The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(47)

“Bitch!” he said, and swung the wine bottle at it.

Another wasp joined the first. Greenmantle shook his arm, dislodging it, but a third flew at him. A fourth, a fifth, a hallway-full of them. They were all over him. He was wearing a beautiful jacket, and boxers, and wasps.

The earrings fell to the floor as he spun. In the mirror, his reflection dripped tears and he saw not wasps, but Piper, her arms and smile wrapped around him.

“We’re through,” her mouth said.

The lights went out.

It was 6:22.





You could say what you liked about Piper Greenmantle, but she wasn’t a quitter, even when things didn’t turn out exactly as she imagined. She kept going to Pilates long after it was physically satisfying, continued attending book club after she discovered she was a far speedier reader than her fellow members, and persisted in getting fake mink eyelashes sewed into her own every two weeks, even after the salon location closest to her was shut down for health violations.

So when she went looking for a magical sleeping entity supposedly buried near her rental house, she didn’t quit until she found it.

Unmaker.

That had been the first thing it had said when she’d found it. It had taken her a moment longer to realize that it was replying to her question (“What the hell?”).

In Piper’s defence, the sleeper was unsettling. She’d been expecting a human, and instead she’d found a murder-black six-legged creature that she would have called a hornet if she didn’t firstly find hornets repellent and secondly think hornets had no business being eleven inches long.

“That is a demon,” Neeve had said. Neeve was the third leg on their uncomfortable tripod. She was a mild-voiced, squat woman with pretty hands and bad hair; Piper thought she was a television psychic but could not remember how she’d arrived at this information.

Neeve had not seemed happy to have uncovered a demon, but Piper had been dying at the time and unchoosy with her friends. She’d skipped over all other social niceties and said to the demon, “I woke you. Do I get a favour? Fix my body.”

I will favour you.

And it had. The air in the darkened tomb had gone a little shifty, and then Piper had stopped bleeding to death. She had expected that to be the end of it. It turned out, though, that a favour was a one-time affair, but favouring was for ever.

Now look at her. They were out of that cave, the sun was sort of shining, and Piper had just killed her cowardly dirtbag husband. Magic was churning through her and, to be honest, she was feeling pretty badass. Beside her, a waterfall was crashing upward, backwards, the water spraying up into the sky in great gasps. The tree closest to Piper was shedding its bark in peeling, wet clumps.

“Why does the air feel like this?” Piper asked. “It’s like it’s scratching me. Is it going to twitch like this the entire time?”

“I believe it is calming,” Neeve said in her faded voice. “The further we travel from the moment of your husband’s death. These are aftershocks. The forest is trying to rid itself of the demon, which seems to use the same power source, focused through the forest. The forest is reacting to being used to kill. I can sense that this place is about creation, and so any step you take that is opposite to that will cause this kind of spiritual quake.”

“We all do things we don’t want to,” Piper said. “And it’s not like we’re going to be killing loads of people. This was just to prove to my father that I was being serious about making up with him.”

The demon asked, Now what do you wish?

It was clinging to the marled old bark of a tree, back hunched in the way hornets curl when they are in the cold or damp or breeze off a waterfall. Its antennae quivered in her direction, and it still hummed in time with a swarm that was no longer in evidence. Overhead, the sun shook; Piper had a thought that it wasn’t really daytime at all. Another bit of bark sloughed off the tree.

“Are you harmful to the environment?” Piper had always been attentive to her carbon footprint. It seemed pointless to have spent two decades recycling if she was going to destroy an entire ecosystem.

I am a natural product of this environment.

A branch sagged to the ground beside Piper. Its leaves were black and running with a thick yellow liquid. The air continued to shudder.

“Piper.” Neeve took Piper’s hand in a tender way, looking as serene as someone could when dressed in tattered rags beside a waterfall travelling in reverse. “I know that when you plunged into the sleeper’s tomb, pushing me out of the way, ensuring that you and you alone would have the sleeper’s favour, you were hoping to cut me out of the loop and continue in a future where you and you alone controlled your own choices and enjoyed the demon’s favour, probably leaving me in the cavern to wander at best and die at worst. At the time, I’ll admit I was very upset with you, and the feelings I had then are not feelings that I’m proud of now. I see now that you not only have some trust issues, and you didn’t know me. But if you want …”

Piper missed a large part of this as she noticed Neeve’s shapely fingernails. They were enviably perfect little coins of keratin. Piper’s own nails were ragged from clawing out of the collapsed cavern.

“… there are better ways to accomplish your goals. Really it’s essential that you learn to rely on my considerable experience in magic.”