Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Briony
My light slams back into my body and throws me off my feet. I land down hard on the cobblestones. I hope, when I open my eyes again, that all this will have been just a dream – a hideous, terrible nightmare. A fiction created by my own silly mind.
I’ll open my eyes and everything will be okay.
Fly will look down at me laughing, offer me his hand, pull me to my feet.
Clare will straighten her glasses, cock her head, and ask me what I’m doing lying there on the ground.
Everything will be okay. All the people I love in this world will be safe. Well. Alive.
I scrunch up my face. I pray to every star, every god, to the powers of fate, to fix everything, to make everything right. Because this is my fault. All my fault.
Clare should never have been here. There was no need for her to be here. She would have been better off never having known me, never crossing my path, never making my acquaintance.
I think back to that moment in the bathroom when we first met.
That had been Odessa too. Her friend had slammed her fist into my nose, smashed it to pieces.
And Clare, even then, had shown just how brave and just how kind she truly was, fixing me up despite what the consequences might be and the harm that might put her in.
I roll onto my side and curl up into a ball, hugging my knees tight to my chest. I can’t open my eyes. I don’t want to know the truth. I want to lie here and pretend none of this has happened.
I don’t want to live in a world where someone like Clare – so innocent, so genuine, so damn clever – could perish. Perish for no reason whatsoever. It isn’t fair.
This world never has been. It’s always been cruel, deceptive, and rotten. I’ve known that from the beginning. And yet, maybe I’d begun to hope that this world could be different. That there could be another way.
And now, I don’t know what to believe.
“Briony.”
I hear someone kneel down beside me, rest their hand on my shoulder.
Thorne.
He doesn’t ask me if I’m okay. It’s pretty obvious that I’m not. Instead, he squeezes my shoulder.
“Stand up now, Briony. Take a deep breath. Steady yourself and stand up.”
“I can’t,” I whisper, not daring to open my eyes. “I can’t. Thorne. She’s dead. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“She is, Briony.” He inhales. “Come on now, get up. There are people who need you. You have to be strong.”
“I can’t be strong,” I whisper so quietly I’m not sure he even hears me.
“You can be. I know you can. You have to be, Briony. There are too many things and too many people depending on you now. And you can’t let them down. That’s not what Clare would have wanted.”
A violent sob wracks my throat at the mention of her name. Every part of my body hurts, most of all my heart. So painful inside my chest I think I might vomit.
But Thorne is right. Clare believes in me. She believes in all of this. Or she did.
I can’t lie here pretending none of it is happening. But I’m not sure I have the strength to go on.
“Just stand, Briony,” Thorne says. “I’m not asking you to do anything else right now. Just stand.”
I jerk my head in a nod. And then he’s tucking his arm around me, helping me up onto my feet.
I’m exhausted. Utterly and completely exhausted. There’s no strength remaining in my body at all. And I don’t think it’s from the shock or the grief. I think I used every drop of my magic. And now I’m so weak I have to lean on Thorne and have him help me stand.
I take a deep breath in, my mind registering the stench of blood and ash and destruction. Then I force my eyes open, blinking for a moment in the gloom.
It’s worse than I thought. So much worse.
Fly cradles Clare in his arms, sobbing uncontrollably, as Dray pats his shoulder. But he’s not the only one. There are others sobbing too. Parents, children, husbands, wives, sobbing over the dead bodies of so many people.
And all of a sudden, all the despair, the sadness, and the misery that was drowning me one moment is replaced by a deep, deep anger the next. A burning, raging, destructive anger.
I step away from Thorne. My knees buckle momentarily and I nearly fall straight back to the ground again, but I grit my teeth and remain on my feet.
“See!” I yell with all my might at all the hurt, mourning, reticent people around me. “This is their doing. The shadow weavers created those monsters. And they weren’t even here to protect you when you needed them.”
“You,” a little girl says, holding the hand of a younger boy, his face bloodied from a demon scratch. “You saved us.”
“I …”
“You killed all the demons,” she says, looking at me with rapture and awe.
I shake my head. I can’t find the words to answer. I simply gesture at the destruction.
“You did. You saved us,” another man says.
But they’re wrong. I didn’t. I didn’t save them.
I turn my back on the square and hobble away, anger still burning inside me.
“Where are you going?” Thorne cries out. “Briony, where are you going?”
“I don’t even know,” I say, “except I can’t be here. I just can’t be.”
I hear Beaufort call after me too, and Fox, but I don’t stop. I keep walking through the destruction toward the other side of the square, barely seeing, barely hearing, no idea where I’m headed.
And then someone blocks my path.
I blink, my eyes focusing.
It’s Odessa.
Odessa.
