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“Stop!” Morgana yelled. There was a crash. Glass shattered against a wall.
Cold seeped into my room. Freezing air. Meera’s aura.
Goosebumps prickled across my arms and legs, and I reached for my blanket, determined to burrow back beneath it into endless darkness and warmth.
“Help!” Morgana cried. “Gods! What do I do?”
I burrowed deeper, willing myself to go deaf, to stop hearing Meera’s screams or Morgana’s pleas. It felt too much like that night. It was too soon, too close.
“Lyr! Help me! Please!”
Meera screamed again, and again I was pulled back into the temple; the memory of how I hadn’t been able to help Jules, to save her, was overwhelming.
But Meera was here. Meera was alive. Meera had a chance.
The scar on my wrist itched wildly. Morgana shouted another desperate call for help. Energy I hadn’t experienced in weeks surged through me, and I jumped out of bed and raced around the piles of clothes on my floor, my ankle nearly tangling in a discarded gown. It was the same gown I’d worn that night, on my birthday.
A moment later, I was in Meera’s room. Her walls were pristine white except for one splotch of red. Blood. There was a cut on Morgana’s forehead and a glass vase on the ground. Water leaked from the shards onto the plush carpet and the wilted silver snap flowers that had spilt from it.
Morgana clutched her forehead, moaning in pain, while Meera circled her. There was a feral look to my eldest sister, a look I’d never seen before. She was thinner than she had been a month earlier, her ash-brown hair was stringy and tangled—in desperate need of being washed and brushed—and her hazel eyes were wide, somehow both full of fear and empty.
Meera’s gaze turned to me but she showed no sign of recognition.
She lunged, her hands in front of her and fingers curled into claws. I was shocked at the impact. For a second, my mind conjured up some old scroll I’d read about vorakh. The forbidden magic strengthened the mages who had them, in effect making them as strong as a soturion when they were enthralled.
In the next second, my back slammed against the carpet, and I wheezed, barely able to catch my breath.
A growl erupted from Meera, her teeth gnashing as she readied herself to pounce on me. I rolled to the side just in time.
“What do I do?” I yelled to Morgana. “Morgs! How do I stop this?” I’d never been in a fight before. I didn’t know what to do or how to help. I only knew I had to keep Meera from hurting herself.
Morgana shifted, gingerly clutching at the wall. Blood dripped down her chin onto her chest, bleeding into the fabric of her black gown. “I don’t know,” she moaned, pressing both hands to her head as she made it to her feet. “I don’t know what to do with her like this. I don’t—I can’t—She’s too strong right now.”
Meera grabbed my arm, the movement fast and vicious. Her nails slid down my arm, cutting into my skin, drawing blood.
“Fuck!” I scurried back, scrambled to my feet, and clutched at my arm to staunch the wound. “Meera. Meera! Are you…?”
She screeched, leaping to her feet and running for me. I flinched, and then something settled deep inside of me.
I made a decision. I wouldn’t lose anyone else in my family. Never again. And I would do whatever it took.
In that moment, I had two objectives: protect my body and keep Meera from further hurting Morgana or herself.
I ran at Meera, at the vision forcing its way inside of her. Our bodies collided, and I pushed her onto the bed to cushion her fall. I found her wrists, pinned them above her head, and pressed my forehead to hers.
“Come on, Meera! It’s me. Come on, come on!”
Her eyes widened, recognition filling them. “Lyr?”
My breaths came sharp and fast as the tension left her body. “Meera?” My tears began to spill. She was all right. She’d survived her first full vision. We had survived.
The room remained filled with a frigid chill as we cleaned the blood off the wall and threw the broken vase and dying silver snaps into the trash. Then the three of us huddled together under layers of blankets as Meera described a scene that didn’t make sense. In her vision, there’d been a forest and a girl wandering through it. There’d been voices in the air, cries for help. But the girl couldn’t find the owners of those voices, and then everything had gone dark.
After Meera described her vision, the temperature in the room slowly returned to normal, and I made another decision. Not only was I going to meet Tristan, but this was the last time I would let myself fall apart. If I was going to play my role to perfection, I couldn’t come home and scream into the ocean. I couldn’t break down and cry anymore. It was getting too hard to pick myself back up. Jules was gone. I couldn’t change that. But I could protect Meera, and to do that, I’d need to wear my mask at all times.
I took a bath and washed and detangled my hair. For the first time in days, I put on clean underwear, tying bows on either hip to secure the undergarment in place. I gathered every article of clothing from my floor into a pile on my balcony. I gathered everything else until my room was clean—glasses, dishes, and cups that had accumulated in Morgana’s attempts to get me to eat, my bedding, anything dirty, anything that smelled, anything I’d touched in my sorrow or grief, anything that reminded me of the fear that had plagued me for the last month or conjured up feelings of how scared and helpless I’d been. It all went to the balcony.
When I stepped onto my balcony, the salt-kissed wind blew at my hair, and my locks turned red beneath the sun and blew across my face. I tossed everything, every last memento of my depression-piles, over the railing. It landed in a heaping dump on the waterway of the fortress grounds below me. One dress remained in my wardrobe untouched—a black gown that cut a low v down the front, nearly to my belly. Silver threading beneath the material made it sparkle and shimmer in the sunlight, and silver rope crisscrossed over my waist and ribcage. Tristan would love the silver. He’d love the low cut of the dress, too.
