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The knots are tight, and Jade has taken the most solemn care in her choice of rope but the hard truth is that care is a luxury she should have abandoned a very long time ago. The knots are tight and they are myriad and they are blessed and they are the only thing keeping Kit’s clawed, twisted, desperate hands from ripping into her again.
Already, Jade wears four long scratches across her collarbones and the swell of her breast because she was too slow – because her hesitation at tying up the only real friend she’s ever had took its toll, and now the demon behind Kit’s eyes is howling with cruel laughter. The hand that Jade managed to bind to the iron bedpost is bent at a terrible angle behind her back, elbow distorted like she's not troubled by anything so mortal as bones, but her sweet pink tongue swirls around the fingers of her free and bloody hand.
A panting Jade pulls her eyes away from the demon’s unblinking gaze, pupils blown so dark they swallow every scrap of familiar, human blue.
(She's thought of those eyes so many times since she left. Those eyes that threaten to soften parts of Jade she mustn’t let ease.)
"I always wanted to get my hands on those tits," the demon riding Kit grins proudly, eying the bloody mess of Jade’s chest. She – no, not she, it, the demon, Jade mustn’t humanise it by being generous with her pronouns – is watching Jade lustfully as it sucks Kit’s bloody fingertips with an obscene and orgasmic moan. It is a sound Jade has only ever heard from demons as they taunt, never from the throat of anyone who wasn’t gripped with the evil she’s been chosen to destroy. Never from anyone gentle.
From Kit's throat, it is a sound that moves through Jade's body like liquid honey, slow and sweet and ever so tempting. No demon has ever made her feel like this before but that's because it’s Kit. Kit, who is the most important living person left in Jade’s whole, entire, broken world. Jade has longed to hear her voice again for so long, it is the cruellest and most typically demonic twist of fate that she should be hearing it like this.
(She shouldn’t be doing this alone. She really shouldn’t be doing this alone. But the war has begun and there's so few of them left who know how to fight it. The choice was alone or not at all. The choice was fight, or lose Kit to the dark.)
"Come closer," Kit’s voice croons, a seductive drawl to it that is nothing like the voice Jade remembers from the youth they shared; back then, Kit was all sharp laughter, all overconfidence covering up a deep well of insecurity. "Come closer, Jade, don’t you want these lips on yours again?"
Jade’s shirt is ragged and bloody and the scratches beneath are deep and merciless, raked through Jade’s freckles and splitting open her skin. Blood is slowly weeping into the cup of her bra and it itches, terribly. She has enough experience to know her wounds already carry an unnatural infection, that if she doesn’t act soon the edges will pucker and the blood will turn – it depends on the demon, and Jade does not yet know which demon she is dealing with – tar black, or watery-yellow, or most vile of all, a milky, viscous saffron.
They need to be cleansed in holy water, they need to be prayed over and bandaged, but to do that Jade would have to step away from Kit’s bedside, and Jade will not leave Kit alone with the demon riding her body. Kit’s soul is in a fight for survival and Jade’s constant prayers – the Mothers give mercy to you the Mothers love and protect you – may be the only thing keeping her tethered to this earthly life. The only thing keeping her from the eternal damnation of being claimed by the darkest of all dark beasts, the one who sleeps deep beneath the earth and has been waking in Jade’s worst dreams since before she could speak.
"She remembers your mouth under hers," the demon grins at Jade, head on a tilt and free hand dropping to squeeze Kit's breast so hard it must be painful. "Soft as she'd dreamed, soft as she'd touched herself about over and over again. How excited she was, all day, knowing she was going to kiss you that night. Do you know how it felt for her, to spend all those hours gathering her bravery up in her hopeful young heart?”
Jade shouldn’t be listening. It’s a story aimed directly at the weakest and guiltiest part of Jade and she knows where it’s going. Jade raises the volume of her prayer, circling the bed. The demon cranks Kit’s head around to watch her every move as it keeps talking. Jade wishes her ears would close up. She can’t help but listen; it’s Kit’s voice, after all.
But that’s precisely why Jade shouldn’t be listening. She knows what demons are like. Knows they use any trick they can find. Knows they tell lies but that truth is their most powerful weapon. It’s easier if she doesn’t imagine how excited Kit was all those years ago, before she kissed her. Easier if she pretends not to know. If she convinces herself she doesn't know.
(But deep down, Jade knows.)
She snaps her head away and turns her attention to her holy wooden box, carved with the protective emblem of the Great Tree, and from it she pulls out the next length of rope and begins to incorporate that into her prayer. Her ropes know her and in them she finds reassurance. They have held many a victim down as Jade prayed them back to themselves, they have seen victory after victory, salvation after salvation.
