In the wake of everything, this felt like a mockery. A dark insult.
He sat up in the lowering gloom, even as the ice cracked all around and water sloshed past him. He raised his hand, looked at it.
The ribbon was visible as a moon-colored glow, no longer tainted with any trace of crimson. The thread wafted back toward Petra’s body.
Her power, her very essence, was still in him, banked away, albeit useless.
But… how was that possible?
Somehow, through some enchantment that he barely understood, he had served as a battery for her. He had used her stored power himself on occasion. And she had drawn it from him, right up until the very end, via the cord that bound them.
After all, Petra’s power was the city. There were no cities here, in the middle of the ocean. Here, she had been at her weakest.
But James had been to many, many cities since he and Petra had become bound together. He had been to New York and New Amsterdam. London and Philadelphia. He had spent weeks with Charlie in Brasov, and nearly a month’s holiday in Cairo with his parents. As he thought back, even now, he could count them, city after city. Dozens of them. Their power had stored up inside him, growing greater by the hour, nearly limitless, all banked away…
And all ultimately unused.
Because there was only so much power that Petra could siphon off through the invisible thread between them. He had hoarded it, unwittingly, unable to plumb its depths himself, but neither releasing it to Petra.
Because, simply put, he had refused to let her go.
Let me go, James, she had asked him, begged him, four years earlier.
But he couldn’t. He’d held onto her instead, divided her power between them, because he couldn’t bear to give her up.
He pushed to his feet, steadied himself on the shifting icy surface. The storm raged all around, battered him with blasts of wind and pelting rain, dragged hungrily at him. He didn’t feel any of it.
He moved to Petra’s body, sat down next to her, and took her hand. It was cold. He wanted to cry over her, to pay with tears for the loss, but somehow he couldn’t. His grief felt beyond even tears.
The frozen ocean cracked and broke around him. He felt the remaining floe lower and heave over the waves.
“I’m sorry, Petra,” he said, holding onto her cold hand. “It’s probably too late now. But I’m finally doing it. I’m doing what you asked. I’m letting you go.”
He closed his eyes and focused his inward senses on the clasp of their hands. He located the point where his palm stemmed power into hers, binding them together, connecting them ever since that fateful moment on the back of the Gwyndemere.
Let me go James…
He did. He let her go.
The release of her power was a palpable sensation. It streamed out of him first like a ribbon of soft wind, and then like a stream of water, and then increasing to something like a rushing river.
It began to hurt, to strain like muscles flexed past their limit.
But there was also a dizzyingly sense of release, like putting down a massive burden that one had forgotten they were even carrying. And still the power flowed out of him, faster and harder, growing to titanic force, like every waterfall in the world forced through a James-sized hose.
His body trembled. He shivered from head to toe, so hard that his eyes seemed to vibrate in their sockets. He tried to breath, but his throat was locked tight. His fingers curled into helpless fists. His right squeezed Petra’s cold hand, his left dug fingernails into the flesh of his palm.
Days and weeks and months of stored energy roared out of him, every moment that he had spent in the many metropolises, soaking in their webs of light and noise, their hives of human interconnectedness.
The surge grew to a blur of colour, of honking horns, and roaring crowds, and steaming vents, and rushing traffic…
And then, with a spasm like a breath gasped only a split second before drowning, James recoiled backwards, limp and exhausted, his heart broken with loss, but his mind and body blissful with relief.
And in the darkness, wet and slick with rain, Petra’s hand warmed. He assumed it was only the heat of their clasped fingers, and the surge of her released power.
But then he gasped.
As her fingers squeezed his.
26. – the Shackle of the brooch
James jerked his head to look down at her. Her eyes opened, but they were changed. They were pure white, glimmering and flashing like diamonds before a winter sun. She did not look at him, but her hand continued to grip his, to squeeze avidly, as if trying to communicate through touch alone.
A warm wind rose up around her, spinning into a soft cyclone, drying her wet hair and clothes, lifting her up to her feet, and then raising her into the air.
James let go of her hand as she arose, straightening, her features firming into a taut expression of severe calm. She raised her hands, held them out at her sides, palms open, fingers spread. She was summoning and controlling the hot wind, using it to repel the viciousness of the storm. Light accompanied her, pale as moonbeams, coalescing in waves around her form and building like a halo.
With a subtle sweep of her hand, she extended the force to James. He leaned, swayed as the air rushed around him, cocooned him in a tempest of warmth, and lifted him away from the sinking ice.
Petra’s power was surging still, increasing, building like a whine in the air, a thrum underfoot, a pulse that seemed to penetrate into the very ocean depths below.
And yet James felt no siphoning of strength from his own inner core. The cord no longer connected them. He had let go of Petra, given it all to her, poured into her the entirety of all that he had stored for her.
And now she was using every last ounce of it.
He arose alongside her, bathed in her power. He found that he was afraid to speak to her, worried that he might somehow break whatever strange enchantment had brought her back. It was Petra, and yet, in some indefinable way, even beyond the unearthly glitter of her eyes, she was changed.
Together they scanned the dark, storm-swept ocean all around.
The spell of ice was shattering into choked shards now. Floating ice fields rode the waves once again. Lightning stabbed down in staccato strobes. In the middle distance, the Gwyndemere floundered before the gale.
And approaching it, walking atop the water alongside her human host, herself transformed into a giantess of ice and water, swollen with purpose and drunken with triumph, the Lady of the Lake stalked, reaching forward, ready to crush the ship and all aboard it like a broken toy.
Petra saw her, narrowed her flashing diamond eyes, and surged forward through the air, supported on her cyclone of warmth, taking James alongside her.