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“Sunny.” I crawled across the floor, cutting my palms open on razor-sharp shards of rock and metal. When I touched her face, my blood left a streak over her too-white skin.
She was looking at me, but I wasn’t sure she actually saw me.
I’d never seen anyone that white before except Manea.
This was skin the color of death.
A scream caught in my throat and emerged as a strangled gulp. “Oh, Sunny, it’s going to be okay, okay? We can fix this.”
“You’re okay, right?” Her free hand gripped mine and squeezed. The pressure was so light I barely felt it.
“I’m okay.” I wasn’t. I never would be again. Part of me was dying with each breath she took, knowing it was one breath closer to the last. I knew I was crying because scalding tears were flowing down my cheeks, but I didn’t bother wiping them away.
“Okay. You’re okay,” she repeated. Her grip loosened. “It hurts,” she admitted.
“I know, sweetie.”
“I don’t want it to hurt.” Now she was crying, and with each tear my heart broke. “Is Sawyer okay?”
I fought against a sob. “Yeah, Sun. She’s fine. You took good care of her.” I stroked my sister’s dirty blonde hair, leaving behind bloody-red highlights in my wake.
Then Prescott was with me suddenly, crouching beside me.
“No.” I shook my head violently, tugging Sunny’s head onto my lap. The blood on the floor around her was soaking into my pants. Even with my damaged hearing I knew her breaths were coming out in rattles.
“It hurts so much,” she breathed.
Prescott put a hand on my shoulder. “Tallulah.”
“No.” I looked down at my sister’s ashen skin, the fading shine in her eyes, and I knew what the right thing to do was, but the right thing meant saying goodbye, and that made it impossible.
I turned to him, and he wore an expression I’d never seen on his face before.
Pity.
“Take me instead,” I pleaded.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Please. Please.” I took his hand and put it against my forehead, pressing his fingers against my feverish skin. “Take me and leave her.”
“I can’t undo this.” He touched my face gently but left me unharmed. “But I can make the pain stop.”
I choked on my tears and went back to stroking Sunny’s hair.
“No,” I whispered again.
“Lula,” she said. “I’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.”
I started to bawl then. Body-shaking, desperate yowls of grief. My chest shook, my limbs trembled, and finally I knew that if I kept her here any longer, it was only for me. “Okay,” I repeated. “Okay.”
Prescott reached past me and gently placed his hand on Sunny’s cheek. She smiled up at him, her beauty staggering even in that final moment, and then she was gone.
One minute she was Sunny, still alive however fleetingly, and the next she was just the beautiful shell that had housed my sister for twenty-seven years.
She was dead.
I would never be whole again.
