Page 14 of The Stone Curse
A soft thud was my only answer.
“Varsa?” Panic bloomed inside me. “Varsa, answer me, please.” The door was locked.
“Out of the way,” Curi said.
I stepped aside and he shoulder-slammed the door. It opened with a splinter of wood.
“Shit,” Curi said.
Varsa lay face down on the floor by the bed. Unmoving. “Varsa!” I fell to my knees beside him, immediately checking for a pulse. “He’s alive.” I rolled him onto his side, and he looked up at me with glassy, vacant eyes. “Hey, it’s me. Varsa, can you hear me?”
He blinked slowly.
“Let’s get him onto the bed,” Curi said.
We hauled him up and got him settled while he continued to stare blankly at us. “He usually talks to me.” I wasn’t sure why it mattered that Curi know this. “He’s so smart. He knows so much stuff.” I stroked Varsa’s forehead. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
Varsa coughed, his body going into a spasm.
“I’ll get some water.” Curi bolted from the room.
Varsa stopped coughing. “Cameron…”
I exhaled shakily. “Hey…You’re here.”
“I wish I could stay longer, but I can’t hold on anymore. I have to go.”
“What?”
He reached up to touch my face. “I’ll see you soon.” His hand dropped to his side, and his body went limp and heavy. I laid him down gently as his eyes fluttered closed.
Curi hurried back into the room with a glass of water. “Here.”
A soft crackling sound filled the air as Varsa’s skin hardened to stone.
Varsa had no use for water any longer.
He was dead.
CHAPTER 5
Guilt had me in a chokehold as I paced the living room back at the elite tower. If I’d gone to check on Varsa sooner, maybe he’d be alive. Why had I left it all day?
“It isn’t your fault,” Shar said.
“She’s right,” Orix said. “Varsa has been sick for a long time. What the graynites did to him…It’s a wonder he lasted this long.”
“My Cameron couldn’t have stopped his death,” Derek said. “But Varsa not die alone.”
“Derek’s right,” Shar said. “Even if you had gone to see him earlier, it wouldn’t have prevented his death. You were there at the end, and he didn’t die alone. That’s what matters.”
I latched on to that fact, holding on to it like a lifeline. “He said he would see me soon.”
“The afterlife is a comfort for many,” Palia said. “Even us goyles.”
“It didn’t feel like he was speaking metaphysically.”
“How else could he have meant it?” Curi asked.
