“Ye ken what I must do now.” Bile said the words as though he did not wish to, as though he wished to say anything but that.
“Ye wouldn’t,” Bláth pleaded with him.
He shook his head, his look so heavy, so sorrowful that I felt it like a punch to my own stomach. The king did not delight in what he was doing.
I didn’t understand this. None of this was making any sense. None of it.
Bás hugged Bláth tight, whispering for her ears alone. I did not hear what he said, but I knew the words of the book by rote, and if I could trust them at all, then these were his words.
“I promise, Bláth. With all my heart, I’ll be what ye need me to be. I’ll keep the babe safe. Always. I promise. I vow it.”
He scraped his thumbs upon her cheeks, but she was sobbing, spilling her tears upon the earth. Wherever her tears landed, life sprang up, beautiful blood-red blooms that burst with the perfume of roses all around us.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Bláth, ye must come now!” her father and king roared, a shivering urgency registered in his words. The sound shifted the land, ripping her out of Bás’s arms.
“No! NO!” she screamed, reaching for her lover, begging her father to stop this now. I knew he heard her because he flinched, looking like someone loath to be doing what he was doing, yet he persisted.
Soon, an impassable gulf spanned between Bláth and Bás. And even from my vantage point, I could see the sadness piercing through them both. Bás’s pain was so raw and visceral that I felt it like a blade to my own chest. And Bláth’s sorrow felt like a millstone tied round my neck, dragging me down. I clutched at my wildly beating heart, shaking my head, wishing somehow that I could stop the inevitable.
Bile stood apart from them both, the ancient and great tree of olde, and on his face, I read not smugness or superiority or even a parental sense of right. No, there was none of that. All I saw was pain, pain so all-encompassing and all-consuming that if he’d been mortal, I worried it might have actually killed him. His head was shaking even as tears raged down his face, but he didn’t stop what he was doing.
I couldn’t understand this. The stories spoke of his hubris, his pride at bringing them both to such great sorrow. But that wasn’t at all what I was seeing. Bile looked like a father torn apart by the actions he was forced to take.
Bláth cried out. “I love ye, Bás, for always. Forever. I’ll always love ye.”
He called back to her, his long arm extended out for her, his fingers curled and clenching over and over. “I will nay forget. I will never stop searching. Not ever. Never, my beloved, flower of olde.”
The world shifted, sucking Zane and I up into that horrible vacuum of time all over again. I cried out, but Zane was holding me tight, and I thought that maybe what we’d just witnessed had affected him too, because he was the one shivering in my arms. He was holding me up, but I was holding him up this time too.
“It was all different. Everything was different!” he cried over the thunderous roar of time speeding by.
“I know.” I looked at him, forced to raise my voice to a shout just so he could hear me over the piercing whistle that made my brain feel as if it would turn to soup in my head. “I-I don’t know what’s happening, Zane. I don’t know what it means. It was almost like Bile didn’t want—”
“To do it,” he finished. “The story was so wrong.”
I shook my head, feeling helpless, lost, and a little confused. We sped through time for what felt like forever and absolutely no time at all.
When the vortex finally touched down, we were not spit out or scattered. Just as before, we were in darkness, but this one was even deeper, soupier, so thick I couldn’t even make out shadow. And if I’d not been clinging tight to Zane and he to me, I wouldn’t have had a clue where he was.
That kind of absolute darkness was so terrifying that I moved deeper into his embrace so when he breathed, my own chest rose and fell with it.
I heard a heart-wrenching noise of sobs and screams. I couldn’t see who it was, but I recognized Bláth’s voice. She was pleading and begging her father to take her out of this place.
“Please, please, Da. I’ll never go to him again. I’ll be a good daughter. Just... please.”
And as she spoke, that innate light I’d first noticed in her began to emanate from her, banishing the yawning dark and highlighting the tragedy of her situation. She stumbled in the light of her own making, walking and walking and walking, moaning and reaching out with trembling fingers as she sought in vain to find something to lean on or hang onto.
