Eli was always calm. Of all the many things she’d come to appreciate about him, it ranked as one of her favorites. He was calm when she was sad, he was calm when she was frightened, he was calm when she was cranky. Admittedly, the last sometimes annoyed her, but that was beside the point.

  The point, of course, being that Eli was always calm.

  A point Eli seemed to have forgotten when he turned full around at her announcement and gave the forest his back, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, pressing her lips together to keep them from trembling. “It’s too late.”

  “It’s not too late,” he said, but the words came out as if fired from a loosely-strung bow, clattering feebly to the ground between them.

  “It’s too late,” she repeated, squeezing Nick tighter. Already, she could feel the Songbird’s pull–not yet a call to run towards, but a tether, keeping her from running away. “Can you run?”

  She saw him try. Saw the waver in his posture as he failed. “No.”

  “Depths,” she gasped, bending her head and pressing her lips to Nick’s temple. She kept her face there, breathing in the scent of his hair. He still smelled like a baby. Like the early days, nursing him, holding him, loving him, weeping. He smelled of fierce, wrenching adoration. Of exhaustion and pain. Of animal possession.

  In the distance, she picked up the early notes of the Songbird’s melody, the suggestion of music drifting through the branches. The forest roared its approval, the birds shrieking their joy, the trees shivering in anticipation.

  They were all going to die. The birds, the trees, Mara, Eli.

  Nick.

  It was too late to run. In minutes, the music would be clear, and they would follow the melody to the Depths.

  “Nicky,” she said, her eyes on Eli’s. His calm had returned while she was distracted, the brown of his eyes a deep, fathomless warmth. “Time to take a nap, love. Would you like me to sing you a little song?”

  Nick nodded against her chest, the tickle of his hair beneath her chin as vital a part of her as the heart flailing in her chest. The sensation ached, bringing hot tears to her eyes.

  “I love you so, Nick,” she whispered, smoothing her hand over the back of his head. “Have a good, sweet sleep, okay? I’ll wake you in a little bit.” And then, before her voice could betray her anguish, she began to hum.

  The song caught in her throat only once, when Eli dipped his head and reached out to rest a hand on Nick’s shoulder. Nick’s breath slowed and deepened, his arms going limp where they hung over her shoulders. She knew without asking that this sleep was deeper than anything Eli had put him in before. Mercifully deep.

  Mara stopped humming.

  “Eli,” she whimpered, cleaving to the calm in his eyes like a drowning woman. “She’s coming.”

  “I know,” he murmured. Another strain of notes warbled through the trees, and she saw the same shudder pass through his body as rattled her own bones. He closed his eyes, cutting her off from the calm. But when he opened them, there it was again, and she sank her fingers into it and clung. “Can you channel the trees? Like you did the other night?”

  “No.” She could barely concentrate on this conversation. The voice was so soft, so lovely, singing her into the sweetest sweep.

  “I can put you under too.”

  “No.” She didn’t want to miss it. If she had to die, she wouldn’t sleep her way to a silent end. She’d die with the music in her ears.

  “Mara, focus. You can use your resistance technique.”

  “No.” She barely heard him, her thoughts crumbling into grains of sand

  “Mara.”

  She watched Eli’s mouth move with the shape of her name, a little behind the sound. Like time had come unstuck, and the world she heard was moving forward faster than the one she saw. It made her dizzy. She staggered forward a step to catch her balance, knocking into Eli. His hands came up to grip her shoulders.

  “Mara, stop.”

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  She staggered forward another step. She couldn’t bear to stand still. She needed to walk, to dance. Such beautiful music yearned for a body to move with its notes.

  “Mara, listen. Listen to me.”

  Her eyes snapped to Eli’s as his voice rang through her head like the peal of a bell.

  “Listen to me,” he said again, and she did. She listened as the words, drawn forward on strained cords of desperation and effort, echoed through her.

  “I’m listening,” she said, her own voice a flat, unmusical thing amidst the clamor.

  “Sit down. Don’t move.”

