“Anything I can do to help,” Madison said.
Sydney leaned forward, then slammed her hands down on Madison’s desk, bracing herself.
“Sydney?”
“Basket,” she said through clenched teeth.
Madison passed the recycling bin over just in time to catch the vomit—flecked with blood, with bright green—that Sydney coughed up. The stench of a rotting garden filled the room. “Sorry. The consequences are getting worse.”
“I know you said you came here today to make your will because you could get hit by a bus, but Sydney, is there anything I should know? I am asking as your friend, incidentally, not your attorney.”
“I’ll be fine,” Sydney said, and wiped blood from her mouth. “This isn’t anything different than I’ve been through before, not really. It’s just more intense because the magic has been bigger, and I’ve used more of it than I normally do. I just need to get through the end of the Turning, and then this will be over.”
“I’m going to pretend like I believe you and ask you one more thing: Are you sure what you’re doing is worth it?”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sydney shrugged herself deeper into her coat, and—as the wind knifed through layers of down and scarf and gloves—wished that there had been any place other than here on Bethesda Terrace where this meeting could have happened. The snow had melted and refrozen enough times that it was no longer picturesque. It was hard heaps in alternating shades of yellow and dinge, with rocks and cigarette butts and worse frozen into it. The air was as bitter as the day.
The Angel of the Waters hadn’t been repaired yet, the lily still missing from its hand. The statue itself was cracked in places—the decay of the magic that had been grounded in it for so long also causing decay in the physical world.
Ian and Lara, both flushed from the cold, walked down the promenade, Lara’s hair the one bright spot in the dull grey of late winter. “Why did you need to see us?” she asked.
“Your father has challenged House Prospero,” Sydney said.
“Of course he did,” said Lara. “I’m only surprised that he waited this long.”
“I’m not killing my sister,” Ian said.
“No, you’re not,” Sydney agreed. “Nor is she killing you. But I am accepting the challenge.”
“I assume you have a plan,” Ian said.
“So long as you’re both willing to go along with it,” Sydney said. “To start with, your father doesn’t have any magic of his own.”
“Are you sure?” Ian asked.
“You don’t seem surprised.” Neither of them did.
“I’m not. But are you sure?”
“I am. When he took my hand at the duel with Grey—”
“He still has blisters, by the way,” Lara said.
“Good. When he took my hand, I could tell. Shadows makes you very good at sensing magic. He has none. At all.”
“Which means he can’t hold a House,” Lara said.
“Which also means he can’t officially make a challenge, either, which is how I plan to get everyone out of this alive. But I need it to play out in public,” Sydney said. “And that’s why we’re meeting here. I assume you both are familiar with the spell anchored in the Angel?”
“House Merlin is responsible for it being there, and its upkeep on this end, so yes,” Ian said.
“Good. Could one of you please—very carefully—check the Angel for magic?” Sydney asked.
“I’ll do it,” Lara said. She peeled off her neon purple mittens and handed them to Ian, then stretched her hands toward the statue. She spoke a phrase that rose at the end, questioning, then yanked her hands back. “What the fuck was that? That’s not how it should feel at all.”
“I need to tell you what happened to Grace Valentine,” Sydney said.
As she spoke, Ian swore, viciously and fluently. Lara’s face closed off further and further, until she might have been a statue herself by the time Sydney finished. “I think what happened is that the spell that was supposed to allow him the use of her magic—his own sacrifice that he’d brought in—somehow got tangled up with the other spell that was already anchored in the statue. And that the more Miles’ magic failed, the more the spell tried to compensate, by pulling magic from everywhere else to feed itself. I think I can stop it, but I need the link to Shadows to be completely broken for it to work.”
“Do it,” Ian said. “Do whatever you need.”
“I need one thing from you in particular, Lara—as heir to House Merlin, you’ll become interim Head of the Unseen World. I’ll need you to verbally break the agreement with Shadows.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That should be enough,” Sydney said.
“Then of course. There is one other thing, though. If he were siphoning off magic somehow, keeping it somewhere, could that have increased the problems in the spell? Turned it from whatever it was supposed to be into that?” She waved a hand at the statue.
“Possibly,” Sydney said. “I don’t know what the magic would have felt like when it was healthy—our perspective, from inside Shadows, is a bit different from what you feel out here. But it could—if that was the part of the spell that misfired, I could see how something that was supposed to act like a siphon turned into something that’s acting like a vacuum.”
Lara looked at Ian. “I think I know what Dad’s been keeping in that locked cupboard.”
? ? ?
Sydney stood on the edge of the Central Park Reservoir and steeled herself against the edge of fear that even now crawled in her gut. Her hand automatically reached for her pocket, for the three wooden matches that used to be the requirement of the journey.
Not today. Not for her.
She spoke a word that froze her breath before it left her mouth, and a path of ice crackled and solidified across the reservoir’s surface. She stepped onto it and crossed once more to the House of Shadows.
It could barely be called a House anymore, this collection of darkness that slumped over a whiteness of bone—all of the sacrifices who had died in its service, fragmented and heaped in the freezing water. A flame lit, hot, in the center of Sydney’s heart: this place was unmade, diminished, rendered almost into nothingness. She had done this. And she would make sure that no more bones were added.
“Have you come back to gloat?” Shara looked like the place, all black and white and grey. Stark now, and now bleeding together in a slurry. She sounded like a wraith, like a remnant.
“I’ve come back to set you free,” Sydney said.
Hunger flashed across Shara’s face. “If that is a joke, it’s in poor taste.”
“The binding between the magic that came from here and the magicians of the Unseen World is almost gone.”
“That is not something I need you to tell me, here as I am, my House breaking around me.” Shara’s voice as sharp as her knife had been.
“I need it completely broken. And one part of doing that is to sever your connection to this place, to this”—she looked around and decided the old word was still the only one that might fit—“House.”
“And if I say no?”