My hands curl into tight fists at my sides. She’s the reason Clare’s dead. Clare, who tried to help her, who tried to save her.
“Briony,” Odessa says. Her voice is not full of its usual haughty arrogance. There are tears tracking down her face. She clutches an arm across her body, an injured arm, cut and bloody.
“You were telling the truth?” she asks. “About those monsters. About those demons. It was really the shadow weavers who created them?”
The anger inside me fizzles out as quickly as it had blazed.
“Yes. It was the shadow weavers. They killed the light wielders in order to gain control over this realm. They disturbed the balance of magic, and in doing so they created the demons.”
“And you can destroy them?”
The people around us are silent and still, so silent you could hear a pin drop in the large market square.
“I don’t know,” I say, my voice breaking in my throat as tears bubble into my eyes.
“I don’t know if I can.” I don’t want anyone else to die.
I don’t want to lose anyone else I love.
The pain nearly tore me apart, and the pain I feel right now might do it again.
And then how will I find the strength to do anything at all?
“She can,” a voice says from somewhere in the crowd.
A dirty face steps forward this time – Fox’s father.
“Fate has given her four chosen mates.” He gestures behind me, where I assume Fox, Beaufort, Dray, and Thorne are standing. “Four shadow weavers.”
“Shadow weavers,” someone scoffs.
“They’re not all bad,” I mutter. “Some want a better way. A better future as well.”
“Can you trust them after everything they’ve done?” Odessa asks. “After the way they’ve treated us?”
I look at her face and wonder if Kratos wasn’t the perfect protector she always made him out to be.
After all, he was the one who put her up to attacking me in the forest. He was the one who stood by when she was carted off to Slate Quarter.
And he was the one who replaced her in the blink of an eye.
“We can,” I say.
“And you really are fated mates?” the mayor says.
“Yes, we are,” I say, pushing up the sleeve of my coat and showing the marks that adorn my wrists.
“Then we’ll stand by you,” he says. “Although I’m not sure what good that will be to you, but we will.”
I stare at him, completely astonished. I thought there might be some among the Slate people who would be on our side, who might help us, but it never in a hundred years occurred to me that one of those people would be the mayor.
“I’ve seen too many people suffer and die out here in this Quarter,” he explains, as if he’s read my mind. “It’s never seemed fair, never seemed right. And if we can change things for the better, then we should. For all our sakes.”
“Thank you,” I say, as other voices murmur in agreement.
I turn around, and my four fated mates are standing there in a row, watching me.
Beaufort. Dray. Thorne. Fox.
“Briony,” Fox says. “There are people here who need our help.”
I jolt. I’d almost forgotten that. But as I scan the destruction, I see he’s right. I may not have been able to save Clare, but there are others I can help. Others I can heal.
I nod, and Fox calls loudly to the gathered people: “Bring the most injured here to the center of the square, and we will heal them.”
Somehow, I reach deep inside myself and find the strength and the magic to help these people.
We work solidly, without pause, healing wounds, stitching flesh back together, mending broken bones.
I’m so absorbed in the work that I forget, for just a moment, the devastation lurking in my heart.
I forget the threat lingering in the air.
The chance more demons might come. The chance the palace now knows our location and the elite guards might appear any moment.
I forget all of that and focus on healing the people around me.
As we work, the people of Slate Quarter pile the dead, sweep up broken wood and glass, splinters of timber, fragments of brick. They wash and scrub the cobblestones clean of blood and carry the bodies away, taking them home to their families.
Finally, when I’ve healed the final scratch, I stagger to my feet and find Fly hovering in the background. His face is wet, drained from shock. His hands wring the hem of his coat over and over again.
I rush to him and fling my arms around him. He stands like a statue, tears streaming down his face.
“Oh, Fly,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save her.”
My usually sharp-witted friend has nothing to say.
I look to the Professor for help.
“Let’s get him back to my house,” Fox says. “Get some alcohol in him. He needs it for the shock.”
I wrap my arm through Fly’s and urge him to walk, but he digs in his heels.
“Cl-Cl-Clare,” he stutters.
I close my eyes as the pain stabs through me again. Then I look up at Fox.
“What about Clare?” I ask.
“They’ve already taken her to the house,” he says. “Mom’s cleaning her up.”
And this time, I can’t stop it.
I wrench my arm away from Fly, double over, and retch onto the freshly cleaned cobblestones. Someone pulls my hair back. Another rubs circles over my back. When it passes, I manage to stand again.
I see Dray with his arm around Fly, leading him away through the streets, Fox showing them the way. Beaufort and Thorne wrap their arms around me, and we follow them through the dark streets back to Tudor’s home.
And I can’t quite believe that only this morning – only this morning! – we were all stepping out together.
All of us.
All of us.
And now Clare is gone.