Maybe I can plant Constance in it, too. Six feet, facedown.
David hoisted Nash again. Somehow he looked lighter, as if the weight of the world was gone from him. It had all fallen to me, and as I followed David and Jenks back out into the sun, I vowed to become a better demon even if it killed me. The people of Cincinnati deserved it.
CHAPTER
13
“Shonook coo ta ra rian,” Hodin said, his low voice even and his eyes turned to the earth. “Umbringe un ta na shonookey.” His head lifted, and I stifled a shiver at his red, goat-slitted eyes, so alien in the sun. The cool spring air shifted my hair into my face, but I didn’t touch it. I hadn’t known you could be angry and depressed at the same time.
Nash lay on the unbroken earth between us, the winter-beaten grass dull and brown with only the first hints of green poking up through. There was no hole. Hodin had said there wasn’t any need, and I took him at his word. I stood at Nash’s feet. Hodin was at his head looking like a priest in one of his auratic spelling robes, the little bells on the sash jingling as he gestured over Nash’s body wrapped in one of Ivy’s black silk curtains. David was to my right, and Jenks on my left, standing with a row of pixies on the top of a nearby gravestone. There was no one else, though eyes were watching us from the church’s backyard.
Nash was the last of his family. He’d had no significant other. The dewar had been his life, and he had given it to protect Zack. The man deserved far more, but perhaps being laid to rest with an elven burial tradition that hadn’t been enacted in thousands of years might make up for it.
“For all return from whence we spring,” Hodin continued, though I didn’t know if he was saying anything new or echoing what he’d just said in elven. “Accept our fallen, failed in body but not deed. Take now his light, so he may illuminate our thoughts and comfort us when we are alone and in darkness. Receive him as we loved him, fully and forever until the two worlds collide.”
The two worlds had collided last year, but the sentiment held true, and I stifled a surge of sorrow that swamped my anger. I could be angry later.
Jenks’s wings were a tight rasp as he flew to my shoulder. His sigh of fatigue was barely audible though he was inches from my ear. “I don’t think even Trent knows the ancient elven funeral rights.”
David leaned close as Hodin crouched to make sweeping gestures over Nash that looked like communication glyphs. “They probably haven’t been spoken since the demons turned the tables on them,” David muttered, and Hodin grimaced, clearly having heard the Were.
Which was interesting all in itself. The demons might revile Hodin, call him weak and ineffective, but he probably knew more elven lore than the last three dewar leaders combined.
My head dropped as I clenched the paper holding the spell that Hodin had given me to recite. Hodin wouldn’t contact the Goddess for the final invocation, so it was up to me. My throat grew tight, and the lingering scent of lily made me want to gag. Under it was the cloying stench of vampire fear. Or maybe it was my fear. I’d told Constance that Cincy was mine. I was in charge. That she looked to me, not the other way around.
And yet, the need to take action was growing in me, rising from Hodin’s softly muttered words. My pulse quickened as Hodin stood to gesture at the sky and earth, drawing enough latent energy into the graveyard to make my hair snarl. If Al hadn’t been pulling his acorns out of the fire for stealing books to give to me, Nash might still be alive. The thought preyed on me. I had needed him, and he hadn’t come.
So when Hodin had unexpectedly shown up at the church again, I had started yelling, seeing in the introverted, angsty demon a bitter reminder of my inabilities. Hodin stoically took my misplaced abuse as if he deserved it: my anger that I hadn’t gone to him first, and then my frustration when I found out that even if I had called Hodin, Nash would have died. Apparently the demon didn’t know a healing curse.
But eventually my angry tirade had disintegrated to leave a growing shame. Seeing him now, elegant and sure as his multi-ringed hand gestured and words I didn’t know passed his lips, I began to wonder if maybe this was the demon I’d rather be: studious, apart, holding wisdom no one else did. Snappy dresser.
Not everyone has to be all-powerful, I thought as Jenks rasped his wings, uncomfortable as the latent energy continued to build. Though admittedly only the powerful had survived the demon/elven war. My eyes went again to Hodin. Mostly.
Regret finally began to push out my anger where sorrow had not, regret at what I’d said to him, that he lacked, that he was useless. He wasn’t useless. This, I thought as he sprinkled herbs atop Nash’s body, is not useless. Healing was not useless. Finding how to live with what had happened was not useless.
With a sudden ping of understanding, I realized that Hodin embodied what was missing from the demons: he knew the way for them to forgive if not forget, a way to find peace with themselves if not everyone else. Hodin, I decided, had far more to offer than at first glance.
My grip tightened on the crackling paper, and I vowed I wouldn’t let the demon collective literally bury him in a hole again so they could go on being broken—as comfortable as they were with that. Forgiveness was hard. Letting go was hard. Staying a sullen, angry-at-the-world, all-powerful, poor-me demon was easy.
I almost panicked when Hodin nodded to the assembled pixies and they began to sing. I’d heard the tune when Hodin taught it to them while David and I had wrapped Nash for burial, but hearing their voices now twined in heart-aching harmonies struck me to the quick. Elves and pixies went together like demons and gargoyles, and I caught back another sob before I could give it voice.
Bis . . . I was losing too much. I had to find a rock to cling to, and as my fingers began to tingle from the rising power, my watery gaze went to the nearby tombstones. How fitting.
“Tal Sa’han?” Hodin prompted.
I blinked my wet eyes and shoved my heartache down. I had one thing to do, and I would do it for Nash.
My breath came in slow, the power-filled air tingling in my lungs. Head dropping, I tucked a staticky strand of hair back and looked at the paper. Exhaling, I felt a welcome drop of power.
“Rache?” Jenks questioned, and I shook my head, sending crackles of ley line power snapping. I was fine. The Goddess didn’t recognize me anymore, didn’t even see me. At least, not any more than she saw anyone else.
“Ta na shay, cooreen na da. Sone dell cooms da nay,” I whispered, recognizing the last phrase as one Trent had used to send a soul to rest. “Sone favilla, suda conay.” I hesitated at the tingling sensation rising through my feet to flow to my hands. Quashing my unreasonable fear, I crouched to take a handful of earth. The tingles became pinpricks, and I looked at Hodin.
He gave me a single nod of approval. I was doing it right, and my pulse quickened. “Sa’ome, sa’ome,” I intoned, shuddering when the rising power collected and dripped from my hands.