I tamped down my panic long enough to muster an anticoagulant into my claws.
He didn’t seem to feel it when I injected him, but I had to bite back a scream.
“Why . . . why would you cover me?” I wadded up my scarf to stem the flow from the worst wound. Over my shoulder, I yelled, “Get a doctor!” His deputies were already running to find one.
“Can’t help it. Got to protect you to my dying breath.”
It would be his dying breath. Crimson covered the stage around us. The blood from one wound was darker. We couldn’t fix a fatal liver injury. When we met gazes, I knew that he knew.
His expression was sheepish. “Stepped in it now, me.”
Didn’t mean I wouldn’t try to save him. “We’re going to fight this! You have never backed down from a fight—don’t start now.”
“Heh.” A ghost of a smile. “Been on borrowed time since I was a kid. I lived every day with you like it was my last, but those last days kept rolling over. Got more than three decades of last days with you.”
Blood poured. Pushing past my agony, I injected him again. And again. “We can do anything together! You told me that. You proved that. So fight.”
He dug into his pocket, pulling free the red ribbon. He tried to hand it to me. “For Domīnija.”
“Do not give me that!” Tears welled. “You’re not leaving me! You wouldn’t.”
“I should’ve let you go. So selfish.”
“No, I wanted every second with you! I love you so much, Jack.” My tears spilled uncontrollably, and that seemed to cause him more pain than his wounds.
“No crying over ole Jack, bébé. We got to talk about you. You can’t win. Promise me.” Even as he was dying, his thoughts were on me. “Swear you’ll follow me. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“J-just don’t leave me.”
“I mean it! Doan think about the kids or coo-yôn. Think of yourself. You’ve got to end it.” He gripped my nape to draw me closer. “Promets-moi.” His voice grew weaker, his skin cooling. His life was leaving him.
My breaths turned to sobs. “I-I promise.”
As my hair made a veil around our faces, he rasped, “My God, woman, I’m goan to miss you.” Jackson Daniel Deveaux’s last words: “Ah, peekôn . . . it was always you.”
55
The Empress
One week later . . .
We’d buried Jack beside Aric, an oak growing above each grave.
Today I lay in the filtered sun beneath those trees. I wore the red ribbon around my wrist. The material was faded and worn—but strong enough for a tourniquet.
Still, I was sinking toward Circe’s abyss, the only place I could see to go. And hadn’t I promised Jack?
Tee opened the cemetery gate with a worried look. He should be worried.
Mama isn’t well, kid. Losing Jack was like losing a part of my body that would never regenerate.
Tee approached me with the gentle steps of one nearing a wild animal. “We need to talk.” He glanced at Jack’s marker, then Aric’s, then back at me.
“Of course.” He’d decided to move his family to Haven. I think Kent was planning to return for good too. Clo as well? I couldn’t remember exactly. The last week had been a haze.
“You wrote in your chronicles that I once turned you away from a dark path. I want to again.”
He didn’t understand. Without Jack, every moment was torment.
Tee read my apprehension. “Dad was the bedrock of this family, and we’ve lost him too early. Mom, we need you now.” He held out his hand to help me stand.
I didn’t take it. “You’ll all be fine. Jack and I taught you everything you need to know.”
His brows drew together. “What about justice?”
“I believe the gunmen paid with their lives.” I still felt that outlay of my powers. “I sentenced them to being smears.”
Upstanding Tee frowned at my words. “We caught another accomplice outside of town. There are more of them.”
“So round them up.” You’re the new sheriff in town.
“A lot more. They were Teeth—under the command of the new Hierophant.” The monsters will just keep coming. “They targeted you as the unclean one, and they’ve vowed not to stop until you and all your children and their children are dead. No one you love is safe. So I need you to help me protect our family. Help us.” Tee was a proud man, as proud as his own father had been. For him to ask must be difficult.
But powers meant pain. How much could I be expected to withstand?
“There are masses of them, banding together.” The breeze ruffled Tee’s blond hair and swayed the oak limbs. “They’re threatening to take over Port Edwin.”
The idea of cannibals overrunning Circe’s shining port only stoked my fury. Yet the fact remained . . . “What can I do?”
“We’re going to unite with Brun and the rest of the Potentials to mobilize against them. You fought the real Hierophant, and you know those mines. I want you to ride with me.”
I glanced back at the graves. Not to join Aric and Jack? To rise with a hundred swords in my back? Though I hadn’t wanted to abandon Matthew, could he blame me now?
Hell, he might have planned for me to take my own life. I frowned.
Or to fight this new threat.
Tee continued, “When you first fell in love with Dad, you wished you had cut him loose so this game would never affect him. But you didn’t, and it did. Those men came here to end you and your children. Dad just jumped in the way.”
Deep inside me, the red witch blinked open her eyes and stretched. You rang?
Maybe I should ride out to meet one last foe. If I survived or if I died, my fate would be a kind of answer.
Tee pulled a piece of paper from his jacket. “I want you to read this. It’s my father’s letter to Dad.”
“Now?” Are you trying to send me over the edge? Still, I’d been curious about it. Jack had offered it to me not long after we’d completed Haven. I hadn’t felt strong enough to view it then.
“Could you possibly hurt worse?” Tee asked.
I accepted the worn parchment. It shook in my hands as all the world seemed to grow quiet for me.
Jack,
If you are reading this, then I’m gone—a fate you’ve probably wished on me a time or two, no, mortal? But then, if you’re reading this, I’m a mortal too.
We both knew I wasn’t coming home from that battle. The Spartans used to tell departing soldiers, “Come back with your shield—or on it.” (That’s how I heard it back then, an anecdote I think you will like.) I will be on mine or burned to ash.
At long last, I will have balanced the scales and paid all my dues. Because I will have given up heaven, my existence ended.
And your life’s journey will only be starting. How I envy you!
Yet now Jack’s had ended as well. Like a flash of Joules’s lightning. Time, you thief.
With my passing, I will be torn away from those dearest to me in all the world, so I am asking you to be a husband to my wife and a father to my son.