Montague Von Vexx's Arc

Chapter 11 of 11

Montague stood by the dark pond in the courtyard, his sister wrapped in a blanket beside him. Wisteria waited at his other shoulder, hands folded, eyes on the eastern gate. The sky had gone gray at the edges. Dawn was close, and Alastair had not come back. Then the iron gate creaked open. Red roses trembled on the black bars as Alastair stepped through. The obsidian blade still hung from his hand, its dark surface streaked with something darker. He did not sheathe it yet. He looked at Montague, then at Wisteria, then at the sister standing between them, and the line of his shoulders finally dropped. "It is done," Alastair said. He walked to them slowly. The blade lowered as he came, until its tip touched the stone. "He will not reach for any of us again." Montague did not ask for the details. He had carried his own silence for two hundred years. He knew the shape of what a man brought back from a night like this. He only stepped forward and put a hand on his brother's shoulder. Alastair did not pull away. Wisteria reached for the blade. Alastair let her take it. She set it carefully on the rim of the pond, where the still black water held the first pale light. "Whatever comes next," she said quietly, "we decide it here. Together." Their sister lifted her eyes to each of them in turn, and for the first time since the chamber broke open, she smiled. Montague looked at the three faces beside him in the gray morning. His brother, who had come back for him twice now. His brother's wife, who had chosen to stand with him instead of behind him. His sister, breathing, alive, returned. He had spent two centuries believing he would have to earn his place again. He understood now that the place had been waiting for him all along. The sun rose over Nightshade Grove. The four of them walked back through the rose-wound gate as one.