Page 49 of Children of Fallen Gods

“It wouldn’t be so bad, to burn together,” Max murmured, lips against my ear. “Would it? You want that. I know you do.”

He spoke the truth that I was too afraid to acknowledge. Exactly how much I wanted to give up for him. Exactly how much I feared losing him.

And I had already let him go.

A breath, and he was gone.

I was alone.

{Not alone. Never alone.}

I turned and saw a figure shrouded in the dusk. Reshaye, as I had seen it in the Mikov estate, a shadow of a shadow of a person. Its face was tilted away from me, to the dark.

I approached it.

What are you looking at?

And then I felt it. The reaching hand. The overwhelming feeling of being watched.

{It is not what I see,}Reshaye whispered.{It is what sees us.}

I reached out into the darkness—

* * *

“Breathe, Tisaanah.”

A shock of ice cold pressed to my forehead. My whole body convulsed and I blindly reached for... something, I wasn’t even sure what, but what I hit was the edge of the basin, into which I violently emptied the contents of my stomach.

When I finished, I blinked into dim lantern light. Nura leaned over me.

“What’re you doing here?” The question slurred. My tongue was not cooperative.

I hadn’t felt like this since… gods, since the beginning.

“You can’t be alone this way. Here.” Nura thrust a small bottle into my hands. “Drink.”

“How did you—”

“What you did out there was remarkable. Even compared to what I had already seen.” She gave me a hard stare. “You forget that I was there through all of it. I know the toll it takes, to do something like that. And forgive me if I didn’t want our best asset to die alone in her room because she was being a showoff.Drink. For your own damned good.”

I swallowed the contents of the bottle and immediately regretted it.

“Don’t throw that up,” Nura said.

“I am trying,” I muttered.

I lifted my head, or tried to. She looked different, her hair loose around her face. And she wore not her typical high-necked jacket, but a camisole that revealed more of her skin than I had ever seen.

Skin that was completely covered in horrible, disfiguring burn scars.

Even though I could barely keep my eyes open, I still found myself staring.

Nura gave me a humorless smirk.

“You and I and our scars. I suppose we both know what it’s like to pay for something.”

We aren’t the same,I wanted to say, but a wave of pain crushed me. Reshaye let out a hideous, wordless wail. The present and the past — mine and so many others — ran together, my senses assaulted by hundreds of fragments of memories all at once.

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