I crane around.
Shit.
“Thalia,” I whisper.Her eyes glimmer as violent as the wails circling us.Mortem trembles beside me.
Thalia is more than a dozen floors above me but it’s still far, far too close.
“I think it’s time we had a new introduction,” she says.“My name is Interitus.”
7
Midnight
Iwake in the medical ward.The heady concoction of herbs, frazzled magic and neurotic nurses fills my nose.My mind is foggy, like I dreamt all night and should remember, but I don’t.My thoughts are thick and glued to the inside of my skull, no longer pliable or malleable.
It’s clean and bright in here.A sharp contrast to the perpetual heaviness outside.Through the window, the campus is shrouded in a dingy mist.Even the bricks shaded by dark ivy on the next building are hard to see from here.
This room is startling with its fluorescent lighting and white walls.I wince against the glare and roll over in bed.
Lucy.
A sharp lance stabs at my ribs.
Now the Veil is closed, the fact she’s gone hits me so hard, I curl my knees into my chest and roar.My cries come so thick and fast I drown in them and soak my pillow.The sadness melts and reforms hotter and angrier.I writhe and kick in the sheets, my fists balled.Nails cut into my palms.The pain doesn’t bring her back and it doesn’t erase what she did.I kick the bed railing but all it does is make a shooting pain blaze up my foot.
Nothing stops the squeezing in my chest, the suffocation.
Can’t breathe.
There’s no oxygen in here.I frantically pluck and yank at my nightgown.It rips in several places.I must look like a crazed woman half cut on a cocktail of magical drugs.
I don’t care.
My body burns with a deep, bone-aching devastation.
Feet pad into the room.“She’s awake,” Bastien says.“Oh… oh shit, Lex…?”
She appears at his side.They both stand there, soft eyes and downward smiles.
“She m—made me reap her,” I say.
Bastien glances at Lex and then strides over to the bed, climbing in at my back and tugging me to his chest.Lex climbs in the other side and snuggles into my front.
There’s nothing either of them can say.They hold me and let me cry and seethe and rant and whimper and curse until there’s nothing left but the ruins of my heart and an exhaustion that wracks my entire body.
What am I supposed to feel?I was in love with her, and she made me take her life when I would have laid mine down for her.
How could she do that to me?
“She gave me her magic—that only happens when a demon loves a mortal,” I breath into Lex’s braids.
Bastien’s fingers stroke down my arm in a soothing motion, so I continue.
“But if she loved me, why would she make me do that to her?”My lids grow heavy, my blinks longer.
“She had to have a reason,” Lex says, snuggling closer to me.
“It must have been the only way,” Bastien says.
