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Terra visibly shivers and wraps her arms around herself as she looks around carefully. Her eyes widen as she stares at the stack of rocks. She whirls to face me, eyes wide and filled with horror.
“You don’t see all of the blood?”
31
Terra
Elias stares at me like I’m utterly insane. He looks at the crates filled with pulsing hearts, dripping blood and quivering, then shakes his head cluelessly.
“Are you talking about the rocks?”
My jaw drops and before I can reply Amser hums inside my head. Only we can see the hearts. Emerai cannot hide anything from time. We see all the moments of a Shadow's past, what they’ve taken and tried to discard.
I swallow thickly. How is this even possible? Then again, how is anything that’s happened thus far possible?
“They may look like rocks to you… but they are hearts,” I say with a knot curling in my stomach. They thump an off-beat tune, and as I watch them, a few stop moving, turning gray and cold before dulling into what truly resembles a stone.
My heart sinks. Those must be the people dying on the front lines… or at Alkrose. I wonder how many will be left by the end of all of this and how many have already been thrown away.
Elias’s brows pull in. “Well fuck, how are we going to find mine then? They all look like fucking stones to me.”
Amser whispers, His heart is older, among the first to be stolen. It’s tucked away with the others behind that wall. I frown, not sure how my Shadow can sense all of this, but who am I to disagree with it?
“Amser says to look behind this wall.” I press my hand against the cold stones and worry the entire room will cave in if we mess with it.
Elias’s face is skeptical as black smoke pools at his feet and Velis emerges in its small feline form. Amser wisps from my veins and joins its mate. They stand side by side and let their tails tangle. My cheeks warm at the affection they so easily show for one another.
Elias’s cold, gray eyes are staring at me.
“Will your eyes regain their color when you get your heart back?” I ask. I’m not sure I want them to change. The gray has grown on me—it’s hard to picture his eyes any other way.
“I don’t know,” he says as he steps closer, pulling me into his arms as we stand to the side so the Shadows can dismantle the wall.
“Do you remember their color?”
“Nope.”
The Shadows both place their paws on the stones. Dark vines start to crawl up the wall and form into an arched door. The black veins look like spindles of poison, the definition of evil and rot. Velis sits on one end while Amser takes the other and they both look up at us expectantly.
“Has Velis ever done that before?”
Elias approaches the makeshift door and pushes the stone. It opens eerily. Dust and mold sting my nose. “Negative,” he says curtly as he disappears into the shadows of the secret room.
I reluctantly trail behind him and wince at the dried blood that coats the stone floor. Enough light trickles in from the cellar to see shelves lined with stones and hearts. These ones are lined up like they’re special, nothing like the piles in the crates.
Velis and Amser weave through my ankles and sit in the center of the room. Elias looks at my Shadow and asks kindly, “Which one is mine?”
Amser stretches like a cat that’s just woken up from its nap and jumps to the middle shelf. It walks past a few stones and stops at a black heart. It looks straight at me and whispers in my mind, Arthur.
A breath escapes me and I rush to it, gently scooping the heart into my hands. It flutters, so much lighter than I could’ve ever imagined. So unlike a real heart. These, as I thought, are figurative ones. Phantoms of the real thing. But they hold the world inside them.
“This one is Arthur’s,” I say when Elias moves closer, his chest pressed along my back. He looks down at it and frowns.
“I wish I could see what you do.” His voice is somber. I wonder how many of the stones in here used to be the beating hearts of his comrades.
Amser jumps to the top shelf and walks along the edge diligently until it reaches the end and sits next to a white heart. It beats in slow, languid thumps. It’s lost all color—each artery and vein that line the cardiac muscles are like ashen roots.
I move to stand beneath Amser and it nudges the heart off the shelf. I catch it with care and stare in awe at the two precious things in the palms of my hands.
