Chapter 8 Child of Dark

8

Child of Dark

I landed in that field of glistening black flowers like I always did, stumbling a little as I gained my footing. Listless air pressed against my skin, rust-red clouds skittering above my head across that pewter sky. In the distance, the orchards stood skeletal as always, bearing glittering loads of bruise-dark fruit, heavy and sharp and never to ripen.

Again, I wasn't alone. But this time, it wasn't the Lettie pretender who stood across from me.

On this side of the veil, the behemoth was human-sized, scaled to me. Still tall, well over six and a half feet, enough that I had to tip my head back to meet those limelight eyes—a gentler, more jeweled green on this side than they'd appeared on the other. Those spectacular wings still flared behind him, both leathery and feathered. And he was naked, but sheathed in what appeared to me as real flesh and proper skin, still black as onyx but gleaming taut over that powerfully muscled bulk.

The real difference was that on this side, he was less sheerly terrifying and more deathly beautiful. That night-hewn face of unnatural symmetry, black curls swept back from a high forehead and shining beneath the weight of a jagged crown, spiraling horns curling away on either side of it.

I wasn't much for men in general, but on rare occasion, one of them managed to catch my eye. And this one…this one was the kind of ferociously gorgeous that couldn't have existed on our side. A dreadful, inhuman, magnificent wonder to behold. Brutally and perfectly made, from those clawed wings to the taloned bare feet, as if someone had carved him out of the fabric of the night.

Goth angel dude, indeed.

For a moment, we simply stared at each other with heads cocked, unwitting mirror images of each other. He hadn't pulled me here on purpose, I realized, even as my blood began to blaze with the unspeakable glory of being here while alive. My presence was probably a side effect of the spell itself, the fact that it had lived briefly in me before unleashing itself on him. That incubation, and the fact that I'd served as its conduit, had created a temporary connection between us. One strong enough to hitch me along for the ride when it banished him.

Probably it wouldn't have happened with someone else, someone less untethered than I was. But a piece of me always yearned to be here, anyway. It must have been easy to latch on to that wishful segment of my soul and tug me along.

He took one step toward me, and then when I didn't flinch away, another. I stood still, trembling like a doe, knowing full well I couldn't outrun him here. That he was something else, something vastly different and much more than any devil I'd eaten before. And some small, treacherous part of me—the part of me reveling in the intoxication of being back here, wallowing in the luxury of being this side's living torch—didn't even want to run. Wanted, instead, to find out what would happen if he touched me, ran one of those claws down my pliant human cheek. Down the column of my throat and over my clavicle, where the skin was thinnest.

In two more steps he closed the distance between us, until I stared directly into those eyes, a green so cold it made me think of glacier hearts, the deepest core of some bottomless ice.

"Child of dark," he whispered, hunger and curiosity vying in his tone, his voice like satin sliding over a sheet of frigid metal. As he leaned closer, nosing my cheek and then my hair, I stood still, breathing in panting little gasps like a trapped animal. And with a judder of surprise, I realized I understood him, even though the language he spoke was unlike anything I'd heard before. Closer, in fact, to the shape of the words in Alyona's Aversion than any living language I knew. "You ousted me! Me. But why?"

"To…to keep them safe," I replied shakily. "Me and mine. You don't belong on the other side. You would have hurt them."

"Is that so?" Something close to amusement rippled in his tone, and goose bumps prickled along my skin. "Who are you to say where I belong? And how are you to know what I would have done?"

"Uh." I swallowed hard. "Context clues?"

A chuckle against my cheek like honey dripped over coals, deep and dark and stirring. "How strange you are," he remarked in that sharp-edged language, nuzzling my ear. "Shadow-full to the brim, and still you glow with life. You smell of death, and yet. And yet you also smell of her ."

The way he said her —venom and longing, all entwined—shook loose a memory that should have surfaced long before now. What had that revenant demon said to me?

