Page 49 of Hellfire to Come
And looked at me.
“The Great Spirit hears your plea,” she said, her voice no longer fully hers. Something deeper rode beneath it, somethingthat was chewing on the words like it didn’t know what to do with them. Like they were foreign. “You offer your life in exchange for your sister’s.”
I nodded, heart stuttering. “Without hesitation.” For whatever was lurking underneath the shaman’s skin spoke the truth. Alice was my sister in all things but blood.
The wind shifted.
Louder now. Not angry. Not hostile. But attentive.
Listening.
“Why?” she asked, her tone laced with suspicion just as before. But this time the question did not come from her alone. It echoed, dissonant, layered. As if a chorus of voices from beneath the soil and above the stars demanded an answer.
“Because she saved me,” I whispered, throat tight. “Not just from death. But from myself. Because she never looked at me like I was a weapon. A monster. Or a tragedy. She saw me as something worth seeing. Something good.”
I took a step forward, toward the center.
“She chose me when she didn’t have to. And I would burn down every version of myself before I let her die because of it.”
The flames blazed brighter. The circle of energy surrounding us shimmered, pulses of light running through the ground like veins in stone.
Laughing Crow’s breath caught and it was the first time I’d seen her startled.
“You would offer your life,” she murmured, “to the earth. To the old powers. Knowing they could and would take it?”
“I don’t care what they take,” I said. “Only that they let her live.” I locked my desperate eyes on hers. “Alice has to live.”
A silence followed. The deepest yet. Not even the fire cracked.
Laughing Crow lowered her head. And when she spoke again, it was softer, almost reverent. “You are not what I expected, Jumilin.”
“I’ve heard that once or twice,” I muttered bitterly, straightening up and dusting off my knees.
She chuckled, the sound dry, but not unkind.
“I have walked this land longer than you can imagine,” the shaman said. “And I have met many who claimed to love. Claimed to sacrifice. But most of them wanted a bargain that did not leave them bleeding. You…” She shook her head. “You speak as if you’ve already died. And perhaps that is why the spirits listen.”
My throat closed. I didn’t know what to say to that. The truth of her words cemented something inside me that I’d refused to acknowledge for a very long time. I did speak like someone that had already died. I lived like it too. I think long before I escaped the cages the first time I knew however this ended it wouldn’t be with me standing. And strangely I was okay with that. Dominic shifted behind me as if to remind me I had people to think of now. My ribcage tightened painfully.
Laughing Crow turned her palms upward, cutting my train of thought. “Then let us ask not just for life,” she said, “but for mercy.”
She drew a blade from her hip, not silver, not iron, but obsidian. Pure and black as sorrow, a long feather dangling from the hilt.
She cut a line across her palm.
Her blood hit the earth, soaking into it immediately.
“Let her life be spared,” she whispered to the wind. “Let the fire that burns her be cooled. Let the voice of her magic be heard and untwisted.”
The wind answered.
It did not howl.
It sighed.
The smoke rose again but this time, it moved toward me.
Not like before, not like mist rising from wet earth or incense curling skyward in reverence. No. This smoke had purpose. Sentience. It came like a memory long buried clawing its way back to the surface. It curled around my chest, my arms, my throat, not strangling, not consuming, but weaving through the spaces between bone and breath.
