It was unbearable, that scream. It rebounded off the college buildings, echoed in Ellini's chest, and made her teeth ache with sympathy. She had never felt more maternal to Elsie than in that moment – when she was unreachable and beside herself with grief.

The poor girl was standing at the top of a rocky column now. Her patch of pavement had risen beneath her until she was fifty feet above the level of the street. And the pressurised air rushing up from the depths seemed to be all one breathless wail. It was roaring in Elsie's voice, but curiously multiplied, as if every pair of lungs in the demon world was echoing her grief. It prickled at the back of Ellini's throat, as if coaxing her to join in. She had to get up there – as much to comfort the girl as to reason with her.

But what could she say? Ellini knew how hollow words of comfort could sound at a time like this. She cringed at the thought. It was quick – he didn't feel a thing – he's in a better place. What did any of it mean? How could she back it up?

The tremors had shaken loose her canopy of vines. Leaves and branches were pattering around her like rain. The wreckage of the fairytale she had told to comfort herself.

Some distant part of her – probably the remains of the dark glow – was trying to tell herself a new story, trying to concoct some kind of narrative consolation. An innocent man being butchered at the spot where the martyrs had been burned was bad, that was true, but this hadn't quite been the same. Danvers had known what he was doing. He had given his life willingly – and, much as it hurt to think about that, it meant he had been martyred, not slaughtered.

Was there magic in that? Just a crumb of hope? But she couldn't bring herself to believe it. That scream was stripping her bare. There was no room for anything in her mind but the ache of sympathy – the vicarious grief. There was no end to it.

Ellini felt the breeze whip past her face, hot and stinging like a slap. She wondered if it was the elementals, rushing to answer Elsie's call. The first wave of the demon invasion. She wondered if her own elemental was in there somewhere – the one she had liberated on the steps of the Turl Street Music Rooms.

You decided not to lie down and die, her memory prompted. And this is part of it.

She looked down at the blade of the axe, catching light with no discernible source, like the irrepressible shine in Jack's eyes.

Dare to believe me, it said. Haven't I worked wonders in the past? What makes you think you can doubt me now?

She turned to Dr Petrescu and raised her voice above the howling. "I have to talk to her! Please don't-" She hesitated, trying to resist the urge to look down at Danvers's motionless face. She didn't want more evidence. She didn't want to be convinced. "Please stay with him."

Dr Petrescu nodded, his jaw set. "You do not have to tell me."

Ellini got to her feet, teetering as the wind shoved her this way and that. Elsie's column was sheer but pockmarked with possible handholds. It wasn't hopeless.

That was probably the axe talking, because it swung again without any prompting from her, the pick-end biting into the stone. Ellini hauled herself up behind it, bracing her feet against the rock.

Hadn't Dr Petrescu said it was a mining implement? Made for clearing tree-roots and picking your way up steep, rocky slopes. That wasn't really incompatible with its ability to bring light to dark places, Ellini thought. What was despair except a sheer, slippery wall you had to scale in slow increments? One that kept you slipping and losing all the painstaking progress of the days before?

The wind chilled against the wet bandage on her shoulder. All this exertion had probably reopened the wound, but she could barely feel that part of her body anymore. The axe was keeping her hands warm, keeping her grip fastened round its handle, and that was all that mattered.

She slipped and grazed her chin, barked her shins and knocked her knees. Grit and tears stung her eyes. But she was rising. It might have been hours, or only minutes, but eventually she was level with the hem of Elsie's skirt, which was whipping around like an untethered sail.

The girl's mouth was open. Her face was wet. There were dark stains on her blindfold that might have been from tears. The wind had lifted her hair off her shoulders – it was rearing up like a flame, blonde roots at the bottom of an orange inferno.

She looked tiny and terrifying at the same time. Ellini suddenly felt ashamed that it had been Danvers leading this girl by the hand, explaining the world to her. She had called Elsie's life forth. She hadn't known what she was doing, but there had been love in it. She remembered how tenderly she had spoken to that doll. And then she had abandoned it, run away from her feelings for Jack and Elsie.

Even when she had found the girl again, Ellini had been frightened by their connection – frightened of the responsibility it entailed. Elsie wasn't just a life, she was a whole universe, and Ellini hadn't felt qualified to help her shape it.

But Mr Danvers hadn't run away from the responsibility. He never ran from the responsibility to be kind.

Could she make up for all that now? Or was it too late?

She dragged herself onto the top of the column, and then staggered as the wind caught her. As violent as the air had been at pavement level, it was worse up here. And yet, as she spread her arms to keep her balance, there was a kind of lull. Elsie's hair dropped back onto her shoulders. Could the girl sense her? Had she heard her ragged breathing? Or was it just a gathering of breath before the next wail?

