Niko doesn’t just wield the power of death—Nikoisdeath. His power, his heart, his skin, his soul. All of him.
He crushes the decayed remnants of the flower in his fist, the once vibrant bloom crumbling into little more than dust, a smudge of black ash against his palm.
Suddenly, I see everything clearer—both of us pushing the other away to keep our own secrets, while simultaneously being drawn together.
Niko was never being cruel by holding me at arm’s length. He was trying to protect me in his own twisted way, all while keeping the shameful secret of who he truly is. And I’d been so determined to keep my own, I hadn’t considered that the disgust and anger spilling from him in my presence may not have been aboutmeat all.
It was a mistake to shy away from the depths of him, because in my misunderstanding, I’ve unintentionally dumped my secret into his lap.
Because the truth is, it doesn’t matter that Niko’s touch is deadly.
I can’t die.
Chapter twenty-eight
Iwas five when my father realized something was different about me. I spent most of my time in the woods surrounding our house, climbing trees and crossing streams; imagining worlds with houses built into the shadows where magic ruled. My father had long given up on trying to corral me into the house, instead issuing stern, but amiable warnings not to climb too high, that I rarely heeded.
On a humid day in June, I fell from the top of the tallest oak tree on the property. My harrowing screams sent my father running from the barn, only to find me lying on the ground with two shattered legs and a broken back. He’d run to call the ambulance, but the by the time he returned, I was back on my feet, both legs whole beneath me. Determined to climb that tree again.
My father had cried and kissed me. Perhaps it was a gift from my mother’s side of the family, he said, the woman who left just after Celie was born, whose memory was little more than shadows and shapes in my young mind. Or perhaps it was amiracle from a god I didn’t know if I believed in. Either way, miracles were to be guarded and so we did, for so many years.
At the time, whispers of a plague that affected children had been circulating for a few years. But Celie, dad, and I lived in our own sheltered world on our farm, thankful for the protection of my miracle.
I was fourteen the first time I saw the plague’s effects firsthand, in the form of my sister, lying still on the floor of our garage in a pool of her own blood. Her beautiful golden hair was matted with crimson, a rusty box cutter discarded beside one of her bleeding wrists. I screamed for help, my knees pressing into the cold cement, begging her to fight. My sister had always been so full of light, it could only have been the plague shrouding her mind in such darkness; the plague that kept her from finding a way out.
My father, who’d heard my screams even over the loud purr of the lawn mower, crashed through the door. He’d always been a stoic man—more comfortable with the hard edges of logic and numbers than with the more vulnerable parts of life. He was always prepared, always steady, and never seemed frightened by how fast the world moved around us, like I was.
But as he took in Celie’s fragile form, and me panicking beside her, I saw my father’s fear for the first time since I fell from that tree. As he gathered my sister in his arms and carried her to the house, it radiated from him in silky waves and embedded deep inside his heart.
It was a fear that never left. Not when we saved Celie by giving her a transfusion of my healing blood; and not in the months after, when we kept her condition a secret from everyone around us, shielding her growing attempts to take her own life from prying eyes.
The fear that planted itself in my father was a mirror of my sister’s own angst. Both left deadened looks in their eyes,siphoning every bit of their energy and leaving behind empty husks. I didn’t understand it then—couldn’tunderstand the way everything good curdled inside them both.
I tried in those years to be the best sister to Celie. I took her with me everywhere. I danced goofily before her until I earned a hint of a smile. I stayed awake for days on end to watch her, to make sure she didn’t harm herself. My father spent all his time searching for a cure, so I took on caring for him as well. I cooked and cleaned. I tried to help him remember there was a life outside of his research, a world beyond Celie’s affliction.
The Amelioration camps were relatively new then. Waves of children around Celie’s age became afflicted as she was, like some unseen force had sucked every bit of light from them. They could only see the dark, only feel the pain, and they sought to end it the only way they knew how. The camps began as the world’s way of saving the population of children, touting safety and medicines for the mind. My father didn’t trust them, believing Celie was safest with us.
In that, at least, he was right.
Celie tried to end her life three more times that year. If it wasn’t for my blood, she would have succeeded. Each time, my father would hug me, his fingers digging desperately into my arms, his tears dripping into my hair as he whispered his thanks for my gift.
But my sister grew more desperate to end the pain, and on a rare outing to town, she slipped away from us. There was no hiding this attempt, no shielding her from the military’s attention no matter how my father begged. The last time I saw her, she’d been unconscious in the back of a military vehicle, headed toward a camp near the city.
Celie’s incarceration took my father’s kernel of fear and nurtured it. The seed grew until it burst, flooding like a poison through him. And while he’d kept Celie’s secret so diligently, heexploited mine. The military came for me two days after they took my sister.
“She’s too weak to survive alone,” he’d told me. “But you’re so strong, Willa. You’re going to keep her safe like you always have.”
He’d said it like a compliment, but that was the first moment being strong didn’t feelgood. It felt like a plague of its own—something that would only bring me pain. But I’d grown up listening to tales of heroes sacrificing themselves for the world, for the ones they love, and I was brave enough to be one too. I could be that for that Celie.
I peered out the rear window of the military vehicle, and watched my father grow smaller and smaller. He shrank before my eyes until he was nothing more than a shadow. I never saw him again. Later, I’d learn that when Celie died less than a year later, he hung himself from the rafters of the same barn. Too weak to survive for the daughter that still lived, the one he’d sold and sacrificed.
In the first few weeks of my imprisonment, I would beg for my father. Then I begged for death. But as years passed, I learned not to beg for anything at all. There was no one coming, nothing to hold onto. Nothing but my hatred.
I burned with it so furiously, it imbued my bones with steel. It hardened the shell of thorns and barbed wire around my heart.
I strengthened myself with it. Every time they drained me of blood to heal other children, and then sat at my bedside taking notes as my body regenerated itself, my hatred burned. When they took me apart, piece by piece, testing the limits of my immortality and finding none, it flamed inside me, until I was fireproof.
The flames of my hate spread from my father to the doctors, to every person who was gifted my healing while I rotted away in a cell. They had the freedom of death—a way out when the painwas too much for one body to bear—but there was no end to the agony for me. Ever.
