Because the black snake whose weight Colin’s slender shoulders had borne carried a thread of Virissong’s essence within it. A thread that I had carried back from the Middle World to make this all possible.

There’d never been any chance the pentagram would hold the serpent, not with a real and true shard of its self outside the star’s safe walls. Not with a willing host waiting to carry it into the world, and not with a helpful conduit shuttling pieces of its core back and forth from the Lower to the Middle World. Faye had done badly by beginning the process that would release Virissong, but I was the one who’d actually brought a piece of him into my world.

Virissong’s grin split Colin’s face in a nasty gash, his laughter a rich deep delight edged with diamond razors. He said, “Thank you,” the whisper rattling the small bones of my ears and sending chilly waves of nausea down my spine and into my fingertips. He swayed his head, watching me with cold flat eyes, snakelike, and split another vicious smile. “Perhapsss the Enemy cannot bind those who walk my path, asss I could not fully bind you. Perhapsss the Enemy is wissser in not trying,” he whispered, “but perhapss that iss not sso. In sso little time of following me, look what you have wrought, Walkingstick.” The hiss in his voice faded with each sentence, as if he was relearning the way a human tongue made speech. “You have brought me forth fully, as no one has been able to do in thousands of years. And there is no Enemy to bind me again, shaman. You are my greatest achievement.”

“Buddy,” I whispered, “I don’t know who your Enemy is, but whoever it is, I’m pretty goddamned sure he’s my friend.” I lifted my voice, hearing it crack as I called out, “Marcia? Take care of Mel.”

Then I wrapped my arms around Colin’s no longer frail body and let go with all the power I’d been collecting, focusing the coven’s spell on myself instead of on Virissong.

Air imploded around me with a soft bamf. I hadn’t previously known that imploding air was a sound in my repertoire of easily recognized noises, but it was. For a couple of seconds, I felt like a special effect in a movie, which was just so cool there wasn’t much else in the world to worry about. Besides, it didn’t hurt, and that made it even better. I’d sort of expected that moving myself from one point to another without going through the intervening distance would rupture my eardrums, or something equally unpleasant. I had some pretty recent experience with ruptured eardrums, and I was extremely pleased to not be revisiting that particular moment in my life. All in all it was a highly enjoyable two seconds.

At the end of that time I noticed I was falling very very fast toward a flat glimmering surface a long, long way below me. I was reasonably sure the part where it didn’t hurt was going to come to an abrupt end in the near future.

Colin twisted in my arms, screaming outrage as he writhed. An elbow caught me in the nose and I nearly let go, then held on tighter. For some reason dropping him seemed careless, even as he flailed and shrieked. “It’s gonna be okay,” I yelled. The air tasted thick and sour, too muggy and too hot, even though we were making our own wind by falling through it.

He gave me a black-eyed look of unmitigated hatred, pulling his lips back from his teeth to hiss, more like a cat than a snake. “It’ll be fine,” I yelled again. I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince, but I suspected of the two of us, I was the one concerned about our future well-being.

Which led me to wonder what the hell I thought I was going to do next. The glittering surface below was slowly getting larger—I was pretty sure it was Lake Washington, although I hadn’t ever seen it from quite this vantage before—and I wondered how high up we were and how long it would take us to hit the water, and whether terminal velocity gave any kind of softening on the odds of survival if you hit liquid instead of solid earth. It was amazing the kinds of things that just flowed right through my mind when the other option to think about was impending death.

Colin screamed again, a long thin sound that had no business coming from a human throat. His whole body bucked in my arms, wrenching itself rigid before it softened, as if the bones were melting out from under his skin. I shuddered and took my eyes away from the looming lake to try to calm him, and instead let out a hoarse yell and let him go despite my best intentions.

Hewas melting, skin molting and blending into black scales, the rage in his eyes flattened by the deadly dullness of the serpent’s gaze. His body threaded longer, arms melding to his sides, legs growing together, and his hair became wild with tiny Medusa-tentacles. Spires ripped from his spine, glistening and deadly with poison, until the boy was gone entirely and I fell beside the serpent.

It flared wings, short and stubby, not nearly enough to lift its bulk through the air. Still, somehow, its fall slowed as its body thickened and lengthened, until it was the colossal monster I’d first met in the Dead Zone. I was still falling at a gravity-dictated rate of speed, but the serpent was above me now, black scales picking up sunlight and glancing the brightness through my eyes.

If I hadn’t promised once upon a time that it could eat me, I might’ve thought it was beautiful. As if the thought reminded the thing, it lunged forward, snapping massive jaws shut mere inches from my head.

Given the choice between being eaten alive and smashing at a billion miles an hour into Lake Washington, I decided smashing sounded good. I tucked myself into a pike, then straightened out so my head was pointed down and my body was streamlined. Maybe I could out-fall the thing. Anything was worth trying.

An unexpectedly powerful buffet of wind crashed into me, ignoring wholesale my attempts to streamline myself It knocked me back up into the air, far enough and fast enough that the serpent’s second lunge missed by yards instead of inches. For one startling instant, the whole thing felt very familiar, like every falling dream I’d ever dreamed had just come real.

Only it wasn’t a dream I was reminded of.

I arched back, closing my eyes against the warm wind, and let the thunderbird’s golden liquid fire burst free from my chest.

CHAPTER 33

I turned inside-out, my consciousness folding upward into the creature that I gave birth to. Disorientation and pain swept over me, bewildering in a muffled way. I felt like I’d turned a somersault that placed me firmly in a new body and put someone else in the driver’s seat. That was good: if I’d been in control of the thunderbird’s body, I’d be plummeting toward the lake at record speeds. Instead, massively powerful wings clapped against the muggy air so heavily I could hear thunder as I climbed higher into the sky.

I turned on a wingtip once I’d gained enough altitude, watching the world spiral below me in vivid colors that went beyond my second sight and into something purely inhuman. It was like discovering I’d been wearing sunglasses that’d been draining the life out of everything I looked at. Even through waves of heat rising off the earth, the leaves were more than just the emerald that gave Seattle its nickname. They had depth, wavering into gem-clear colors that made my hands—never mind that I didn’t seem to have any—ache with the desire to touch them. The sky around me was the same, so pure a blue I felt like I should draw my wings in for fear of being sliced apart on the clarity of air.

Amusement that wasn’t my own welled up from deep within the broad chest. Even that was so sharp it throbbed, making my own experiences and feelings shallow by comparison. Great. The thunderbird thought I was funny, with my tiny human emotions and my tiny human brain.