Chapter 4 - Aurela
When I wake up, I’m choking. I blink against the stinging in my eyes.
Directly above me, through the hazy air, I can just barely make out the twinkling of the stars. But the sky is quickly being concealed by the thick, blanketing smoke that hovers in the atmosphere.
“This is what I’ve been waiting for.”
It’s a voice I recognize, floating around me, twinkling and amused. When I close my eyes, I see her. Tara. My best friend from high school. The girl who made me feel like I could be something other than the image I projected.
My back throbs with pain, and when I spread my hands out on the grass to push myself to sitting, the soil is hot to the touch. This time, when I open my eyes again, I’m able to sit up, but everything in my body hurts.
I’m out in the middle of the forest—I realize it when I look around and see tree trunks, then higher to find the leaves themselves ablaze, alive with the hypnotic dancing of blue flames.
Daemon fire. Hotter than a house fire or regular wildfires. The blaze that consumed nearly half the town back in high school, and continues to return, year after year, swallowing the forest up and leaving no time or space for something new to grow in its place.
At first, I think that I’m just imagining Tara, like I have been for so many years. But when I swing my gaze around, I see her.
I thought she was dead.
But she stands next to one of the trees, leaning against it casually, wearing a pair of tight dark-wash jeans and a cropped leather jacket, showing off her lean stomach. Her hair is just like I remember it—choppy and blue. The coolest thing I’d ever seen when I was a teenager.
Back then, I would have given anything to try a fun color on my hair. But my mom thought that was tacky.
“Why don’t you want to try some highlights or lowlights?” Mom had said. “What about layers? There are a million things you can do to make your hair look more exciting before you go for something tacky like that.”
I’d walk up and down the aisles at the store, running the sample hair between my fingers, wondering what it might be like to make my hair green or orange. If a drastic move like a hair change would keep me from fading into the background.
In high school, I was so skinny that sometimes I felt I could back up against the wall and nobody would even know I was there. Thin as paper.
“Hey, Aury,” Tara says now, swinging her leg out and walking toward me.
The entire scene makes my brain buzz, flashing between whatever is happening now—some sort of bad dream?—and what happened back then. The person I was back then, when I knew Tara.
“I can’t believe it took me so long to draw you out here.”
“Draw me out here,” I repeat somewhat numbly, staring at her because I don’t know what else to say, and also because my body feels strange. Almost like I’ve been drugged.
But I didn’t drink anything at dinner with my family. My mom had commented on it cheekily, and Valerie’s eyes had met mine over the table, a look of worry and surprise in them.
Later that evening, in the bathroom, Valerie stepped up next to me as we washed our hands, her eyes flitting over to mine in the mirror. “Caspian doesn’t really seem like he’s your type, Aur.”
My throat went dry at the sound of that old nickname for me. We were friends, once. But I’ve worked so hard to avoid her in the past few years she and Lachlan have been together that any moment alone with her feels strange. Vulnerable.
I stared in the mirror, swallowing, trying to handle the emotions rising up in my throat, until apparently I took so long to answer that Valerie decided to backpedal, shaking her head and running her fingers through her black-green hair.
“Sorry,” she said, shaking water droplets from the tips of her fingers and moving to the paper towels. “I know it’s none of my business.”
Now, in the woods, I shake my head a bit, trying to clear away the strange buzzing that’s making it hard to think. Everything is hazy from the smoke, but it casts a dream-like quality over the night. Like I’m sleepwalking.
“That’s right,” Tara coos soothingly.
I stay seated in the grass, realizing that even though the smoke is growing thicker, and it’s getting harder to breathe, the ground below me is actually cool and dry. Pleasant to sit on. My hands are still planted on the grass, fingers digging into the dirt.
“I thought you were dead,” I rasp, clearing my throat even though it doesn’t help.
The fire rages on behind Tara as she comes to stand in front of me, looking down at me with the same almost-pitying look I remember from high school.
And the other thing I remember—her going up in that brilliant teardrop of blue light and heat—doesn’t make sense with what I’m looking at now.
“Well,” she says, frowning a little playfully, tilting her head in a pitying way. “I thought you were better than this.”
“Better than what?”
