Year of the Tiger (Changeling Sisters) (33 page)

I closed my eyes. The petals whirled past my cheeks—sharp, screaming with silent anger—and shriveled up upon the snow.

When Vampyre swallowed her own soul, it seemed enough to shatter all illusions. When I opened my eyes, I could only see from one of them. But it was enough to see a white tiger sitting where No-Name’s body had fallen.

–Maya–

I backed up the path toward the summit. I felt like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation I wasn’t supposed to be a part of.

–When you betrayed my mother, you were responsible for severing your own soul– the new Lady of Eve told her enemy’s fallen ashes. –And still, my mother gave you one last chance to save yourself. I held your soul for you all of these years, in hopes that you, a vampyre, would one day learn how to reconcile with it. But just as you let the Dark Spirits feast upon the body of your stillborn son, so, too, did you jump to devour your old friend’s daughter, not realizing what I held. And thus did the predator, unable to recognize its own image, eat itself–

Chapter 42: The Alpha and the Omega

They came upon me cautiously: Xiang of the goshawks; Kaelan and Yu Li; a pair of cloud leopards; the werenaga leader; a werebear, grumbling that the high elevation wasn’t good for his blood pressure; and finally, a watchful weretiger, noticeably smaller than the Lady of Eve. They looked around at the empty summit, eyes growing bigger and rounder, until all gazes came to rest upon me standing beneath the Korean flag.

I said what they wanted to hear: “Maya the Vampyre Queen is dead. The true Lady of Eve has returned.”

Xiang narrowed a milky yellow eye. “And who is naming herself Lady of Eve, Fire Wolf?”

So they knew about Demon. Drat. I was saved from answering by a tiger’s low growl, rippling through the clouds like powerful thunder. Our hairs stood on end. No one had to say anything. We all knew.

“She’s returned,” Yu Li said wonderingly. “With Maya gone, the souls can move on. We’ve won!” We fell into an excited bundle of yaps and howls, giddy like we’d fallen under the spell of the moon.

“Seu Jaehoon-nim would be proud.” Xiang’s predatory gaze swept over the wolves present. “His successor must pass the word along to the rest of the pack.”

We three wolves bowed our heads.

“
Sajang-nim
,” Yu Li began gruffly, “our Alpha’s passing came so sudden that I don’t believe he had time to pass the red fang on—”

My head reared up, as if I smelled something wrong on the breeze. Kaelan, too, was staring at me funny.

“But the juin-nim did give it to someone,” he said. “He gave it to Citlalli.”

All heads slowly pivoted toward me and the red fang tied fast around my neck. Their long silence made me shiver.

***

I cleaned and dressed myself at the Were base camp in Eve, established in the wreckage of the lunar night procession.

“Alpha?” Bae ducked into my tent. He seemed uncertain of my English title. “The prayer wheel message you requested.”

I snatched it, but remembered to say thank you. Bae bowed out, still looking puzzled.

The message read:

Vampyres retreat. All girls stable condition in hospital. Happy soon to see your face. –Moon

I set the prayer wheel down and stared hard into a cracked hand mirror at my new face. I tried to look happy. With my one eye, I looked like a stupid leering pirate. My eyes wandered down to the red fang necklace. The one that declared me Alpha, although the jury was still out on that one. I replayed their arguments in my mind:
Did
Jaehoon really intend for me to be the next Alpha? How could I lead, when I was, as Xiang had put it, A) a foreigner, B) young, and C) distracted?

 I could hear Jaehoon’s stern chiding running circles around my head: I had no work ethic. I had no respect.

I had, as he’d once admitted before a photograph of bygone pack mates, the temperament for an Alpha.

“Were you really choosing me?” I whispered. “Or was there no other choice, in Rafael and Yu Li’s absence? What about Kaelan? Yah. Jaehoon. What about Kaelan? Do you have something against the Irish? They’re supposed to be lucky, didn’t you know? Why did you choose
me
?”

My hands touched the red fang, trembling, and then tucked it beneath my shirt. Its cold persistence pressed against my skin, whispering of Jaehoon’s mighty head lying broken, his sightless eyes blessedly oblivious to the mutts fighting over his body. Gone.

