Chapter 60
EVER
Death stone,” Kaleida whispers.
But a whisper is the last thing I’m capable of. “Kelter, you fuck-hole!”
Kelter stares down at his father’s open chest. “I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was losing my mind.”
“What in the fuck?” Eli bellows. “You used his entire essence for yourself?”
Still maddeningly calm, Kelter lifts his head and sets his hazel eyes on Eli. “Linking didn’t work, but this did. My cravings are gone. And you too. You’re finally out of my head.”
Rage claws through my veins, but my voice is low, lethal. “You were wrong to do this.”
“I would have killed everyone in here,” he counters.
“Look!” I shout. “Someone is dying, you selfish bastard. We could have saved him.”
Eli shakes violently. “I’m going to fucking kill—”
“Eli…” Milo rasps, grabbing his sleeve before he launches at Kelter. “Stay with me.”
His neck twists. He slowly turns back to Milo, wiping the emotion from his face, but the shallowness of his eyes reveals the truth, the pain that echoes deep inside him.
Milo grips Eli’s forearm, his body weak and trembling, slouching lower and lower. “That light-dark curse is bullshit.”
Eli humors him, his tremors waning. “Yeah.”
“I only ever saw a friend,” Milo says, cracking a feeble smile. “And an asshole.”
Eli lets out a clipped chuckle, stopping himself partway through as if he swallowed a thousand feelings at once.
Milo’s eyelids grow heavy. His head tips sideways, the effort of holding it up far too much. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
After the longest time, Eli’s chest expands with a sudden sharp breath, and I wait—wait for the release of his breath, the sign that it’s all okay, that the amount of blood is an illusion, a misunderstanding, anything but reality.
But he holds it in like everything else, and I realize he could hold his breath endlessly, suffocating in his own feelings, and never die.
Kaleida sobs and quickly covers her face.
But he’s Milo—it’s the thought I can’t shake. He can’t die. He can’t. I repeat it over and over, my gaze fixed so hard on him that I start to believe I could stitch together his skin with only a piercing look.
Milo gropes the air until he finds Atom’s face, unable to turn his head.
He brushes the messy brown hair from his eyes, soft words leaving his lips.
“I didn’t get to choose how to live, but I chose how to die so you can have a chance to change that.
Sonnet needs you.” Blood gurgles from his mouth.
He collapses with a low grunt, loud enough to hear over Kaleida’s whimpering.
Eli catches him and rests his head on his leg.
One hand remains in the air, awkwardly searching for how to comfort the grown man in his lap, how to show his friend how much he cares.
Atom startles, retreating from Milo’s reach. His breath is stunted, his tiny, blood-spattered face tight with worry, tears welling in his eyes, overflowing with his next words. “No. You don’t understand. I can’t stay here.”
Kaleida wraps her arms around him and holds tight. “We’ll get you out of here.”
“That’s not what I mean!” Atom yells. He hops to his feet and runs… straight to Kelter. Then loops his arms around his waist.
Kelter lifts his arms up. “What are you doing, kid?” Atom squeezes tighter.
This kid will hug anyone. They’ve never even met. I peel my eyes away, back to Eli, trembling from the pain I can’t escape.
“Milo,” he gasps out, finally setting his hand on Milo’s chest. “Your sisters…”
Milo shakes his head, barely a movement at all. “I know, Eli. I know you will.”
Blood pools beneath Eli, spilling from the hole through Milo’s back and chest. It soaks into his pants. Then he sings, drumming a beat on Milo’s chest and giving him the distraction he deserves.
Only broken hearts can sing
I’m more than a soul, more than a mind
More than memories combined
One heart is all it takes
One death
One breath
One beat
One song
My heart jumps from Milo to Eli to Atom, tears flowing freely. I don’t let myself turn around to look at Kelter. I don’t run and ask all the questions flitting through my mind. Or smack him upside the head like he deserves. I stay with Eli. With Milo.
Kaleida holds Milo’s hand. His cough spews deep red blood over us. He manages a final, soul-brightening smile and tries to grip Eli’s shirt, only finding the scarred skin of his chest. He closes his fist, weak and trembling, and rests it over Eli’s heart.
It stays there through his next shaky breath. And the next and the next, pulling in more blood than air. Until his fist falls. Until his chest is still. Until he’s gone.
I’m dizzy with pain, but it’s his body—the limp limbs and empty blue stare—that fills my lungs with cement. I want to undo his death. I want to go back in time.
I want it to be a vision.
But it’s not. I pull his ring off my finger, the only real one I carried all this time, though the others are already back. Then I tie the red string around his bloody pinky. And knot it twice so he doesn’t lose it again.
The pain on Eli’s face, the twitchy control he can’t sustain, the tears he fights to contain—they hurt as much as the loss.
An unbearable weight crushes my existence.
His chest heaves, and he looks at me, petrified.
His body quakes, violent shakes and shudders, those consuming brown eyes begging for another reality.
And it all strikes me at once, a massacre, a caffeine injection direct to my heart.
Every carefully constructed wall falls. My defenses are bombarded with forbidden feelings, stepped on by a defiant march of emotion across my chest. My heart is exposed, blasted with memories and moments…
with Eli. Of songs and drums. Of knives and cuffs.
Of grins that slip past his control. Memorable firsts and facing fears.
Of whispered needs. Of confessions. Of each kiss that he couldn’t hold back.
Every wall I thought was within my control belonged to him.
And now, he’s dropped them all. I grip my chest. This man.
This man who arranged my abduction a year in advance, who locked me up and pushed me with triggers.
Who laid bare his secrets, his soul. Who treasures my underwear and favors my ears.
I feel everything he wouldn’t let free in me.
Only now is my heart my own, able to choose. And it’s as simple as Ametrine made it sound. I know how I feel. I let those eyes of his see as deep as they dare. He needs to know. “I—”
“You don’t,” he interrupts, near hysterical, my voice now under his control. And silenced. “You keep your fucking promise.”
My eyes sting. My nose and mouth clog as though I were dunked underwater. Sound is distorted. I can breathe, but my lungs hurt anyway. Or maybe that’s the ache of my heart as it overflows. But when the sensation passes, I’m left hollow, incomplete.
Eli clutches his ear, his face twisting with heartbreak. The whites of his eyes go gray, the irises too, a storm inside. His body lurches, every limb rigid and tight. Milo slips from his lap. His face is taut, neck corded, jaw clenched. He falls forward and catches himself on his hands and knees.
“What are you doing?” I cry. Gray flames burst from the marks on his back, reaching four feet high.
He roars in pain, his neck circling, back rolling up and down.
“Eli!” I rip off my shirt with an excruciating pull past my shoulder and whack his back to extinguish the flames.
They finally surrender under my constant attack.
Smoke billows and escapes in wisps. His scream falters, his throat too raw to continue.
Then his head swivels in my direction, but with his eyes grayed over, I can’t tell where he’s looking. “What happened?”
His neck ticks to the side. “You broke your promise not to love me. You triggered the second half of the curse.” His voice is low and unfeeling.
My blood crunches inside my veins, crystalized and clogged, hardly slogging along. “And now what?”
He blinks, and when his lashes rise, his eyes are solid black, so shiny that my own reflect back at me, like indigo stars on a cloudless night.
But I still see the struggle, the pain deep in those tunnels.
He’s trapped, his words revealing just how far I’ll have to go to free him from this curse. “Now, Everielle, I kill you.”
THEre is no END to Never.