Chapter 43 #2
I laugh, a foreign sound even to my own ears. “I’ve made far more of a mess than this.”
She inches closer to the ward bars. “I meant, you’re making this harder than necessary.”
Ember surges inside me, her heat flooding my limbs.
The girl has changed. There is something wrong—
Callie flicks her hand, a dismissive gesture I might have missed if I weren’t in the throes of not being able to blink.
I gasp. My chest hollows out, a void expanding where Ember’s heat should burn. The absence hits me with such force I roll onto my back, hands pressed to my stomach.
The surviving cursework on my arm gutters, magick light eating away at it in patchy pulses.
“Ember?” I whisper, searching the corners of my mind. “Ember!”
Nothing answers.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
For the first time in months, I am completely alone inside my own skull.
No connection with Falcen, no Ember. The space feels wrong.
Too big, too cold, too quiet. Thoughts bounce around with no resistance, no second voice to argue or guide or warn.
Even in my darkest moments in the academy, Ember burned inside me.
Irritating and cryptic, but always there.
I curl on my side, lying in my own blood, clutching my chest, and staring wide-eyed at Callie. “What did you do?”
Callie tilts her head. “I simply quieted you.”
The emptiness inside me feels like a wound, far worse than my bleeding wrists. “What does that mean?”
“Your magick. I dampened it.” She speaks matter-of-factly, as if wielding that kind of silencing ability is an everyday occurrence at the academy. “You were about to destroy academy property and likely yourself in the process.”
I push myself up, fighting dizziness. “Give her back.”
“Give who back?”
My mind backtracks. Callie doesn’t know about Ember specifically; no one but Falcen does. But she must be aware I have some kind of abnormal mastery, hence my imprisonment.
But if she has a unique power, too, why isn’t she behind ward bars?
“Callie, what’s going on? Why are you down here?”
She inches close enough to the bars that blue sparks dance across her skin without seeming to cause her pain. “I’m here because they asked me to be.”
“They?”
“The Keepers.” Her amber eyes study my face. “Someone needs to watch you, and Keeper Sonnet can’t match your abilities. She usually works with Elites, not initiates, but today is proving to be a strange one, isn’t it?”
“What did they do to you?” I push myself up to a sit, fighting against the dizziness and nausea now that Ember isn’t here to staunch it. “You’re not a Keeper. You’re not high-ranking yet. You shouldn’t be guarding me.”
Callie smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I found a purpose. Something better than cowering in the dark.”
I search her face, noting subtle changes I missed before. Her skin glows with an unnatural vitality, but beneath it runs a network of faint lines, almost invisible unless you know to look for them.
Like the beginning stages of what crawls under Falcen’s skin.
“You underwent the Darkening,” I whisper, horror dawning. “Oh gods.”
A flash of surprise crosses her face before she masks it. “So you know. I’m impressed. You’ve been busy.”
“So have you, it seems. Is that what’s given you this silencing ability? Because the Darkening comes with a lot more than that. Have you seen your brother? What they’re doing to him? Have you been to the underground with those pour, soulless halflings that used to be like us?”
“My brother?” She laughs, but the sound is brittle as frost-covered glass. “You worry about him more than yourself.”
“And you don’t worry about him at all!” I retort, wincing as I clench my fists. “What did they promise you, Callie?”
She traces the ward bars, fingers trailing dangerously close to the crackling energy. “My brother was dead to me long before his scales started growing.”
I pull myself up straighter despite the agony shooting through my body. “Yet you’re following in his footsteps.”
“No.” Her sharp denial cuts right through me. “I’m creating my own path. The difference between Falcen and me is that I could control the rot once it entered my veins.”
Nox below, is she another Davrin?
Blood pools beneath me. Without Ember to lessen the flow, I’m weakening by the second. “Callie, please. They’re going to kill him.”
She leans back, a flicker of unease crossing her face. “And why should I care?”
“Because he’s your brother,” I say, despite the blood loss making my head swim.
Callie laughs, cold and hollow. “My brother abandoned me in the catacombs without a backward glance.”
“You know why he did it,” I argue through my clenched jaw. “He knew what he was becoming and needed to escape the academy before they made him worse. He didn’t know they would use you to force him to return.”
Callie sniffs then looks away, as if battling internal thoughts, before coming back to me. “Even if I believe half of what you say, it’s not his return that worsened him, is it? It was you.”
