Chapter 90 Taera
Taera
Omi lays crumpled on the ground. They’re silent, their eyes slipping closed. I can’t look, I can’t look away. I’m frozen—suspended between fear and instinct—wanting to go to them. Because even if Omi lied to me, I still care for them.
But blood glass crackles and snaps around my feet, and as I stare at Omi’s broken form—their head tilted to the side, eyes closed, red glass creeping up around them to steal their magic—I know I’ll only make things worse.
Nikolai is already kneeling beside them, careful not to touch the blood glass. He raises a hand, and walls of light fly up, creating a curtain of privacy between us and the onlookers.
Guilt spears me, catching in my stomach like barbed wire. But I can’t help Omi now; I’ll only hurt them more, with the jagged edges crackling around me. I’ll hurt everyone.
“Is Omi—” My throat collapses around the words.
“They’re drained.” Nikolai’s face is chalk white.
I let out a strangled sob and stagger back a step. “Why aren’t they waking up?”
“They won’t regain consciousness inside the Halls.”
“No. No.” I shake my head. “They can have my magic, I don’t need it.”
“Taera,” Nikolai says slowly, “there’s nothing you can do.”
“They—” I gasp, clutching at my wrist until I’m holding up the walnut-shaped clasp Omi gave me before the ball. “They gave me this.”
Nikolai looks at it, and his gaze darkens with grief. “A small relic. Something to soothe pain.”
My heart feels like it’s being pulped. Omi gave me a relic.
For Gramps. A way to soothe his pain. I clap my hand over my mouth; my sobs threaten to consume me.
The pain, the despair, the guilt and unfairness—I’m drowning in it.
Omi’s magic is gone because of me. I can’t even say goodbye to them.
The blood glass reacts to the storm inside me, roaring across the floor around me like a living wave.
I lurch backward. I have to get out of here. I have to get out of the Halls, or I’m going to hurt the magician I love—who betrayed me.
Staggering back, I turn and flee.
My beautiful gown, woven from lies, drops away. But there’s no one left to see. I cover myself with my hands, and run, naked, blinded by tears.
Blood glass snaps at my heels as I take the twists and turns that are supposed to lead me out of here. The hallway doesn’t widen. It bends. Warps. Loops. The corridor grows sickeningly familiar.
An obsidian door comes into view. Of course it does. The Halls have a morbid sense of humor.
I scrub my mind clean, trying to imagine the desert, my freedom from the deception and pain and hurt that I’ve suffered as well as inflicted. I quash every memory of the liar who I asked for my first kiss, and ignore the door to his chambers.
I dash past, continuing down the hall. I’m just out of sight of it—and the blood glass following me—when the same cursed door appears again.
I don’t even look at it, clenching my fists, and pass it again.
But my agitation is growing, my reckless rage.
And the blood-red crystals crackle gleefully behind me as they zig-zag closer.
When the door appears for the third time, tears overcome my vision.
This is too much. Everything is too much.
I hate this place, and I hate the magicians in it.
I hover outside as blood glass coats the walls and floors around me, snapping and vicious.
I deserve to succumb to those jagged crystals after what I did to Omi.
I should be the one to hurt, to have my magic torn from my body.
Instead, with the crimson crystals at my heels, I grit my teeth and shove open the door to Nikolai’s chambers.