Zane and I didn’t speak as we followed behind, but tears blinded my vision as her pain crowded all the way through me. Somehow I knew time was passing in a rapid blur because her stomach was growing large with child. And as time marched on, something began to happen to her. She no longer cried, but muttered. Nonsense spewed from her lips, riddles and childish rhymes. Then she would begin to laugh softly to herself, and I knew she was losing her mind in this black prison, slowly devolving a little bit at a time, sinking deeper and deeper into madness, even as her stomach continued to press outward.
As the days moved on at a whirring, blinding speed, I saw the darkness take shape, formed from her own magic into a world budding with blooms and roses and life. Massive trees that were fully matured shoved up from the ground.
Bláth was the ancient fae goddess of the spring, and it seemed that even in the absolute darkness, she could not help but bring forth new life.
She ran from tree to tree, clawing and scratching symbols upon them, runes with no meaning to me, muttering to herself about blood and death and how he would kill them all.
He would kill them all.
Then one day, she began to scream, and she didn’t stop. She screamed until her voice went raw, screamed in a language full of words I could not understand, until finally she collapsed upon a verdant bed of plush grass and cried out, shaking and trembling as she gave birth.
The child had a crown of blond hair. It looked beautiful, its flesh gleaming with the glow of the fae.
I waited for Bláth to sit up and grab the child, but she simply clung to her stomach with shaking hands. Sweat coated her body, and her back was bowed, her spine stiff. She screamed and grunted, her face contorting and turning crimson from the rush of blood.
I frowned. “Is she—”
“She’s having a second,” Zane finished for me in a disbelieving whisper.
My eyes widened, and we both turned to look at one another at the same time. I saw the same questions that burned in my head rolling through his gaze, but neither of us asked. We simply watched as the second child was swiftly but painfully birthed.
Unlike the first child, this one had skin as fair as bleached bone. It was silent, unlike its still lustily crying sibling. I worried that it might be stillborn until the child passively kicked out one tiny foot before sucking on its fist.
A second child?
I swallowed hard, trying to understand what this meant. Why hadn’t Aunt Prim documented the second babe? Had something happened to it? Had it not survived somehow?
Breathing deeply, Bláth finally pushed herself to a sitting position, still bleeding heavily from between her legs. She stared at the children with a blank look upon her lovely face. I waited for that mother’s love to kick in, waited to see her smile or reach for them. But there was nothing, nothing at all, no sign of recognition or acknowledgement of what she’d done.
The children’s chubby little fists punched the sky as they both started screaming at the tops of their strong lungs, pleading for mother’s milk, to be held, anything at all. But she just stood there and scoffed.
“No. No. No no no no no...” was all she said over and over.
Then she turned her back to the babies, ignoring them completely as her fingers played through the blades of bloodied grass, now bursting with wildflowers of deepest crimson.
My skin began to tingle and itch, an
d at first I thought perhaps the scene unfolding before us was what caused it. But then my blood began to warm through, and I gasped, knowing what was coming for me. I’d felt it so many times before.
Zane looked at me. “Zinnia, what’s the matter?”
I wet my lips. “I’m turning, Zane. I feel myself starting to shift.”
“Oh gods,” he breathed, clutching my elbows and staring down at me worriedly. “How much longer? How much longer do you think you have?”
“Minutes maybe.” I cut my eyes to his as panic beat at the back of my throat with strong wings.
He nodded, squeezing my fingers tight. “Okay. It’s okay. I’m right here.”
“Y-you promise?” I whimpered, biting down on my bottom lip so hard, I tasted the tang of iron on my tongue.
He kissed my knuckles harshly then set his jaw and nodded. “On my life, Zinny. I swear it. Focus on what’s in front of us while you’ve still got your wits about you. Because I’m not going to know how to make sense of any of this after your shift. But I promise you, newt, I will guard you.”
I trusted him so implicitly that I did exactly as he said without question. I knew he would protect me, and I also suspected this was the very reason why Time had sent him with me. Just as Zane had rescued me from Illusion, he would do the same in time. I gave him a determined nod even as I dug my fingers into his robe.
