Chapter 17 The Dark Three

17

The Dark Three

I stayed up with Maya until almost midnight after we left Saanvi's. She sat with me on the porch, drinking wine as the chill air curled around us like the forest's ghostly breath, watching the unlikely fireflies that sometimes winked at the very outskirts of the Witch Woods. So out of season I'd often wondered if they were tiny sprites.

"She's so precious," Maya said a little wistfully, swirling the gritty dregs of her wine in the stemless glass. "Your little niece."

"Does she remind you of anyone?" I asked carefully, not wanting to probe too hard. "Someone from home?"

She huffed a rueful laugh, shaking her head. "Nah. Even her being that ridiculously cute didn't jog the memory any. But they're all precious, though…even the missing. I can see why you cherish them the way you do."

I jerked my head up at that, trying to pick her tidy features out in the candlelit dark. "The missing? What do you mean? How could you…how do you know about them?"

I could just make out the sympathetic curve of her smile, her soft cheek rounding above it. Her ringlets floated as if suspended on the breeze, like glistening tinsel. "I could feel the spaces. The energy around you all, it flows like a current." Her voice sounded vague in a way I hadn't heard before from her; untethered, like poetry. She was shaping the air between her hands in a sinuous gesture, as if she were trying to draw what she'd felt. It made her rings glitter in the dark like tiny stars. "And the way it eddies around some places…you can feel the imprint of someone who was once there, someone who mattered very much. Two absent pillars, there yet gone. The water of this world still eddying around them."

"That's my mom and dad you felt," I said unsteadily, swallowing back the hot brine of tears. "And I still don't understand how you could possibly have known about them, when none of us even brought them up."

"I have no idea," she replied after a moment, in her normal voice. "If magic exists, maybe so do other things? Things like that? Maybe I was some kind of psychic before all this. Honestly, Dasha, fuck if I know. It's annoying, though, isn't it? The not knowing anything at all."

"I don't know about annoying," I replied with an unsteady laugh. "I would never call you that, no matter what you do or don't remember. Mystifying, definitely. Very charming, for sure."

"Well, I'll take that all night." A wrinkle of that pert nose, another sweet smile in the dark. "And just know you're not wrong to still miss them as much as you do. If even I can feel them, they must have been so special. Larger than life."

"They were," I agreed quietly, that familiar pressure bearing down on my rib cage. "Both of them. Especially to me."

We both went to bed soon after. It hadn't occurred to me to ask her how she knew I still missed my parents, especially my mother, every day. Maybe she was right; maybe she had been a sensitive, some sort of non-witch mortal psychic in her pre-amnesia life. Enough that she could sense the ragged edges of the hole that was still gnawed into my psyche by that double loss, the saw-toothed bite life had taken out of me. It made me desperately curious about who else she might have been before I met her, the family and friends and work she'd left behind.

Why wasn't anyone looking for her? Why couldn't I seem to help her at all?

I was still agonizing over it the following night as I sat with Ivy at Tomes she'd even given me a small smile when letting us in, her raven familiar cawing what sounded like a non-pejorative greeting. "I was busy trying to keep my shit together, to be honest. That is one exceedingly scary bitch, and I say that with the utmost respect. But those were the only three she mentioned by name, yeah."

"The annoying thing is, those three deities are very similar," Delilah muttered, eyes bright with curiosity in the bookstore's gloom. I could hear a chorus of soft rustles around us every now and then, as if the books themselves were roosting against each other like birds tucking their heads beneath their wings for the night. "Deucedly so, as Cat might say. They're chaotic, dark—anthropomorphic manifestations of the void that negates all life and light. What is it about them that you want to know?"

"Anything that might help us identify which we're dealing with," I said. "Specific affinities when it comes to herbs, colors, moon phases. Their energies. For what it's worth this one was, uh. Sexy. So, there's that to consider."

To her credit, she didn't even miss a beat. "They do tend to be like that, weirdly enough. Very unfortunate for whatever mortals fall under their sway. Let me see what I can dig up."

Three hours later, Ivy let her head slump onto her crossed arms, releasing a defeated sigh. "I feel like I inhaled three whole dust bunnies," she mumbled into them. "Only to find out Lilah was exactly right."

