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On the longest night of the year, Jade loses Kit.
It’s – it’s bad, of course it’s bad. The kind of bad that’s been building for weeks.
It starts with nightmares. More than once, as the nights grow longer, Jade wakes herself up by scratching at the ill-healed wounds on her chest till they bleed sluggishly onto motel sheets. After the second time Jade breaks the scab open in her sleep, she starts going to bed in mittens.
Kit, too, is wracked with nightmares. She wakes frozen like a corpse in the night as if something is sitting on her chest. When she can move she curls towards Jade, stretches her hand out and watches Jade breathe. Their fingers remain separated, sometimes by a chasm of space between their beds, sometimes by barely an inch.
Jade has been trained well enough – or has worn herself out enough – that she can sleep again once she’s washed the cold sweat from her face and from the back of her clammy neck. Once she has stepped outside and pressed her hands against the earth, a tree, a weed poking up through the cracks in the concrete – anything she can find to reconnect with the power of the Great Tree.
Whenever Kit wakes, she doesn't close her eyes again no matter how tired she feels. She relies on headphones and loud music. On food – the spicier the better. On push ups till her arms burn followed by a shower, either as hot or as cold as the dial allows. Often, Kit spends the shortening days catching up on sleep in the passenger seat of Jade’s truck.
It starts with nightmares, but it ends with Kit retching up something solid and scrabbling and nasty in the bathroom of their cheap motel. It ends in Kit’s despair curdling into self-loathing when Kit staggers out of the bathroom to find Jade tending the scratches Kit gave her, moons ago, that will not heal.
And so Kit yells at her, voice rasping like more than sick has crawled up her throat and a swell of hopeless fear in her eyes that makes her sharp as a knife. It’s a bad argument. The gist of it is this: Lili is gone but things are happening to Kit the way they happened before… as though there is something else tying strings around her wrists and ankles, getting ready to make her their puppet.
And Jade shouts back that whatever is happening they’re going to face it together, but it’s a promise that makes Kit put her hands over her ears and scream. It’s not that Kit wants to face it alone, it’s that she doesn’t want to face it at all.
Kit is tired. She hurts. The things Lili put her through – said to her and made her say – the things Lili made her beg for – all make Kit’s guts churn to remember, though she’s spent the moons since then with Jade honing her humour about it into the blackest of the black, the sharpest of the sharp.
But her dark dagger of humour can’t help her now, and Kit is scared.
Before the end of Lili’s exorcism, Lili let Kit in on a secret; that Lili had hollowed out a tainted little nest in Kit that could never heal. Despite Jade’s unfailing litany of prayers that were, at the last, wearing Lili away, she’d still had enough delight left to truly giggle when she swore that even if Kit outlived Lili, someone else was going to scent the spoiled reek of her soul; someone else was going to slither up inside Kit and have such fun in the damage Lili had left.
Kit spent these last moons pretending Lili never told her that, but lately flowers have begun to wilt when she touches them, lately food has started to putrefy if she holds it for too long before swallowing it down.
The thought that possession is the only thing her body is for makes it impossible, in this dark moment, on this longest of nights, for Kit to think of anything else.
So she screams at Jade till Jade stops screaming back, and they fall into a silent sulk.
Kit curls up in her twin motel bed with her back to Jade while Jade does her perimeter checks. The only sound out of Kit is a muttering about how pointless it is that Jade makes her nightly round of the window and doors with her water and her salt and her faith.
“Prayer is never pointless,” Jade says, a defensive little bitter streak in her voice. She knows better than to argue with Kit when she’s like this, but she says it anyway. Kit’s snort of laughter is derisive and harsh.
Jade cleches her jaw and gets on with warding each window, each door.
Sometimes they get a motel with one bed and sleep close, sometimes they have two but Kit will push them together to act as one, even if they don’t sleep touching. And then there are nights Kit wraps herself around Jade's back like a shield and Jade sleeps deeper and more peacefully than she has since before she can remember.
But some Kit has a porcupine air around her and isn't to be touched. Tonight is the worst porcupine night Jade's ever seen.
Somehow, Jade manages to sleep. It’s a skill, sleeping while miserable, sleeping while packed full of dread. A survival skill Jade’s honed over too many years. But for a couple of hours, she sleeps to the white noise of the little air heater, doing its best to take a bite out of the cold in the air but unable to devour it completely. She sleeps, packed down with heavy blankets, till a greater weight wakes her up.
Kit straddles her, her hand over Jade’s mouth as she tells her to be quiet, and as soon as Kit removes her hand, she replaces it with her mouth.
Jade’s never had a proper goodbye kiss before, but somehow her heart knows that’s what this one is.
It is the fourth time Kit has kissed her.
The first was… ill-fated, and Jade's stomach still seethes with ruin to remember it. Kit, acting on a crush when she pressed her lips to Jade, Jade, acting on pure panic when she threw herself away.
The second – Jade didn't want it to count any more than she wanted the first to count. Kit had begged Jade to kiss her, days into the exorcism. Begged her and begged her to do something to overpower Lili. It had been a ravenous, potent, powerful kiss, Kit clutching her with both hands, desperate to feel Jade against her instead of Lili inside her. It was – it's not fair if it counts.
