Chapter 21 Like a Genie in a Lamp

21

Like a Genie in a Lamp

"Your goddess," Maya said softly, lifting a hand to brush her fingertips over one temple. She sat in an overstuffed burgundy chair so large it should have dwarfed her, but that aura of enormity hadn't left her entirely. Her curls burned with reflected firelight from the blazing hearth behind her, and flickers of blue still sparked in her eyes, piercing the gloom of The Bitters' library. Sprite-sized as she was, she felt immense. Like a tangible dip in the fabric of reality, something that exerted its own gravity. "The one you call Belisama. The piece of her that slept in your lake…that's inside me now."

The hush that engulfed the library was so thick and complete that I could hear the rushing gallop of my heartbeat in my ears.

After another large-scale glamouring of the normies—at this rate, we'd be lucky if this crop of tourists left Thistle Grove any better off than Maya—the entire quorum had assembled, along with me and Ivy by Emmy's invitation. I'd never shared a room with all of them before, and the air itself seemed to tremble with the gravity of the occasion. Gabrielle and Aspen Thorn sat to one side on a shared love seat, hands clasped, with Rowan in a chair beside them, his forearms slung between his thighs, locs falling over his face. Next to them was the former Harlow elder, James, now the master recordkeeper, with Emmy seated beside him—though as Victor and Voice and current Harlow elder, she outranked her own father on every level. To their left were Elena and Talia. Closing the circle and representing the Blackmoores, Gareth sat with his sister and advisor, Nina.

Finally, Ivy and I were on either side of Maya in our own wingback chairs—protectively bookending her, like we'd done from the beginning.

I'd never felt so out of place in my entire life, even as we all shared in the collective sense of seismic shock. After the glamouring, I'd finally given everyone the rundown of how and where I'd found Maya, trying not to quail as Elena glared flinty daggers at me. No doubt I'd be dealing with those repercussions down the line.

But there wasn't space for any of that now. None of us could have been prepared for this.

"I know," Maya said wryly, a faint smile tracing over her lips. "It's wild to me, too. But it's the truth. I can feel it. She's hovering in the background right now. There's a…a boundary of sorts, between us. A wall in my mind that she built for me, so her presence wouldn't overwhelm me. She took the wheel for a minute there, just to banish him, but she doesn't want to…" Her brow wrinkled as her gaze drifted up to the ceiling, sifting for the right words. "Disrespect me? Dishonor me? It's bad enough, apparently, that she chose me as a vessel rather than one of you. But she had no choice; she thought it would be one of the families who answered the call. But I was closest, the one who happened to come when she summoned. Even if I don't remember it."

"Does it hurt?" Ivy whispered, her lovely face alight with painful empathy. "Hosting her?"

I'd had the same thought, my stomach twisting at the unfathomable notion of a goddess—or a slice of one, anyway—writhing like a trapped genie inside the lamp of Maya's mind. But Ivy had actually touched that blazing partition, felt the searing strangeness of it. She had a much better sense of what Maya was dealing with than I did.

Gabrielle and Aspen both twitched instinctively toward Ivy, clearly feeling her distress, though they were too far away to touch her, take her hands the way Thorns did so easily with each other. So I did it instead, folding Ivy's hand between both of mine and nestling it in my lap. She shot me a grateful smile, entwining her fingers with mine.

"Oh, no." Maya's smile widened into something broad and fond. "That boundary keeps it from being too much—and it's also why I can't remember who I am. She did that to protect me; there's not enough room in my mind for both of us at the same time. But I know what she knows, and what I do feel of her is…" Her face softened, went misty with awe. " Wonderful. She feels like so, so many good things. Dawn breaking over water. A bonfire by a lake at dusk, the light all reflected on the surface, leaves rustling in a warm breeze. Smaller things, even, but still so nice. A hot bath with candles lit around it; your toes buried in lakeside silt. Warmth and water. Liquid and light. All the things life needs to happen, and then to abide."

The way she spoke had become fluid itself, I noticed, its meter and rhythm shifting with each sentence, as if she were slipping in and out of poetry without being aware of it. As if the melding between them had become more integrated, that partition eroding a little now that Belisama had risen to the fore once.

