Page 44 of Magpie

Winking at me from underneath his desk is the softly glowing green light of the luna key.

Reaching my hand out, I splay it as wide as I can, my fingertips a hair’s breadth away from the painted barrier of my cage. Turning my head slowly back to Alister, I force my eyes to focus on him as I say, “You’re wrong.”

He sits atop me, staring down at me with his wrath and his power swimming around him. His brow furrows as he cocks his arm back, ready to strike me again.

“You gave me a muted world built on lies,” I say before he can. “The only splendor I knew was in the arms of another. Your embrace gave me nothing . All you do is take, and Alister, I’m done giving.”

With the last of my strength, I curl my finger in the way Sean taught me, performing the simple magic trick I learned so long ago. The luna key slides across the floor, flying into my hand, and with the very last of my strength, I plunge it into Alister’s chest and twist, like I am opening a door.

Alister is stone-still, poised like he will attack at any moment, his face frozen in a mask of rage. I think perhaps my mind has finally snapped, and that I’ll be stuck in this scene forever. But then he moves. I flinch, waiting for the onslaught—but he tilts backward and slams into the ground.

My chest rises and falls as I wait for him to stir, to round on me, to attack. When he doesn’t move, I sit up, my head swimming. It takes a moment to get the room to stop spinning, and when I do, I find Alister’s body prone before me.

As I inch across the floor toward him, every nerve in my body is screaming at me to run, to leave him behind, but I ignore it. I don’t test the bounds of my cage, don’t even attempt to see if I can run free. I never intended to leave this house a free woman. I intended to end this .

Alister’s eyes are open but blank, and his chest does not rise and fall. He might as well be made of stone for all he moves. The luna key is still stuck directly in his chest, protruding from the space above his heart.

Crawling on top of him, my knees on either side of his torso, I begin to peel away his shirt, the material ripping around the key lodged firmly in his chest. Black spiderwebbing veins jut out from where I stabbed him before, when I tried so foolishly to destroy him by running.

I know better now. There is no ending him without facing him.

The only way to outrun the dark is to go through it.

Gripping the handle of the luna key, I give it one final twist, and pull it out.

Alister’s chest begins to crumble and break away, bits and pieces of his flesh deteriorating and falling into the cavern of his heart like cascading puzzle pieces.

Setting the luna key down, I give his lifeless eyes one last glance before I reach into the black hole.

It’s like dipping my hand into a frozen mud puddle, icy cold and thick, exactly as I remember from the last time.

But now, I am not searching for just my key. I’m looking for all of them.

Grabbing the first bit of metal I feel, I pull my arm back out of the hole in his chest. Blood drips down my forearm—not bright red, not the color of Sean’s eyes, but deep, closer to black than anything resembling life—and off the wrought iron key in my hand.

The handle looks like a candle, and I can almost imagine the flame is flickering.

Grabbing either end of the key, I snap it in half with surprising ease.

It crumbles to dust, the substance sticking to the thick liquid coating my hands.

I am death, and I will bring an end to Alister, even if it means ending every other life fed into his burning inferno.

Without a second thought, I plunge my hand back into his chest. Again and again, I pull out keys, snapping them in half and watching in a silent vigil as they disintegrate to dust. The viscous black substance drips off me, pooling on the floor around us like an ink blot test. The dust floats in the air, the ashy remains clouding the glass walls, cutting me off from the night sky and the coming dawn.

Good. I shouldn’t watch another sunrise.

I don’t deserve it.

I work slowly, taking my time reaching, searching, focusing on each key before I break it in half.

I should be rushing, feverishly snapping key after key, but it doesn’t feel right to sever these connections without some semblance of a funeral.

Some last moment of mourning for each soul that burned in his flame.

I trace my eyes over each key handle, committing it to memory before erasing it from this world as only death can.

There must be hundreds of keys, or maybe thousands.

I stop paying attention. Hours or days pass, or it could only be minutes—I’m not sure.

The room is dimming, the ash from the broken keys joining the growing fog that surrounds me.

Soon the study is nothing but a murky backdrop, and I have to reach my arm up to my shoulder inside the hole in Alister’s chest to find more keys.

I think I may be crying; it’s hard to tell.

Even my gentle sobs have gone silent in the ashy void.

It’s easy to think I have been doing this endlessly. Pulling out keys and snapping them, adding to the blood splatter and the ashy fog. Then I sink my arm back in, and I feel it.

My key.

It calls out to me, even from the void of his chest, where he consumed it. Where he consumed me, and so many others. I grab it, my fingers finding purchase around a second key as well. I begin to pull them both out.

Alister’s arms move, wrapping around me and pressing me to his chest, caging me to him.

“Do not do this, Magpie,” he sputters, sending a spray of blood against the side of my face as he coughs. “Don’t leave me.” He is trying to sound commanding, instead sounding timid and unsure.

I pull back from him easily, finding he has no hold over me.

I’m not sure he ever did.

“It is not too late to stop. We can come back from even this,” he begs, his desperation breaking through.

I sit up straight, staring down at him. He’s covered in splatters of blood and smears of ash. His skin is sunken, yellowed, tinged with disease and decay. His cheekbones are jutting out, trying to break through his paper-thin flesh.

He darts his thick, swollen tongue out, wetting his cracked lips. “You can’t live without me, Magpie.”

“Living with you is no life at all.”

I pull both keys from his chest.

His arms slide limply off me. I hold his gaze as I snap the key with the spade on the handle. I hold his gaze as he turns gray and crumbles to ash, as his body disintegrates beneath me. I hold his gaze in my mind, long after the last bit of his dust blows away.

And then I let him go.

The blood on my hands mixes with the ashes surrounding me, drying into a crusty layer on my skin as I sit, motionless.

I’m staring at the other key, the one with the black-and-white bird adorning the handle, its wings outstretched in flight.

Running my thumb over the bird, I feel the bend of every feather, the point of its beak.

It is the final key, my key, and holding my breath, I grip each end, ready at last to be done.

I move to snap it in half—

“I’ll take that.”