Chapter 9 Shoulder to Shoulder

9

Shoulder to Shoulder

"I still can't believe we had to glamour everyone ," Amrita said, tucking her bare feet under her on the couch. Puffy purple moons stood out beneath her eyes, her heavy mass of hair pulled up in a precarious topknot on the verge of collapse. It was well past midnight; the day had been a very long one for both of us. "That was some shit for the history books."

I sighed deeply, taking another fortifying sip of the still-hot rooibos with a dash of brandy that Saanvi had brewed for us before she finally managed to pry a very reluctant Kira off my lap and whisk her back to bed about fifteen minutes ago. "Just imagine future Thistle Grove generations reading about this Cavalcade," I said, lifting my mug in a mock toast. "Never thought we'd actually be those people living in interesting times."

Back at The Bitters, Ivy's flowers had sung to me for hours. Long enough that by the time I'd trusted myself to be parted from her and ushered home by Amrita, the large-scale damage control had been completed. Elena had led a small circle of Avramov casters in working a modified version of the oblivion glamour that would allow all the normie attendees to remember what had transpired at the spectacle—but only up until the moment the Potential King of the Many Hells had appeared. They'd remember the food and drinks and masked fortune tellers, the candlelit tour of the inside of The Bitters if they'd taken one, and even the performance of Morty's aerial troupe. But after that, they would recall nothing except being herded out of The Bitters and shooed off toward town, where they'd head to dinner or to Castle Camelot for the Blackmoore spectacle.

Too much tinkering would have done more harm than good, so Elena apparently hadn't even tried to instill any fabricated memories. Anyone who didn't automatically assume they'd had too much to drink would simply think their attention had wandered somehow, that they'd accidentally missed the grand finale by chatting with a friend, getting lost in thought, wondering about dinner or when they could go pee.

The human brain was unparalleled at confabulation, at stitching dreams into the holes where bits of reality had gone unexpectedly missing.

At least, that was the case when it came to a single mundane, or even a small group of normies. A glamour of this scale had never been performed before, which meant that no one, not even Elena, could predict any possible repercussions or ripple effects.

"So, the show must go on?" I asked Amrita. While I'd been clinging to Ivy for dear life—or the other way around, maybe—Amrita had been part of the mega-glamour casting, and then close enough to overhear Elena conferring with the higher-ranking Blackmoores who'd been at the spectacle. "They went ahead and held the Blackmoore spectacle at Castle Camelot, even after what happened?"

"From what I heard, yes. The Grimoire is very clear on the fact that nothing should be allowed to disrupt the flow of the Cavalcade, which always includes all four spectacles. But the Blackmoores agreed not to use magic tonight—Elena suspects that was what attracted his attention, somehow, both there and at the Thorn spectacle earlier. They went with mundane fireworks instead, mimicking what they would have done with elemental spells."

"I wonder why he wouldn't have fully manifested at the orchards?" I said, rubbing the underside of my chin. "The Thorns used a lot of their magic today."

Amrita shrugged. "No idea. Maybe Thorn magic isn't conducive to building gateways for whatever kind of thing he is? Maybe he's more potent at night? No one seemed to know anything for sure. I do know there was an emergency quorum meeting tonight after the Blackmoore spectacle, with the elders and scions. So some decision will likely already have been made about what we're doing tomorrow and Sunday. We'll probably find out first thing tomorrow."

She took a final sip of her boozy tea, stretching awkwardly over the couch arm behind her to set the empty mug on an end table before fixing her gaze on me. "At least the decision-making is above our pay grade. What I'm much more worried about is you, Dash. What happened to you on the other side? Because that was bad, the way you came back. Extremely fucking bad, even. Worse than it's ever been, at least since the last time Elena had to wrench you out."

"I don't understand what happened, exactly." At Amrita's half-skeptical look, I bristled, spreading my hands. "Honestly, Ree, I don't. All I can really say for sure is that he wasn't a demon, at least not like any I've banished before. He's something much bigger, much more. And I know this is going to sound fucked up, but he's also very…enticing, somehow. Over on the other side, he's beautiful, this highly monstrous kind of sexy. He hugged me, and then I wanted…Amrita, I wanted to stay over there with him. And he wanted me to stay, too."

