Chapter 37
Dread tore through me as we slid onto the scene, Celine at our sides in an instant.
“The hell happened?” Cillian asked, scanning the perimeter as he slammed the truck door behind him.
I hopped out behind him, rushing to Celine’s side.
“It happened about an hour ago,” Celine said. “I tried to call you, but you never answer your damn phone.”
A strange sensation came over me then, Celine and Cillian’s voices turned to mush as a more prominent, demanding sound took root in me. A melody, one which haunted me, sank into my lungs; water set to drown me. The Queen of Lore’s song.
“Bethesda,” I whispered, my feet taking control. I drifted through the chaos, slow, eyes locked on the bloodied sheet.
With each step, the lyrics grew louder, sharper.
From the hunger of forgotten Gods came the wrathful Ancient Lores, their bodies woven by humanity’s sins and rotten fleshy cores.
Woven of humanity’s sins, the Ancient Lores … she was singing about the Shroud.
One night they crept where children wept for their fallen fathers and mothers, and in this grief secured a thief the waking world had smothered.
They crept … as in, the Ancient Lores crept? Children wept … nightmares. They came in nightmares, but the thief—I choked on the metallic tang in the air.
A pact of blood and shattered heart befell one mourning mother, for on her daughter’s back the world would track through the open doors of slaughter.
My eyes traced across the lifeless hand hung below the sheet’s edge. Those nails, the polish … ruby red.
Oh God, no, no, no …
My tongue turned to lead, my knees almost giving out.
I dared those last few steps. Dropped my hand to that sheet without a single person trying to stop me.
A quick look back was all I needed to know why.
Cillian’s right hand twisted at his side, despite his continued heated conversation with Celine.
He’d cloaked me. The expression on his face said it all: for better or worse, this was my choice to make.
To look. To see what very well could never be unseen.
I grasped the sheet’s edge, felt the heat rise from the fresh blood.
So fight or flee the sleeping key and the beasts that claw and tear …
I peeled back the corner, heartbeat quickening enough I feared I might die right alongside whoever was underneath.
For they will not cease until their souls’ release, restoring their rightful heir.
One glance and the world went silent, a ringing building in my ear. Eyes vacant and body motionless, lay…
“Ro-Roxie?”
My knees buckled, sending me straight into the dirt.
No. No, this … this wasn’t right! This couldn’t be happening!
There would be no breathing through this; no coping method known to man which could slow the terror pelting through my bloodstream.
I heaved for air, sucked in mouthful after mouthful, though my lungs still labored.
What the actual fuck? It … it must be a trick.
A delusion, a nightmare! It had to be! But tears thrashed down my cheeks, salty and poisonous against my lips, reminding me I was awake.
This was real, and—I screamed until my throat was raw.
Then another. Cillian appeared at my side in a heartbeat, slid an arm beneath mine, and pulled my rag doll body to its feet.
My eyes locked on the lifeless face before me, her beautiful chestnut hair crusted in dried bits of blood.
“Wake up,” I whispered at first. But soon it grew, became a demand. “Wake up, please! You have to wake up—”
“Hey, hey,” Cillian cooed, and pulled me into his arms. “I’m right here, it’s going to be okay—”
“No, it’s not,” I screamed, and thrashed from his arms. A strange sensation began to build within me, like a thick oozing in my bones.
It spread into the pit of my stomach, growing and sliding up my arms. The light beneath my skin skittered into my toes, fleeing at the feeling’s approach.
Before I knew what was happening, my hands had grasped her head, lifting it, prying her to sit, to move, to do anything but lay there, and mist settled over her face, heavy and invasive.
“Get up,” I screamed. “Wake up, damn it!”
“Fey,” Celine called, reaching for me.
I reeled to face her; finger pointed. “Don’t touch me!”
It was then I saw the shadows encasing my fingertips, stuck to me like a second layer of skin.
I shook at it, but the darkness only spread.
Up and up to my elbows, clawing its way toward my face in thick tendrils.
Panic gripped me as the shadows siphoned into my nose, choking and burning.
Cillian wrapped me in his arms, whipping a ball of wind around my face, but it did little to slow the leeching fog.
An EMT in the distance yelled something about “Get that girl outta here,” and I turned around, hell-bent on latching onto the gurney and never letting go. Then my eyes settled on the worst of it.
The branded eye on her right forearm.
