63. Callum
Callum
Hazel’s cry is not a scream. It’s a puncture in the night.
A bellow of grief and rage that ripples the wind like a current. She drops to her knees on the ground, black fingertips digging into the sand, and she unleashes the essence of her being.
Hazel has always been more powerful than her brother. But to learn that was only a piece—to feel the strike of her magic now that she is whole—stuns me silent. The rest of those on the beach roar in pain. My friends drop to their knees, calling on any drop of magic to shield them from her wrath.
But I take my first step forward.
Every footfall is harder than moving through the strongest tide.
Each push shoves me a half step back. But I keep moving.
One foot in front of the other, my magic pulsing against Hazel’s.
I don’t know why I can resist her shadows, especially when I wasn’t lucky enough to withstand my father’s, but I did it once, and I can only hope I can do it now.
Her magic thickens. Weaker Fae drop dead as she rips their magic from their bones. Shadows whisper, and I don’t know how much of this is her and how much is them. Or how much is the void, now bound inside her.
I take another step.
Another.
Fighting through the thick fog as the firelit shell around my friends begins to falter. Elorie is drained from taking down the palemor, and Wilder hasn’t summoned his magic since I last saw him running toward the village. They’re out of defenses.
Hazel’s dress billows out behind her. It glimmers without holding any light, dipping low at the front and revealing the extent of her magic climbing.
The dark veins, usually confined to her forearms, grow. They reach up to her shoulders, webbing across her chest and up her neck, climbing nearly to her temple. My body pushes past her wave of anger, and she looks up at me, eyes all black, apart from a few flecks of purple.
“Hazel, stop.” I drop to my knees and try to see the young Fae I met when the court was her father’s.
Before I reached a hand for her and she grew cold and disconnected. I try to see a hint of someone I remember as easily as I forget.
My gaze meets hers. Death stares back.
“Hazel.” My hands find her cold cheeks.
They’re so icy they burn my palms, but I don’t pull away. I let the chill of her burn through me, slowly trying to weave my magic around the ribbons of hers.
This isn’t like it was in the Ley Court when she was attacking Elorie, and my touch was able to stop her. This time, her magic fights back. It claws at the air-kissed wisps that try to contain them. It thrashes.
Inside her, the void pulses, but that is not what this is. This pain—this darkness—is all Hazel grieving, reaching for relief. She gasps for air as her chest heaves, and hot tears stream down her face, pooling in my hands where I cradle her jaw.
She blinks, and for a flicker, the black shell covering the whites of her eyes fades. “Malachi.”
That one name falls from her lips like the realm splitting open. It tears her apart as she shakes in my hands.
“He wasn’t Malachi anymore, you know that,” I say, and her magic thrashes, but I don’t give up.
“I remember him from before. You do too. Back when you wouldn’t leave the palace.
You wouldn’t venture any farther than the royal garden because you couldn’t control your magic.
So Malachi would make the best of it. Do you remember how he made the flowers bloom for you? ”
Hazel’s touch has only ever brought death to those around her. It was a reality that pained her, and Malachi understood it. So he’d bring her to the garden in winter and hold his palms over the hibernating flowers until they’d bloom.
A mirage of colors spread in the bitter cold.
The yellow ones were her favorite.
How did I forget that until now?
Where was this memory until this moment?
Hazel blinks, and more memories flood back. Shadows whisper in my ears, telling me secrets and stories.
I see Hazel’s smile against a rosy sunset.
I feel a brush of her fingers against my ear when she tucked my hair back.
I’m flooded with memories of her. Of things long forgotten, as if my mind is a series of rooms and these doors had been closed.
When did I close them?
Magic whips around us. Mine tries to find its way through hers, but the more they tangle, the more her shadows knock against this wall in my chest. Something rattles beyond it, pulling me in a hundred different directions.
A breeze catches in Hazel’s hair. It’s never done that before. The wind has never moved her. Black strands dance around her shoulders. She smells like plums and raspberries. Impossibly sweet, with a tinge of bitterness. I want to sink my teeth in. She smells so good that my mouth waters.
From the corner of my eye, Fae fall on the sand; no matter how hard Lochlan pushes back with his magic, it begins to falter. He’s an air wielder, which I assume is why he can defend against Hazel’s magic better than most, but it’s starting to crack. All around us, bodies fall.
My magic wraps around her arms of darkness. I link us together, pulling the threads of her in one by one as I stare into her eyes.
She’s an all-consuming night.
“It wasn’t the yellow flowers I liked,” she whispers, her magic slowly pooling as I weave a shell around us. “It was the vines that tied them to the trees. Inside the bark, the trees were already rotting. But those vines wrapped their death in beauty.”
Another tear slips down her cheek. This one as cold as her skin. As cold as her smile—as her eyes.
My magic finally seals around us, but it does not quiet her rage; it locks me in her cage of nightmares. The shadows scream, and I wonder if this is what they do in her mind. Whispering and cackling at each other. They crawl my skin, and I’m itching for something to relieve the unending pressure.
Visions flood my head.
And still, that single hand of darkness knocks against my chest.
“Remember. See it.”
But I don’t see anything through Hazel’s pitch-black grief except her, the opposite of light. The darkness in the sky. Sadness spills down her cheeks and into my hands, but there is no pulling back.
Remember.
Remember.
Her magic finds its way through every pore, pausing at a memory that won’t quite unlock. No matter how loud her shadows whisper in my ears, or how deep the claws of her shadows scratch, there is something they cannot reach.
“You need to stop, Hazel.” I brush my thumb over her cheek. “It’s done. You need to stop. Please.”
Grief swells in her gaze. It rages against my magic.
Her lip wobbles as she takes a breath, and her shadows start to wrap back inward.
They tunnel into her fingers, her body, her heart.
With every inhale, she pulls them together.
With every exhale, she calms them. But it does not loosen the weight in her eyes.
“There you go.” I keep my hands locked on her face, brushing my thumbs under her lashes and not letting her take her eyes off me. I’m carefully positioned between her and her brother’s body. “Breathe.”
She does.
Hazel takes a deep breath that twines through the wind like a key. It snags those scratching fingers of magic and pulls them back. A moment of relief releases everything.
The final lock unwinds as the beach quiets, and that door in my mind opens. A door that has been closed so long I forgot it existed.
With the fading whisper of Hazel’s magic in my head, I hear what falls from the depths of her heart. A truth she had hidden. A secret in the wind. The answer to everything raging inside me.