Shaw’s childhood home was empty. His apartment was not. She dodged around a glowing tree root tunneling through its side, a trunk now towering above the alley with leaves that gleamed in the first kiss of sunlight. Glimmering leaves glinted everywhere, in fact. They stretched above rooftops for as far as she could see. The wood had destroyed Ghadra’s walls, ransacked their buildings, and claimed their homes. They had taken back the revived and many more along with them.
Lux hurried past the Dark Market, past a massive tree extending from its middle, an empty stand propped and broken against a looping root. A dried raccoon paw still dangled from it.
Her eyes stung. The silence weighed, heavy. Had anyone survived?
Her home neared, and with every step, her heart beat louder. When she rounded that final corner, she didn’t immediately see the tree blocking her door, or the branch extended upwardthrough each floor until it pushed through the apothecary’s open window, the main support of the building now. Her mind could only comprehend one thing: a mussed head bent low on hunched shoulders, rocking a body as murmured cries broke the quiet.
Blonde tendrils fell across the arm beneath it to caress the cobblestones.
Lux stopped moving. She stopped thinking. She stopped feeling. And then all three things crashed over her at once, propelling her around the tree, diving into her destroyed home.
The stairs were crooked, jagged and broken, but she managed down them. The workroom. She had to reach the workroom.
But it didn’t exist anymore.
The jars, the vials, the decanters. The table, the loyal plants.The Risen. An entire portion of her home, the one place she felt alive even while encased by death, had been reduced to broken brick and smashed stone.
Lux fisted a hand to her mouth, blocking the sob, and she staggered away.
She ran to her bedroom.
She wasn’t thinking properly. It couldn’t bring back the dead. Not a body with lifeblood pooling still within it, and certainly not in the way she wanted. But it didn’t stop her from sprinting, from heaving against the overturned wardrobe, and from crying aloud at the shattered vial, silver oozing through the cracks of the floorboards.
What would she say?
What could she say?
Tears pooled in her eyes, and she hurtled back up the steps. When she swung the door this time it clattered apart from its hinges. Shaw looked up, his eyes filled with such tormentedloss,Lux couldn’t draw her next breath.
“She’s dying.”
Lux followed his gaze back to Aline, resting with closed lids and the barest of breaths. Shaw’s hand clutched a wad of once-white cloth to the wound in her chest. Every breath stained it darker.
Hot drops fell from her own lashes then. But Aline wasn’t dead. She wasn’t—
“All those vials we stole! Are there any left?”
Shaw shook his head; his hair brushed Aline’s forehead. “None. My mother saved nineteen lives poised to fall to the plague.”
Fine. That’s fine.She would think of something else. “Everything is destroyed, but we have time. Just hold onto her. I can scour homes, the markets. I can trap a howler again. If you can just give me time, I can—”
“Lux…”
“I can do it, Shaw! You brought her here for a reason, didn’t you? It’s what I was made for. Please, just—Aline! Do you hear me, you stubborn, daft girl? Don’t leave us. Don’t give in.”
“He stabbed her. He buried a blade in her chest, and I did the same to him. A tree took him. I killed my own father.” His shoulders heaved; he gathered his sister closer. “And now I’m going to lose her, too. It’s too late, Lux.”
“Twelve hours is a long time!”
“Not enough. Not enough when there’s nothing of this town left. There’s no one left.”
Already, Lux had compiled an impossible-to-obtain list in her head of every ingredient she needed. She gripped Shaw’s hand, the one holding pressure until his fingers blanched, and she gasped. It wasn’t warm.
He wasn’twarm.
Shaw’s gaze found hers, and the devastation in their depths stretched, endless and bleak. A frost made up of despair. Was this how her touch felt to others? How she looked? Her soulrecognized the darkness settling in the other. It wasn’t like the mayor’s, Morana or his Shield. This darkness was different, but no less cold. No less an abyss.
Lux yearned for the light. She couldn’t let Shaw know that agony.