"Well, that's horrifying." She tucked her hands into her armpits, sinking deeper into the oversized folds of her slouchy, heather-blue sweater. "Did he say why?"

"Because I smelled like her," I said vaguely, struggling to remember all the details, overwhelmed as I'd been while they were actually happening to me. "He kept calling me ‘child of dark.' He thought I smelled like…shadows, I think, but also like light? It confused him. Because I remind him of whoever he's looking for, but I'm also definitely not her."

"Well, we do have quite the number of contenders for this monster-seeking-partner reality show," Amrita remarked dryly. "Two of our current family elders are women—and one of them also happens to be the Victor of the Wreath and the Voice of Thistle Grove."

"That's true," I murmured, mulling it over. I hadn't even considered Emmeline Harlow, but as the Voice of Thistle Grove, she was intimately connected to the living essence of Thistle Grove itself—the town having been rendered a certain kind of sentient by centuries of being bathed in the magic that spilled over it from Lady's Lake. "He did call the ‘her' he's searching for ‘a font of light.' Doesn't Emmy glow blue sometimes, when she's reaching for her connection with the town?"

"She does. Then there's Nina Blackmoore, former recipient of a goddess's favor. And let's not forget the full-blown goddess avatar in our lake, if he's more into magical statues." She shuddered like a cat, a full-body tremor. "Thank Mother and Crone Elena managed to snatch you away from him. The way you were when you came back to yourself, so feral…I can't imagine what might have happened if you'd been exposed to him for much longer."

I hung my head, a steady drumbeat of guilt thumping through me. "I'm so sorry to have scared you like that." I groaned, burying my head in the crook of my elbow. "And everloving fuck , I cannot believe I hit Elena Avramov in the face. Hnnnnngh. Think I'm fired?"

"Oh, sweetie," Amrita said, on a soft exhale of a chuckle, propping her cheek up on a fist. "Elena surely doesn't give a shit about that. She appointed you— you , of all people—to channel Alyona's Aversion. That shitty consequences were a possibility, especially for someone as vulnerable as you, was eminently foreseeable. I'm not saying she was wrong to do it. It was the definition of an emergency, and you were the obvious choice." She shifted around until she was sitting tightly cross-legged, closer to me, the sleeves of her oversized sweater flopping over her hands like a little girl's. "But you absolutely can't blame yourself for this like it's some personal lapse in discipline or control, not when you didn't even choose to slide over of your own accord. I will not have you treating this as a relapse, you hear me?"

"Loud and clear." I gave her a two-fingered salute. "And just this once, I will indulge this endearing delusion that you're the older sibling."

"We all know I am older. In spirit and temperament."

"Is that what we're calling ‘dementedly bossier' these days? Because that's a lot closer to how I think of it."

"I think what you mean to say is ‘intentionally nurturing.'?"

We smiled at each other, both abruptly awash in a sepia-tinged bath of nostalgia for our shared childhood, as unusual yet perfect as it had been.

I was actually a little over three years older than Amrita. My parents, Lev Avramov and Jacqueline Harlow, had been partnered for four years by the time they had me, but they had never chosen to pledge the witch bond. I was not quite one when they separated, and two when my father met Saanvi—a first-generation Punjabi American who'd recently moved to Thistle Grove from Chicago to start a solo CPA practice, away from a faster-paced consulting career and the dismal aftermath of a miserable divorce. They'd fallen headlong into what had clearly been the kind of once-in-a-lifetime love that my parents had never shared. They were witchbound within the year—which meant that beyond the empathic bond all witchbound couples enjoyed, Saanvi had also become an honorary Avramov, a witch by marriage. Amrita had arrived soon after that, and I remembered how fiercely I'd loved her from the very start. That tiny, squalling face, bunched up and furious; the way she'd melt whenever I held her, even at her most colicky. Like she recognized me from birth, knew me already.

Somehow, the fact that we had different mothers swept away most of our sibling jealousy and rivalry, drew us closer where it might have been a wedge. I may have shared my father with my new favorite little person, but my mother would always be mine, and that was its own kind of security.