She tended the flax on the Legion’s grounds herself, chose the plant that called to her because it resonated with something inside of her and not because the blue of the flowers was the same blue as eyes she forced herself to stop thinking about. She was the one who scutched and hackled the fibres till they were soft enough to spin, and she was the one who spun them into yarn, who twisted the yarn into rope. She knows them. She trusts them.
Jade remembers the roots of the plant they came from, and the rope remembers too. In the great interconnected family of things, it is closer to the Tree at the Centre of All Things than she is, and if she is beloved by the Tree, as Jade knows she is, then the ropes are more treasured still.
They will bind Kit, they will hold her down while Jade does what she has to do.
But as she prepares, the demon keeps talking.
“Do you remember how she knelt? Those bare, dirty knees on that exquisite Cashmere rug of her mother’s, that open fire bringing a pretty flush to her pale skin? Or the way she moved forward and lay a hand on your leg, leaning her weight against you as she pressed her soft lips to yours? Kit remembers, she remembers every moment. She remembers the shame she set in you, oh, how disgusted you were at that innocent little-girl kiss!”
"Stop it," Jade spits even though she knows better, offended at the demon’s choice of the word disgust even though she knows better. The demon laughs, and it sounds like Kit at her meanest, how she'd get when she was hurt, a laugh as flat as a mirror but not quite as impossible to see through.
Jade misses her. There’s a knot of pain in her own chest but Jade wills it away.
“The Mothers love you,” she says, in the common tongue, taking strength from the familiarity of the first purification ritual she ever learned. The demon just sneers with Kit’s lip, the expression tugging at the deep, dry crack in her tender skin. Jade aches to sate her thirst, but not while those teeth are bared.
“Yes, that’s what you told her, isn’t it?” The pride in Kit’s voice is cruel and knowing, and it hurts, knowing that the demon has pried open Kit’s mind and has its fingers deep in her worst memories. Jade doesn’t falter in her prayer – the Mothers love you and the will of the Empress is your salvation and she will not relinquish your spirit to feed that which would eat it.
This demon just raises her voice.
“Love, that’s what you spoke of, when you launched yourself at poor, unsuspecting, unkissable Kit. Love, you claimed, when you pinned her down on the rug and prayed for the soul that must have been tainted. Oh Jade, what a wonderful weapon the Order made of you. Do you remember how hard she fought to get free, writhing this fit little body underneath you and screaming for you to stop? Do you remember it took her brother and her mother to pull you off? But even when they dragged you away, it was too late, wasn’t it? You’d already bled your shame right into her – can you still feel the heat as it spread across your face, swallowing all those pretty freckles in the red of it? Do you remember watching shame make a home behind these baby blue eyes?”
“By the light of the daughter of the sun and the moon – I cast you out!” Jade snarls, because she does remember, and the guilt is a brand in her gut. The guilt has been branding her from the inside out all this time, but when she pulls her pocketed bottle of pure, holy water – water gathered by the roaming members of the Legion from the springs at the source of the Freen, before the river becomes tainted with industry – Jade brands the demon back. She casts it with a strong flick of her wrist from the bottle, sending a spray across Kit’s body, aiming in particular for the hand that won’t stop viciously bruising Kit’s breast.
Kit yowls – her hand swiping at the wet and steaming parts of her front, and Jade lashes her with it again. Kit’s body twists, her pained noise turns into a long, high pitched keen as she rises completely off the mattress, bent as though her entire body is supported by one point right in the centre of her spine. Her bound wrist keeps her tethered to the bed, and Jade can see her shoulder straining in its socket as the rest of her body rises higher.
She grits her teeth and launches herself over Kit, covering Kit’s body with hers so that her own, earthly weight presses Kit back down toward the mattress. She’s wounded the demon with the water, she’s sure, but still there’s a moment where the two of them hover in the air above the bed, pressed more closely together than they have been since youthful wrestling matches from another life.
It’s a rash move coming from someone already bleeding from demonic claws. Jade does it anyway, knowing full well this is how she might die. She wraps an arm around the back of Kit’s shoulders and splays a hand around the back of her skull, Jade’s forearm supporting her limp neck.
“By the light of the daughter of the sun and the moon,” she repeats, in Kit’s ear. “You cannot have her.”
With a hiss the demon withdraws, and Kit drops back to the mattress. Jade bends her knee, braces her other arm, and these catch her weight against the sheets enough to save Kit from being crushed, but there’s still a sharp exhale of breath from underneath Jade, slapped from Kit’s lungs by the fall.
