“Why are you crying, Mommy?”the memory-Karr asked.
“Nothing to burden yourself with, sweet boy.”She wiped her tears away, and smiled down at him, beautiful as a star.“I love you,”she said.“I would give anything for you. Even my goodness. Even my soul.”
The next memory was Karr’s, one of the most recent, as he hid inside theStarfalland the raiders came aboard. He saw his parents’ bodies, withering from existence. He’d been clouded by fear then, but he saw it all clearer now. He heard their words as they searched the ship.
“That’s what happens when you try to run from Geisinger. When you don’t honor his deals,”the first raider said, staring down at Karr’s father’s body.“No one can ever escape him.”
“Kids, man,”the other raider said.“Geisinger didn’t say they had kids.”
That one was Jeb. He knelt down, his golden, shark-toothed smile widening as he found Karr hiding beneath the ship’s dash. Karr had passed out, then. Fainted out of pure fear.
But some part of his brain must have held onto the memory. Or perhaps it was the new heart he hadn’t known was beating inside of his chest… holding half of Eona’s soul, the soul that had been entrusted to Soahm. And Karr had stolen it in the end.
The next scene showed Cade returning to the ship, back from his errands on the docks, to discover his parents, dead. His little brother, captured.
“You work for Geisinger, don’t you?”Cade asked Jeb.
Jeb’s nose was broken and bleeding, his eyes bloodshot as he held a gun to Cade’s head. A second gun sat discarded, just out of Cade’s reach. As if when Cade had arrived, he’d shot the other man, but fell to Jeb’s strength in the end.
“You’ve been ordered to kill us, too?”Cade asked.
Jeb nodded, pressing the gun closer to Cade’s temple. But it trembled.
And Cade looked up at him, a perfect mask of sadness spread across his young face.“We will pay our parents’ debt. We will do it. Say you killed us. But let us live. We’ll do whatever you ask. We’ll serve you forever… just let us live.”
The memories stilled.
The sea of darkness returned.
Eona turned away from the edge, facing Karr and Sonara with a sad smile.
“All this time,” Sonara said. “All this time I spent searching for him… he was already gone.” There were tears pouring down her face. Her body shook with rage.
Karr wanted to reach over. To grab her hand with his, but then he thought better of it. For what was he to her, but the boy his parents had killed her brother to save?
A monster.
Achildof monsters.
That was what he was.
“Not gone,” Eona said. “Not entirely. The portion of my soul that Soahm carried in his heart… it remains in Karr now. His memories are also held within.”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” Sonara growled. “Soahm should havelived.”
“My soul held on to his heart, because it chose him a worthy replacement,” Eona explained.
Somehow the wordreplacementfelt like a knife driven into Karr’s chest.
“And now he lives again, through Karr. Your magic killed Karr so that he would come to our side. So that Soahm’s portion of my soul would not be wasted. That it would be brought back home, where it belongs. And here he is, a chosen Shadowblood, who has half the power I once had. Together, you can stop the darkness.”
“I will kill him,” Sonara said suddenly. “I will kill Cade, and Geisinger, and whoever else had a hand in this.”
She would not look at Karr.
And what would he do, if she did?
Karr swallowed his own tears away, the horrors that he’d seen. The reality that all of his life—hislives—had been some tangled, covered-up lie.
