Page 57 of Family Found

The land, pragmatic to the last, didn’t go looking. It didn’t call on my mom or aunt. No, the mental image I had was of the land opening the front door to my mind and saying, loud and clear, Death is ever welcome in this house.

For just a moment that felt like a shard of eternity, everything went silent. Death stepped across the threshold of my mind.

She was neither man nor woman, she was both and neither. She was not pain or hate or anger, although some met her with those emotions. The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh was heir to, as Hamlet said, Lady Death knew them all, had seen them all. They didn’t scare her.

The land stepped aside, and Death looked at me.

There was a strange kind of beauty in her. I could not argue it, couldn’t unsee it. She took up room in whatever place inside of me could receive such a guest and waited for me to speak.

The bones and lives of my sister mages, of the few brother mages, of those venerated mages who were neither or both, you hold them. Please. I need their strength and knowledge, just this once.

Lady Death smiled, and I knew this meant she had granted my request. I also knew that it would cost me.

I DO NOT TAKE IN GREED OR WITH ILL INTENT. IT WILL BE A WHILE YET BEFORE I COLLECT, MAGE. AND REMEMBER, I CARRY OR CRADLE OR COMFORT. I DO NOT CUT OR REAP, NOR BURY FOREVER. I AM MANY THINGS. I AM NOT CRUEL.

And Lady Death folded her cloak back, her cloak of shadows, and out stepped my sisters, brothers, brother-sisters, and siblings.

Old hands, young hands, cold hands, warm hands, they all joined atop the Stone, and they sang both hymn and requiem, majors and minors combined, and the Stone sang with them.

Kinnek’s wound closed fully, and he went back to stitching the tears shut, a dozen hands holding the seams together to make his work easy. I pushed bullets out of bodies and stemmed the flow of blood, mended flesh and skin like Kinnek did the fabric of the veils. We pushed the Koa Esher magic back together, and shuttered the muzzles of attacking guns with nothing but our hands. They misfired, and the sparks that escaped looked like flowers.

I was spread so thin, my attention everywhere, but I made sure my mate was fine. I did leave him with a scar though. Just before I mended his skin for good, I knew that he would like that scar as a mark of how he had protected me, the one he cherished most, in this moment.

“Holy fucking hell, he’s a badass twink dispensomancer after all,” Vergis mumbled as he took aim, guided by Lady Death herself. His bullet found its mark yet again, and the Lady reaped.

We were at the last stitch faster than I had thought, but there it was. Kinnek closed the seam and sealed it with his magic.

And like that, with all of us, it had been done. The veil to the monster world was closed, the monsters who were here already stranded and alone.

The anointed before me whom Death had allowed one more deed, clapped their hands and slowly walked back to the Lady, each touching the Stone as they went, each turning to look at me, the last of their line. I saw their faces for seconds only, but I knew I would remember each one.

At the end of the procession came the green-eyed witch. She stopped and looked at me. We didn’t speak the same language, but I understood her smile and nod of gratitude, and I returned it. I didn’t even know her name, but I owed her and the others everything. We all did.

She looked over toward where the celadon was still raging at having to stay back from where our archers and armed guys could hit him. Furious, he lifted his blade and brought it down on the first of the chains holding the purple beasts, then the other. The mages with him were smart enough not to hold on and let go, and the beasts ran toward the Raikengana.

“Aljos,” my witch ancestor said before she returned to the Lady.

I assumed that meant something along the lines of, oh, look, another cola asshat, and she was right. Both the land’s and my attention turned to him.

Someone else is passing through the veils, the land said.

That could only mean more Koa Esher. I wanted to scream to everyone that we needed to get away, that they needed to fall back to the Stone, but Fellisse and Nokim were busy handling one beast, and Inkiri sprinted around the Stone to handle the other. Both of those purple things were coming for me.

In the time it took Inkiri to draw one of his swords and do his swoon-worthy decapitation move, I saw who was coming through the veils, but at first, I didn’t get it. I thought it was reinforcements, more people who wanted to kill us.

But it wasn’t. It was Aragis. The two Koa Esher mages who’d held the beasts had stepped back, likely afraid of the celadon’s temper. He was enraged at seeing the beasts being dealt with by my guys. He wasn’t paying any attention to what was happening around him. He didn’t see Aragis, who had appeared behind him.

I got closer with my outside-of-myself sense, but the moment I did, I wished I hadn’t. Aragis had found a knife somewhere. No, not a knife. This was one of the things Gesango had packed, and I’d pronounced it for him: scalpel.

Aragis took one step, uncertain because of his mutilated feet, but he didn’t fall. He grabbed the celadon’s left horn with force and jerked it back and to the side so that the celadon reflexively bent his head back. There was a moment of recognition in his eyes, slick and sticky like dried tears and sweat against the skin.

Aragis sliced right through the celadon’s throat, driving the blade deep without a hint of hesitation, and the blood started pouring.

Inkiri, done with one beast, looked at where Fellisse was ramming his sword into the head of the other. Nokim had burned one half of the beast’s face, and it whined, both because it was dying and at the smell of blood it would never get to feast on.

Across the field, Aragis dropped the scalpel and stepped around the celadon. He wanted the celadon to know that he had done this, I knew. Aragis wanted his face to be the last the celadon ever got to see before he died, and he got that wish. I could no longer see the Lady all that well, but her shadow passed across the field to collect, and collect she did. The celadon died in the mud, his white robes filthy with his own blood.

But Aragis was still there, and while he’d acted too fast for the two mages to stop him, there were other Koa Esher there, using human guns, and Aragis wouldn’t be able to outrun them. He didn’t even try. He just stood there and watched blood ooze from the celadon’s corpse.