Chapter Fifty-Five
LOLA
All is quiet. All is dark. All is cold.
The only thing left is the steady thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of my heart with its soothing echo in someone else’s chest, so familiar, so calm.
I do not know where I am or why everything has frozen to numbness, but that feeling of someone else, there in my soul, is a reassurance that, no matter what else happens, I am safe.
I try to stay lost in this place where I cannot remember what brought me here, but the longer I remain, the more hurt feathers at my edges. Loss. Images of my father’s face going slack. Echoes of shouts. Remnants of pain licking through my veins.
And then I see it. An afterimage burned into my brain. Enzo stepping into the light, looking back at me with resolve in his eyes.
Be free.
No. I don’t want to find out where this memory leads. Don’t want to follow where it goes.
But it continues because I have to know, have to see, have to feel the moment when his heartbeat disappears from mine. When his body ripples, becomes light, plunges into me, and then out to the new moon-shard alongside all the power in Laurel’s body.
It is at that instant I realize the second heartbeat in my chest now isn’t the one I know like the back of my own hand. Not the one that would lull me to sleep, that would check in with a gentle tug to see if I was all right. It’s a new heartbeat. One familiar and yet not.
It’s Nic’s.
Only Nic’s.
My eyes fly wide.
“Enzo,” I choke out, flailing my arms, trying to get my bearings.
The pale glint of sunlight filters from the other side of the moon. The eclipse has ended, and the morning light is slowly growing, limning the roof of Nic’s casino in gold. My glasses are still missing, and my vision is blurrier than ever, but I push upright, squinting.
Nothing moves. The bodies of Soren, Arden, Jade, Isla, and the people I now recognize as my father’s guards lie in haphazard clumps.
My eyes are drawn immediately to the massive glowing shard of voratium.
Otherworldly, multicolor light shimmers, bathing everything around it in an icy glow.
Estelle lies next to it, flopped like a doll someone cast aside.
Her chest rises steadily, and I wish that were enough to assuage the panic in me.
But nothing soothes it. Not right now. Not when I can’t feel Enzo’s heartbeat. Not when I can’t see him.
“Enzo,” I croak, crawling on all fours to the spot where he stood.
There is nothing there. Only outward scorch marks, an indication of the epicenter of the soullight’s detonation.
I wrap a trembling hand around our pendant hanging from my neck. Somehow, impossibly, it’s as warm as he was, and I wish desperately that I could wrap myself in that warmth the way he would when he’d embrace me in that big bear hug that always made everything all right.
“No,” I whisper as tears sting at the corners of my eyes, leak down my cheeks, drip onto that empty necklace.
But the warmth in the pendant is fading already.
Enzo is gone.
I clench that necklace between both my fists and bring it to my mouth, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to breathe as everything inside me breaks, but it’s like I’ve been plunged to the bottom of Nic’s bioluminescent pond.
All that comes out are wrenching shrieks.
My body crumples, and I curl in around the pendant, begging it not to go cold.
Begging Enzo to come back.
“Lola?” a voice croaks nearby, but I am hurting too much to raise my head. “Lola, what’s going on?”
Someone scrabbles over to me, and a hand settles on my shoulder, smooths away the moisture on my cheeks. “What is it, little thief ?”
“Nic,” I gasp, seizing his hands with the gold chain still tangled in my fingers. “He’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?” He peers at me, his face a smear in my blurry, tearstained vision.
“Enzo,” I choke out.
He goes utterly still. “What did you say?”
“Enzo,” I weep. “He’s gone.”
“No.” He pulls away, whirling, searching as frantically as I did a moment ago.
And then, when he inevitably sees no head of black curls and no bejeweled, sparkling ears, he scrabbles to his feet, pulling people aside, shoving the lumenoring devices out of the way, his limbs weak, his legs quaking, but his jaw hard with desperation. “Enzo!” he shouts. “Enzo!”
I sob as the lumenoscopes crash sideways, as mirrors shatter. As he shifts bodies, checking every face.
“Nic, wait!” I shout.
