CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
My heart flamed out in my chest. “Have who?” I demanded, my tone sharper than I’d intended.
A slow smile spread across Bellan’s face, now lined with wrinkles. We’d been playing this game for many years now, he and I. “Griffon.”
Indra stands at the center of a cluster of bodies, her chin held high despite the burns that ravage her body. Davina stares her down, Sorrell and Aris at her sides. My eyes snag on Aris’ sandy-brown hair that looks so much like Beck’s, except I’ve never seen Beck drenched in blood.
“You will shift, Indra Amiri, as I will not burden one of my people with carrying you.” This is the fifth variation of her demand.
Indra spits at Davina’s feet. Or tries to.
The glob catches on her crispy lips and dribbles into the tatters of her armor.
Sorrell and Aris both stiffen but remain at their sovereign’s side.
Griffon flings propriety into the same crater of shit that accommodates my sanity and shoulders his way out of the crowd.
He gets right in Indra’s face. “I have been stabbed, and broken, and left for dead and I have zero patience left for your show of fucking defiance.” He leans his face so close to hers their noses nearly touch.
“Use your fucking wings, or the next time Stone finds you, I will hack them off. Slowly.” The words are so quiet I can barely hear them, but Indra’s face drains of any color that is visible through the burns. Her nostrils flare, but she shifts.
Griffon turns to Davina and sweeps his arms toward Indra. The Archon’s eyes narrow at the impertinence in that single motion. He bends his knees and shoots into the sky without another word. Those around me follow.
I fall behind the legion within the first mile.
By the tenth, they are little more than a dark cloud staining the horizon.
My wings are shuddering so badly I can’t keep myself in the sky by the thirtieth.
I execute my typical faceplant just beside the road, next to an ocean of trees and little else.
I don’t get up. My body has never ached so badly, not even the day after Charlise shattered my bones.
I don’t see him. Or hear him. But I feel him land, some piece of my heart recognizing that he is near.
I roll over and stare at the stars that peek through the patchy clouds.
“My sister loved the stars,” I say. “I think if she could, she would have left us all behind and traveled the cosmos. Discovered what else is out there.”
I don’t know why I say it. Or why I tell him something about my family each time I tumble out of the sky.
My mother had loved nutmeg as much as his loved cinnamon. She’d dump unreasonable amounts of it in her tea, her breakfast, even the occasional cup of coffee.
She was kind, and understanding, and there wasn’t a bad bone in her body.
I had a feeling our mothers would have loved each other.
My father had penned fantastical stories. No one ever saw them, but he was a dreamer, and the words escaped his crowded mind as ink on a page.
His advice had been unparalleled, and I’d lost my compass the day he died.
Jackson was tiny and perfect.
I had been able to make him laugh like no one else could.
He would have been a man worthy of a fairytale princess.
He shadows my stilted journey deep into the night and early morning. I tell him every forgotten memory that bobs to the surface of my mind, the horrors of Vircann trawling them up, one after another. My mind is too frazzled to contain them, and they escape as nimbly as my father’s stories.
I catch a glimpse of him once. Watching.
Listening. I don’t know why he stays. Curiosity, maybe.
Or some lingering protectiveness. Perhaps for the pure satisfaction of watching me struggle.
I have no idea how he has managed to fly with his wounds, but he vanishes once the sun begins to peek over the horizon.
His absence leaves a hollowness in my chest as vast as the magenta-tinted sky.
We’d left Vircann at midnight. By the angle of the sun when Falcos finally comes into view, I guess it’s nearing nine. I have nothing left. I crawl up the steps and through Falcos’ front doors.
Hundreds crowd the foyer as those left behind reunite with their families or weep at their absence.
My eyes lock on Brie, sitting alone at the apex of the branched staircase.
A pink nightgown bunches around her knees, and she clutches a teddy bear to her chest. Her small face is pinched with more worry than a child should ever have to bear.
She doesn’t notice me as I drag myself along the stones.
Her wide, brown eyes are glued to a corridor to my right, where footsteps now echo down the hall.
She leans forward, her knuckles turning white on the teddy.
I reach for her. Silently beg her to return to her bed and the sweet oblivion of her dreams. Dreams where Laney is alive and well and coming back for her. She jumps to her feet.
The Archon and her advisors file out of the corridor and disperse as they search for their families.
