She looked down past the body to Tav’s face, their eyes bright with horror and fear and something maybe close to excitement. Eli pushed the creature off Tav. Immediately, Tav jumped up and ran over to where Cam lay prone and trembling.
“You’re okay, you’re going to be okay.” Tav staunched the bleeding with their hands. Eli could tell that they were superficial wounds and that he was suffering from shock rather than blood loss.
She lumbered toward them.
Cam moaned in terror as her shadow fell across his body.
“Stop!” Tav’s voice was harsh as they whipped around, eyes falling on Eli. “Don’t come any closer.”
Eli saw herself reflected in their eyes. A girl on all fours, with crocodile teeth spilling out of her mouth. Eyes like slits in her face.
A monster.
Suddenly, she understood — they were afraid of her.
Her eyes fell to the discarded blade of black glass and then to Tav’s hand, which they were cradling against their chest.
The blade had wounded them. Again.
The taste of shame, perfumed and sickly sweet, coated her tongue.
Eli tried to change back, but her magic was sticking, fear and worry and hurt twinging in her joints, slowing the transformation.
How could they look at her like that?
How dare they look at her like that?
She had saved them.
The anger that had kept her alive burned through her veins. Ungrateful. Selfish. Humans.
Eli growled and showed her teeth.
“Eli, calm down,” said Tav, pulling Cam to his feet and shoving him behind them. “We have to find the entrance to the Coven. You have to change back.”
Eli took another step forward. She was hungry. Her blades were hungry.
“I know you’re hungry,” said Tav. “But it’s not time. You have to wait.”
Eli stopped. Tav had seen Eli’s feelings again. Tav was afraid of her, but they weren’t running away.
Why was she always hurting the people she cared about?
Kite hurt you first, she thought. So what if you hurt her back?
Kite might be gone. The thought of a world without her was unbearable. All those mornings lying tangled in Kite’s arms, caressed by strands of seaweed hair. She wouldn’t give those up for anything.
“It’s okay,” said Tav. “It’s going to be okay.”
Tav was nothing like Kite — they were movement and anger where Kite was stillness and tranquility — but when they spoke, Eli felt that same sense of calm wash over her. Breathe. Remember to breathe.
Slowly, painfully, her body re-formed, bones retreating to the size and shape of a human. Only her yellow eyes remained unchanged.
She picked up the fallen blades and sheathed them.
“How deep is it?” she asked, refusing to meet Tav’s eyes.
“Shallow. He’ll be okay.”
“I can speak for myself,” said Cam. “And ‘okay’ is definitely the wrong word.” But he managed a shaky smile. “Luckily for you, I’m very tough and manly.”
“Very.” Tav grinned.
Eli took a breath. “I’m going to look for the magic, to see if I can track it to the Coven.” She switched to her pure black eyes. Threads of magic criss-crossed one another in the hallway, strings of pure light that stretched between every single body and object and made-thing. Animate and inanimate, living and dead. The network of power that made up the world.
Eli tried to sort through the kaleidoscope of colours and shapes that was a world made entirely of magic. A wave of nausea swept through her body.
Tangles of hurt and anger buzzed furiously in the air, lighting up strands of light that flowed between Cam, Eli, and Tav. A few threads even connected them to the dead body of the monster that was still lying on the ground, looking like something that belonged in a curiosity shop. It looked fake now, like a giant puppet.
She started coughing up ash and smoke and petals.
“Eli?”
She waved them away. “Too much magic,” she gasped. When the coughing fit subsided, she reached out with her hands, searching for the crease of a shadow door or the fold of the Children’s Lair. Seeking the invisible doors that connected the Labyrinth to the City of Eyes.
Her hands came away empty. Frustrated, she drew the frost blade to enhance her truth sight. She tried to forget that Tav and Cam were watching her. In the City of Eyes, she was used to being watched — but this felt different. More intimate. Not the cold disinterest of walls or trees or witches. Eli exhaled and tried to clear her head. Hand tightening around the shard of ice, she looked again.
One strand, a glittering gold, was brighter than the rest, clearly visible to her magic sight.
Eli grabbed a hold of it. It was warm and soft and sturdy. She began to pull herself along as it wound through the Labyrinth.
“I guess we should follow her?” Cam’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.
“She’s tracking the magic. Touching it, holding it in her hand,” said Tav. “I never thought to try.”
“You can see it?” asked Cam.
“You can’t?”
Walls seemed to switch and grow and shrink around the gentle golden glow. They followed the thread through the shifting maze of the Labyrinth. Soon, they came to a place where the thread ended — or rather where it emerged from one place to another. It disappeared down into nothingness. Kneeling down, Eli felt the familiar rough edges of a shadow door, and she was willing to bet anything that it led straight into the Coven. When her fingers brushed the door, it lit up, as if illuminated by a thousand fireflies. She exhaled, and that breath nudged the door open. Through the hole in the ground, there was only darkness, and the smell of power.
This was where she would find answers.
Eli’s hand slipped into the cool darkness that lay beyond the door.
“Here,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“I see it,” said Tav. Guiding Cam, they stepped forward.
The ground opened up and they fell through bedrock, fossil, everything.
Twenty-Nine
When Eli felt a cool hard floor under her feet, she opened her eyes again — one magic black eye, one reptilian yellow.
Her heart sank. “We’re not in the Coven.”
“It’s like the Labyrinth, but not,” said Tav, brushing a piece of mica from their hair.
They were right. Eli looked around the dimly lit chamber. Torches burned faintly on the walls. Eli closed her eyes. When her eyelids fell shut, guillotining off the fireworks of pain and purpose that formed the network of bodies and fantasies Eli sometimes called home, something sparked in her body.
The labyrinth underneath the Labyrinth.
I thought it was a myth.
Eli laughed once, a sharp sound that rang out as if the password had finally been uttered after a thousand wrong attempts.
“Well, we’re definitely somewhere. I think we’re getting closer.”
She opened her eyes again and could make out the gold thread, drawing them deeper into the under-labyrinth.
“Where’s Cam?” asked Tav.
“Here.” His voice was strangled and heavy with frustration. “I don’t think the door wanted me to pass through it.”
Peering through the shadows, Eli realized that Cam was not huddled against the wall but firmly embedded inside it. From the shoulders down, he was entirely in the stone.