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The little witch sucks in her breath. Her fingers lace behind my neck and she pulls me down to her, lips crashing on mine. She kisses me fast and hard, hungry, like we’re running out of time. Like every moment is our last.
And I realize with a lacerating pang to my gut that she absolutely believes that; she’s counting down her days. It sparks a fire inside me bright enough to burn down the whole city, the whole world. I walk us back into the living room enough to press her back to the wall and grab her waist, hoisting her higher. Her legs wrap around my back, and she holds me in a vice grip, which is absolutely fine by me. I don’t want even a hair of space between us as I devour her. When we part, we’re both entirely short of breath as if we’d just run a marathon. “I love you, Esmeralda Parella. My witch, my gem. You own my soul.”
She wraps her arms around my neck and sobs.
“Please tell me what’s wrong,” I beg through the knot in my throat.
“Isabel didn’t have a happy ending in mind. I don’t even think she meant for me to be the one who’d get this far; the fact that I’m a witch, that I might be able to make the trinket a different way given enough time is irrelevant, because no witch could pull off what she did in two months. There was always just one way to end the curse, witch or human.”
I know what’s coming next, and I desperately don’t want to hear it, so I seal my lips against hers in another kiss, hoping to steal the words, as if keeping them unspoken would make them less true.
But as soon as we part, Esme continues, “this was always meant to be her revenge; to love and to lose. I die, you’re free. But your soul, the one I own, goes with me.” She lays her face in the crook of my neck, sighing. “Will you find my spirit, in the Beyond?”
“Esme,” I growl.
“Please tell me you will find me. Tell me our love is stronger than death. I’m not afraid of dying for you. I just want to know I’ll get to see you again.”
I can’t take another second of this, allowing her to think I’d ever accept her to make this sacrifice. Esme’s still the brightest flame I’ve ever known — I want to be her fuel, spend our days witness and accomplice to her conquests. Not now, nor ever, will I stand to be the one who put out her fire.
Reaching a hand between us, I force her face up until our foreheads press together. “You won’t die playing this game, you hear me? I don’t care about breaking the curse as much as I care about you. And if I must burn the world down to find the answer, then I will. Gladly.”
chapter 50
Âmes Sœurs
esmeralda
I’ve come to terms with my upcoming death. Truly. It might sound like a coping mechanism, but I’ve done a lot of introspection over the last few days, and I’ve come to the realization that if this is the only way for this story to end — which, after absolutely exhausting all pages of Isabel’s grimoire, I’m certain that it is — then I’m at peace with it.
Mei, hovering cross-legged opposite of me on her bed, looks at me like I sprouted a second head. “There has to be another way,” she says for what has to be the twentieth time.
“I promise you if there were, at this point, we’d have found it,” I say slowly, as if speaking to a child.
She throws her arms in the air. “So what? We just give up?”
“We’re not giving up, per se. The curse is going to be broken.”
“And you’re going to be dead.”
I point a finger in her direction and hover it in the air, scanning her figure up and down. “You’re dead, and you seem to be doing fine.”
“Don’t joke about this with me.”
“Why not? Mei, I’m fine. I’ve grieved the things I’m going to lose, which honestly, are not going to be a whole lot. Most of my family is already in the Beyond, and when I started this whole thing, I thought I was saving them from some kind of hell populated with monstrous creatures, which is very far from the truth. I’m sad I won’t get to know my cousin or the other witches in my family much, but I can live with that. It’s not something I’m losing, just something I won’t get to gain.” I swallow, struggling to get the next part out. The things I will truly miss. The ones I had to come to terms with having to part with. “I will miss Sara. She was good to me. But at some point, we have to part with the people in our lives. I’ve done it before.” Taking a deep breath, I try to continue keeping my voice steady. The last one is the hardest. “And I know things with Tei will be… different. He’s Prince of the Beyond, and I’ll just be a random soul. But I’ll get to see him, in some capacity.”
At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself. That much might be a coping mechanism. I’m not willing to let go of it, yet. If I think about eternity without Tei, I might chicken out — not that I really have an option, since the curse will just take my life once my sixty days are up.
How pathetic does it make me, that I would fall for a man — a monster — this hard? I swallow the lump in my throat and lick my dry lips.
“Which brings me to my next point — you, who’s also dead. You and I can still be friends just like we are now, even more so, when we’re both spirits, if you also pass on to the Beyond.”
Mei’s back stiffens. “You know I can’t…”
“I talked to Marta about what we saw. She told me sometimes spirits experience a blockage, something they can’t let go of. They need to be able to release that burden before they can move on.”
She looks down onto her fingers, which she keeps knotting together. “Oh.”
She knows exactly what her blockage is; I have no doubts myself, either.
