Act III Scene XXX
My fingernails scrape at the splintering floorboards, cold and rotting. Then the smell hits me: snow and oak.
Pain cleaves through my side as I push myself up to take in my surroundings, one hand clumsily stanching the blood and discovering shreds of my dress drying into the rapidly healing spear wound.
I’m alone in a cabin. And I’ve been here before. Dorian. I recognize the chair I was tied to in the corner.
Fear bobs in my throat when I notice the bottle, there at the very center, its serpentine silver top. Poison of Echidna.
“Go on,” a voice growls. It sounds like Dorian’s. “Since you loathe your life so.”
I picture the bottle I’d seen, wrapped in layers of satin in Jude’s dressing room. He must have brought it into the arena. Not to force to my mouth, but just to see if I’d do it.
Because I almost had, that day Dorian waved the vial in my face. I’d considered it.
Now I grip the poison and hurl it at the wall.
A sparkle of glass sprinkles over the floor like rain as I stagger to my feet and run for the door, grabbing the handle and yanking it open.
I hurry outside, the shock of snow pressing into my sandaled toes nearly making me stumble.
But I keep running, weaving among twisted branches and jumping over fallen logs.
Night is thick in the air, and everywhere I look, there’s nothing—nothing but the stretch of tall, dark trees and twisted branches along the side of a steep precipice of ice and stone. I slow to catch my breath and walk over to the edge of the cliff, peer down at the rushing black river far below.
I steel myself, but hair rises on the back of my neck and a cold shiver rolls down my spine. I’m being watched. “Where are you?” I call out. The ache of sleet soaks my heels. “Show yourself.”
A long shadow emerges from behind a tree.
My hand presses at my side to stem the flow of blood.
A prop metal spear wound isn’t enough to incapacitate me, but my legs have begun to wobble as the figure moves in my direction, slow and deliberate.
I dread the light, waiting for it to shine over Jude’s face.
But when he steps into the dim moonglow, it’s not Jude.
It’s worse.
My lungs cinch, recognition cutting into me.
Galen steps forward into the snow, blinking with confusion. Moonlight shadows half his face. Normal. Relaxed. Kind. His head drifts lazily to one side. “You should really be getting home, Riv. What are you doing out here?”
The calm timbre of his voice unglues my anger, my resolve collapsing like my illusions a moment ago. It’s enough to make me wonder if, after a long, terrible nightmare, I’ve woken up. All I want in the world is for him to be real.
“Galen,” I breathe, though I know it isn’t possible. Even if every detail down to the small scar above his cheek is intact and—
My eyes lower to the crimson stain that blooms from his chest. Small at first, until it spreads. A startled sound pushes from my throat, followed by the sort of unfettered rage that sends my feet rushing forward.
Galen catches hold of me, his hands firmly gripping my elbows. “This,” he whispers harshly, inches from my face. But that crackle of hostility doesn’t fit his voice. He never sounds angry. “This is what humans do. To you. To me. To everything good and everything we love.”
The words tug at my heartstrings. Galen wasn’t killed by my kind. He was killed by an ordinary human.
“They don’t know right from wrong. They have to be taught,” he presses.
The scent of blood stings my nose. I shut my eyes, begging my ears for silence, when all I hear is my brother’s voice.
“This is what they take when given the chance, Riven.”
There are a million things I would tell Galen if I could. But none of them surface. And this is not Galen. Bitterness festers in my chest, grows. The air around me hums, alive and thunderous.
I want the illusion to go away, to stop. But I can’t focus. It’s too convincing. Part of me isn’t sure it isn’t my brother, that he hasn’t somehow emerged from the dead to rescue me—
“Don’t let all this death be for nothing,” he says.
My eyes snap open, meet his gaze.
Gold slices across his eye like a live ember—and it’s enough. Jude.
I’m in the arena with Jude.
This isn’t real. He’s trying to provoke me with every vile thing the world has done to me until I break.
I grip him closer to me. “Trust me,” I say. “I won’t.”
Then I take a sharp step back, off the cliff, casting us both into the icy waters gnashing below.