The gods—if that’s what they were—wanted me dead, or some of them did while others didn’t, and I couldn’t make sense of how many there were or why they were divided, but none of it mattered, not when something was dragging me down and I couldn’t reach the fire. I tried anyway, clawing inside myself past the panic and the ache, searching for the place where it used to live. That spark, that warmth, but there was nothing, only cold and silence and water pressing into every part of me.
It hurt. Gods, it hurt.
My chest convulsed, tight and panicked, every instinct in me screaming to breathe. My throat burned. My ribs felt like they might split. I tried to hold it back. The gasp. The surrender. But my body betrayed me, and water rushed in. Cold, sharp, suffocating. It scalded on the way down, filled every part of me, and I thrashed, arms flailing, head spinning. I couldn’t tell which way was up. The glow was gone, and the pressure crushed me from the inside out.
So this is how it ends.
Will and Aran were just outside, sleeping like none of it was happening, and they would wake to find me still and bloated and blue. I’d never see the sun again. Never feel it warm my skin. Never find Licia. Never hear Aran’s awful jokes or meet Will’s eyes again, and that thought cut deeper than anything.
They didn’t just need me.
I needed them.
I didn’t want to die. I really didn’t want to die.
So I let go. Of the panic. Of the shame. Of the armor I’d buried myself beneath for so long. Even as the terror curled tighter in my veins. Even as the edges of my mind began to dim.
Something inside me split. It felt like a scar tearing open, like a part of me breaking loose that had been waiting for that moment, waiting to be unleashed. A scream tore out of me. Not made of sound or magic or heat. But ofrage. Ofgrief. And I let it out.
The thing inside me.
It didn’t come as fire. Or as light.
It came as a quake. A deep, violent pulse that tore through my chest and exploded outward, shaking the water itself.
And the shadowshattered.
I didn’t stop to ask how.
I didn’t think.
I just kicked upward, desperate for air.
Precious, taken-for-granted air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I didn’t tell the boys what happened in the cave. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I didn’t understand it myself. And would it have helped anything, really, for them to know I was being hunted by shadows, possibly gods, possibly myth, possibly just another thing out to kill me? I had no answers for any of the questions they might’ve asked. So I kept it to myself.
I was dreaming, maybe. Or just floating. That soft place between memory and sleep where nothing hurts. And then someone touched my shoulder.
I nearly punched him in the face.
Aran flinched back, holding his hands up like he expected it.
“It’s just me,” he whispered. “Don’t kill me. I have something to show you.”
I blinked up at him. He was crouched beside me, lit in flickering firelight and the glow of the moon, holding the spellbook in one hand. His hair stuck up like he’d run his fingers through it a hundred times. His boots were only half-laced. A vision of chaos, as usual.
“What is it?” I rasped.
“I was taking a piss,” he murmured, “and I saw that—”
I squinted. “Taking a piss?”
He huffed, almost smiling. “Yeah. And I looked up… and saw that it’s a full moon.”
I stared at him. “Okay?”
