Sing Sweet Nightingale (37 page)

I bite my lip and nod, but then we all flinch.

Bright orange light floods the room, and with it comes an icy wind that bites into my bones. Hudson steps closer, his attention locked on the portal and the tendrils of light beating against the shield created by the gemstones. We can’t carry enough with us to keep it up. We have to go in with what we’re wearing. Without turning toward me, Hudson’s hand finds mine. Holding each other tight, we both take a breath and jump into Hell.

Orane’s world is in chaos. The opera hall is crumbling and the cherry trees are bare, but the willow tree is triple its usual size. The once-lush ground is a desert, and the crystalline lake has become a roiling black mass.

Hudson told me that Calease’s world started decaying as soon as he fought her control. Maybe I’ve been doing the same thing. Maybe I’ve managed to weaken him. Then again, “weak” is a relative word. Orane can create buildings in the blink of an eye and has the ability to probe into my mind for my darkest fears and worst faults. An overgrown tree and a cracking façade are nothing to gloat over. I need to face down the man himself.

“Happy birthday, my sweet nightingale,” Orane coos. He’s standing at the edge of the cobblestone path, between the cherry orchard and the willow tree, but his voice seems to come from everywhere at once. It echoes across his world and inside my head. “You do not look like yourself tonight. The last human who came to face me protected by those designs lasted all of a minute.”

He’s taunting me, knowing I can’t answer. He’s already taken away that ability. In his mind, he’s already won. This entire meeting is for my benefit. A punishment.

The energy around the nightingale flares, tendrils escaping the confines of the silver cage and reaching out for me. My legs tremble, and my throat goes dry. I have to force myself to keep walking. He’s trying to use my own fear against me, make it overwhelm everything else until I cower at his feet and surrender.

If Orane succeeds, I’ll never see my parents, K.T., or Hudson again. I’m risking everything for the chance to live a life I willingly turned my back on before. The irony is not lost on me.

“Even now you cling to the tokens I sent you.” Orane laughs and moves closer, his voice echoing inside my head and his step sending ripples through the ground under our feet. “It is endearing. Though your taste in champions is poor.”

Hudson stiffens but doesn’t say anything. He slides closer and presses his hand against my lower back, energy pulsing into my body. He’s like a conduit, passing power directly to me. It helps, grounding me and giving me the extra bit of strength I need.

Using the stones and Hudson as an anchor, I close my eyes and reach down into the core of the dreamworld. I touched it before, the power that makes everything I see and hear and touch in this place possible, but that was just a glimpse. That was playing in a puddle compared to jumping into the ocean.

On the back of the unicorn, the energy buzzed. Guided by the power in the stones I’m wearing, there isn’t a buzz; the power is pure music. It’s every instrument I’ve ever heard, from the bell-like tones of a glockenspiel to the bass thunder of tympani. The melody is impossible to capture, but within that gorgeous chaos, something pulls at my chest, making my heart ache and my eyes burn.

I’m aware of everything around me, even with my eyes closed. I feel the way Orane is directing the power under the surface of what we see, pulling energy away from the façade of the world and using it to supercharge his own abilities.

But Hudson is doing the same thing, channeling the dreamworld’s energy, sucking it out of the air and pushing it into the stones we’re wearing. Compared to the two of them, the area around me is nearly a void, a calm spot in a struggle between opposing currents. The deeper I reach into the magic of this world, the further the stillness spreads.

Slowly moving closer, Orane laughs.

“And your plan is to do what now? Nothing? Is this a surrender?”

Hell no, this isn’t surrender
.

The ground ripples, and Hudson wraps his arm around my waist, steadying me. I picture a marble wall and build it high, encasing my mind and pushing Orane out. With each foot of marble that appears, the music shifts, growing louder as the melody changes, becoming less dense, less complex. Higher and higher the walls climb until they meet at the top like a marble igloo. The moment those walls close off, I open my eyes and gasp.

Okay. That works. I actually built a wall.

Hudson spins, his hands on the smooth white stone, searching for a way out.

