Luminous (25 page)

“From mirror to mirror, ad infinitum,” he said reverently. “The world is full of mirrors, so it's easy to get lost. I think, once upon a time, it was easier because mirrors were rare.”

“I thought only Sissy and Tender had powers that have existed before,” Consuela said.

V shook his head. “I mark the corners of mirrors to know which ones I've used, and I've seen other markings. I know someone's done this before.” He turned the silvered disk over in his hands. “There's too much out there—magic mirrors, covering mirrors, seven years' bad luck—someone knew something about this, once. I know I'm not the only one.”

She had a twin feeling of being infinitesimal and déjà vu. If she hadn't been here in some incarnation before, had there ever been others like her? Like the
calaveras
dancing in flowers and flames?

“So what am I, then?” she wondered aloud.

V gestured with his chin. “Stalling,” he said. Sissy's hand drummed its fingernails impatiently against the ground.

“Right,” Consuela said. “I'll be back.”

“I'll be waiting.”

// Bones. Angel Bones, //
he thrummed, achingly pure. She stepped up and tapped the back of Sissy's hand, which sprang alert and, waving its fingers in a chipper good-bye to V, scuttled on its way. Consuela, obediently, followed.

As soon as she emerged onto level ground, Consuela could see the gaping cave in the hillside. It was framed by large rocks overgrown with wild grass and sheltered from the sun and weather with a flat duckbill outcropping like a baseball cap. Sissy's hand scurried toward the den on a well-worn track of trampled-down weeds.

“Coming,” Consuela muttered as she hurried after the hand.

All she would have to do was catch a glimpse of Maddy the She-Bear, to know that she was okay. But the possibility nagged her: What if she wasn't okay? What if she was chopped into bits like the Yad or beheaded like Nikki? She'd never seen a dead body, let alone a murdered one. The thought twisted her stomach, even though she didn't have one.
No. She's fine. She's a warrior. She'll be fine.

But Consuela agreed with Sissy—she'd feel better knowing for sure.

Nearing the entrance of the bear cave, Consuela had to mount the large rocks like stairs, cresting their peaks before clambering down. She hoped that her bones didn't make too much noise clacking against the rock. She sounded like wind chimes made of bamboo sticks.

The fetid, wild scents emerged with a whiff, washing over Consuela's body and prickling in her nasal cavities. She recognized the smells of wilderness and woods. It was as if her bones remembered a time when the world had been shared equally by man, animal, and earth. Here was a power old and slumbering.

The bearess was home.

Consuela hesitated, wondering if this was enough to confirm Maddy's well-being, even though she couldn't yet see a shape in the darkness. Did she really have to go on?

Sissy's hand, heedless of Consuela's pause, pulled itself along the grassy lip of the cave side and dropped like a stone. Consuela shook her head as if to clear it. Of course she'd have to go inside and look. She couldn't take someone else's word for it. She wouldn't repeat her mistake with Abacus by listening to Tender and not seeing for herself. She'd failed Sissy once. She had to trust her own eyes.

As soon as her foot touched the leafy floor, she knew that something was wrong. Winking like candles on the edge of her vision, Consuela stood still, trying to place what it was.

A flash of color made her turn. Flickering beside her, a brazen butterfly fought against the exhaling breeze. It was a bold creature of black and Florida orange. The monarch hovered over a patch of milkweed, battling to stay aloft in the draft. It settled on her arm.

The monarch poked her with its proboscis as if searching for what made her sweet. A powerful urge reached up inside her and answered with a honeyed wisdom.

Yes. I know you,
she thought. And she did.

Raising her limbs to the sky, she called it down. A cloud of flittering life unwound, curling itself around her like a ribbon; Cinderella's magical ball gown descending in a rush of wings. The flock of tiny, tickle-me legs prodded and planted as their bodies became one; a thousand glittering compound eyes, a thousand antennae testing the wind, a thousand-times-four wings opening and closing; drinking in the scents of millions. Her body all of butterflies.

The world snapped open.

The world snapped shut.