My fingers automatically went up to trace the bandages swathing my right eye. The shamans of Thaksin’s people had promised to do everything they could to help me recover my sight, but I knew the greatest help they could give me was their unwavering friendship—not to bite where I turned a blind eye. Nothing could help this. Maya’s parting gift.

Something called to me, reducing Wolf and Demon to whimpering pups. I exited the tent.

The white tiger sat in the shifting mists, her great tail curled around her paws. Her head tilted, the only sign that I was being summoned. Unnoticed by the others, I slipped off into the clouds.

***

Soft rain pattered against our backs as we walked, leaving a trail of steamy footprints in the snow. Early morning, when rubicund rays of dawn burned faintly on the ridge, the mists blew off, leaving a comforting hiss in my ears and the fragrance of damp soil in my nostrils. The earth moaned, as if yawning off the blanket of snow that had tucked it to bed for too many sunless years. Cold starlight slanted through the crystalized fingers of ice-cocooned pines, coming to play over the striped back of the white tiger. She said nothing to me, merely examining the land as if curious about what had been done to it. So we walked along in content silence, through that dreamy, melting forest.

We passed many ghosts along the side of the road. Some turned their heads toward the warmth in the way a flower’s face follows the sun; others lay still, barely breathing. I recognized the self-proclaimed “Madame of Memories” lying prone in the snow. Every so often, a fiery burst of light emanated from
within
her; it just touched the roof of her mouth before she swallowed it back. Her back buckled in pain, and her sharp old eyes sought mine.

“Please,” she gasped.

The white tiger gave her no more than a cursory twitch of her tail.

–Leave her– she told me.

I hovered, inclined to help. I’d already left her stranded once before. “She’s in pain.”

–It is of her own infliction. She took your sister’s fire in exchange for a sun bracelet of old memories–

“
Raina’
s fire?”

The white tiger glanced at me. –The fire of your mother’s side of the family. Fire of the Aztecs. It runs freely in you. In your sister, it battled long and hard with her father’s water nature, one suppressing the other, neither gaining an edge, until the Madame bargained for it–

“But then, I must help her!” I exclaimed. “Raina would never have discovered her true self otherwise!”

The white tiger was unconcerned. –The Madame of Memories knows very well what is wrong with her. Too much fire for her to tame. But she is unwilling to do the one thing that would save her life–

“What?”

–Share it–

A stream of light arched forth, an achingly beautiful golden rainbow, and the Madame immediately crunched in her abdomen to contain it, desperate that none of it should get free. The white tiger didn’t look back, but I did plenty of times.

She knew paths no one else could. When we emerged in a clearing of hilly tombs, overlooking Old Man Zhi’s village of sleepy chimneys snoring smoke clouds, I shook myself, certain it was only a happy vision.

–The Lantern-Maker’s key– Eyes of deep ocean blue entranced me. –Tie it around my neck–

I did as she told me. She disappeared into the rows of slate-roofed huts, and I didn’t follow. I sensed that my path had somehow reached its end, so I settled down on a stone bench, hands bundled deep in my pockets, and waited for the fireworks to start.

The first lantern to rise over the roofs was the heart-shaped lantern that guarded baby cradles. The flames beat in a gentle scarlet rhythm inside, and I heard a child’s cry.

Ghosts. They bobbed on the rooftops, curious. And waiting. Always waiting—I suddenly remembered Fred’s words from long ago—“Waiting for shooting stars.”

More and more lanterns floated into the air like escaped kites; lilac streamers and turquoise ropes rippled into empty space. Lanterns painted with the grinning faces of frogs, or twisted into the emerald shapes of snakes, cartwheeled past. The ghost children laughed and began to follow them. Old Man Zhi’s warrior lanterns puffed smoke to buoy themselves, violet velvet lanterns shed petals on the cheeks of the elderly, and chirpy, yellow bird lamps piped open their tops to sing. Lanterns of every shape and size, every color and pattern, blew this way and that, but always, up they flew.

The lanterns filled the sky, pulsing with the harmonious light of fireflies, and a great host of ghosts departed from the earth to join them. The higher they rose into the zenith of the heavens, the further night was chased back, until a great and radiant being resumed its throne in the sky. And there was light.

The daylight hurt my eyes. I closed my eyes tight and felt its warm fingers cup my face. A foreign touch.

