Fiery Edge of Steel (A NOON ONYX NOVEL) (47 page)

“Your heart, huh?” Ari said softly. “Well, you heard what I had to say, and you felt what I feel for you. What does your heart say about me?”

I swallowed. My throat hurt.

“It says it’s broken, Ari.” I pushed his hands away. “What do you think it says?”

“And what do you say?” Ari’s voice was immeasurably quiet, but even the Angels must have heard the unshed emotion in his voice. I knew they were ready to cast.

“I can’t be with you anymore. I’m sorry.”

Just before he closed up his signature I felt the liquid fire rush into the kiln. I imagined the whole thing was internally combusting right now. But all he said was, “I’m sorry too.”

He walked backward across the bridge, never taking his eyes off me. And then he shifted. He suddenly grew five times his human size and crouched before us on four legs instead of two. His dove-colored skin turned greenish black. His tail lengthened, its thick base extending a good twelve feet or so into a narrow, pointed tip. At least there wasn’t a scorpion’s stinger on its end. I shuddered. Ari reared and then lowered those lance-like spiral ridges at us. The Angels stiffened. I stood my ground.

I’d said I didn’t trust him. But I knew he wouldn’t hurt us. At least, not with his body or his magic.

“What was that spell you cast over Sasha, Tosca, and Brunus at the beginning of the semester, Fara?” I said, “The one where you turned them all to ghosts and swished them away?”

On the other side of the bridge, Ari snorted fire. It reminded me of Serafina. But Ari was at least a thousand times bigger than she’d been. If he chose to singe something with fire, the effect would be far greater than a few tiny burn marks created by a sneeze of blown embers. Fara glanced between Ari and me and shook her head. “Let him leave his own way,” she said.

Ari’s massive wings beat the air, ruffling my hair. I felt a final puff of warm air and a fleeting echo of his white-hot signature core, and he was gone.

We stood for a moment looking at the ruined keep. Finally, I broke down. Fara pulled me into a fierce embrace and, inspired by my spell request, I suppose, quoted the verse from Joshua 5:34: “We are all but pale spirits to be poured over the land until the time shall come to be made whole again.”

“You
will
feel whole again someday, Noon,” she whispered hoarsely. “I promise.”

R
afe found me the next day in the small tin-roofed storage shed on the Secernere side of the Shallows, the one we’d walked through when we’d first arrived. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor amongst the fishing poles, tackle boxes, crab pots, and birdcages contemplating the silver spice box with the words “For Ebony” on it. I’d been contemplating it, for hours. I’m sure it’s because the box conjured up the fatalistic sentiment I’d been feeding myself since Ari had left yesterday.
“‘Better late than never’ is a lie.”
No kidding.
On time
is definitely best. Like the fact that Ari should have revealed to me
before yesterday
that he was a drakon and not just a human member of the Host like me.

Rafe came in quietly at one point and sat next to me. It reminded me of the time we’d made tea together on board
Cnawlece
. Our silence was companionable, not uncomfortable. After a while he said:

“I really do know the spell Pat on the Back.”

Despite everything, I laughed. “Who taught it to you?”

He shrugged. “I learn most of my spells on my own. Or I design them myself. None of the traditional ones ever seem to do what you need them to do.”

“Maybe you should have been a gap filler.”

“Maybe.”

“What
is
your specialty, Rafe?”

He fiddled with one of the birdcage doors, pressing it open, then shut, then open again.

“Looking out for you, Onyx. Luck knows you need it. So how ’bout it?”

“How about what?”

“Pat on the Back,” he said, just the tiniest put out that I’d seemed to have forgotten the spell that he’d offered.

I smiled, playing along. “How long does it last?”

Rafe’s taupe-eyed gaze met mine. “As long as you want it to.”

He left a few moments later. He wasn’t insulted when I didn’t take him up on his offer. I think he realized I needed exactly what we all suddenly had so much of—time. We had at least a week before the Boatman was due to arrive. So I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to unravel the mystery of the spice box.

What had
“Better late than never” is a lie
meant to the person who’d engraved this box? What had been too late for Ebony? Legend said she was a water demon who gave her memory of home to her wandering lover so he could find his way back to her. But why had her lover been wandering in the first place?

Burr’s mother (the near-incontrovertible Alba) had said that Grimasca’s lover was a big black river serpent who liked to hunt with him. According to her tale, Grimasca had bitten her and she’d drowned.

I had no hard evidence, but I thought it likely that Grimasca and Ebony had been the two lovers both Alba and the legends spoke of. So if Grimasca bit Ebony and then she drowned, it seemed safe to assume she’d drowned from a hellcnight bite.

Ebony’s final resting place had been the Elbow. According to legends, that’s just where she succumbed. The legends were always vague about what she’d succumbed to. But couldn’t it have been a hellcnight bite? But if so, why hadn’t Grimasca been with her? If he’d bitten her, why wouldn’t he have been with her at the end?

But then I thought about the wandering part again. The fact that Ebony’s lover had been a wanderer. And that she’d given him her memory of home
so that he could find his way back to her
. Well, had he? Had Grimasca found Ebony before she died? Ebony’s legends say she died alone.

And then it hit me. What the quote might mean and what the powder might be. An antidote. A cure for Grimasca’s bite. Maybe Grimasca had been wandering, looking for a cure, but when he finally found it, he didn’t make it back in time to use it. Maybe that’s what
“Better late than never” is a lie
meant.

