Chapter Forty-Nine
NIC
Laurel channels my magic through Lola, blasting it back at me. Light shards across my vision as my sinews shred, and the pain of the shelves crashing down on me is nothing compared to the illusionary agony razing my bones.
Lola screams.
I grit my teeth, shoving splintered wood off me, squinting through tears and sweat and blood to see Lola’s back arching as threads of my magic spear through her like solid blades of electricity.
A human body is not meant to channel so much magic at once.
I search out Estelle and find her twitching in pain on the ground, too.
I have to stop this.
I dig my fingernails into my palms, clenching my fists so hard my knuckles pop as I mentally try to halt the magic flooding out of me.
But it’s like trying to block a tsunami.
Lola’s legs wobble, and she drops to her knees as her shrieks peal higher.
“No!” I grit out, wobbling through the torture to snatch up a nearby shard of the voratium Estelle just removed from Laurel’s arm. I hold it ahead of me like a dagger, its point gleaming in the dawn light peeking through the window.
The ice in my body grows colder. The familiar electric surge of my magic pulses through my blood, punctuated by the screams I’ve heard in my mind since the moment the moonshard broke.
Enzo. Laurel.
And now Lola, too.
Her cries fill me with a rage and a fury, a terror and a dread I have never known. I face Laurel, who stands like an undead goddess, glowing with white magic under her skin.
And still, that thread of the Unbreakable Lie twists through her. My magic. My fault.
I do not pause, do not even breathe. I hurtle at her, slamming into her with the force of everything I am and everything I wish I could be. She hits the ground beneath me as I swing my makeshift voratium dagger.
But before I can pierce her throat, she grins, and then a thousand glamours ram me backward, clouding my vision until I cannot see anything, hear anything, feel anything. I am alone in the dark. Lola is gone, the casino has dissolved, and I can’t see Laurel anywhere.
Ice unspools from my chest. Secrets unwind out of me, drawn like entrails from my throat into scintillating illusions on Laurel’s terrible stage of nothingness.
“Wait—” I gasp into the emptiness.
But instead of a response from the current Laurel, sixteen-year-old Laurel’s scream splits the air.
An illusion of her ripples to life in the darkness.
She rushes forward as the temple’s vault sprouts around me.
Past-Nic drops a moonshard, and Laurel dives for it as it breaks.
Her shrieks fill the temple with agony as her skin boils.
My vocal cords scrape as I shout at her to run.
“No!” I growl, trying to squeeze my eyes shut so I cannot see these secrets spilling to life. But they’re still there, dancing on the inside of my eyelids.
Teen-Laurel transforms into my father. This is the night I found him in my office a few weeks after the moonshard cursed me.
He stands behind my desk, and when past-Nic enters, he looks up, holds out my copy of the Odelion, and points at the notes in the margins.
The questions, the doubts, the anger, the hurt I scrawled out as I tried to make sense of what I once believed and what I no longer could.
Tears well in his eyes. Lines draw his mouth tight.
“Who are you?” he croaks at the past version of me, and the words cleave me here deeper and harder than they did the first time. “What have you become?”
“Father—” I gasp as my throat closes over.
He walks out, never to return.
And then Enzo swirls into view. I sob, pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes. “No. Stop. Laurel.”
But she doesn’t. The illusions hit me like a bludgeon to the skull.
The countless times Enzo came to the casino in those early days, trying to kill me.
All over again, I live the agony of wishing I could tell him the truth but believing it would lead to ruin.
Becoming outwardly the very thing I once despised because I thought that’s what I needed to do to keep Enzo and Laurel safe from one another.
Hot tears stream down my face as Enzo dissolves. Acid burns my throat. My whole body shakes.
But Laurel still isn’t finished.
Lola appears. Beautiful and fierce. Her lazy eye, her gorgeous curls, her cunning tongue dismantling every lie I tried to tell myself about what was honest and what was good and what my own deception did to the people I loved.
I watch myself manipulate her. Deceive her.
