Текст книги "Six Scorched Roses"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Vitarus was beautiful.

All gods were beautiful, and all mortals knew this in theory. But when people say the gods are beautiful, you imagine it as the beauty of a human—perhaps even the beauty of a vampire, ageless and perfect.

No. No, that wasn’t right at all. Vitarus’s beauty was that of a mountain range or lightning storm, the beauty of the sun reflecting off the horizon of a rolling plain, the beauty of a fierce summer storm that kills half the town’s livestock, the tragic beauty of a stag’s body rotting and returning to the earth.

Vitarus was beautiful the way death was surely beautiful moments before it took you.

He lowered himself to the ground, though his feet didn’t quite touch, hovering just above the tips of the sparse grass. He was tall and foreboding. His hair and eyes were the ever-shifting gold of sunshine and wheat fields, his skin gleaming bronze. He wore loose trousers of silk and a long, sleeveless robe that looked as if it could be either green or gold with every blink, which he left open, exposing a lean torso covered with the silhouettes of flowers and leaves. His hands and forearms were darker than the rest of him, all the way up to the elbow—they looked different from each other, though I couldn’t place why, not when I was so preoccupied with my own overwhelming fear.

A shimmering white mist surrounded him. Water vapor, I realized, when he ventured closer and the damp of it clung to my skin. The grass rustled, greened, withered beneath his feet.

For a moment, the presence of him paralyzed me.

Then his world-shattering gaze, disinterested and cruel, fell to my sister. Mina cowered like a deer cornered by a wolf, and that sight awoke every wild protective instinct in me.

I didn’t even remember running to the field.

“Go,” I bit out, shoving Mina aside as I fell to my knees before Vitarus. “Go, Mina.”

I didn’t look back long enough to see if she’d listened—where was there to run, anyway?

And I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to, when Vitarus’s eyes locked to mine. They were a million colors of the sky and earth, every shade of radiant sun and coarse dirt.

“It wasn’t her,” I said. “She’s innocent. She did nothing to offend you.”

His gaze was so entrancing that it took me too long to remember to bow my head. I lowered my chin, but a firm grip tilted it back up. Vitarus’s skin against mine ripped a gasp from my throat.

A dizzy spell passed over me—a wave of fever, weakness. Death’s breath over my skin, a too-familiar sensation I hadn’t felt quite this strongly in a very long time. My eyes fell to the darkened skin of Vitarus’s forearm, and the nature of his hands, the thing I hadn’t been able to place moments ago, hit me: this hand was decay, his skin mottled and purpling, crawling with insects. The other was dark with the rich hue of soil, roots winding up his muscled forearms like veins, hints of green sprouting at his fingertips.

Decay and abundance. Plague and vitality.

He held my chin tight, not allowing me to look away.

And then, after a long moment, he smiled.

“I remember you. My, how easy it is to forget how time moves for you. Fifteen years. A blink, and yet an age. How quickly you grow and wither.”

His thumb stroked my cheek, and the flush of fever flared. My lashes fluttered, and for a moment I saw my father kneeling in these very fields, just as I kneeled now.

“You were just a pitiful ailing lamb then. Death walking in a little girl,” Vitarus crooned. “And now, look at you. Time is so kind to humans. And so cruel.”

He released his hold on me, the fever falling from the surface of my skin. I let out a ragged breath.

“No one offended you here,” I said.

Vitarus’s smile withered.

“One of my acolytes has been slaughtered. And you… you both stink of my traitorous cousin Nyaxia’s stench.” His eyes lifted beyond me—to the skyline of Adcova. “This whole town reeks of it.”

“They had nothing to do with any of it,” I choked. “They’ve suffered enough. Please.”

I couldn’t think of what to do, so I’d beg.

It was the wrong thing.

“Enough?” Vitarus said, incredulous. “Enough? What is it to suffer enough? The mouse suffers at the fangs of a snake. The snake suffers at the claws of a badger. The badger suffers at the teeth of a wolf. The wolf suffers at the spear of a hunter. There is no such thing as enough suffering.”

His words were vicious, and yet his tone, somehow, was not. He seemed genuinely perplexed by my statement, as if the idea that suffering could be cruel was foreign to him.

A hysterical wave of sympathy passed over me—because he, like me, struggled to understand human nature. Maybe we were both so bad at it that my entire town would perish because of it.

“Is that all we are to you?” I said. “Animals? Would you waste the lives of animals the way you have wasted the lives of the people you have killed here?”

Vitarus’s face went cold.

