Kiersten's Arc

Chapter 12 of 33

Kiersten walked down from the keep with four small fires burning against her skin. The hum in her jaw was gone. Witness sat quiet under her collarbone. She reached the stone house with the green shutters, latched the door, and fell into bed without taking off her boots. Sleep pulled her under fast. She stood on a porch she knew. The house behind Eduardo sagged. Its roof had caved in one corner. The windows were boarded with split planks. Paint peeled from the siding in long strips. She had never seen this house awake, only in him. Eduardo stood in the doorway. His cap sat crooked. His blue shirt hung open at the collar. His auburn eyes were not his. Something black moved behind them, wide and patient, and when he opened his mouth the demon spoke through him. "You left the door open," it said, in his voice. "I came in through him. I stay because you keep looking." Kiersten's hands shook. She reached for the porch rail to steady herself and felt a hand settle on her shoulder instead. Mother Angel stood beside her, curls bright in the dim yard. Behind her, wings the color of old bruise light hovered a butterfly with one wing thinned to almost nothing. "Look," Mother Angel said, kindly. "This is what he has become. Not what you can fix." Kiersten looked. She saw Eduardo behind the demon, small, arms wrapped around his ribs, mouth moving with no sound. She stepped forward. Mother Angel's hand tightened. "No, child. Your reaching is the hallway. Every time you turn toward him, it walks in." Fortune padded up the broken steps and sat between Kiersten and the door. The wheel on Fortune's face turned once and stopped. "You cannot pull him out," Fortune said. "Only he can wake. Your care is the door it uses." The demon smiled with Eduardo's mouth. It waited for her to argue. Kiersten's chest hurt in the old, clean way. She had spent years bending toward endings she already knew. She felt this one now, fixed and not hers. She let her hand fall from the rail. "I see you," she said to Eduardo, not the thing wearing him. "I am not the way in anymore." She turned her back on the porch. The butterfly lifted from Mother Angel's shoulder and drifted between her and the house, its thin wing catching what little light there was. The demon's voice rose behind her and thinned to nothing. Kiersten woke in gray dawn. The four crystal fires still burned steady. Witness pressed once against her ribs, calm. The seam in her chest held. She sat up and understood one thing plainly: she could deepen the bond now, because she had stopped leaving a door propped open for him. She reached for her boots. The bond was hers to build. The hunter was still coming.