The yowling stops, but starts up again as a long, high pitched laugh. Jade scrambles off Kit’s body just before Kit’s snapping teeth can close on her neck.
“That all you’ve got?” The demon asks, dropping Kit’s head to one side and making her neck pop. “As if a little water is ever going to hurt as much as you did when you broke her heart.”
Jade finds those eyes fixed on her once again, and they’re fierce and hateful but they’re watering with a pain that doesn’t look demonic. “You broke it hard, you know? And what pain there is still living in that break! Spreading poison with every beat of her little heart, for six years and oh," the demon tilts Kit's head back, arches her spine, presses her chest harder into her groping hand till Kit’s fingertips disappear into her flesh. "Oh it makes her a delicious ride.”
"I will banish you, ancient serpent, as a most impure flood,” Jade steps forward with her bottle raised and lets the last of the water drip, drip, drip down onto Kit’s writhing torso. Each fat drop bursts and hisses like water hitting a frying pan. It bubbles and blisters where it finds her skin, leaves marks in a messy trail up her throat.
“With the blessing of the Most Sacred Princess,” Jade swears, “I will draw out your venom and your malice and purify all that is impure.”
The demon bares Kit’s teeth – it’s a grimace of pain that still manages to be a grin, as it twists Kit’s neck to look at her. WIth her mouth open like she’s ready to take a juicy bite, Kit’s eyes rake down her body, and Kit’s hips roll when Kit’s eyes settle on the crotch of Jade’s pants. “Don't you wish you could ride her too, Jade?” The demon asks. “Mount her and rut her and fuck her till pleasure wrings every holy thought from your head. How fast will those trim, virginal hips of yours thrust against her, hard enough you see stars?"
Jade’s stomach twists awfully. It's not true that she's thought about rutting. Not the way the demon means. Sometimes, at her most lonely, she'll imagine a hand, and soft fingers, careful fingers, another arm around her shoulders to hold her close and whisper that it's okay, it’s okay, no one knows… over and over again promising her that this is okay. She can never bring herself to imagine the voice. Or the hair shadowing those eyes. If she doesn't put a face to the fantasy, it's not… it's not anything.
Jade knows better. Is supposed to know better. Hours of memorising the Shining Scripture every day of her life since she herself was saved should have taught her better. But nothing she tried could exorcise the aching thought of being held so close, of something wonderful and secret and safe.
"I think it’s time our Kit grows up, don’t you?” The demon smiles. “Enough of this childish humiliation over a kiss. Let’s show her what real shame feels like, shall we Jade?” The demon taunts, trailing Kit’s fingers down Kit’s body, dragging her chewed nails over the strip of her belly visible where her shirt has ridden up in the demon’s thrashing. “Shall we open her up and dig our fingers in deep?"
The demon spreads Kit's legs open wide and Jade grits her jaw till it aches and finds her strongest stance. With her next breath, she begins to pray anew. Her fingers splay, and she can feel the power building, sunshine-hot in her palms. Spiderwebs of light flash between her fingers, a dark, deep green of leaves in shadow.
It is not a first-day-of-an-exorcism spell. Not without a backup. The risk of Jade tiring herself out too early is too strong. Rituals of exorcism are marathons, not sprints, but Jade’s been sprinting since the moment she ended Sorsha’s call.
This is not a soft benediction meant to imbue loving strength into the ropes, either, this is a battle prayer. She is calling her forces to war.
Jade growls out the words in High Kymerian and a wind whips around the room, sending her long coat flapping out behind her, ripping open the curtains and making the light flicker sporadically. Paint cracks from where black mould has ruined the ceiling above Kit’s bed and the flecks of it circle violently in the wind. The words strike the demon like a lash. Even though it’s Kit’s body that bends backward and Kit’s voice that yells in pain, Jade still feels a flare of success. Something works.
She keeps calling on the power, and now – blessedly – the demon is fighting her too hard to speak. Jade readies the rope. Her infected chest itches and burns and it needs attention but Jade will let this little piece of herself start to rot if it means Kit’s soul stands a fighting chance. Once, she would have been able to take care of herself. Once, when Ballantine stood at her side, his deep and even and unshakable voice calling on the Mothers and the Tree and the High Priestess herself for aid and mercy and love, love, always love.
When there were two of them, it mattered less if one paused, because the chant would continue from the lips of one while the other cleaned wounds or relieved themselves or even ate, if the demon was not so strong that it turned all nearby food to maggots and rot, as this one has.
There’s no food to be found here. Sorsha’s house is overrun, fruit fresh two days ago is putrid and soft in the bowl now, the fridge smells like a corpse, every tap splutters and spews something that is not water. Jade should not be here alone.
