‘Didn’t work,’ she says, exhausted. Her hair stands out around her head in a wiry, static mess; her skin is glistening with sweat. ‘I couldn’t get close enough. It was too much . . .’
‘We’ll make it work together,’ I manage, the words clumsy on my tongue as I move towards her. ‘Here . . .’ I use the knife, watch numbly as blood wells up, and hold my arm out to the violent, swirling rift. ‘Blood, and salt, and . . .’ I shake my head, frustrated. ‘What was the other thing?’
‘Tears of the fallen, heart’s truth, or heart’s pain, something,’ she says.
Too much, I think numbly. I tear at the lining of my coat; wrap a strand of silk around her hand.
‘Read the spell,’ she whispers. ‘I already did it once, but I don’t know Latin – I don’t know if I did it right.’
She pushes the book towards me, and the words swim before my eyes. I know it all by heart already, but there’s a piece missing – I can see that now. The piece that puts it all to rest.
I am the fallen. This whole family, we are the fallen. We are the ones who opened the rift and let the creatures see a world they never would have seen. We are the ones who let them smell the blood of humanity until it was all they craved. I watch my blood spill, and Angel is silent beside me, and I hold her hand and hope my warmth is enough for both of us, just while I read this, just until I get to the end, because she looks so cold and small, and I don’t know . . . I don’t know how she’s survived this long, with all she has seen. But there’s one thing I do know. If she can, then so can I. I can do this.
The words are like fire; they hurt as they flow. I go faster, speak louder, and Angel is trying to tell me something, but her voice is a whisper, and the words I’m saying have a life of their own. Dark shapes form within the rift, screaming as they dart towards us. I raise my voice, shouting, and Angel’s voice gets more insistent, and I realize she’s crying, her hand pulling at mine as if to tell me something that’s desperately important, but it’s too late. Too late for listening, or for questions. Too late for doubts. Too late even for words. I finish the spell and it isn’t enough, so I roar into the abyss, and the raksasa halt in their tracks because that is a language they understand, and it is friendship and regret and sorrow and – more than that – it is hope. It is the hope that comes out of fighting for something, knowing that you aren’t fighting alone. It is Angel’s hand in mine, her voice roaring alongside mine. The raksasa understand that. They hesitate. The magic, the house, the rift itself and the creatures who live beyond it – for an instant we are all together in this. We are connected.
And then something deep inside me snaps, and we are not. I stumble forward with a sharp cry, and everything gets darker. The world of the raksasa begins to fade, the temperature of the room plummets . . .
‘Bavar!’
Angel’s voice, bright beside me.
‘Is it done?’ I whisper, my head throbbing.
‘You did it!’
‘We did it,’ he says with a ghost of a smile, looking from me to the wall where the rift used to be.
I follow his gaze, I can’t quite believe it’s gone. A moment ago there was a whole world there.
‘How did you do it?’ I ask. I don’t know what he said towards the end of the spell, what he put into the words that he shouted. I don’t know how he roared like that for so long, till the lights flickered and the world all went to black and white. Whatever it was, I think it might have broken him a bit. He tries to stand and ends up stumbling into me.
‘Uh, sorry,’ he mutters. ‘M’head’s spinny . . .’
‘You got clawed by the raksasa.’ I remember. ‘Did you send it back, Bavar? Did you see it disappear?’
‘Yup,’ he says, leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes.
It’s so quiet now. My ears are ringing with it; I’ve never heard this place so silent.
Bavar opens his eyes. ‘What’s happened?’
I stare at him. ‘What do you mean? You closed the rift . . .’
‘Yes, I remember that,’ he says. He frowns. ‘But the silence. Why did everything stop? Why did it hurt like that?’
‘I was trying to tell you,’ I say, sitting next to him against the wall. My head is thumping; my hand aches where I cut it. It seemed like forever since I was in here without him, saying words I didn’t understand, staring into that red-gold sky and just willing it to go away, before any more harm was done. ‘You cut the magic. I think that’s why it had to be you, to say the words like that. Your connection with the house, and the magic that opened the rift in the first place. That’s what you got rid of.’
‘I got rid of the magic? All of the magic? What does that even mean?’
He looks so confused, so lost. And I don’t want to be the one to tell him. I don’t want to be the one who pushed and pushed until this happened, but I was, and now he’s lost so much.
‘It means it’s over,’ I say. ‘The rift is gone. No more raksasa. No more fighting.’
‘But there’s more,’ he says, his eyes never leaving mine.
‘I think it was the same magic that was in the house. In the portraits, and the way you could stay unseen. The way you fought . . .’
I can’t say it. He stares at me until I have to look away, and I’m not going to cry, not now. So I bite my lip instead.
‘The ancestors are gone,’ he says.
There’s a long silence.
‘Grandfather?’
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry, Bavar. I was trying to tell you. I wanted to warn you, before it was too late.’
‘But it was too late.’ He sighs. ‘There wasn’t really a choice.’
‘There was,’ I say, turning back to him. ‘You could have kept on being as you were. You could have fought them, just like your parents did, until it was easy, or until you lost. It would have been easier, wouldn’t it? Just to ignore all this and carry on like that? But you didn’t. You chose to stop it. You did the harder thing. And your mum . . .’
‘My mother?’
‘She spoke to me, from the portrait by the door. She wanted us to close the rift, Bavar, before you got like they did. I could see what it had done to her; she didn’t want that for you.’
‘They weren’t always like that,’ he says. ‘It was the fighting. It got to them. I get it now. There was a moment in that fight earlier, when I was in the thick of it . . . well, you know. You saw it before, when you threw that stone at me.’
‘Do you ever wonder where they are now?’ I ask, ignoring the catapult reference.
‘Sometimes,’ he says. ‘I try not to think about them too much. They left so they could fight the raksasa without distraction.’ He shakes his head. ‘Without me. And it was better when they’d gone, for a while, so maybe it was the right thing, but they still left me alone, with all this . . .’ He tips his head back, looks up at the ceiling. ‘I guess . . . I thought maybe they’d come back one day, and they’d be different. Like they were before. They never did though.’
‘Maybe they will now,’ I say. ‘I don’t know. It’s going to feel so quiet here without all the ancestors, isn’t it? They’ve been here so long.’