Chapter 57
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
DAKOTA
Two Weeks After
I curled up on my side, the wind sweeping up off the ocean and over my body.
My shoulders shook with exhausted sobs and my eyes stung with tears that never stopped coming.
I gasped for air, choking on it, my skull aching like it was being crushed by something bigger than me.
So much bigger than me I couldn’t even comprehend it.
I was too weak to move. All my muscles were limp, my body slumped on the cold ground while I cried, feeling every ounce of strength drain away, feeling him.
Mason, above the ocean, shattering into a thousand pieces.
He couldn’t control it, and so we were here.
Me, laying on the cliff. Him, carving lightning into the cloud-covered sky.
I gritted my teeth, fingers twisting in clumps of grass, my mind screaming as I tried to hold him together, screaming for help.
Mason was too strong, drowning in his darkness, yanking me down with him.
A cinder block chained to my ankle in the middle of the coldest ocean.
Lightning bolted across the sky and I squeezed my eyes shut, cheek pressed to the dirt.
He couldn’t stop it, and neither could I.
The breaking, the splintering, the fracturing.
And now it was my job to help keep him together. I was the Sigeian meant to save him, despite the fact that I’d never be strong enough.
I’d dug into his mind on the first day I came back, on the day I learned about Micah’s death, and he hated me then. He didn’t hate me now because he didn’t get a fucking choice. I would not let him hide from me anymore.
My chest convulsed on a sob, like the cry was being ripped out of me, ripped from my fucking soul. I dug my fingernails into the ground, Mason’s agony suffocating me, his instability tearing me apart.
I understood now.
Understood why he couldn’t show me this, even when I’d begged him.
Because I couldn’t survive him. He’d known that long before I did.
Fractures—real fractures—were terrifying in a way I’d never known.
The magnitude of his power was far too vast for me to comprehend before now, before I could actually feel it tearing his mind apart.
He was going to kill me, and I’d entirely resigned myself to that fate now.
I couldn’t control him, couldn’t be his anchor in the storm. The storm was too fucking strong.
I need you, Micah.
Fresh tears poured down my cheeks.
I flattened my hands to the ground as if I could still feel him here.
As if he was rooted in this soil. His blood, his ichor, his sweat and tears and breath.
His weight anchoring me to the cliff all those weeks ago, holding me so close to death but never letting me go.
My head tipped back over the edge and my chest full of exhilaration, my hair tangling in the wind.
A predator, protecting his prey. Shielding me from everything else, protecting me to his death.
I remembered his words on another day, whispered into cold air in the forest after he caught me, pinned me down. Tears on my face and pain in my heart and emptiness in my womb.
I love you more than my own life.
He’d meant it.
I couldn’t cope with that.
I wished he hadn’t done it. Between me and him, his life was so much more important. He contributed to the world. He made it better. He impacted people. Me, I did nothing except exist silently, all alone in my dark corner, never daring to reach out, never parting my lips to speak.
I am no one. I am nothing.
I have always been nothing. Crushed up small and meaningless, buried under the weight of my endless shame.
My mind was breaking into pieces, already torn apart by my grief and now Mason.
I was never going to survive this.
There was no version of this where Mason and I made it through together.
I would cling to him with white knuckles until I bled, until I couldn’t breathe through my tears, until the rest of my mind was gone, but it would never be enough.
Immortality wasn’t survivable like this.
My fingers dug into the dirt on the cliff, all the threads I’d tied around Mason’s soul stretched to the brink of snapping, ready to break apart and let him shatter irreversibly.
We barely spoke to each other anymore, but he’d told me before that a fracture was quick—or that was how it’d seemed to him.
Micah could take it from him, and then it was over.
It didn’t keep regenerating, the same way anger or sadness did.
It was a spike of massive instability, and if you stopped it, there was no aftermath.
The problem was that Mason was no longer capable of single fractures.
He had no desire to stop himself. He couldn’t. The weight of his grief had eroded his control into nothing, and all of the weight rested on my shoulders alone.
As soon as I burned through one, a new one was there to replace it. For hours, this happened. I couldn’t even stand up when it happened. All I could do was lay on the ground, clinging to the solidness of the rocks, crying and gritting my teeth and trying to keep him from falling into the void.
I wouldn’t survive many more days like today.
My stomach lurched with nausea, and I rolled to the side, spitting acid into the dirt.
What I hadn’t known before becoming Sigeian myself was every emotion I took had weight. A weight I was transferring onto myself.
Micah carried the weight so well I never would’ve known. But everything I took from Mason, all the pain and anguish and instability, I felt in myself. A relentless heaviness I’d never have words to fully explain, a lingering darkness in the back of my mind, a weight like wearing wet clothes.
Every tear Micah had dried, every panic spiral he’d pulled me out of, every drop of sadness he’d taken from me; he’d been pouring all of it into himself alone. Carrying so much weight just so the people he loved wouldn’t have to.
I pushed further back on the cliff, head hanging off the edge, my stomach tightening with the shift in my balance. Micah wasn’t here to keep me from falling now. His body couldn’t hold me to the Earth anymore.
Wind ripped over me, tangling my hair, burying itself in my tired lungs.
The sky flashed with lightning, bright and fast, electric bolts shooting through the clouds. Any human who could see it would assume this was a thunderstorm. Only I knew it was an angel.
This was what it looked like to be Thrausian. This was why they all died.
Not because a moment could make them snap, not because they wanted to feel the rush of power on a whim, but because they couldn’t stop what was in their nature. Their destiny. It didn’t happen in an instant. It built on itself, growing larger and darker until it swallowed everything.
One fracture on his own was survivable. Two fractures were more difficult. Beyond that point, it was so easy to fracture, so easy to be pulled below the surface it was a miracle anyone ever made it out.
Unless there was a Sigeian to take the instability away.
That was me.
But I wasn’t lasting. I couldn’t last.
I wasn’t as strong as Micah.
I swore I could hear him screaming.
Raw sounds of agony. A voice being shredded.
I pushed back farther, feeling my balance shift on the edge of the cliff, bits of dirt crumbling away on either side of me.
Then I rolled over, tumbling right off the edge, wind ripping around my numb body. I swore my heart wasn’t beating at all anymore. It hadn’t, since the day he died. I stared at the rocks at the base of the cliff as they approached.
Micah couldn’t hold me and Mason couldn’t catch me.
Nobody was coming to save me now.
I had to save myself.
I contemplated not doing anything. Contemplated letting my body smash into the rocks, my bones shattering, my blood spilling, pain ripping through my veins but never killing me. Crimson on onyx, gold threaded through it all.
But I didn’t.
I gritted my teeth with the feeling of my wings tearing out of my back, sweeping me away from the ground, out over the ocean.
As I kept low to the waves, saltwater mist stung my cold cheeks, my black feathers rippling sharply on the cold wind.
I flapped my wings, soaring over the ocean, low and fast, warm tears dripping off my cheeks and into the frigid water, salt meeting salt.
I wished that Micah had fucked me up more, that he’d carved himself into my brain, shaped me into whatever he’d wanted, trapped me in a labyrinth I could never find my way out of because then at least I’d have some part of him left to hold onto.
All I had now were the wings coming out of my back.
And I didn’t fucking want them.