Lilith's Arc

Chapter 35 of 40

Apollo was gone, but the fear he'd stirred did not leave. Lilith walked back to the temple where her family slept. She had bound them to eternity. She had paid every price the spell demanded. Still she did not know if the binding would hold when death came reaching. No spell had ever been tested against it. She could seal a thousand memories and never learn the truth until something struck at one of her own. The answer came before dawn. Hadley began to scream. Lilith ran. The baby lay in her crib, and the glass of the window above her had cracked into a web. A shard hung loose. As Lilith reached the door, it fell, straight for the crib. Behind her, Novalee stood frozen in the hall. Gabe pushed past his sister and lunged for the crib, too far to catch it. The shard struck. It hit Hadley's blanket and drove down. Lilith's throat closed. She could not reach her. She did the only thing left. She sang. Her goddess side seized the thread of the binding. Her mermaid and siren voices poured out, not to enchant, but to test what she had built. The gold light at the spell's center flared. Teal edges snapped tight around all four of her family at once. The glass touched Hadley and stopped. It did not cut. It lay against her skin like a dull stone, then slid to the floor and shattered harmless. Hadley blinked up, unhurt. She was not bleeding. She could not be. Gabe reached the crib and lifted her. He held very still, the way he always did, watching the glass on the floor. "It should have cut her," he said. "It should have," Lilith answered. Tre came in last, breathing hard. He looked at the crib, then at the loose glass, then at Lilith's face. He knew what she had been afraid to say for months. "It held," he said. Not a question. Plain, the way he said everything. "It held," Lilith said. Her hands shook. "Death came for her. The spell turned it away." Novalee had not moved. She stared at her baby sister, safe in Gabe's arms. "So none of us can die now," she said. "Not even if we wanted to." Lilith looked at her daughter. The words were flat, but they were not relief. "No," she said. "None of you can." Novalee said nothing more. She turned and went back down the hall. Lilith held Hadley to her chest. The binding was real. It had done what she built it to do. Her family would not age past her, and now she knew they would not fall to a wound either. She had won the thing she chased across a hundred nights. But Novalee's face stayed with her. Her daughter had asked what it meant to be unable to die, and Lilith had no answer that would make her feel wanted.