But I watched Bláth. I kept my eyes glued to the past, hoping that before I was forced to shift, I would be able to work through the riddle keeping my friends cursed.
And just as I was thinking that, Bláth did the most extraordinary, most startling thing I’d ever seen. In fact, what she did was so stunning, it took me a solid five seconds at least to process it.
She turned.
As in literally shifted.
She was no longer a woman, but a ball of glittering silver stars. I gasped, recognizing that ball immediately. That was the silver ball Malachite had retrieved from Illusion—the very ball Sage had come from.
“Holy... holy... oh dear goddess,” I breathed, shaking my head even as it all made a twisted sort of sense.
Sage’s core burned unlike anything I’d ever encountered before, stronger than any core I’d ever touched before. But she was human. And so empty. I’d always thought that about her. She was empty of memory, unable to recall anything from her life before stepping out of that sphere of starlight.
My jaw dropped. I wanted to shout it to Zane, tell him what I’d just realized, but the scene was far from revealing its secrets to us. Because now there was a man there, a man I knew very, very well—the very one who’d sent me through time itself.
And he was looking at us, his intelligent eyes piercing through the veil of magick imbued within the hood. He knew we were there. Time knew we were there.
“Za-Zane,” I whimpered and tugged on his hand furiously. “Zane, that’s Time. That’s Time, and that’s—”
But fire suddenly curled through my limbs, so potent and furious that all I could do was scream as I felt my own curse finally take me. I dropped to my knees and somewhere in the back of my head, I heard Zane roaring my name, but the pain was too great. My limbs shortened, and my body turned reptilian. Scales washed down my flesh like a wave.
Then I remembered nothing else except that I really wanted to eat some flies.
Chapter 10
Zane Huntington III
I SNATCHED HER LITTLE red-bellied body out of thin air. She wiggled in my hand, trying her hardest to escape me. I had to cage my fingers around her bod just to make sure she didn’t run off. She was far more slippery than she’d ever been before, almost as though she wished to escape where we were, as if some part of her knew we were no place fun.
“I’ve got you, Zinny,” I whispered, hating that she’d shifted so quickly. Her tail flicked almost angrily between my fingers. She was trying any way she could to get away.
I had to use every trick I had up my sleeve to secure her. I bore down with a little extra pressure on the sides of her heaving belly to help calm her. She nipped me for my efforts, but at least I finally had a good grip on her.
I’d almost lost her. And that had been far too close for comfort. I breathed a heavy sigh and hung my head.
I dreaded what could happen to her if I literally lost her in time, or what her aunts would do to me if I were forced to return without her. I had no idea how she and I were getting back, but one thing I knew for certain was we were getting back together.
I really wished she’d been able to finish saying whatever it was she’d learned. I really hated that now I not only had to learn the rest of the story on my own, but I had to hope I was able to key in on the parts that actually mattered, the parts that would help her bring her friends back. I hoped that maybe that was what she’d learned before turning. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell me anything at the moment. I peered at her now silent form. Somehow, I was going to have to keep my newt, which had no thoughts that even vaguely resembled human, from escaping me as her instinct demanded she should.
“Piece of cake,” I muttered with a fair bit of sarcasm.
And as if my words had woken her up from her temporary stupor, she started wiggling and writhing, attempting yet another escape through my hands.
“Zinnia,” I mumbled between my teeth, “if you’re in there at all, stop, sweetheart. Please stop.”
I wasn’t sure if it was my words or my gruff growl that did it, but she did actually settle down after that.
Flattening my hands against my chest so that there was no way for her to escape, I blew out a heavy breath. Things had just gotten about a million times more difficult. But I could do this. I had no choice.
So I fashioned a pouch out of a corner of her hood and, using her own clothes, sealed it off as tightly as I could. It was the best I could do on such short notice. Feeling marginally better that I’d managed to secure my gorgeous and temporarily reptilian girlfriend, I was finally able to turn my attention back to the scene unfolding before me. Then I got my first good look at what had made her so anxious.
