Chapter 40 Choices
Eleanora and Samuel argued in low voices near the shelves, their silhouettes slashing back and forth across the lantern’s glow. Daisy let them have it. She and Oliver had claimed the long reading table, its battered top scattered with what passed for the library’s most dangerous texts, three centuries of banned tomes, ink blotted by hand, the spines scarred by fire.
Oliver lounged, but not really. He sat close enough that Daisy could feel his heat, close enough to read over her shoulder when she flipped the page.
“You ever think about what you’ll do after?” he asked, voice soft. “When this is done.”
Daisy shrugged. “I don’t think that far ahead.”
He watched her finger as it traced a line of runes in a diagram, a blood-bond circle, the lines drawn tight and angry. “You should. You might have a future worth surviving for.”
She snorted. “If the city doesn’t chew us up first.”
Oliver shook his head. “You’re not the only monster left, Daisy.” He let it hang, a joke or a confession, depending.
She stopped at a diagram, something close to a dragon, wings sketched in red, a human figure at its core, hands raised in prayer or warning. The text was in Old City dialect, but Daisy made out enough to get the gist.
Blood-pacts like hers didn’t end well. Humans will melt away, leaving the dragon in charge. No way to undo it, not after the spiral is completed.
She closed the book, trying to keep her hands from trembling.
Oliver caught it, of course. “What’s wrong?”
She answered without looking up. “If I don’t stop this, the thing inside me takes over. I become a puppet for Xeris. Forever.”
He reached across, gently touched her wrist, as if scales might cut him. “There’s always a way out,” he said, and for once she believed he meant it.
Another volume lay open at the edge of the table: her mother’s journal, bound with bits of thread and patched with scraps of city ledgers. Daisy picked it up, ran a thumb along the worn pages. The final entries were in her mother’s cramped hand, shaky but urgent. There were sketches of the spiral, of wards she’d never seen, and at the very end, a set of instructions, half code, half incantation.
She’d never noticed the last page before.
Oliver peered over, his breath on her neck. “What’s that?”
Daisy blinked. “It’s a counterspell. Or the start of one. If I can finish it…”
“You keep your mind,” he said, finishing for her. “You stay you.”
Daisy wanted to laugh, or scream, or cry, but instead she just stared at the page, memorizing every line.
Oliver’s hand lingered on hers. “You can do it,” he said, so quiet she almost missed it.
The moment broke with the crack of the outer door, the echo slapping through the library like a thrown brick. Oliver tensed, ready to move, but it was Mira Stone, her robes burned at the edges and her eyes wild.
“They’re starting,” she said, breathing hard. “He’s not waiting for the Gala. Ravensworth’s already draining magic from the slums. Look.”
They ran to the window. Even from the depths of the stacks, the sky pulsed, crimson lightning, stitched into the air above the castle, veins crawling out in every direction.
Samuel caught up, face pale. “He rebuilt the menagerie array. He’s harvesting from every citizen with even a drop of magic.”
Daisy felt her blood surge, the scales on her arm glowing faintly. Her hand curled into a fist, and red motes drifted from her knuckles, weaving the spiral in the air.
Eleanora joined them, no pretense now, only fear and calculation. “He’ll take your family first,” she said to Daisy. “Unless we act now, you won’t even have a self left to save.”
Mira fixed her gaze on Daisy. “The dragon wants you to join him. But your blood can change the game if you get close enough.”
Daisy looked at Oliver, at the hope and terror shining in his eyes. She looked at the city, the castle, the storm.
Then she nodded, and her blood-magic answered, painting the air with her mother’s symbols, ready to burn, ready to remake the world.
Oliver’s arm slipped around her shoulders. The four of them stood together, facing the window, the future crashing toward them in a hail of red light and thunder.
Somewhere above, the dragon waited.
Daisy waited back.