"But why?" Emmy broke in. She had an odd expression on her face, something caught between fascination and envy. I could understand it; before this, out of all of us, she'd been the most deeply connected to the town, to the magic of the lake. The closest to being the goddess's chosen, aside from Nina Blackmoore. But not anymore. "Why did she wake now?"

"Most of her actually hasn't," Maya explained, scrunching up her face. "I know that's confusing, I'm sorry. I understand it because she does, but it's hard to put into people words. The best I can do is say that the…the bulk of her is still asleep, locked away somewhere far away, down deep in a different lake." From the corner of my eye, I caught Emmy and James exchanging a conspiratorial look—as if they knew something about this already, more than the rest of us. "Healing, from the last time this happened. The last time he found her and won. But it's the part of her that's here—the very essence of her—that he wants. That he needs, if he aims to get her back."

"So what the fuck does he want with her?" Gareth asked bluntly, dragging a hand over his stubbled face, the weary hollows under his blue eyes stark in the firelight. The former Blackmoore golden boy—or abominable fuckboy, depending on how you knew him—looked very different these days from the louche scion I remembered from the Gauntlet of the Grove. It had only been a few years, but taking on the mantle of Blackmoore elder had clearly changed him, and for the better. That old arrogance had been tempered, solidified into something much less mercurial and more dependable. "She's been hidden here for centuries. Like Emmy said, why's he barging in now?"

"Because Chernobog needs her," Maya said simply. "He's her other half. They're a twinned set, two parts of a whole. Light and dark, order and chaos, summer and winter. Siblings. Lovers. Everything all at once, from the moment they came aware together."

Ivy made a face at that, and Maya caught it, the corner of her mouth quirking indulgently, like a parent's at their child's adorable naivete. "It's not like that for them," she said with a little laugh, shaking her head. "It's not wrong. They're all siblings, in a way. The gods, I mean. Living clusters of energy, who sometimes incorporate into bodies if they choose."

"But Chernobog already has a specific counterpart," Elena interrupted, steepling her hands. "The mythology has him as part of an existing duality with Belobog."

"Belisama is Belobog," Maya clarified, tilting her head. "It's just a different name for the same divine entity, manifested female as Belisama. That doesn't mean there aren't others, gods and goddesses that personify other, different aspects of water and light. The names do carry a significant distinction, sometimes—but remember, we're the ones who gave them these names in the first place. Mortal designations aren't what they call themselves. And in this case, she's both. Welsh goddess of lakes and light, ancient Slavic god of life and day. One and the same."

"Man, how I do loathe that trippy cosmic shit," Gareth muttered to himself. Next to him, Nina suppressed a smile, tucking a honey-blond lock behind her ear. "Well, it makes sense to me," she offered gingerly, as all the eyes in the room slid to her. "Back when I had Belisama's favor and her stone, that's what it felt like to me, too. She's…multitudes. I could easily see how she could be both, and more."

"And he's equally vast," Maya continued, idly playing with her fingertips in her lap, a gesture so achingly human that it somehow threw the uncanny reality of her predicament into even sharper relief. "But just because they were made to be together, to yearn for each other, doesn't mean they always get along. The opposite, actually. She's light and life; he's the utter absence of both. He craves her in a way that intrinsically consumes what she's meant to be. It's in his destructive nature, part of how he loves her."

A brisk shiver skittered down my spine at the memory of Chernobog's intoxicating seduction, the way I'd actually considered staying on the other side with him, craved the intensity of that all-consuming lust. But why had I reminded him of her so keenly? Why had he wanted me at all, when it was her he was always looking for?

"And when she can't endure it any longer," Maya went on, "she runs from him, takes refuge somewhere in this realm. Claims a place—a lake, a town, a village—as her own, and shelters there. Until she's ready to both be with and stand against him once again."

"Toxic relationships," Emmy quipped, arching an eyebrow. "Even the gods have them."

"And here everyone thought I was the original shithead," Gareth snarked under his breath, shooting a good-natured half smile at her.

"Oh, but you were," Talia assured him coolly. "Just smaller scale. I mean, much smaller."

Emmy snorted so hard she half choked, the stern Victor and Voice fa?ade cracking for a moment.

Gareth rolled his eyes. "Okay, unnecessary , Tal."

"You started it, Blackmoore."

"And you don't always have to finish it, Talia, have you considered that?"