“What the hell? What good does this do? He—”

I grab his arm and sign, “I built it.”

“
You
did? But—”

The world trembles and shakes, the ground below us rolling like waves on the ocean. My stone igloo absorbs the energy, more supple than any stone should be, but it’s not immune to the pressure. Tiny fractures appear. This protection won’t last forever.

Hudson didn’t regain his memories until he was back in the dreamworld. I have to keep Orane at bay long enough to find mine.

“Am I suddenly so frightening?” Orane’s voice echoes in time with the quaking ground. I use my grip on the energy of his world to keep our little section stable, but it won’t last for long. “How many times have you begged to stay with me forever? Why does it scare you to know that was exactly what I planned?”

I pull harder on the energy below my feet, and the music shifts again, the myriad of instruments dropping away until all that’s left is a piano. Mom’s upright piano.

It’s the song she plays every night before she goes to sleep, the one I would sneak out to the landing to listen to without her knowing. The one I could never sing for Orane. I thought it was because the song belonged to Mom, but it doesn’t.

The song isn’t hers.

It’s
mine
.

I wrote that song in elementary school. My first and only composition. Mom gave me the knowledge to write it, but the melody was mine. That’s why she plays it every night, hoping against hope that one night I will come back down and play it with her.

Tears stream from my eyes in rivers as my own life hits me like an avalanche, ten years of forgotten moments streaming into my head until the weight of it all pushes me to my knees.

Sensation disappears. It’s as though I’m floating in the center of a crystal globe, watching my own life play across the surface like a movie. It’s peaceful here. Emotions, sounds, and colors are all muted, their edges dulled, but the closer the moments flashing before my eyes come to the present, the faster they stream. The louder the music plays. The brighter everything becomes.

The crystal globe shatters into multicolored smoke, a rainbow of color and light swirling around me faster and faster, closer and closer, until it seeps under my skin, memories reunited with the person they were stolen from.

My eyes open slowly when the tremors get worse. I’m thrown against the wall, my shoulder slamming into solid stone. Orane’s voice echoes across the world, but this time it’s barely audible inside my head.

“You are trying to steal what does not belong to you anymore. That, I will not abide. I will give you one last chance, child. Give me what I want, and I will give you your life.”

For less than a hundredth of a second, I consider it. Can I really get Hudson and myself out in one piece by giving up something I’ve lived without for years?

A part of me wants to cave in, the same part that was fooled into believing he loved me. But with each piece of my mind I restore, each piece of myself I reclaim, it’s easier to look back at the last ten years and see every moment he lied to me.

All I have to do is listen to his voice. I remember every false promise and every description of what our lives would be like if I could join him here forever. Every single lie. He sounded like this every time he told me he loved me. Every time, his voice was sweet and apologetic with the tiniest hint of laughter.

Looking back on all the waste—the time and energy and friendships I will never get back—fury rises within me, giving me strength and burning away my fear. I grab Hudson’s hand and shove his palm against the stone, trying to make him understand what I want him to do. The marble around us is cracking. I need him to pour his energy into the wall and stabilize it. I need more time. Just a little more time.

“You cannot defeat me, and you cannot hide. I could find you anywhere, Mariella.”

Hudson reinforces the walls, but it doesn’t stop new cracks from forming. His grip on the dreamworld’s energy is too weak. He barely buys me the time I need to adjust my hold on the nightingale pendant and get ready for the only endgame I have.

Orane’s scream makes the world shudder. The wall shatters into dust, and Orane is there waiting, his hand outstretched and his fingers spread like claws reaching for my throat.

I hold up my nightingale pendant, dodging his strike and letting his hand close around the silver birdcage. He hisses, smoke rising as the stones burn his skin. I yank on the chain and the birdcage breaks open like Hudson designed it to. I catch the nightingale as it swings out of Orane’s hand. Orane growls and reaches for me again, but my hand is already flying for his cheek.

The physical power behind the strike is nothing. I’m exhausted and weak and human. But that doesn’t matter. I’m pressing the nightingale pendant against his skin. It ties me to him. It contains a tiny piece of my soul—and my voice—but it also contains a tiny piece of him.

