Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Nova
Thalia let out a soft, guttural cry—a raw, broken sound, a mixture of grief and confusion and anger.
I made no sound at all. I couldn’t breathe. The world tilted and spun.
Nothing seemed to make sense.
Orin’s eyes stayed open, moving between my face and Thalia’s. In the end, he ended up locked somewhere between the two of us. Unseeing. Unfocused. A man caught between worlds, between duties, between the two people he’d tried desperately to protect until the end.
He went still.
The entire world did.
And in the stillness, the helplessness, I felt like a child again. Like I was back in the gardens of Rose Point, trying and failing to take a commanding hold on death. To will the flowers back to life. To stop the inevitable decay of everything I loved.
Failing.
I was failing, and all around me, things were withering.
The last echoes of my childhood, of my safety, of the home I’d once known…all fading to nothing but ash and memory. I was losing everything, one piece at a time.
Why the hell couldn’t I save any of it?