Talia bared her teeth like a wolf, her ice-gray eyes glinting. "Why would I ever not, when the last word is so reliably delicious?"

"But the thing is—"

"Gareth. Dude ," Rowan groaned, tossing his head irritably. "Will you just take your L's for once and shut the hell up?"

"You heard the man, Gareth," Talia agreed gleefully, crossing her arms over her chest. "Suck up all those L's and—"

"Tal." Rowan glowered, shooting her an exasperated look. "He's not wrong, either. You could cut it out, yourself."

" Toxic about sums it up," Maya agreed, with an amused shrug at their sparring. "At an epic level, obviously. Apparently, the last time they clashed…it was somewhere in Scotland, I think? A tiny town near Linlithgow, that doesn't exist anymore—because he destroyed it and most of its inhabitants in a rage, scouring it for her. She was pissed, to put it mildly; you don't fuck with a town under divine protection, not even as another god. They clashed, and he hurt her, very badly. But she had more followers back then, an entire cult of worshippers. And she trusted one of them to hide her essence where he wouldn't find her anytime soon. Someplace she'd have a chance to heal."

"Elias Harlow," James Harlow broke in, eyes gleaming beneath bushy dark brows—so he had known something about this, and that it had to do with the Harlow founder of Thistle Grove. "The records were correct, then. He brought her here across the ocean, chose the lake as a home for her. And turned the town itself into a magical convalescing mechanism—a haven for witches to gather in, so that her divine magic could fuel their spells, and their spells her healing, wherever she lies. Like a positive feedback loop."

"But isn't that why there's a deflection glamour around the town?" Emmy asked him. I glanced at the rest of the quorum; no one seemed at all surprised by this very well-informed line of questioning. Apparently this knowledge had already been dispensed to a select few, I thought sourly, and the rest of us had been deemed unfit to know. "To keep her safe? There's been a Cavalcade every twenty years since the founding. Why would he have only found her now?"

"The Cavalcades are crucial," Maya explained. "They're like, um, using a magnifying lens to focus a ray of sun, if that makes sense. They enhance the low-level effect Thistle Grove consistently exerts on Belisama. The magic and mortal wonder from the re-creations of the founding—they're what funnel the healing to her like a conduit, all the way on the other side of the water. But this time was different. This time, the magic managed to draw him here, even through the deflection glamour. Which means someone had to have issued him a direct invitation."

"And who would do something so deranged?" Emmy demanded pointedly, leveling a much less playful glare at Gareth. "Anyone we know?"

"Hey, it wasn't us!" Gareth protested, lifting both hands. "I swear, on my honor. Come on, Emmy, why would we, especially now? I've cleaned house, gotten our shit together—because you granted me the privilege. I'm not forgetting that anytime soon. Plus, this is a necromantic god we're talking about, and we're a bunch of elementalists tossing around magical glitter. None of us would've known how to even begin summoning him."

Emmy kept that saw-toothed glare on him for another moment, then softened. "Fair enough. It would be a monumentally stupid thing to pull, even by former Blackmoore standards—and I know you're running a tighter ship these days. So, who else? Nina, any ideas? You were the one who dreamed about Belisama, before she granted you her favor. Have you had any other dreams? Any premonitions about this?"

"Nothing at all," Nina replied with a dejected shake of her head, a flash of hollow pain in her eyes. I didn't know much of what had happened to her then, but whatever she'd lost had clearly cost her.

"I…" My voice emerged as a harsh croak. I hadn't been prepared to speak at all, and I certainly hadn't been expecting to become an active participant in the conversation. "I did have a dream. Before I found Maya up on the lakeside…it's why I went up there at all. I'm not sure if it matters, though. It was more of a jumble of dream and memory. Strange, that's for sure. But it didn't feel like communion to me."

"Describe it, please," Emmy ordered, with such a crisp air of accustomed command that it didn't even occur to me to be indignant over being told what to do. "Anything is relevant right now. Especially something that brought you to Lady's Lake just in time to meet Belisama-as-Maya and become her de facto protector. Because that's what you've been, isn't it? Her knight, of sorts?"

