Page 116 of A Grave Not Made For Mourning
The only way.
All paths must end with her blood on my hands.
“So much for fighting,”the boy mutters.
“What do you want?”I ask, my tone gentle. There’s only so much I can feel guilty for, and I won’t add being mean to the boy to the list today.
“I want to make you whole.”I ignore him, and he adds,“You think accidental death stings, but deliberate killing stains.”
I wipe him away like an ink blot. He only smears, sitting at the corners of my mind, watching.
I pull my gloves completely off, knowing he can see.
“I felt something when I channeled it,” I tell Desdemona, referring to her prophecy. The reason she wanted to speak to me. “I can share it with you.”
I hold out my bare hands.
She’s severely undereducated.
She takes hold of my hands immediately.
If I were any other Eunoia, this would be enough to control her emotion. But for me, this is enough to kill.
I don’t blame her. She’s from the septic. She doesn’t know any better. She likely has no idea what the Eunoia can do. WhatIcan do.
Perhaps I’ll cut the prophecy down before it grows roots.
All I have to do is hold her. If I wanted, I could push my emotions into Desdemona. It would be more than enough to fry her brain, like I did to Xander.
It’s his memory that holds me back—the little bit of Xander that lives in the boy. He keeps me from deliberately killing Desdemona.
Instead, I wait for my touch to take its natural course.
Her skin on mine, her feeling this prophecy in its entirety, it has to be enough to kill her. It should be.
I begin to share the prophecy with her.
The first part is mind-splitting agony—becoming someone else involuntarily. Perhaps it’s what Xander felt when my emotions overrode his own. The next part is agonizing loneliness—not much different from my past four years.
It’s the end that feels like the end.When the cracks in the universe divide. Death, so much of it. How it felt when Ma died, times thousands.
I wait for the breath to escape Desdemona—for her to keel over.
It never comes.
She pulls her hands from mine when the prophecy ends, alive and well. One part of me breathes a sigh of relief. The other feels like it was a job not well done.
“Don’t take this path,”the boy warns.“It’s stained in black.”
“What the fuck was that?” Desdemona’s voice trembles, her hands held out before her, shaking more violently than mine.
“Your prophecy.” My gaze follows the natural curve of her collarbone. Beneath her shirt, the faint outline of a necklace presses against her skin—just like Calista said.
The bee buzzing in my ear intensifies, as if it’s turned human and started screaming.
“It’s what I felt when I channeled it,” I say, voice low as I fixate on that necklace.
There’s something off about it. About her. The agony, the fear, everything she always feels is twisted beneath the surface, tangled with that necklace. It’s as if a shard of her pain is lodged there, buried in the stone.
