Artemis flies across the room, slamming into Honora, who does her best to catch her. There’s a gash across Artemis’s side; her shirt is already slick with blood. More is pooling out on the floor.
“Artemis!” I scream.
“Enough,” Eve snaps, her voice distorted. If she was shadows before, now she is night. She is dreams and nightmares and darkness personified. My power is like a cloak on her shoulders, pulsing and seething.
Without another word, Eve punches a hole right through reality.
34
ONE OF US WOULD MEND the world, and one of us would break it.
I kneel on the floor next to my mother, watching the hole Eve made in the world using my power. It starts small, but the air blurs around it, cracking and shimmering. And behind the hole, nothing. No, not nothing. Like the magical purple flames from my nightmares, only worse. I can’t make my eyes look at it. They refuse. The darkness burns within the hole. It’s hungry.
And something is moving there. A hand reaches through, grasping Eve’s. If Eve is shadows, this hand is tar. She didn’t start out as a demon. Whatever Leo’s father is, he definitely did.
She croons with delight. “Only a little longer, my love.” She releases the hand, then grabs either side of the hole and pulls. It tears slowly in protest as our world resists giving way to hell. But it’s losing the battle.
“Why?” I ask.
She laughs. “This is the only way in or out of the world now. Everything that comes through will have to go through me. Nothing will happen unless I let it. I’ll be the ultimate Watcher.” She tugs again, straining, and the hellmouth opens a little more. The waiting darkness writhes in anticipation.
I expect heat, but biting cold radiates from the hole.
“It won’t be a large hellmouth.” Eve switches sides, trying to get a better grip. “Nothing like Sunnydale, or even Cleveland. But it will be our hellmouth. The Dublin Hellmouth. And we’ll take a tithe of power from every demon who crosses. My son and I will never be hungry again.”
“Why do you need the other Slayers, then?” I ask.
“You’re the best thing I’ve ever had.” She smiles, teeth showing white through the shadows of her face. “I’m going to drain every Slayer, and then this world will truly know power. It will know safety and protection. Because I will protect it.” She pushes, and the hole widens. “For a price.”
A figure barrels into Eve, knocking her away. The hellmouth is almost big enough for a person to slip through. The air around it crackles, brittle and freezing. The tar hand reaches through, grasping at the air, pulling at the edges. But it can’t rip the hellmouth larger. Only Eve is strong enough to do that. Because of me.
Eve screams in rage and frustration. I see who knocked her to the floor, who is keeping her down.
Leo hits his mother’s clawed hands away as they rake against his chest, then pushes his own hand against her ribs, holding her on the ground. She bucks, trying to throw him off, but I know from experience that Leo can’t be budged. A shriek echoes through the space. The shadows shift, swirl. Leo begins to glow like a black light.
“Nina,” Honora says, panicked. She’s holding her own shirt against Artemis’s side. “She’s bleeding too much.”
I rush over to them. There’s nothing I can do down here. The cut is too deep, too long. “Can you carry her?”
“I don’t think so. I’m out of my pills.” Tears stream down Honora’s face as she looks at Artemis, now alarmingly pale.
“Allow me.” A pair of toxic-yellow hands reaches down and gently lifts my sister. Doug cradles her to his sticky chest. “Come on, little Slayer. Let’s run.”
I look back at the hole in the world. I let this happen. And I have to fix it. “Take her out of here.”
Doug hesitates, then hurries away. Honora, unable to stand, crawls after them. My mother pushes herself up. She looks at the new hellmouth, and she breaks. Her face, always so strong and remote, cracks like the barrier between our world and this hell dimension.
I’ve seen this terror on her once before. When she had to choose which daughter to save first. But this is worse, because she knows what I do: If this hellmouth is left open, none of us are safe.
“What do we do?” She looks to me for answers for the first time in my life.
But I don’t know.
I stare numbly past her into Sean’s office, so incongruously modern and clean, no indication that hell is quite literally outside its doorway. I wish Buffy were here. I wish I could talk to her again. I wish I were back on that rooftop, staring at the sea serpent, chatting with the Slayer who changed everything.
You define being the Slayer, she said. I may not be a Slayer anymore, but I still get to make the choice of how I live. So what are the choices here?
Stay, and definitely die.