Chapter Seventy-Eight
MERISSA
Merissa lay on the bench as the world swam by. She’d eaten…she didn’t even know how many green grapes, and she was beginning to sober up.
That mad swirl of ecstasy and delight was draining out of her by the second. Instead, they were replaced with those familiar, all too known feelings of shame.
She forced herself up, trying to focus on the way out of the crowded streets towards Piscea’s temple, and repressing the actions that were sure to haunt her for years.
It was only as she reached the end of Sagitton’s street—though, skies, she still didn’t know how exactly she’d ended up there—that someone in an angel costume bumped into her.
‘Excuse me,’ Merissa murmured.
‘Merissa?’ the person responded.
Merissa looked up, gawping.
‘Lias?’ she asked incredulously.
This was not a clumsy stranger in costume as she’d first thought, but her brother, angel wings as soft and real as on the first day she’d laid eyes on them. His green eyes, as bright as her own, were wide with worry as he took hold of her hand. ‘Thank the skies,’ he breathed. ‘Mer, I—’
She stepped away from him. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said in as scathing a voice as she could muster. Her relationship with her mother was tenuous at best, but with her brother? She would never forgive him for what he’d done to her in the past.
‘What are you doing here?’ she hissed.
‘I know about the Dark, what’s to happen tonight—that she’s trying to get in, the coup of the other Stars…Many of us walk the streets tonight.’
‘And?’ she demanded.
‘I had to descend. Because…’ He turned to Merissa imploringly. ‘Merissa, I felt something. In your love line. Something changed. I had to find you, to warn you—’
‘Save it,’ Merissa snapped. ‘Another taunt that I’m still cursed?’
‘Merissa, please listen to me.’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Don’t ever speak to me of love again.’ She turned away. ‘I have to go.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Lias said.
‘No, you won’t,’ she growled. She hated who she became around him, how her very demeanour, very tone, changed. How her brother brought out the worst in her. ‘Go back to the heavens, Lias, where you belong.’
Merissa had no guilt, no pity, as she left the angel standing in the centre of the chaos.