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“Viola, no!” Esta screamed when she realized what was happening. “Please. No. You can’t do this. You have to fight him.”
“Oh, she is. For what little good it will do her.” Nibsy smiled then, a slow, satisfied curve of his thin lips. “You didn’t really think I’d take the chance of letting him shoot me?”
“Please, Viola.” Tears clouded Esta’s vision as she watched Harte struggle against Viola’s power. His face was draining of color, but the gun was still in his hand. He struggled to lift it, his arm shaking as he took aim.
Nibsy only laughed, but when the shot went off, his laughter died as his body lurched. He staggered forward.
“No,” Esta said as Nibsy clutched his chest like his fingers alone could keep the blood in his body.
“No,” she said again, waiting for what she knew would come next. She’d felt time tear her apart before, that horrifying feeling of being unmade.
Nibsy looked up at her, but Esta couldn’t see his eyes past the glare of the light glinting off his glasses to tell whether it was surprise or fear that colored his expression. And then he fell to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
The cold energy around her drained away, and she felt herself flying back together. She lunged for Harte just in time for him to lurch upward, gasping for air.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she told him through her tears, because what he’d done couldn’t be taken back. She didn’t know how long she had before time would take what it was owed. “I told you not to kill him.”
“He didn’t.”
Esta froze at the voice, her heart thundering in her ears as she turned to see an impossibility step out of the shadows of the roof. He wore a murderous expression, and in one hand, he held a gun.
Dolph Saunders glared down at Nibsy’s body. “That shot has always belonged to me.”
ONE HUNDRED TIMES OVER
Jianyu thought he knew what it meant to be trapped. How many times before had he felt imprisoned—by his own poor choices, by this jail of a city, by fate itself? But none of those struggles had prepared him for what it would mean to be truly controlled. When he felt the mark on his back flare and his will recede, when he felt Nibsy Lorcan hold his every possibility through the power in the ring, he understood what desperation truly meant.
Esta and Darrigan had been trapped in the boundary of the sigils, and he could do nothing to free them. Struggle though he might, he could not fight against the hold Nibsy had on him. There was a terrible roaring in his ears, and his back had begun to burn and blister with the effort of fighting the compulsion of the mark, but it was no good.
This hell was what the future would be if Nibsy took Esta’s magic, if he used it to control the Book. And there was nothing Jianyu could do to stop it.
When the shot rang out, he barely heard it. At first he did not know what it meant. But as Nibsy stumbled and fell, the power coursing through the mark went warm and then dead. The leash that had been holding him snapped, and he fell back with the sudden absence of its pressure. In the space between him and Viola, Esta rushed to Darrigan, and from the shadows of the roof stepped a ghost.
Not a ghost, Jianyu realized.
Dolph Saunders was dead. For months now, he had believed that Dolph was dead. But… there had been no body. No proof except Nibsy Lorcan’s word.
They had all believed that word. Jianyu had believed, because he could not have imagined a world in which Dolph Saunders allowed Nibsy to take all that he had built and bend it to breaking. But this was no ghost, for there was no spirit that killed with a gun. His skin was perhaps more colorless than it had been before, and his cheeks were sunken from the weight he had lost, but with the shock of white in his hair and the icy blue of his eyes, there was no mistaking that his friend was alive.
Dolph threw the gun aside as he limped to where Nibsy lay. The boy’s body was motionless. No breath stirred in his chest, and even from that distance, it was clear that his magic was dead. The look in Dolph’s eyes was as cold and as dangerous as the Brink itself as he glared down at the boy. Then he crouched and took the silver gorgon from his hand.
As he turned the piece over in his hand, Dolph’s expression was unfathomable, a mixture of fury and regret, of loss and love. After the length of a heartbeat, he tucked it into his coat and stood.
Before Jianyu could gather his wits, Viola had already launched herself across the distance. She stopped short, just before she reached Dolph.
“Is it really you?” she whispered, slowly lifting her hand as though to touch him.
Dolph lifted a single brow. “Disappointed?” he asked wryly. But Jianyu could hear the exhaustion and the worry in his tone.
She smacked him. “Where have you been?” Viola demanded. “We thought you were dead. Nibsy told us you were dead.” She smacked him again, and Dolph allowed it, taking the punishment as his due.
“I’m sorry, Vee,” he told her once her fury was spent. “If there had been any other way—”
She threw her arms around him then, silencing his excuses. “You idiot.”
Dolph seemed to melt into her embrace. Slowly, his arms came around her. “It’s good to see you, too.”
She drew back from him again. “You didn’t need to wait so long, you know,” she said tartly. “You didn’t have to let him get so far.”
