Page 107 of Iridian

I did. Her hands were on my face and she was right in front of me.She’d entered the circle of the ritual. Her wide eyes were full of horror, no fire left in them, only darkness. She spoke, moved those beautiful lips, tried to hold me in place while my body moved to the sides as it ripped apart again and again, while the soldiers screamed, wailed, begged me to make it stop. Begged me to save them—yet again.

I thought I did, though.Wethought we were setting them free.

All I’d done was doom them for the rest of eternity. All that pain and suffering and magic—gone as if it had never existed. All of them would be justgone.

“Let me through,” Rosabel was saying, over and over again. And only when her words made sense did I force every ounce of my attention on her. “Let me through—let me have them. Please, Taland, give them to me!”

Never,I thought. The idea ofherfeeling this pain in my stead made me want to tear the world apart just as those souls, that curse was tearing me. I no longer had the energy to look down at my body, to move at all, but I felt it just fine how much of me it had already consumed.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.We’d done it all wrong. I’d made mistake after mistake after mistake, and the most fatal one was to trust that a man like Titus hadn’t tied upallloose ends before he created this curse.

“Please, Taland, please!” Rosabel shouted, and I was dying. I was leaving her.

Something in me stirred.

“Look at me, baby.”

Again, I did.

“Trust me.”

These words left her lips in a whisper.

These words I heard all the way in what was left of my soul.

“I know what I’m doing,” she said, bringing her lips closer until they touched mine. “You asked me to trust you and I did. Now I’m asking you—please!”

Every instinct in my body was rioting. Every shallow breath I took already belonged to her anyway. Even the screams in my head, the speed with which the curse undid those souls in the same order that it had bound them, slowed down.

I heard nothing, saw nothing but her. Everything else just…stopped.

“Trust me.”

How could I not?

Chapter 26

Rosabel La Rouge

Taland was dying right in front of my eyes. He was being torn apart completely by the very souls that he was setting free. He was being torn apartliterally. His clothes were nearly gone, and there was almost no inch of skin on him left without a cut, without blood.

Taland was dying, and if I couldn’t stop it, I was going down with him.

The world around us no longer mattered. I’d made him this circle with my own blood, damn it, and I wasn’t going to let him die in it all alone. The soldiers and the crowd and the IDD—none of it mattered except for this: I would try to stop whatever was doing this to Taland, and if I couldn’t, I’d already accepted my fate. There really was no better way to go, anyway.

I begged him to let me through, tosharethe soldiers with me, so that maybe I could carry at least half the load that setting them free was putting on him.

Taland finally agreed.

I felt the switch as if it flipped somewhere in my own mind, and the world around me turned dark.

Suddenly, there was no bus underneath me, no lines drawn in my blood. There was no Taland in front of me, either. It was just me—and everything I had justseenhappening to him with my own eyes felt like it had happened tome.

I couldn’t even begin to explain it if I tried, but it’s like for a moment, we eclipsed each other, Taland and I. In my mind, we were in perfect alignment, perfectly connected, trulyone. We didn’t exist as individuals at all for as long as the darkness kept me under, and I was completely disoriented until…

The pain began.

I’d seen those tears on Taland’s body, had heard his screams, had felt the horror in his every breath. Yet now, it wasmewho’d been torn apart, andmewho’d screamed, andmewho’d been horrified with every breath—not him.

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