She wishes their third kiss was their first, but as Ballantine used to say, if wishes were horses.
The third kiss had been wonderful and terrifying.
After the exorcism, when Kit was almost too weak to walk, she had not gone back to her mother. Instead – there was never any question about it in Kit’s eyes – she stayed with Jade, and Jade had taken her home.
Home, to the barracks in which she’d grown up. Home to the grounds of the Shining Legion, which were emptier than she’d ever seen them before. Everyone had left to fight the demons that had burst through the veil during the Great Awakening, and Jade didn’t know who was still out there fighting, and who, like Ballantine, hadn’t made it.
Jade lay Kit down on Jade’s old cot and tended her till Kit grew tired of being tended.
Kit kissed her beside the lake on the Legions grounds, near where the flax still grew. It was careful and quiet and had silenced every thought in Jade’s head, stolen every word.
Jade has been a weapon - willingly, eagerly, with gravity - all her life. Kissing kit makes her feel…
Willing, eager, but light.
Like she is weightless, like she shines.
They have not yet spoken of that kiss, just like they never spoke of their first or their second. Jade didn’t know what to say about it - still doesn’t know. Surely, she thinks sometimes, surely if she’d been raised differently, she'd know…
But - she counters herself each time - if she'd been raised differently, Kit would be dead.
And this is the fourth kiss, and Jade doesn’t need words to understand Kit means it as goodbye.
Time freezes into something quiet and still and soft, something in Jade's heart unfurls like a new fern. She opens her mouth, lips sliding against Kit's, eyes closed, heart open, hand gently cupped around the ball of Kit's shoulder.
And then Kit is out the warded window and Jade’s mouth tastes like the loss of her.
If Jade’s half-asleep, fully-exhausted, kiss-stunned head had been screwed on properly, she would have been able to find her tongue, find her voice. She should have been able to call after Kit: not tonight.
Of all the nights in all the long year, don’t go out into the dark tonight.
Whatever Kit is going through, it’s safer to face it inside than out there.
It’s the solstice, tonight. There are more hours of dark ahead of them than any other night of the year.
And – she hasn’t told Kit this, she should have told Kit this – every year, on this night, they come for Jade.
When she was young they could only claw their way into her dreams, the horrors the Wyrm sent to torment her. She’d wake with a bloody nose and her nightie pasted to the front of her body and Ballantine burning herbs to clear the sulphur in the air.
As she got older, as the Wyrm stirred more and more often, things around her started to break. When she was thirteen, she’d glanced into her bedroom mirror and seen not only her own wiry body but a dark beast behind her, wrapping tendrils of shadow round her waist and legs - and the mirror had shattered before she’d had a chance to scream. When she was fourteen, another mirror, this one in a bathroom, showed her six demonic fingers curling around her neck before she’d screamed loudly enough that Ballantine had burst in and crushed the mirror with his sledgehammer elbow. Each solstice since, Jade makes sure there are no mirrors around.
There’s no mirrors in the motel tonight. There’s also no Ballantine.
But Jade grabs her gear and wraps her long coat around her body anyway. It is not safe outside her wards, but she will not abandon Kit to face this night alone. Lili may be gone, but Jade’s dreams all tell her the same thing; the destruction of Lili was a victory but it was not the turning of the tide in the war against the darkness. What it did was turn the tides of Jade’s life, and Kit’s, and now they are beginning to learn how to flow together (even if, from time to time, they keep messing it up.)
Lili was one of the worst, but she was absolutely not the only adversary who knows Jade’s name.
Instantly, this is proven to be true. Jade steps into the night and finds a woman’s black eyes on her from across the parking lot. Her hair is black as oil, her skin white and carved in a language Jade’s not close enough to translate. Everything in her countenance is a warning and everything in Jade’s body tells her to run.
“Happy solstice, Jade,” the woman says. Her mouth splits in a grin filled with pointed teeth. Jade's seen this expression on countless possessed before but this woman is not possessed – she just is.
Jade's only seen a creature like this once before; the night she lost Ballantine.
The night that thing did something to him that corrupted him so thoroughly he was past saving before she knew it.
This creature is a different one, but Jade knows it in her bones: they're the same. An extension of the Wyrm, corruption and darkness and violence.
Jade runs. The woman behind her takes flight.
Each footstep connects Jade with the earth and she prays as she runs, her spirit seeking out the guidance of the Great Tree. She doesn’t know which direction Kit took when she bolted, but the Tree does, and she is an extension of the Tree, and the map of its roots will guide her back to Kit. They must. Her heart will not allow her to consider letting Kit slip through her fingers.
Possessed or not, haunted or not, messed up beyond belief or not, she loves Kit. There’s nothing the demonic world can throw at her that will scare her out of loving Kit. There’s nothing that will stop her. Perhaps that’s what she should have said, when Kit kissed her.
