The End of Magic (The Witches of Echo Park #3)(105)

When past-Lyse removed her hands, her face was ugly with tears. She turned her head, looking for the ghost, but Eleanora was gone.

"Eleanora?" past-Lyse whispered, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, her hot tears finally spilling.

There was no reply. Only the gentle hum of the night. Past-Lyse sat beside the broken body of the Lady-only a few feet from where Lyse and Niamh sat hunched in the bushes-for what seemed like hours, her gaze far away. Then she climbed to her feet, and with an unsteady gait, she walked out of their view.

"That's so creepy," Niamh whispered.

"It's even creepier when it's your own body that you're watching," Lyse replied.

"So now what?" Niamh asked.

Lyse sighed-she wasn't sure about what came next, but she had an inkling.

"C'mon," Lyse said. "Let's go take a look."

She crawled out from the bushes, Niamh behind her. The two of them walked over to the broken body of the Lady of the Lake . . . and the dead man who lay pinned beneath her. But he didn't really count.

Lyse stared at the beautiful stone beauty that lay smashed to smithereens. The moon hung back, hidden behind a sheet of clouds, not willing to shine its light on the abomination. The abomination not being the Lady and her destruction, but the man trapped beneath her stone body.

Flesh and meat that once held human form-yet there was almost nothing human about him now . . . except for one pale arm peeking out from beneath the stone, its long fingers curled into the approximation of a claw. He was crushed like a cockroach under a shoe, and there was too much blood for him to be anything but dead. The Lady of the Lake was not a waif; her body was large and imposing, and when the man found himself under her as she toppled forward, his fate had been sealed.

Lyse didn't feel bad for the way the Lady had been used as a murder weapon by Eleanora and past-Lyse. Her uncle David deserved what happened to him.

The moon chose this moment to reveal itself again, illuminating the lake. The face of the water reflected back the moonlight, the surface sparkling like diamonds on black velvet. As if called down by the moon, the prickling fingers of a cold breeze tickled the Lady's broken body.

"Lyse?" Niamh whispered in her ear. "Why are we still here?"

"Because we have to undo what was done here."

Niamh stared at her.

"Bring someone back from the dead?" she said, indicating the corpse under the broken statue. "That's not possible."

Lyse smiled, but there was no warmth in her eyes.

"Oh, I think it's entirely possible," Lyse said. "Besides, I can't throw my uncle into a singularity if he's not there to be thrown. And if we do this . . . I think it will be the thing that returns the balance of power to our world and takes away The Flood's advantage."

Lyse was sure that returning her uncle to the living . . . was the moment she had come here to change.


• • •



       
         
       
        

The breeze was almost a warning that magic was fast approaching. There was a slowing down of time, a swirling of the ether around them, and then the air split apart like someone shucking the husk from an ear of corn as a bolt of lightning shot across the sky.

"Are you sure we can do it?" Niamh asked Lyse. She sounded tentative, unsure of herself.

"We are both capable of so much more than we even know," Lyse said, and then she began to hum.

The song was not something she knew consciously, but once she opened her mouth, it flowed out of her. The tune was rambling and old-no, not old . . . but timeless. It came from before, when the world was new and magic lived in every living thing that took its sustenance from the Earth and sun. The song called to the Lady, to the stone she was made of, which had been taken from the Earth and would one day go back to it. Lyse felt the great stone body begin to stir.

Niamh rested her palms against the Lady's shattered torso, the tune Lyse hummed encircling the splintered pieces of the statue's body. With the grinding of stone on concrete, the pieces began to move back toward one another as if they were magnetized. Lyse continued to hum, while Niamh moved the pads of her fingers along the Lady's back. When she finally took her hands away, a powerful magic linked both her and Lyse to the statue.

"I can move through space and time," Lyse murmured to Niamh. "And you are the maker."

Niamh left her kneeling position and rose to her feet. The magical link between them pulled the Lady into the air, where she floated weightlessly. Using the same magical tune, Lyse sung the Lady forward, swinging the heavy stone figure back onto the pedestal from which she'd watched over Echo Park Lake for almost a century-all without so much as lifting a physical finger.