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“I don’t know what else I can do.” I squeezed the scale in my hand. I had a suspicion. A dark, haunting idea why my futile attempts to sacrifice my own magic wasn’t working. But I pushed it from my mind because I refused to accept that it could actually be the truth. There had to be another way…
“I do,” Milo said, leaning forward in the skiff, his eyes downcast.
No. He was thinking it, too.
“The thing you love most isn’t your magic, Katrina,” He muttered pulling a knife from his belt. “And it isn’t a thing, is it?”
“What are you doing?” I asked, noticing how he held the knife, gripping it as if ready to use it.
“Tell me what you care for more than anything.” His voice draped over me like heavy velvet, darkening the air around me, while my grip tightened on the trident. Now I understood why he’d asked me how much I love him back on the ship. I knew what he was doing. And I couldn’t let him do it.
“Oh my god! Look!” McKenzie shouted, pointing at the pirate hunters who were readying a cannon directly our way. The schooner was long gone under, with only a quarter of its mast jutting out of the water to mark its presence. Our only shield was gone. Bellamy was back on the Widow, hustling to redirect the ship and block our enemies, but there was no way he could move that thing fast enough.
“Katrina, tell me. What do you love more than anything?” Milo repeated, pulling my focus back to him.
I blinked back hot tears and swallowed the burning lump rising in my throat. I was so afraid of what would happen if I answered him. But we were out of time. I didn’t know what else to do.
“You know it’s you.” The words dripped from my mouth weakly, cracking between each hoarse syllable.
Milo stood up, rocking the unbalanced skiff on the already choppy water, and took a step forward so that he could lean over me. He reached over around the back of my neck and pulled my face to his to kiss me. It was brief, but passionate, and I held onto the taste of him like the sweet savor of honey.
When he pulled away, before any of us could say a word, he raised the knife in his hand and swiped it across the flesh of his palm. With an unwavering stare fixated on the trident, he pressed his blood-soaked hand to the trident’s prongs, and the glowing haze around it became brighter.
“No!” I screamed. “No!” I knew what he was doing. He was taking his rightful place as the thing I loved most in this world. The thing I was most afraid of losing. The thing I would never have given up, not even to save the world.
“This is the only way to get you back.” He spoke as calmly as if he was simply putting a lure on a fishing hook, but in those long-familiar hazel eyes, he couldn’t hide the brokenness and turmoil giving away the truth. “You’ve saved me, Katrina. In every way. And now it’s finally my turn to save you.” As he spoke, the glow around the trident strengthened, and I felt its magic surging through the scepter rod in my hand.
“No!” I shrieked. “I’ll stay here with you forever if I have to. I won’t leave you again!” I threw down the trident and let it hit the floor of the boat with a heavy, bell-like clang.
“Katrina, we have to go!” Noah screamed, gesturing to the cannon readying to blast us. “You’re the only one of us who can use it! Pick it up!”
“No!” I screamed until my throat was raw, my knees hitting the floor of the boat as McKenzie and Noah each fought to hold me up on either side. But I melted in their grasp, begging them to leave me alone, screaming through wails and cries until my lungs nearly gave out. “No…no…no…”
Please no.
“Katrina! We’re going to die here if we don’t go back! You know that’s what’s going to happen! There’s no other way!” McKenzie’s tearful voice of reason raked against my core like claws.
I trembled, waves of tears breaking through my pitiful hold on them. The urgency of the moment brought back all too many fresh, horrid memories of standing at the edge of the Siren’s Scorn that dark night months ago. When the fate of everyone I cared about was crushing me with its weight on my shoulders. Was I really to be forced to make this choice again? Lose Milo forever or doom us all?
What would it mean to give Milo to the trident? Would it kill him? Would it make him forget me? Would it take him to a place I could never find?
I stared, lost in my spiraling cyclone of thoughts as quiet tears streamed down my face. I couldn’t make this choice. I couldn’t do it. I shook my head, nearly choking on deep, short breaths as the hopelessness set in. McKenzie and Noah still shouted and pleaded with me, but I couldn’t even understand them. I could see only darkness. Darkness as empty and void as the depths I’d just swum back from.
Just then, a strong guiding hand took mine and pried open the fingers of my balled fist. It was Milo, forcing the trident back into my grip and kneeling in front of me. I tried to pull away, to let go of the cold metal in my hand. But he held his hand firmly over mine, locking my hold on the trident in place. Each beat of my heart felt like a pickaxe in my chest as I realized there was no way to change this. The cannon would fire in seconds. Even if it missed, there was nowhere to go here in this place where no one that I’d brought here belonged. There was no other choice but this. Milo was going to make sure of it.
And I hated him for it. I hated him then, as he watched me through tangled locks of dark gold hair, falling in front of that scarred eyebrow. Then he smirked that slightly crooked smile that made me hate him more. And I smiled back, as the tears kept flowing, and I choked back the desperate wail I wanted so badly to let out.
“You just couldn’t stop trying to protect me, could you?” I shook my head, barely able to see him as my tears blurred my vision. He stroked my hand reassuringly with his thumb as the trident’s light became the purest white, forming a halo around us in our skiff. I could feel him shaking and it broke every part of me. I pressed my forehead to the place where our hands met on the trident. “I told you to stop protecting me…I told you…I told you…” The words broke into fractured pieces that I couldn’t piece back together.
Milo reached his uncut hand forward, touching the side of my face where Thane had cut me. “That’s the one thing I can never do for you, Starlight.” He paused as he pressed his eyes shut for just a moment, and then looked back at me through tears of his own. “I always lose you eventually. But I find you again and again.”
The light from the trident became so intense that I couldn’t see him anymore. I cherished the last bit of his touch on my face and hands, and as the light shone brighter than the sun, I whispered one promise I prayed to be true as my wet lips trembled, and I felt I could barely hold myself upright anymore.
“I’ll find you in every lifetime.”
Cannon fire exploded, voices faded, and the white light consumed us. I opened my eyes to a blue sky.
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