But there is only one of her, and so Jade must be the one to cast the spell and Jade must be the one to tie the knots and Jade must bear her wounds uncared for and Jade must forsake sleep and food and every other mortal care because Jade has a job to do and she is the only one who can do it. Ballantine is rotting in the grave that was set aside for him the moment he took the exorcist’s oath. A grave that Jade put him in. A grave that lies beside a small piece of earth that is the only land Jade will ever again come home to.
Jade was once honoured to know she would take her final rest at Ballantine’s side, but now she is sickened by the thought. He is dead because of her mistakes – no, worse than that – because of her weakness. She will never atone enough to deserve that grave, not as long as she lives.
But she will also never stop trying.
The final shout of the prayer leaves Jade's strained throat and the power does what she needs it to do and pins Kit's wrist against the sweat soaked sheets as it scours the demon away from the surface of her. The wail from Kit's throat is awful – Jade knows the purity of this heat burns the victim as much as it does the demon, worse than holy water, but exorcism has always been a balance of evils and Jade wears every choice she ever made.
She'll wear this one too, as hard as it is. Jade throws herself across a screaming Kit, and ties her wrists to the bed with the rope in her hands. The knots are tight and myriad and blessed, they bind and they burn and Kit may bleed yet, but this is the only chance Kit has.
Jade’s deep green light crackles around Kit’s wrists for a few moments longer, greeting the rope as their colleague as it passes over the duty of binding Kit to the well-tied network of knots. Kit breathes out, a shuddering breath, and sinks down against the sheets, her fingers twitching, her body trembling, sweat pasting her hair to her forehead.
For a moment the only sound is the beating of their hearts, blood rushing in Kit’s ears, a steady deep thudding in Jade’s chest. The war is not won, but Jade thinks she can claim the first battle.
“Jade?” Kit says, her voice small, like the little girl she was when Jade first met her. But wobblier, and much more afraid. “Is that – is that really you?”
Jade grows cold, the hairs on her arms and the back of her marked neck standing to attention. “It’s me,” she says, promises, feels the oath forming in the roots of her heart.
Kit’s voice trips, stumbles its way into a giggle and Jade stiffens and prepares for another assault, but it’s not a demon giggle. It dies quickly, and Kit speaks dryly through the husk of it. “Guess you were right,” she croaks. “Always was something wrong with me.”
“No,” Jade says, and her heart hurts for Kit. Jade knows the words to more prayers than she can count and Jade can translate those words into four different almost forgotten languages and still Jade does not know how to tell Kit that she has seen true evil, now, over and over again, and true evil is not to be found against the soft lips of another girl.
She doesn’t know how to tell Kit she was wrong.
She tells Kit another kind of truth, instead. It should sing with hope, but in the shadow of this greater truth it doesn’t ring like it’s supposed to. “I’m here to save you, Kit.”
Kit groans, low and pained and miserable, her red-rimmed eyes closed. “She won’t let you,” she rasps, her forehead crumbling. “I’m not for you, I’m hers, she says.”
Jade steps closer, just a little. It’s safe enough, Kit can’t slash her open again, not with fingernails anyway, though her words feel like they’re slicing through the emotional core of her and are about to spill all her guts at her feet. She cannot let herself be spilled. She’s trained to be better than this. “Who says, Kit?” Jade demands, all business. “What does it call itself?”
Movement twitches through Kit’s body, arches her spine for a harsh, tense second, and the pain ramps her moan up in volume. “I can’t–”
Guilt twists its way through Jade’s defences anyway, insidious.
“The Mothers love you,” Jade prays quickly, the words slipping out of her mouth as instinctively as breathing. She speaks softly, as she pulls a plain bottle from her wooden box, one full of water from the tap at her dingy motel this morning. “Kit Tanthalos, child of the Mothers, you are loved. Kit Tanthalos, sheltered by the Great Tree, you are loved. The roots weave beneath your feet and keep the darkness down, the roots are ancient and unyielding and incorruptible and they were made to keep you safe. You are loved. You will be saved.” Jade takes her own shaken inhale, though her breath doesn’t shake with the same force as Kit’s. She’s not fighting a demon, only her own self. “I’m not going to leave you,” she promises, unscrewing the cap on the bottle, lifting it gently to Kit’s chapped and peeling lips.
“You already did,” Kit’s eyes open, and there’s so much regret in them it floors Jade. It feels like penance, gently cupping Kit’s head to guide her to the bottle, carefully monitoring how much she could swallow to make sure she doesn’t choke.
“It’s true,” Jade says, soft and tender as a bruise and twice as painful. “I did.”