I ran out of the shed, found Rafe and Fara, and told them my theory. They both thought it was at least worth seeing what Meghan, Stillwater, and Russ thought of it. Depending on what their take was, we could decide whether we wanted to try it out on Delgato. It took us the better part of an hour to round them up (scattered as they were in various parts of the camp), but when we were all assembled outside of the med shack, I once again explained my theory. That the white powder was really an antidote to a hellcnight bite. That the silver spice box had been Grimasca’s and he’d found the cure for his lover Ebony but he’d been too late to use it.

Frankly, they all thought it was pretty far-fetched. Russ didn’t believe in Grimasca at all. But the fact that I’d tested the powder already on myself, and no harm had come to me, impressed Meghan mightily. She asked us if we thought Delgato would rather die sleeping in his cot after Luck knew how many years lying like that, be floated out into the river and given to Estes (Rafe cleared his throat, narrowed his eyes, and shook his head at Meghan over that option, making his position clear), or take a chance on this mysterious powder. To a person, we all agreed that Captain Delgato would rather take his chances with the powder. We had nothing to lose. If it didn’t work, nothing would happen.

Late that night, Meghan mixed a small amount of the powder with warm water and managed to get most of it down Delgato’s throat. He was still for so long after, I feared we’d failed, that my theory was bunk, and I was no closer to figuring out the mystery of the powder, the box, or the quote than before. But then he coughed. The first real movement he’d made since the night the hellcnight attacked us on board
Cnawlece
. And I knew I’d been right. And I knew then that we could save everyone, or at least the twelve settlers we’d pulled out of the keep. After that, everything happened fairly quickly. It took half the night and the rest of the powder to wake everyone up, but we did. By the darkest hour in the Shallows, not a single person was sleeping.

*   *   *

A
few days later nearly everyone in the Shallows was gathered for breakfast on the Blandjan dock. We’d been gathering here for meals since the keep had fallen. No one in the camp wanted to eat their meals (even if those meals consisted of bloodfish, bonemeal and/or other various and sundry “edible” marshland offerings) while looking at the pile of debris that had almost become a tomb for at least a dozen of them. In the dirt next to the dock were small campfires here and there where settlers were frying or roasting fish. The dock itself was covered with people, kids especially, who sat at its edge, legs dangling over the water, with makeshift poles and lines. Athalie, who’d turned out to be a precocious eight-year-old with wide brown eyes and wild, corkscrew curly hair, sat off to one side on a blanket with Zella, Antony, and her new niece, Nona. Stillwater, Meghan, and Russ were standing at the very end of the dock looking east toward the mouth of the Lethe and the sea. At dinner last night, Antony had casually suggested that the group relocate once a new patron was found. The idea had met with immediate resistance from a few folks, including Stillwater. I smiled to myself. Those two would likely continue their feud long after I was gone, but it didn’t involve demons or seem anything more than two men who had differing views on what was best for their community. A healthy sort of problem, in my opinion. And one their new patron could deal with.

The morning was already hot and humid, but without a cloud in the sky. The rising sun on the Blandjan had been blinding, which I thought fitting since Blandjan meant “blind.” Rafe had been continually casting Demon Net so we’d know if anything tried to sneak up on us, either on land or from underneath the water. But he’d felt nothing. Nor had I, not even Ari. I had no idea whether I’d see him again in New Babylon when we finally made it back or not, but I was determined not to think of it. Besides, I had enough to keep my body busy and my mind occupied. Like convincing Delgato he should become the new Patron Demon of the Shallows.

Delgato had been told about
Cnawlece
’s sinking and Burr’s death. He was more grief stricken over Burr, which I found touching. Apparently, Delgato
had
appreciated Burr as much as I’d started to during our brief voyage. We filled Delgato in on recent events in the Shallows, Beetiennik and Biviennik, the rescue and revival of their victims, and the collapse of the keep. He was told about Ari. Delgato seemed less surprised by that revelation than by the tales of my heroism. I tried not to be insulted about either.

Fara outdid herself on her glamour that morning. I think she knew her time in the Shallows was almost up and so she had a limited number of further opportunities to create lasting dramatic impressions. Inspired by tales of Lethe sirens, she chose to appear in a glimmering sheath of oyster shells. Freshwater pearls adorned her lustrously wavy hair and glitter sparkled on her eyelashes like sunlight sparkling on the surface of the river. She’d even gone so far as to “grow” webbing between her fingers and toes. Soon every young girl at the docks had a fish tail or iridescent scaled skin. The boys then asked to be turned into giant toads, snails, or lizards. Within minutes, Virtus was left alone at the edge of the dock, peering into the sun-flecked water, hungrily eyeing its surface for any evidence of the fish lurking beneath. Sometimes his ears would twitch. Sometimes his tail. Sometimes his eyes would grow big as saucers and his haunches would wriggle in anticipation . . . But he stayed out of the water.

And so it was when I asked Delgato that fateful question one sunny summer morning during Haita, Halja’s seventh month (which was named after what it felt like,
hot
) while standing on a wooden dock halfway between New Babylon and the sea.

“So what do you say,
Captain
Delgato? Would you like to be
Lord
Delgato and look after these people?” I asked him.

What demon would say no to that?

But he didn’t answer right away. Instead, he looked around and carefully considered each of the settlers, assessing them as he’d once assessed me. He made a sound that was half-grunt, half-growl. Delgato’s catlike characteristics (the pointy ears, furry paws, and sharp teeth) had all come back with his consciousness.

“Not sure what the Council would have to say about it,” he said.