's-feet once against graced her face and her body was stouter than it had been when she wielded a sword.
"Ciaran and Iollan send their goodwill and greetings," she said.
Ciaran, his hair more silver than copper now, had dropped by the Henhouse the day before and told me he and the druid were going to go check and make sure Balor's Eye was shut. They promised to be back within a week. I told Ciaran I'd keep an eye on his shop, but him being out of town for periods of time was normal. Everyone would assume he was on a buying trip somewhere.
"So," I said. Lamest opening ever, but how exactly did one go about asking what I wanted to ask? "You look, well, better. Older again." I could add two and two. Or one and three. I wasn't so ignorant of mythology that I hadn't heard of the Morrigan. I mean, she's all over videogame lore, too. Goddess of war. Threefold goddess.
"I am not what you think," Brie said, opening the lid of her coffee cup and blowing on it.
"So you aren't the Morrigan?"
She laughed, the sound rich and multilayered.
"All right," she admitted. "I'm sort of what you think."
"Iollan called you Brigit, though," I said.
"I was three goddesses once, long before, in a time when we walked among men, spoke with them, were revered. But the old ways are lost. We have dwindled. Brigit, Airmid, and Macha, who you call Morrigan, made a pact, we three. We tied ourselves, our memory, our knowledge, to a young druid, one of the last of his kind, and a young fey, one of the few who remained in this world."
She held up her hand, palm toward me, and a glyph glowed on it briefly.
"A triqueta," I said. The knot was common—an embellishment all over manuscripts, a common piece of tattoo work, too. Yosemite had one right over his heart. Remembering that, I leaned back on my stool and smiled. "Three and one."
"My power is nearly gone. Only our bond holds us together. When I have to use power, I lose myself. I am immortal, in a way, and cannot die, but I become less—we become less."
"A child," I said.
"Ciaran and Iollan guard my memories. They restore me, give me back what I spend, bring me back to life with their belief. There is enough knowledge of the truth of what we were in them to sustain us. For now."
"But people worship old gods, too," I said, still wrapping my head around the idea that I was talking to a freaking goddess. After everything I'd seen this week, it wasn't that tough a stretch, weirdly enough.
"They worship what they think we were. Without knowledge, without truth. The time of gods has come and gone." She shook her head and smiled sadly. Then, rising, she capped her coffee and sighed. "I am sorry I judged you so poorly. It is difficult to hang on to my memories, and the ones that stay are often the most painful. They cloud my judgment sometimes."
"Pretty sure that's normal," I said.
"Perhaps. Well, if you need anything, my door is open to you." She turned to leave but I hopped off my stool and came around the counter.
"Actually," I said, "there is something I need from you."
Peggy Olsen held book group, which was code for coven meetings, in the basement of the library on Wednesday nights. Brie had been reluctant to tell me, but I swore up and down on all the honor I still hoped I had that I wouldn't kill anyone.
Of course, Peggy Olsen and the twelve women of her coven hadn't heard me make that promise.
I had to wait a week longer than I wanted because what I needed was on special order and totally out of season, but I slammed my way into book group in spectacular, showy fashion. Purple light danced along my skin and I'd left my hair loose, expending power so that it floated around me as I kicked in the door and stomped right into the center of the coven meeting, a duffle bag in each hand.
"Stand where you are," I cried out, using more magic to enhance my voice.
The witches froze. Some had been getting coffee from a thermos. There was a long wooden table down the center of the room. On it was a dull ceremonial knife carved from wood. Incense and candles were lit around the room. The witches mostly sat at folding chairs around the table. One looked like she had been taking notes. There wasn't a book in sight. Clearly they hadn't expected anyone to interrupt them or question their cover story. I felt the hum of warding magic, weak but present, as I crossed the threshold. Whatever they'd warded against hadn't included pissed-off sorceresses, apparently.
I memorized each face, recognizing a few. We lived in a small town, after all.
"What do you want?" Peggy said in a shaking voice, finally summoning the courage to rise to her feet.
"I want to talk to you about magic," I said. "I've been reading up, you see. And you all have been terrible witches."
Gasps ran around the room, the fear and tension rising.
"I'm tired of you hexing me, sending bugs and rats and whatever into my business. Harassing my friends. Basically, being annoying little bitches. You know I could squash you like bugs, bring this whole building down, or burn you all to ash where you stand."
I stopped and looked around at them again, meeting each gaze. Only Peggy looked me in the eye.
"But I won't. Because I'm not evil. If you think I am, you need your prescriptions amended, because you have no fucking clue what evil really is. You are dabbling idiots, mistaking a match flame's worth of power for the sun. But you have laws, rules you have to follow. Rules you've apparently forgotten."
I put down the bags and unzipped them. No one made a move to stop me, which showed serious smarts on their side. I wouldn't have hurt anyone, but I'd practiced holding someone in place with magic all week long. Levi, Ezee, Max, and Harper were pretty sick of it. Alek had just raised a pale eyebrow when I'd asked if he would let me practice on him. He was the only one I'd failed to pin for any length of time.
Ladybugs started to flood out of the bag. I prodded them gently with magic, waking them up. I had gone with those because I figured that if any made it out of the building, they wouldn't infest anyone's kitchen or hurt the landscaping. Wylde was going to be free of aphids next spring, for sure.
"I am invoking the threefold law," I said as the little red and black bodies took flight, streaming toward the shocked women. "You want to keep being assholes to me? Fine. Everything you do will come back on you threefold. All of you, since I know without a full coven, there is no way you could raise the power Peggy wields. So think about it before you hex."
Everyone was still frozen in place, staring at me and then at the bugs with shock. Peggy looked like her head was about to implode, her skin turning scarlet.
"Oh yeah," I said, as I turned to leave. I clicked my fingers, sending a low wave of electricity around the room. Witches started cursing as cell phones in purses made terrible squealing noises and died. Acrid green smoke leaked out of Peggy's sweatshirt pocket. "Hexen," I added.
I used my magic to dramatically slam the door behind me as the women unfroze and angry, scared voices started pestering Peggy with questions. I grinned. That had felt way too good. Hopefully it would solve my witch problem. I had a feeling it would. Praise Harper and her clever mind.
"Samir will come for me this time," I whispered to Alek as we lay on the blankets piled across my floor that night. "Tess is sure of it."
"Tess is dead," Alek murmured.
"Not in here," I said, tapping my forehead. "I knew him long ago. She knew him lately. He's grown bored, more bored. Without his apprentices to distract him, and with the lure of Clyde's heart, he'll come himself this time."
"Good," Alek said. "We will face him. You are strong, kitten. And you have many allies."
Great. More people to get killed. I shoved the bleak thought away.
"I just hope it is enough."
"We fight with what we have," he murmured. "Not what we wish to have."
"Okay, Obi-Wan." I nipped his chin and settled into his arms.
"I am not quoting Star Wars," he said, glaring down at me in mock annoyance.
"No, but you sound wise for your years."
"Protect you, I will," he said. "Love you, I do."
We fell asleep, laughter still on our lips.