The visions had started when she was very young, too young to be able to explain to anyone that they were more devastating than ordinary childish nightmares, too young to understand herself that they weren't the same night terrors that woke the other orphans and abandoned kids in the home. Instead, Jade would scream. Jade would fight tooth and claw to break out her room and if that mean breaking windows, so be it, anything to be able to press her whole body flush against the earth, where she could feel the network of roots somewhere far below, feel one of them reaching up from the depths to touch her heart. Nothing calmed her but this. There were times, lying with her chest pressed into the mud and her bony little fingers digging as deep as they could, where she felt the Empress’s hand on the back of her neck, telling her it was okay, that she was good, that she was chosen. Telling her the visions of something serpentine and sinister sleeping beneath the earth were real, but that the roots of the Tree at the Centre of All Things were real as well, and so long as the Tree lived, the rot that wormed its way beneath the world could not break through.
But the visions also showed her that just because the beast itself could not yet slither its way to the surface, it didn’t mean that other things couldn’t scramble and ooze out between the gaps in the roots. The Tree could not make a perfect shield, not with fewer and fewer people around who truly knew how to tend it. The world moved on. People forgot. It was the nature of people to forget.
But the Shining Legion remembered.
When Ballantine found Jade for the second time in her life, she was sobbing face down into the dirt. The vision that had ripped through her was one of a demon picking apart a whole family, half a world away. Nothing Jade could do to stop it, but she’d shattered her bedroom window to escape out into the night to throw herself against the ground and plead with the Tree to stop letting the demons through. She’d cried and cried, willing that her tears and the strings of snot and the blood from where she’d caught her leg on the broken glass would all soak into the ground and give the Tree the strength to hold the darkness down.
It wasn’t the Empress’s hand she felt on her back, then, but the same strange man she'd met the night her parents died, two dozen moons earlier.
He’d carried her out of that blood soaked house then, and this time, too, he hauled her skinny body up into his arms and carried her out of the orphanage. She never did ask what he told them. She only held tightly onto what he told her:
The visions she had were real. The family she’d seen was real, and two of the Legion’s finest warriors were being sent to save them. The beast she saw sleeping beneath the earth was real, but so was the Tree, and they hadn’t found anyone since Raziel who seemed to connect to the power of it as naturally as she did. And yes, there was a better way to keep the roots strong than by sobbing her strength into the earth, and he was going to show her how to do it. The Legion was waiting for her, and they would teach her her how to fathom all mysteries, they would nurture in her a faith that would move mountains.
He did say he was sorry their prophets hadn’t noticed her earlier. But he made her a promise; that when she was strong enough, he was going to show her how to rip demons right out of the world.
It took many moons and daily intensive, punishing training to stop herself being shaken apart from the power that was growing inside of her. Many moons for Jade to recognise the signs that a vision was coming and get herself outside, because if her hands were pressed against the earth – or better yet, a tree – then she would not shake and scream under the overwhelming pressure, but she could see more clearly what needed to be done. Who needed to be saved. Where they were. How to do it.
Jade grew. Some moons, she grew faster than the nightmares, and the little space this afforded inside herself gave her magic somewhere to grow. Everyone in her new home held their breath as they watched her develop. Jade held her breath too. Sometimes, when she did very well, like the first night she made a sacramental dagger glow bright with her own holy light, she felt a bright spark of pride.
It was the happiest she’d ever been. How could it not be? She was the only child raised in the Legion and everyone’s eyes were on her and she was doing so well.
After the first year – Ballantine fought hard for this – she was allowed to go to a normal school, though she did it with a silver bracelet on her wrist and extensive medical notes in her files so that no one would panic during those times when she would drop, thrashing, to the ground. The other kids eyed her up and gave her a wide berth. She was a lanky one still, cranked tall by a growth spurt from her training and her connection to the magic; Jade felt like an alien even before she was paired up with the shortest girl in the class.
Unimpressed by everything, this floppy haired kid crossed her arms, looked up at Jade and said, rudely: “And what are you supposed to be, then?”
Kit was always asking questions Jade never had the answer to.
It took nearly another year after that before she realised Kit was her friend. Kit teased her relentlessly for her height, for her accent, for the weird way she understood the world. She made fun of her long legs whenever Jade beat her in a race, made fun of her long arms that could throw a javelin further than Kit – you look like a gibbon. Kit made fun of her because she didn’t know the names of anyone important, no words to any of the songs that were vital to playground life, no characters from any of the epic tales that coloured Kit’s life. Kit made fun of her because she had a father and Kit didn’t, and that could never, ever be made up for by the fact that Kit had a mother, and Jade had lost hers, and her first father, in a way that still haunted her to her core.
