Poison (37 page)

But I had come to kill. I tried to remember that as the snakes became rats and swarmed toward the barrier. One of them bit me hard on my leg before it fell down dead. I gasped at the pain, but I couldn’t stop to look at the wound. More were coming, and behind them, birds.

A wall of birds.

“Hurry, Bryce,” I called, my voice shaking.

The sky was black with them. I’d had no idea there were so many of the Seer’s followers. They’d come out in force, though, to stop the exodus of the Travelers. And me.

I shot out my hands at them, but there were too many of them, and I couldn’t take them all from a distance. As poisonous as I was, I just didn’t have that much power anymore. Even when they got closer, it was taking a lot longer for them to die. I was getting tired, and my poison was being spent.
Oh, man,
I thought. What a time to run out of juice.

Meanwhile, the people behind me screamed in panic as they tumbled through the narrow portal, looking over their shoulders at the snakes, rats, and vultures that were bearing
down on them. But they weren’t the target now. I was the one the Seer’s followers were after. In a suicidal frenzy they swarmed around me, biting and scratching my legs until my knees buckled and I found myself on the ground in the middle of a moving sea of repulsive creatures bent on destroying me.

I struggled against them, but I was exhausted. There was nothing more I could do. A rat tangled in my hair, chattering. I gagged in revulsion but was too weak even to stand. I had no power left in my hands. The stone in my ring was the flat gray of limestone.

With the last of my strength I pulled myself upright and picked up two of the rats. They bit my fingers until my blood washed over them and dripped onto the ground. When they fell out of my hands, they changed back into human witches, still clawing at me with their gray fingernails. Their mouths opened into weird, perverted smiles, their rank breath spewing through brown stubs of rotten teeth, their eyes glinting with malice and victory.

They pulled me up by my hair until I dangled with my feet off the ground. “Bryce,” I panted. I don’t know if he heard me. “Hurry. Please.” But I knew in my heart that nothing he could do would help me now. I only wished I could have won this battle. I might have felt that my life had been worth something after all.

But even this,
I thought,
even this pain, this failure, was worthwhile
. Because I’d tried. I’d done my best, and I would keep trying until the very end, and that meant I was something more than poison. I was a human being—flawed, maybe, wrong, but still a person whose life had been worth living.

“Forgive me,” I whispered, knowing that I was worthy of
forgiveness. That we all were, no matter what we’d done, and why.

I blinked away my tears. I wasn’t the only one who needed forgiveness. We all had something of the Darkness in us. We all just did what we could.

“I forgive you, Dad,” I said. Immediately I felt as if a weight of a thousand pounds had lifted off my chest. “And Mim,” I went on. “And Mrs. Fowler.” I took a deep breath. “And Morgan, too,” I managed. “I forgive you all.” My words flew into the wind like the fragrance of flowers. They left my heart clean and full of peace, and I knew at last that I was free.

Suddenly there was a brilliant light that bleached out everything in sight. A gasp of wonder went up from the crowd of Travelers, and I felt the witches’ fingernails scrape against my skin as they released me. Wobbling, I stood on my own feet again, shielding my eyes from the light.

Eventually I could see a shape in the center of the blinding light. At first the shape was amorphous and nearly blue, like the cobalt heart of a flame, but as the light began to ebb, it grew more distinct, revealing a human figure.

My heart was pounding. What new horror had the Seer sent? It was a woman. I could see that much. An alien, then? Or a hologram? Or had one of the Avalon witches shape-shifted into something like a burning sun come to kill us all with its heat?

“I should have known you’d screw up without me,” the figure inside the light said conversationally.

“What?” I squinted at the bright halo.

“You’re supposed to be the hero here,” she went on, stepping out of the nimbus of light.

“Morgan,” I whispered.

“Who else? You summoned me, didn’t you?”

“Summoned?”

“Okay, you
thought
of me. That counts.” She pulled a wand out of her sleeve and shot it at a pile of sniffing rats. They dissolved into jelly. “Good thing too. Somebody had to bail out your sorry butt.”