Her words hit like she punched me, stealing what little certainty I have left.
“That’s not true,” I whisper, though the memory of last night won’t leave my mind, how I threaded gold into his veins, formed that cursed tether, then watched him convulse as Ember severed it.
“Isn’t it? He was stable, or stable enough, before you came along. He met you with your pretty face and your bits and bobs of magick, and suddenly, he’s rotting faster than ever.”
My vision blurs, whether from blood loss or tears, I can’t tell. “I was trying to help him.”
“By giving him fragments of your unpredictable, unstudied soul?” Callie’s voice drops to a whisper that somehow carries more impact than a shout. “What did you think would happen? Unicorns and butterflies and happily ever afters?”
“Please,” I whisper, the plea scraping against my throat. “He’s your brother.”
“Was,” she corrects, but her tone wavers.
“You’d really let him die?”
“He’s dying, anyway.”
“So you’ll just watch?” My voice is a thread of what it once was. “You’ll stand there while they parade him around like a Void-caught spectacle?”
Callie’s jaw sharpens, but she doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, she glances toward the corridor, listening to something I can’t hear. When she looks back, her expression has hardened again.
“The Master Keeper is making an example of him. Of what happens when chosen Elites resist their purpose.”
“What purpose? To become monsters? To lose their humanity piece by piece until there’s nothing left?”
“To serve Vehloria,” she snaps, then catches herself, as if she’s reciting a lesson. “The Void grows stronger every day. We need weapons that can match it.”
My tunic’s fabric is warm and sticky. The emptiness in my chest yawns wider with each slowing heartbeat. But I don’t relent.
“Then help me get to him,” I say. “If Falcen’s going to die, let him die with someone who cares for him instead of chained in an arena for entertainment.”
Callie’s face hardens. “Care.”
She spits the word like it tastes rotten.
“He came back for you, Callie.”
“Liar.” Her eyes flash. “He only came back because he had nowhere else to go.”
“You know better. Why else would he return to a place he hated and successfully escaped? A place turning him into something he kills for a living?”
“Stop talking.”
“He told me how he blamed himself after they took you.”
She shakes her head. “If he cared about me, he would have...”
“Would have what? Stayed and turned into one of those halflings faster? Right in front of you?”
Blood seeps through my fingers. The room tilts sideways. I don’t have much time. Falcen doesn’t have time.
Callie flinches, then recovers enough to glare at me through the bars. “Stop talking.”
“You know what he is to you,” I continue, tilting sideways, blood dripping down the slab. “You’re all he has left. And he’s being led to slaughter while we argue.”
A crack appears in Callie’s composure, the smallest tremble of her lower lip.
“They told me he abandoned me,” she says. “Left me to die in the catacombs because I was too weak. Too much of a burden.”
I open my mouth to plead with her one last time while losing myself piece by piece, until nothing is left but the empty shell of my body, but my vision tunnels, and darkness creeps in from all sides.
Callie flicks her wrist again, this time with a sharp, decisive motion.
Heat floods my chest, sudden and violent. Ember surges up like a tide returning to shore, her familiar burn spreading from my core to my limbs. The blood pooling beneath me begins to move, defying gravity, streaming upward and back into my open wounds.
I gasp, back arching as strength returns in a rush. Veins re-knit, skin seals, and my head clears, the fog of blood loss evaporating as Ember blazes inside me, furious and protective.
Lines of golden light outline my skin, racing through my veins, knitting flesh and stopping blood with frantic efficiency.
Callie recoils from the ward bars, aghast.
“What are you?” she breathes. “Did you undergo the Darkening as well?”
“No,” I say, flexing my newly healed wrists. “This is different.”
She doesn’t blink as she watches gold light flow through my veins. “But ... the blood ... how can you—?”
Ember blazes into my mind. You are not like her. You were born this way. And she’s about to pay for silencing me.
“Run,” I warn Callie, even as the gold surges under my skin.
Callie staggers away from the ward bars, her face pale. “What are you doing?”
“It’s not me,” I say, struggling to control Ember’s fury. “She doesn’t like being caged.”
I thrust my hand toward the ward bars, letting the gold from my veins spill over like water breaking through a dam.
“Wait,” Callie says, holding out her hand. “You can’t—”
I roll off the slab and drop to my feet, muscles trembling but holding. Ember burns through me like wildfire, her presence so fierce I almost choke on it.
This girl tried to cage us. She has been remade for their purpose.