Reeve wasn’t moving. Reeve wasn’t moving, lying there on the ground like a corpse. Faron saw his unmoving body, and then she saw so many more, scattered around her on a battlefield. She felt heat on her face, saw the flash of fires overhead. She drowned in the shadows of drakes and dragons trying to blast one another out of the sky. She saw a sword buried in the gut of an Iryan soldier, watched them collapse as their viscera escaped through the fingers they clutched against the wound. She saw bodies in the dirt, bodies roasting under the unforgiving sun, bodies reduced to stumps and exposed bones and ashes.
Reeve wasn’t moving, and she was trapped here, facing down another life she couldn’t save. What was thepointof being the Childe Empyrean if she couldn’t save the people she loved? What was the point of being good in a world where the best night of her life could turn so quickly into a nightmare?
Faron heard herself screaming as if from a distance, her words, if she had formed any, unintelligible. She had surged beyond her body, and all she saw were swirls of light. Souls, she realized. She was seeing them not as men, but as souls. Living souls.
Living souls that she could manipulate.
She reached out to Roger first, pressing her will into the very fabric of him.Stop this, she wrote into his inner being.Leave us alone. Go home and forget that you ever saw us.
Drunk and furious as he was, his will was nothing compared to hers. It was like giving orders to a toddler. His strikes slowedto a stop as Faron curved away from him. Jarell still caged her, his fingertips pressing bruises into her arms, and, as she skimmed the essence of his soul, she saw nothing but weary resentment there. Visions of medical summoners and infirmary stays, lost opportunities and permanent pain. Everything that Langley had taken away, laid bare on the surface of his soul. It was a wound he always carried with him, a wound he couldn’t look into a reflective surface without being reminded of.
Let me go, Faron told him.Leave us alone. Go home and forget that you ever saw us.
He wasn’t as drunk as Roger, but he wastired. His hands loosened around her, her instructions burrowing so deep within him that he would think it was his idea. Faron’s soul slipped back into her own body, disoriented but ecstatic. After so much failure, she had done it. She haddone it.
She had commanded a living soul. A human soul.
Roger was standing up, his expression alarmingly blank. Faron massaged the hinge of her shoulders as Jarell moved to join him. There wasn’t a flicker of light behind their eyes or a twitch of life across their faces. They shuffled as one unit down the path until it merged into a sidewalk lined with storefronts and bars. Only once she could no longer see them did Faron rush to Reeve’s side and kneel next to him.
His blood soaked into the fabric of her pants. “Please don’t be dead.”
His lip was split. Both eyes were swollen, his skin darkening to varying shades of purple. Roger must have been wearing a ring, because there was a jagged cut across Reeve’s cheek that spilled red down the side of his face. His hair was smeared with dirt andgrime, but, as he turned his head to look at her, something in her settled. He wasn’t dead. She’d saved him, and she hadn’t needed the powers of the gods to do it.
“You need a medical summoner,” she said. “You look even uglier than usual.”
Reeve gave a wet laugh that ended in a cough. Blood bubbled up, along with a tooth. Faron made a face as she plucked it off his shirt, tucking it into her pocket for the medical summoner to fix later.
“You did well,” said Gael Soto, appearing over them with a wrinkle between his eyebrows as he gazed down at Reeve. By now, his sudden arrivals had stopped surprising her. “Better late than never, I suppose.”
“I need to get him back to Renard Hall,” Faron said, her brief flush of pleasure at the compliment snuffed out by a wave of fear. There was so much blood everywhere, on Reeve’s clothes and on her hands and—and she had forgotten how much she hated that tangy, coppery scent that had only ever meant death. It was an effort to gather her scattered thoughts back together. “I need help. Will you help me?”
Gael kneeled down beside her. “What would you like me to do?”
Her lips parted, but nothing came out. She had no idea anymore. The stress of the night slammed into her, and her fingers were sticking together as Reeve’s blood dried between them. Control of the situation was rapidly slipping away. If Elara were here… If only Elara were here…
A hand covered her shoulder. Gael’s amber-flecked eyes were all that she could see, holding her gaze with a steady calm. “If I possess him, then he’ll be able to walk without aggravating his injuries. All you have to do is lead the way. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“I’m happy to help.” Gael gave her shoulder a squeeze before letting go. “Everything will be all right, Empyrean.”
It had been so long since anyone had said those words to her instead of the other way around. Faron fought back tears.
She stood, giving Gael room to lean over Reeve’s prone form so he could, she assumed, ask him for permission to borrow his body. Light enveloped them both, and then Gael disappeared. Reeve sat up unsteadily, his eyes glowing as Gael figured out how to work this new shape. They weren’t too different, Faron mused as Reeve stood. Reeve was shorter than Gael, his hair lighter, his eyes bluer, but they were both boys she had conflicted feelings about.
And when Gael smiled at her with Reeve’s face, she was unsure which one of them was making her heart race. Unsure if it was fear or relief that made her pulse stutter. Or something else.
“It’s just up this way,” she said. “Follow me.”
“Anywhere and always,” Gael said with Reeve’s voice.
Faron hesitated for only a moment more before leading them back to Renard Hall, hoping that Reeve wouldn’t hate her for what she’d done to save him.
It took two days for Reeve to be back on his feet. The damage ran deeper than Faron had thought.
A medical summoner had diagnosed him with a broken nose as well as three broken ribs. It was a miracle, she said, that Faron had managed to get him back to Renard Hall without doing further damage.It was Gael, Faron had wanted to say, but he remained one of the biggest secrets that she was keeping. Gael had not appearedsince he’d positioned Reeve in bed and vanished in another flash of light, and Faron craved his presence. Without him and without Reeve, there was no escape from her doubts and questions.
Had she done the right thing?
