Rewrite That Witch
CH295 · Rewrite
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Chapter 295: Wings Spreading Out

The moment the spear hit Roland, Nightingale’s stomach clenched and everything went distant.

Sound became a thing happening in another room — the creak of ropes, the crack of revolvers, the low sounds of the Devils. She crossed the basket in two steps and lifted him, and discovered that his body had gone the particular heavy stillness of unconsciousness. His hands trembled slightly. Only his hands.

She held him, and she was afraid. Not the shaped, manageable fear of someone who has made a calculation and found it unfavorable. The other kind — the kind that works inward rather than outward, that finds the places you didn’t know you’d been guarding and presses on them.

She was afraid he was losing warmth.

She was afraid he would not wake.

Just breathing felt like lifting something.

Anna moved first. She crouched beside him, placed both hands over the wound, and summoned her flame — the lightless black heat that cut without burning, that held temperatures no furnace could match. White smoke curled upward with a sound like fat on a hot stone. When the flame withdrew, the torn shoulder was sealed in black char. The blood had stopped. Not clean, not repaired — but stopped, which was what mattered right now.

The emergency measure from the first aid class. Cauterize. Wrap. Hospital. Nightingale’s gaze moved across the basket, an involuntary inventory. No Nana. Of course there was no Nana. Nana was in Border Town.

We have to go back.

She lifted her head toward the southeast and held the direction for a moment the way a compass holds north — then the basket shuddered, and the sounds of combat came back into her at full volume, and the makeshift wall she’d built in her mind around the fact of Roland lying bleeding against her knees had to be enough.

“Don’t engage the Devils,” she said. Her voice came out even. “If they catch us before we land, we never reach Border Town.”

“Lightning.” Anna’s voice was sharp with urgency. “Protect the balloon.”

Lightning’s face was white. She looked at Roland, set her jaw, and flew out of the basket without answering.

Nightingale watched her go and understood immediately that it would not be enough. Lightning was fast, precise, capable — and completely without combat experience. She had never fought something that was trying to kill her. She fought in the language of speed and repositioning, not the language of closing distance and delivering violence. Most witches were the same. They hadn’t needed to learn the other language, because they’d had Border Town.

I’m the only one here who can kill these things.

She took one breath and pulled everything that was not immediately useful behind a curtain at the back of her mind. Roland unconscious, the blood, the fear — she folded it and set it aside. It would still be there when this was over. It would demand everything she had, then. Right now she needed what was in front of her.

Two Devils, still in formation. One front, one rear. Their throwing arms looked desiccated, the muscle exhausted by the previous throw — probably minutes before they could repeat. And the balloon was still at altitude, which was the problem. In her fog, Nightingale could step between the lines of reality that stitched the world together, crossing distance in the space of a thought. But the lines were thin up here. They grew sparse with height, and if she overextended a single line, or slipped while traveling one, the line could invert — and she’d be in pieces before she understood what had happened. Fifty meters between her and either Devil. It might as well be fifty kilometers.

The front Devil understood something was wrong. It waved its three-fingered hand, called something to its partner in whatever language Devils used, and drove its mount toward the balloon’s envelope.

The rear Devil banked toward Lightning. Its mount moved like a hawk that has spotted something smaller — patient, economical, using altitude and angle to cut off escape before committing to the strike. Lightning was already burning effort just to stay out of reach, every feint costing her more than it cost the thing pursuing her. The other witches had stopped shooting — too likely to hit the girl in the cross-fire.

The front mount bit and clawed at the balloon’s sac. Soraya’s coating held. The beast’s claws skidded off the treated surface, and the Devil above it roared its frustration and pulled back, gaining altitude, building speed for a collision run.

There.

That was the window. Nightingale released her fog. A faintly luminous thread materialized above her, thin as a hair, and she stepped onto it without hesitation, using the balloon’s shifting contour as the path changed shape beneath her. The world went black and white and sharp — every detail outlined, every living thing showing its internal light. She ran across the top of the envelope in the time it took to exhale.

In that world, the Devil glowed. Faintly — a sparse, slowly rotating cyclone in the chest, thinner than the witches’ magic but recognizably the same genus. The arm holding the reins had a stone embedded in it, bright and hard, the light of it different from the cyclone.

They carry God’s Stones.

No time for that now. The Devil’s mount was at full acceleration, committed to the ram. Nightingale stepped off the fog line and appeared on the creature’s back.

The beast dropped half a meter under the sudden addition of her weight, lurching. The Devil turned. She put the barrel of her twelve-millimeter revolver against its skull, looked it in its scarlet-crystal eyes, and pulled the trigger.

The shot took most of the back of its head. Black blood scattered — thick, the smell of it harsh and metallic in a way that was nothing like human blood. The Devil went limp, its weight pulling back on the reins as it fell, and the mount rolled with the shift of the load and threw Nightingale before she could jump clear.

She had one instant of clarity before she understood what had happened. The balloon was above her. The sea was below. She was outside any return distance, falling, and accelerating.

In the fog, falling was suicide. No control over angle, no way to select a line, no way to stop. She would tumble into whatever thread was nearest and the thread would do the rest. She kept her fog closed and fell in plain air, watching the balloon shrink above her and the sea resolve below — the blur of distance becoming detail, the waves gaining individual shape, the white of breaking water going from suggestion to certainty.

Her sisters were screaming her name from somewhere above. She could hear them but she couldn’t reach them, and Maggie was bird-sized and Lightning was pinned, and—

She closed her eyes.

The bedroom. The flickering lamp. She’d sat on the edge of the bed with the dagger in her hand, turning it against the light, waiting for the fourth prince to come through the door. She’d had a plan for him and a reason for the plan and a great deal of patience. He’d come through the door and the plan had not survived contact with him, which was the first sign that something unusual was happening.

All the things I didn’t say, she thought. All the things I should have—

“Goo goo!”

She opened her eyes.

A white shape was falling toward her from above — not gliding, falling, aimed, deliberate. Maggie hit her square in the chest like a thrown stone and wrapped around her in a grip that was far too strong for a pigeon, and in Nightingale’s arms the pigeon was already not a pigeon. Light split outward from the white feathers, painful and absolute, and the body beneath her hands expanded — bone structure shifting, wings emerging not as feathers arranged on arms but as a new and separate architecture, thick-veined and enormous, erupting from Maggie’s back with a sound like sails catching wind. The bird head widened, lengthened, grew teeth and a ridge of bone above empty eyes. The throat opened and what came out was not goo.

“Ahool—!”

The sound crossed the whole sky. Maggie’s claws caught Nightingale and the dive became a climb, sudden enough that Nightingale’s stomach dropped, and then she was draped across a broad warm back, watching the sea recede below her, and she understood that she was not dead and that Maggie was very large.

“Ahool ahool!”

She didn’t need a translation. She’d understood Maggie perfectly well before she could understand words.

“Yes,” she said, to the back of a head that no longer looked anything like a pigeon. “Let’s go.”

The Devil pursuing Lightning was still circling, still wearing it down, still patient. Nightingale braced, checked her revolver’s cylinder — four rounds remaining — and leaned into the turn as Maggie banked toward it.

Come on, then.

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