She hears her name again and hears in the distorted voice the desire of the speaker to hurt her. Something behind her howls, and she can’t tell if the howl comes from the same throat as the voice. But then it’s joined by another, and another, till the fog is thick with cries for her blood. The clawmarks on her chest throb as she runs, pain pulsing in time to the war drum of her heartbeat.
Through the fog, the first howling, spectral beast bursts toward her, and then another on her right. Jade pulls the burning light of her magic into the palms of her hands in preparation, but then another beast is at her heels and sharp teeth snap at her ankle - not so spectral, fuck - and the pain is sharp enough her spell goes wide, splashing up the glass of a shop window.
She’s seen these creatures in the margins of old manuscripts, their real name a long and complex one in the old Pnakotic. The Legion just called them Death Dogs. No one really thought they existed.
Jade should have known better; they were terrible and of the darkness. Of course they existed.
Jade runs faster. She’s never been chased like this before. By dogs that are not dogs that snap and snarl and feel like abominations in the fabric of the world. Never been chased by something with footsteps too heavy behind her she can feel the assault of each one on the earth. Jade doesn’t dare turn around to see what manner of beast is chasing her - it’s not the light-footed woman with the grin, it’s another one, that’s all she can tell - instead she keeps her eyes scanning the road in front of her, looking out for an ambush, looking out for Kit.
The attack has to mean she’s running in the right direction; Jade’s racing heart doesn’t doubt.
Not even when one of the Death Dogs hits her full force in the middle of her back and sends her crashing to the ground.
Even before she was rescued by Ballantine and trained by the Legion, Jade’s reflexes were sharp. The group home that had taken her in after the death of her parents had fed her and sheltered her but it was still a place that needed to be survived, still a place filled with children who had lost as much as her, and who processed it as roughly as she had, with biting and kicking and sudden tackles from behind.
So when Jade is hit, her reflexes take over, and she catches herself with quick hands before her face can slam into the wet asphalt. The beast that knocked her down doesn’t stop though - it keeps running, stampeding over her, followed by others, too many paws to count, all of them bruisingly heavy and keeping her on the ground for several awful, panicked seconds. Jade can feel the sharp points of their claws too, but her coat is long and thick enough that the claws don’t break her skin. She is quite sure that her knees are bleeding inside her jeans, though.
As soon as the last one uses her shoulders as a launching pad and thrusts her face down against the ground one more time, Jade straightens her arms and pushes herself up. The first thing she sees is the six of them arranged in a semi circle in front of her, a dozen pairs of hungry eyes trained on her, countless teeth bared.
Jade bares her teeth back, and hauls herself to her feet with an Angorian battle spell forming in her throat. Three Death Dogs fly at her, but the spell is a fast one and takes out two.
The third gets its teeth around her forearm and the pressure is so intense it bursts fear and adrenaline through her gut. Jade doesn’t scream; she has been trained out of screaming, but she can feel the shape of what would be a scream and its pressure is almost as bad as the jaw around her arm. Still her flesh doesn’t tear - but her coat is going to be wearing the teeth marks for the rest of its life.
Her right hand is still sizzling from the spell, and she shoves it hard up against the dog’s chest and is gratified when the monster yelps.
They’ve done what they were meant to do, though. Slowed her down. Cut off her exit down the alley.
Given time for the smashing footsteps behind her to catch up.
He's –
Jade's never seen anyone as big as he is before.
She's always known tall men. As a kid Ballantine was the biggest person in her life, and her father – she recalls the shape of her father, enormous in her memory. How little she felt in his arms, how little she felt again, the first time Ballantine carried her out of her father's house.
This is – inhumanely big. He towers. He looms. And his head is so swollen and monstrous its flesh has grown into the spikes of the iron cage that sits on his shoulders. Jade cannot imagine why – and her mind is caught on trying to imagine when it should be focused on building another spell. He’s that big he chases everything but horrified fear from her body.
She steps back, but one step of his covers three of hers and he grabs her by the throat with an arm larger than her torso.
How little she feels again, as he lifts her up into the air like she's nothing. How powerless she feels when he tosses her across the alley and her body comes to grief against a number of trashcans.
Winded by the fall, tongue bleeding from her teeth, and throat half-crushed from his grip, Jade is hardly able to scream at all when one of the Death Dogs bites down on her ankle. Its teeth shred through her jeans and into her flesh, and the pain is overwhelming as she hears herself crunch in its jaw.
She cannot run, but she will not lie down and die. Spitting blood from her mouth, Jade tries to drag herself along the ground with her elbows. The dog does not let her go, but she fights for her freedom anyway.
There’s freezing water everywhere from some earlier rain and it reeks of trash and blood and something evil, inhuman. The water shakes and ripples as the beast runs toward her once more.
A monstrous hand grabs her shoulder and rolls her over, and Jade yells with the pain and, terribly, with fear. He's so big, he looks so wrong, his face – could it have ever been human? Something in the eyes speaks of humanity lost – swollen and scarred like something once caused him great pain, and just like whenever Jade sees pain in anyone she’s ever tried to help, part of her wants to reach out and soothe him.
But she doesn’t get the chance to try before he's hauling her off the ground by her throat, pinning her to the posters glued to the brick of the alley.