Ellini got to her feet, half-blinded with tears, and blurted out, "Little cricket, I know – I know it's awful. I don't know what we're going to do now, but we'll figure it out together, I promise. I promise I won't leave you."

Elsie was taking rapid, shaky breaths – her lip was trembling – but she had turned her head in Ellini's direction, and there were no more screams.

"Where – where is he?" she stammered, in a voice that still seemed to echo with the depths.

Ellini hesitated. Did she mean the body? Or everything that had made Danvers Danvers?

"I don't know," she managed. "But wherever he is, I think he's happy. He wanted to save us. He would always rather have died than let us come to harm." She hastened on, afraid of the sound of that word – died. "He shouldn't have had to, I know, but he did the only thing he could – the thing that would hurt the least number of people – and we have to do the same. We can't-"

But perhaps this came too close to preaching. Perhaps it sounded like the same wheedling, coaxing tone in which she had urged Elsie not to give up the knife for Danvers's sake. Perhaps Elsie sensed the unspoken words – the ones Ellini couldn't quite keep out of her thoughts: 'Your man is dead, but mine might not be. Please reopen that door you pushed him through'.

Or perhaps Elsie had just reached the point in growing up where she no longer listened to her mother.

She shook her head, raised her hands, and threw her head back in a scream. The column of rock lurched underneath them, knocking Ellini off balance.

She tried to use the axe to right herself, but there was suddenly no stone underneath her, nothing for it to bite into. It slipped from her fingers, and she fell after it, feet-first.

The wind hurtled past her so fast that it was almost solid. It was like pushing through a press of bodies, each one buffeting and shoving and then grumblingly slipping out of her way.

And then suddenly, one didn't.

Her momentum was arrested so sharply that her head snapped back. She felt a twang of pain across her shoulders, and her vision flashed red, but she held onto consciousness.

At least, she thought she was conscious.

Her eyes were streaming with the wind resistance, but she was fairly sure they were open. And yet she couldn't see what had stopped her. She was just hanging in mid-air, her feet dangling, her skirts whipping round her ankles.

Had her dress caught on something? But it didn't feel like that. The air had just sort of thickened around her. There was a gentle pressure under her feet, close at her back, even holding up her chin and keeping her head from drooping. And yet the air around her wasn't still. Her skirt was billowing. The wind was vibrating against her eardrums, fast as the blades of a fan.

She spread her arms out shakily. There was nothing to grab onto. Elsie's column of rock must have been yards behind her – although she couldn't be sure, because it hurt too much to turn her head.

She squawked as the air dropped her another few feet, and then caught her again. And the wind whistling in her ears now almost sounded like laughter. It wasn't human, but it wasn't particularly malicious. Just the kind of laugh you'd get from a creature that didn't know about vertigo or whiplash or broken bones.

And Ellini thought: My elemental.

Suddenly, the air turned her, spun her round, burrowed between her fingers as if it was trying to hold her hand.

"Stop it!" Ellini yelled, with the breath she had been holding in for half a minute. "Put me down! Gently!" she squealed, as the wind dropped her another few feet.

The snickering vibrations in her ear intensified. She heard her own voice, diluted with time, whistle back: All right. Just trying to have a moment with you.

The air lowered her down with exaggerated care, until Ellini could feel pavement underneath her. She staggered and swayed, her legs numb with terror, but the gentle pressure of the air kept her upright. It nestled against her ribs and lingered at her back, as if it was giving her a parting hug before it evaporated.

Ellini sank to her knees, pressing her palms against the broken paving slabs. She wanted to be sick, but wasn't sure she had the energy. Besides, she didn't want the elemental to see her losing control. It was strange that she still cared about that, with Jack gone and the world literally collapsing around her, but it kept her upright and conscious, so she supposed she had to be thankful.

A moment later, the axe thunked blade-first into the ground beside her, with a little ringing noise that couldn't help but cheer her.

Had the elemental retrieved it? But she was too breathless and nauseous to say thank you. Besides, she wasn't sure the creature would have understood.

She reached out shaky fingers to the axe, and felt warmth surge up her arm. Not gone, said that inexplicable shine. Dare to believe me.

She couldn't reach Elsie – she couldn't keep that terrible torrent of grief from sweeping everything away – but some semblance of Jack was still with her. And her elemental had remembered their bond. Her two biggest reasons to keep going were still in the world, somewhere. She had no right to give up.  

***

Thank you so much for reading! Please give this chapter a vote if you've enjoyed it!