“I have no idea, but it’s freaking me out,” Mordecai answers.
“Get me another body…quickly?” I purse my lips, frustrated that it’s not making sense.
“Goodnight, prophet. I look forward to never seeing you again.”
I move so suddenly that Mordecai almost doesn’t get hold of me. It’s only at the last minute and because of Cadel that they manage to hold me.
Prophet?
I sit up, still held in his arms, and look straight into the dead, screaming face of the girl I’d tried to rescue.
Mordecai turns me.
“Don’t look.”
I shudder in his arms.
“Don’t you dare look. This isn’t your fault. It’s not your fault.”
I stare at the wall; the image burned on my retinas and into my mind. Her eyes are gone. Why are her eyes gone?
“They’ve left,” Jarek says.
Mordecai loosens his hold, and I double over, sobbing so hard I can’t hold myself up. I collapse on the floor, but he picks me up and pulls me into his arms.
The purr starts from one of the alphas, I’m not sure who, but the other two join in, soothing away the pain, smoothing the edges of my guilt.
“Did you try to rescue those kids? Is that how you got caught?” Cadel asks.
I nod and realise our fingers are laced together.
“That was an amazing thing to do, Kaida. You gave them a chance, but whatever bad luck happened was not because of you.”
“Are her alphas with her?” I ask in a huff of breath.
“Yes,” Jarek says. “They all died together.”
“Someone needs to come back and give everyone a proper burial,” I say brokenly.
“They will; it’s one of the first priorities the Resistance has. They will also raze Foreen to the ground and leave the city as a memorial for the lives lost here.”
I free myself from the alphas and look out the window. I’ve prepared myself, but it still hurts to see them all lined up beside each other.
I try to ignore them and look instead for the skull. I find it on the pole to the right, a long, yellow-brown skull that has been sitting in the elements, left alone and lonely.
“Someone make sure my mother’s skull is recovered when it’s over.”
“Of course, we will. We’ll all come back and do it together,” Jarek says.
I don’t answer him because I’m not sure anymore, and my mind is drifting back to those words.
“Cadel, if you die in this body, are you dead everywhere, or would your soul return?”
“I would go back.”
“What if you possessed a body?”
His head whips to me. “Say that again?”