She can't possibly be able to hear this over the roar of blood in her ears, but she feels the dripping of blood from her ankle into the puddles below her.
Her leg is on fire. Her arm, her back, her head, her mouth, her throat - the hurt is overwhelming.
His strength is overwhelming.
His eyes are yellow. Jade’s are bloodshot and brown. If this is death, Jade will face it with open eyes.
He is strong, but her love is stronger. He can beat her and the dogs can tear into her but safe in her chest is a unquelled heart that belongs wholly to the Great Tree- to the world - to Kit - and it pumps blood through her body till every bloody fingertip is filled with love, Jade feels it like a magic spell, like a tidal swell, like the moon crashing to earth, like a tree bursting through the cracks in the pavement beneath her, straight up through her heart.
She opens her mouth to save herself, but nothing more than a ravaged gasp comes out.
And then a sound as loud as a gunshot blasts through the air. He releases her, and she falls useless-leg-first onto the ground.
Jade choke for air, but nothing comes, the shock of the fall on her lungs is too much. Her vision is going dark, her blood pooling out into the filthy alley water. She presses one cheek against the asphalt, feels a tear seep out, seeking to water the roots of the Tree beneath her.
She closes her eyes now, to control her own darkness, and in this softer dark it’s easier to feel connected to the Tree. Everything she’s ever been taught has told her how she is part of this system, her heart inextricably bound to something so, so much greater than herself. She can barely move her body, but there is power there, still. The connection is there, still.
And somewhere out there is Kit. Lying prone on the ground, Jade can almost sense her direction through the network of roots – with time, Jade is certain she could find her.
But she cannot even drag herself another inch.
Something soft touches her shoulder – a hand, and then another is fishing her face out of the shallow, filthy puddle. Jade’s vision swims for a moment and her eyes refocus on a pale, beautiful face, two arms reaching for her. A spirit. A Mother. Jade’s eyes flutter as her forehead is touched with the most careful fingers that ever touched her.
“No match for Roargoth, are ya, big fella!?” A voice says as another person steps closer. This one is one silhouetted against a bright set of headlights like a halo at their back; they’re a wiry, strong figure, with a smoking shotgun held in their hands.
Not like a gunshot, then. A real gunshot.
Cool metal is pressed to her lips, the rim of a little bottle, and something liquid slips into her mouth. It’s honey-sweet, and herby-sharp, Jade can taste the earth in it; sow thistle and dandelion and the flavour of a home she can’t place, this feeling she gets sometimes when she prays to the Mothers, when she thinks of her mother. It coats the inside of her ruined throat and seems to seep into her heart without any need to swallow – Jade’s not sure she can swallow, right now, so it's for the best, this magic quality of the potion. She feels more tears slip out of her eyes, feels them flow down her throat, too.
Kind arms bundle her up, strong and sure and sweet-smelling. Jade feels her head tip, her face finds a pale neck, soft hair, softer skin.
They lift her into the air and Jade feels like she's being lifted by the boughs of the Great Tree itself.
And then the voice says, “Attagirl, lift with the knees. You right with her, Elora?”
And Jade knows she must be dead.
She is dead, and the daughter of the sun and the moon herself has come to take Jade’s battered spirit to the canopy of the world.
She is dead, and she is leaving Kit alone on this earth.
Jade feels the heartbreak slip out of her eyes in trails of hot tears, lost against the soft skin of her empress goddess. Her mouth opens in the shape of a plea, not for her own life, but to watch over Kit’s. Surely, if Jade’s life and death has pleased the empress so well that she has come to earth herself to take her, she might extend some of her mercy toward Kit. Jade knows this isn’t how divine mercy works, that miracles and salvation are something to be fought for not something that is given from above... but she tries to pray for it anyway
No words come out, nothing but a pained choke and a gargle, but the empress must be able to see into her heart and read what she needs, so badly. Kit’s safety, Kit’s life, nothing else matters so long as Kit is safe, so long as someone promises to watch over Kit.
And then there’s a bang of metal and the creak of a hinge, a grunt from beneath her as Jade is turned and the goddess that carries her steps, sidewards, through the too-narrow door of a motorhome.
Jade feels the collision of the doorframe against her ankle, and this time it isn’t training that holds back her scream, but it’s her own crushed throat. Jade tries to scream, arches her body in a scream, and the divine empress says “oh shit, shit, sorry!” and hurriedly lays her down on the narrow double bed at the back of the vehicle.
Someone slams the door behind them, bangs it twice with the firm palm of a hand, and the engine kicks into life. A voice calls “Braced?” from the front, and the empress puts a steadying hand on Jade’s shoulder to hold her down and yells: “Yeah GO!”
The whole vehicle jerks, and it jostles Jade’s ankle so badly the wave of pain drags her down into the dark. She passes out with the cool, gentle hand of her saviour on her forehead, two beautiful, worried eyes watching her, and a firm, stubborn voice telling her “You did good, it’s alright, we’ve got you now.”
Half awake, half delirious with pain, Jade dreams.
In her dream, Kit is safe, that’s how Jade knows it’s a dream. Jade’s true dreams don’t come in the genre of safe.