  With the languid clumsiness of the severely intoxicated, she folded her body into a sitting position. The roots of the tree made a lumpy, uncomfortable seat, but Nick lay safely cradled between her upraised knees and her chest.

  She stared at Eli’s legs as he stood over her, arms hanging at his sides. She waited for him to join her. He needed to join her. He needed to sit down. To not move. It was important. It was imperative.

  Though she didn’t know why.

  She watched his weight shift on his feet. He wasn’t sitting. He was moving. Turning.

  She reached out, hooking stiff fingers over the top of his boot, clinging to the last wisps of his command. “Sit down,” she bit out, her own conviction an echo of his.

  He dropped heavily to his knees, right where he was standing, his shoulder pressed against her legs.

  “Tell me to listen to you,” she pleaded, squeezing her eyes shut. She couldn’t remember why. She couldn’t remember anything.

  “Listen to me,” he said, but the words had no music to them. They couldn’t compete with the sweet, melancholy lure that lingered at the edges of her consciousness.

  “Eli.” She reached out again, her fingers this time finding the sleeve of his shirt. She pulled, like a spoiled child. “Eli, listen. Tell me to listen.”

  A pause. Mara heard the Songbird now, the voice as clear as spring water, dancing over piled stone. Bliss and terror twined like writhing lovers in her chest.

  “Listen to me.” Eli. Finally.

  Her hand had fallen to the crook of his elbow, and she tightened her grip. “Listen to me,” she whispered back.

  He nodded, and understanding passed between them finally—a flicker of a plan, fumbled together in the haze of malicious magic drifting invariably closer. Mara lowered her face and breathed in the scent of Nick’s hair, eyes screwed tightly shut.

  “Listen to me,” Eli urged, looping his magic around her, distracting her from the Songbird’s pull.

  “Listen to me,” she demanded, closing the loop, restarting it.

  Back and forth. Again and again.

  Somehow, at some point, her hand found its way down his forearm, past his wrist, and she laced her fingers with his.

  Eli’s voice rose and fell in her head like slow heartbeats, and at the bottom of each swell Mara listened to the music draw ever closer, approaching now distinctly from her right. She heard the mad scurry of clawed creatures across the ground around her, the flutter of dead leaves as insects rose up from little holes in the ground and swept in hordes across the earth. The whole forest raced joyfully towards doom, and her muscles tensed to join the stampede. To run, free and careless, into painless oblivion.

  Eli’s hand tightened around hers. “Listen to me.”

  His voice drowned out the cacophony, and she let out a sob of relief. She squeezed back. “Listen to me.”

  With each rise and fall of their cycle, the Songbird grew closer, until Mara could feel her music through the earth itself, a vibration that found its way inside her and trembled in the deep parts of her being like the early shiver of a languid orgasm.

  “Listen to me.” Eli’s voice, closer now. “Listen.” He smelled of sweat, his breath warm against her cheek. Their fingers were intertwined, their arms lifted so that he clasped her hand against his chest. She felt his heart hammering against the back of her hand.

  “Listen to me,” she murmured, pulling him closer still. “Listen.”

  The Songbird drew near enough that Mara could taste her—decadence and decay sweet on her tongue. She bit her lip until she tasted blood instead. She listened to Eli instead. She smelled the sweat of his fear instead, felt the warmth of his body instead. And in return, she offered him her own voice, her own scent, her own warmth. The entire forest raced toward the heart of the storm in swift rivers of desire–scurrying, fluttering, straining.

  But Mara sat and she held onto Eli, drifting around and around in the safe, serene eddy where his strength met her stubbornness.

  A breeze caressed her skin, tickling the side of her face with loose tendrils of her own hair. She felt the Songbird’s footsteps, the soft skin of her bare feet as she padded softly along, trailing destruction. The creature was so close, but Eli was closer. Some part of him had crawled beneath her skin and lingered there, weighting her down, holding her in this orbit of their joint creation.

  “Listen to me,” he said, but he no longer needed to tell her.

  She couldn’t have stopped if she tried.