“You speak to me of waste,” he sneered. “The blood of one of my acolytes has spilled here. You stink of the bitch who betrayed me. I have fed your people for millennia. Sheltered you. Given you purpose. And yet you spurn me. Disrespect me.” He looked around, lip curled in disgust. “I never understood the others’ fondness for your kind. What would spring from this soil if this miserable assemblage of stone and wood wasn’t here? Perhaps I should prefer to see that.” He let out a low laugh. It sounded like the wind through the trees. “That is the mistake of my kin. Assuming that humans are more interesting than any of the other millions of forms of life in this world. No. You are no more interesting. Simply more trouble.”

His gaze fell back to me, and whatever he saw in my face made him laugh again, mockingly.

“You should see your face, little girl. Such hatred.” He plucked one of the roses from one of the bushes and twirled it between his fingers. The petals rustled and flourished, multiplying until they fell gently to the soil, the vine of the stem wrapping around his arm. “A flower doesn’t hate. It fulfills its function, and then returns to the earth without a fuss.”

I did hate him. I wanted to spit in his face and curse at him and strike him. If only killing a god was as easy as killing his acolyte.

But the thought of Mina flashed through my mind. Farrow, and the wild risks he had taken for me. My people, and the illness that would devour them all. And then the thought of Vale, and I prayed that he was far away by now from the grasp of gods that resented him.

I hated Vitarus. But what I felt for them was stronger than my hatred.

No, I couldn’t kill a god. I couldn’t appease him with empty apologies. I certainly couldn’t move his heart to compassion.

But…

“I’ll make a deal with you,” I blurted out.

Vitarus paused, his interest piqued.

Gods weren’t compassionate or logical. But they were bored. They liked games, liked bargains.

I didn’t let my hope show as his head tilted, a slow smile spreading over his lips.

“Ah, just like your father,” he said. “You know, he made a deal with me a long time ago, too.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A deal?

My mind grabbed onto those words and didn’t let go.

A deal.

Not a punishment. An exchange.

It seemed like such a small distinction, and yet it reframed everything I knew of what had happened between my father and Vitarus that day. The story I had told myself for fifteen years—that my father had cursed his god, and by terrible chance, that god had decided to curse him right back—was false.

My father had made a choice.

Betrayal skewered me.

“A deal.” The word was scratchy in my throat. “He made a deal with you.”

Vitarus’s eyes glinted with interest, peeking through his boredom like sun through the clouds. “You did not know?”

I said nothing, but I didn’t need to speak for a god to know my answer.

He laughed, the sound rain on the fields. “You came here hating me for my cruelty. But how your heart changes when you realize it was your own father who damned your people.”

He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. He…

But my fingers closed around the branches of the rose bushes, thorns coaxing blood to my fingertips.

My strange roses, that grew right here in the spot where Vitarus had stood, all those years ago. I had thought that they grew here because a god had once stood upon this soil.

But…

My father had been so upset by the crops he couldn’t save. The fields he couldn’t fill.

Vitarus saw the realization in me. In this moment, the only creature I hated more than my father was him—for the utter delight on his face.

“All the things he was willing to give up for some fertile soil,” he crooned. “I told him that life requires death. He did not care.”

Vitarus twirled the rose between his fingertips. The vine now wove all the way down his arm, the blossom and leaves so swollen they filled his palm.

“Beautiful, aren’t they? Shame they aren’t edible. Tell me, little girl, was he disappointed by that?”

My eyes burned. My stupid, selfish father. The truth was, he never even lived to see the roses. He was the first to die of the illness, and the first sprouts of these bushes poked from the earth after his death. I remembered vividly staring down at them as I walked home from his funeral, staring down at those little beads of green like they were an equation that didn’t make sense.

Well, they didn’t. They never had.

I crushed the rose in my clenched palm. It left smears of black and red against my skin.

All of it for nothing.

I had fought. I had studied. I had sacrificed whatever life I had left—and I had succeeded, I had succeeded in creating a cure, and it would be for nothing.

Vitarus tilted my chin up, his rose-covered hand sweeping the tear from my cheek, a thorn leaving a salt-stung scratch of red.

“Why are you so surprised?” he murmured—a genuine question. “Do you not know the nature of humans by now?”

He cradled my face like a lover, one hand on each cheek—one touch of death, one of life. I could feel both roiling inside me, surging at his touch—illness and vitality, decay and growth. My reflection stared back at me from his curious eyes, shrouded in the gold glint of his desire.

He wanted to consume me the same way he consumed withering crops. And I wanted to give up and let him.

