The Shade drops Henry’s heart to the floor and scampers closer. I try to sit up straighter, to stand, to run, but I can’t move.
What’s the point, anyway?
This wound…I won’t survive it. Not without a healer, and who the hell would take me—the duke’s disobedient sacrifice—to a surgeon? Especially once they see Henry dead before me. No, this can’t end well. It can only end.
I’m just glad I took him out on the way.
I flinch as the Shade crouches before me. Its spidery fingers extend toward my chest, and I expect it to reach inside my rib cage and pull out my heart next. I wait for the shock of pain to come…but it doesn’t.
The Shade presses its semitransparent palm over the cut across my breast, and I get the strangest sense of sorrow radiating from it.
“Are you showing me compassion right now?”I could laugh if I wasn’t in so much pain. Here I was taught to fear the Shades, yet the man I loved, one of the Sinless I was taught to admire, was the real monster.
The creature rifles through the straw. I blink, my eyelids growing heavier. When I force my vision to focus, there’s a glint of silver between the Shade’s fingertips. One of my sewing needles. It holds it toward me, and I shake my head. “This isn’t a wound I can sew shut,” I say, but I wonder if it even notices my abdomen. Its attention seems fixed on my chest.
Something like frustration ripples through it, and in the next blink, I see my own face staring back at me. A perfect replica. A shadowed mirror.
Terror dawns, but it’s short-lived.
What does it matter whether I’m killed by a knife wound or an Incarnate?
Still, it’s uncanny to see my reflection made of shadow.
The Shade with my face flourishes the needle, then points to the matching wound on its chest. Just like I suspected, there’s nothing on its abdomen. It doesn’t understand that I’ve been stabbed.
It offers me the needle again, pointing from its chest to mine.
With a sigh, I accept the needle.
Its lips—my lips—pull into a satisfied smile, and it scampers back, mirroring my posture and sitting across from me.
It occurs to me now how intelligent this Shade seems to be. It knows what a sewing needle is and what it can do. And its replication of my face, my clothing, my body…
Something warm and sad and dreadful pools in my heart. “You’ve been watching me a long time, haven’t you? Are you the one I’ve always whispered stories to?”
It doesn’t respond, and I don’t expect it to. Shades can’t talk. They don’t have voices.
The creature gives me an encouraging nod, eyes lowering to my chest wound again. Then it takes up Henry’s discarded heart, plucks my other needle from the bloody ground, and threads a strand of shadow through it. My stomach lurches as it stabs the needle into the heart, pulling the thread through. Then again.
Again.
Again—
I’m pulled out of the memory with a lurch.
My body is racked with tremors as I reach inside my bodice and extract my patchwork heart.
I stare at the even stitches, the colorful array of fabrics. I constructed my hearts with so much passion, so much fervor, so much…familiarity. As if I’d done it before. As if a beating, pulsing patchwork heart was something I’d seen and felt, not just in the story I told at the Wretched Lair.
I remember—
“Stop,” I say, unable to handle another moment of the macabre tapestry the Shade is making of Henry’s heart. It’s now threaded with veins of shadow and sinew, a patchwork monstrosity.
The Shade halts its efforts, cocking its head to the side. Tendrils of shadowy hair fall over the face that looks just like mine. I sense agitation wafting from it, so I soften my voice.
“Try something else,” I say, choking on the last word. I can’t tell if my wound has stopped bleeding or if I’m merely losing feeling. All I know is this isn’t the last sight I want to see. I lift one hand, so heavy and weak, to my chest. “Try stitching that up first.”
The Shade looks from me to its own cut. It gives me a pointed look, as if to say, “You too.” The expression is so human, so real, I wonder if maybeI’mthe replica.
