Blood Casters if she ever wanted to get serious.
“Can you honestly say that you would’ve gone on all these missions where you knew that Emil was being protected by Spell Walkers if Brighton wasn’t there?”
Prudencia takes a deep breath. There are words on the tip of her tongue, but she keeps them to herself and walks away. Hiding from her truth seems to be her signature.
If Wesley hadn’t pulled me away from June, I would invite him to go with me to pick up Atlas’s car. But I’m pissed, so I head down the stairs to avoid him and Iris, and once I’m outside, I jump into the air and glide through the shadows of the night with the wind in my ears.
It doesn’t take too long to arrive at the church. I’m careful because there is still one enforcer tank parked out front, with an ambulance truck and police cars nearby. The body bags with dead acolytes should be brought out soon enough. Police officers are taking statements and I wonder if the eyewitnesses are exaggerating details about what happened like so many have in the past.
I unlock Atlas’s car, but before I make my way back to Aldebaran for updates on Brighton, I open the storage compartment and pull out the wine bottle that’s holding Atlas’s ashes. I cremated him myself with the power that manifested after his death; I’ll die before I let a poet get their hands on that story.
I’m not an expert on ghosts. It’s not an enemy force we’ve crossed swords with before, and I grew up knowing just the obvious details, like how ghosts can only appear under night skies and how they only wander the world if they were violently murdered. But I learned something valuable because of Luna’s ritual. An alchemist proficient in necromancy can summon a wandering ghost; they just need something of the person from when they were alive and the presence of the person who killed them. It doesn’t seem cosmically fair to the ghosts, but if there’s one bright side to June possessing me when she shot Atlas in the heart with a spell, it’s that I should count as his killer too.
But first I’ll kill June and avenge him.
I press Atlas’s ashes against my heart, daydreaming of the night when I get to summon his ghost and peacefully send him off into the stars.
Four
Nightmare
EMIL
My brother is a nightmare.
The streets are crowded with enforcers casting spells into the night as their tanks blaze in gold fire. Brighton has flown higher than every building around him, and he freezes in the air, admiring his chaos. He has three heads with eyes as dark as black holes, and streams of phoenix fire are flowing from the palms of his six hands. I fly into the air to tackle him, to get him to stop, but he’s untouchable. I go through him like he’s made of air. I float in front of his face, begging him to stop, and there’s nothing but cruel laughter echoing from all three of his heads. The city is his to destroy. Finally, when I’m brave enough to stop my brother and conjure fire of my own, Brighton unleashes an inferno toward me and—
I snap awake, groaning and panting.
My brother was a nightmare. That’s all. It was all a nightmare. Brighton wouldn’t ever go dark like that. It’s all in my head.
I remember pieces of conversation, of an argument between Brighton and Prudencia, but neither of them are with me now. I’m alone in a room with bright white walls and lights that hurt my eyes, so I shift to the see-through ceiling and stare out into the night sky. I don’t know what time it is, or even what day it is, but I don’t see the Crowned Dreamer or its glow stretched across the darkness. Not even a single star in sight. This constellation is rare and won’t return to the sky until I’m an old man, assuming I get to live that long. Maybe my next life will see it, or the one after that, or however many lives I get to have before someone gets me good with an infinity-ender.
This bed I’m in is too firm, and I’m hot, so I remove the sheet and realize I’m shirtless. There’s dried blood around my stomach from where Luna stabbed me. The wound is closed, but it looks odd, like discolored, stretched-out skin; someone’s healed me. But I don’t think it was Eva.