I could squint, but little more. In my watery vision, the snowy hills glittered like diamonds, and the ghosts’ faces were stripped of layers of shadows, leaving them less scary. Now it was the spirits who looked young, frightened, and confused. But tired of waiting.

“What are you waiting for? That’s it! Go home!” I yelled, jumping and waving my arms, waving goodbye, as their shadows passed over my face, flowing ever upwards and beyond.

I think one had Marisol’s face and Marisol’s body, her real body, the body of
la bailarina de salsa,
set free to dance the rhythm of the winds.

Chapter 43: A Parting of Ways

I found the way back to the cabin in the woods all by myself, thank you very much, with nothing but my good old reliable nose. Nevertheless, I caught sight of Kwan’s emerald-green belly breaking through the clouds every now and then, checking in to make sure I didn’t get lost. I guessed it was the least the cockatrice could do, my sister being related to their kind and all.

Eve felt like an empty train platform, right after everyone has cleared out to new and better places, leaving nothing behind but an echo of their voices. Once I thought I saw a fox staring at me from the underbrush, its eyes a hateful cranberry red. Another time I was serenaded for half a mile by a three-eyed crow. It perched on a branch, and when I looked at it, I saw in each eye the image of a girl, a wolf, and a demon.

Needless to say, I was ready to get the hell out of the spirit world until it repopulated a little.

I’d just come into sight of the cabin when the sky darkened. I sniffed the air suspiciously. Something smelled wrong, but there was no one in sight.

“Rafael?” I called, a small blossom of hope blooming in my heart.

Silence. Kwan had long disappeared toward the Yellow Sea. There was nothing else for it. The only thing left was the river.

I shivered, hugging myself. The river was only partially encased in ice, but deep patches of artic blue created a bridge across. I made the mistake of locking eyes with those churning eddies, and my throat clogged. I imagined them swirling higher and higher to encircle my neck with cold hands, all of my body going numb below.

“Rafael!” He hadn’t returned to the cabin yet. I could search for a way around the river. But then I would linger in the open, and those rain clouds had me worried.

Wolf was scared stiff of the river, so I took my first few steps out onto the ice slowly. My boots brushed aside the light dusting of snow, and for a second, I thought I saw a hand pressed, pleading, against the ice. I bolted back, and when I forced myself to look back at the river again, I saw nothing but bottomless black. But encased in the ice…there was a handprint.

That was all the motivation I needed. I bolted across that frozen river, the hairs on the back of my neck shooting up, when an owl’s hoot broke the stillness of an otherwise silent forest. Suddenly, it seemed like the ice stretched on endlessly, like a glacier, and the warm cabin was lost from sight. I spun around and around, spooked. And then I heard it: the
scrape
of heavy, dragging footsteps.

“Dark Spirit—” I made the mistake of uttering its name aloud. When I turned, it was standing there. Its hollow eyes stared vacantly at a spot above my head; its thin black hair flapped in the wind like a crow’s wing.

“Y-you.” I extended a quivering finger, careful not to touch it. “I’ve seen you before. You’re the son-of-a-bitch who led to Maya’s downfall. You started it all. Who the hell are you?”

–I am Xec–

Xec. Rhymed with ‘sick.’ Cute. But the name felt strange, somehow. Incomplete.

I folded my arms. “What the hell do you want?”

–Deals have been broken–

“Sure. Your queen’s dead. The white tiger’s returned.” The first wings of fear fluttered in my chest. “If I were you, I would run for the hills before she hunts you.”

–We were here before
Her
. We will be here after–

It stepped closer, its black lips stretching
up
its face, as if it were trying to smile. –I do not speak of the mother’s broken deal. I speak of the son’s–

“Khyber.” I shivered as the fog gathered around us. The sun shrank into a black hole surrounded by an eerie halo of white fire.

“Don’t let me stop you. Be on your way, then.”

–Yes–

The Dark Spirit walked past me at a glacial pace, one foot dragging. It suddenly spun about, grabbed my shoulders, and screamed soundlessly into my face. I screamed back, petrified, because I couldn’t hear myself. Its abnormally shaped head snapped forward, and everything dissolved into howls and fire; I think Wolf and Demon tried to protect me.

Everything snapped back and righted itself. I could see the cabin nestled in the trees, could practically feel the warm blaze of the candlelit doorway beckoning through the window.