In the beginning, I spent every other weekend with my father and Saanvi. But as I got older, I alternated weeks between my mother's and father's houses, conveniently only two streets away from each other, so I could walk or bike between them by myself once I was old enough. As a result of all those years spent here, the warm homeyness of this house, with its creamy yellow walls and antique furniture—picked and restored by my father and stepmother as one of their mutual hobbies—had always been as familiar and welcoming to me as my mother's. As an adult, I recognized that there must have been at least some chafing, a fissure or five tucked somewhere in there; no blended family was ever perfectly harmonious. But all three of my parents managed to shield me and Amrita from it, bubble-wrapping us away from adult discord. Enough that I had no memories tainted by acrimony, not so much as a raised voice between the three of them.

Instead, if a tight-knit bond between all five of us had been some kind of purposeful arrangement, the three of them nailed it. There had been shared parties for anything that passed for an occasion, birthdays and BBQs and Wheel of the Year holidays. The five of us had spent so much time together that I couldn't remember a time when Saanvi hadn't felt like blood kin to me, in the same bone-deep way my parents and sister did.

"And don't act like you ever got the shorter end of any stick. You always had meltiest-s'more dibs when Dad took us camping up on Hallows," Amrita pointed out. "And he taught you how to tickle trout way before he did me."

I cleared my throat. "That was, um, actually a spell. You'd spurt a little ectoplasm at them to stun them into flopping over. I was just better at it because I'd started spellwork school already."

Amrita mock gasped, clapping a sweater-floppy hand to her mouth. "You nasty cheater! And all these years you let me think you just had better hands !"

"Who's to say it wasn't both?"

"You know what he'd have said," Amrita murmured, her face softening. "That wonderful sappy little rhyme."

"?‘Sisters are soldiers, comrades-in-arms,'?" I recited. "?‘Sisters are always on the same side.'?"

"?‘Shoulder to shoulder, steady on their feet. Sisters don't judge, or compare, or compete,'?" she finished, a wistful ghost of a smile hovering over her lips.

"Kind of weird martial imagery there, now that I think about it. You'd think he'd have enrolled us in aikido or karate or something, to go with it."

Instead, we'd both participated in decidedly pacifistic, un-Avramov extracurriculars. Gymnastics, dance—contemporary for me, ballet for Amrita—singing and violin lessons, musical theater when we got older. It helped that we had similar talents, but there was a certain throughline there I'd never really considered before.

"You know, it makes me wonder," I said slowly. "Maybe he nudged us toward what one might call highly life-affirming activities because of me. Because things like dancing and singing and tumbling would ground me in my body, on this side. And doing it with you would only reinforce it."

And it had worked. I had been highly resilient, even joyful, for most of my life. Pre-orphan Dasha was spirited and energetic and luminous. Full of the trademark Avramov charm, but with a much lower helping of darkness than most of us, despite the fact that I'd been born to eat devils and traverse the veil.

Amrita gave a thoughtful nod. "It does sound like him, the way he thought things through so meticulously. Always with the pedagogic theories. And he worried about you so much, once it became clear what you could do. It wouldn't surprise me that he'd have planned for it in some elaborate way—molded your whole life into an anchor on this side of the veil."

"To be fair, you'd probably have worked out an action plan, too, if Kira had eaten her first demon at the age of seven, and without any training to boot," I said dryly. "I imagine that might've been a little unsettling for everyone."

Amrita flung an instinctively adoring glance in the direction of her daughter's bedroom. Saanvi had never reemerged to join us, probably because she'd fallen asleep in the rocking chair while singing lullabies to Kira, a not-uncommon occurrence. "You know I'd have come around. Even if she turned out to be a full-bore, creep-ass devil eater like her Auntie Dash."

I flicked her a casual finger, and she blew me a kiss in return.

"Seriously, how could I not love any magic that makes my baby who she is?" she said, face hardening. "Unlike that bigoted shithead Evrain. Sometimes I want to kill him with my bare hands for not wanting any time with her aside from the occasional random Sunday. She's clearly not the one missing out, but how can he handle not seeing his own daughter grow up? Making her think, Mother and Crone forbid, that it might somehow be her fault? She's too little to think that now. But it'll occur to her one day."

"We'll make sure it doesn't," I assured her, wondering myself how anyone could help but adore the perfect nugget that was my little niece. Kira had done so much to heal me when I needed it the most, back when I lived with them during my recovery; intuiting how much her sweetness, the wealth of loving energy in her generous little body, acted on me as a physical balm. She was forever clambering all over me like a kitten or a puppy, scrambling onto my lap, demanding piggyback and horsey rides. There was even a stint during which she'd only accepted Auntie Dash as the provider of her bedtime routine, from her mango-scented bubble bath to the minimum of six board books deemed necessary before she'd even consider sleep.

