I put my head in my hands.“I fucked up.”
“Define fucked… because from where I’m sitting it looks like the opposite of that.Ignatius hasn’t reaped your soul, and you’re still breathing,” Bastien says.
“I was in the medical ward and Ignatius came in.I overheard the chancellor ripping him a new one.He did not appreciate me witnessing that.So, really, I was just trying to survive… you know?”
“Of course, you had to do whatever you could.”
“He offered me a deal.”
“Another one?”Bastien groans.
“It’s not like I had a choice,” I snap, a little too harshly.
Bastien holds up his hands in defence.“I’m not saying you did, it’s just… deals are what got you into this mess in the first place.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Midnight…” Lex says, her hand stretching to find mine.Where her warm skin meets mine, it jolts me back to reality.
“I’m sorry.I didn’t mean…” I look up at Bastien.“I’m sorry, okay.That wasn’t called for.I’m exhausted.I only have five days to save my lifeagain, and I’m still grappling with the fact I have Lucy’s magic coursing through me.And the fact she broke my heart.”
“It’s fine, you’re having a shit week…” He smiles.
“She’s having a shit year,” Lex adds.
“Make that decade,” I say.
Lex lets out a muffled snort.Bastien and I glance at her lips pressed so thin they’ve turned yellow.
She shakes her head, the pressure building.
I burst first.I can’t help it.
It’s all so ridiculous.
Bastien cracks next, and then Lex promptly follows.The three of us laughing at absolutely nothing.We reach a hysterical fever pitch.All of us bent over, eyes leaking.None of us even knowing what’s funny anymore.
Lex mumbles half an incoherent sentence about a wraith hand, and Bastien rears backward laughing so hard he falls off the arm of the chair.Which sets all of us off again.
We laugh and laugh and laugh until there’s no air left in any off our lungs.
And then the heaviest silence I’ve ever felt settles over the room.We stay like that, all of us wrapped in the weight of what’s happened and the horror of what’s coming when I finally pluck up the courage to tell them.
“She did it to get away from him…” I whisper.
“Ignatius?”Lex asks.
I nod.“He was awful to her.And she made me reap her so that she was free of the contract he created at her birth.It was what was keeping Architecti locked up.Reaping Lucy’s soul didn’t just set her free, it freed Architecti, too.”
“I’m sorry she made you do it,” Bastien says.
But I shrug.“That’s not the worst bit of it…”
Bastien and Lex share a look before turning back to me.
“What did you agree to?”Lex says.
I sigh.“Ignatius cornered me.He gave me a choice.A soul for a soul…”
