Then the darkness took me and I was gone.
* * *
Something warm and wet moved across my face.
I was dead. I was sure of it. Dead and lying on a cold stone floor in a tower no one knew existed, and something was touching my face and I should be afraid but I couldn't remember how to be afraid because I couldn't remember anything except the color of stars and the sound of something shattering and the taste of shadows in my mouth.
The warm thing moved again. Across my swollen cheek. Over the split skin. A rough, insistent pressure — not hands, not human — followed by a sound. A thin, high sound. A whine. The kind of sound an animal makes when it finds something broken and doesn't understand why it won't get up.
I opened my eyes. One wouldn't cooperate — swollen shut, the flesh so tight and hot it felt like it belonged to someone else. The other opened to a slit and the world came in sideways: cold stone, a wash of gray dawn light through the archway, and red. A blur of red.
Melo.
At some point I stopped holding the spell. I don't know when. I didn't choose to — I simply had nothing left to hold it with. Whatever I'd used to keep myself hidden had run out, like water through a cracked cup, and I couldn't have gathered it back even if I'd wanted to. Every wall I'd built, every thread I'd pulled inward and sealed away — gone. I had nothing left to protect with. Nothing left at all.
Fox-shaped, small, pressed against my side with her nose against my cheek. Her tongue lapped at the blood on my face, gentle and frantic at the same time, the way she'd cleaned my wounds when I was a child — but her eyes were wrong. Too bright. Too wild. The turquoise irises were blown wide, ringed with a thin band of something feral and ancient that I'd never seen before.
She whined again. Pressed her entire body against mine. Her fur was damp — sweat, dew, both — and beneath it her small frame shook with a tremor that was not cold.
I tried to speak. What came out was a sound that didn't have consonants.
And then something happened that I had never seen before. Something I had no name for and no framework to hold.
Melo shifted.
Not the way she sometimes did — smooth, considered, deliberate, the controlled unfurling of a being who knew exactly what she was doing. This was different. This was sudden and almost violent, like watching a storm break, like watching a held breath finally released after far too long. One moment she was a fox, her wet nose pressed to my ruined face, her small body trembling against mine — and the next the air around her shivered and fractured and something vast and bright moved through the space where the fox had been.
A woman.
She was— I didn't have words. Even broken as I was, even barely conscious, I noticed. She was tall where Melo-the-fox was small, all long limbs and a kind of unself-conscious grace that had nothing trained in it. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders in a tumble of deep, vivid red — not the soft russet of her fur but something richer, darker, the color of embers an hour after the fire has gone down. Her face was sharp and ancient and beautiful in the way that things with no vanity are beautiful: without knowing it, without trying. Her eyes were turquoise. The same turquoise I had known my whole life, in every form — but in this face, this impossible face, they looked like something you could fall into. She was shaking. Staring at her own hands — long-fingered, trembling — with an expression I had never seen on her face in any form. Not fear exactly. Not wonder exactly. Something between the two. Something closer to recognition, as though this shape, this impossible human shape, was not entirely a surprise but was still not something she had expected to find herself inside.
She didn't speak for a long moment. Just looked at her hands. Then at me.
Then, very slowly, whatever had seized her face released it. The shaking didn't stop — but she looked at me. A real look. Not at her hands, not at herself, but at me. At the torn dress. At the blood between my thighs, dried to a dark crust on the stone around me. At my wrists — raw, shredded, caked with blood where I'd torn my own skin against shadow restraints. At the bruises on my breasts, my hips, my inner thighs. At my face — split, swollen, one eye sealed shut, jaw already purpling.
Her expression didn't change. That was the thing about Melo — she didn't crumble. Didn't gasp. Her face went completely, terrifyingly still, and those turquoise eyes turned to something that was not quite fox and not quite human and not quite anything with a name, and she said, in a voice I had never heard from her — not the voice I knew, but lower, clearer, human, and colder than anything.
"Who."
One word. Not a question. A promise of violence so absolute it made the air taste of copper.
I shook my head. My mouth was so swollen the words came out misshapen, pushed through split lips and a jaw that screamed when it moved. "I don't know. I couldn't see. I couldn't?—"
My voice broke. Shattered like thin ice under too much weight, and the pieces of it fell into the silence between us, and Melo caught every one.
She didn't ask me to explain. Didn't ask where or how or why. She pulled me into her arms — carefully, so carefully, as though I were made of something that had already broken and might crumble to dust — and she held me against her chest and wrapped her cloak around both of us. I pressed my face againsther shoulder — a human shoulder, warm and solid, strange only in its newness — and I breathed in the scent of her, which was still pine and wild places and ancient loyalty underneath everything else, unchanged by the shape that held it.
"I've got you. I've got you. We're leaving."
She lifted me as if I weighed nothing. Carried me into the trees, away from the palace, away from the tower. I closed my eyes, and I let her carry me through the dawn toward the only family I had left.
I did not look back.
But the tower looked at me. I felt it. The way you feel someone's gaze on the back of your neck in a dark room.
The stars had seen everything.
They would tell no one.