CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Yael
A part of me was dying watching Jemma decline. Every day that passed sent her further down a dark hole I wasn’t sure I could pull her out of. But I knew if I didn’t try, she’d disappear entirely.
When she came home that night, pale and bruised with dark circles rimming her eyes, it was clear that I was out of time. I followed her down the hall to her room and caught the door when she tried to close it. “Where have you been?” I asked as I barged in.
She flashed a disapproving look over her shoulder as she shrugged out of her jacket. I tried not to notice how painfully thin she looked. “Out.”
“Where?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It absolutely matters, Jem. Every time you leave, I’m worried sick about who you’re with and what you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything—”
“Bullshit!” I shouted at her. “I’m neither dumb nor blind; I see what’s going on here, and I can’t stand it, because you’re slipping away from me. I can’t lose you too,” I pleaded, taking her hand in mine. “I’ll do anything—just tell me how to help you.”
“You can’t, big brother. No one can.”
The resignation in her darkened eyes was something I couldn't suffer. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that all I can do is sit here and watch you fade away with the same level of acceptance you seem to have.”
“This is my burden to bear, Yael, not yours.”
“What if it wasn’t?” I asked softly, puzzling out the possibility as I spoke. “What if it was mine? What if you could share it with me?”
“Then you would be as I am now,” she snapped at me, pulling her hand away, “and you would never survive it because you were not built to. You are life and creation—I am death and destruction. That is how it must be.”
“Maybe that makes me the perfect person to help you—because I’m your opposite.” Her eyes narrowed with suspicion, but I could tell she was considering my argument. “Just give me some of it,” I begged her. “Just enough for you to be well again.”
“You know that it’s forbidden,” she argued. “You will forever be in danger if I do this.”
“Do I look as though I care?”
She lunged forward and grabbed my shoulders, leveling her midnight gaze on me.
“You should,” she said in a voice that barely sounded like her—a deep, feral tone that set me on edge.
“You know not what you request—for what you so freely volunteer. You will know no peace ever again, brother. It will start as a niggling in the back of your mind at first, a hum of something dark and seductive that lives just beyond your grasp. You can ignore it in the beginning, but it will eventually take root and spread and grow, until you become a slave to its insatiable craving and suffer its torment until you beg for death to take you, if only to escape its hold—provided that even death can save you from its claws. Is that what you want, brother?”
I reached up and cupped her cheek. “I want you back, Jemma. No matter the cost.”
“You will regret this,” she replied as she pulled away to look at me with sadness in her now-soft, green eyes. “I’m sorry, Yael… sorry that I let things get this far.”
“It’s not your fault—you didn’t know what would happen when you started.
Now we do, and we’ll do better this time.
We can get away from here and the temptation; go somewhere where nobody knows what you are.
” Hopefulness shone in her glassy stare, and my heart wrenched in my chest. “I have a connection in America. We can go there and start over.”
A tiny smile tugged at her pale lips. “I think I’d like that.”
“Then let’s do this.” I held out my hand to her, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she stared at me as that fleeting hope bled out of her expression, leaving a wicked grin and a black abyss looking back.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Her words echoed through my mind as her hand shot forward and pressed to my chest. Fire roared through my veins, my head shot back, and her bitter laughter filled the air as death and darkness took me.