your aunts. Conduct the power of all the women he’s ever killed. Together you have the strength—
“Stop!” My father’s command ricochets through the glade, obliterating every other sound. He glares at me, golden eyes flashing and furious again.
I feel my sisters look to me, questioning. They heard her too. But we don’t know how. For a moment, I’m paralysed. Then I think: Together. Each of our powers brought together as one. I recall the first time I saw Leo, the first time I spoke to him in my mind. Now I do the same with my sisters.
Watch me, you’ll know what to do.
I take one quick, deep breath to ready myself. I draw on my dreams. I focus every synapse, every cell. I feel strength, power, coursing through my body once more. I look up to the falling leaves. I twitch my fingers, I tug at them. I whisper, I call. An invitation, a request, a direction. Follow me.
Rise.
Stronger, louder.
Rise, my sisters. Rise!
One by one, the falling leaves of Everwhere still, suspended in the air. Then they begin pulling together until they are circling, in flurries and funnels, siphoned by the quickening rain, every falling drop drawing together tornadoes of leaves, until an aerial tower forms, a whirlpool of bright white.
My father, shocked into stillness, stares up. Within the roar of water I hear a single scream, the pitched scream of a woman in the throes of birth and death, a piercing, primitive, primal scream. Then it’s a battle cry, a clarion call. A hundred thousand cracks of thunder, a hundred thousand sisters howling for destruction, annihilation, obliteration . . .
The roar penetrates everything, everyone. It fills me so that I shake with the sound of my sisters and their mothers, my chest a cathedral of screams. And I see that my father is shaking too, shuddering from deep within, as if he’s being torn apart, unstitched at the seams.
I turn to Liyana. She is drenched, rivers running from her fingers as she conducts the rain. I see that she is screaming too, though I cannot hear her.
Now.
Liyana springs forward, fuelled by the roar, funnelling the great torrent of water and leaves towards our father. The force is like a sword plunged into a stone. Liyana drags the liquid blade down, splitting the seams, wrenching him open. I join the roar, the battle cry of our sisters, our mothers, all the women he’s killed, all the Sisters Grimm. I’m certain I hear Ma’s cry among them, and Bea’s too.
For a second everything is still, suspended, petrified. Liyana lifts her hands and the whirlpool of rain, the tornado of leaves, is twisting through the air, borne on the screams, funnelling down, driving a river of white blood into our father and cleaving him apart.
I turn to Scarlet.
Now!
Scarlet presses her hands together. Sparks ignite. Electricity catches. Flashes of lightning shoot from her fingertips, curling in huge arcs through the air. She sets him alight.
And we all watch him burn.
Legacy
Inheritance
We each feel the darkness at our fingertips. We feel the twitch. The flares. We’ve shared it, as all sisters should, so none of us has too much. But then none of us has a little either. It’s there. We don’t use it. Well, only on occasion, when necessary. Or when we can’t control it. But we are moderate. And nothing terrible happens. At least, it hasn’t yet.
Commemoration
After Leo died, I went to Everwhere every night for a year, though I never told my sisters. They were too afraid to go back, thinking they might meet our father’s spirit. I was afraid of that too, but I didn’t care. I’d brave anything, any depths of darkness, to feel close to Leo again.
I visit still.
Sometimes I’ll see a stray soldier skulking in the woods and think for a moment that it’s him. Then I’ll remember, and my spirits will fall before they’ve barely had a chance to lift. The remaining soldiers have disbanded, I believe, since I hardly see them anymore.
I go to the glade where he died, where the air is infused with his spirit and the soil with his soul, and sit on the trunk of the fallen oak tree. I hoist myself up by one of the long, thick tendrils of ivy that’s encroaching on every inert thing, every tree and shrub and stone. I sit; I close my eyes.
I think about spirits. I remember what Leo said about Aether and I wonder on the possibility of resurrection. I feel his breath