And Tender emerged from the cave with a sword.

She fluttered in mute amazement; the smells eking off of him were coppery and hot. Shadows lit him in grainy black and white. Dark fluids dripped off the blade.

He stopped. Saw her.

Consuela took off for the sky.

She was a swarm of disparate entities carried on the heady breath of spring. Forewings and hind wings climbed into the air. She smelled V below and saw him helplessly shouting something. But whatever he said dissipated like pollen in the wind.

She tried to go, but alarm buzzed her hive mind. She struggled and failed to reach that peaceful surrender of being called, to escape and return to the world beyond. She flailed for a kite string to pull her out, to tug her toward the soul that needed saving . . . but then Tender stepped out onto nothingness and scattered her thoughts like bees.

Tender vaulted invisible stairs, the Flow materializing instantly under his feet, charging at her with his black sword held high. Pieces of her body bumped and crashed in panic. She fought against the wind, a constant capricious buffeting. It was all she could do to gather herself together. She raised the tiny flocks of her arms in front of her face as Tender swung the sword.

The blade ran right through her.

Insects parted and re-formed like two handfuls of water. She was as surprised as Tender, who stood forty feet in the air, black eyebrows high over wide, wide eyes. She drifted, feeling the insistent pull of her assignment, the need to go somewhere across worlds, but Tender stabbed again—two-handed—and her instinct to evade overrode the pull to comply.

The sword cleaved. There was a fluttering, a rippling, but nothing more.

Tender growled. A splash of reddish black speckled his lip.

He was blocking her, keeping her here. By attempting to kill her, he made it impossible for her to leave. Each time she coalesced, he followed, vainly trying to damage her rabble of wings. He hacked at her wildly, chasing her through the air. Consuela tore and re-formed, but there was no escape. It took time to scatter, time to merge; it was time she didn't have. She grew desperate with the inexplicable need to
leave now
! She could feel the compulsion pulling tighter, thinner, fraying along her edges and burning nerves raw. Panic rippled like static, passing from thorax to abdomen to antennae to eye, frantic little lightning shocks building pressure in her head.

Desperate, she swelled and swarmed—rushing Tender, trying to push through him, past him, surrounding his face and neck and hair as he batted his arms and screamed. She felt his breath on her face, touched his tongue.

A thousand wings gave voice:
“Tender?”

He gripped the hilt and swung baseball-bat-blindly again and again. He took a deep, enraged breath and screamed. Her butterflies spun, reeling, a cloud punched by the wind. Her alarm became one single, achingly high note in her ears, piercing like a migraine—

—something inside her broke and went slack.

She merged with a snap, shocked, confused, and in pain.

“It would have been easier if you'd gone!” Tender shouted from far away, inches before her. “I gave you a choice! And you've made your choice!”

She quailed, meek and afraid. Disoriented, she couldn't hold on.

“But it's not your time, is it?” he granted with a wry smirk. He gave an offhand salute. “Until then, Bones. At the end of the world.” He sank slowly down, wiping his hand through the thick sludge of the blade, fingering its tip as he eclipsed into the Flow and disappeared.

Consuela hovered, feeling hollow. Empty. Except her hand, which burned cold.

She didn't recognize where she was. Tender was gone. V and Sissy's hand were gone. Maddy was dead, but that wasn't it.

She searched for what was missing. She couldn't feel it. She couldn't find it.

The butterflies on her left hand had shriveled black.

That's when it hit her: she had nowhere to go.

Somewhere in the world, her assignment had died.

 

SHe
crashed into her room in an undignified heap, splattering monarch wings haphazardly on the bed. Consuela unzipped her butterfly skin and hurled it to the floor, where it fluttered weakly, a soft mound of black bodies and veined sunset leaves. She looked at her left hand: there was an ugly patch of shadow painting several bones black. She ran to her closet, rubbing her palm anxiously against her thigh; she felt pins and needles and a piercing ache. She might have chosen the fire-skin—craving its warmth and destruction and heat—but a deeper part of her needed to be herself.