But then, something moved over his shoulder, something barely visible within the thick cloud cover. A little glint of silver-white.

Wings.

Vale.

My stomach dropped.

Vale couldn’t be here. Vitarus wouldn’t tolerate a vampire in his presence. There was nothing the gods of the White Pantheon hated more than reminders of Nyaxia’s betrayal.

Maybe Vale knew that.

Vitarus’s brow furrowed, noticing my distraction. He started to turn, but in a fit of desperation, I turned his face back to me. His skin was violently hot, and I drew in a sharp breath to resist the urge to pull my hand away.

“I told you I want a deal,” I said. “I want to terminate my father’s bargain.”

I couldn’t offer Vitarus goods or riches. But in an immortal life, one thing becomes more valuable than all else. I heard the answer as Vale had said it to me, months ago:

Curiosity, mouse. Curiosity.

“It will be a game,” I said. “If I can give you back everything that you gave my father, you will take back the plague. You’ll treat our town just as you did before.”

For a moment, I thought I’d miscalculated, and Vitarus’s petty anger would still win. But…

There. There it was. A glint of curiosity in his eyes. Cruel amusement. His knuckles stroked my cheek—decay blossoming over my skin.

“You do not know what you are offering me, child.”

“Do we have a deal?” I said.

In the distance, Vale flew faster. I could make out his shape now, hurtling through the air at impossible speed.

Vitarus could not resist it. He smiled and leaned close to my ear. “Deal,” he whispered, then straightened. The full height of him, now that he stood again, nearly paralyzed me with fear. But he outstretched his hands, waiting, expectant.

My father made a deal out of desperation.

I dug a handful of the earth from the ground, then pressed it into Vitarus’s waiting hands. “Soil,” I said.

Vitarus’s palm remained open, expectant.

My father made a deal because he was surrounded by a withering world—soil that would not give life, crops that would not grow.

I yanked a flower from the rosebushes, placing it atop the dirt in Vitarus’s palms. “Flowers.”

A slow, terrible smile spread over his mouth.

Vale was nearly here. I could see his face, now, desperate—his hand, outstretched, reaching for me even though he was still far away. Within it was a single flower, just a tiny dot of red and black in the distance.

“What else?” Vitarus prodded.

My father made a deal because he was surrounded by a withering world.

Soil that would not produce.

Crops that would not grow.

And a daughter that would die.

My father hated the gods for taking his livelihood. And he loved his family too much to let them go. That day, he had kneeled in the fields and looked back at me like hope destroyed, the same way he’d looked at those dead plants.

It now seemed so, so obvious.

I thought I wouldn’t live to see seventeen, twenty, twenty-five. But here I was, thirty years old with a heart still beating, death matching my pace without overtaking it. Still living, just like the cursed, blessed flowers my father had left behind.

I felt like a fool for not realizing it sooner. That my longer-than-expected life was so much more than luck. When the town withered, and I lived. Why hadn’t it even occurred to me to question it?

I placed my hand in Vitarus’s, laid on top of the flower and the dirt.

Vale hurtled to the ground, a rough, stumbling land, just behind Vitarus.

But I had the god’s attention now.

“And?” Vitarus breathed.

“Me,” I said. “I give you me.”

Vitarus leaned close, his lips so close they brushed mine.

“Humans,” he purred. “For all your faults, maybe you aren’t so boring, after all.”

His kiss was fierce and thorough, his tongue parting my lips, claiming, searching. I couldn’t breathe. The world dissolved. Life and death collided. He breathed into me, and his breath was growth and sun and water and light—and then he drew in a deep inhale, peeling all those things away, and coaxing forth like a fire the illness that had followed me since the day I was born. My strength withered. My lungs shriveled. My skin grew hot with fever and cold with shivers. My heart beat, beat, beat, pulsing only thin, impotent blood.

Fifteen years of illness that my father’s deal had staved off now crashed back into my ailing body, all at once. Fifteen years of weakness rushing through my veins, stealing my unfairly prolonged life with it.

In the distance, I heard a familiar voice call my name.

But that shout of desperation fell far into the background as Vitarus, a lifetime later, broke our kiss.

“You have your deal, little ailing lamb,” he whispered, licking my health from his lips.

And then he was gone, and I fell backwards into the newly barren soil, right back into death’s embrace.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The first time I met death, I saw its face before I even saw the face of the midwife, my mother, my father. My death defined my entire life. It was my beginning and my only end. For fifteen years, death had hovered with its grip near my throat—so close and yet never able to touch me.

