Chapter 39
MORRIGAN
Looking around, I searched for something to tie around the handles.
A leather belt had been conveniently lying beside my dresser. I used my foot to drag it toward the door before wrapping it tight enough to prevent him, or anyone else for that matter, from coming inside.
“Are you ready to listen, Morrigan?” he asked from somewhere behind me.
Turning slowly, I found him standing at the center of my room, face covered with his mask. I nodded, pressing my back against the door vibrating from Eris’s pounding.
“Okay…” My voice shook with uncertainty. “I’ll listen.”
Moving his hands behind his back, he straightened his spine and took a couple of steps forward. “That diary of yours,” he said quietly, “do you know who wrote it?”
I swallowed nervously, remaining close to the door. “I have my suspicions.”
He chuckled as he looked down at his feet, continuing to move closer to me. “I think my mother would have liked you.”
My mouth instantly fell open. He couldn’t have meant… He couldn’t be… “You’re the baby…”
“I am.”
“Then… you are real.” The realization felt like someone had knocked me in the head with a brick.
The back of my eyes pulsed with a headache as I tried to wrap my brain around this.
He was their son… He was a… a god. “I don’t understand.
The gods all ascended together. Why are you here?
Where are you, and why do I keep seeing you… hearing you?”
He laughed again, and I didn’t like the butterflies that awoke in my stomach at the sound of it. When he finally reached me, he lifted a finger to my hair and moved a stray curl back behind my ear. “I couldn’t ascend even if I wanted to.”
“Why?”
His lips pressed together, forming a tight line right before he answered, “Because I’m not… whole.”
Not whole? What was that supposed to mean?
“It means that part of what makes me a god is missing.”
“Well, where is it?” I asked, though the words felt almost ignorant as they left my lips.
His fingers slid down my cheek, tracing a slow line that left a tingling sensation in their wake.
His hand stopped as it reached my chest, and I sucked in a deep breath, unsure of why the butterflies had now morphed into a raging storm.
Above my heart, he tapped his fingers a few times, and I knitted my brows in confusion.
“I don’t understand.”
“You have it, Morrigan.”
Before I could form a response, dark shadows seeped from his neck, pouring out of his shirt.
I jumped as I felt a small tickle on my skin and looked down to see the thick, black mist crawling over my chest. His other hand moved toward the door, and I felt a strange pulse in my body as his shadows spread over it.
Suddenly, small, black veins began to form along my skin beneath his fingers, darkening until the area was completely black. And then… it changed.
“What’s happening?” I asked, my breath catching in my chest as I began to panic.
“It’s okay,” he whispered.
The darkness began to lighten, turning into an orange hue that somehow shone brighter than the sun. As quickly as it appeared, it sank back into my skin, and I leaned back against the door.
“Morrigan!” Eris yelled. “Let me in! Now!”
“What was that?” I asked him. I touched my chest where his finger had been, but felt nothing. That was, until my entire body began to buzz with an uncomfortable itch, and my panic returned. “What did you do to me?!”
“Morrigan, calm down.” He placed his hands on my arms, holding them with his cold touch.
But I shoved them off and moved away from the door, distancing us as the itch turned into a burning sensation. “What did you do?!”
“If you start freaking out, you’re going to cause a surge, Morrigan.” His voice was so calm. How was he so calm?
I ran my hands through my hair, feeling the need to touch something… do something—anything. My confusion began melting into a rage that hadn’t been there before. “Why… Why am I feeling this?” I scratched at my arms, trying to make it go away.
“Fire,” he whispered. “I thought it would be more like mine. I didn’t realize you would have something different—”
“What do you mean?!” My body twitched with fury, and I needed somewhere to direct it.
My eyes landed on the porcelain tea cup sitting on my vanity, and I picked it up, turning back toward him.
“Tell me what you did!” I threw it at him, but the cup passed through his body as if he, too, was made out of mist.
“I didn’t do anything, Morrigan, I swear. I just unlocked the light inside—”
A scream erupted from my lips as the scratches began to burn. It felt like someone had lit a fire in my chest that spread through my veins, boiling every ounce of blood in my body. “It hurts!”
I scrambled toward my vanity, grabbing the mirror, but as I pushed down on it, the mirror slid beneath my palms. I landed against the wood and, in a fit of anger, grabbed the mirror and threw it to the ground.
The sound of shattering glass echoed in my mind like a hollow cave, growing louder as the seconds passed.
“Just breathe, Morrigan,” he insisted. “I promise I will help you through this. I just need you to breathe.”
I grabbed onto the wall, trying to keep myself upright as my knees threatened to give out. But, when I looked at the placement of my hand, smoke started to rise, and the paint looked like it was… melting.
“It won’t stop,” I panted, unable to catch my own breath. “Why… Why is this…”
“Morrigan, you’re starting to shut me out,” he said with panic in his voice. “The surge… I can’t control the link between us anymore.”
As the pain worsened, I fell to my knees and screamed through the sensation of my skin tearing apart. All I could see were my veins glowing as if they were on fire under my skin.
“Morrigan,” he whispered, kneeling down beside me. “Keep me here. Find the link between us.”
I tried to look for it—that tether that bound us every time I heard his voice—but the pain was too great. I looked up to see smoke rising to the ceiling. “The room… It’s… on fire…” I coughed as I inhaled some of it.
“You need to get to the door. I can lift the ward I placed through you, but only if you’re touching it.”
I searched for the door, needing to hurry and open it so I could get out, but I noticed that fire had caught on the wood of the mirror, blocking the exit. The only other room was the bathing room. So, I turned and crawled toward it as more smoke filled my lungs.
“I can’t lift the ward without you, Morrigan! I need you to go to the door!”
“I… I can’t…” As I made it into the bathing room, I collapsed onto the cold marble, and when I looked up, I saw him hovering over me. “My… fault…”
“Shhh,” he muttered, resting his cold hands on my face. “Come on, Morrigan. I need you, please!”
My coughs grew more painful, and my lungs were on fire as well. Slowly, the light that lit my veins began to dim, but just as well, my blinking slowed.
“No! Morrigan, listen to me!”
“Morrigan!” Eris’s voice screamed from the hall. It was muffled beneath the sound of crackling fire. Fire that I had somehow started…
“My f-fault… Why… Why is e-everything always… my fault?” I grasped onto his arms, hyperventilating as my lungs struggled to breathe in clean air. “I can’t… I can’t breathe… I can’t—”
“Shit,” he whispered under his breath. As my head lolled back onto the floor, he leaned over me and placed his hands against my temples.
“It’s going to be okay, Morrigan. He’s here.
He’ll be able to get past the wards. This was too soon.
I’m sorry. I… fuck… I have to do this, okay? Please don’t hate me.”
Suddenly, a large burst of light flashed over my eyes, and pain seeped into my head like I had been slammed against a wall. It was as though someone had reached into my brain and squeezed it, making everything around me fuzzy until my eyes closed and the room disappeared.