Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
Elodie
My matches freeze.
Salvatore glances over his shoulder at me, his forehead furrowed.
Byron turns right around, his hands falling to his sides. “Tell us what, Elodie?”
An awful, triumphant smile crosses Cole’s face. I want to smack it right off him, but I still can’t move, because he’s held on to the invisible restraints he bound me with through the whole fight.
It mattered that much to him to keep me imprisoned.
I can’t stop myself from at least glaring, even as my stomach sinks with the admission I’m making. How much can I trust the imagined reassurances of my other matches, and how much was that just wishful thinking?
I can’t let them keep going like this. That’s all I know for sure.
By some miracle, my voice stays steady. “There are things I haven’t shared with you. But they aren’t anything like what Cole’s saying.” A short, despairing laugh hitches out of me. “And you probably won’t believe me anyway.”
One corner of Cole’s smile tugs downward with obvious disbelief—and maybe because of the familiar way I said his name. As if I could think of him as just “Professor Raith” now.
I focus my attention on the men who believe better of me, even though my heart is breaking. I might be about to shatter their good opinion too.
Salvatore swivels to face me, looking more concerned than betrayed. “You’re allowed to keep some things to yourself, mia amata. This snuffer doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You only just started really getting to know us. Of course you wouldn’t hurt us.”
I swallow hard. It’s not enough to clear the rasp from my throat. “I did, though. In different ways. Before.”
Asher’s voice carries from the back of the room, as gentle as always. “Before what, Elodie?”
Dear Parvati, how I love him.
Hearing him say my name alongside memories pushed to the front of my mind cracks something inside me. My head droops, my eyes squeezing shut against a prickle of tears.
“Elodie.” Byron moves to my side. “I’m sure whatever it is—”
“No. You don’t know. It’s too crazy.”
I drag in a breath, sorting through the jumble in my head. How can I even start to explain the truth?
Cole’s tone is as caustic as ever. “Are you actually going to tell us anything, or is this another diversion?”
My teeth set on edge. The anger grounds me more than I’d have expected.
Why does he have to be such a fucking prick about everything?
Even if on a deeper level, he’s right.
I suppose I might as well start at the beginning. At least, the beginning of when I entered their lives.
Girding myself, I lift my gaze again. I don’t know who to look at, so I focus on the doorway that leads to the stairs.
When I walk back up those steps, will it be with no matches at all, at least none who still want me?
I force out the words. “I’m not the Elodie you all used to know. That Elodie died on April 8th.”
At the edge of my vision, Salvatore’s frown deepens. “Are we talking, like, metaphorically?”
“No, I’m being totally literal. She was run down on a street one night, and her—my—aunt found her.
Aunt Daphne had no idea who was responsible, and she says she was worried about how the death would affect the family, so…
so she reached out with her magic, found another Elodie in an alternate reality who was still alive, and yanked me into this one. ”
Cole’s eyebrows shoot up. “And these two were calling me insane. You expect us to believe you’re some alternate Elodie Devine from a parallel universe?”
I can’t help glaring at him again. “You can believe whatever you want. You asked me to tell you what I’ve been hiding, and I’m telling you. What you do with the information is up to you.”
“But of all the stories—”
“Of all the stories, this one is true.” I suck more air into my lungs. “You noticed something was different about me, down to my ephemera, and I’m telling you why. Because I’m not her. We’re two different people, who lived very different lives.”
Byron is studying me, his expression unreadable. Is he already regretting the intimacy we shared yesterday?
“Different how?” he asks.
My hands itch to clasp together on my lap, as if that will help steady me through the confession.
“The main thing is that in my original reality, when I was six, my dad died in a car accident. In this reality, from what I’ve gathered, my mom was the one who was driving and died.
I grew up with her rather than with him…
and my grandparents on the Devine side didn’t want to believe I was their son’s kid. They bullied her into keeping quiet.”
Cole looks like he’s on the verge of rolling his eyes. “And why would they kick out their only heir?”
My tone turns tart. “What do you know about my mother?”
He makes a dismissive gesture. “Why should I know anything?”
“Oh, I don’t know, because people talk? Because when a beloved family member dies, there are memorials and fond mentions of them and all that.
But you’ve never heard a peep about Maya Singh, have you?