Kit paid her more attention than anyone – other than the holy warriors of the Legion – did in her life, and Jade was fascinated by all of it. The Legion treated her as their protégé, their daughter, their mascot, their savant; as their last shred of hope left in a world growing darker by the year. Kit treated her like an annoying kid, despite the (unimportant) thirteen moons Jade had on her, or the (unforgivable) extra head of height.
It was on Kit’s ninth birthday when a tremor rocked through the entire city, and swallowed all the power from the grid. Kit – who was only mollified from being forced to go to school on her birthday by the fact that they got to spend the afternoon at the Museum – yelped when the elevator they’d just stepped into jolted violently and went suddenly dark.
Kit screamed, short and embarrassed, and when the elevator started trundling downwards her voice dropped low, the undercurrent of panic pulling it down, a litany of “no no no” interspersed with a few words Jade hadn’t heard since she lived in the group home.
“Close your eyes,” Jade told her, and Kit giggled incredulously at what she clearly thought was the most ridiculous, unhelpful idea she ever heard.
“You close your eyes every night,” Jade continued. “When they’re shut, it doesn’t matter how dark it is. When you close them, you get to control your own darkness.”
There was a long silent pause from the girl, and when she spoke again her voice was harder. “I'm not scared of the dark.”
Jade, eyes closed, smiled. “Neither am I.”
Jade never knew if Kit did close her eyes. She suspected not. But as soon as the elevator reached the ground floor, an eerie emergency glow kicked in, and Jade let her own eyes open.
The doors, though, stayed stubbornly shut, and the light and the stillness of their enclosure seemed to gift Kit with a brand new intensity.
Jade would have been okay with being imprisoned alone. She’d been left longer in darker spaces, after all. And she was only trapped in here with Kit, not anything trying to turn her to stone because she wouldn’t let it take her. If it was up to Jade, she would have sat cross legged on the floor and recited passages from the scripture of Cherlindrea – her very favourite scripture – till the power came back on.
But Kit wanted to try to claw open the doors as if her tiny fingers stood a chance at levering the heavy doors open. She wanted to pry the buttons off the walls, make Jade stand in the corner and climb up her body so Kit could bash open the ceiling and climb up onto the top, like she’d seen in movies Jade had never even heard the names of.
It was annoying, but it was an awful Jade could cope with. Twice, even, Kit had suggested something so ridiculous Jade even almost laughed. It was fine. It was Kit. Of all the awful in the world, Jade had realised that day, Kit was sort-of her favourite kind.
It was one of her best days, even, till she started to feel the oncoming prickling of a vision, zapping at her skin like static electricity.
One of her best days, till she was overcome by the knowledge that a new demon was climbing into the world to claim a new victim, and Jade, grasping her own throat and gasping, sank down onto the floor. She crawled toward the door and hammered at it, screaming. She bashed each button, all of them powerless and dead. She shook with sobs because she couldn’t get outside, couldn’t connect with the earth, couldn’t put the reins on this vision to control it enough to see what the Empress needed to show her.
She felt herself swallowed whole, felt the vision chew down on her like a tough bit of meat.
Jade didn’t know how long it lasted, but when she came back to herself afterwards, her head hurt so badly it felt like someone had stabbed a sword through both temples. She was curled in the foetal position in one corner of the lift, and Kit was on her knees beside her, stroking her hair.
“Do you know you’re glowing?” Kit had asked, lifting up one of Jade’s hands by her limp wrist and dangling it in front of her face. It was true; the magic danced over her skin, green sparks of it falling from her fingers and soaking down into the floor of the lift. Jade wished them well, though she knew they’d fade before they dug through the foundations of this building to the true earth. “What’s with that?”
Another question from Kit with no easy answer. Jade didn’t try, she just slowly pushed herself up off the floor, trying to sort through the hopeless mess of impressions in her head. Water on the edge of a lake. The hull of a small boat, overturned and half submerged, the writing on the side impossible to make out. The usual screaming too, and the feeling of soul-destroying dread, of course, but that didn’t narrow anything down.
“My grandmother did that,” Kit spoke to the ceiling, instead of to Jade. It took Jade a fair number of confused, haunted moments to hear her.
“What?” she said, because she was an amateur at this, talking to other kids, even after a year of going to normal classes.
“How you’re kinda sparky? The magic. She did that.”
“Oh.”
“I saw it once. I know it’s real.”
“Yeah.”
“My mum says it's all dying out and my grandmother was one of the last, but you’re here.”
“Not dying out.”
“That’s cool.”
“It’s not really.”
