Belladonna

Chapter Thirty-five

The next morning, Michael stepped outside and looked at the two men waiting for him.

“You here already?” he asked.

Teaser grinned. “You are a lollygagger, a layabout, and a…What was the other word?” He raised his eyebrows at Sebastian.

“I think Michael gets the idea,” Sebastian said. “We’ve been here long enough for the ladies to have made an assessment of people’s gardening skills.” He handed Michael a rake. “They have taken the sensible men and are working in the walled garden. We—”

“The garden idiots,” Teaser said gleefully.

“—get to rake the leaves around the house and do the weeding in the flower beds where our efforts will cause the least harm,” Sebastian finished. “Unsupervised.”

Michael looked at the two incubi, who looked extraordinarily pleased about this arrangement. And he was beginning to understand the gleam in Sebastian’s eyes. “Well, I guess that tells us our place in the pecking order, doesn’t it?”

“You do some luck-wishing for us this morning, Magician?” Sebastian asked.

“Maybe a little.” Michael grinned. “Maybe just a little.”

She shivered in the chilly air. Because being cold and unhappy made her vengeful, the deserts within her landscape baked under a merciless sun, and the surviving bonelovers couldn’t cross the burning sand. The river in the death rollers’ landscape got so hot fish cooked in the water—and even the death rollers were driven out of the water by the heat. But fog shrouded the plateau where the Wizards’ Hall stood, and fog filled the corridors, brushing against the Dark Guides’ skins like damp, clingy fingers. And rain, tasting like bitter tears, poured down on the rest of Wizard City.

She walked beneath the merciless sun, walked along the banks of that simmering river, walked through the fog and the bitter rain. Her heart poured out Dark purity, and Ephemera manifested everything that came from that heart.

And all the dark things that had once wanted nothing more than to chew up the Light and spit it out now huddled in their mounds, in their caves, in their houses—and shivered in fear.

“They went home,” Michael muttered as he made his way down to the sandbox. “They all went home. Lady of Light, my thanks for small favors.” And it was a small favor, since they were all coming back tomorrow to finish the work.

He stepped into the part of the box that held the gravel, set a little clutch of violets on the sand, then sat down on the bench.

Those women were ferocious when they set their minds to a task. It scared him a little to see how well Caitlin Marie fit in with Nadia and Lynnea. And Aunt Brighid, whom he’d always thought of as a formidable woman, didn’t seem intimidating at all compared with those two.

“They mean well. It’s a small comfort to my aching body, but they mean well.” He took out his whistle and sighed. “Just you and me tonight, wild child. Sebastian is done in, so I sent him on home.” And part of that decision was the growing doubt that their efforts were making any difference. “If you could take that little clutch of flowers to the same place you took the basket, I’ll play a little while and then we’ll all get some rest.”

He waited. Felt nothing.

“Wild child?”

Ephemera finally answered his call, but the world wasn’t happy. He couldn’t prove it, but he suspected that the Dark currents in all parts of the world were a little swollen, and little bits of unhappiness were occurring to a lot of people—a lost brooch, a broken dish, a missing toy. Each thing wasn’t more than an extra drop of unhappiness, but all those extra drops eventually could change the tone of a family or a village.

“You can do this, wild child. I know you can.”

Gone. A flurry of notes that sounded in his mind like a child blaming him for some unhappiness, and Ephemera was gone.

He could think of one reason why the world would be unhappy with him. “Did something happen when you took the basket?”

No response. He couldn’t even do that much.

The violets looked sad in the waning light. A lover’s token, rejected before it was received.

Since he was playing for no one but himself, he played the music he called “Glorianna’s Light.” Then he played the music of love. The music that remembered the touch of her hand, the feel of her lips, the wonder of being inside her.

Tears slipped down his face, and his heart ached with the remembering, but he kept playing.

And never noticed when the little clutch of violets disappeared.

She picked up the little clutch of violets and felt the resonances that had names, faces, memories. Pretty little flowers with savage hooks that dug in and dug in until she wept from the pain of remembering those names, those faces. Screamed out the agony of wanting to touch those names, those faces.

Don’t belong there. Not anymore.

But the hooks dug in, dug in, dug in. And from the thin threads that were anchored in another landscape, Light flowed.

World? It whispered. World? Is there Light?