But he doesn’t hear me. He stumbles along the edge of the roof, peering over the side, shouting Enzo’s name, clumsy and so close to pitching off into oblivion as he searches the streets for signs of the brother I already know isn’t there.
I trip after him, begging him not to fall. I cannot lose him, too.
Finally, when he pauses at the corner, I grasp his arm and drag him away from the ledge.
“He might be down there,” he coughs, wheezing.
“He isn’t,” I say.
“He could be hurt!” he shouts, trying to pry my fingers off his bicep.
I dig them in hard. “He’s not.”
“I’m not letting him die!” he bellows.
“He’s already dead!” I scream.
Nic stares at me.
I break, sobbing so hard my body convulses. My tears swirl around the disbelief in his face.
“How do you know?” he whispers.
I grip my chest like I might wrench out my own heart with my bare fingers. Wishing I could, because maybe then it wouldn’t feel so gods-damned empty.
He pulls out of my grasp, and this time I let him. He stumbles backward, unseeing, clawing his hair, eyes squeezing shut.
And then he crumples to his knees, throws back his head, and lets out a guttural roar that tears me to pieces.
I hobble to him, crouching at his side and pulling his head against my chest. He clings to me, sobbing, and I’m crying, too, and we ride the tidal wave of pain together.
Then something scrapes behind us. An intake of air. A quiet laugh.
A voice croaks from nearby. “Which is closer, me or this massive moonshard?”
I gasp, leaping to my feet as I whirl.
A form, fuzzy at first, solidifies next to the moonshard, leaning on it with arms crossed like it’s a random day of the week. Like he didn’t just disappear. Like I didn’t watch him die.
Nic makes a choking noise and barrels at him, pinning Enzo to the floor with his forearm to his windpipe. “You bastard.”
“I’m touched, big brother. Maybe I should die more often.” He smirks.
“You couldn’t have, I don’t know, made yourself a new body faster?” Nic asks, releasing his throat and yanking him to his feet by his collar before wrapping his arms around him so tightly it could break him in half.
“It took a minute to figure out how to build one from scratch,” Enzo protests. “Now that I have this shiny, brand-new moonshard and all.” He looks at me and winks.
Tears are still streaking down my cheeks and dripping off my chin. “Why did you do that?” I hiccup.
“Make a new body? I should think it would be obvious.”
I cross my arms, sniffing. “You know what I’m referring to.”
His eyes soften, and his grin fades. “Because,” he says, “you are more important to me than anything I fear. I’m just sorry it took me so long to realize it.”
I run forward, leaping into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist as he spins me, clutching me close.
“You’re not allowed to die, okay?” I whisper into his curls.
“Right back at you, Lockpick.”
“I told you Lola likes me better, Nic,” Enzo says over my head as he sets me down.
“What are you talking about?” Nic asks, crossing his arms in mock-jealousy.
“Yes, I think we’d all like to know,” I tease.
“She just made me my own moonshard,” Enzo says, jabbing a thumb at the voratium. “Has she ever made you one?”
“No, I can’t say she has,” Nic admits. “You’ve got me there.”
“Laurel?” a voice croaks nearby, and we turn to see Estelle pushing herself onto all fours and crawling over to where Laurel lies, life-less. “Laurel!”
Though Estelle and I do not share a heart, I feel the pain in that exclamation down to my toes. I stumble over to her, gather her in my arms, and hold her as she sobs.
Laurel stares, unseeing, at the morning sky. The light is gone from her skin, the rage vanished from her eyes, and for a moment, I see the girl Nic once loved. The friend Estelle gave up so much for.
There may be no gods in the sky, but I find myself hoping, for Laurel’s sake, that there’s something beyond them. That she’s somewhere out there, finally free of all that fear.
Once Estelle’s tears have slowed, Nic and I help her hoist Laurel’s body down to the street, where Paol still lies, cold and alone. We settle them side by side to be picked up by medical personnel from the nearby hospital, and Estelle sits to wait with them, twining her fingers through Laurel’s.
Then Nic, Enzo, and I set about searching for the rest of the Tentacles. We find Soren first, who was crushed under a pile of my father’s goons. He’s got several broken ribs and a bullet wound in his leg, but he should pull through.
