So she locked her fingers around the wheel and didn’t think of what she’d left behind or what she’d done. She didn’t wonder if Monty was still alive or notice that she was smeared with blood. She drove and she drove and she prayed so loudly that it was a scream in her mind, a howl to be heard by the gods who’d never seen fit to listen to her before.
Alashiya barely registered it when she crossed the border into the Draakonriik. Even the thought of being so far away from home would’ve made her sick to her stomach before, but now she only felt the smallest spark of relief.
When the gray sky split open to release a torrent of summer rain, she didn’t notice. The other cars on the road were blurs of muted color. The landscape was a smudge in the corner of her eye.
The navigation system assured her over and over again that they were on the fastest route to Drummond Island — and that it was a restricted space, which would require identification toenter — but as the hours crawled by, Alashiya felt in her bones that they wouldn’t make it.
The hook behind her breast bone tugged softly but insistently, and the whispers of her grove were loud. It was as if everyone was trying to speak at once, all of them with something vital to tell her, but she couldn’t make sense of the din. Exhausted, terrified, and desperate to do as Taevas asked of her, she wished she could cover her ears until it all went away.
There were two hundred miles left when the whispers coalesced into one unified voice.
It pierced through the haze that had clouded her mind with a single word:Stop.
Alashiya jumped. Her aching fingers spasmed on the steering wheel, and before she knew what she was doing, she’d already disengaged the self-driving function and clumsily guided the vehicle off the road.
Her pulse throbbed in her ears as she sat for a moment, unable to process what she’d done or why.
Stop,the grove instructed her, clearer than they’d ever been. It sounded like her grandmother but also like her father, her aunties, her cousins, and everyone she’d never met but loved in the very foundation of her being.
It sounded like the First. The queen, Kubaba.
Her eyes burned with tears she could no longer make. “I stopped,” she croaked, yanking on the wheel like tearing it off might fix everything. “What do I do? What do Ido?”
Bring him in.
“Bring him— I’mtryingto take him home.”
Alashiya twisted around to look at Taevas. She’d lowered the back seat to make a big enough space and thrown Adon’s robe over him in a desperate bid to keep him comfortable. With the way he was sprawled and the robe obscuring her view, it wasn’t easy to see everything, but she knew instantly that he’d gotten worse.
Bring him in,the voices urged her.Bring him home.
A chill permeated every cell of her body. Her fingers fumbled with the latch of her seatbelt. “Taevas? Taevas, please— I’m trying?—”
Her legs were numb when she threw herself out the driver’s seat. Stumbling and immediately soaked to the bone, she could barely draw a breath in through the constriction of her throat as she tore open the passenger door.
Alashiya threw herself into the backseat and crawled on her hands and knees to be beside him. Cupping his ashen face with wet, shaking hands, she frantically searched for a pulse, for a breath, anything at all.
The tiniest flutter of his long lashes was all she got. The hook in her chest pulled hard enough to hurt.
Alashiya slumped against the siding. Bile churned in her empty stomach as she stroked the sweaty hair back from his cheeks and forehead. “I can feel you leaving me,” she choked out. “You said you wouldn’t. You promised you’d always chase me. Youpromised.You said you’d give me anything I wanted. You said you’d— you said I’d never be alone again. You can’t break your promises,argaman mlk.You just can’t.”
She leaned down to press her lips to his cool forehead. A distant rumble of thunder rolled over them like the tolling of a funeral bell.
Whispering into his skin, she asked, “How can I argue with you if you’re dead? How can you smother me in bed if you leave me now? How can you boss me around if you abandon me here?”
Bring him home.
Alashiya’s shoulders shook with a sob. “I can’t. He won’t make it.”
Shiya,the grove called, as sharp and immediate as a lightning bolt through her mind. Kubaba’s voice was the crack of a sturdy branch in the wind.Bring him to us.
For a moment, all she heard was the drumming of rain on the SUV’s roof and her own ragged breathing.
“We’re the stuff of life,” she whispered, repeatingwords spoken over generations. “We carry Blight’s gift. We guard it and give it to others.”
Alashiya’s gaze slid over to the floor of the backseat, where the bag Taevas had packed had been tossed haphazardly just before she figured out how to use the damn silly key fob to start the vehicle. The hook in her chest became an unbearable, tearing thing.
She’d seen the glint of her sewing shears in the depths of the bag when she pulled out the robe. A wild, awful sort of hope grew alongside the pain in her chest.
