My head whips up.
The ground gives way.
She plummets.
A burst of undiluted fear widens Rai’s eyes and electrifies me from within. I lurch forward, arm whipping out, snatching thin air.
Time seems to slow, her hair a storm around her face, bloody hand reaching for me—a desperate, hopeless plea. Her terrified gaze never leaves mine as her mouth opens in a tortured scream.
Her body folds, arms outstretched.
There’s a splash, and for a split second, her tragic stare spears through me, resigned to her fate …
Then she’s gone.
* * *
Iopen my eyes to find myself reaching through the grass, muscles bunched like I’m preparing to jump through the ages and fail all over again, that mournful ache in my gut just as gnashing as it’s ever been.
Groaning, I roll, squinting at the shafts of light piercing the dense canopy, the air warmer.
Thicker.
How long has it been this time?
I paw at my chest, feeling around the edges of the sore, sticky wound that’s not healing fast enough, then snatch the soft bladder hanging from the string around my neck. Easing onto my knees, I lean back as I pop the cork and tip my head like I’m exposing my throat to the very contents of this fucking thing. I suspend the nozzle over my mouth and wait for her to drip.
I killed my mother …
Orlaith’s words attack me as she hits my tongue in a cold splat, and I let her confession spoil every other inch of my body that’s not weeping rot.
She passed me those words like they were a bloody weapon she’d first used to stab herself. If she’d given me time to speak, I would have told her the truth. Would have given her another reason to plunge that talon through my chest, confessing it wasmewho stilled her mother’s heart.
Me.
I close my mouth around the crackling ember ofher—unable to stop myself from drawing a breath through my nose and savoring her taste …
She’s a swirling prism of color and light tingling my taste buds. She’s amber warmed by a beam of sun, leaking down the side of a pine tree and heaping in the soil, begging me to extinguish her with a heady gulp.
She’s a flower, so fresh and full of life—crushed between my teeth as I swallow. She’s a sun in my throat, sinking low, igniting me from the inside out.
She’s everything I love.
Everything I hate.
The hairs on my arms and legs stand on end as she calms every bristled cell; the sharp edges threatening to gouge through my flesh. She soothes the gnashing teeth and the serrated edges that never dull.
That restless beast beneath my skin rumbles—a deep, satiated sound as my blood begins to boil, making me want to rip out my veins. That same heat pools in the tips of my fingers, electricity crackling through my muscles, making them twitch and tighten.
Making my bindschew.
I tip my head and laugh at the sky.
“You fucked up,” I mutter as my senses hone, and I become terribly aware of every root beneath the soil, the pulse of energy slugging through them. Of the air rushing past me like a blown breath I could choke or feed. Of the water barreling through the chasm below, alive with heaving might I can feel thrashing through my arteries.
And below the earth, beneath the roots and the rocks, beneath the layers of death and decay and bones and long-forgotten secrets …
Obsidian.