Because he is coming, the rough beast breaching the horizon. For her above all, and the rest of you along with her! And when he comes, all of you will fall to your brittle human knees and weep, a flood of salty, futile, delicious tears…

At the time, I'd assumed the revenant demon was talking about Emily. But what if that hadn't been it at all?

"Who?" I asked, my lips trembling. "Which her?"

"She who is the font of light," he replied, still against my ear, the ice of his breath sweeping down my entire side. "Your fallen star. What other could there ever be for me?"

Before I could reply, he slid those powerful arms around me and clasped me against the bulwark of his chest, drawing me close. His sigh of satisfaction curled like a purr inside my ear, tinged with a wisp of melancholy.

"No, you are not her," he crooned, cheek against my cheek, that despondency intensifying. "Though I do not fault you for what you could never be. But for now, you are close enough. For now, you are here. With me."

Then the glory blazed up inside me, infinite and dense and sweet, like some thick custard scorched to a perfectly crisp caramel finish. Such an ineffable euphoria that I felt like I might burst, die of all that honeyed heat and light pulsing under my skin.

With my flesh feverish against his—because he was cold as the very void, the chill antithesis of light—I felt something beyond transcendent. Being held by him was like gulping down the quintessence of what it felt like to exist here. My eyes fluttered shut, a deep moan twisting itself from my throat. And what would happen if I turned my head, found his lips? My arms were already wound around his neck, clinging to him with all I had, though I didn't even remember returning the embrace.

What bliss would it be, to angle my head into a kiss with something like him? Wrap my legs around those strong hips and let him lift me up, until the blazing light of me swallowed such a length of living shadow?

"Ah," he murmured against me, throaty and deep, a hand sliding down to the small of my back. "Is it so, child of dark? Perhaps…"

The fishhook lodged beneath my ribs tugged again, sharp and insistent—yanking, this time, back toward the other side. The garnet at my throat pulsed to life, a hot, insistent throbbing against my skin.

"What?" I mumbled, still too enraptured to understand what was even happening. "Wait, no, I don't want—"

Then came another, much more fearsome pull—cast on a reel that I recognized even through my stupor as the line of Elena Avramov's formidable, unmistakable will. Dragging me away from him.

"There you are," Elena said, her peaked face hovering above mine as I blearily came to, my back pressed against hard ground. The night sky beyond her head swam as I struggled to focus, stars doubling on themselves like a crystalline swarm, the dissipating skeins of all that conjured fog still twisting around each other. My ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton, like they needed a sharp, elusive pop.

Relief lit in Elena's eyes as I stirred, groaning, and managed to prop myself up on one arm. "You're safe now, Daria. You're back with us. Now let's see if…"

The sound of her voice faded as a wave of anguish broke over me, bleak and heavy as a ton of earth dumped over my soul—the equal and opposite to that sweet, heady flame that had engulfed me on the other side. I felt like I'd been interred, buried alive. Stripped of everything hot and rich and joyful, mired once again in the sticky bog of despair that was this side of the veil.

And yet again, it was Elena who had brought me back.

A wrinkle furrowed her brow as she registered the shift in my expression, the rage that must have begun creeping into the blankness. "Daria? Are you—"

With a wordless roar, I hauled off and slapped the Avramov matriarch full across the face, hard enough that my palm stung from the impact.

" Why? " I shrieked at her as she reeled back, hand clapped to her cheek. Her face a picture of such absolute consternation that under different circumstances, it might have been funny to imagine how utterly unacceptable it was of me to slap not just my boss but the absurdly intimidating Avramov family head. "Why won't you ever just leave me the fuck alone? I want to go back! I want to stay! That's all I want, that's all I ever wanted. I just want to stay !"

Elena made an abortive little movement, as if to brush my hair away from my eyes, though the imprint of my palm still blazed like an angry weal over her cheek. For a moment, the sympathy on her face nearly pierced my desolation. "Daria, I can't let you do that. You know I can't."

I set my jaw and scrabbled back away from her, enraged and devastated beyond all logic, all reason. "Then why don't you fucking try to stop me!"