She yanked on her own skin, pulling it hard, stretching it painfully. Consuela pulled on her clothes and a pair of good running shoes.

V was the closest to guessing the truth. He was the next likely target. Maybe Consuela could find Wish and make her baby-tooth dream come true—she tried to think how she might phrase a wish to stop Tender as she fought with the straps on her shoes.

She upended her makeup case into the sink. Fumbling for her darkest lipstick, she unscrewed a finger length of Red Hotts, writing IT WAS TENDER on the mirror over the sink, the full-length, the vanity, and the one in her closet. One way or another, V would be sure to see it. She threw the tube away and turned toward the door.

“Bones!”

She spun around, heart in her throat.

A hand stuck out of her closet mirror. Lipstick-stained fingers beckoned; V had reached right through the
N
.

She lunged and grabbed his hand in both of hers, pressing his knuckles to her cheek like a rosary. She bowed her head and closed her eyes as he pulled her through.

She bounced off his chest with the force of his pull. Squeezing his hand tighter, Consuela buried herself against him. She was dimly aware of him, hugging her tightly, the weirdly alien chorus of his steel-violin-voice singing, //
Thank God! Thank God! //

He kissed her forehead. Hard.

“Are you all right?” V asked her hairline.

She didn't know. All she could say was, “It was Tender!”

“I saw,” he said. “I couldn't reach you.”

Consuela shook her head. “Maddy . . . ?” she started to ask.

V squeezed her tighter. “I couldn't see, but I saw Tender.
// And the sword. // And the blood. //
He gritted his teeth at the memory. “Then you were both gone, so I brought the Watcher's hand back and went searching for you. And Wish.”

Consuela was suddenly aware of her surroundings. She searched for something familiar, as if trying to place herself on a mall map: You Are Here.

“Where are we?” she asked.

They were in a long, brick corridor lined with painted lockers and wooden doors. It was a high school, but it could have been any high school. They all looked the same, smelled the same—a mix of antiseptic cleaner, hormones, and sweat socks. V had pulled them through a small vanity mirror mounted inside an open locker door.

“It's a straightaway connecting Wish's hideout to the outside,” V said quickly. “He's been through here recently. I thought if I could find him, I could find you.” He dropped his eyes suddenly.
// My wish/For you. //
V shut the locker door with a sharp, metal bang. “He's alive somewhere. Come on.”

There was something that burned hot as cinnamon in her mouth, along with the creeping tickle she recognized as her own fear. The feeling of wrongness spread through her again, much as it had on the lip of Maddy's cave. Being in her skin made her feel vulnerable. But it was more than that. She rubbed the blackened spot on her palm and hid it behind her back. The place was eerie, too quiet; the school hall lights doused like a thousand candles, dark.

V started down the hall, his boots squeaking echoes on tile. She followed in soft sneakers. The lonely sound of their footsteps only heightened the feeling that they might not be alone.

Passing through the emergency fire doors, V pushed his way into the stairwell. The air was stale with antiseptic as if it'd recently been washed, a chemical-soap smell. The rapid-fire patter of their feet on the stairs echoed like phantom pursuers. V exited onto the first floor with a squeal of hinges. He held the door open with his shoulder and they headed straight for the exit. A sudden sound brought them up short.

Consuela felt every pore on her skin contract.

“What was that?” she whispered.

It came again. A quick, metal hiss-click.

Fear stabbed her spine. V froze. He'd heard it, too.

Only about thirty feet to the edge of Flow, but neither of them moved.

A soft
snick
echoed down the hall. Again. And again. More than one now—tiny snippets of overlapping sound, filling the abandoned emptiness with noise.

The front doors slammed closed and audibly locked. She and V spun around as a cloud of motion rounded the corner.

She had the flash impression of impossibly thin birds: wide, sightless eyes and sharp, pointy beaks. Dozens came in a flock, converging, dense almost to black in the center.

Without speaking, V and Consuela turned and ran.

The whispering cackles grew louder as the things gave chase.