Mourning Cloak

I plow through the remnants of Sera’s army. Eerie men, exhausted and trembling, still try to stop me. A mourning cloak shrieks and dissolves as I clip her wing, cobble crunchers scamper into cracks and among boulders. The space in front of the gates is clear, a half-circle of bare rock, dusted with fine ash.

Bits of those creatures unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast. Bits of Sera.

My belly is made of iron now, or else I’d have to retch at that thought.

The gates swing outward, slow but inexorable, on noiseless hinges. The gap between them is still narrower than a man when I reach them. I throw myself at the doors, grab each edge and try to force them back together.

On the other side, through the crack, I see shadows. Despair. Rot. Death. Demon spawn. Every emotion, every experience, every entity taken and twisted and broken into something so awful and dark that even my mechanized body and glass-and-electric mind quake at the sight.

Flutter is right. The city is a prison. A prison for things so terrible that a sob wrenches through my lips as I struggle with the gates.

They halt, momentarily. I strain so hard that things pop and hiss inside me. The doors bite into my hand, then swing out once more. Inch by inch, they push me back, my feet leaving furrows in the rock.

The creatures imprisoned within Tau M, mwithin arai have noticed. Their malevolent attention focuses on me and the means of their escape. Their desire bludgeons me with its intensity, its craving for release.

The desire to once more walk the world and wreak terror upon it.

Sera died for what she believed was right. Surely I can do no less.

There is one last step of the transformation, the point beyond which there is no returning. I can let the spiders consume me completely, like they did Sera. Let them turn my flesh into energy.

Sera’s transformation opened the gates. Let mine close them.

Flutter. Even now, I’m afraid. Afraid to die alone.

Her presence, alien and cool, papery and fragile as a moth’s, brushes against me. I’m here. I’ll help you.

I’m on my knees, and my arms are hyper-extended, screaming under the stress. No, leave me, now, Flutter! You won’t survive this!

Monsters unknown to any mortal nightmares race toward me. Toward the gap. Toward freedom.

Stay… keep you… together… I don’t hear her, because I’ve set the spiders lose upon myself. And as my battered arms finally give way, the furnace in my belly becomes a sun. Light flares out all around me, washing out even the abominations in front of me.

I give myself up to it. The final transformation.



The spiders don’t notice me, so busy are they cannibalizing Kato’s body. I burst out of my hiding place, pull myself together, and break for the outside. Out to Kato’s skin, to that armor plating now turned white-hot and shredding off him in layers. Out for the open.

There’s matter here that isn’t Kato, isn’t sentient, isn’t a consciousness. The gates. His hands are fused to the gates and they’re made of more than just metal. They’re threaded through with all the building blocks of the world, arrayed in familiar patterns.

And I see them. With nothing more than a quick prayer, a routine chant, I see them. Clear and shining, each gold strand waiting to be plucked and played. And as Kato burns and flares, turns to lines of energy in tortured flux, I channel gate into him.

Taurin, let me not be prolonging the agony! Am I just fueling his pain, throwing more wood onto the fire of his anguish? The gates bend and twist under the raw power of his transformation.

I stretch myself out, a faintly-glimmering thread all the way to where the Kato-essence is curled up. I can’t feel his pain, but the echoes of it reverberate through my particles.

Control it, Kato, control it! Can he hear me through the burning?

And then I feel the gates move. Feel his will ripple through the fire-knot that is his body. The gates are soft and malleable; Kato forces them back into place. Each movement of his ravaged body sends a volcano eruption of agony through him. I try to block it, but I’m spread too thin. I reach out a tendril to soothe even some of it away.

And then a tentacle, made of shadow and acid, spikes and despair, lashes at Kato, through him, and into—

I…

Scatter…

Fleeing…



I feel Flutter disintegrate. The tentacle shoots throughgn=oots th the narrowing gap of the closing gates, smacks me in the chest, slides off and tightens around my wrist.

It’s almost out. They’re almost out.

Spiders!

They know what I want. In another instant, my wrist and my hand turns to light. My spiders, all crowded in that section, vaporize. A shriek, so high that only my enhanced hearing can make it out, pierces through my skull. The tentacle dissolves, like shadows evaporated in the sun. The energy from that burst clangs the gates shut, fuses them together. Seals the demons in.

I close my eyes against the explosion, but it doesn’t come. There are too few spiders, too little fuel. I twitch and the fire in my belly subsides. Freed from the terrible pressure, my body returns to itself. The armor dissolves back into skin, my organs are flesh again, blood flows in my veins.

My right hand is gone. My wrist ends in a stump cauterized by the same heat that took off the hand. I feel torn muscles, overextended joints, broken bones. Pain washes over me. Pain in my body, pain in my heart. I’ve lost Sera.

My body lives, but my soul feels dead.

Steam rises off the gates. A pale scar of new metal slashes down the inner edges.

Flutter lies not far from me, a sprawled mess of hair and wing and pale skin. She twitches uncontrollably, fading in and out of existence. As I crawl toward her, her edges dissolve into the ground. She’s leaking away.

“Flutter,” I call, hunching over her. I can’t touch her; I can barely move my own arms.

Instead, I whisper the only things that can call her back. The Invocations. The Chants. The prayers. I say them over and over, in a ragged voice, my head sinking lower and lower until it almost touches her chest, till I’m almost dissolving into her now-here-now-not body.

“Lalita vey. Itauri dia itauri. Eilendi dia eilendi.” Taurin’s child to Taurin’s child.

One broken being to another broken being. One sick heart to another sick heart.

Flutter. I need you to live.

She wakes in the cooling twilight, the land softened by bluish shadows.

I lift my head and she’s looking at me. Her eyes are not quite human, but not quite mourning cloak either. There are whites, but there’s something crystalline about the dark of her irises.

The rustles and whimpers of Sera’s bewildered, hurting army fill the air. They stay away, have stayed away all the bitter afternoon. Something must be done about them.

By me, I think, with weariness. But there is Toro to ask, if I can reach him, and now I have Flutter back.

I wait for her to speak.


“Why did you save me?” she asks.


“Why did you save me?” I counter.

She doesn’t even think about it. “Because you are worth saving.”

And I say, “So are you.”





Author’s Note


This story owes its existence to a butterfly.


On a family hike one May, we saw dozens of lovely, unknown butterflies. They had dark wings, with bluish spots and cream edgin a g. Being the kind of person who carries an Audubon field guide to every encounter with nature, I looked them up.

They were mourning cloaks, and my muse insisted that there was a story in the name.

My muse was right.

Butterflies inspired Mourning Cloak, but other people also had a hand in shaping it. Many thanks go out to Jo Anderton and Robin Cornett for offering comments. Thanks also to Ravven for creating the perfect cover image for Flutter, an arguably difficult character to portray. Kellie Sheridan set up the cover reveal, got ARCs into t

he hands of reviewers, and organized a blog tour—all things I'm very grateful for.

Most of all, this book is for my husband, David, for his technical and moral support, and for our children, who leave us laughing, crying, wondering, shocked, delighted, frustrated—but never bored.