Break her. Cast her out. Then shame her for returning to my brother.
I failed her. I failed Enzo. I failed my father. I failed Laurel.
I failed them all when Laurel showed up in that mayor’s house up in Opalton and turned me into a weapon using the guilt I could not face. The pain I did not want to bear.
Enzo may have made the mistake that led us to the moonshard, but I’m the one who’s at fault for where we have all ended up.
And while I’ve halted the shame, I still carry the responsibility. How can I hurt Laurel now when I am the one who caused this? How can I strike her, when that Unbreakable Lie I created is the reason she’s become what she has?
My secrets fade, and present-Laurel flickers into view. She grins, the pupils of her eyes eaten away to white soullight. Even the interior of her mouth glows when she bares her teeth, as though every bone and nerve and sinew is saturated.
“You are not going to hurt me,” she says, her voice calm and steady and unnaturally cheerful in a way that sounds almost childlike. “You are going to help me.”
“Laurel,” I bite out. “Leave them alone.”
Her hand shoots out, clamping around my throat, and my magic tears through me harder and faster. The screams of all the people I’ve loved and failed reaches a fever pitch, clouding my vision, sending barbs along every nerve in my body.
But then an echo of Enzo’s voice the other day in the temple. Do you know how exhausting it has been my whole life, carrying the weight of you and the way you’d take responsibility for whatever thing I might do?
Let me make my mistakes. Let me own them. They’re not yours to carry.
Do I blame Enzo because I followed him into the temple to steal the moonshard?
Do I blame my father for raising me to believe what he did when that was all he’d ever known?
Do I blame Lola for bringing scrutiny to my casino when her intent was only to save my brother?
All of those actions led me here, but I do not hold them responsible for my choices.
So why do I take ownership of theirs?
I failed, yes. I hurt people. More than I can count. I disappointed my father and deceived my brother and pushed away Lola and meddled in the affairs of thousands of others.
I may have created the Unbreakable Lie that runs through Laurel now, but Lola showed that magic is breakable. She broke it herself in order to do the right thing earlier tonight.
Which means Laurel could have, too, if she’d wanted it enough.
She chose this. Not me.
I did not make her what she’s become. I can be sorry for my part, but her actions are her own weight to bear.
Not mine.
And since she will not stop what she has begun, I can choose to end it.
So I let the screams splinter through my nerves, the ice carve my flesh, the agony devour my soul. I welcome it, and then I plunge the voratium shard toward her throat.
She shrieks, jolting sideways. My makeshift blade grazes the side of her neck, and fury boils in her eyes. She sinks her fingers around my throat, cutting off the blood supply in the arteries on either side of my neck. I scrabble at her hands as darkness eats the edges of my vision.
“You cannot stop me,” her voice ricochets in my ears.
“With a conduit in my grasp, I will finally be what the gods intended. Powerful enough to destroy everyone who stands in their path and make sure their will is obeyed.” Her voice drops to a whisper somehow loud enough to make me wince. “And I will be one of them.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, pulling every ounce of pain and regret and terror and fear—the things I’ve been running from for so long I cannot remember a time when I ever wasn’t—and I raise my blade once more. Another blow will take her, will break this, will save us.
“Put it down,” Laurel cries, tracking the movement.
“I’m—” I try to say, but the word sorry is caught by my curse in my throat, and I can’t breathe around it.
Laurel’s lips curl as tears spill over her lashes. Lola jolts to her feet, lunging for me with jerky, puppeted movements.
Laurel’s got her.
I swing my arm to strike Laurel, but Lola’s fingers close around my throat, dragging me backward as Laurel wrenches the makeshift voratium blade from my hands.
With a guttural roar, she hauls back and cleaves it deep into my heart, right through the epicenter of the glowing scar, fracturing the icy power in my chest.
Soullight funnels through me, screaming into the blade as I topple backward.
I look at her, meeting her eyes, mouth dropping open as pain tears my veins asunder.
“—sorry,” the word finally bursts free as I hit the ground.
Darkness claims me.