52. Chapter 52
Chapter fifty-two
Dawn neared, and still Lux ran.
Shaw’s childhood home was empty. His apartment was not. She dodged around a glowing tree root tunneling through its side, a trunk now towering above the alley with leaves that gleamed in the first kiss of sunlight. Glimmering leaves glinted everywhere, in fact. They stretched above rooftops for as far as she could see. The wood had destroyed Ghadra’s walls, ransacked their buildings, and claimed their homes. They had taken back the revived and many more along with them.
Lux hurried past the Dark Market, past a massive tree extending from its middle, an empty stand propped and broken against a looping root. A dried raccoon paw still dangled from it.
Her eyes stung. The silence weighed, heavy. Had anyone survived?
Her home neared, and with every step, her heart beat louder. When she rounded that final corner, she didn’t immediately see the tree blocking her door, or the branch extended upward through each floor until it pushed through the apothecary’s open window, the main support of the building now. Her mind could only comprehend one thing: a mussed head bent low on hunched shoulders, rocking a body as murmured cries broke the quiet.
Blonde tendrils fell across the arm beneath it to caress the cobblestones.
Lux stopped moving. She stopped thinking. She stopped feeling. And then all three things crashed over her at once, propelling her around the tree, diving into her destroyed home.
The stairs were crooked, jagged and broken, but she managed down them. The workroom. She had to reach the workroom.
But it didn’t exist anymore.
The jars, the vials, the decanters. The table, the loyal plants. The Risen . An entire portion of her home, the one place she felt alive even while encased by death, had been reduced to broken brick and smashed stone.
Lux fisted a hand to her mouth, blocking the sob, and she staggered away.
She ran to her bedroom.
She wasn’t thinking properly. It couldn’t bring back the dead. Not a body with lifeblood pooling still within it, and certainly not in the way she wanted. But it didn’t stop her from sprinting, from heaving against the overturned wardrobe, and from crying aloud at the shattered vial, silver oozing through the cracks of the floorboards.
What would she say?
What could she say?
Tears pooled in her eyes, and she hurtled back up the steps. When she swung the door this time it clattered apart from its hinges. Shaw looked up, his eyes filled with such tormented loss, Lux couldn’t draw her next breath.
“She’s dying.”
Lux followed his gaze back to Aline, resting with closed lids and the barest of breaths. Shaw’s hand clutched a wad of once-white cloth to the wound in her chest. Every breath stained it darker.
Hot drops fell from her own lashes then. But Aline wasn’t dead. She wasn’t—
“All those vials we stole! Are there any left?”
Shaw shook his head; his hair brushed Aline’s forehead. “None. My mother saved nineteen lives poised to fall to the plague.”
Fine. That’s fine. She would think of something else. “Everything is destroyed, but we have time. Just hold onto her. I can scour homes, the markets. I can trap a howler again. If you can just give me time, I can—”
“Lux…”
“I can do it, Shaw! You brought her here for a reason, didn’t you? It’s what I was made for. Please, just—Aline! Do you hear me, you stubborn, daft girl? Don’t leave us. Don’t give in.”
“He stabbed her. He buried a blade in her chest, and I did the same to him. A tree took him. I killed my own father.” His shoulders heaved; he gathered his sister closer. “And now I’m going to lose her, too. It’s too late, Lux.”
“Twelve hours is a long time!”
“Not enough. Not enough when there’s nothing of this town left. There’s no one left.”
Already, Lux had compiled an impossible-to-obtain list in her head of every ingredient she needed. She gripped Shaw’s hand, the one holding pressure until his fingers blanched, and she gasped. It wasn’t warm.
He wasn’t warm .
Shaw’s gaze found hers, and the devastation in their depths stretched, endless and bleak. A frost made up of despair. Was this how her touch felt to others? How she looked? Her soul recognized the darkness settling in the other. It wasn’t like the mayor’s, Morana or his Shield. This darkness was different, but no less cold. No less an abyss.
Lux yearned for the light. She couldn’t let Shaw know that agony.
If only—
“Lux!”
Shaw turned as she did, blinking against the unusual sight of Morana running, hair a tangled mass and skirt hiked to her knees. She held tight to the wound at her side.