We'd flipped through enough musty old tomes to leave my eyes feeling gritty, too, yet we'd managed to glean only the sketchiest depictions of each deity, with very little to differentiate between the three. All three were affiliated with black and gray—the traditional night, death, and winter colors. Erebos came from Greco-Roman mythology and was considered a primordial being, one of the first five manifested into existence, and either the offspring or sibling of Chaos. Dark mists, cold winds, and dead things seemed to be his calling card, whenever he was even embodied enough for affinities.

Angra Mainyu was a Zoroastrian concept, and eventually thought to be a sort of king of daevas, or demons, known for bringing winter, sickness, and vice. Remembering that icy thrill of his touch, this resonated with me slightly more. Angra Mainyu's affinities were of questionable scholarly provenance, but it seemed like onyx, condor bones, and mandrake root could be considered for sympathetic magic or summonings—which, as the lore made clear, shouldn't be attempted under any circumstances, so probably best to forget you ever read about it.

Chernobog came with the most substantiated mythology, though we might have been in more luck if I'd had access to The Bitters' own library. Of ancient Slavic origin, he was half of a duality—the Black God, the dark flipside to the White God, Belobog—and considered the ruler of night, winter, death, famine, and illness. All the undesirable shit, naturally, exactly like the other two. A few of the woodcuts we found depicted him haloed in darkness and sporting what looked like stylized stag horns, but I didn't spot any clawed and feathered wings. His affinities were even more dire: black blizzard stone, wolf's blood, snakeskin, and wormwood. The cautionary tales here were in a similar vein—more grisly examples of what had befallen overeager supplicants who'd dared disturb Chernobog from his slumber in the void.

As far as I could tell, nearly getting to first base on the other side of the veil wasn't among them.

And that was about as far as we'd gotten.

"I'm sorry," Delilah said dejectedly, as though the lack of useful information was a personal scholarly failure on her part. "There's usually at least something more concrete to go on. Back when Nina needed to know about Belisama, we actually had one of her artifacts to offer for examination. But we wouldn't keep anything related to a dark chaos deity if it happened to cross our path. Too dangerous, even for a place as warded as Tomes. It'd be borrowing trouble."

"It's not your fault, Lilah," Ivy said, squeezing Delilah around the waist without lifting her head. "All we asked for was your help in sifting through anything you might have, and hey, we even took notes."

"It isn't like we expected any of this to be definitive," I seconded, though that was a lie—I'd been hoping for exactly that, something easy and clear-cut to bring to Elena like an offering. Something that would let us both defend Thistle Grove and restore Maya's memory in one fell swoop. "Thank you again for letting us use Tomes. Your next herb order from the Emporium's on me."

She waved me away, with another flicker of that almost-sweet smile I'd seen at the door. "No need for that. I know I've been shitty to you because of Ivy, and while I'm not sorry, I know you all are…" She flapped a hand, clearly at a loss to articulate the evolving relationship dynamic I was also still failing to understand. "Well, whatever you are. And I do still owe you for what you did for Cat. So, maybe let's call it even and keep it moving?"

I blinked. This did not sound like the vehemently grudge-clinging Delilah Harlow I'd known my entire life. "Uh, sure. Fine by me. We can go with that."

"See you tomorrow for brunch with Cat at Wicked Sweet?" Ivy asked as we stood, helping Delilah gather the books strewn across the lamplit table. "Or are you trying to avoid the tourist rush?"

"No, we'll be there," Delilah assured her, flashing a broad smile at the thought of her partner. "Uncle James will be covering for me here. Gods know I'll need a break by then."

We left her to reshelve and lock up Tomes, heading out onto Yarrow, where too many jostling Cavalcade tourists still milled over the cobblestoned street. But even their overbearing presence couldn't diminish the half-musky, half-decaying smell of autumn magic and incense hovering in the nippy air. The darkness of approaching Samhain curled around the corner like a beckoning finger, wispy clouds strewn across the fat slice of moon like tattered lace.

The closer we got to Samhain, the thinner the veil would become. Maybe that was why I'd been drawn across the veil with him so quickly in the first place, in the spell's aftermath—because the sheering process had already begun, and would only become more pronounced.

And all those gods…they were gods of winter and darkness, the coming closeness to the void. The same elements Samhain itself revolved around.

"I'm sorry," Ivy was saying as she fell into step beside me, oblivious to the sudden whirl of my mind. "I really thought that maybe Delilah could—"

"She did," I interrupted, grabbing her hand, my breath pinching short with excitement. "Ivy, I have an idea. You're going to hate it, but I think I know what to do next."