Well, it had me now, and its grip was fierce. It choked the life from me in a single ruthless sweep.

Death’s home was a field of blackened flowers.

You have been on your way here, it whispered, for a long, long time.

“Lilith. Lilith.”

Someone was calling my name. A familiar voice—a face I wanted to turn to see. I blinked. It was hard. I saw a clearing sky.

I blinked again.

A face.

Two faces.

Mina, my sister, her eyes brighter than they had been in a long time. Her tears were warm against my cheek.

I opened my mouth, a sudden wave of words rising in my throat—a lifetime of words I had never known how to say to her, a lifetime of affection I didn’t know how to offer her. But I couldn’t speak, my breath wet and burning, producing only iron-sweet bubbles at my lips.

I blinked.

Death’s home was a field of flowers. A destination I had come to terms with—a path I was fifteen years late in traveling. Death walked beside me.

You seem sad to go, it said.

I stopped walking.

It was right, I realized. I was sad to go.

In another world, a gentle touch turned my face.

My eyes opened with great, impossible effort.

Vale leaned over me. His hand gripped mine so tight I could feel it in the next world. Maybe that made sense. Vale, like me, straddled both life and death.

And the scorched rose grasped between us was withering now, just like me.

Vale’s eyes said, Stay, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to. I wanted to stay so badly I would die for it.

I tried to speak, tried to tell him—

He murmured, “Do you want to live, Lilith?”

I blinked and almost couldn’t open my eyes again.

Death’s home was a field of flowers, and someone was pulling my hand, but I wouldn’t go—

Vale’s voice, again, more frantic: “Lilith, do you want this?”

And I knew what he was offering me. I knew that he would accept whatever answer I gave him.

Death stopped. Turned back to me.

For a moment, I stood between them both. Vale, and death.

Do you want this?

I forced my eyes open.

“Quickly, Lilith.” Vale’s voice was urgent, rough with almost-tears. “Do you want this?”

I wanted life.

I wanted time.

“Yes,” I choked, as death grabbed my hand.

I felt a sharp pain at my throat as the scent of dead roses overwhelmed me.

Somewhere in a world far away, my body writhed, lungs fighting for another gulp of air.

I balked. Death tightened its hold on me.

You have waited for this for so long, it told me, frustrated.

Something hot filled my mouth, pooled in my throat. Sweet, with a bitter bite.

I choked on it, sputtered.

“Drink,” a familiar voice commanded—begged.

Muscles that I barely controlled swallowed. Death tasted like rose petals. It dribbled down my chin, pooling in dusty earth.

Death’s empty eyes stared at me, its hand clutching mine.

I want to stay, I said.

You can’t.

I need to stay.

I yanked my hand away from death’s grip. Turned away from the field of flowers.

And I drew in a great gasp of air.

Vale held me tight to his chest, cradled in his arms, forehead to mine. There were tears in his eyes and blood on his lips.

“I want to stay,” I choked out.

“I know,” he whispered, as his mouth lowered to mine, and I faded away there in his arms, surrounded by withering roses.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A million dreams consumed me. Dreams of my mother, my father. Dreams of Mina. Dreams of dusty skin on rickety floorboards. Dreams of amber eyes and silver wings.

I dreamed of mundane days and torrid nights. I dreamed of a body pressing me to a silk-sheeted bed. I dreamed of needles and vials and flower petals on a wall.

In my dreams I couldn’t breathe, and I’d struggle and struggle, and then I’d put my head between my knees and choke up blood and roses.

Time passed. So much time. Flashes of the past and future, this world and the next, life and death. Pain, fever. Consciousness, unconsciousness.

I’m dead, I thought. I’m dead. This is death.

Or is it life?

Maybe, a voice said, it’s something in between, mouse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I startled awake, choking and sputtering.

I couldn’t orient myself. My entire body felt strange, foreign. My heartbeat was too loud, scents too strong, light too bright. My head pounded. My own senses overwhelmed me, blocking out all else.

Until I became aware of a hand holding mine, tightly, as if to lead me back to the world.

“Careful.” Vale’s voice was steady, solid. Real. “Careful, mouse.”

Words spilled out of me without my permission. “I’m dead,” I gasped. “I died. I died, and Vitarus, and my father, and—and—”

“Slow.” It was only when he put his hands on my shoulders and started to push me back to the bed that I realized I had been leaning over it, precariously close to throwing myself to the floor.

I let him place me back against the headboard and a truly obscene number of pillows, though my hands were clasped tight in my lap. He eyed me with that analytical stare.

