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23
ADDIE
Well,shit.
Where was I?
I wasn’t falling, but I wasn’t standing either. It felt like…floating. I tried to look around but there was nothing. It wasn’t darkness, but it wasn’t light, either.
Fuck.
Was I dead?
I waited for panic to rush up on me and consume my thoughts, but it never came. I was too tired to panic. All of these fights had taken everything out of me. The void of death welcomed me and promised a restful sleep. It offered me a last look at my life, but that was an unfinished story.
Determination hardened my core. I gritted my non-existent teeth—it was more of a mindset than a physical feeling—bear with me in thisnothingness. I would crawl my way out of the grave if I had to.
That meant rising as an undead creature. Was I willing to do that? I wanted to live alongside Maddox, but not as a zombie. What I truly wanted waslife. I’d been surrounded by death for as long as I could remember. I was truly sick of it.
I never asked for any of this. I didn’t ask for the power to kill or reanimate. I didn’t ask to have the power of fate in my own hands. If I could have, I would have gone back and given it all up. My power meant nothing to me if I couldn’t live and enjoy the time that I had left.
My fate thread flickered with the blue light of my arcana. It reminded me of a cartoon god, his fire burning otherworldly-blue. I reached out for my own thread and felt fate shudder in response. If I wanted, I could trace it back and change the past. I could make it so that I never had this power in the first place.
However, that meant that my path would never cross with Maddox’s. We would never stop Bastien from killing. We wouldn’t be there when Vince tore a hole in reality. And we wouldn’t be there to stop Fenrir after his escape.
These were duties that I did not want. What I truly wanted was a cozy home that smelled of freshly brewed tea and wolf fur. I wanted to stand out beneath the stars in the middle of the night and feel the heat of Maddox’s body behind me.
I couldn’t have any of that if I didn’t overcome every obstacle in my path. That was the reward, and I would be damned if anyone took that away from me right now.
Maddox’s hand closed around mine. His soul was here with me. He’d made the promise that he would find me no matter where I went, and I trusted him to uphold that promise. He had so many times before. This time, I would crawl back to him, though.
Maddox floated above me. He tugged my hand as if directing me upward. That had to be the way out of here.
Even in death, I commanded control of my arcana. I raised it like a vast ocean under me and used it to lift myself up out of the void. The feeling of floating quickly turned into a feeling offlyingas I shot up.
I didn’t know what awaited me at the top, but there had to be something, or else Maddox wouldn’t have told me to go here. A force pushed from the bottom. It was that of a soul, a familiar one.
Connor was here, in the sea of my arcana. As was Jaden. Both pushed, helping me zoom towards the bright light far above.
I had a moment to wonder what would happen. Fenrir had devoured me. That meant I wouldn’t have a body…
Oh, but that also told me where I was. I wasn’t in the void of death. I was in the vast wasteland of Fenrir’s hunger—inside Fenrir. This wasn’t death or the end or anything like that. Like Maddox said, it was a kind of transmutation. Fenrir turned matter into energy. I was energy right now. I just had to figure out how to turn myself back into matter.
It seemed like a wild concept, but I quickly realized that’s what I always did. Maddox’s and Fenrir’s abilities made energy of matter while I made matter out of energy. That was what I did when I took the life force from one thing and gave it to another so that it could reform.
Now…I just had to do that to myself?
Yeah, it seemed weird even to me. I didn’t like the idea of what I had to do, but there was no getting around this part. I had to shove my energy together and press it into an Addie-shaped mold since there was no body to feed my energy into.
This had to be the strangest thing I’d ever done, hands down. Maddox floated alongside me the whole time. Whenever my hand slipped, his soul picked up the slack. Together, we created a shape that roughly resembled me.
Now, I just had to shove the Addie-puppet out of Fenrir. I assumed that the bright light far above was the exit. It could be an afterlife, but even that would buy me some time to contact Maddox and summon him to me.
Right?
Was that how any of this worked? I had no idea. Every time something happened, I was forced to wing it and hope for the best. This would be way easier if I had a handbook. I was tempted to spend the rest of my mortal life working on one. I would title it:
Death is a Pain in my Ass; the Reaper’s Manual.
