She held on to herself amid a whipping storm that wished to reduce her, too, to stardust. Its fingers plucked her clothes to tatters, then molecules. It didn’t matter, there was so little she’d ever been allowed to keep. Only the righteous burning sword at her center, because Astrid was wrong. She did have a core. It was intent on a single end.
Ivy.
Knowledge and faith are all you need, plus will tempered by time into steel. All of you yearning toward what you seek. Marion felt whipping wind, gritty with the remains of the released occultist. For a bright empty instant she felt nothing.
And then.
Vastness. A world without walls.
She opened her eyes onto stars. True ones. Stars in a real sky and a tepid breeze that ran over her like … like a goddamned breeze, it was itself and there was nothing like it, not anywhere. All around her was the massive breath of night and inside it she felt drunk and sick and wild.
She was out. Astrid’s world was dead, and she hadn’t died with it.
Marion’s feet were bare. Beneath them was the wet black grain of that shining-dark stuff machines poured out to make roads in summer. Asphalt, she thought, and laughed. She looked up into a bell jar of endless sky, up and up, to the place where three stars gathered in a row.
That meant something. It was called something. She was reaching for the words when the sound she’d registered only in her spine, as a tingling rising anxiety, became a white-eyed monster bearing down on her.
Fixed halogen gaze and clunky bullet of a body, tearing the air. Marion froze in a fog of toxin and terror before the monster changed course, screaming away from her, and only when it was still did she think, Car. I almost got hit by a car.
Instinct sent her toward the trees. The lash of branches and everything that tore at her was a gift, she was laughing at the wealth of it, the pain of opened skin and the itch of sweat and the sheer spiraling pleasure of the wind on her naked skin.
She smelled water—or heard it, maybe, all her senses were shaken up like a cocktail—and it washed her clean of anything but the desire to submerge herself. Out of the trees and over an abbreviated bank, then she stumbled face-first into a sluggish creek, sinking ankle-deep into its bed. The rest of her floated with the current. It gentled her, seduced her. She was laughing and delirious, slapping at her body just to feel that she had one.
Then: a pen-sharp point of light, cast on her from the trees. Two shapes lingered there, watching her.
People! Marion hadn’t had to be human in so long, but she welcomed it. Every new thing. She shouted at them, something goading, something crude, wanting them to come closer. When they didn’t answer she felt, not fear, but the first inkling of a grander awareness: she was just one animal again, in a world full of them.
She reached for magic first, but it didn’t come. That wasn’t too surprising, she was out of practice in this place. Next she reached for a big stick.
Then the light went off and she could see the people looking down at her and one of them was Ivy.
Marion would’ve needed a different kind of heart to feel it swell, to feel it break. But it did ache to see the girl so close, so real. She had Dana’s hair, a gentler riff on Dana’s ruthless face. All the certainty of her younger self had bled out with her magic. Marion was flush with triumph, drunk with thrill, but laying eyes on this tipped-out version of Ivy sobered her up.
You don’t remember me, she wanted to say, but you will when I’m through.
Not yet. They had world enough, and time.
Marion had forgotten she was naked until Ivy took off her own shirt and threw it to her. She snatched it up, her brain already unraveling its scents.
She let the girl leave, for now. “Thank you, Ivy,” she called, and was gratified to see her startle, looking back over her shoulder in the moonlight.
Good. This was the start. Marion had to get her bearings, had to move at proper speed. She’d been watching when Fee warned Dana against simply reopening the golden box. It could break Ivy again, and worse. She had to be lured back into the thickets. Magic had to glitter a while at the edges of her sight. The seeds must be planted and coaxed from the soil before she was ready to receive everything.
With one hand she would give Ivy back her magic. With the other she would pick Dana to pieces. She would plant a bomb in the middle of her lovely life and make damned sure she heard it ticking.
PART III
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
You bob in the blue embrace of a suburban swimming pool. Bleeding, stripped to your skin, holding tight to a box made of gold. You lift the box’s lid and come