She kneels down, frowning at me. “I mean, I dig that you’re finally taking up more space, but you’re still right under your mom’s thumb, aren’t you? Just like in high school. Even after everything that happened, you’re still invisible.”
A burst of emotion as bright and volatile as a sun flare flashes through me, and Tara lets out a surprised laugh, tipping her head back, shimmying her shoulders as if she felt it, too.
“Oh, I forgot how good that could feel,” she purrs, opening her eyes and finding mine again. “What else is there? I’m guessing you didn’t get the guy, huh?”
My chest squeezes. The guy.
Soren.
The guy I’ve been doing everything in my power not to think about. Just another person who didn’t want me in high school, and who would definitely not want me now. Not with the way my body has changed, morphing into something I no longer recognize.
All I want is to feel good. To not care what other people think. But it feels impossible.
“That’s right,” Tara says softly, and even though the world around me is on fire, I almost feel lulled to sleep, energy seeping right out of my pores. I lay back in the grass, and after a second, I sense Tara lying right down beside me. “Just relax, Aury.”
“I thought you were dead,” I murmur again, and when I close my eyes, the image of her going up in those blue flames is right there, as if I were watching it on TV.
That was the first time the two of us had ever fought. And it was all my fault.
“I thought you wanted to ruin prom?” Tara had snapped at me that day on the ridge, the wind whipping through her blue hair and turning it to a violent, frizzy halo around her head. “This will ruin prom!”
“This will ruin the whole town!” I’d cried back, reaching out to grab her shoulder and stop her from walking away from me.
The strangest thing happened when I did. I felt a sharp tug right in the center of my chest, almost like I was grabbing an electric fence.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed, turning around, her voice dropping an octave when she got to “me.”
“Tara,” I said, my voice dropping to that whisper-soft tone. Chastened, invisible. The voice I used with my parents, my brother. Teachers at school. It only reinforced the idea that I was barely there. Tiny, skinny, and so, so hard to hear.
“We had an agreement,” Tara said, and her heels were close enough to the edge of the ridge that it made my heart beat inside out, flipping again and again. “We agreed that we were going to do this!”
After Soren cut off contact with me, saying he wasn’t interested anymore and warning me not to get in touch with him, I’d fallen apart.
Tara and I had agreed that we’d had enough of the stupid school, enough of the people pushing us down.
Enough of people acting like we were freaks just because we were better than them, with our ability to use and manipulate magic.
But I never wanted what was happening right now. I didn’t want Maeve crying, the other girls on their hands and knees, unable to get close to Tara and me. I didn’t want to fight with my best friend. I didn’t want to start a fire that engulfed the entire town.
Tara had always been bolder than I, and in some ways, I felt like I should have known better than to expect her to go for something mild, like lacing the punch at prom with laxatives.
“You’re taking something from me,” I say to her now, closing my eyes and letting my head sink back into my pillow.
I can feel it, almost like Tara is some sort of long-distance vampire, slowly drawing a life force right from the center of my body.
It feels like the fire around us is burning even hotter.
“Yeah,” Tara whispers, and when I turn and look at her, my eyes stinging from the smoke, I see her eyes are closed, and she’s wearing the most serene expression of contentment and pleasure. “Don’t you remember?” she asks. “Like from school?”
I don’t. But it doesn’t matter, because the tugging, slow, unraveling sensation actually feels kind of good.
If my future is just Caspian, just a wedding and passionless sex with a man I don’t care about—if my future is just wishing I had someone else for the rest of my life—maybe it would be better to let Tara take what she wants. Maybe it would be better to let her bleed me dry.
“You can have it,” I murmur, turning on my side.
When Tara takes my hand, hers is white-hot, burning to the touch, but I hold onto it, thinking about all the times she comforted me through high school.
“I’m done fighting, Tar,” I say. “You can take whatever you want from me.”
She says something like, “I know,” but I barely hear it, because there’s another sound drifting through the trees.
Almost like Soren’s voice, calling my name.
I know it’s not real, and so I close my eyes, letting that one last thought carry me through this thing. Letting his voice be the last thing I hear before I slip into the dark, empty void Tara is preparing for me.