Clumsily I lumbered toward her. “Morgan,” I began, looking warily at the Travelers, who recognized her and were tripping over one another in a frantic attempt to reach the portal. “Please don’t hurt them. They haven’t—”

“Oh, shut up,” she snapped. “I won’t touch your precious people.”

“They’re
your
people,” I said.

“Stop talking and touch my wand.”

I wasn’t sure what she was planning, but a new wave of vultures was heading toward us, so I did as she said. The moment my hand came in contact with the tip of Morgan’s wand, I felt a powerful surge like nothing I’d ever felt before. The shock of it was so strong that it nearly knocked me backward. Instantly the ring on my finger glowed a brilliant blue that shot out across the sky in Klieg-like rays, and the vultures fell.

“Go now!” I shouted to Bryce.

“Almost done,” he called back. “But you have to come, too. Once the portal’s closed—”

“Just
go
!” I screamed.

Then I couldn’t hear him any longer.

The sky, so bright now that involuntary tears streamed out of my eyes, reeked of burning flesh. “I think they’re gone,” I said, mostly to myself, but Morgan answered me.

“Good,” she said, breaking the contact with me. For a second
I could see the space between us. “Because the next wave is coming, and it’s going to be rough.”

She nodded toward the grove of trees from where the Seer and her followers had come. Something that looked like a thick snake was winding out of it now, twisting like a long rope toward us.

“Listen,” Morgan said. The snake was talking.

“I call thee to my aid, O mighty one, thou who is greater than all things. . . . ”

The sound dissipated as the wind changed. I looked at Morgan, frowning in bewilderment. “What is that?”

“The Seer,” she said. “She’s calling the Darkness.”

That was when the snake began to hiss, and then to grow, squirming upright like a giant cobra.

“The . . . the Seer?” I asked numbly.

“Old friendships die hard,” she said with a mocking smile.

The snake rose up over us, looming so large that it blotted out the sun.

“But you’re not still her . . . friend,” I said uncertainly.

“I made a deal with her, remember?”

I looked down at the ring whose poison was destroying this whole magical universe. “You aren’t that person anymore,” I said softly.

Morgan shrugged. “Does it matter?” She looked over at me. “I think she’s come to tell me that a deal’s a deal.”

•  •  •

The snake crept closer, and I saw that it had transformed into a twister, a hundred feet high, picking up everything in its path as it grew darker and denser. And it was coming at us with the speed of a locomotive.

“Oh, Gram,” I squeaked. I could feel myself shaking.

“Stop thinking about yourself,” Morgan said. I thought it was an odd thing to say, especially since I was only thinking of myself in terms of my imminent death, but it brought me to my senses. She was right—it wasn’t about me, and it hadn’t been ever since I’d had to leave Whitfield. As far as the future went, I had none. I’d known that when I’d gotten to Avalon. Either I would leave every last bit of myself out on this field or everything I’d been through would have been for nothing.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m ready.” Morgan turned to look straight at me. “What?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t going to show me another monster on the horizon.

“I just want to tell you . . . ” She hesitated.

Can this wait?
I thought. I looked at the snake slithering at incredible speed across the field. “What
is
it, Morgan?” I nearly shouted.

“. . . that I’m sorry,” she finished. “About everything. I wish I hadn’t brought you into this.”

I swallowed. Could she have waited? And I answered myself.
No, she couldn’t.
Because she wasn’t expecting us to live through what was ahead either. Whatever had to be said, whatever had to be mended, it had to be done now.

“Forget that,” I said, reaching over to squeeze her hand.

•  •  •

Suddenly it was as if the sky exploded around me. Debris flew everywhere as the wind increased to hurricane proportions and the perennial sunny spring of Avalon was engulfed in pitch blackness. In the distance I heard Bryce’s voice call my name, but it was too late to talk. Too late for everything, really. The Travelers were all safely away. There was nothing
to do anymore but take whatever the Darkness had to give.