“Fuck!” I wept and wretched into the gravel, Cillian holding my hair back as I heaved and heaved. This was my fault. I had done this. I had killed her.
Fuck, I killed my best friend!
“Honey, I know it’s hard,” Celine said, her voice echoing throughout Fhírinne. “But you have to take a breath and relax. If you don’t, the water will keep—”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” I heaved, rocking back and forth, arms cemented around my knees. Water poured from the ceiling, newly formed clouds of elemental creation weeping alongside me.
You killed her. You killed her! My brain repeated over and over and over.
Bethesda had warned me there’d be consequences if I didn’t return the bloodstone, and I—I should have listened.
Now my best friend was dead; “jumped out the second-story window in her sleep,” I’d heard an EMT say as they hauled me up the stairs and away from the cold, lifeless body under the sheet. How could I have let this happen?
My sobs intensified; the clouds butted up to the solarium windows mirroring me in a burst of torrential downpour.
Winds whipped up against the windows from the outside.
Since the second I’d passed through those front doors—after that haunting image had burnt itself in my brain for eternity—my magic had gone haywire.
It’d all but exploded. Thank God the institute had been put under lockdown, everybody safely tucked into their rooms under Rudy’s watchful eye.
I can’t imagine what kind of damage I might have done if somebody had been in the foyer when that first lightning bolt touched down.
Seared right through the grand staircase railing like hot metal through butter.
Cillian edged closer, slushing through the two-foot-high water around us.
“Fey,” he murmured in my ear. “I’m here, all right? Just … let me hold you?”
“It’s all my fault,” I sobbed, eyes swollen. “I killed her! Me!”
“This is not your fault,” Cillian said, firmly. “This is what Bethesda does, she ruins people. What happened to Roxie was a horrific tragedy that never should have happened. But it was not your fault!”
I rocked in place. It was. It was my fault, and I knew it.
If I’d listened like Bethesda had ordered, given her the damn stone, then Roxie would still be upstairs having a girl’s night with Sam, not on her way to the fucking morgue.
My lungs hiccupped. “Sam … I want to see Sam! She probably saw everything and—shit!”
Celine nodded and settled on bended knee in the churning waters.
“Absolutely. But first,” she said and wiped my tears. “We have to get your magic under control, okay? For both your safety and hers.”
My head fell back in defeat, tears rolling down my throat. How? With all this rage and pain inside me, how was I supposed to calm down?
Celine set her hand on my knee, and her peace blanketed around me.
I willed it into my bloodstream, allowed it to appease the light magic overshadowed by the feral elements inside me.
But, as hard as she tried, as much as I watched her strain to realign my affinities, a war of the soul was already well underway.
I could sense it. Feel it burrow deeper in my bones.
She snapped her eyes open, looked to Cillian, and then back to me. The concern on her face only served to rile me further, even Fhírinne’s usual effect falling flat. “Fey … you have to calm down.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, it’s—”
“Stop lying to me,” I screamed, another lightning crack flashing overhead, shaking the solarium windows. “Why?”
She stood, looked down over me in a maternal way I’d not seen since I was a child.
“Your affinities are clashing. Emotion is a physical reaction, it happens, but your Elemental affinity is still too new. Too raw. It’s taken precedence over your Tinctured affinity.
If you don’t gain control now, you … you risk losing your Tinctured magic entirely. ”
Another trap set by Bethesda. She had to have known I’d react this way! That my magics would aim to devour one another. Of course, she’d go after the warm magic that had saved me from her wickedness more than once. The soul-sucking, light-smothering bitch!
The open air rattled with another crack of thunder.
No! I would not let her take another thing from me. She’d taken my rest, my peace of mind, my sanity, and now? Now she’d taken someone I loved. Not again.
Never again.
I pushed from Cillian’s arms, wiped my face with my sleeve, and slushed through the waters to look up at Celine. Close enough so she could feel my sincerity. “Tell me how to stop it.”
“It won’t be easy,” she said. “But we can do this. Together.”
Her hand extended to mine, and I took it. The elements inside me reared on contact as if they knew what we were about to attempt. They didn’t want to be stilled. They wanted vengeance. Justice. Revenge!
“In order for this to work, I need to access my full strength,” Celine continued. “That means I … I have to take true form.”
I searched her face. “True form?”
“I’ll explain, I promise. But for now, I need you to trust me, okay? Don’t be afraid.”