I felt awful. My head was spinning, I was hot and feverish, my stomach churned. My mouth was sandpaper dry, my throat raw. And my whole body… my body didn’t feel the way it always had, like I’d just been put in a version of my childhood home where every measurement had been adjusted by a few inches.

But I was certainly alive.

“You remember this time?” Vale said, quietly. He wiped sweat from my forehead.

Was it the first time I had woken up?

“I…”

My head hurt so much. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to assemble the pieces of what had happened. Vitarus. The rose bushes. The deal.

And…

Do you want to live?

The choice. The choice Vale had offered me, and the one I had taken.

“I remember.”

The words were gritty because my mouth was so, so dry. As if he knew that, Vale pressed a cup into my hands. I drank without even looking at it.

It wasn’t what I was expecting—water. No, it was thick and sweet and bitter and rich, and—and—

Gods, it was amazing.

I tilted my head back, practically drowning in my own frenzied gulps, until Vale gently pulled the cup away.

“Enough for now. Not too fast.”

He kept his hand on my wrist, as if to keep me from drinking again. I blinked down at the cup and wiped the liquid away from my mouth. I’d gotten it everywhere.

Red. Very, very dark red. Practically black.

I recognized it right away. By sight, and… even the taste.

“It’s not human,” he said, misreading my expression.

“It’s yours.”

I’d spent months obsessed with Vale’s blood. I’d know it anywhere.

“Yes,” he said.

I tried to raise the cup again, and he said, “Slowly,” before allowing me another sip.

I still felt horrible, but the blood helped. I took in the room around me for the first time. Unfamiliar—somewhere far from home, judging by the decor. Simple. It was a small room, and sparse, with only a few pieces of simple furniture. The curtains, thick brocade fabric, were drawn. No light seeped beneath them—it was night.

“Where are we?”

“The coast of Pikov.”

My brows rose. We were far from home. Far from Adcova—far from the continent of Dhera, too.

I didn’t know how I knew that significant time had passed. It was like I could smell it in the air—summer, the damp humidity of the sky outside, the salt on the skin of those beyond this building. I could… feel, sense, so much more now.

“How long—”

“Weeks.”

Vale sounded weary. He looked weary, too—his hair unkempt, his eyes shadowed, like he’d gotten very little rest or food.

“I didn’t know if you would survive,” he said quietly. “You were very sick.”

Most don’t survive the process, he had told me.

The process.

Only now did it start to sink in, what had happened to me—what I had done. My human self had withered and died, just as it had always been destined to.

And I…

I rubbed my fingers together. Even my skin felt different. Smoother. Unmarked.

Gods. The shock left me dizzier than my illness. The words even sounded strange aloud.

“You Turned me.”

Vale nodded slowly. Hesitantly.

“I asked you—”

“I said yes.”

I want to stay.

And so, he’d helped me stay.

“Yes,” he whispered.

I met his eyes. He didn’t blink, watching me carefully—as if to make sure he saw every shade of my reaction to this.

“I won’t lie to you, mouse. It won’t be an easy transition. A part of you did die that day. A different version of you was born. There will be things you’ll grieve. There will be things about yourself you’ll need to learn how to embrace. Things that might be… uncomfortable. But…”

His hand fell over mine as his voice faded. He cleared his throat a little. “But you’ll have help.”

I took this in for a long moment.

He asked quietly, “Do you regret it?”

Regret it?

I felt… different. So wildly different than I always had in every way, shedding not only my humanity, but the ever-present looming threat of time.

Even through my illness, I felt the strength lying in wait, ready to be seized. This body wouldn’t wither. It would thrive.

But I couldn’t care less about that.

The prospect that overwhelmed me was the thought of time.

Time. So much of it. Time to collect knowledge. Time to see the world. I didn’t know what I might do with so much of it.

I felt strange, yes. I could already tell Vale was right that it would take me a long time to adjust to this new existence.

But regret?

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

Vale’s shoulders lowered slightly, as if in relief. He avoided my gaze, rolling my fingers gently through his. My senses were so heightened, I could feel every wrinkle and texture of his skin.

“You… you came back,” I said.

“I know it wasn’t what you wanted me to do. But I was a general because I was better at giving orders than following them.”

Not true. I wanted it more than anything. For him to come back. Even if I didn’t know it at the time.

“Why?” I asked.

“You were right. The roses were special.”

I smiled a little. “You finally noticed.”

“They never died.”

