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Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tamsin
The pain is unbearable.
I am somewhere black and empty. An endless, terrifying stretch of nothing, a void. Empty except for the faces of those I’ve wronged.
My parents. Luciana. Blake.
“We’d still be alive if it wasn’t for you,” my mother hisses, her face twisted and burned from the wreckage of the accident.
My father’s face looms right in front of mine, his breath hot on my cheeks. “If you hadn’t been off screwing your boyfriend, you could have saved us.”
“Your magic failed. You failed.” My mother spits on me. “You are pathetic. Your lack of power disgusts me.”
Luciana is next on the carousel of shame and horror. “I was only fourteen, and you abandoned me the day our parents were put in the ground. Never came back home once in twenty years.”
She swoops in like a specter, except she’s orange and has spikes all over her body. “I was turned into a demon because of you. I dreamed of Hell for weeks. Do you know what that’s like? What it feels like to have your flesh burned off, over and over and over again?”
And then Blake. “You tore my heart into pieces, Tamsin. I suffered for years. And then you came back and ripped me open again. Only to use me for sex whenever your magic gets out of control. I could never love someone like you. Never.”
I don’t know how long the torture has been going on. It seems an eternity has passed. Vaguely, in some far corner of my mind, I remember a hospital, and snow falling on an old city. But I can’t recall what those images mean, or when I might have seen them. I don’t know anything beyond the dark and the guilt. Heavier than a mountain, heavier than the whole universe.
I’m a terrible person. I deserve this.
In the back of my mind, the snow keeps falling. It’s falling all around me, where I’m lying in a fetal position in the endless darkness. It starts to prick against my skin, so cold it burns for a moment before it melts off. For a long time, it seems this is just an addition to my torment. I try to keep my eyes closed as my parents and Luciana and Blake hover before me, repeating their grievances.
I realize the snow fall is increasing, and I open my eyes a moment to watch it drift down. In the distance, bright against the endless black, I see a spot of red. It’s a tower, I realize. A red-roofed tower.
As I watch it, a house materializes around the tower. It’s familiar to me, but I don’t remember why. I just know that it makes me happy. An emotion that feels very odd after this eternity of grief and guilt.
Then I feel something else. A warmth, wrapping around me. Arms, strong and sturdy, followed by lips pressing against mine. A kiss full of magic and promise. Soft words ring in my head. “You are my home, Tamsin MacPherson.”
Who had said that to me? Where is that voice even coming from?
Like it had with the tower and then the house, images begin to appear before me in the dark. A walled garden, covered in ice and snow. Frozen flowers. The golden lights of a cityscape. And then there is a man.
He has dark hair and pale skin and eyes the blue of lapis or a deep mountain lake. Eyes that turn the yellow of a harvest moon when his magic flows through him. The eyes of a wolf. He has the voice of a wolf, too, deep and smooth with a hint of a growl, even when he’s content.
Blake.
I remember now.
There’s a howl and a rush of wind and the specter of Blake appears before me. “You broke me, Tamsin. Shunned me. Abandoned me. I could never love you.”
I squeeze my eyes shut again and shake my head. “No.”
“Yes. It’s true. You used me and I’ve used you. I’m just getting revenge, so I can break your heart like you broke mine. I have no intention of getting back together with you.” He snarls in my face. “The sex meant nothing. It’s just payback.”
A shiver moves through my core, but those pricks of snow won’t let me slip away again. Won’t let me fall all the way into the black abyss. I peek through my eyelids, and I can still see the stone house and the walled garden. And as soon as I see them, I feel Blake’s arms around me again, his lips on mine, his magic merging with mine.
“No,” I say again, more firmly this time.
Blake loves me. I’d broken his heart, that much is true. I’d broken mine, too. Young, stupid, and grieving the loss of my parents. I shouldn’t have run away. I owe him and Luciana for taking the coward’s path and ignoring my pain all these years. And I’ll find a way to make it up to them.
But first I have to forgive myself.
“I will never love you,” the phantom Blake whispers in my ear.
