Ethan, I almost said, but then Leila’s hold tightened like a handcuff. It had almost been a relief to look out on a crowd and tell the truth about my mother, but I was not free now any more than I had been before. Neither in the Light nor in the Dark could I speak my whole heart.
“The Golden Thread in the Dark is my young niece, Lucie,” Aunt Leila cried, her voice ringing out. “Her tortured father was my sister’s husband. My father was exiled from the Light city for wielding Dark magic, and he died in the Dark. My sister was killed for wielding Light magic. Those dead are my dead. And their murderers are now at last summoned to answer for their crimes.”
My aunt took a few steps forward, dragging me with her to the edge of the platform. I stumbled and teetered for a moment, the whole world seeming off balance, the sinking in my stomach telling me that I would fall.
I stared from the platform at the terrible new cages suspended against the sky, against the bright towers of the Light city. The bars of the nearest cage were black and stark, like charcoal strokes on a watercolor painting. Inside the cage, hemmed in on all sides by Dark magic and metal spikes, was Mark Stryker.
My aunt’s triumphant voice rose and rose, so high that it almost became a wail.
“These creatures of the Light protect their own, at any cost. But the time has come for them to know that we can protect our own as well as they. Turn your face to me, Stryker!”
Mark Stryker turned his face toward her. It was a face I had feared for so long. It did not look any kinder now that he was in trouble and in pain. He spat at Aunt Leila, but it did not come close to hitting her. His hate was as futile as hers had been for years. The power might have changed sides, but there was hate on both sides, inescapable. I felt like I was choking on it.
Aunt Leila’s voice was a triumphant scream. “Even now, you see we cannot make him sorry. They are more soulless than doppelgangers. We can only make him pay. Mark Stryker, these are the days when all your sins are to be paid for. I summon you and yours, to the last of your evil line, to answer for your crimes. Your blood is ours to be used now, and we will not rest until the last drop of blood is spilled!”
Then I saw how the new cages worked.
The cage closed in on Mark like a dark claw. I saw his body jerk convulsively like a puppet whose strings were being pulled, in what seemed like an inhuman mimicry of human movement, because human bodies did not and could not move so. I saw the burst of Dark magic his death made, like a black supernova within the cage. I saw the Dark magicians in the crowd shudder in an ecstasy of power, and I heard the small animal sound Mark Stryker made as he died.
A terrible noise rose up from the crowd, more like the growl and whine of a hungry beast than words formed by people who could still think, feel pity, or know reason.
“We killed Charles Stryker in his bed for his crimes!” shouted Aunt Leila. “We killed James Stryker when we took this city! Now we have killed Mark Stryker. And we will kill the last of their villainous family soon. We will not let any one of the Light Council live. We will not have peace until we have blood!”
I looked at Ethan’s Uncle Mark swinging in his cage, and I knew that I had been wrong to think of him as the villain in my story, one whose power could crush me. I had been as wrong as Aunt Leila was to think that defeating the Strykers or even bringing down the Light city would change anything.
They brought out more of the Light Council, one after the other, and killed them before our eyes. They brought out the woman they called Bright Mariah in the Light city, and Bitter Mariah in the Dark, and when she was dead, a rebel held her head aloft on one of their spikes, her hair streaming and shining, a symbol the same way I was. The blood fell like rain and caused a joyful riot.
There was no escape from the ugliness in the human heart, the hate that led to this violence and all violence. It had taken my mother, tortured my father, taken my first home and was burning my second. I had struggled to be safe for years, but there was no way to be safe.
There were villains all around me. There was evil in the very air I breathed. There would be no final showdown, no end, no possibility of happiness after evil was vanquished.
The only choice, in the Light city or the Dark, was to be twisted or to break.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I went back with Aunt Leila to the Plaza Hotel, where the sans-merci had established their headquarters. She took me into one of the suites, and she washed her hands and face at the sink. I sat on a sofa and looked down at my clenched hands on the blue and white striped silk.
Aunt Leila seemed happy, as if the obscene show on the platform had been her notion of an ideal family outing. She was talking about the way the sans-merci intended to run the city they had taken: the Committee of the Free, set up to judge and punish the members of the Light regime, and how she thought Dad and I should be on it.
She wanted Ethan to be one of the first victims judged and condemned by the new committee. She wanted Ethan as her example of how life would be from now on. She thought I would actually support that.