Brie darts down the stairs and trips over one of the floppy heads on her duck slippers.
Her small hand grips the railing to catch herself, and she pauses for long enough to scan the crowd.
Her eyes lock on Alexei and she flings off the slippers before darting down the last steps.
Alexei’s shoulders cave as he watches her run to him, his hands shaking at his sides.
She stares up into his face with pleading eyes and trembling lips.
Alexei kneels in front of her and speaks quiet words I can’t hear through the roaring in my ears.
Her face crumples and the scream that catapults out of her tiny chest shatters mine in a wholly new and terrible way.
She beats every part of him she can reach, her cries rebounding through the foyer and slamming into me from every direction.
“I hate you!” she screams. “You promised you’d both come back! You promised!” Her fists pelt his dirty leathers and he lets them, his head bowed and hands open on his knees. “You promised!” she wails, over and over again.
“I know,” he says through her cries. “I failed you. Both of you.”
Watching her is like throwing open a window to my own past, except I did this.
I made her world colder and lonelier and a place where light will have to fight to reach.
My body bows beneath the weight of her grief, and my palms strike the ground.
Each of her wild sobs carves a permanent scar into my soul as I pant, hunched and barely upright.
How much agony and guilt can one being endure before they are sundered beyond repair?
Alexei drags Brie into his arms. She clocks him in the face with a wildly flailing fist before the fight leaves her and she sags against his chest. He lifts her shaking body into his arms and carries her back up the stairs and into the passages beyond.
I can’t look away from her little duck slippers, left abandoned on the stairs. Her cries fade, but the roaring in my ears and the pressure in my chest grows and grows and grows until I think I might explode. I can’t breathe. I can’t—
“Lydia,” Griffon says softly.
My gaze darts up to his beautiful face. To those stunning eyes that have looked at me with both hatred and love but are just…dead, now. His face is a mask and I can’t bear it, whatever he is opening his mouth to say. Not again.
I stumble to my feet and shoulder through the crowd that stares at the spot where Brie and Alexei had disappeared.
Pity is carved into their faces—pity that I remember with a too-fine, crystal clarity.
I sprint past bare halls and empty corridors.
Unoccupied chambers and unused spaces. I burst into my room and slam the door shut behind me.
I stare at the phoenix on my wrist. A flash of Griffon’s awe-filled face fills my mind, but it is swept aside by his brutal judgment in that tent.
I try to imagine the ecstasy that grips his features when he comes undone for me but I can’t quite conjure the image.
My mind slips deeper into Stone, and the pain dulls a fraction.
I take in a full, deep breath. It sucks at me, the beast that lurks just beneath my control.
The beast that doesn’t feel. Just acts and reacts.
“No,” I grind out, every shred of my fraying resolve contained within that one word. I had demanded that Griffon fight and battle a current a thousand times stronger than this. How can I let myself give into it now?
I slam my eyes shut and imagine us in that greenhouse. His unguarded expression as he’d stared at me like I was the anchor that could keep him from drifting away. That kiss was the final battle. I surrender. You’ve disarmed me, and I don’t want to fight it anymore.
His words drag me back from the precipice I teeter on, and I slam my will into shifting. Into fighting like I’d demanded Griffon fight. Flesh finally finds me. And it tears me apart.
I hit the ground and screamed as my magic exploded out of me.
Every flammable thing in the room ignited and burned until I was hunched in the middle of a raging inferno.
I clutched at my skull in some futile effort to keep my mind whole, but there was nowhere to hide from the three deaths that tore it to ribbons.
Laney’s ripped open the festering, fifteen-year-old wound that had poisoned my mind and twisted my soul into something I couldn’t recognize.
Every shred of the guilt that had drowned me on Solstice came flooding back in and I choked on it.
Losing Griffon, too, shredded my heart so thoroughly it struggled to beat.
The third death hollowed out my chest. It left me empty.
Cold. Forgotten by gravity and tossed into an endless abyss.
I was a stray shadow without a body to cling to.
Without myself to cling to. This death was in the crackling of the flames and popping of the burning wood.
In the ashes that fluttered to the ground around me.
I sank to my side on the burning-hot stones and fought to hold some semblance of myself together.
But as I watched that person I’d thought I was burn, it didn’t matter, in the end.
Because the last death was mine.