CHAPTER 27 RAYA #2
I’m assuming she meant that in a romantic sense rather than a literal one, since their illicit coupling couldn’t have been preordained.
Unless it was . . . That thought takes me by surprise—but if there’s anything these past few days have taught me, it’s not to underestimate fate.
If, for whatever reason, it did decide to push a Hue and a Shade together, then it would have had to ensure that Hue had been born in the first place, which would have meant prompting a Shade to turn rogue and marry a typic, then teach her son how to survive long enough to fulfil his purpose and start the cycle again.
“But I’m sure that’s a little hard to understand,” Ezzo’s quick to add, as if expecting me to minimize the idea. “Choosing to believe that the fates would orchestrate something so forbidden.”
“Not as odd as you might think,” I say, since minimizing it hasn’t been working for a fair while.
It was hard to understand when Akari and I first left the castle, and when the future led me to the Golden Stag tavern where Ezzo was drinking himself numb, and especially when he invited Chase to feast on the color in my blood.
But three days and a whole bunch of revelations later, I’m starting to consider all manner of odd things. Like finally coming clean.
“Ezzo, there’s—there’s something I haven’t told you,” I say, since given where we are—what’s about to befall us—keeping this secret feels kind of pointless.
“Well, now’s as good a time as ever.” Though his voice stays light, his body stiffens, bracing for whatever admission is to come.
He knows I’ve been hiding something—he even asked me about it back at Saleen’s, when I was still intent on being less forthcoming—he just doesn’t know what that something is yet, and I have no earthly clue how he’s likely to react.
Gods, then spit it out already, I will myself, doing a little bracing of my own. At worst, he’ll reject the very idea of you. And mortifying as that would be, it isn’t much of a problem, seeing how we’re both slated to die.
“The original vision I had, after I asked the open question—it wasn’t only about the Gray dying; it was also about . . . me and you,” I say, slow and quiet. “Us.”
“Us?” He repeats the word as though it belongs to another language, the tension in him snapping taut. “As in—?”
“Yeah.” Since I can’t bring myself to look at him, I drop my gaze to the ground, counting the cracks in the grimy concrete. One, two, three, four, five . . . I’ll count them all if I have to, if it keeps this charged silence from sparking and setting my skin on fire. Six, seven, eight, nine—
“Raya.” An entire age seems to pass before Ezzo speaks, before he says my name and forces me to meet his eyes.
And perhaps he is open to that possibility, because what I see in them isn’t pity, or embarrassment, or even disgust; it’s more akin to indecision, and understanding, and want, I think—or rather, the want to want, to lean in closer and give the future the ending it demands.
Do it. I’m suddenly staring at him every bit as intently as I did in the park, aching to know what his kiss might be like, how it would feel to break a rule this fundamental.
But the difference today is that Ezzo isn’t oblivious; while I’m staring at him, he’s staring right back, tracing the line of my jaw, and the curve of my mouth, and the way my lashes graze the top of my deepening blush, the way I’m slowly starting to tilt my head up and up in his direction, a mix of air and hope bubbling in my lungs, waiting, waiting, waiting for him to make the final choice I can’t, to ask our very own version of an open question.
Except he doesn’t.
And all at once, the desire I felt in him turns to panic and a self-loathing flush, a heart-wrenching torrent of pain.
“I’m sorry, Raya, I—I can’t.” Ezzo jerks away from me, leaving my nerves stinging with his absence. “It’s not that I don’t—that you’re not—this just can’t happen, okay? Not now, not ever. It wouldn’t be fair—to either of us.”
Because he’s still in love with someone else. That answer is clear as day and hot as lightning, a truth I should have seen the second he told me the pain will get better with time—but that his hasn’t. That we don’t always get forever.
“What happened to her?” The question slips out unbidden—in curiosity, sure, though it’s also an invitation for him to talk, if he’d like. If he needs to.
“She shattered.” And I guess Ezzo does need to, since after a long moment, he whispers that awful truth into the dark.
“She stepped in front of a Green spell meant for me and then I had to watch her lose her magic one splintering crack at a time, until the shadows shattered her to pieces. There was nothing I could do to stop it,” he says, though the sentiment sounds oddly flat, as though he doesn’t quite believe it.
“Eve died, and I couldn’t save her, and then I couldn’t find the strength to follow her into the black. ”
Colors help me. His heartbreak far outweighs the rejection squirming in my gut.
It’s little wonder he lost his head when we watched Adriel’s tribute shatter, and it certainly does explain the reckless disregard he’s shown for his own life.
The girl he loved died and ever since, he’s been aching to join her.
He’s been living with her ghost this entire time.
“We were supposed to die together,” Ezzo continues, lost to the telling now that he’s begun.
“We always knew that death would find us sooner rather than later—we’d already lived much longer than most Hues tend to last. Sometimes, we’d even plan for how it might happen; I know it sounds morbid, but it felt like we were keeping that possibility at bay by looking it in the eye.
And when we did, we’d imagine it happening in some wildly spectacular fashion, the sort of death the bards would one day sing a song about. We called it dying like the stars.”
If I didn’t resent the fates before, then I sure as hell do now.
It was cruel of them to feed me those words, to have me manipulate him with them, tarnish a cherished memory.
Gods, I don’t blame him for lurching away from me; he’s still deep in mourning and yet, here I am, telling him the future wants me to be the new her.
“I’m so sorry, Ezzo,” I say, and I don’t just mean for the part I played in his misery, but for the part we all did, every last Shade from Isitar to Sarotuza.
Because it breaks my heart that our hate took from him that love, that he’s in pain and we’re the ones who caused it.
It breaks and it breaks and it breaks me.
Just like in my original vision.