They look exactly the same as they always have, he’d said, so irritated, like I’d tricked him. I’d thought it was funny at the time. Of course a vampire wouldn’t notice the absence of decay, the absence of time, when they lived beyond it themselves.

“When I was preparing to leave,” he said, “I was gathering the roses. And I noticed, when I held them, that one of them had begun to wither—just a little. I’ve held god-touched objects before. And when I was touching them, I—I felt it. It feels strange, for us to touch an object touched by the White Pantheon.”

Us.

Him and I. Vampires.

But that struck me less than the image of what he was describing. That Vale, when packing up his belongings, had not only taken the roses with him, but had sat there holding them. For a moment I could picture it so vividly, him cradling those roses, and it made my chest tighten.

His thumb rubbed the back of my hand.

“It was foolish that I didn’t realize you were god-touched, too. You strange creature.” A wry smile tugged at his lips. “Different from any human or any vampire I had ever encountered.”

Gods, the way he looked at me—a strange feeling shivered in my heart.

But then my brow furrowed.

“But how did you know?” I said.

Vale had pieces of the truth. Incomplete evidence. But not enough to draw a final conclusion.

He lifted one shoulder in an almost-shrug. “I didn’t know, Lilith. I felt.”

So few words, and yet they encapsulated something I had struggled to name in those final moments. Something I understood, against all reason and logic.

“I knew that—that I would be making a mistake, in leaving you,” he said softly. “I knew it, even if I couldn’t name precisely why. So I came for you.”

And he had saved me.

My throat thickened. I swallowed, though it was difficult through the dryness of my throat.

“And what about Adcova?”

“Ah, the best part.” He smoothed my hair from my face. He’d been doing that this whole time—touching me in all these little mundane, fussing ways. Smoothing hair, adjusting my sleeve, wiping beads of sweat. “It seems,” he said, “that Adcova has escaped its god’s ire at last.”

I let out a rough exhale. I almost didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to hope it could be true.

“I asked my errand boy to send updates,” he went on. “There have been no new cases reported in town, or anywhere else in the area. And it seems a peculiar new drug has cured the cases that already existed.”

The pride shone in his voice. My chest hurt fiercely, a strange burning sensation. I couldn’t speak. He held my hand tight.

“It’s over, Lilith,” he said. “You saved them.”

Years. Years of my life. Countless hours in my study, countless hours of sleep stolen. Thousands of books, thousands of notes. Years-worth of pen-grip callouses on my fingers.

For this.

For…

“Mina,” I choked out.

I’d meant for it to be a real question, but I couldn’t get it out, not without breaking down.

Vale was silent for too long, making worry tighten in my stomach. He let go of my hand—somewhat reluctantly—and went to the door.

And when she appeared in the doorway, my heart cracked open.

She was bright and vivacious and full of life like I hadn’t seen her in years, as if all those layers of death she had shed in the form of dusty skin on our floors had left her a whole new person. New, and yet, the version of her I had always known.

She smiled at me through tears, a huge, sun-bright grin, and I opened my mouth to speak and let out a garbled sob.

She crossed the room in several clumsy rushed steps and threw herself against me in an embrace.

“I know,” she said, when I couldn’t speak, and neither of us said anything else.

Because for so long, I had struggled to connect with my sister. Struggled to show her the warmth beneath my cold. Struggled to let her see the love my face and words couldn’t convey to her.

I’d thought I’d die with her thinking I did not love her.

I did die, and that fear died with me.

Because here, in this moment, with me on the right side of death and her on the right side of living, lost in a tearful embrace hello instead of goodbye, we met each other on level ground.

Here, we understood each other so completely, words were useless, anyway.

We did, eventually, let each other go and compose ourselves, and I did, eventually, manage to get my grip on words again.

We made it through a few awkward minutes of stilted conversation before the question I couldn’t help but ask bubbled to the surface.

“Do you hate me?” I asked. “Or hate… what I’ve become?”

Mina’s eyes widened. Her answer was immediate. “Never. I could never hate you, Lilith.”

“Do I look different now?”

I was curious, I had to admit. There was no mirror in this room, and I definitely wasn’t strong enough to get up and go look for one.

She thought about this before answering.

“You look different,” she said, “but you also look more like yourself than you ever had. And that makes sense, because you were never… like us. You were always so different than the rest of us.”

She said it with such warmth, even though I’d always resented my differences from those around me.

“You’ll be going with him,” she said. “Right? To Obitraes.”

I hadn’t even been able to think that far ahead yet. I touched my throbbing temple.