Although he was still covered in blood and the debris of the cristala tower, his face was no longer the bloody pulp it’d been a minute ago. No—his features were exactly as she remembered them from before the tower collapsed, exactly as she remembered them when she’d seen him for the first time in that alley.
Exactly the same as when she’d told him she loved him.
A laugh croaked through her wobbling lips as she threw herself on top of him, holding him so tightly that she could hear his heart beating in her ear.
He was breathing. He wasbreathing. She clung to the sound, savoring every beat and every breath, as she held onto him, her anchor in her storm, and sobbed into his shirt.
Darien’s arms wrapped around her, pressing her harder against him. “I feel like I got hit by a truck.” The rumble of his voice in her ear was a sound she would never forget.
“You were dead!” she gasped against his tear-damp neck. “Youdied.”
“Dead?” he repeated. His voice was thick. “I’m not dead, baby girl. Just a little sore is all.” A hand stroked her back, igniting the fire within her that had very nearly gone out. “You saved my life.”
Loren pulled back to look at him, to touch him. “You left me,” she said, every word a strangled gasp.“You left me.”
Darien’s expression lined with concern. “I’ll never leave you, Loren,” he said, brushing aside a strand of hair clinging to her cheek. “I’m yours to keep.” It was his turn to gather her face into his hands as he repeated,“I am yours to keep.”
He noticed it, then: the hollow silence. Slowly, still cupping her face, he looked out at the wreckage of the city, finally seeing it for the first time.
Darien’s hand trembled as he reached up to readjust his earpiece, flicking it on.
When he spoke, the words were nearly inaudible. “Does anyone copy?”
Loren pushed up from the ground. Sickness spread through her as she realized that, although she’d managed to bring Darien back, she couldn’t say the same for anyone else.
The city was destroyed, the population obliterated.
And they were horribly, and utterly, alone.
—
Darien felt like puking as he said, again and again into the speaker, “Is anybody there?” The words were tense, his every breath coming so fast he swore he was going to pass out.“Is anybody there?”Bile burned his tongue.
But he choked it down, repeating those same words, again and again and again.
“Do you copy?” Nothing.
“Do you copy?”Silence.
And then Loren took off through the city, hurtling over the rubble at a speed Darien had never seen her move before.
He pushed himself up off the ground, nearly tripping in the wreckage strewn about what was left of the streets he’d walked a thousand times.
“Loren!” he called, grunting as he stumbled over chunks of stone and fallen streetlamps. Over dismembered bodies and burning car bumpers and tires. Clumps of ash floated on the wind, settling upon his shoulders and in his hair.“Loren!”
She didn’t slow until she got to the Avenue of the Scarlet Star.
To what remained of it.
The entire road had been razed to the ground. The Mortar and Pestle was nothing but a husk, the buildings lining it and the other side of the avenue nothing but piles of broken bricks. All those plants had been singed into nothing. Every trace of the job she’d loved with her whole heart—gone. Mordred and Penny—
Gone.
There was nothing left now for them to remember the avenue by, nothing except the bracelet Loren still wore around her wrist, the charm of the apothecary peeking out from beneath a scrap of magic-enhanced leather. The real thing was no more than an echo of the mind, a footprint on the heart, both of which would fade too quickly with the passing of time.
Loren sank to her knees on the ground before the giant sundial that spanned the width of the avenue. The marble that was struck through with veins of gold was cracked and crumbling now, like everything else in Angelthene. Broken. Never to be the same again.
Darien didn’t say anything as he came up behind where she knelt. Charred remnants of everyday life—the Daystar paper, coffee mugs, shattered potion bottles, appliances, pots and utensils—were strewn about. He didn’t have the words; there was nothing he could say that would help. Nothing that would change this.
