Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(93)
Niko glowered for a moment, then melted into a smile like sunrise, reaching up with both hands to pull my sister’s face down to hers. Blushing a little, I turned away from the private fervor of their kiss.
In the meantime, Luka waited for me by the van, his eyes hooded. His face was pale beneath its olive tint, his hair tousled from lack of sleep, jaw tight the way it was when he hoarded words like a living vault. I approached him slowly, penitent, wondering if he would keep me locked out—but as soon as I lifted a hand to touch his shoulder, he circled my wrist with his long fingers and pulled me to him, crushing me against him so tight he lifted me off the ground. It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable thing, dangling in his arms with my toes just barely brushing the grass, but I’d have let him hold me like that until I died.
“Thank you for coming,” I whispered. “Thank you so much.”
“I’ll always come for you, Missy.” I felt his heart beating steady against my chest. “Always, anytime, anywhere. Though I’d rather just be there to begin with. You should really know at least that much by now.”
I’M NOT SURE what I’d expected from this spell. A cauldron, maybe, bubbling over a low flame. Pickled nightmare nuggets bobbing in glass jars. Fingernails, teeth, black candles, and bloody runes. And nighttime, at the very least.
What I hadn’t expected was to be standing at a lapping lakeshore in broad daylight, staring at the glint of my glasswork bougainvillea, which perched like a diadem on top of the unlikely pile of things we were about to burn.
“So how, exactly, are these bits and bobs supposed to work?” I asked Niko, sweeping my hand at the pile.
“We know Mara bound Death to her through a love ritual, though we can’t know exactly how it worked, and we aren’t her, anyway,” Niko said.
We’d spent over an hour explaining everything to her and Luka. I’d expected more pushback, more incredulity. But then there was Dunja beside us, gazing narrowly at the pile. She should have looked absurd, barefoot in the forest with her snow-fox hair and harem pants, sunlight sparking off the sequined band that covered her breasts above the bare expanse of navel. But she didn’t. Instead, she looked like something precious from another world, too queer and beautiful to be human. Like something that had been born in a realm a sideways step from our own.
“This gathering should act as a reversal,” Niko continued, ticking them off on her fine fingers. “The tapestry from Our Lady of the Rocks is a symbol of boundless love, the willing sacrifice Jacinta made for her husband—her labor and eyesight, in exchange for the hope that she might bring him home. The opposite of Mara’s forced-labor love.”
“Not only that,” Dunja broke in. “That island was meant to be consecrated to Mara, a gift in her name. The brothers who discovered her figurine on that first stone kept it; and Jacinta sought it out, ground it to bits, wove the fragments into the tapestry. Her will—a mortal’s will, but still, not to be dismissed—was that Mara’s power of love help save her husband, the chosen of her heart. It therefore connects directly to our witch mother, but with a purpose equal and opposite to the spell that she wrought. Subverted by one woman’s choice.”
“And Malina’s violin and Iris’s sculpture,” Niko continued. “They represent you, the gifts you inherited as Mara’s daughters so you could be fun and pretty for Death like the spell demands. And Mara’s hair, and Dunja’s, link this ritual to them, specifically.”
“They used to call her Black Mara when she was truly young,” Dunja said, her eyes distant. “She was always proud of her hair. That was how they caught me in the first place; I had to risk getting close enough to her to steal some for this, and they swarmed me, trapped me before I could take it.”
“What about the bones?” Malina asked, choking a little over the last word.
We knew now what Dunja had taken: the remnants of the saint’s right hand, wrapped in a torn-off bit of the velvet raiment. She’d called it his “righteous hand,” and I hadn’t been able to tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic. I wondered with a shudder if there’d still been scraps of tendon attached to it, if it had come loose at the lightest tug, or if she’d had to snap it free like chicken bone.
“From what you’ve said, the Christian canon doesn’t agree with Mara, not if she’s bound to much older gods,” Niko said. “Christianity doesn’t exactly play well with others, particularly witches. That’s probably why you had that reaction at the Ostrog monastery, Iris. Those bones are holy, and they rebel against Mara and her blood. Their burning should release that aversion, and that’ll be our fuel.”
Luka spoke up for the first time. He sat with his back against a pine trunk, the color finally returned to his face now that he was sure I wasn’t going to vanish on him again. “So, basically, you’re just doing what the legends in Mama’s book say. You’re trying to burn her—and then drown her, I assume, since we’re by the water.”
Niko raised her eyebrows at him. “That’s right. Do you object?”
“I don’t object, gnat,” he tossed back. “I’m just not sure we’re going about this the right way.”
“And why not?”
“Because you’re acting as though it’s an algorithm, and all you have to do is plug in the proper values for it to spit out the result you want. That’s not how spellwork goes. A collection of symbols isn’t enough by itself. There has to be something—something more. Active intention, maybe. Even I know that much from Mama’s stories.”