But the dream carries on whether Jade believes it’s real or not. She sees Kit and she is safe.
Kit is sitting in the booth of a diner, with a bowl of curly fries and a smaller bowl of aioli, coffee steaming in a thick mug, breath steaming up the window as she looks out into the dark. Jade’s vision pulls back too quickly for her liking; she wants to linger in Kit’s breath, wants a moment to read the expression on her face, wants to see her bite into a fry and savour the heat, the fat, the salt. Jade wants to hear her complain about coffee because no matter what, wherever they went, Kit would always complain about the coffee.
Jade will miss her complaints, if Jade is dead. Or dying. Or whatever she is doing, right now.
But Jade’s vision pulls back, and that is important too, because now she can see the parking lot outside, see a large truck pulling up and two people get out, the woman stretching, the man locking up. Sees a young couple holding hands as they make their way back to their own car, the taller figure with a baby on their back. There’s no Death Dogs, no demons, nothing hunting Kit tonight.
She’s safe, for now, because as Jade’s vision pulls back even further she can see the RV from above and she can see the Death Dogs chasing it down and it’s a vivid reminder that the eye of the Wyrm itself is turned on her tonight.
Has always been on her, when the veil is so thin it can send its worst after her.
The Wyrm’s attention is centred on her and Jade has never felt so afraid, nor so grateful. Anything to pull its eye away from Kit.
She gasps back into her body as a voice says “now this might hurt a little,” and pain shoots through her ankle. Her boot is being removed, and no matter how carefully she’s being handled, the bending of her ankle makes her scream.
“Or a lot – oh, sorry, here please–” the soft voice winces, and Jade finds herself biting down hard on a green knitted scarf that has been shoved between her teeth before her bloodsoaked and torn up sock is peeled away from the burning pain of the bite. The texture of the scarf makes her gag, but it’s not enough to distract from the pain.
Not till she opens her eyes, and sees the glory of the woman throwing her wretched sock into a bucket.
Elora, the older woman called her.
Elora Danan.
It is both not possible and the one thing Jade has always believed to be true.
Elora Danan is here, walking this earth, and Jade is choking on her scarf.
With another gag from the depth of her throat – she hates the feel of wool on her teeth – Jade spits out the scarf, gets her hands underneath her to force herself to crank the top half of her body up, and looks down at her ankle. It’s propped on a fat and neatly folded towel that is efficiently soaking up a good deal of her blood. There’s a white, bloody glimmer of bone that sends a wash of ice through her body.
“You should lie down,” says the woman kneeling on the bed beside Jade’s feet. She reaches out, presses a hand to Jade’s shoulder, and eases her down onto her back. “I'm going to take your pants off so I can see your ankle properly, is that alright?”
Jade almost passes out all over again.
She’s the most beautiful, ethereal being Jade has ever seen. Her pale hair is tangled into a messy braid and her eyes are shadowed with the familiar bruising of exhaustion… but she is bathed in the light of Jade’s knowledge and the memory of her name, spoken in Jade’s ears.
“Elora Danan,” Jade’s wretched voice crackles from her abused throat. “Highest, holiest Empress…” She tries to curl her body up again so she can find some position of obeisance, but the sacred princess puts a hand on her collarbone and pushes her back down against the bed and the hand embroidered pillow her head had been resting on.
“My name is Bee,” she says firmly. “Just Bee, that’s all. Now please, stay down.”
That's not all. Jade can feel her power, can see it in the same way she can see her own when it pools in the palm of her hand, bright and clear as sunlight.
Demons lie, and demons tell the truth. Lili, through Kit’s mouth, mostly spoke the truth, and one of her dying promises I’m going to send my children to EAT you has turned out truest of all. When demons use the truth, they wield it like a weapon.
This truth is messier. Elora Danan is calling herself Bee and it’s not untrue; Jade doesn’t think Bee is a lie she’s being told, but she cannot understand why Elora Danan would say it. Jade’s eyes catch again on the weary shadows of not enough sleep, and wonders how dire their straights are that the semprum sorceress looks like Kit when she desperately needs a nap.
Looks like Jade feels, always.
She’s not supposed to look like that.
Jade has no idea what to do, so the next time she's asked by the empress of the world if she can take off her pants, Jade lets her. Tries to help, but her hands are shaking too clumsily to work her fly herself. Elora lays a reassuring hand over Jade’s fingers, and guides them away. Jade closes her eyes, and lets the daughter of the sun and the moon undress her.
It strikes her that no one's ever helped remove her pants since she learned to dress herself, although it's something countless crude demons have insisted she'd love them to do, if only she'd just step a little closer. The hands of her goddess are gentle, careful, tugging the damp, bloody denim down her thighs, apologising and grimacing on Jade's behalf as she reaches Jade's ankle and has to ease the fabric over the wound.
“It’s alright,” she says, as Jade’s teeth clench so hard she feels like her ears might pop. “I’m really good at this, okay? But you should maybe bite down on something again because this is going to sting.”
