It seemed to be staring at her arms, studying the damage the stardust steel had done. Her wrists were bloody and raw where her flesh had burned away.
“Does it hurt?”
She nodded.
The ghost moved closer. Eris held herself still. It reached for her wrists, and as it touched her, a rush of feelings swept through her, all of them familiar, none of them her own:
The terrible longing for someone you can never have.
The empty ache of forever being alone.
The soul-crushing darkness of despair.
If she’d been standing, she would have fallen to her knees with the overwhelming weight of them all. She shuddered. But as the ghost’s feelings flooded her, they expunged the stinging, throbbing pain in her wrists.
The ghost stepped back. And though its sorrow lingered in her, everything else had been taken.
She drew her hands into her lap and stared down at her wrists. They were sore and festering just moments ago. Now the pain was gone and there were ugly red scars where the open wounds used to be.
Scars that would be there, she knew, for the rest of her life.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The ghost said nothing.
“What are you?”
“Nothing good,” it said.
She frowned. If it wasn’t good, why had it taken her pain away? “What’s your name?”
“I’m... Crow,” it said finally. “Or I was, once.”
And then it melted back into the shadows.
Twenty-Three
“What in all the skies wasthat?”
Dax’s jaw hardened as he ran his fingers through his curls, staring at Safire like he suddenly didn’t recognize her. Which made two of them.
Not only had Safire let the empress’s fugitive slip through her fingers—a fugitive who was now free to hunt down Asha—she’dkissedher.
Safire shoved the thought out of her head. She was desperately trying not to think about that kiss. How it felt like waking up. Like every day before this one, she’d been asleep and hadn’t known it.
She tried to quickly stopper the emotions swirling inside her. Confusion, shame, fear—they were all foreign feelings. She didn’t know what to do with them. “She was trying to blend in. To escape detection.”
She was just using me.
Safire looked back over her shoulder. New songs started up again as new lovestruck couples moved into the dancing circle.
“And you let her,” said Dax, his voice accusatory. But she could see the confusion in him, too. He was trying to make sense of what he’d seen. Trying to come up with a logical reason. One that would allow him to still trust and admire his cousin—who knew just how badly he needed this visit to go well.
But there was no sense to make of it.
A commotion broke out behind her. Dax reacted, stepping to Safire’s side. She turned to see a flash of black uniforms and silver stars. Several Lumina soldiers surrounded them.
Safire’s stomach knotted at the sight of the man leading them. It was the same soldier from the alley. The one whose club she’d intercepted.