Closing my eyes, I reached for the other side of the veil as I'd done so many times, fumbling for the path that was normally as familiar to me as the length of my own limbs, the fleshy drumming of my heart, the patterns of my breath. But that meddling bitch was blocking me somehow; I could feel the hulking obstruction of her like a menhir looming in my path, a standing stone that would not let me pass to where I needed, craved to go. Back to the other side, to that fiery caramel flood of a feeling.

Back to him, and his dreadful and glorious embrace.

But no matter how I clawed at or grappled with her will, I couldn't get past it. She wouldn't let me through.

"Daria, stop," I heard her plead, and this time there was anguish in her voice, too, along with a thread of strain that filled me with a bitter twist of hope. Maybe I could wear her out, if I just kept battering myself against her. Maybe even she couldn't stand between me and the other side forever. "You'll hurt yourself, and I still won't let you through. Not like this. Not when you're in this state, and especially not while he might still be there."

I began to cry in dry, soundless sobs, my insides aching with fatigue and need. I was so spent, brittle as shale, yet somehow still overflowing with fury and want.

"Just please let me go," I begged Elena, pitching forward and burying my face in my hands, shoulders heaving. "I don't want to be here! I don't need to be here, don't you understand? I belong over there, like I always have. So just…just let me go this time."

"No," a different, determined voice said a little while later, cool fingers sliding over my hands. Gently, those fingers peeled my own away from my face, then clasped them against the softness of her chest. Through a blur of tears, I made out Ivy's luminous face in front of me. Those huge bright eyes, the way the naturally darker outline of her lips faded to a softer color toward the plush center, the glimmer of the silver hoop that sat flush against the cleft of her lower lip.

She'd taken Elena's place, kneeling so close that her knees pressed against my own. Over her shoulder, one of those multicolored bonfires still blazed, its flickering rainbow gleaming off the curve of her left cheek. Somehow it made her look like a gorgeous warrior, a slash of brilliant color painted beneath one eye.

"Ivy?" I said, perplexed, twining my fingers more tightly through hers. "Why…"

"Elena tapped me in," she replied. "She thought I might be better equipped to hold you down."

The idea that Elena had been forced to call in reinforcements gave me a perverse rush of triumph that I savored anyway, as the first positive emotion I'd felt since I found myself stranded back here.

"Kinda funny, right, given that Thorns don't exactly choose violence every day of their lives like you all like to do. But she's goddamn right about me tonight, Dash," Ivy continued, those soft lips setting in a very familiar expression of dogged stubbornness. "Because I am not letting you slide back over. Not after you just saved us from a doomsday angel with an overly literal understanding of ‘swinging dicks.'?"

I sputtered a wet laugh, shaking my head—though just the sight of her had made the darkness recede the slightest bit. "And what do you plan to do about it?"

Her eyes sparkled almost mischievously. "I was thinking some fairy-tale bullshit," she said, cocking her head. "If you're good with that?"

When I gave a wary nod, she cupped my face with a palm and leaned forward to cover my lips in a soft, sweeping kiss.

I caught my breath from the shock of it, my heart feeling like it was shuddering instead of beating in my chest. I'd been thinking—dreaming—of kissing Ivy again for months now. And this wasn't anything so cautious or hesitant as what I'd been imagining. She buried her hand in my hair, murmured, "Damn, you still taste like starshine," against my lips, and then drew me flush against her with an arm around my waist until I was halfway on her lap, one of my legs draped over her thigh. My insides clenched with an immediate flare of desire that blazed up from everywhere we touched; the silken graze of lush lips against mine, the warm press of thigh to thigh, the hand tangled in my hair and the other at my waist. The sweet, hot whisper of her breath as her mouth parted open against mine. Inhaling her perfume, that commingling of sweet pea and vanilla and shea, felt as crucial as the very act of breathing. Expanding my lungs, anchoring me in place.

She lit all the dark places, filled up the bleak yearning. Chased the desolation away like the orange sweep of a torch cleaving the night.

