“When we broke their laws, we suffered for it, but when they broke their laws, we suffered for that too. Charles Stryker wanted to protect the doppelganger, and Mark Stryker wanted to control the creature. So the Strykers had spies set on the dirty little house where the doppelganger lived, spies who followed my sister home and worked out that she was secretly living with a Light magician. Mark Stryker knew that a woman linked to a Light citizen would recognize Ethan Stryker’s face. He realized Josephine knew the Stryker family secret, and so she had to be destroyed. Stryker sent his men to kill my sister. They did it one night as she left the doppelganger’s house. They buried her in a shallow grave in the earth beneath another lost soul’s window, as if her dead body was the seeds for a flower bed. When her Light magician husband went searching for her, Stryker’s power made certain he was taken and caged, in the cages we have torn down. When her daughter, our Golden One, spoke up against their cruelty and the people began to listen to her, Stryker’s power carried her and her father away into the captivity of the Light. She was too famous for them to kill, so they tried to force her to become one of their own, when she was always ours. This was the final wrong we had to avenge. This was why we had to sweep into the city and save the Golden One! Little did Stryker think we would come to him and strike him down. Little did Stryker’s hired assassins know, as they tossed black earth onto my sister’s cold face, that she would rise up. That all of us buried would rise up and take our vengeance.”
The hold on my wrist was all I could feel. Otherwise I was numb. I kept thinking of my mother, her always-worried, always-earnest living face, and of Ethan. Ethan was the only person in the world I had ever spoken to of my mother, and he had held me as I cried. I would never have dreamed there was any link between them but me.
I had never dreamed, when I had tried to help Carwyn and thought I was acting like my mother, how right I had been.
Leila shook me. “Speak!” she hissed.
“I . . .” I said. “I loved my mother. She was murdered. I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t even tell the world she was my mother. But she is not the only person I love. I love—”
Ethan, I almost said, but then Leila’s hold tightened like a handcuff. It had almost been a relief to look out on a crowd and tell the truth about my mother, but I was not free now any more than I had been before. Neither in the Light nor in the Dark could I speak my whole heart.
“The Golden Thread in the Dark is my young niece, Lucie,” Aunt Leila cried, her voice ringing out. “Her tortured father was my sister’s husband. My father was exiled from the Light city for wielding Dark magic, and he died in the Dark. My sister was killed for wielding Light magic. Those dead are my dead. And their murderers are now at last summoned to answer for their crimes.”
My aunt took a few steps forward, dragging me with her to the edge of the platform. I stumbled and teetered for a moment, the whole world seeming off balance, the sinking in my stomach telling me that I would fall.
I stared from the platform at the terrible new cages suspended against the sky, against the bright towers of the Light city. The bars of the nearest cage were black and stark, like charcoal strokes on a watercolor painting. Inside the cage, hemmed in on all sides by Dark magic and metal spikes, was Mark Stryker.
My aunt’s triumphant voice rose and rose, so high that it almost became a wail.
“These creatures of the Light protect their own, at any cost. But the time has come for them to know that we can protect our own as well as they. Turn your face to me, Stryker!”
Mark Stryker turned his face toward her. It was a face I had feared for so long. It did not look any kinder now that he was in trouble and in pain. He spat at Aunt Leila, but it did not come close to hitting her. His hate was as futile as hers had been for years. The power might have changed sides, but there was hate on both sides, inescapable. I felt like I was choking on it.
Aunt Leila’s voice was a triumphant scream. “Even now, you see we cannot make him sorry. They are more soulless than doppelgangers. We can only make him pay. Mark Stryker, these are the days when all your sins are to be paid for. I summon you and yours, to the last of your evil line, to answer for your crimes. Your blood is ours to be used now, and we will not rest until the last drop of blood is spilled!”
Then I saw how the new cages worked.
The cage closed in on Mark like a dark claw. I saw his body jerk convulsively like a puppet whose strings were being pulled, in what seemed like an inhuman mimicry of human movement, because human bodies did not and could not move so. I saw the burst of Dark magic his death made, like a black supernova within the cage. I saw the Dark magicians in the crowd shudder in an ecstasy of power, and I heard the small animal sound Mark Stryker made as he died.