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The sound of a child shouting.
“Piper? Papa, she’s awake! Piper’s awake!”
I don’t get the chance to turn and look before something small and gangly and messy and wonderful barrels into me from behind, swinging herself around my torso until she’s crushing me in her embrace.
Tears sting at my eyes, then soak Amity’s hair as I rock her back and forth.
Our hug is short-lived, however, because Amity snaps her face up and quickly tells the other person behind me he’s an hour late taking his medicine.
“I think it can wait a few more moments,” says a voice that makes my chest want to explode with song.
Amity crawls off my lap as Marcus sidles up behind me, pulling me into his. He wraps his warm arms around me, the thorns of his tattoos poking out from beneath the long sleeves of his tunic.
“Hi,” I say, leaning my head back and resting it on his firm chest.
“Hi back,” he says, and then his beautiful face breaks into a grin, one that shatters my ribs and promptly puts them back together.
“How? When?”
Marcus presses a kiss to my forehead. “We had some help.”
I look up and find two blurry forms escaping in the distance.
It looks like a woman riding on the back of an enormous white wolf.
“Cheyenne,” I say, eyes watering, wishing I could thank my sister-in-law. But Cheyenne is a glacier we’ve yet to thaw, and I imagine it will take a long while yet.
Instead, I turn my attention to my own betrayal.
“I didn’t save you,” I blurt out. “I didn’t do what Abra asked, and…and you could have died…”
Marcus chuckles. “Well, you saved the world. And since I’m included in that group, we’ll say you skirted by on a technicality. Besides, technically, you saved Amity, who ended up saving me by coming up with her own remedy to help with the disease. So in a roundabout way, you really did save me.”
I lean my head against his shoulder, grateful not to have to support the weight of my aching neck.
But then Marcus brushes away my hair, leaning down until his warm breath tickles my ear. “If you’re feeling that guilty about it”—his fingers slip under the hem of my shirt, tracing patterns up my torso—“I can think of a few ways you could make it up to me.”
A breathless giggle escapes my lips, but my response is cut off by Amity sliding her arm between the two of us, her fist stuffed with a rather pungent glob of what looks to be steamed ash.
Marcus bites back a wince and grins up at Amity. “I’m on a rather strict regimen,” he explains to me, running his fingers through my hair as he massages my scalp. It only takes him one gulp to choke down the ash, which is rather impressive.
Despite the aching burgeoning in my back, I sit straight up, turning around to face him, my gaze scanning him from head to toe, searching for signs of illness.
“You’re not cured,” I say, and though I mean it to be a question, it doesn’t come out as one.
Marcus sits across from me. It looks silly—such a large man sitting there with his legs crossed in the grass like a child. Though his smile is the weary sort, it’s genuine all the same.
“Amity’s still looking for a way to rid it from my system completely, but no. I’m pretty much reliant on her antidote for the time being.”
My heart sinks, my gut twisting, and all of a sudden I’m back in the coach with Abra, wondering what and how I could have possibly done differently to keep her alive. To make her cure him.
“I helped them kill her. The only person who knew how to cure you,” I whisper, my limbs trembling.
Marcus’s forehead wrinkles. “And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. You know that,” he says, emphasizing his sentiment by nudging me in the shoulder. “Hey,” he says as I bite the inside of my cheek and look away. He grabs my chin, his touch gentle, then turns my face to look at him. “You made the right choice.”
“But if you die…”
“I have no intention of doing that anytime soon. But so what if I do? Piper, I’ve spent too long in the company of people—Fates bless them—who have eternity sitting at their feet, and they don’t seem any better for it. You and I, we only have a finite amount of time in this world, and I’d rather it be a shortened one that leaves something good behind, than wander through life stepping on others trying to outrun the inevitable.”