There must have been people in distress all around us, but I couldn't spare a single thought for them, for whatever damage control was transpiring beyond us. The crowd—maybe the entire world itself—seemed to have peeled back, withdrawn from me and Ivy. Maybe Elena had drawn a tactful privacy glamour over us, or maybe it was simply Ivy herself, the same effect on me she'd always had, especially lightheaded and hazy as I was. When the kiss deepened, a slick, singeing rush of tongue against tongue, I sighed into her mouth, snagging her lower lip with my teeth until she rewarded me with a sharp intake of breath.

But when I leaned in for more— more more more —she pulled back, her eyes at once heated and deadly serious on mine.

"So? What say you, Dasha Avramov? Will you stay?"

I hesitated, still torn. Coming from her, the question seemed to double on itself like blurred vision. It didn't just mean did I want to stay here, on this side of the mortal plane—but also did I want to stay here with her or run again?

"I don't know," I finally said, the craving for the other side still throbbing inside me, though weaker now. "I do want to, Ivy. I want to be wherever you are, more than almost anything. But it's…fuck, how do I even explain it? It's so hard to be on this side. So empty. Over there, everything else is dead, but me? I'm so, so alive. It feels like nothing else."

An unexpected smile curved her lips, where I'd expected disappointment. "So what you're requesting is more life? Did I hear that right?"

"I guess that's what it is, yeah."

She leaned closer again, until our lips just barely brushed. "Lucky for you, life is kind of my specialty. So listen, and breathe with me. Beat with me. Let me show you what it can be like over here."

I closed my eyes, uncertain, but trusting her enough to at least try to follow where she led. We'd done things like this before, when she guided me through one of her longer and more demanding yoga flows (usually with a good bit of grumbled complaint from me, which always felt like it halfway defeated the spirit of the practice). As our breath mingled, our rhythms slowly syncing up, she took my hand and wrapped my fingers around her other wrist, pressing their tips to where her pulse leapt beneath warm skin. I focused on it, the rapid but steady ticking of her heart, along with the peaks and valleys of her breath matching up with mine, until it felt like we were perfectly threaded cogs in a strange and delicate two-part machine.

"That's it," she murmured, brushing a tiny kiss over my mouth, like a little zing of static electricity. "Stay with me, okay, just like that. This is the good part."

She lifted her other hand and curled it around my nape, tilting my forehead against hers. And on the next joint exhale, a wave of rich, violet-and-green Thorn magic came sluicing into me. Mellow and sweet as maple sap, a gentle elixir of well-being and renewal.

I'd felt this healing Thorn magic before; Ivy had never had any compunction about using it during sex in many delicious ways. But she'd also never let it flow as openly as this, until it coursed so indiscriminately between us that I couldn't tell which of us it even came from, as if I were a tributary to her vast river. There was such a sweetness to her magic, such grounded yet tender hope, the precious perseverance of something new and green nosing its way past cold, stiff earth, toward a still-weak sun. And she was right. This was life, at least the fragile, burgeoning beginnings of it. Not the overly extravagant glut of it I felt within myself on the other side, so wildly blown out of human proportion it was nearly too much to bear. This was simple, nourishing, natural. A smear of wildflower honey across a slice of freshly baked bread. The taste of hearty home cooking with the windows flung wide open, letting in the breath of spring.

"There we go," Ivy murmured against me, the softest shade of triumph to her tone. She dug strong fingers into my nape, into the sensitive knobs of my skull where I loved to be rubbed, adding a simple but enthralling physical sensation to the mix. "There you are. And now that I've got you, time to turn it up."

I huffed a breathless laugh against her, frankly amazed that I even had it in me to laugh. "What are you talking about?"

"If you let me focus, you just might find out."

Sliding her hand free from my hair, she lifted it slowly toward the sky, palm cupped like an empty chalice.

Then flowers burst through the trampled grass all around us, like an enchanted bower transplanted from a storybook in one gorgeous swoop.