"I really thought he would, no matter what," Amrita said, with a somberness to her tone that she usually kept locked up tight. The small hours were good for lowering defenses—or terrible, depending on where you fell when it came to vulnerability. "Just the way our father loved us. I mean, I always knew Evrain could be kind of feckless, self-centered. You know—Blackmoore-ish. But he really did love me. And when I got pregnant with Kira, he seemed so genuinely happy about it, too, even if it was so much sooner than we thought. I figured it would be impossible for him not to love her, no matter which way she manifested."

In Thistle Grove, inherited magic ran unpredictably down bloodlines. There were no percentages, no probabilities that anyone had been able to discern over the centuries. As the child of a Harlow and an Avramov, I'd had just as much a chance of inheriting the quieter version of Harlow magic as Avramov necromancy—just like Kira could have taken after her father and become an elementalist. The predisposition usually made itself clear no later than three or four, sometimes even earlier. Once it was set, the child officially took that bloodline's last name.

Fucking Evrain certainly hadn't let the door hit his ass on the way out, as soon as he'd absorbed the fact that his precious daughter was going to grow up an Avramov rather than a Blackmoore. I still hadn't forgiven him, and never would, for how he'd made my sister cry over the illusion of love he'd conjured for her; the way it had brushed away like sticky cobwebs as soon as something hadn't fallen in his favor. Saanvi and I had quietly discussed the possibility of sending a subtly malicious little hex his way many times—always concluding it wasn't worth the trouble it might cause for Amrita if the judiciary ever caught wind of it.

"You were young, and in love with him," I consoled my sister, reaching out to squeeze her sweatered hand. "You couldn't have known. Much as it pains me to admit, not all Blackmoores are inherently trash. Look at Nina with Morty. Hells, look at Gareth. He's been leading them on something like a semi-righteous path ever since Emmy let him have the helm."

"I know." She cleared her throat, blinked back incipient tears. "I just…I wish that at least Dad had gotten to meet Kira. Can you imagine how wonderful he'd have been with her?"

I could. Our father had been a rare person, in many ways. Unlike most members of the Thistle Grove witch families, he'd never held down a mundane job. Instead, he'd been one of the few modern spellsmiths we still counted among our ranks, and for his paid work, he'd been a spellcraft teacher—one of the members of the community tasked with teaching baby witches the lessons of the Grimoire, how to control their own magic, and eventually how to cast. It had been perfect for him. As raucous and larger-than-life as he'd been, huge on elaborate pranks and with a memorized encyclopedia of jokes on tap, he was also infinitely patient. Slow to anger, quick to thrill at a child's most minor magical achievement.

I'd never been able to decide whether my favorite memories with him were outdoors—him teaching us the Avramov names for the constellations when we slept outside for solstices and equinoxes—or inside with one of our favorite books. The way he nailed all the voices and never tired of rereading our dog-eared favorites.

The way he'd died had been one of those fluke tragedies you could mourn without regretting. I'd been seventeen, Amrita thirteen, when it happened. A student had cast a practice summoning that had spiraled out of control, and our father had died in the process of reversing it, and shielding the student from the necromantic blowback.

"He'd have been the best with her," I said quietly, my own eyes stinging. "So many pranks. So many Best Grandpa mugs. So many homemade Lucky Charms peanut butter cookies."

"Those were fucking disgusting," Amrita whispered, her voice cracking. "I loved them so much."

For a moment, we sat in silence broken only by the occasional sniffle, just remembering Lev Avramov. We hadn't had a night like this, of overtired reminiscing, in a while—though I couldn't count the times my sister and I had shared this couch, drinking wine and swapping confidences. But something about a goth angel dude invading the Cavalcade and stealing me away apparently had both of us wishing for our father.

"I don't know how to ask this," Amrita said, breaking the muffled silence. "But I think I should, given what happened tonight. So just, I don't know. Stop me if it's bullshit, okay?"

I nodded, a touch of apprehension flaring in my chest.