"She has," Maya said softly, smiling at me with that luminous grace. "My shield and solace. It was Belisama, you know, not me. She needed me away from hospitals or the police, anywhere I could be restrained. Because she knew he was here; she'd felt him come battering at the veil. She knew that she'd have to fight him, eventually, but she's stranded in the lake, without corporeal form. That was why she inhabited me in the first place—and why she needed someone to take care of me just like you did, until I was strong enough. Until the moment came."

"But why me?" I asked plaintively, struggling to understand. "I'm not anyone's protector. Until recently, I wasn't even very good at taking care of myself, much less someone else."

"She knows every single one of you, and you're the one she wanted for this," Maya said, flicking a placid shoulder. Wholly trusting of the goddess who'd lodged in her mind like a burr, even though she herself hadn't asked for any of this. "There's a plan, I think. She won't let me see it—or maybe I can't, because I'm mortal and it hasn't happened yet. Possibly she doesn't even know the details. But she needs you, Dasha, specifically. An Avramov witch with Harlow blood."

"Why would my Harlow blood matter?" I demanded. "My magic manifests as Avramov. That's how we define ourselves."

"Because the Harlows are Belisama's mortal descendants," Maya said gently, almost wincing at the shock that must have blazed like a solar flare across my face. "Part divine. That was why Elias was able to ferry her essence here in the first place."

I gaped at the quorum, stunned. Ivy caught her breath, too, then squeezed my hand hard in response, trying to anchor me as I reeled with the revelation. "And this—this is something we know ?" I eked out.

"Yes," Emmy said quietly. "Though only recently."

"Well, shit," Ivy groused, aggrieved on my behalf. "Keeping something like a divine lineage from other Harlow descendants surely seems fair."

"It wasn't something we wanted widely disseminated," Emmy said, with a hint of apology. "Not until we understood the ramifications better, anyway."

I thought of the way my mother had always been by the lake, so serene, so completely at home up on Hallows Hill. A Harlow through and through, in a way I'd never thought applied to me. So maybe that was it, what Chernobog had smelled on me. A trace of Belisama herself, intriguingly mingled with my necromantic legacy.

"And you're a…devil eater on top of that," Maya added with a slight frown, as if she knew the term from her divine hitchhiker, but maybe not exactly what it entailed. "I don't know why that matters to her, but it does. So whatever you dreamed, it is important. It matters more than you think. Because he'll be back. The banishment she managed hurt him, but she's terribly weak in comparison. Barely a shadow of the primeval fire she once was. She needs me to hold her—and she needs your help."

Haltingly, my insides still clanging with shock, I walked the quorum through what I remembered of the dream that had led me to Maya.

"It started as a memory," I began. "The first farmer's market of the season, the day I met Ivy." I described setting up the stall with Wynter, Ivy's and my flirtation—omitting some of the juicier Wanton's Guide details, because honestly, the quorum had no right to those—and then the malevolent moment in which Wynter had transformed into Chernobog. The way Ivy's eyes had turned amber as she tried to maintain her hold on me, to keep me from drifting back to him. Forcing me to choose what I wanted, to stay with her or return with him to the other side of the veil.

"It was as if someone were speaking through her," I said slowly, mind whirling. "She told me…"

"What?" Emmy said intently, leaning forward over her thighs. "She told you what, Dasha?"

"That when the time came, I'd know," I said, but abstractedly, because I'd remembered something else. That unnervingly alien look on Wynter's face, the purple obelisk pendant she'd been toying with at the stall, the sinister smile curling her lips. There'd been other people in the dream—browsing shoppers, fellow vendors. Why had my sleeping brain insisted on twisting her, specifically, into Chernobog?

Maybe it had been Belisama brushing against my dreams, nudging me toward something meaningful. Or maybe it had been my own subconscious, piecing together clues that I'd missed in the glare of daylight, glossed over during my waking hours.

When I'd run into Wynter at the first spectacle, she'd smelled of mugwort and something else, something pungent yet familiar. My mind snared on the memory of her stricken face, those strange, misplaced tears. Then tonight, the way she'd seemed so bizarrely thrilled at Chernobog's appearance…as if she'd been expecting him, or something like him, all along.

Wormwood , I realized with a hard jolt. She'd smelled of mugwort and wormwood. And then there were the herbs missing from the emporium—specialty herbs she'd have had direct access to.

"I think I know who summoned Chernobog," I said, lifting my chin, anger licking at my insides like a slow-stoked blaze. "And I know where to find her, too."