Kit pulled a face at her. Jade never really talked back to her, no one did, apart from her brother. Kit had realised last summer that most people who agreed with her didn’t actually think she was right about anything, they were just agreeing with her mother’s copious amounts of money. So even though Jade was clearly wrong when she disagreed with Kit – it was obviously cool to glow, and send out weird arcs of light like green solar flares – it was a bit refreshing that Jade disagreed at all.
“Who’s your grandmother?” Jade asked, understanding that she must know her – the Legion was not large and it recruited everyone with a connection to the Bloodstream of the Universe, even if they could do no more than warm water in their hands or light a candle from a foot away.
Kit wrinkled her nose up, like a disgruntled rabbit. Their grandmother was so seared out of the family tree that their mother had never even told Kit and Airk her name. The memory of her grandmother crackling with angry magic while shouting at her mother as Sorsha dragged both young twins from her family home was the only thing Kit knew for sure about her. It was just. Who admitted they didn’t know something as basic as their grandmother’s name? It was as bad as not knowing where your father was. Embarrassing.
“She’s no one, anymore,” Kit said, picking at a crack on the aglet of her shoelace, prying the plastic open. “She blew herself up or something. I don’t know. I thought you might blow yourself up just then, actually. If you did a spontaneous self explosion, would you blow me up too?”
“People don’t just blow up,” Jade said, running a hand over the back of her neck. The skin there was burning, she could feel the ring of heat searing into her palm. It took her another minute to realise the other thing Kit was telling her, and she dropped her hand from her neck. It never really helped anyway. “I’m sorry your grandmother’s dead,” she added, insufficient and awkwardly belated. “Her spirit’s with the Empress, now.”
“Oh for real?” Kit asked, the edge of a laugh on her voice, lifting her expressive brows. “You believe in the Empress?”
And Jade was saved from trying to explain that one by the whirring back to life of the power, and the sliding open of the elevator doors into the lobby of the museum.
They talked about it later, though. They talked about everything. Religion and faith and history and wars and ghost stories and jokes. Almost everything – Jade could not mention her extracurricular activities. By their second year of friendship Jade had seen more bad movies than she could name. They lay together on Kit’s wide bed, reading comic books and sharing bowls of food so processed and removed from the earth the Legion would never allow it. Jade became a secret fan of cheetos.
As they grew bigger, the bed grew less wide and more and more of their bodies pressed against each other while they were reading. Neither of them commented on it, not once. Neither of them suggested they change their habits.
The demons Jade faced at Ballantine’s side began to smell it on her. Their comments, always monstrous, turned carnal, and the obscene things they tried to tempt her with horrified her in a whole new part of her body. Worst of all, some of the things they suggested gave her flickerings of a dark and explicit thrill, worse than cheetos, though it was almost impossible to feel through the rush of shame and fury and terror.
Jade knew terror intimately. Had known it before she could speak. Her first memory was her father with his face so distorted by the demon inside him that all the flesh seemed stripped from his bones.
Ballantine and his partner Kase had been taking her along to exorcisms from almost as soon as she’d settled into her little cloister at the Legion. They wanted her to see them destroy the demon she’d dreamed about. And they had destroyed it, and the next one. But the third one spoke to Jade in her dead father’s voice and spoke to Ballantine in the voice of his lost, adopted son and ripped out Kase’s throat while Jade blinked and coated them both in a hot spray of his blood, and Ballantine had pressed the last of their holy water into Jade’s hands and inaugurated her right then and there.
A baptism of blood, the Legion decreed it. A good sign.
Jade knew terror but she knew hard work, too.
This work was difficult. This work was dangerous, and dirty. This work was pulling souls from the mire and getting her own hands filthy, filthy, filthy in the process. Jade lost her first soul at fifteen, after Ballantine pulled her urgently out of a calculus exam and she was gone from school for a week. The woman possessed was too far gone. She was the fourth case Jade had taken the lead on. Three others was all it had taken to convince Jade she could save anyone – to prove that pride still survived in her heart. The demon cried out to her with the voice of her mother. It had grabbed her, pulled her close, pulled her under. She'd tasted its breath. Felt its teeth. Couldn't scream loud enough to drown out the lewd remarks about Jade’s body and what could be done to it. Made Jade feel she was naked when it turned its eyes on her, spoke of things Jade dreamed horrified dreams about for moons after the woman's merciful death at the end of Jade’s glowing dagger.
Jade was still dreaming them when Kit climbed on top of her and kissed her.
It was true it had taken both Airk and Sorsha to pull her off. That Sorsha had dragged her by one arm out the front door with the strength of a mother who’d give anything to protect her child. Jade had grazed her hand open where Sorsha threw her against the driveway, picked gravel out of her wound all the way home.
