Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chrys didn’t think. She lunged.
Something black and inky was about to land on top of Lily’s head. Chrys didn’t consider whether it might land on her if she jumped in the way. All she knew was that her heart, which had surely stopped as Lily apologized, burst back into action. She had to protect Lily.
As a result, they both crashed to the floor. Lily screamed. Rough carpet dug into Chrys’s knees. Her forehead smacked Lily’s shoulder, and Chrys retained just enough of her wits to roll them out of the path of the curse’s tentacle—or whatever it was.
Lily’s cry of surprise cut off, and Chrys craned her neck. The blackness was retreating. Only then did Chrys realize she was tangled in a heap of limbs with Lily, her head mere inches above Lily’s chest, her hands around Lily’s arms, their legs … Chrys had no idea where those were. She was twisted and trapped in a mound of black tulle.
“What happened?”
Lily shifted, and Chrys climbed off her, feeling as dazed as Lily sounded.
Her cheeks burned with the realization of how close Lily was.
“It was about to …”
She had no idea what, so she gestured vaguely at the inkiness creeping toward the chandelier, uncertain whether it was real or another illusion, like with the pumpkin.
Lily shuddered.
“Um, thanks.”
“You’re welcome?”
She should get up, get the water, finish banishing the wretched thing.
But Lily was so close.
And she’d apologized.
Chrys hadn’t been expecting that.
Not really, not the way Lily had done it.
At best, she’d thought Lily might apologize for the way she’d dumped Chrys.
Worse, Chrys had feared that Lily might suggest they try being friends, something Chrys wasn’t sure she could handle.
So she’d ignored Lily’s text and done her best to avoid Lily and any more misery she might bring.
She’d told herself she was strong for doing it.
But she’d never felt strong.
Just sad and empty.
It was strange—only because of the curse had she begun to acknowledge to herself that she did care what happened to everyone at school.
To the people here at the hotel, too.
In fact, she was more scared for what might be happening to everyone outside this room than she was for herself.
It didn’t feel great being worried, but it did make her feel more whole.
Lily was right.
She deserved to protect herself.
But what was she protecting—a hard shell of a person? That didn’t seem very worth it.
She had been happiest when she’d made herself vulnerable.
When she’d let Lily in.
This wasn’t the time to be having these epiphanies, and it sure wasn’t the time to say any of this to Lily.
Not with that writhing mass of evil magic hovering over their heads.
But … it might be now or never.
Chrys started to speak, but the curse had other ideas.
The magic that came for them this time was invisible.
Like the hand that had shoved them through the hotel door, a gust of frigid, putrid wind sent her flying farther from Lily.
Hair whipped Chrys about her face, and her skirt knotted around her legs, tangling her far worse than the tumble she’d just taken had.
Lily screamed again, but Chrys could barely see her.
Dark smoke began filling the room.
“The water!”
Chrys yelled. They’d set the cups down nearby. She had to find them before she couldn’t see at all.
“Chrys!”
Lily’s face appeared through the smoke. She was crawling along the floor, struggling to reach the cups, like something was pushing her away.
It was the first time Chrys had ever heard Lily use her shortened name, and it could have given rise to a thousand questions under other circumstances.
Chrys stretched for Lily’s hand and pressed a cup of water into it. Her cup? Lily’s? It hardly mattered. Water sloshed over the sides. There wouldn’t be enough, couldn’t be enough, but it would have to do. She turned and grabbed a second cup, swaying under the force of the magic that tried to pin her down.
“This curse’s power is now broken!”
Wait, that wasn’t right.
“As I speak these words?”
How could she have forgotten when she’d read the chant a few minutes ago? Fear, like smoke, clouded her brain.
“As these words are spoken, this curse’s power is now broken.”
Lily remembered (of course she did), but she couldn’t seem to stand, and her attempts at flinging the water were worse than Chrys’s own. Droplets sprinkled the floor, but neither of them could reach the curse high above in the gaudy crystals.
Chrys tried again, timing her voice with Lily’s, but the cups were tiny. She ran out of water without being confident she’d hit the curse at all. She should have tried harder to talk Lily out of trusting her intuition, but then, what choice had they had? Lily’s elaborate ritual had been impossible to replicate. Their innate power was all they could use.
“Lily?”
Smoke choked her, stinking and thick. Lily had all but disappeared within it, and so had the remaining two cups. Chrys felt blindly around for them, and her fingers brushed one. Badly. She knocked it over, and she swore.
“Chrys?”
It sounded like Lily used her full name, but her voice disintegrated into a coughing fit after the first syllable.
Giving up on the cups, Chrys scrambled to where she could barely make out Lily’s outline. They’d made a valiant attempt, but this wasn’t working. More water wasn’t going to help. The pessimist in her had been right, which meant the only thing left to do was talk to Lily before it was too late. Crack her chest open and let her heart bleed out of its own accord. Spilling her guts was painful, but it was better than letting the curse end her.
