I pretend to obey, bringing the needle to my chest and mimicking stitches.
Satisfied, the Shade copies me, but far more convincingly, threading shadows through the wound.
I don’t know how much time passes. I think I might close my eyes for a while.
When next I open them, the Shade beams at me, pointing at its imperfect line of stitches.
“Look at that,” I say, coughing. “You’ve created art. That’s all it takes, you know. Even mending something broken is art. Whatever you mend becomes new.”
I don’t know what I’m saying.
Where even am I?
The Shade crawls back over to me, grinning with my lips. It holds out a hand as if it wants me to take it. As if we might entwine our fingers and skip through town like sisters. What the hell does it want from me? Can’t it see I’m dying?
Yet beneath my irritation there’s tenderness too. This monster killed my enemy. It tried to help me, in its own twisted way.
I slump farther down the wall, feeling a strange numbness settling over me.
“Are you going to eat my body when I die? Turn Incarnate with my face?”
The creature lowers its hand, its shoulders slumping. Finally, its eyes dip down to my abdomen. Shadowed hands frame my face, and my own eyes stare back at me, filled with terror.
“Are you grieving for me?”I let out a bark of laughter, and I realize this still isn’t the last thing I want to see or feel. And I don’t wantitto feel the way it feels now either. I don’t want my apathy or its sympathy.
I want fire and rage and victory.
The embers spark in my chest.
Infusing my final breath.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Eat my body. Just promise me one thing.”
A shadow tear trails down the Shade’s face.
“Kill the guards on your way out.”
The Shade presses its forehead to mine, its wrath rising to meet my own. And when I speak next, so does the creature.
Our voices are one.
“Get revenge.”
The memory ends there. I stare down at my patchwork heart, my vision overlaid with that gruesome shadow-stitched heart held in the Shade’s hands.
My hands.
The Shade’s hands.
What does this mean?
It can’t mean…
That I’m…
Footsteps sound on the floor, coming down the hall.
I don’t stiffen. I’m not even surprised. I knew it would be a matter of time before Dominic found me. I didn’t try to hide where I was going, for I only wanted a head start. I lift my eyes, my lower lip wobbling. “I was expecting you—”