Jade makes a sound in response somewhere between a grunt and a whimper, and bites down on the leather sleeve of her coat, adding her own teeth marks to the edge. She can do pain. She’s good at pain.
The salve Elora spreads on her ankle burns like lemon juice on a papercut – not mortal pain, but so sharp and sudden that it’s all she can feel. She whines again, high and long, and Elora rubs her shin reassuringly. “You’re doing great. Really, really good.”
Jade forces herself to breathe. Breathing helps. She pictures a tree, leaves shifting in the wind of her breath. Pictures sunlight and the conversion of light into life.
There’s a soft light dancing against her eyes, and gently, she opens them. As Elora wraps gauze around Jade’s ankle she murmurs something to herself, and her skin glows as though she’s touched by moonslight. She’s numinous, holy, and everywhere she touches Jade becomes briefly holy, too.
Jade breathes deeper, feels the light touch her heart. She’s okay. She’s going to be okay.
They’re interrupted by a crash above, and the roof of the RV buckles, but holds. There’s a shout from the front, an unlikely cry of “lawks!” and then a word so obscene Jade is stunned that any might utter it in the presence of the empress. She spits out her sleeve, realises how absolutely, viscerally vulnerable she is right now, and even dragging her coat over her black, 5-pack cornershop underwear doesn’t help her feel any less naked.
Up on the roof, something is banging to get in. Jade’s eyes – wide open now – follow the dents in the metal as they move across the roof, toward them. Her breathing, already dangerously short and shallow, becomes an even greater struggle. Blinking away is becoming a struggle. Outside, there’s a wild howl at their left, another answering howl at their right. Hungry. Predacious.
Next comes a hideous screech of claws on metal like something is trying to open the vehicle like a can, and Jade isn’t proud of how she stops breathing entirely. The whole RV swerves to the side as the driver tries to throw it off.
Elora Danan has one hand braced against the wall and the other braced against Jade as though she had ridden this ride before. She looks both daunted and far too stubborn to be daunted, scowling at the warped ceiling before she clenches her jaw and turns her divine attention back to Jade. “Your ankle is going to be just fine,” she says. “And so are you. I’ve never seen anything outrun Anne when she’s behind the wheel and with Hubert riding shotgun – literally – nothing’s going to–”
She stops with a gasp as a face appears at the window, upside down and grinning with its mountainous teeth. The bird-woman’s taloned fingers scratch across the glass that separates them, leaving eight long marks, making Jade’s hair stand on end at the screeching sound.
Desperately Jade searches her pockets, finds the vial of holy water and pulls it out to be ready. She can feel her hand shaking around it, feel the lack of strength in her arm. The beast outside is lathing her tongue across the window, over the marks her claws have left, and both women inside can see the scratches smoking, see the glass failing. “It’s okay-” says Elora Danan, though her voice is just a few shades shy of certain–
And then another gunshot from the front blows the beast right off the window. She’s gone in a flash, but not so fast that Jade doesn’t catch a glimpse of the surprise on her face.
Jade’s surprised too.
“Riding shotgun,” Elora Danan says, and there’s still a slight shake to her voice but it is perhaps this time more of a laugh of relief. “Literally.”
Guns have never been the Legion’s way; Jade has never been trained in them. The Legion would never choose bullets against their foes because the body they’d be shooting would be a human host and even when the Legion deemed a person past saving, they would not choose a gun to end it with.
Jade can’t fail to admit that it’s working here, though.
But even so, Elora Danan is the saviour of them all and Jade’s mind can’t stretch out of its trained shape to figure out why she might need to be protected by people who use something so magicless as guns.
It’s so unexpected. So mortal. But strung above the door, Jade’s blurry eyes catch sight of the wards. They’re familiar – many of them. The one that hung above her own bedroom door in the barracks is there above the door she was carried through (her blood still wet against the doorframe). Jade’s comforted to see the ward, like an old friend. Others are impossibly strange, markings that Jade has never seen before despite her thousands of hours of studying every manuscript in the Legion’s library. She cannot even recognise the language carefully painted above each window, and the hole in her knowledge hurts, but even so, she can sense the Tree’s power in the words.
And as the painted words above the window start to leak down onto the damaged glass, and seep into the cracks, mending the glass till the scratchmarks blow away like dust on the wind, Jade has to acknowledge; she’s in a vehicle of people who know what they’re doing.
The deity before her bites her lip between her teeth and leans over Jade to tap at the window, as though she’s not certain the magic will hold, and this action, this doubt, makes Jade’s mind go blank with white noise.
How can this be, how can any of this be–
“Are your hands okay?” Elora Danan is asking her, her attention trained back on Jade. “Are your arms alright?”
Jade slowly unclenches the fist that grips the vial, and turns her hands palms up to her goddess. They’re grazed, and the vial is stained with a small smudge of blood, but it’s the movement of her crush-bitten forearm that hurts the most and she bites back another moan of pain, though it's visible dancing through her whole body.
