Page 80 of Serpentine Valentine
A quivering silence like the faint rumble of the earth heralding a catastrophic quake.
Foreboding swept through me, a sudden chill.
“Lex…”
She bared her teeth at me like a cornered animal. “She deserves everything coming to her.”
“What are you going to do?” And then, my stomach cramping so hard I fought the urge to gag, I whispered, “What have you done?”
She canted her chin into the air just like she’d done that day in the quad when I’d noticed her, like she was daring anyone to come at her. Now, she was daring me.
“I’m taking away everything she loves,” she said, her voice dead, dead, dead. “Acheron…”
No, no, no, I thought madly, knowing I was about to be hit by a freight train but unable to move out of the way.
“And you.”
“And me.” The air punched out of my body. My bones cracked and disintegrated on impact, and I felt like I was bleeding out all over the red chair, all over the ground. I looked down at my chest in a daze, startled to find I was physically whole.
It was just my insides crumbling to dust.
I didn’t have any more words for her. What could I say?
Why did you have to go so far?
How could you have drawn me into this awful game of revenge when I did nothing to no one?
What was I supposed to do with this betrayal when Ilovedher? When she’d changed me, and I had no idea how to go back to what I’d been before?
I just sat there quietly falling to pieces, and Lex just watched me.
“Okay,” I said finally, long after the computer had gone dark and plunged us into absolute blackness. “Okay, then.”
I got up, surprised my bones would hold me, and carefully walked around the desk on the far side of Lex so I didn’t have to get closer than necessary.
“Lux––” she started.
I was at the door, pulling it open, hall light flooding over my face like salvation. I held up a trembling hand to stop her, waited a beat to make sure I wouldn’t start crying, and then moved out into the hall.
I closed the door softly behind me.
No one bothered me when I went to Lex’s attic room, the room I’d come to love so much. I got to say goodbye to Chrysaor, who slithered to the glass to stare at me morosely as I collected my things.
I got to leave without seeing the Gorgon sisters or the monster that led them.
When I looked back at the shadowed Victorian house from the end of the walkway, I realized that Charity Lane was haunted.
By the ghosts of the Gorgon sisters’ pasts, whom they allowed to possess them.
I shivered as shadows moved behind the curtains, and I got the hell out of there before I was crying too hard to see where I was going.
“But surely for everything you love, you have to pay some price.”
––Agatha Christie
Luna
Pierce letme crash on his couch. He offered me the bed, but I didn’t want the memories of us between the sheets. Not when all I had left of Lex were memories I wanted to cherish, untainted by what came before. She’d done me so wrong, broken my heart intentionally like a hammer to Spode china. Yet I loved her still. I loved her for showing me the path back to a version of myself I wanted to be.