Next, we find Arden, whose arm appears to have been slashed by a blade. Emergency medics gather him onto a stretcher and rush him to the hospital.
“Jade?” I call, picking my way over gables and ducking under electrical wires.
“Over here!” Nic calls, and I rush to where he’s trying to lift a beefy St. James bloke. A hand sticks out from beneath him, a small pile of glowing voratium pebbles in its palm.
“No.” I help Nic heave the man up and off her.
A bullet wound in her chest is drenched in blood.
“Lola?” she gasps.
“I’m here,” I say, grabbing her hand. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Keep my extra poppers,” she says. “There’s more”—she coughs, and blood spatters her lips—“under my bed . . .”
“Let’s get her down to the medics,” I tell Nic. “Can you lift her?”
But when he pushes aside another St. James guard, we both catch sight of just how extensive the pool of Jade’s blood has become.
She sucks in a rattling breath. “Take my gran a cake, will you?”
“Don’t talk like that.” Tears sting my cheeks all over again as I press my hands to Jade’s wound. If I could save Nic, I could do it for Jade, too. I pull in as much magic as I can all at once, but I’m so weak it’s like trying to breathe underwater.
“Just make sure . . . ,” Jade wheezes, going very still. “It’s not . . .” A slow exhale as her eyes empty. “. . . poppyseed.”
“No!” I shout, pulling magic harder, but my head swims, and I pitch sideways.
Nic catches me. “You’re going to burn yourself out.”
“Help me!” I rasp, reaching for Jade. “I have to save her.”
“I . . . think she’s . . . gone . . . ,” he says softly.
I break down sobbing all over again.
Nic does not try to stop my pain, does not try to explain it away. He pulls me to his chest, holds me as I cry, and stays with me until Enzo and Isla find us.
The three of us lean over our fallen Tentacle, mourning until the sun is high in the sky.
And then, finally, Enzo croaks, “If we let the city lay claim to her, she’ll be put in some grave downtown.” He meets my gaze. “Your father, too.”
I nod, immediately catching on to what he’s not saying.
Jade and Magnus are not like the other victims here. Considered a criminal by everyone in Aethera, she will not be given the dignity or love and care she deserves.
“We should take Jade home,” I say softly. “To the sea.”
Jade may not be seaspawned by zenithic definition, but to me, the sea is where she belongs. A place full of mystery, yes, but also full of beauty and color and life. Just like her.
“And your father?”
I turn to meet Nic’s eyes. “Can we take him south? I know a grove of orange trees I’d like to visit.”
“Of course.” He presses his lips to my brow. “Whatever you need.”
We only wait long enough to get word that Arden and Soren will be all right before maneuvering Jade’s body onto the deck of a boat. Ships are difficult to come by in Aethera—people still believe that the sea is dangerous—but it seems the Liar still has some strings he can pull.
Enzo gathers Septavia from the ocean, and then we set sail with the sun dipping beyond the horizon and dyeing the waves a deep purple-red.
Jade’s body is encased in a gorgeous coffin (that Enzo claims he paid for “all legal and noble-like” but then winked, so who really knows).
We weigh it down with as much of the treasure from the Brig as we can fit, and when the stars unfurl above us and we are so far beyond shore that Aethera’s lights have gone out, we set Jade off on her final con over the edge of the boat.
Tears streak down my cheeks as the coffin fades into the dark. I toss a handful of poppers after her. They detonate when they hit the water’s surface, sending up flurries of water spangled in multicolor light like fireworks.
Nic’s arm slides around me, pulling me close. Enzo comes up on my other side, settling his hand over mine on the railing, and we watch the night devour our comrade together.
Maybe we are dysfunctional, the three of us. Maybe we are evil, as Laurel claimed. Maybe my father’s death and the loss of a half dozen of his men will spell a chaos that will unmake us in the coming weeks.
But somehow, standing here flanked by the two people I love more than anyone else, I take the first whole breath since the night Salazar’s goons came to kidnap me from my bed four years ago.
Because I am finally free.