“Morana.”
“A woman,” she sucked in a breath, “came. Searching—for a—healer. There’s no one—left. Here.” Morana thrust a vial of lifeblood into Lux’s hands. The very last. “Take it.”
Lux’s entire body shook, and she clutched it to her chest. Without wasting precious seconds on more questions, she dropped to her knees. She unstopped the vial with quivering fingers, only made steady by Shaw’s cool palms wrapped around them in support.
Together, they poured every last drop down Aline’s throat.
To Death, she said, You cannot have her.
“Come back, Aline,” Shaw whispered against his sister’s hair.
“Your house—”
Lux ignored Morana, unable to breathe and refusing to blink.
The lung-filling gasp that followed next forced Aline into Shaw’s crushed embrace. “ Saints, ” he breathed, ragged with relief, and Lux almost collapsed then, in hearing it.
Aline’s arms came around her brother’s neck in return. Her small shoulders began to shake. “What happened?”
Shaw’s muffled reply could hardly be heard. “I should have known better. I almost lost you.”
Several moments passed that way, with Shaw and Aline murmuring to one another, and Lux scrunching her eyes closed, hands stacked over her mouth as she attempted to swallow her emotion away. She opened them to see Aline pull back, then push. She stood and glanced down her blood-soaked front, and her mouth gaped wide for a moment before clamping closed, her gaze raising tentatively to meet Lux’s. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen.”
Lux swiped at her eyes and willed her chin to cease its quivering. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it before it began.”
“You saved my brother. I shouldn’t expect you to defeat a devil in the same day, though it would have been nice to have this dress for longer.”
Lux’s welling tears dried in an instant and she snorted.
Aline’s voice dropped to a loud whisper. “What did you do to her ?”
“Your devoted mother begged me to save you, so I did.” Morana glowered, straightening her skirt. “And now I regret it.”
Aline’s mouth fell open for a moment before she burst into laughter. “Honest people are my favorite. Don’t worry, you’re still the most beautiful, even with a crow’s nest on your head.”
Morana blushed with gratitude, patting her mass of hair. “Thank you for saying so.”
Lux sought Shaw from behind Aline. When he made to stand at last, she reached out a hand to help him. He took it.
It chilled her to the bone.
“Where’s my mother now?” Aline asked Morana.
“I gave her the keys to the prison. I’ve met a few people as I ran here, but if there’s going to be any number of survivors, I assumed it’d be there.”
“Would you mind taking me to her?” Aline worked through her tangled blonde tresses with her fingers.
Morana smiled. A true one that creased the corners of her eyes. “Yes. And I have just the thing for your hair.”
“ Our hair.” Aline fell into step beside the former mayor’s daughter. “Are you coming?” She glanced back, her eyes meeting her brother’s and Lux’s in turn.
“We will meet you there,” he said.
Lux watched them go, and then she glanced up to Shaw. He gazed back at her, his eyes filled with a shadow thicker than any fog. “You can tell me.”
He stared down at his hands, dried a dull red. He shook his head. “Does it ever get easier?”
Lux stared at them, too, and opted for the truth. “It’s been nine years since I killed my parents. Nine years of feeling cold and dark—and choosing to stay there. Because I thought I deserved to be broken. But I met you. And you were horrible to me, all warm and glowing like the sun, and it woke something… Something I thought I would never get back. Still, it’s like an ember trying to burn away a midnight. Maybe I’ll finally find my light in another nine years…” Her voice trailed off, thinking on how even if it took another decade for that ember to finally catch, it was still infinitely better than where she’d been. She lifted her head. “It is easier, I think, from then until now. I can finally swallow when I think of them. But you can’t embrace that place like I did.”
His eyes bore into hers, the copper and gold as faded and bleak as the crumbled wall behind them. Soon, it would build to an unscalable fortress to block out the world. “I don’t know how to stop it. It’s as if I’ve closed my eyes and stared into the dark too long, and I can’t bear it.”
When he would have turned away, she gripped his fingers. “What do you feel, Shaw?”
“What do I—”
“From my touch.”
His brow creased. “Your touch calms me…and also…doesn’t. It makes my heart constrict a little less, even if I know it will return.”