“Come here,” Elora Danan says, and takes Jade’s nearest hand in hers, gently easing back the sleeve. Her hands are so soft and gentle a disarmed little moan escapes Jade’s throat. Hands are rarely soft with her. Hands at the Legion guided and corrected her stance, never cruel but never the kindness she’s being shown now. And Kit’s touch is – too complicated to feel gentle, the way it sets all her body alight.
The RV swerves again, and Elora grounds her knees into the bed, one pressed against Jade’s waist, one hand against Jade’s shoulder to stop her rolling. Jade winces her eyes shut to cope with the pain as her ankle moves with the sway, but the wave doesn’t hit her as hard as she expected. It still hurts, but her whole leg feels like it’s wrapped in a numbing blanket. She’d ask what was in that salve, but she’s pretty certain the ingredients are laced with a divinity she cannot replicate.
“We’ve got ourselves a plenitude of canines keeping pace,” calls the voice from the front. “Spotted your gargantuan friend in the rearview, too, he's not dead and he’s not slow! You copacetic, phenom of ours?”
“Copa-?” Elora begins to echo, then sighs, calls back “We’re good!” instead, and turns her attention back to undoing Jade's coat. “Anne never lets the tank get less than three quarters empty, and I swear she has a mental map of every road in the country tattooed on her eyelids; she never gets lost. That’s her power. Hubert’s is that she swallowed a thesaurus and didn’t choke on it. That and her aim. But don’t worry, we can keep driving till morning, if we need to. They won’t have as much oomph, after the sun rises. Can you pull your arm through your sleeve now?”
Jade, grunting, gives her arm a helpful tug. No one around her has ever described demons as having oomph before, but Jade knows what she means. She remembers previous solstices, lying awake and afraid and praying endlessly for sunrise while just-as-endless little scratching noises wore away at the wards she’d set. She remembers the quiet relief of dawn breaking. The restoration of the veil between worlds.
But sunrise is hours away.
“Kit,” Jade croaks, though it barely sounds like a word, even to her own ears. “My friend,” she tries again. “Can’t abandon–”
“The girl in the diner? Curly fries, rakish hair?” Elora asks as she smoothes a thinner layer of the salve down Jade's darkly bruised forearm, and Jade’s eyes widen in wonder, a relief greater than the lifting pain or thought of dawn. “Oh, please don’t look at me like that. Just because I have a vision or two doesn’t mean I’m the reincarnated whatsit of some legendary princess, you know?”
Jade does not know. Jade does not understand how Elora can doubt herself. With a trembling hand, she reaches toward the tangled braid of Elora’s hair where a ginger-golden streak winds its way through the paler blond. She doesn’t dare to touch it, though her fingertips tingle in recognition of the magical lifeblood that flows strong within both of them. Perhaps it is wrong even for her hand to hover like it does, half way between her own pained body and the body of their saviour, but tonight has Jade a little more than rattled. There is perhaps something, she suspects, in the salve. Her leg is beginning to feel like it's floating.
“Oh damn,” Elora says, looking down at her hair. “That's new.”
She swallows tightly, sets her jaw once more, and starts to clean the gravel and blood from Jade's palm. “Look, once Anne wove a spell so fine she actually didn’t stop glowing for three days. Sometimes magic’s funny like that. It doesn’t mean I’m a goddess, okay. I have a zit, on my back. Goddesses don’t get zits on their back. I’m just… my name is Bee. What’s yours?”
“Jade,” Jade manages, every part of her mind rejecting the concept of divine zits. “Claymore.”
“Hi, Jade Claymore,” Elora Danan, who cannot just be a woman named Bee, smiles at her as she wraps a soft, clean gauze around Jade’s palm, then all the way down her forearm to keep the salve from smearing everywhere. There’s a soothing, scented tingle to it. “I don’t know what diner your friend is at, but we're the ones being chased by actual monsters tonight, we’re the ones with the pack of really messed up looking dogs on our tail. And you’re not going to be able to walk on that leg for… a while, so all we can do right now is survive the night, alright?”
“She’s–” Jade winces, remembering the terror in Kit’s face as she ran. “Vulnerable. To demons. She need me–”
“I know,” Elora says, two words that widen Jade's eyes once more. “I've had… maybe one or two visions about you two, actually. I know what you did to Lili six moons ago – but right now you need not to get murdered,” Elora’s voice brooks no argument, and Jade presses her own stubborn mouth together and tries to flex her ankle. Nothing happens. “Just let me take care of you tonight, Jade. In the morning you can find… Kit? Kit. In the morning, you can find Kit. Now, does anything else hurt?”
Jade wants to argue, wants to find Kit now, but she thinks about Kit with her curly fries and inferior coffee. Thinks of leading a pack of Death Dogs and two monsters to that diner, thinks of the carnage it could cause.
Every vision Jade’s ever had has turned out to be true. She has to trust that this one is too; Kit isn’t the one being hunted tonight.
Jade taps her throat, and Elora nods, unsurprised, which probably says a lot about how bad it looks. Jade swallows, and it hurts, and when Elora reaches forward with her careful, slender fingers, Jade has to close her eyes as they run down the length of her throat.