As far as I knew, no garden had ever grown on The Bitters' grounds. The pall of our necromancy seeped into the soil itself, turning it sere and unhospitable, until the only things we managed to cultivate were hardscrabble patches of grass that grew to weird and unpredictable lengths, like Baba Yaga's storied chin hairs. Yet somehow, Ivy was managing to coax night bloomers of all kinds to grow. Jasmine crawled over our legs, shedding its overpowering perfume from a profusion of tiny, tubular flowers. Heavy moonflowers twined up on their stems as if climbing an invisible ladder, until they nudged our cheeks with silver petals. Evening primrose like sprays of sunshine hovered in the night air, little yellow sparklers in the periphery of our vision. And finally, Japanese wisteria burst to life, so feathery and purple that its fronds made me think of fireworks as they grew into a net that bowed over our heads.

Living plants were usually antithetical to Avramovs—especially animated ones like these, imbued with Ivy's will into something like semi-sentience. They instinctively knew just enough to recognize the magic in my blood as something that repelled and frightened them. But connected as Ivy and I were, heart to heart and breath to breath—bound up so tightly with the threads of her green magic—tonight they seemed to accept me as part of her. Someone to bend to, to equally worship and adore.

This time, not one of them shied away from me.

As I closed my eyes to revel in the soft tickle of their leaves against my skin, the droop of heavy blossoms settling onto my head, I realized I could feel them back. I felt them the way that I imagined Ivy must always feel them, at least to some degree. The brash way their roots corkscrewed into the soil, the fizz of chlorophyll in their tiny cells like green champagne. The intricacy of their wordless, chemical language with one another.

The way they existed wasn't loud, but it was ferociously tenacious nonetheless. In its own way, so much more formidable than the death I wielded with my own hands.

"Well?" Ivy said as I opened my eyes, awash in wonder. She was smiling so wide that the dimples on either full cheek looked like crescent moons. "That enough life for you yet?"

I shrugged, as if considering. "Well, you were dead-on about the fairy-tale bullshit. Though I guess you could have made them sing, if you wanted to go that extra mile."

She widened her eyes at me in mock outrage. " So greedy!"

"I was just thinking, imagine this…" I swept my free hand up to encompass our vibrant cage of flowers, dazzling against the night sky. "But set to something like ‘Big Energy.'?"

She burst out laughing, throaty and delicious, a sound I hadn't heard in so long it made my stomach clench with pleasurable longing. "You want me to make animated night bloomers cover Latto for you? Are you for real right now?"

"I actually think I'm being pretty reasonable. It's not like I'm requesting Taylor Swift over here. I mean, ‘evermore' would really hit right now, but you know. Too on the nose."

"You are out of your mind, truly." She pressed her lips together, sobering in an instant. "Seriously, Dasha. Is this enough? Does it feel like enough to make you want to stay?"

"Why are you even doing this for me?" I asked, finally steady enough to fully grasp the magnitude of what was happening between us. "After everything I did, how badly I fucked up with you. Why do you care what happens to me? Why are you going out on such a limb?"

"I take it you wouldn't accept ‘just being a good neighbor' as an answer?"

When I raised an eyebrow, she took a shaky breath.

"I'm doing this because, as it turns out, I can't stand the thought of this world without you and your chaos in it," she said, her eyes welling. "Okay? And…well, there's more to it than that. But I'm not talking about it with you tonight. Not until I'm sure you're not going to poof away. So? Are you planning on poofing?"

Even without everything else she'd done for me, seeing the ache in her eyes, that painful hope, would have been enough to banish the last of the raw yearning still clinging to my edges.

"No imminent plans of poofing, thanks to you," I assured her, setting my hand on her thigh. "Not tonight. Not anytime soon. I swear."

I could see her relax, the tension leaving her body in a way that the bower around us echoed, each petal and leaf nestling more comfortably in place. This was why so few Thorns bonded familiars, I realized. Why would you need to, when all flora bent to you like something that mimicked the shape of your thoughts, like you were born grafted to anything green?

"Alright, then," Ivy said, with another sunrise smile. "In that case, buckle up. Looks like we're about hear some very zesty covers."