A strangled sob squeezes up my throat as I stagger back from the heat. The smell—clapping my hand upon my mouth.
Something clatters against my boot.
I open my eyes, looking to the ground splotched red. To the bloody blade resting by my foot and the leather satchel beside it.
Black.
Essi’s.
My heart lurches, like something just tossed it against my ribs so hard I’m surprised they didn’t fracture.
Tentatively, I bend down and flick the mouth of the bag aside to peer in, seeing a book and a frosted jar. A book she must’ve gotten from the library.
From the Undercity.
I don’t bother opening the jar, knowing exactly what’s within. The final ingredient she required to bind the diamond cap to my tooth …
The cap she’d made to protect me.
My lungs constrict.
I reach for the dagger Essi must’ve pulled from her abdomen. The dagger that did this to her.
That took her from me.
I’m about to sheathe it next to my own when something catches my eye—a slithering motion on the flat face of the blade.
Every cell in my body stills as Essi’s blood congeals into a collection of ruddy letters:
A summons. For me.
From Rekk Zharos.
The blade slips from my hand. Clatters to the ground.
He’s narrowed his eyes on me. Discovered where I live. Taken down Essi to lure me out.
Somehow.
Which means it’s my fault she snuck out to the Undercity. My fault she got stabbed, then returned to our home rather than finding a Fleshthread to heal her. My fault she bled out on the couch until she stopped moving.
My fault she’s burning—
Dead.
A guttural groan ruptures from deep within, bruising my insides as it wrestles free. As the realization crouches upon my chest, slashes me open, then stuffs its maw in and chews—masticating my lungs. My heart.
My soul.
My face crumbles, shoulders, spine.
Knees.
I heap upon the ground, deflating just as fast as my rupturing resolve, crushed by a mountain of suffocating guilt. Certain I’m being slit through the chest in long, jagged severs—again.
Again.
I flinch with each agonizing slash, my gaze dropping to the blood-soaked hands I used to lead Essi from the dark bowels of the Undercity—so determined I could give her a better life.
I promised I’d keep her safe. Instead, I gave her a grave.
And I—
I—
I can’t do this. I can’t fucking do this anymore.
Something within me shifts, and a booming collision jars me from the inside out, my bones locking from the impact. A thunderous crack ricochets from deep beneath my ribs before a sharp explosion pierces through me, shattering my insides into a thousand icy shards.
My body temperature plummets so fast I hear my heart slow, like it’s wrestling slushy blood through my veins one sluggish beat at a time.
I inhale a shudder of air that feels too warm. Like pulling lava into my frosted lungs.
It’s coming.
A tear shreds down my cheek as I lose sensation in my fingers and toes.
My arms and legs.
Part of me wants to fight it. To be strong for Essi, despite the fact that I’ve never felt weaker in my life. To tear the fucking world to shreds until I find Rekk Zharos and string him up. Slit him a thousand times. Wait for him to heal.
Do it all over again.
But there’s a bigger part of me that’s still lying on that seater inside, tucked around my young, miraculous, beautiful friend who just lost her life because I loved her. A bigger part of me that’s burning right alongside her. And that part …
It’s tired.
Lonely.
Lost.
Sad.
More broken than I’ll ever admit.
That part of me just wants to stop and never start again.
The icy anger inside me roars, its essence expanding with such ferocity my organs feel like they’re being shoved aside. I lose sensation in my chest, and my face twists as I slip from my sight, falling backward into a frigid numb that swaddles me so tight I can’t move. Can’t see.
Can’t feel.
A beautiful, blissful numb. So pure—like a cold, silken bandage for my soul. So soft I can almost forget I won’t get the glory of killing Rekk Zharos and avenging Essi’s death, but as I sink, curled into this frigid comfort, I grow calm.
Resolved.
He deserves to be ripped limb from limb. To have his vertebrae crumbled, brain mulched. To have his insides pulverized by the strange, savage entity that exists within me.
He deserves—
The Other prowls through the Undercity—a dark, lofty excavation fixed with a web of bridges that reach across the hollow, only a scatter of torches to sketch out the shape of things.