A door opens between our minds. For less than a second, I’m staring into an expanse so vast I can’t comprehend how one person can contain it.

“Give it back.”
I grip the first thread of energy I can catch from the other side of the doorway, and I give it a powerful yank.

It’s like unraveling a tornado.

Orane screams. I scream with him, and for the first time in over a week, I hear my own voice. Lightning shoots up my arm, sparking and burning and freezing all at once. It slams into my mind, and my head snaps back. Thousands of people are screaming for help. The voices of every child Orane ever hunted. Bits of all of them are here.

All I want is what he took from me, but once the flow starts, I don’t know how to make it stop. Everything Orane kept locked away—his memories and the pieces of others he stole over the centuries—rushes into my head in a burning stream of light and color. I’m screaming my throat raw, but no matter how hard I try to pull away, the connection won’t break.

My mind hisses and crackles like a piece of wood about to split in a fire. Before the pressure and the pain and the fear and the sorrow pouring in can shatter me, the connection breaks. Like the door slammed shut from the other side.

I drop, something solid barely catching me on the way down.

Thirty-Five

Hudson

Saturday, September 13 – 12:00 AM

Her scream is like a siren’s call. It’s beautiful and terrifying, sending jolts through my body. It’s also a signal. A pulse blasts through the world like the first shockwave after a nuclear explosion.

It hits me square in the chest and knocks me off my feet. I barely lift my arms in time to catch Mari when she drops.

Her eyes flutter open and shut, but all I see is white.

I duck, covering Mari as something goes flying low over our heads. Holy shit. Was that an entire cherry tree?

It was.

The shockwave shattered Orane’s control over this world. The black lake has become a cyclone, tearing limbs off the willow and bricks out of the opera hall. The sky is a mass of storm clouds in impossible shades of dark green and red, lit up by large strikes of violet lightning.

I have to get us the hell out of here. Mariella hasn’t moved.

“Mari!” I lean over her, chest pounding so hard it’s like all of my organs are pulsing in time with my heart. “Get
up
! Mariella!”

Mari shifts, lids fluttering faster, each blink lasting longer. Her eyes—the same honey-brown she came here with, thankfully—open, and she gasps.

Before I can say a word, her hand grabs the collar of my shirt and tugs me out of the way as a huge willow branch flies by where my head would’ve been.

Time to go.

Swinging Mari into my arms, I scramble to my feet and run for the portal. Dodging flying debris and jumping trenches that open under my feet, I keep running. Holding Mari tight against my chest, I run. I try not to worry that she’s barely moved. I try not to worry that the portal seems to be getting farther away and the space between more impassable. There has to be a way to make it through the end of a world alive.

Thirty-Six

Mariella

Saturday, September 13 – 12:00 AM

The knowledge and the abilities I pulled from Orane all activate at once.

I can see the path we traveled falling into a black void, and the world in front of us is collapsing too fast. Hudson won’t make it out before this world disappears unless I can ease the way.

Fear forces me to think clearly, and I grasp a thread of power I didn’t have before. My nightingale pendant is still in one hand. I grip it tight. Acting on an instinct I barely understand, I breathe out.

Everything in our path tumbles out of the way.

I bring up one hand. The ground in front of us levels.

We’re almost to the portal, but that might not matter. The air is pulling us backward. It’s the suction of a world collapsing. I put my hand on Hudson’s chest, silently urging him forward, close my eyes, and pray.

Hudson loses his step. He recovers, but not enough. Diving, Hudson throws me forward as far as he can.

No!
I will not lose him, not after everything.

Moving faster than I thought was possible, I twist and use my last bit of strength to grab his hand and pull him with me. The momentum Hudson gave me isn’t enough. Using every ounce of what I drew from Orane’s mind, I propel us forward and yank him through the door. He groans in relief as we both land on my bedroom floor.

“Are you guys okay?” K.T. whispers. She places her hands on my cheeks and peers into my eyes. “Mari?”