“Two sisters,” Jez murmured, searching my stare, “imbued with the powers of life and death.”
“One to raise the constellations,” I continued what the Storyteller had said.
“Another to hold their leashes.” At Jezebel’s words, her control over the alpheous flashed through my memory. Her gazed tracked over the marble at our feet, stopping at the enormous paws of that sphinx. Up, up, up, until it landed on that female face, so beautiful even etched in stone, and she voiced the words I’d been afraid of. “You need to wake her.”
“I do.” A familiar enthusiasm swirled in my chest, and instead of shoving it deep down, I allowed it to gather.
“Do you know how to do that?” Jezebel asked.
Not for the first time tonight, I was brutally honest about how lost I was. “No idea.” I forced a laugh, sheathing Starfire. “But I have to try.”
“What are you going to do?” Erista’s voice was guarded, her hand drifting toward her hooked blade as she moved between both Jezebel and the sphinx, and me, as if protecting the girl she loved and this precious work of art from an unknown magic.
“I promise, Erista,” I said, taking a step forward, “nothing the Angels haven’t sent me for.”
I’d been led here, and without any kind of direction, I had to trust what wove my bones and being to guide me.
Hesitantly, Erista stepped aside.
“Jez, put up your own shield,” I instructed, because while I wanted to test this magic on the sphinx, I would let it take my own life before I set it on my sister again.
Immediately, one of those silver-blue veils shimmered in front of Jezebel and Erista. If we were right, and Jez’s power was death while mine was life, maybe they’d repel one another as they’d fought before. I thought that was what they’d been doing when we flew with Sapphire and the khrysaor and that day in the inn, fighting after stifled for so long.
“Start slowly,” Erista cautioned, not harshly.
I took a deep breath, cementing that memory of Jezebel struggling to breathe in the back of my mind as my own warning.
Watching the beautiful stone face, I dug deep within myself. To the same place I pulled the strings of the Angel emblems, the hollows that filled in my spirit. But this time I ignored each one of those connections. Shifting them aside, I searched for something else. Something that had always been there, but that had woken on the bridge to another realm and longed to be unleashed.
There.
Hidden beneath the cover of Angellight, another source of magic welled within me. And when I finally acknowledged it, saw it for what it truly was, it rose like a great beast spreading its wings for the first time in long, long centuries.
Now that I knowingly called it forth, named it for what it was, the power to raise myths answered my call.
Magic budded through my veins, emerging at my fingertips. It looked so strikingly similar to the Angellight, as if both were meant to weave together within me. As if, perhaps, it was my being that decided what form they took.
Carefully, but not timidly—I didn’t want the power to believe it owned me—I cast a gentle stream of shimmering light toward the sphinx. It bathed the air like a shooting star.
My muscles tightened, shaking as I struggled to retain control over a power born of myths, and set to work raising a constellation.
Gold light poured around the sphinx, down over her head, across her shoulders and that powerful lion’s body. It explored those magnificent wings?—
The feathers ruffled.
“It’s working,” I breathed. It was the most minute flutter in the drafty hall, the stone facade slipping away to reveal the softness beneath.
But like a veil falling one draping inch at a time, white stone melted down her features.
It started at the highest points of her wings and the top of her head. Her flowing black hair and sharp green eyes. The nose and dusty-pink lips. All the way down to the massive paws and back to her whipping tail.
And when all the stone was melted upon the floor like an oily spill, the sphinx rose before us. My power recoiled into me, purring and satisfied after being intentionally fed for the first time in Spirits knew how long.
“By the fucking Angels,” I muttered.
I’d woken a sleeping myth. A creature long gone from this world, that many believed no longer existed. That many believed hadneverexisted, much like the pegasus.
Before I could truly allow that to sink in, the sphinx opened her mouth, and she said in a voice like warm honey that showed no indication of having been frozen in stone for millennia, “Welcome, Alabath sisters. I have long hoped you would rescue me.”
