“I want to go back,” he said softly. It was barely above a whisper, but his voice echoed through the expanse as if he had shouted it. He took in a heaving breath and scrambled to his feet. “I want to go back!”
He turned from the way Soleil had gone and stumbled in the opposite direction, repeating it to himself.I want to go back. I want to go back.
A pinprick of darkness appeared on the distant horizon. He ran toward it, and it swallowed him up until the light was gone.
When his vision cleared, Kade was the first thing he saw. His red-rimmed, glassy eyes were wide with shock, mouth hanging half-open as Florian stared at him. But relief flooded Florian at the sight—it meant he really had gone back. He really was back in the Summer Court.
He smiled, and Kade’s face crumpled as tears spilled from his eyes. Before Florian could speak, Kade fell to his knees—Florian stumbled down with him, realizing that Kade had been holding him up.
“You’re alive,” Kade gasped, voice breaking as he sobbed. “You’re alive, you’realive.”
“I’m—I’m alive,” Florian said. His own voice was shaking, and he realized he had started to tear up, too. “I’m okay. I told you everything would be okay.”
“You were dead,” Kade wept, burying his face in Florian’s lap, hands clinging desperately to Florian’s torso as if afraid that he might vanish again at any moment. “You were dead, Florian, and I—I didn’t know what to do.” His words devolved into wordless cries. Florian’s chest constricted with pain and guilt. Even at his most emotional, he had never seen Kade like this.
Unsure of what else to do, he clung back to Kade, curling over him and pressing kisses to his tear-stained face.
“Florian, you asshole,” Rune’s shaking voice came from behind him, and he looked up to see her and Koji coming up to them. She sat and wrapped one arm around his shoulders, squeezing as she pressed her head against the back of his shoulder. “I was fucking crying because of you. I kicked the shit out of the wall, and I’m pretty sure I broke my foot, and it’s your fault.”
He laughed weakly, smiling. “I’ll fix it, I promise.”
Koji all but collapsed beside them as well, placing a hand on Florian’s arm and gripping him tightly, as if afraid he might be a ghost. His face looked ashen and bewildered. He said nothing, but managed a tremulous smile when Florian looked at him.
“I’m sorry I scared you guys,” Florian said, still rubbing Kade’s back but lifting one hand to wipe his eyes. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, so I’m sorry.”
“You didn’tknow?” Rune repeated incredulously. “You stabbed yourself in the fucking chest! And you didn’t know what would happen?”
He laughed nervously. “Well, when you put it that way...”
“That was really dangerous, Florian,” Koji managed, his voice strained.
“I thought you knew that was what you needed to do and just lied to keep us from talking you out of it,” Rune continued. Despite the anger tinging her voice, she squeezed Florian harder—although since her arm was around his shoulders, it felt like she was strangling him, in a sisterly sort of way.
“Not at all,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just when I was standing there with her... It didn’t make any sense. And from the way she looked at me... I don’t know. It’s like it all clicked into place all at once. But I didn’t know before then.”
He could hear Rune breathing shakily against his back. Koji remained silent, looking just as stunned. Kade had seemed to mostly stop crying now, but was still clinging to Florian with his head buried in his lap.
They had been devastated, he thought. How could he have even considered not coming back to them—to this? Guilt made his eyes sting with tears, but he blinked them away.
“But it let me talk to her. To Soleil,” he continued, focusing on his words so he wouldn’t start to cry all over again. “She told meit worked, and it released her and Thaddeus. I was with them, and I saw them go. But I could come back.”
But then his memory of everything Soleil had told him struck him all over again, making his eyes burn as his skin went cold. He fell silent, trying to formulate what he would say now.
Kade slowly pushed himself up until he was sitting cross-legged in front of Florian, knees touching and their hands entangled between them. Rune released her grip on his shoulders, then they were all sitting in a tight circle beside each other.
“Your—Your eye,” Kade said softly, loosening his grip with one hand to lightly brush against Florian’s left temple. “What happened?”
“My eye?” Florian asked, frowning. He touched his eyelid. It didn’t feel any different. “What’s wrong with my eye?”
“It’s blue,” Kade said. “Almost white. Does it hurt?”
Florian couldn’t bring himself to respond right away. Soleil’s eyes were a pale, pale blue—almost white. When she had cradled his head in her hands, her fingers had brushed over his left cheekbone. Maybe it had already changed then.
That was it, he thought: the physical manifestation of their exchange, the symbol of Florian taking her place. He had to tell them now.
“Does it hurt?” Kade repeated, sounding more concerned now as tears filled Florian’s eyes. He shook his head, wiping them away.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “But there’s something else. Something else happened.”