Ballantine didn’t fight her when she told him the next day she was dropping out of school so she could focus on her calling. No one did.
The pair of them were halfway to Galladoorn to fight a demon that had taken over a boy by the time Jade’s grazed hand healed.
And ever since then life was this: sleeping in motels or the back of a truck. Mission after mission after mission as each year the world grew darker and her faith that she could stop it grew sharper. The muscles in her arms and legs and back grew stronger and stronger as her heart grew harder and harder.
Jade lived her whole life out of a battered school backpack and a carved wooden box.
Till three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago when the sun was swallowed by the eclipse. When earth tremors ripped open the ground from coast to coast. When every omen suddenly pointed decisively toward the same thing, The Great Awakening.
Three weeks ago when the entire surviving Legion was cast to the four winds to fight a slew of new demons bursting forth into the world.
Three weeks ago, when she and Ballantine bit off more than they could chew.
Jade had not been able to scrub the blood from all of her clothes before Sorsha rang, her voice hoarse from a long cry, her heart heavy from too many years waiting for another tragedy.
“Please,” she’d said, and Jade was already shoving her feet into her stained leather boots, already gathering the keys to Ballantine’s – to her truck.
“She needs you,” Sorsha had said, and those words burrowed deep into Jade’s hardened heart as she drove through the night, all the way back to the manor she’d been thrown out of, all those terrible years ago.
And now Kit is tied to the bed they used to share, wrists bound and spread, torn shirt soaked with sweat and holy water clinging to her body that heaves with each wounded breath. The sun is going down, but through the ripped curtains the moons are rising.
“I’m not leavin' this time,” Jade promises. “I’m with you till the end. Till the end of all things.” She swallows, hard, sets a determined smile on her face. “But first, till the end of this fucking demon.”
Kit whimpers, a shudder of revulsion quaking all the way down her body. “She’s too–” she begins and then “you should–” and then, meekly, meeker than Kit has ever been in her whole entire life, “just run, Jade.”
“Not happening,” Jade tells her. “If I’m runnin', I’m taking you with me. Who’s the demon, Kit? Tell me its name, so I know who I’m going to destroy.”
Kit’s breath is suddenly sucked into her lungs with a violence that makes Jade’s muscles tense, like fear has developed a solid fist and punched right into Kit’s gut. But Kit fights it, Kit does what she’s done every time the horrors of the world get too much. She closes her eyes.
She reminds herself she isn’t afraid of the dark.
“Lili,” she whispers, through a bile-burned throat.
Jade is glad Kit’s eyes are closed, so Kit can’t see how badly Jade winces.
She’s heard of Lili. The entire Shining Legion has heard of Lili.
Kit chokes out a soft little sob, and she turns her head to the side to try and hide her face in her shoulder. “Face it,” Kit’s voice cracks out, while Jade gathers her strength again. There’s a darkness to her tone; at first Jade can’t tell if it’s the demon surging back or if it’s just Kit, but then the hollow resignation creeps in. “I’m not worth saving, Jade.”
“No, you are, Kit, you are,” Jade’s voice cracks too, and she’s close, dangerously close now, gathering Kit’s clammy face in her hands. It is Jade's heartfelt belief that every soul in the world is worth saving, that there’s nothing that can be done to a person to make them unworthy of that, but no one she believes it about more than Kit. None she will fight as hard for. Jade will tap into every dark corner of her being, will turn her own self inside out, will drain herself dry if it gives her the strength to obliterate this demon. To obliterate anyone who ever touches Kit again.
Jade turns Kit’s face toward her, presses her forehead against Kit’s, stares deep into her eyes. “Listen to me, Kit, I'm going to save you,” she says, and this time, the truth of it sings. Kit’s eyes, blue as the flowers of the flax that made the rope that binds her down, blue as the sky they will live through this night to see, stare up at Jade, needy and trusting, frightened and so, so brave.
They're eyes like a revelation.
Jade’s own eyes open wider as she realises the previously-unimaginable, world-shifting truth: Jade isn't doing this alone. Kit is fighting at her side.
Something swells in her heart as she looks into those eyes, something new.
"You tell her, Kit,” Jade says, and there’s a different quality to the heat in her voice, an undiscovered well of strength her years of training never figured out how to tap. “You tell Lili she won’t live to see the next sunrise.”
Kit’s eyes darken as the stormcloud of her pupils swallows the blue once more, but it’s not over, Jade has absolute faith that this fight is far from over.
“Oh, you shining little sword,” Lili's tainted voice curls out of Kit’s mouth, and she snaps her teeth forward, missing Jade’s lip by a hair. “Come and get me.”