But Halla had fallen to her knees. Her robe spilled around her like melting flesh as the spell she’d performed—the death spell—finally came for its due. She arched; her hands flew to her eyes.
I kept my attention on Eusia. “Do you recall… Rohana’s prophecy?” I coughed and sucked in a shallow breath. “There is a bond… cut, cut, cut…” The words slurred, but I thought of the bonds I’d severed. “Three cuts. My bond with Theo. Your bond with my mother.” I pulled in a painful, shallow breath. “And now… ours.”
To the side of the pool, Halla writhed and whimpered in a thready voice. The skin around her eyes was a bright, angry red, and still she dragged herself closer to me, as if she could stop what was already done.
I held Eusia’s gaze as she tried to get closer, arms scraping over the floor, mouth in an awful grimace. She was so small, so horrid, that I wanted to flinch at the sight of her raving and clambering toward me, but I didn’t move.
There was nothing more to fear.
I watched her fight as the draught sliced through me. My eyes and lips felt sticky with the first purge of black blood. Just like last time, the draught thickened and spread. It forced its way to the spot in my stomach where our bond resided. Peace flowed alongside the choking pain because I was certain it was working. It was ripping the bond we shared apart at its seams, and if it didn’t remove her from my blood entirely… I would soon be gone.
A breath fell through my lips. My tensed muscles eased, easing me into the floor.
As Eusia mumbled a string of begging words, she gave a sudden jolt. Those thick white veins lifted her out of the water, then dropped her back in, as if flinching in discomfort. “Halla… who…” Eusia’s face contorted. “Whom did you curse?”
Halla huddled against the wall, her fingers wound into her hair at the scalp. I knew how it burned. “I cursed—” Her voice was still frayed from the spell. She coughed. “My mother.”
I watched the following moments in disjointed shock. A deep howling cry rose up from Eusia’s hollow chest. Thudding, yelling from up above. Eusia squirmed and splashed in the water as if she tried to grasp for some invisible tether. Her sobs were horrific before she went suddenly rigid. Then she went limp. Her face, too, pulled taut, then slackened.
Halla scrambled toward her, the wordnospilling from her mouth again and again.
Just before she reached Eusia’s side, the orb light above us winked out.
Halla’s scream was a nightmarish echo in the dark.
In my chest, the severing draught spread further. There was a new emptiness in my stomach. Then came that familiar sensation of drowning—the burn, the panic.
A crash. Thuds from up above again. Shouts. Pain and muck in my throat.
“Imogen!”
My consciousness churned like black water.Theodore. I was grateful to hear his voice once more. A sweet memory playing through my mind.
I closed my eyes. Mingled with Halla’s cries, I heard splashing. More crashing and drumming and then there was a beam of light against my eyelids.
Like the sun,I thought, despite the way I shook with cold.
“Immy.”
He sounded so close. I forced my eyes open, but I could see hardly anything at all. The blurred shape of Halla cradling Eusia’s small, finned body. Debris rained down from above them.
Everything was fading, but I fought, I fought to look. The light in the pool chamber was growing inexplicably brighter, its rays reaching down into the darkness like a hand. With the last of my strength, I forced my gaze to it, up, up.
Even brimming with poison, on the brink of consciousness, I knew the shape of him. He was just a shadow outlined by flickering torchlight, and his voice was naught but a pained rasp. Sounds were going soft, but he spoke my name again. How grateful I was, for even as the whole world slipped away, he’d manage to make me feel a spark of bright, eternal hope.
38
Imogen
I floated over the cool, winking sea. Eyes shut, body strong. My face was to the sun and my hair floated around me in a wide, dark halo. Below me, the water was clear—empty. Down to the seafloor, I could not tether my power to anything at all but the sea itself.
As it should be,I thought.Right.
I opened my eyes and marveled at the bright azure sky. I let my arms float out at my sides, let the surface cradle and rock me. By now, I knew the difference between a vision and a dream, and this was the latter. The sky was too lucent; the sea too untroubled. My body too hale.
That didn’t keep me from taking in all that I could of the water’s touch, the day’s warmth, the soft curl of the wind over my wet skin. I reveled in it, savored it like it was a final, desperate farewell shared with a parting lover.
Soon the grip of reality would firm its hold.