She had no family connections, no family of her own she even wanted to associate with, and I don’t imagine the fact that her skin was brown helped either.
My grandparents here have made it pretty clear they’re glad she died. ”
Byron’s eyes widen. I can almost see his understanding shifting behind his eyes as he considers the complexion Other Elodie always passed off as a Mediterranean tan. “She— You—”
I offer him a twisted smile. “This world’s Elodie hid it well, didn’t she?
You know what it’s like. Bad enough even when you have an esteemed history behind you.
Mom managed to get me into Luminary, but to everyone there I was a mutt who didn’t belong, whose unhinged mother had tried to scam one of the most prominent families in the lucent community. ”
Salvatore eyes me hesitantly. “You still knew us, in your… reality? We were there?”
I shrug as well as I’m able to in my bindings. “You and Byron didn’t really pay attention to me, definitely never in a good way. Cole was a prick as soon as he started teaching, just like here it sounds like.”
My smile sharpens as I aim it at our professor. “My only real friend, my best friend, was Asher, because he was the only one at Luminary in a similar position to me. And even you thought I was beneath him.”
Cole sputters a guffaw. “Okay, now it’s obvious you’re spinning fables. If my brother was your best friend, why are you acting like he’s dirt under your shoe? You’ve either ignored him or lashed out at him every time he’s been near you in the past several weeks, even after our bond sparked.”
The words snag in my throat. My whole body balks.
But I have to admit this part too, don’t I?
The only person this secret protects is me. They deserve to know.
My voice comes out rougher than before. I compel myself to seek out Asher’s gaze. “I’m sorry. This version of you—you don’t know me, and I didn’t want you to, because I was scared…” I have to drag my eyes away before they start to burn.
I focus on Cole and his smoldering animosity instead. He’ll probably like this part, if only because it’ll give him an actual reason to resent me.
“When I was seventeen, sometimes I’d go over to your neighborhood to meet up with Asher.
One evening I had to stay at school late but I was hoping to catch him anyway—I got to the parking lot by the bank and the library, and while I was heading across it…
someone tackled me and started stabbing me.
They ran off, and I would have died, but Asher found me.
He was trying so hard to heal me… He took off his gloves to work the ephemera better and accidentally touched my skin. ”
“The match sparked,” Byron fills in, his tone unreadable.
“Yeah.” My gaze drops to my lap. “And so did my glim. I didn’t tell you what it is because I hate it; I wish I could erase it…”
Salvatore makes a noise that sounds way too eager. “You do know! What is it?”
I grimace. “The best I’ve been able to determine, it heals anything that’s wrong with me physically… by drawing energy from someone else nearby. And in the process of drawing the energy it needs, it inflicts whatever problems it’s healing in me on the person it’s stealing from.”
My throat closes up completely. My matches remain silent as I gather myself. “So that… that happened. All of a sudden, I had all this magical energy rushing into me, and the pain went away—and then I realized the stab wounds had appeared all over Asher’s back instead, and he was bleeding out, and…”
I pause to blink hard at the tears that are welling up. The final part of my explanation sounds feeble to my ears. “By the time I’d recovered enough to understand what was going on, he was dead. I killed him. I never wanted—I never would have—but I did.”
Cole stares at me, totally rigid. Apparently I’ve shocked the snark right out of him.
“Fuck,” Salvatore mutters, which about sums up the situation.
It doesn’t feel right to leave my explanation there.
“I’ve been trying to avoid all of you the entire time I’ve been here.
I hurt Asher the worst, but I screwed up all of your lives—Salvatore and Byron got cut off by their families when they decided to keep an outcast as a match, and Cole, obviously losing Asher was horrible…
I didn’t want to mess up anything here. The only reason I sparked our bond was that Salvatore would have died otherwise. ”
When I look at the mafia heir, his lips have parted, but it takes a moment before any sound comes out. “You knew.”
“I knew we were matches. I knew what your glim is and that it’d probably help us get out of the river when it kicked in.” My gaze slides to Byron. “I knew yours too, which is why I knew it’d be safe to wake it up as long as we had some shelter overhead and no one else around.”
“You also knew,” Salvatore says abruptly, “about—when we were sparring—and…”
He trails off with a scowl at the men around us. The things I shouldn’t have known about him he doesn’t want them knowing either.