Lux frowned. His did the same to her, and yet, this wasn’t him. “The first time I touched you—the living you, that is—you were so warm . Your skin nearly burned me. Every time. Nobody has felt like that. Not even my parents. Riselda was cold, the mayor’s like ice.” She was losing him, confusion creeping across his face. “You’re not warm anymore. Don’t you understand? And I think I’m not either. I don’t think I’ve been since the night I murdered them. There’s something clawing about this darkness in me. I can feel its edges, can sense it like the dead. Like death . I can—” She choked, stumbling back.
“What? What’s the matter?”
“I cannot forget. But I’ve got to… Do you think…?” She ran her hands over her face.
“Saints above, Lux. You’re scaring me.”
She grabbed for his bloodied hand.
“Can you help me dig?”
When the last bit of stone was hauled away and the last remnant of dust blown from the cover of The Risen , Lux settled onto the righted stool.
She knew every margin of the book: the instructions, incantations and ingredients. And she knew she didn’t need it anymore. She possessed more confidence in her brilliance, and in herself, now more than ever.
Once upon a time, a returned Riselda had turned to a final page and smiled over what she found there. Lux bared that same page now. She knew what it was, or at least what it appeared to be: some pretty writings, the print large and flourishing. But she never wondered at it more. She’d not needed to. Untether, it said. It didn’t have instruction or a detailed list of powders and venom. No lore about its becoming or illustrations to hint at its purpose. And yet…
“Give me your hands?”
Shaw leaned into the table beside her, willingly lacing his fingers with hers. “What’s this?”
Her mother’s voice: Shine bright, Lucena.
“Shh. I will pry these claws from us.” Lux shut her eyes. “Saints above, devil below—”
Allow me to know, she pleaded . Then she fell within.
She’d glimpsed it before.
But never like this.
Gnarled branches greeted her. Fingers bent and rigid. Unmoving.
Her soul was not only withered but barred, encased in a rib cage of poison. And pulsing behind it—inside it—yearning for freedom: the faintest glow. Lux trembled, twitching in her seat, breathing only when Shaw’s hands tightened their grip. Intertwined, overgrown: she didn’t know how she could ever peel herself free from its grasp.
Then she shifted her focus.
She saw his.
And it was impenetrable. Nothing but perfect, horrific darkness.
“ No. You monstrous , wicked—”
“Lux—”
“Be quiet ,” she snarled and dug her sharpened nails inside.
Shaw jolted, and she did, too, but what was a little discomfort, a little pain, compared to years of feeling a shell instead of your humanity?
At last, when her fingers could dig no deeper, Lux fluttered open her eyes and read the words aloud:
"The weight of past lives, heavy and cold,
Anchors that drag, roots that grow bold.
Have courage to bloom in the darkest of nights.
Untether your chains.
Reclaim your light."
She let the words choose their own pace, and some sentences stretched while others rushed, and with every syllable leaving her lips, Lux felt their energy bolster her instead of take. Just as they cracked her core, expunged the darkness, and polished what remained. Tears fell from her lashes, splashing onto her skirt long before she’d finished, but she could see it, glaring and brilliant ahead.
Light.
Lux gasped as Shaw did. With his next breath, he dragged her to him. Amongst the rubble of her and Riselda’s home, he stole her seat and gathered her into his lap, and when he did release her hands, it was to wrap his arms around her, his head lowering to her shoulder.
Lux’s heart pounded so hard, she knew he must hear it. “Did it work? Have I given you your ember?”
“You have given me more than that, Necromancer. I feel…”
“Warm?” His skin was hot on hers, so blissfully familiar, she wanted to cocoon within it. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he lifted his head to press his brow to hers.
“The pain is there, but the guilt… I’m not drowning any longer.” She had siphoned the frigid shadows from his eyes, and what awaited her made the heat of his hands sear upward and into her cheeks. His fingers traced the path of her blush. Up her neck, until his knuckle pressed to her chin, lifting it. “How do you feel?”
Lux’s lashes lowered, and she breathed deep. Even in the darkness of her destroyed home, beneath the eerie glow of the tree, she still felt the sunlight on her skin.
An enchantment for forgiveness…
An untethering.
A release.
Finally.
“I feel light.”