Chapter 23 #2
—and then something switches on.
A hum starts at the base of my skull, low and electric, a thing waking that was always there, injected in, sleeping, waiting.
It spreads—a fine buzzing down my spine and out along every nerve, like a current somebody just sent through me—and the back of my mouth floods with a taste I'd know anywhere, blind, dead, a hundred years from now: flat and metallic and clinical, the taste of a white room and a paper cup and a hand strapping my wrist to a rail.
My body knows it before my mind can catch up. My body has twelve years of mornings that started exactly like this.
The fail-safe. The leash.
And my magic feels it coming. The hum, the wrongness, the leash powering up inside me—and instead of shrinking from it, it bucks.
Surges higher. Claws harder. Twelve years of the thing throwing itself at my walls, and now it can feel the box swinging shut again, and it would sooner take the whole hall down than go back inside—so it climbs, faster, hotter, the second wave doubling on itself, racing the device to see which of them reaches me first.
No. Not this. Not this, anything but this. I'm not going back, you can't put me back—
I search around the room and finally, I find him.
Aamon.
Across the hall, where he's always been, one hand out toward me and the other—the other holding the small dark device, his thumb still pressed to it, the device the council put in my body and the key in his.
The same hands.
The exact same hands that held my face last night in the gold of his lair, that wound into my hair, that I let myself believe were safe.
Those hands. About to put me down like an animal.
His face is the last thing I see. Not composed. Not for once. Cracked all the way open, every door blown off its hinges, something in his expression so wrecked and so wrong that if I had one more second I might almost—
I don't get the second.
The fail-safe wins.
It fires.
The world goes white—pain, pure and electric, every nerve I have lit at once. My knees buckle and I go down hard onto the stone, and the tears come in the same instant, already streaming, faster than I can feel them start.
I'm on fire. All of me, scalp to heels, burning from the inside out on a current there's no fighting and no outrunning.
I can't breathe. There's no air left in the world, no room in me to hold it—nothing but the leash and the burning and a scream I can't tell is tearing out of my mouth or only ringing in my skull.
And it takes me under.
–
–
–
I come back in pieces.
Pain first. My whole body one long bruise, my ears ringing a high thin note, the taste of copper and ash in my mouth. Everything is slow motion. Each blink, each painful inhale.
Then light—wrong light, low and flickering, the witchfire guttering in whatever candelabra are left. Then the smell: smoke, and crushed marigold, and under it something scorched.
Then sound. Someone is screaming, far off and steady. Glass crunches under shoes. A voice keeps saying don't move her, don't move her. And over all of it, the silence in my own head—vast and total and new, the place behind my sternum scraped down to nothing, no warmth, no presence, no voice.
Just a hole the exact shape of him.
I'm on the floor. The fail-safe still has me pinned with the last of it’s charge, that low electric hum lodged in my spine and weighing down every limb; I can barely lift my head.
But I try.
And I see.
The hall is wrecked—the front rows thrown back, the windows gone, glass and marigolds and spilled wine across the stone, two hundred immortals pressed to the walls and staring. Staring at me.
Leopold stands frozen at the edge of the dais, the file fallen open at his feet.
The man who built all of this—who laid every petal and lit every candle and read every word of that file on purpose—has come apart too.
Grey. Stricken. His three-tap hand hangs useless at his side, and he's staring at the ash in front of me like he's forgotten how to move.
Kage is closer, halfway across the room, stopped mid-stride where he must have been trying to reach me, storm-blue eyes fixed on me with something that isn't fear and isn't hunger and has no business being as gentle as it is.
Nellie is on her knees a few feet away, both hands over her mouth, and she's the one screaming, I realize. She's screaming my name.
And at my feet, where the stone is scorched black in a perfect ring, is what's left of Emric.
Ash. A soft grey drift of it, stirring in the moving air, already starting to scatter—because that's all my power leaves, in the end.
It doesn't wound. It doesn't break. It unmakes, and it unmade him so completely that there is nothing here to hold, nothing to kneel over, no eyes to close, no body to cover with mine.
There's no boy who looks like he could sit up and grin and say he forgives me. There's a burn mark, and a little grey hill of ash, and the hem of my dress going filthy where he came to rest.
But his face—
I have his face. The fire couldn't take that.
I have the last half-second of it seared into me forever: open, certain, kind, reaching for me as the light swallowed him, not one flicker of fear anywhere in it.
He knew. Some part of him knew what stepping in would cost, and he came anyway, because that was the whole shape of him—he stepped in when no one else would, one last time, for me.
And I burned him alive.
I… I fucking burned him alive.
I reach—uselessly, the fail-safe pinning me, my hand shaking across the cold stone toward the little heap of ash that an hour ago was a boy who taught me to dance—and somewhere above me a shape moves, and I don't have to look to know it's Aamon, kneeling, the device still in his fist, close enough to touch and a thousand miles away.
He says my name. Once. Low and ruined.
I drag my hand the last inch across the stone and close my fingers around what's left of Emric—a small fistful of ash, still warm, already sifting away between my knuckles no matter how hard I try to hold it—and I pull it in against my chest.
A sob tears out of me, cracked and raw and barely any sound at all, the only piece of grief my body has the air left to give.
And then the shock drains the rest of my strength, and the wrecked, glittering hall tips slowly sideways, and the last light in me goes out.
To be continued...