Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(106)

The last thing I heard as he pulled me through was Malina calling my name, before her voice cut out as fully as if it were sliced clean through with glass.





EPILOGUE


Malina



I COULDN’T HEAR MY SISTER.

All my life I’d heard her, steady as the rush of blood in my own ears. Iris had sounded like the rain. Sometimes storms, sometimes light patters, sometimes the sweet, lashing gales after a long drought. Sometimes even the kind that came with rainbows. The kind you wanted to feel on your face while you held the rest of your body underwater in the summer sea.

Rain could be so warm. No one ever really talked about that.

But she’d always been there, water rushing against the windows of my soul, shushing me to sleep. In one form or another, she’d flooded me with sound, like a waterfall that kept me safe in my own cave. A water shield that made me invisible, that let me do whatever I wanted. That hid the way I burned so freely inside myself.

And now I couldn’t hear her.

The agony was like nothing I’d ever felt, but what was I supposed to do with it? Tears would sound too much like she had sounded. I couldn’t even cry for her, or I’d never get up again, peel myself away from all this stone beneath my cheek.

I didn’t actually remember having fallen down at all, but then there were hands picking me up. Had I been on the ground? Had I passed out? I must have, if there were coven daughters lifting me to my feet with strangely gentle hands. One of them still had a half-snout and fangs. “So you’re the one who was baying,” I said woozily to her. “Aren’t you supposed to be rending me from stem to stern or something?”

“No one shall be rending anyone,” a tripled voice rang out, and I turned. Mara was there, somehow slightly less like a charred, melted plastic doll in the starlit dark. “The worst is done; the damage is wrought. There will be no more evil wreaked. Not by us, at the very least.”

“Of course the worst is done!” I shrieked at her. I hadn’t meant to scream like that, but now it felt like the only sound I was likely to make for a while. “Riss is gone gone gone, he took her away! I need her back! Give her back to me!”

“We all need her back, child,” she said, again in those calm but ravaged tones. It was so strange I bothered to listen below it, just for a second. Beneath she sounded like a careful detonation, a building scheduled for demolition caving, controlled, unto itself. “We need her now because he is free. I have failed. My net has failed. I can feel him stir already under the fathoms.”

“Fjolar?” I demanded. My voices were pure cacophony, a music box shattering under a hammer, all snapped cords and smashed-up gears. “Death, or whatever? Obviously he was free before, at least free enough to stalk Riss and then take her. And so what, you don’t have him trapped, so now you don’t get to live forever anymore, you miserable hag?” I tossed my head back and hawked thickly, spitting in her face. “Do you think I care what happens to you now?”

She wiped it away calmly, no trace of anger anywhere on her, nowhere in her sound. Nothing but devastation, and that buckling iron chassis of control. “It’s not about what happens to me, child. And my feckless boy—my death-son made of the flesh I lent him—is not what we should fear.”

I flinched away from her, but she caught me in an iron grip, made me meet her gaze. She stroked lightly at the edges of my face, and for the first time I saw the dead weight in her eyes, thousands of years of exhaustion floodlit by the moonlight. “It’s what happens to you, and this whole unready world, when a king of demons walks its face again.”