Page 149 of Fangs
Now, I felt everything, and it was tearing me apart.
I slowly leaned forward until I folded in half over my knees, the letter still clutched in my hand. I couldn’t move, frozen in place as the pain poured out of me. I had to be dying. I was no stranger to pain, but no person could endure, couldsurvivefeeling pain like this.
My mind knew what to do. It wanted to retreat down that worn path to the empty, quiet place in my head where I’d hidden from Juck so many times. I didn’t fight it. Maybe I could stay there forever. A lifetime of feeling nothing had to be better than this.
I closed my eyes. My mind was already pulling away, folding into itself again, the pain fading. I didn’t even have to recite medical textbooks to keep myself anchored. I sank like a stone.
“Ember?”
A hand wrapped around my wrist, and for a moment—a single desperate second—I thought maybe I would open my eyes and see Trey.
Instead, I met Mac’s dark gaze.
We weren’t in the loft. Darkness surrounded us, but it wasn’t empty. Golden light twisted around us, flowing from our bodies. It reminded me of when light would emanate from my skin, but this was different. Instead of beams or a glow, it was thin and sparkling like a thread made of flecks of pure gold. The threads flowed from our skin and around the two of us, moving gracefully in a way that reminded me of the Northern Lights. I’d never seen this before, but I instinctively knew it was my magic—it wasourmagic. Mac was gripping my wrist, holding me in place, keeping me from falling farther into the deep darkness below. His eyes flashed fiercely, reflecting the golden threads that danced around us.
“Come back,”he said in my head.
I stared at him, tears still leaking from my eyes, but they drifted around my face instead of falling.
“Ember, come back,”he repeated.
I couldn’t muster the energy to explain that I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t face that pain anymore. It was too much.Iwas too much, slowly drowning on dry land while everyone around me continued to breathe.
“Then lean on me; let me carry you for a while,”he said, and the emotion in his words colored the darkness a deep midnight blue.“I know it hurts, but if you lock everything away, you’ll lose all the beauty, too. So lean on me—I can take it.”
As though he commanded them, the golden threads began to weave together, forming a cord twining around his arm, moving down toward his wrist and my hand. I watched numbly as my golden threads did the same. The thicker the cord, the brighter the light became, and when the two cords of woven magic met where Mac’s hand still tightly gripped my wrist, the light flared, blindingly bright. When it faded, there was no sign of where the cords had joined. It was like they had fused into one, binding the two of us together with one long, continuous flow of magic.
Somehow, I knew if I wanted to pull away, I could; the magic would release me. The magic between us seemed to pulse like a heartbeat; whatever this binding was, itlived.Pulling away would hurt us both; severing our connection would be like sawing off a limb. I stared into Mac’s grey eyes and knew he was aware of it, too. He knew I had the power to hurt him, but he still waited.
“Em,”his voice was rough,“please let me in.”
His pain flowed through our magic and crashed into me, stealing the air from my lungs. The weight of his grief, fear, regret, and guilt would have been enough to bring me to my knees, but it was his crushing loneliness, like an echo of my own, that broke me.
I instinctively reached for him with my free hand, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. I wasn’t so much trying to reach for help as I was trying to ease that pain in him, but the relief that filled his eyes was impossible to miss. He pulled, and I moved toward him like we were floating in water. The golden magic between us grew brighter again as I neared him, and just before I reached him, everything went white.
I opened my eyes with a gasp. I was still kneeling on the loft floor, folded in half, but Mac was beside me with one arm around my back and the other gripping my hand. The letter lay on the floor in front of us. Awareness and pain poured back into my body, and my muscles tensed at the onslaught. Mac shifted to pull me upright, and I winced at the pain in my back, but then he was crushing me against his chest, his arms wrapped tightly around me, anchoring me with his entire body.
“I’m here,”he murmured in my head.“Let it out.”
Another crack in the dam. Pain and grief poured from my body in sobs, but the weight of his arms soothed the sharpness. I wanted to be done. I wanted to pack this grief into a neat little box and tuck it away, never to be seen again, but it was everywhere, in my blood and bones.
“I know.”I could hear the pain in his voice.“I know. I loved him, too.”
Eventually, the flood eased, and I returned to the quiet loft and Mac. He sat on the floor, leaning back against the wall, and I was sitting between his legs, curled into him. His arms were solid around me, and my face was pressed into the crook of his neck. My senses flooded with the smell of mint from Mist’s soap, and his chest rose and fell beneath me as he breathed. My arms had wrapped around his neck at some point, and my entire body felt like liquid.
“What happened?”I mumbled.
“I felt you,”he answered, emotion roughening his voice.“I dunno how. I was talkin’ to Nemo, and suddenly I felt your pain and then… nothin’.”His arms tightened around me.“You were just gone. Scared the hell outta me. I thought you fuckin’ died.”
We didn’t speak for a while, just breathing together. My eyes found the discarded letter on the floor.
“Did you read it?”I whispered.
“Yeah,”he answered, the single word heavy with guilt.“I’m sorry, I was tryin’ to figure out what happened.”
“It’s okay,”I mumbled, mostly relieved I didn’t have to explain what the letter had said.“You were in my head?”
“I came to find you,”he explained quietly.“You weren’t responding to me, and I… or maybe these powers knew what to do. I can’t really explain it. Felt more like instinct than anything else. I had to search for a while, though.”I felt a tiny hint of amusement.“Figures that you’d be good at hidin’ in your head, too.”
