Chapter Fifty-One
LOLA
Laurel’s hold on me shatters, and I lurch forward, screaming as Nic hits the tile. Soullight bleeds out of him alongside his blood, that shard of voratium embedded far too deep.
Tears sting hot in my eyes. Magic buzzes in the air. Panic has me numb.
My fingers grasp a collar. A shoulder. Wavy, sweat-slicked hair.
“Nic,” I sob.
He shudders and slumps, eyes going out of focus as tendrils of smoke dusted with stars curl out into the air around the voratium shard in his chest like beckoning fingers.
“Nic?” I repeat as I press my hands to the side of his neck, where Laurel’s handprint is bruised on his skin. “Nic . . .”
His pulse is barely a flutter.
“Please,” I choke as his last gasped words echo in my ears. I’m sorry. The first truth he’s been able to speak of himself in five years. Tears blur my vision until I cannot see anything but the glow of the would-be dagger embedded in his heart. “Stay with me . . .”
The voratium slides out, as though repelled by his flesh, and clatters to the floor.
The metal glitters multicolor ebony like his dice once did.
I press my hand to the blackened hole on his breast, begging the wound to stitch itself back together.
Praying that some trace of magic remains inside that could mend this.
But nothing happens.
Tears bead like fire on my lashes.
This can’t be it. He can’t be dying. There has to be something I can do.
Shouts echo from the hall, and an instant later, explosions fill the air.
Jade’s poppers.
People spill into the room. I blink up at them, but my glasses are missing, and between my poor vision, the tears, the popper smoke, and the dissipating sunlight from the window being slowly shrouded by the moon, I cannot make out faces, just a mass of bodies charging toward Laurel, pistols firing, glinting blades swinging.
“When is it going to stop?” Laurel croaks, her eyes toward the heavens as though asking the gods, but she steels herself and raises her hands to the attackers, causing about half of them to stumble to a stop.
But not all of them.
No, it seems there are too many for her to control, and the ones she cannot manage keep coming. She grits her teeth, barreling toward them, puppeting the newcomers under her power to fire on their comrades.
“Nic?” a familiar voice cries, panicked. “Nic!”
Enzo hurtles toward me and leans over his brother. The purple pendant swings past my face, knocking loose a thought. An idea.
A desperate, painful, terrifying idea.
“The pendant,” I croak, jostling his shoulders. “Enzo . . .”
A pistol fires. A bullet whizzes past Nic’s face. My heart nearly stops.
“Enzo, come on!” I shout. “Pick him up!”
He blinks, then obeys without question, hoisting Nic into his arms. I stumble through the chaos, Enzo hot on my heels as Laurel battles what must be a dozen people.
We need to get as far away from her as possible. If I’m going to use Enzo’s magic to save Nic, I need to do it where she won’t be able to interfere.
I pelt into the elevator and slam my thumb against the top floor’s button.
The doors slide shut, and I turn to Enzo, yanking the pendant from his neck and pressing it over Nic’s chest. Trembling, I reach for Enzo’s magic inside it that allowed me to share my heart four years ago and try to push it into Nic.
To share our heart with him, too.
His withering pulse flutters against my fingers, bringing forth a desperate hope. But the magic has grown too weak.
I push the gem harder, begging the magic to work, his heart to beat stronger, his eyes to sparkle with that starsdamned cunning charm.
“Wake up!” I sob through my teeth. “Come on!”
But Nic is nearly gone. His chest is barely rising and falling at all anymore.
“No,” Enzo whispers, voice cracking as the elevator slows to a stop. The doors slide open.
“Maybe if we get closer to the moonshard . . . ,” I gasp, dragging Enzo out into the hall and up the fire escape to the roof.
The sun is little more than a slip of orange in the sky just above the sea, almost entirely obscured by the moon.
I totter toward the brightly glowing voratium at the center of the roof. A thousand colors swim under its glassy surface.
Enzo sets Nic down next to the shard, and we press his palm to it. I hold the pendant once more to his chest, begging Enzo’s magic to bleed out from the shard, to fill Nic, to bind him to us, too.
Nothing happens.
Tears spill down my cheeks. “Why won’t it work . . . ?”
Enzo stares past me at the diminishing sun, his face ashen. The eclipse is underway, totality quickly approaching.
I blink through tears at the pendant in my hand. “What use is your magic,” I croak to Enzo, “if it can’t bring him back?”
He doesn’t move, doesn’t reply. His hands tremble, and if not for that, I might wonder if he’s dying, too.
This pendant has been Enzo’s access to my heart—the conduit through which he’s been able to draw in the soullight of my pulse, the soullight of my emotions, the soullight of my lifeblood. Why can’t it be enough for Nic as well?
I cough on a sob as something dawns on me.
If I’m a conduit, then maybe my magic is the answer here, not Enzo’s. His is weakened. It has limits. Consequences. Because it came from an unstable piece of voratium and is split between him, Laurel, Nic, and this new shard.
My mother channeled magic from the stars themselves to make the original moonshard. Could I do that too? Trembling, I toss the pendant aside and press my bare palms to Nic’s singed chest. I take a deep breath, letting my eyes fall shut, and tip my head back to the sky.
I pull myself inward and then upward, reaching, reaching, reaching. Past the cold emanating from Enzo, past the icefire in Nic.
The fear and pain in my body dissipate. The world fades as I grasp desperately upward, extending my mind as far as I can toward the distant frost of the horizon.
The further I go, the more the temperature in my bones plummets. Shivers rack through me. My teeth chatter.
And then, there it is. A gaping, frigid, endless universe at the edge of my grasp.
I take hold and pull.
It blasts through me, and my jaws slam together so hard my skull reverberates. Light rockets into me, vicious and wild. With hot tears streaming down my cheeks, I grasp the beat of it, the shape of it, the soul of it, and push it out through my palms. A torrent, a flood, a fire.
Nic’s body begins to glow white like Laurel’s. His eyes blaze open, pupils devoured by that pale light.
I focus on the thrum of the blood in my veins, the whoosh of it in my ears, the tang of copper on the back of my tongue, the warmth of it under my skin.
My heart is enough for this. I am enough. I don’t need anyone else’s magic, don’t need games or lies or answers. Just my heart. The one that loves, the one that breaks, the one that heals and forgives and tries again.
And only when I’m about to unravel, only when the magic nearly overcomes me, do I feel it.
Thump.
Was that stronger than before?
I suck in a breath. Enzo’s shouting, but I hear nothing, see nothing but Nic’s pale face.
Thump.
“Please,” I whisper. “Stay.”
Thump.
The magic from above slows to a trickle, then fades, and the light in Nic’s eyes fades, too, leaving only the muted violet color of their irises. His skin goes gray once more.
Thump.
“Nic,” I plead, keeping my hands on his chest.
And then he sucks in a deep, gasping lungful of air, warmth flooding his cheeks as he jolts awake, both hands locking around my wrists.
He blinks up at me as my sobs renew, choking through me so hard and so fast I can barely breathe.
“It’s you,” he gasps.
“It’s us,” I weep, finally lifting my hands from his chest. The tuxedo shirt and jacket are still torn, but beneath is newly healed skin, complete with his glittering scar. I grasp his hands and bring them to my mouth, pressing my lips to his knuckles. “It’s us.”