“I can’t believe you’d do this to me.” Karen’s voice was shaking. She took a step into the room, and for one wild second, Luc thought she might swing at him. “I went out with you, you know. It’s not like I couldn’t do better.”
“You’re the one screwing around with Mike, Karen.” It felt good to say it out loud, even if it didn’t matter anymore.
Karen’s mouth opened and closed. She looked at Luc and Corinthe, then to Mike. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said stubbornly.
Corinthe laid a hand on his arm. “Luc,” she said quietly. “Does it really matter? Really?”
She was right. None of this was real.
Maybe it never really had been.
Luc’s pulse was a hum underneath his skin as he pushed out of the room and off the boat. He could hear Corinthe running after him. The noise from the party faded around them. Everything was silent except for the lapping of the waves, except for the sound of Corinthe’s breath.
There was that smell of flowers again.
A breeze lifted the hair around her face and it danced erratically. The air changed, grew cooler, damper. And he realized that the noise of the party really had faded; the fog was rolling in. Suddenly, he and Corinthe were once again alone in the mist.
The boat, the party—it was gone. The moment had passed.
The fog began to swirl, becoming so dense he couldn’t even see Corinthe. Instinctively, he reached out and grabbed her hand through the thick, cold mist, just as they were wrenched through spinning nothingness like kites on a string.
When the world righted itself again, they found themselves waist deep in cold water.
The mist still hung heavy in the air, but it was different—frozen and salty when he licked his lips. In the distance, a foghorn was blowing.
Boats bobbed against their moorings, and in the distance, he could see the Golden Gate Bridge. They were at the Marina again.
They were still in San Francisco?
Luc turned, some anxiety needling him, demanding attention. They’d been in this exact spot before. Right before … A loud crack filled the silence, and the mast over Luc’s head snapped, crashing into the bay only feet from where he stood.
He covered his face against the splash. The next thing he knew, Corinthe was there, so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. Before he could react, a sharp pain seared through his stomach. A wave of pain and nausea made his legs weak and he staggered backward.
He looked down to see the knife handle jutting from his gut.
17
“Oh God, I didn’t mean … It was just there. … I couldn’t stop it.” Corinthe gripped the knife in her hand. She couldn’t believe what she had done.
But this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
He couldn’t die. Not like this.
Luc struggled to the shore, collapsing onto the ground. The knife was slick with blood now. Corinthe sank to her knees in front of him. She reached for his face. She was shaking so hard she was nearly convulsing.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “This was supposed to happen. But it didn’t. I—”
Luc groaned. He inhaled a ragged breath and pushed himself to his feet. Corinthe immediately wrapped her arm around his waist to help him stay upright. She could feel his energy flickering, fading in and out. She couldn’t stitch from him. He didn’t have enough strength to spare.
“This isn’t real,” he panted. “It can’t be. So we just have to keep moving, right?”
She nodded. He leaned into her and together they plunged forward. One foot in front of the other. They made it to the road before his strength finally gave out. There was nowhere to go anyway. He sank to the ground.
Corinthe sat down beside him and slipped her fingers through his again, drawing his head into her lap. His energy was barely detectable, like a flame sputtering in heavy darkness. She was wild with panic—and fear, too: the sickening knowledge that this was what she was meant to do, what the universe had charged her to do.
Luc coughed and shook in her arms. And then, slowly, gently, the fog began to roll in. It swirled around them, stroking its long fingers over his stomach.
“Luc!” she cried. The vision began to fade, and Corinthe felt her limbs trembling. When she thought she’d stabbed him … it was as if a piece of herself had died, too.
There was no knife now. No wound.
Corinthe let out a small sob of relief.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. How could she complete her last task when even the idea of his death hurt so badly?
He sat up. “It wasn’t real,” he said. He smiled and touched her face.
It will be. The words were strangling her. Corinthe placed one hand on his chest. As earlier she had been able to draw energy from the tree, now she could feel his emotions vibrating just below his skin, pressure building, as though he might explode. She tried to stitch just a little—to work out some of the venom, some of the despair—even though it made her exhausted.
She could feel his heart hammering. She could sense his confusion, and his longing, and something else. …
How could one person affect the balance so much when the universe was so big?
Why couldn’t Luc live?
What would it hurt?
Never before had she been unable to execute a fate. His hair had fallen forward into his eyes, and she noticed for the first time that his ears were a perfect seashell shape, tinged with pink, and that there was a small scar just below his lower lip.
She kept staring, trying to figure out what it was about him that made her act so different. She’d met countless humans during her exile in Humana, had lived among them for ten years, but she had never understood one.
Somehow she did understand Luc—wordlessly, deeply.
And yet, what Luc was doing to save his sister still didn’t make sense to her. His need to rescue Jasmine was ecstatic and painful, and almost addicting, flowing through his body and out of his skin, into her touch.
“Your sister,” she said automatically, finally pulling her hand away from his chest. “You love her.” It was more of a statement than a question. The concept of love was foreign to Corinthe, but she knew it was very, very powerful.
“Of course I do.” Luc’s brow wrinkled.
A question was building inside her, something she had never thought to ask before. She took a deep breath. “What does love feel like?” she blurted out.
He looked at her then. His eyes darkened, shifted, as though shadows were moving underneath them. She suddenly regretted having asked. The question felt far too intimate.
“I mean, you love your sister,” she said hurriedly. “But what does it feel like?”
He ran a hand through his hair and frowned. She wondered if he wouldn’t answer, but after a minute’s pause, he said, “It’s like, you care about someone so much that you’d do anything to keep them safe. That it kills you to think of them getting hurt.”
“I love Pyralis,” she said, knowing that on some level it was true. It was the thing, the idea she felt closest to in the world.
He shook his head. “It’s different. You can love places, but not like you love people. Sometimes it feels totally out of control. Like you don’t have a choice. Gets under your skin like this itch you can’t scratch and it makes you insane, but in a good way, because you know you can’t live without it. Kind of like … well … kind of like your whole idea of fate, actually. Now that I think about it.”
Corinthe shifted uncomfortably. It sounded an awful lot like how she felt when Luc touched her. Maybe this squirmy uncertainty inside her—this desire to feel what Luc felt—was yet another sign she was becoming more human.