But no one with magic was brave enough to use it.
No one with magic could move at all.
Phoenix’s arms and legs lay limp, only a twitch of his finger with every blow. But Kane never stopped. Mania consumed him with no intention of stopping until Phoenix’s skull was caved in, brain bashed and bones in bits.
Fable slipped out of my heavy arms and threw herself on Kane’s back. I couldn’t do anything. I was stunned and shaken, with eyes locked on blood. It seemed to go on forever.
The blood. The blows.
My sister tried prying Kane from Phoenix.
Cyrus wrapped his arms around Fable and snatched her away. The only sounds were wet blood, snapping bones, and Susan Tedeschi singing through the speakers about how“it hurts, it hurts, it hurts so bad.”
Fable was shoved into my chest, and I stumbled back a step.
Cyrus hooked Kane’s arm behind his back, taking him backward and snapping him out of his blind rage.
Kane stood in shock, with the front of his shirt drenched in blood. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, blood painted his forearms and hands, and the eight ball was still inside his fist.
Phoenix’s body hung off the pool table, head bashed in, a crimson face, eyes open. There was no fire left inside them. They were black. Hollow. No glow, just gone.
Fable’s cries echoed in my head, sounding far away, but I couldn’t break away from Phoenix’s eyes and how they looked like Stone’s. Not until Cyrus grabbed my hand.
“You have to get out of here. Grab your sister, take my car, and go home.” I shook my head in a daze. Cyrus grabbed my face. “Adora!” he shouted. I didn’t know I was facing him until I blinked, and he was suddenly in front of me. “Grab Fable,” he said, his cheeks red and sweaty as he pushed a set of keys against my chest. “Take my car and leave right now before the Heathens get here.”
I looked at Fable.
She was screaming, beating her fists into Kane, who just stood there like I was just standing there. The bloody eight-ball slipped from Kane’s fist and rolled across the bar floor. It was then I gazed around the room.
Bodies had fled, bloody footprints smeared across the hardwood.
My sister was in love with a Heathen, and her heartbreak was screaming all around us.
Because he was dead.
Phoenix Wildes was dead.
In the end, love always spilled blood.
CHAPTER 40
ADORA
That night,the pearly-white moon was cut in half, leaving a vintage glow on the Cantini Manor. With a white-lipped smile and two stars as dimples, a dazzling grin taunted us from above as I held my sister’s hair back.
We never made it to Cyrus’s porch steps.
Fable’s shoulders lurched forward as she hurled in the rose bushes surrounding the home. Winter had stripped them of their flowers, only snow clinging to the thorned stalks, and each time she dry-heaved, I feared the power of it would rip her from my hands and toss her into the barbed corpse.
When Fable was three, a broken shell sliced open her foot. I carried her home, singing the whole way, blood dripping from her heel and onto my dress. It was a struggle, as I was not much bigger than her, but by the time we reached the steps to the cottage, her crying had sent her to sleep in my arms. I stopped to rest on the steps and fell asleep, too.“Your dress is ruined,”Mama said that night. Surprisingly, at the time, I didn’t care.
When Fable was fifteen, she experimented with drugs. It wasn’t like her, and I never knew why she took them, but that night, I carried her from Monday’s all the way home. To avoid Dad finding out, we never stepped inside the cottage. I slept beside her on the lawn ‘til morning.
But this I didn’t know how to handle. I could barely hold on myself.
Fable had a secret, too. One neither Ivy nor I knew a thing about.
She was in love.With a Heathen, my mind cursed.
