Chapter 468: You Were Never This Nice When You Were Alive

She brought her hands together.

The seedling touched the mist.

Nothing exploded.

The leaves unfurled further, silver-green now, trimmed in a thin dark line. The mist soaked into them and became part of them. In her cupped palms, a small bright flower opened, and as it did the outermost petals began to curl and fade, and new ones opened behind them. Blooming and withering in the same slow breath. It did not grow out of control. It did not die. It was simply alive and dying and alive, in one unbroken rhythm, like a heartbeat.

The hall was absolutely silent.

"Don’t move," Victoria whispered.

Lilith didn’t. She stood with the flower in her hands and her pulse in her ears and watched it turn.

One second. Ten. Thirty.

At a minute, her arms began to shake, and she let the flower go. It dissolved into a drift of green-grey light and faded.

She stood panting. Her whole body felt scraped hollow and wonderfully clean.

"A minute and a quarter," Victoria said. Her voice was not quite steady. "Lilith. That was a minute and a quarter."

"I held it." Lilith stared at her hands. "I actually held it."

"You did." Victoria pressed her fingers to her mouth, and for a moment she looked younger than she had in weeks. "Your mother couldn’t have done that. I couldn’t have done that at your age. No one in the family has done that since before the massacre."

Lilith laughed. It came out cracked and surprised. She sat down on the stone floor because her legs gave out, and she kept laughing until it turned into something closer to breathing.

She felt it then. Not from the room. From somewhere very close behind her ribs. A cool pressure at her wrist, brief and gentle, like a hand wrapping around hers.

"There she is," Nicholas said. "I knew you could."

Lilith closed her eyes. "You were watching."

"I’m always watching." Warm amusement under the words. "Don’t get used to the praise."

"You were never this nice when you were alive."

"I was nicer than you remember. You were just angry."

She laughed again, and this time her eyes stung with it.

They tried it again, and again. By the third attempt she held the flower for two minutes. By the fifth, for three. Victoria stopped timing and just watched, her hands folded around the head of her cane.

"Now," Victoria said, after a long silence. "The harder part."

Lilith wiped her face with her sleeve. "The Veil."

"You told me it’s pulling on you when you reach too far."

"It has been. Since the battle. Since before." Lilith drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "I think Nicholas is right. It knows what I’m carrying. It wants it back. Every time I use both currents hard, I feel it. A tug. A grey edge creeping into the room."

"Then we need you to be able to stand at that edge without falling in."

"How?"

"You already know." Victoria leaned forward. "Nicholas told you. Don’t pull too hard. Don’t open the door more than you must. But that isn’t enough. You also have to learn what to do when it opens by itself."

"It opens by itself?"

"It will." Victoria’s expression was grave. "Tomorrow. The day after. In the middle of a fight, with Keres at the gates and your hands full of power. You need to have been there on purpose, so that when it happens by accident you aren’t afraid."

Lilith’s mouth went dry.

"Show me."

She sat cross-legged in the middle of the chalk ring with her palms on her knees and breathed until the edges of the room went soft.

Down. Past the warm green current. Past the cold one. Down into the place where they were not two things anymore.

The door was where she’d left it. Open a hand’s width. Grey light seeped from it, pale and endless.

"Careful," Nicholas said, very close. "Stay on this side of the frame."

"I’m not going through."

"Good. Then look."

She looked.

The grey spread out before her, formless and vast. Far off, so faint she almost mistook it for wind, she heard voices. Hundreds of them, whispering in languages she couldn’t name. Lost souls, still murmuring, still half-aware.

And behind them, deeper, something else.

It wasn’t a voice. It was a pressure. A vast, slow, patient attention turning toward her the way a great animal’s head turns toward movement in tall grass.

Her breath caught.

"It sees you," Nicholas said. His voice stayed calm. "Don’t run from it. If you run, it follows."

"What do I do?"

"Do what you did with the flower. Don’t fight it. Don’t feed it. Stand in the doorway like a person standing in a doorway. A pause. A door isn’t a floor, Lilith. You don’t have to step through it. You just have to be the one who decides when it closes."

The pressure grew. Cold crept up her arms. The grey was reaching for her now, in thin pale fingers that curled around the edge of the door.

Lilith did not pull back. She didn’t reach out either.

She stood in the opening and let herself be seen.

"Mine," the pressure said.

Not a word. A feeling. It rolled over her like a tide, enormous and ancient and utterly without malice, the way a flood has no malice. It simply wanted what had been taken. It simply was.

Her whole body went rigid. Her heart hammered.

"Lilith," Nicholas said sharply. "Now. Close it."

She gripped the edge of the door with both hands and pushed.

It resisted. It was heavier than anything she had ever moved. The grey strained against her, pouring through the gap, cold and endless.

"Not with force. With intent. Decide it’s closed." Nicholas instructed.

She thought of the courtyard. Of Ysolde’s face. Of Sebastian and Lucian standing at her sides and not in front of her. Of Nicholas, somewhere beyond this door, keeping a vast thing busy with whatever it was he did. Of every person in this house who had decided, one by one, to stand beside her.

Mine, she thought. Not yours.

The door swung shut.