It’s the most intimate touch. Fear prickles over every inch of Jade’s body and it takes all her strength to hold it back. To let Elora touch her here, where it hurts the most, where her heart beats so frail under her skin, where the river of her blood flows so close to the surface, where her breath struggles through the damage to reach her lungs.
There’s nothing she can do to stop herself crying, as slow fingers find every place the beast’s enormous hand crushed and choked. Fear twists in her stomach, makes her tremble, and it gets so much worse when Elora brushes a tear away with a tender sweep of her thumb. Jade’s not a crier, Jade has never been a crier, and here she is wetting the hands of the empress with tears she can’t stop flowing.
“It’s alright,” Elora says again, though how can it be? “You’re doing really well. I was a mess too, when Hubert and Anne found me. I was running – well, it doesn’t so much matter what I was running from, now, I’ve long outrun it. Just trust me that it was a surprise, to meet them. To have them start calling me that. Like okay, I can do a bit of magic, which is pretty cool, but I dream a lot, which is one of the most uncool things that has ever happened to me. I’m grateful? I mean, without it, we wouldn’t have found you in time. But it’s awful, seeing people on the worst day of their lives. Private. Can you swallow now? How does it feel?”
Jade raises her hand to her throat, touching the side of her neck very lightly, and attempts a swallow. The tenderness is still there, and the ache, but her voice sounds a little more like her own when she says, “better, thank you.”
“Have some more of this,” Elora says, passing her a hipflask warmed from her pocket. It’s the same honey-herbed drink she’d slipped down Jade’s throat in the alley, and it helps, too. The pain is still there, the bruising is still there, the violation of it is still hanging around her neck, but it helps.
Jade pushes herself up, and her head spins as she does (no salve can make up for the blood she’s lost, she assumes) but it’s better to sit than it is to lie on her back, tossed back and forth each time Anne takes a corner at an angle this size vehicle truly isn’t made for. She passes the hipflask back to Elora.
“I’ll find you some proper pants before dawn,” Elora promises, passing her a quilt that Jade tucks tightly around her bare legs. “Sorry about your jeans, you could probably cut them off at the knee, though, if you wanted to save them.”
Jade stares at her. She is absolutely not thinking about jeans.
“You are Elora Danan, though,” she breathes. “I can see it in you. I’ve never met anyone so… so obviously an extension of the Great Tree. I can feel it, stronger than I’ve ever felt the Tree’s presence before.”
Elora – Jade cannot think of her as Bee, she just cannot – screws up her nose, rubs a spot on her arm that’s hidden by her clothes. “I know there are all these stories… and yeah there’s a few weird coincidences in them, but, I don’t think “Elora Danan” is a person, even though Hubert says she’s me. I’m not… You’re the exorcist, right? I’ve never pulled a demon out of anyone, but I saw you do it. You’re the one who destroyed Lili, Jade, it wasn’t anything to do with me.”
“Me and Kit.”
“And Kit.”
“But we did it with the strength of the Mothers. With your strength.”
“Mmm,” Elora hums, and because Jade cannot take her eyes off her, she cannot fail to see the doubt in Elora’s face. Each time she’s witness to this doubt it unsettles Jade to her very core, each time plants something in Jade that Jade doesn’t want to grow.
“I think,” Elora says, putting out her hand to brace against the window as Anne performs what must certainly be an illegal U-turn. “I think the Mothers, the Tree… they’re all just other names for love. You know? None of the things you’ve done, saving those people, saving your friend… none of it would be possible if you didn’t love them, completely. I truly believe that’s better than believing in some tree. And I don’t know. Maybe there is a big tree somewhere that’s planted over some great wiggly beast and keeping it down, maybe. Hubert sure thinks there is, but Hubert thinks a lot of things. But I don’t believe that tree magic is the be all and end all. You know what I think? Love is the most powerful force in the universe, actually. Not some tree, and definitely not me.”
Jade’s finding it hard to breathe again, but this time it isn’t because of her throat. It’s these words. It’s her heart. She doesn’t know if she’s being tested. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say.
She closes her eyes for a moment, and finds a soft, safe darkness, and thinks about what she knows to be true.
She does love every person she’s ever tried to save. She loved Ballantine, had told him this as she ended his life. She loves Kit more than anyone else in the world; and outside the exorcism, hasn’t told her this at all.
She knows that as soon as the sun rises, she will lie herself flat on the earth and feel the power in the Tree below her. She knows that she is an extension of the tree, and because of this, the map of its roots will guide her back to Kit.
She knows she’ll find Kit in the morning and Kit will complain about the coffee. She knows Kit will curl up under Jade’s coat in the front seat of her truck and go to sleep they moment they get out onto the motorway.
She knows the sun will rise, that they’ll all live to see it.
She knows that every day after this one will get a little longer, a little lighter.
She knows that one day she will kiss Kit again.
“I believe you,” Jade says, at last, lifting her eyes to Elora. “And I believe in you, as well, and that one day, you will see the power I see in you.”
Anne spins the wheel again. This time Jade is pitched toward Elora, and she grabs onto the arm Elora raises for support.
The RV swerves the opposite way and for a moment, as they turn another long, impossible corner, Jade and Elora steady each other.