AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The quiet tears won’t stop, but even more noticeable is the way I’m trembling. Elias buries his face into my hair, cradling my head as he rests his own against the top of mine. The quiet anguish in his expression only breaks my heart even more.
I don’t know how long we stay like that. It feels like an embarrassingly long time before I finally cry it all out. But eventually, I fall quiet, still shivering, but my breathing evens at last. Elias doesn’t let go of me, and I’m glad about that.
He murmurs my name, gently stroking a hand through my hair.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, voice hoarse.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
It almost scares me even more. Now I’m done crying, I just feel empty.Where do we go from here?
“Elias… did you mean it? When you told me to leave?”
His grip on me tightens, and there’s a pause before he replies. “No. It might have been better for you if you did, but I never wanted it.”
I didn’t realize just how much I needed to hear that. The relief threatens to push me right back into crying again.
Elias hesitates even longer, his guilt only growing worse instead of better. It’s obvious from the look in his eyes how bitterly torn he is.
“Shannon,” he begins, voice dangerously quiet. “About the injury.”
“I’m okay. Caelan fixed it.”
“No, dear. It’s not that simple.”
A chill of fear curls in my gut. After all, what do I even know about what Elias’ powers can do? Caelan said that those things… those shadows of Elias’, the essence of the abyss-like power he commands, had pierced my soul. What the hell are the ramifications of that?
Now Caelan is looking guilty as well. “Sorry, doll. I did what I could, but…”
“But?”
He shrugs ineffectually, as if he could shake away the weight of what he’s done.
“No,” Elias says. “If I’d stayed and faced the consequences of my actions, maybe things could have turned out differently. Caelan did what he had to. You can’t blame him.”
They’re making me so damn nervous now. “Blame him forwhat?”
The two of them share a glance. Then Elias lowers his hand, hovering it above where the wound was. “He used his own energy to seal the gap that had been torn in yours. It had to become part of you. And he also sealed in some of my energy, the remnant of my power that injured you in the first place and already corrupted and drained you. Under the circumstances, with the strength of the energy he was using…”
“I might have accidentally fused some fragment of our souls into yours,” Caelan concludes.
Oh.
Oh,fuck.
I don’t even know how to process that.
I can only stare at them. “Your s-souls?” I attempt shakily.
Mind racing, I try to work through everything they’ve told me about all of it. About the way their souls are warped, tangled with something human, entwined together on a quantum level. Permanent. Irrevocable.
And now mine was combined with theirs.
“I’m sorry,” Elias says softly. “This isn’t a fate we would have wished on anyone.”
“Trust us, we know how goddamn shitty it is to go through.”
My heart is pounding far too fast. I can hear the echo of my pulse in my ears. Elias takes both my hands in his, but I can barely feel the contact, staring straight through him.
