But I wasn’t an empty shell anymore.
A necklace and bracelet pulsed warm against my skin, reminding me that my soul wasn’t as empty. I was connected to the twins.
There was a bit of color in my life, and the cold didn’t feel as pervasive with my best friend lying in my arms.
I’d slaughtered too many infected. I’d spent too many hours slicing people to pieces because they were unlucky enough to be taken over by monsters. I wasn’t going to cut Jinx out of my life.
It was messed up, but war had given me perspective.
I just wanted the killing, the hate, the violence to stop.
I wanted peace for all of us.
And sun god, for the first time in my life, I understood why I was the way I was. I no longer felt like I was going insane.
Sadie let out a long dramatic wail, and I grimaced as I patted her head. She was taking the death of the twin girls and mutilation of my soul extra hard. I wanted to join her in grieving, but since I had no memories of the girls, I couldn’t find the emotions.
All I could focus on was the three of us were alive.
It was a miracle.
For a period back in that room, I’d been certain that Sadie was going to die.
I’d been a few seconds away from losing her.
Jinx shifted and I patted her head. She gave me a death glare, but didn’t pull away or say anything mean.
For her, that was a declaration of love.
Back in the settlement, after Jinx had finished confessing everything, she’d started to crawl away from us. She’d thought we’d blame her. She’d thought we wouldn’t want her to be a part of our family anymore.
She didn’t understand how this family worked.
We’d all been used. We’d all been mutilated, each of us in different ways. We’d all been treated as pawns.
“So,” I said conversationally. “How do we stop the leaders?”
“I’m going to tear them to shreds,” Sadie said as she punched my pillow.
Jinx sighed loudly and shook her head. “I’ve told you both, we don’t. They have an entire institution behind them, and the leaders are insanely powerful. They are more.”
“What does that mean?” Sadie asked with confusion.
Jinx looked back at us, midnight-black eyes wide and haunted. “Some things in life are beatable. Some are only survivable. This is the latter.”
“I don’t accept that,” Sadie said.
Jinx stared blankly.
Her pale features were stark and slightly uncanny. It finally made sense; they were too sharp to be from these realms because she wasn’t.
She was a class six creature.
A trafficked child.
She was a monster soulmancer.
She was my sister, and I wanted to gut the people who’d hurt her.
“Here I opened wide the door—” Jinx closed her eyes. “—darkness there, and nothing more.”
Ice spread across the sheets, and Sadie shivered but didn’t complain.
Sadie trembled against me. “Is that also from Nietzsche?”
“No, a genius named Edgar Allan Poe.” Jinx leaned into our touch and rested her head against the side of the bed. She whispered, “I thought for sure you’d both hate me. I thought”—her voice cracked—“that I’d be completely alone.”
I whispered, “You’re stuck with us.”
Sadie laughed weakly. “We all have our problems.”
Jinx’s face twisted with confusion. “How can you say that? I mutilated your souls?”
Acceptance was a foreign emotion in my chest as I replied, “It happened a long time ago. Crying about it now won’t change anything.”
Sadie sobbed harder and whispered, “I have a confession—once in the beast realm, I enslaved Aran with my blood when she was asleep, and I made her get me food from the kitchen because I was so sore from training, and she doesn’t remember it.”
I rolled my eyes and replied, “Once I found a kitten and gave it to Sadie as a gift, and it kidnapped her.”
Sadie barked with laughter and hiccuped as she remembered how Xerxes had spied on us. The sound was so ridiculous that I chuckled.
“What even is our lives?” she asked between gasps.
“I think we’re lucky,” I whispered, and Sadie looked at me with confusion.
I explained, “At this rate, we probably shouldn’t be alive. But here the three of us are—it’s a miracle.”
Sadie’s lower lip trembled as she thought about it, then she let out a half scream, half sob. “You both are so special,” she wailed loudly.