Just do what you can
, I told myself as Morgan and I stepped hand in hand into the heart of the Darkness. I screamed, not out of fear but to let the Darkness know that the two of us were there, in its belly, and that these two women would not go meekly to their deaths.

I felt my hair standing on end as I reached out my free hand. Through even this primeval blackness my ring glowed, a dot of light in the dark depths of space that had descended on us.

Morgan’s grip on me loosened. I looked over to see her vanishing into the blackness. “No!” I shouted as I realized that she was leaving. “No!”

But in an instant she was gone.

Well, that’s just fricking great,
I thought, furious. But then, what had I expected? Morgan and the Seer had made a pact with the Darkness a long time ago. She’d told me herself: A deal’s a deal. Had I really thought she’d help me do anything except die?

A strangled sound shrilled out of my throat. Forgiveness, my tuchus. I wished I had her throat between my hands.

“Oh, hell,” I said out loud, allowing myself to breathe again. What did it even matter, really? Dying alone or holding hands, it was still dying. The Travelers were safe. I’d done my job. It was time for the poison girl to move on.

I thought of Peter. He would miss me. I’d been faced with death before, but Peter had been with me then. It was better this way, because I knew he’d at least have a chance to be safe.

But he would miss me. My thoughts raced back to when I’d last seen him in New York. When we’d held our hands to
opposite sides of Gram’s car window, all I’d been able to feel was the glass, but through it I could imagine his skin, his soft lips, his beating heart. I would never know these things again, even if I lived. And so it didn’t matter to me that I wouldn’t live. Only that I would never touch him again.

As the Native Americans used to say, it was a good day to die.

But Peter would miss me.

•  •  •

Then the speed of the black whirlwind around me picked up with a wild sound like bagpipes from hell. In the center of it the face of the Seer seemed to emerge, ancient and mad, its rotting teeth sharpened to daggerlike points, its mouth open wide.

Just do what you can,
I reminded myself, willing my hands to stop shaking. Dying wouldn’t be so hard if it weren’t for the fear that came with it. “I love you, Peter,” I whispered. I knew he couldn’t hear me, but I hoped that maybe he would feel it anyway.

That centered me a little, although the Darkness was pressing upon me like a huge weight. The wind was so forceful that I could barely breathe. In another moment, I knew, the whirlwind would pick me up and tear me to pieces.

Just then I saw my ring glowing brighter, brighter than I’d ever seen it, until, in what had to be a trick of the light, it seemed to lift off my finger.

It formed a still ball of light in the whirling Darkness. I gasped with what I thought must be my last breath as the floating ball of light elongated into the form of a woman, shimmering like a goddess in the dark vacuum where I stood.

I watched, astonished, as Morgan’s face appeared in the glow, as if she had become the ring itself. Before my eyes she had transformed into something eternal and beautiful, and powerful beyond imagining.

“Thank you for being my friend,” the ethereal being breathed into my ear before she leaped into the Darkness like a diver slicing through water.

She whirled inside the cone of the Darkness, a blur of gold. It was her life force I was watching, everything about Morgan that the Darkness had not taken from her. She thought she had traded her soul for power, but a soul can never really be lost. Now she had found it again, and she had used it to save me.

The light that was Morgan exploded into a million fragments. I heard the Seer scream as the Darkness slowly vanished into fog, consumed by the power of Morgan le Fay’s beautiful, blessed soul.

•

The sky cleared. The ring, now a flat, spent stone, still sat on my finger. Some things really were forever, and evil was one of them. Somewhere, I knew, the Darkness still existed. It always would. Goodness—or love, or whatever was the Darkness’s opposite—was different. It came from tiny dots of light inside each of us. Morgan’s light had saved my life. Mine had saved the Travelers’ lives. And theirs would pass through the Darkness too, in their own ways, in their own time. In the end we would always have a fighting chance.