“No,” he said. “I’m not leaving you.”
She raised her eyes. There was a determined set to his jaw that surprised her. “But where will you go, if you can’t stay here?” she asked. “And besides, when your internship starts you’ll have to leave anyway, and then…”
“Thaumaturge Mira gave me another option. Or…” He gulped. “The queen gave me another option. They’ve invited me to join the palace guard. I could begin training as early as next week.”
Her eyes widened and she yanked her hand away. “No. No. Jacin, you can’t. What about being a doctor? What about—”
“I could stay with you, Winter. I could stay here in the palace.”
“Until they send you off to one of the outer sectors, you mean.”
“They won’t do that.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I’ll be the most loyal guard Her Majesty has ever known.”
His expression was withdrawn. Haunted.
Winter’s hand went slack in his grip.
Levana would threaten her, maybe even threaten her life.
Maybe she already had, which was how they’d gotten Jacin to consider it in the first place.
He would do anything they asked if he thought he was protecting her.
“You know how we all take aptitude tests in year fourteen?” Jacin said, unable to look at her. “I tested high for a potential pilot role. Thaumaturge Mira said she could use me as her personal guard and transporter.”
“No, Jacin. You can’t. If you do this, you’ll never be able to get out.”
Releasing her hand, he stood up and began pacing the powder room floor. “I don’t know what else to do. I can’t leave you here, especially now, after this.” He waved a hand toward her cheek and Winter placed her palm over the washcloth. The blood hadn’t yet soaked through.
“I don’t want you to be a guard, Jacin. Not after … what happened to my father…” Her voice cracked.
Killed by a thaumaturge, with no hope at all of defending himself. Because he was weak. Jacin was weak. She was weak.
Against the queen and her court, they had no hope at all.
Pawns. Just pawns.
“I think you should go,” she said.
He stared at her, hurt.
“With your parents, I mean. I think you should go with them. In a year, apply for your medical internship and be the doctor you’ve always wanted to be. This is what you want, Jacin. To help people. To save people.”
“Winter, I…”
She gasped, her gaze catching on the wall over Jacin’s shoulder. A frosted-glass window was there, letting in enough daylight to make the entire room glow rosy and gold.
But the light was being blotted out.
By blood.
Crimson, thick, sticky blood, oozing from the mortar that held in the glass windowpane, dripping thickly down the sides and pooling on the sill.
She started to tremble. Jacin spun around, following the look. He was silent a long moment before saying, “What? What’s wrong?” He looked back at her.
Something splattered on Winter’s forearm.
She tilted her head back.
The ceiling.
Covered in it.
Red, everywhere. The tang of iron on her tongue. Her mouth was thick with it.
Her chest convulsed with panic and nausea. She shoved herself to her feet and spun in a full circle, watching as the blood came down from the ceiling, soaking into the gilt wallpaper and wood moldings, puddling on the tile floor.
“Winter. What is it? What are you seeing?”
The blood reached her toes.
She turned and shoved past him, scrambling out of the powder room.
“Winter!”
Her bedroom was no better. She froze in the middle of it. Blood had made a waterfall over her bed, staining the linens in crimson, squishing in the carpet beneath her feet. The door into the corridor had a bloodied curtain dripping from the jamb.
No getting through.
No getting away.
She stumbled and teetered on her weak legs, then tripped toward the only escape—the doors that led to the balcony. She heard Jacin screaming behind her, and she hoped he would follow, hoped he would not get stuck here in the suffocating stench, the incessant dripping—
She threw open the doors.
Her stomach hit the protective barrier. Her hands latched on to the rail. The blood kept coming. Pouring out of the bedroom, spilling over the balcony, dribbling down to the garden.
It was the palace. The whole palace was bleeding.
It would fill up the entire lake.
Gasping for air, she hauled one leg up and threw herself over the rail.
Arms locked around her just as her center of balance tilted forward. Her stomach swooped, but Jacin was hauling her back into the room. She shrieked and clawed, demanding that he let her go. If he didn’t, she would drown. They would both be swallowed alive—
He wrestled her to the warm, sticky carpet and pinned her wrists to either side of her head.
“Winter, stop!” he cried, leaning down and pressing his cheek against hers in an attempt to soothe her. “It’s all right, Winter. You’re all right.”
She turned her head and snapped her teeth at him. He pulled back far enough that she barely missed his ear. She screamed in frustration, writhing and kicking, but Jacin refused to yield. “You’re all right,” he whispered, again and again. “I’m here.”
Winter had no idea how long the hallucination lasted. How long she struggled, trying to get away from the blood that cascaded over every surface of the room. A room that had once seemed a sanctuary.
Sanctuary.
There was no safe place. Not in Artemisia. Not on all of Luna.
Except—Jacin.
When her screams succumbed to hysterical sobbing, Jacin finally allowed his hold to turn from the grip of a jailer to the embrace of her best friend.
“This is why,” he whispered, and it occurred to Winter that, at some point, he’d started crying too. “This is why I can’t leave you, Winter. This is why I’ll never leave.”
* * *
The nightmare came again. And again. Weeks of it, incessant.
Gunshots.
Dead eyes.
Blood sprayed on the bedroom walls.
Only, this time, the queen did not simply curl herself against her dead husband and cry and cry and cry.
This time, she took the knife that she had used to stab the thaumaturge and she carved three straight lines into the cheek of Winter’s father.
Winter tried so hard to stay strong, knowing that every time she sought out Jacin’s security, it would further cement his decision to stay. So she rocked herself in her bed and tried to whisper comfort into her own blankets.
Until the night she could stand it no longer.
He was the only place that was safe.
Her nightclothes still damp from the terrors, she rushed out of her quarters, pretending not to notice the night guard who followed in her wake.
Jacin would hold her. Jacin would comfort her. Jacin would keep the nightmares at bay.
Except—Jacin was gone.
That’s what they told her when she arrived, pounding on the apartment door that the Clays had shared with two other families.
He and his family had been transferred the day before and she hadn’t even known, he hadn’t even told her, he hadn’t said good-bye.
Demoted. Transferred. Gone.
Shocked and heartbroken, Winter retreated. She wandered blindly back toward the main corridor of the palace.
Gone.
She’d told him to go. She’d believed it would be for the best. It was the only way for him to have a chance at happiness. He had to get away from Artemisia. Away from the queen. Away from her.