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“And you expect me to go with you? To turn my back on my friends and lie down in your clinic, so you can make me into the perfect wife?” I ask.
“Wife?” Amie mumbles, peeking from behind Cormac.
“Cormac and I are engaged, or didn’t he tell you? Like he didn’t tell you what he did to our mother? Our father?” I ask, but my voice is too cold and I regret speaking so cruelly to her. Amie’s as much a victim of Cormac as any of us.
“Come, come, darling,” Cormac says. “I have a proposal that will be more to your liking. Your life for hers. If you come with me, she can stay with your friends.”
Amie stares at him, confused and hurt, but nothing about his proposition surprises me. Using Amie was always part of his endgame.
“And them?” I ask, gesturing to my friends. “They can go?”
“All of them, even your pitiful scientist. He’s no good without you,” Cormac says. So he knows. “Good move not telling Kincaid the truth that Einstein is incapable of completing the binding without you—that you were the true Whorl the whole time.”
“I am getting smarter,” I say absently. I don’t trust Cormac to release them, but this isn’t just about my choice anymore.
“I’ll let her go, too, and you’ll return with me. I’ve seen the light, Adelice,” Cormac says. “I’m a changed man. Maybe becoming prime minister has done that. We’ll sever the worlds. We have his notes. I’m not unreasonable. You come back to my world and I’ll give them their own. We need you there, Adelice. None of them can do this, and in exchange, I won’t touch you.”
It’s a honeyed promise, coated in something sweet to make it palatable, but I taste its bitterness, the venom he’s trying to hide. I merely nod in agreement.
“Adelice!” Erik calls from behind me, and I turn to look at him. He’s watched this without a word until now, and his brother stands beside him looking set and determined. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Take her,” I cry, pushing Amie toward him. She’s sobbing, and I want to reassure her, but how can I after what she’s seen?
Erik’s face sinks and he nods. One last promise he’ll make to me for a lifetime of promises we’ll never keep.
“I’ll come with you, Cormac, and if you so much as try to alter my hair, I will rip you in half,” I warn him in a low voice.
Cormac’s face contorts. He knows I can do it. He’s seen it with his own eyes. It doesn’t ensure my safety. It merely raises the stakes of our cat-and-mouse game. And I know something he doesn’t. Something that could change everything. If it’s true and Amie has been training, our small resistance will have everything it needs, save one thing. One thing I can give them: time.
Cormac offers his arm and I take it tentatively, not daring to cast one more look over my shoulder at what I’m leaving behind—a life I’ll lose forever.
A bullet whistles overhead, cracking through the solemn moment, and I realize with horror it’s come from behind me. I’m simultaneously furious and terrified. Enough blood has been spilled here today.
“Fool!” Cormac yells as his guards rush toward us. “She already lost one father to inane valor.”
Dante. The wild card, who never quite wanted me, didn’t know what to do with me, is fighting for me now. I whip toward them and see guns raised, but they can’t take on all these men. Valery is helping Albert to safety, but Amie is nowhere to be seen. I twirl, trying to find her, but she’s hidden from my sight, lost in the chaos of drawn weapons and gunfire. I choose to believe she has fled with Albert and Valery, disappeared into the night, beyond my vision—because I have one last thing to do.
I think of the house crumbling behind them, the severed time strands. Albert wanted me to remember, to look at this world for what it was, and I had. I unwound Kincaid but I studied everything first and I’m able to call it forth now as rifles click into place and fingers press down on triggers, and with a great and sudden fury, I pull against the world around me. This conflict won’t be solved with guns, and I’d rather go with Cormac than watch the life seep from another friend, the only family I have left. I can stop the bloodshed with a single choice. My fingers find the right strand, long and wild, a lifeti
me of possibilities and it cracks against Earth, mutilating what lies in its wake, forming a long barrier of protection. I turn and instantly warp another spot and another, until I’ve surrounded us in protection. They can’t reach me, but Cormac’s men can’t shoot them.
Their cries are muffled, and I see the look on Dante’s face. Grim, but determined, and he waves for the rest of them to flee as I build my own cage. The only way to protect those I love is to cage myself with the Guild. I’m as dangerous to them as these men with guns.
Erik doesn’t run with the others, he walks forward and places his hand on the rift between us. He can’t reach through, and I can’t touch him, but I let my hand rest there for a moment. One final goodbye.
“Go!” I choke at the words, and even if he can’t hear them, I know he understands. He doesn’t move, not even to breathe.
“I can’t.” The words are lost in the wind or muffled by the rift, but I see them.
And so I whisper back, carefully articulating each word, so that he understands: “‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’”
He bites his lip and I see the desperation in his eyes, but then Jost comes and pulls Erik away. Jost pushes Erik away from the cage of light and time I’ve created.
Jost turns toward me, and although his words are lost to the warp between us, I understand them. “Find her.”
I give him a determined nod. Somehow I will protect Sebrina for him.
He raises his hand and places his fist over his heart before he turns away from me—perhaps forever.