"Why do you think you didn't…get lost, after Dad died? So consumed with the other side, the way you did after Jacquie died? What was different about it?"

I wrapped my arms around myself, reluctant to talk about this of all things, tonight of all nights. But I could see why Amrita had asked, why it might be important for both of us to understand, especially if the encounter with the Potential King turned out not to be an isolated incident. Because she was right. I'd always dabbled with the other side of the veil, been fascinated with it and the bright feeling it gave me, ever since the first time I'd accidentally slid over as a child.

But the obsession with it—the dark days—hadn't happened until after my mother's death.

"After Dad died, things were terrible," I finally said. "I don't have to tell you that. But they were terrible for all of us, and Saanvi especially, because of the witch bond. It felt like grieving together, as a family. Less lonely. Remember how much time Mom and I spent here, just because it seemed the tiniest bit easier to face when we were all together?"

"Yeah," she murmured. "And then there were those few weeks, a couple months in, when Saanvi just couldn't get out of bed. And Jacquie took care of all of us."

My mother and Saanvi had always been friendly with each other, despite the unusual circumstances that had brought them together. But after my father died, they'd grown much closer, into real friends. The kind that spent time together even when Amrita and I weren't around, just for the pleasure of each other's company. In a way, they'd been almost like platonic partners, giving Amrita and me a joint well of reliable gravity to orbit like satellites.

"But when I lost her, it suddenly felt like…I don't know. Like being an orphan for real. Even though I knew," I hastened to add, at the aghast look on her face, "Amrita, no, of course I knew that I still had family. That I had you and Saanvi, who loved me so much. But Jacquie and I…we were so close, in a different way. Inseparable. You know how I adored her. She was so funny, so smart, so completely strong. Such a golden person. And she made me the center of her world. You remember how she barely even dated while we were growing up, not that anyone would have judged her for wanting companionship."

The ache fissured inside me like it always did when I thought about my mother, fracturing outward from the star crack embedded in my very center, no less sharp even four years after the fact. It was as though her death had been a form of grievous physical injury, an insult that my body would never fully forget. The loss of Jacqueline Harlow, from whom I'd inherited my corn silk hair, pale skin, and veiny eyelids, along with my mezzo-soprano and perfect pitch. She'd given me the shape of my mouth, and the bony, weirdly small feet for my height.

What I hadn't gotten were her gift for numbers or single-minded academic focus, specifically the fascination with infectious diseases. It might have seemed strange for a Thistle Grove witch to carry a torch for something so mundane as viruses and bacteria, but this was a Harlow witch we were talking about, not particularly magically powerful, but devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, thrilled to share all sorts of revolting germ facts with me upon request. By the time I was ten, I'd probably been more conversant in the pathogenesis of rare diseases than your average second-year medical resident.

She'd worked at a medical research lab in Carbondale, her normally easy commutes much longer in bad weather—like the blizzard we'd had the night she died, when I was twenty-seven. Almost exactly ten years after we lost my dad.

For the first two years, I'd been mired in such deep denial I'd thought something was wrong with me, that after having lost my dad I'd become pathologically incapable of grieving. That was the era of desperate, frenetic partying, relationship after doomed relationship, me cutting the moorings as soon as it felt like I might be getting in too deep with anyone. Then something tectonic shifted; some deep part of me grasped once and for all that my beloved mother was never, ever coming back. That vault had slid closed, and could not be opened again.

And then the darkness had truly come calling.

I discovered what it felt like when I lingered on the other side, spent more than the odd few minutes there. The blazing glory of it, the way it blotted out the loneliness and grief like the most perfect antidote to the endless ache of missing her every single day.

But I couldn't think about those details tonight, not when I'd just experienced the ultimate distillation of the other side. Not when the memory of him still fluttered like moths at the edges of my perception, a soft, brushing beckoning that threatened to raise goose bumps on my skin if I let myself think about it too long.

"I don't think I can talk about this tonight, Ree," I said, ducking my chin. "I'm sorry. It's too much. Not safe. Another time, maybe? When we're both operating on less recent trauma and more sleep?"

"Of course," she said hastily, unfolding herself from the couch and offering me her hand. "I shouldn't have…I'm sorry to push. Let's both try to get some rest, before we discover what kind of fresh hell we're in for tomorrow."