More to the point, intuition was telling her she needed to do this. That they’d failed last time because neither she nor Lily had truly let go of the issues between them.
“Lily?”
Chrys snagged her arm and dragged herself closer until she could see Lily more clearly.
She was all Chrys could see—reddish hair, warm eyes, an autumnal fairy of a girl. When Chrys glanced down, the carpet had disappeared. The floor seemed to have opened up beneath them. They were falling into a black void. Into the cracks.
Chrys pushed down the terror that streaked through her and focused on Lily’s stupid, perfect face.
“I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your text. I didn’t want to hear whatever you had to say because I thought it would rip me apart.”
“I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
Lily was crying.
Oh shit. Lily was crying. Chrys couldn’t handle tears. Her own eyes were getting misty, and if she was falling into a void or about to die, she did not want to do it with tearstained cheeks and smeared mascara. She wanted dignity. She wanted to go down fighting—if not against the curse, then for Lily. For herself.
The thought made her laugh, but the laugh didn’t stop tears from pricking her eyes.
“As you should be,”
she said, unable to resist one more dig.
“But I’m sure I’ll do something stupid and hurt you, too. And I’ll try to learn from it, like you are. Lily, you … you made me happy. Happier than I’ve been in a long time. I think the truth is … if I can’t let myself be hurt, I also can’t let myself be happy.”
Lily blinked, and confusion seemed to have stopped her tears.
“Are you saying you forgive me, or was that some kind of inappropriately timed philosophy lesson?”
To be fair, she had rambled a bit. And maybe had forgotten to actually say she forgave Lily. So, possibly, they both could work on communication.
Chrys started to explain and decided to hell with it. The smoky darkness was encroaching on Lily’s face.
Chrys reached out and grabbed Lily’s cheeks, and she kissed her.
Lips against soft lips, eyes closed, Lily’s warm skin beneath her fingers—the room or the void or whatever was around her—faded from Chrys’s consciousness. There was nothing else but her and Lily, and she finally felt like they were moving past the hang-ups that had gotten them into this mess in the first place.
It just figured that it was too late.
Lily’s hand tentatively touched the back of Chrys’s neck, and her lips parted wider. Sweet and salty with tears, warming her from the inside out. Chrys could barely breathe, but when she did, all she inhaled was Lily. The scent of her perfume. The very air from her lungs. It was like they were becoming one person, and Chrys could sense that Lily felt the same. Some magic in their blood linked them. Some power pulled them together. They could have been unstoppable. One day, they could have created their own Thornhaven legend.
A bang like thunder broke the spell, and Chrys’s eyes opened in spite of herself.
She could see.
Chrys caught her breath, inhaling the scent of Lily’s shampoo, but the heady rush it gave her was nothing compared to the dizziness she felt about the sights around her. The smoke was fading. Moonlight once more poured through the tall windows.
“Lily?”
The heaviness on Chrys’s back was gone, too. She could breathe more easily. Hell, she could run a marathon, powered by her shock and the taste of Lily’s lips.
Lightning flashed outside the room, and Chrys remembered her phone in her pocket. She had signal again, and when she turned on the flashlight …
“It’s gone.”
Lily gasped. She stared at the chandelier with Chrys, but she hadn’t removed her arms from around Chrys’s neck.
“We banished it.”
Chrys swallowed. She didn’t want to get too excited, but thinking rationally was a challenge when Lily was holding on to her for dear life. She dropped her phone to her skirt and wrapped Lily in a hug.
“For good this time?”
“I hope so.”
Lily smiled.
“I think we had, um, issues to work out.”
That was exactly what Chrys’s intuition had been telling her, and she grinned, her confidence growing since Lily had arrived at the same conclusion.
“A few, I suppose.”
Then she kissed Lily again.
At some point, they toppled over, and only when Lily’s phone started making noises did Chrys remember where they were and that they needed to find out what was going on outside this room they weren’t supposed to be in.
“It’s my mom,”
Lily said.
“She’s frantic because she can’t find me.”
Lily sounded happy about that. Chrys, however, was not happy to discover that she also had frantic messages from her mom.
“We need to go,”
she said, jumping up.
Lily nodded.
“Do I look okay?”
“You look like you just did battle, but since no one’s going to suspect that, you look like you were rolling around on the floor with your girlfriend.”
Oh. Presumptuous of her to use the G-word.
But Lily preened as she finger combed her hair.
“Well, we were just rolling around on the floor, so I guess that’s accurate.”
Warmth flooded Chrys’s veins, and she couldn’t help but smile at that, too. She held out a hand to Lily.
“Let’s go see what happened.”