Page 155 of The Incendiary

“And?”

Another moment of silence passed. Then another. “Shera!”

“He drank the poison around his neck, Ary. Molochai must have given him your name. I was too late.”

“No,” I whispered.

“I did all I could.” On the other end of our mental pathway, Shera’s voice was darkened by defeat. “I broke the vial of blood with my teeth and got some of the blood on him, in his mouth, but… it didn’t work, and I didn’t know what else to do. I… I waited a week. A whole week just to see if he even flinched, but he didn’t move. He didn’t even breathe.”

“Take me there.”

“No.” She didn’t hesitate.

“Shera,” I warned her. My body shook with panic. “You will take me there. I need to see him. I need to see for myself⁠—”

“He’s gone. There’s nothing to see.”

“Please!” I begged her. “I can⁠—”

“You can what?” Shera retorted. “Dig him up? I’m not letting you do that to yourself. When he sent me to you months ago, I promised him I’d protect you. It’s not what he would have wanted.”

“What about what I want? What I need?” I choked on an audible cry. “I can find a way to be sure.”

“I am sure!” Shera answered, her own voice breaking. “I watched as four men found him and buried him, and then I waited for two more days after that, just to be sure. He’s deep in the ground. He is gone.”

“Shera,” I cried, aloud this time. “I can’t accept that… Please.”

“After everything he’s done… Let him rest, Ary.”

A low, dreadful whimper left my throat, to the sound of a wounded animal seconds from death.

But I had died before, and this was worse. He sacrificed himself to keep me safe.

I should have known the only one besides Molochai himself who could take him down was him.

“Shera,” I croaked out. Her name was all I could say, and barely.

“You’re going to be okay, Ary,” she promised.

That didn’t feel possible. Not right now. After Brinnea, I’d thought I had a solid grasp on who I was. Christabel’s daughter. A warrior. A queen. A woman with choices, desires, and thoughts of her own. I’d reminded myself of this repeatedly.

But no matter how ardently I’d tried to deny it to myself, all of who I’d become rested secretly on one foundation: him.

I realized I wasn’t really, truly sure of who I was if not his. Not because I wasn’t capable of more. I had proven that to be true. But because it was the one thing I wanted to be above all else.

And after four centuries of murder, his last act was selfless. This world would never remember him as anything other than a bloodthirsty savage. The demon that haunted their nightmares, generation after generation. To them, he was evil personified. To me, he was strength and sacrifice. He was warmth and safety and truth and love.

He was freedom, and now he was gone.

My foundation shattered, and so did my sanity. My head hurt so much I couldn’t think straight. Dull and sharp and never-ending all at once, pain bouncing off the walls as they closed in around me. I lay on the floor of the bathroom for a long time, curled up at the foot of the tub, convinced this was a nightmare.

I wanted to wake up. I needed to wake up, and yet, I couldn’t even sleep.

Since the night he’d saved me from that wolf in the barn, I hadn’t been willing to imagine a world without him in it. Even when I demanded he leave, when I tried to despise him, when I couldn’t make sense of anything I felt, I hadn’t considered the possibility. A world without him wasn’t a world I wanted to know. I couldn’t bear the gaping emptiness the thought left in me.

Then again, what right did I have to not bear it? His hands had taken the lives of so many of my people. I was sure their families wanted to wake up from their own nightmares, but they never got to. Why should I get that privilege?

I mourned the man that killed them. I mourned them, too.