Silver hair, cruel beauty, gentle hands—he awakened me.
The way he looked at me made me want something of my own. Made me want to separate from Barbie and carve out my own identity.
The oracle’s words echoed through my fragmented mind:The last drop of old magic, hidden within goddess flesh.
That magic was being extracted now, in Hell’s inferno, along with everything else I was.
The tearing sensation peaked, then the remaking began.
I was condensed, then stretched. Scattered, then gathered. Ancient and newborn. The pain was indescribable as every atom was erased and rewritten. Barbie and I felt it all.
Then, suddenly air.
My lungs pulled it in desperately. My ribs expanded. My heart beat again.
I was outside Barbie’s body, looking down at my own hands. Long fingers tipped with subtle claws. Skin paler than hers, shimmering faintly. My fingers traced my face—high cheekbones, pointed ears, radiant white hair flowing past my ankles. When I ran my tongue over my teeth, I felt fangs.
I was myself. And I was complete.
I lifted my gaze and looked at Barbie—really looked. Not her reflection in a mirror buther right in front of me. Those full, pale lips trembled. Freckles scattered like constellations across her cheeks. And her eyes, one green, one sapphire, stared back at me with the same shock, sorrow, joy, and wonder I felt.
“Sy? Sy,” she whispered, “do you copy?”
Her voice came from outside my head for the first time, and it was music.
“Roger.” My voice was mine alone now, lower than hers, rougher, edged with smoke.
We lunged at each other, tumbling into an embrace, sobbing in the lava that could no longer touch us. Twenty years of never being alone, of always sharing thoughts—and now, a hollow silence where she used to be.
“We’re still here,” I told her, swallowing hard.
She nodded. “Still two peas in a pod.”
“Still two peas,” I said.
The volcano erupted around us. Lava sheeted down the chamber walls. My magic of creation wrapped around us in radiant light as her dark flame rose to meet it. Two shields became one.
“Ready to go, Sy?” she asked.
“Born ready,” I said.
We rose together, hands locked as though we might dissolve if we let go. My hair whipped around my face, a strangeand thrilling new sensation. Beside me, Barbie’s curls bounced, shedding droplets of lava as we shot upward from the magma chamber.
Finally leaving.
Two bodies. Two hearts. Two souls that had been one for so long we’d forgotten how to be apart, yet still bound by a love even Heaven’s Arrow couldn’t sever.
We burst from the volcano into the Underworld’s blood-red sky, reborn and broken and whole, all at once.
Chapter
Nine
Killian
Iclosed my eyes, focusing my senses to a razor’s edge, and pushed beyond the physical to reach for Barbie through the dream walk.
I had to find her.