It was Time, but he wasn’t alone anymore. Standing beside him was Bile, dressed in regal robes of what looked like dyed spider silk. Ropey vines stretched out from where he was planted. And I used that word specifically because he wasn’t actually standing on feet but rather on gnarled roots sunk deep into the ground.
They were both standing over the children. But where Time studied the babies, Bile gazed at the sphere of glittering light that had once been his daughter.
“Tell me, Time,” he said, “were the witches right?” His voice rolled as ancient and weathered-sounding as I imagined a giant redwood of California would if it could speak.
“Are they all cursed, or were they wrong and I banished my daughter to the nether realm for no reason at all?”
Obvious pain trembled through his words. It seemed as though Zinnia and I had learned so much tonight, but just like her, I felt completely lost and baffled by the revelations. Very little was actually lining up with the accounts of their books.
Time took a deep breath and, without speaking a word, knelt beside the children. He passed his ebony hand over the crown of the very pale child first. “The girl is... untouched.”
The king inhaled, trembling powerfully, and the skies above him rumbled. “Praise be to the wind and stars. And the boy?”
Time moved his hand over the boy child, looking calm at first, but his look slowly shifted to a hard, stony mask. Sighing deeply, he dipped his chin, and even from where I stood, I knew that wasn’t a good sign. I draped a protective hand over Zinnia’s curled little form. I hoped she was sleeping. Her breaths were long and even, and I hoped that she was finally resting. She hadn’t slept well in weeks. If anything good could come out of this shift, I at least hoped she would be clearer of mind when she turned back.
“Nay,” the king said low. “Nay.”
Time shook his head. “It was as we feared, Bile. You did right in sending her her
e.”
Bile shook all over, scattering golden ants from his crown to the four winds as he did so. “I’d hoped I was wrong. I wanted to be wrong,” he said, clenching his jaw and hands.
Time turned, and his robes shifted around his feet, swirling like a sandstorm. His brows lowered into a heavy frown.
Bile scowled, and forks of lightning cracked through the sky. “Dinna look at me like that. Ye canna be certain. There can be another way, surely.”
Time scoffed. “You seek answers to questions you already know. What you are wanting to—”
Bile lifted a hand, and thunder boomed in the darkened sky. “Enough! Ye will nay speak to me thus. Respect me.”
“You are used to the groveling of your lessers, but I do not worship you, Bile. I never have. You are not my maker. And do not forget it.” Time spoke low, but his words were sharp and cold.
The proud king’s nostrils flared, but he turned his eyes away, acknowledging Time’s words as truth.
Man, I really wished I had Zinnia there to explain to me what this meant.
“I did this.” Bile’s voice was full of the grit of regret and sorrow. “And somehow I must undo this. The witches. They ken how. They can—”
Time took a step forward, holding up his midnight-cloaked hand. “You understand that if you take this path, if you choose this way, it could still be the end of everything.”
Bile closed his eyes, his breaths the only sounds being made.
A gentle zephyr smelling of cedar and moss rolled through. I wet my lips, waiting on tenterhooks and more confused than ever as to what they were talking about. I didn’t know what any of this meant. If Zinnia were here, she might know, but this wasn’t part of the legend. This hadn’t even been in the stories. Why had Time sent us here? There had to be a reason that he chose to reveal this to us, so why?
“But there is a chance,” the ancient king whispered, and the night rushed with the sound of deep, heavy bells.
Maybe the ringing of bells was the sound of his hope, but I wasn’t sure. I knew so little of the world my girlfriend inhabited. I wished I’d had more time to study. I’d never imagined that I would be flung so soon into the very thick of the paranormal. Up until a few months ago, the only life I’d ever known had been a very mundane, straightforward human one. But witches and monsters and time travel... That was the stuff of fiction, and nothing at all I’d been prepared for. If I’d known this would happen, I would have studied day and night. But I felt useless, watching the past through eyes that had no point of reference to make sense of any of it.