“I slit Wendy’s throat in her living room, and it did nothing but stain her couch,” Niko says, the absurdity of his words hardly registering. “I can attest to the curse’s truth.”
All my life, I thought I was cursed by immortality; by the continued beat of my heart when all I wished for was its silence. But the truth is somehow worse. I’ve never been immortal—I’ve just never had anyone who loved me truly enough to hurt me.
Until now.
The implication resounds through my blood, pounds in my skull. All my clawing, all my scraping for the smallest amount of power, and I’ve unwittingly placed it all in the hands of another.
Niko bows his head, and speaks my fear to life. “Pan will never be able to kill you, Willa. ButIcan.”
Chapter thirty-nine
Iwatch my words fall over Willa like an icy rain.
Watch as her skin goes pale and shivers race over her arms; watch as she paints the gladius lost somewhere in the wreckage of the Indomnitus back into her grasp. She stands, her eyes narrowing as she considers me before her: sopping wet and unarmed, body still spasming from the earlier exertion.
My heart beats somewhere near my throat, as her gaze snaps to where my ribbons linger between us. Like she’s calculating whether or not she’s fast enough to get to me before they lash her into submission.
I wind my death slowly back to me, forcing it into stillness. Her eyes flare at the small act of subservience, and her lips pout slightly as she determines whether or not it’s a trick.
But there is no ruse, only an immense peace as I bare myself to her justice. If Willa moves to cut me down right now, I won’t lift a finger to stop her. For once, my death and I are in agreement.
Willa does not react well to being vulnerable—she is all gnashing teeth and brilliant fury—and I have just stripped herof the little that remained of her protective armor. Seen down to her bones, and held a power over her she never consented to give.
It will not matter that I also never consented to it. This final slight may be unforgivable. And if it is—if she chooses to rid herself of the last thing binding her power—I cannot fault her for it. She’s been granted so little agency in her life—always being used by others, never in charge of her own fate—I’ll do whatever needed to grant her that control. Including dying at her hand.
So I wait, bowed before her.
“That’s why your magic doesn’t affect me?” she asks, her tone measured. Unreadable. “Because you can only kill me with your hands?”
I am well acquainted with the shape of Willa’s body when she feels cornered—a wild animal caged—and though she holds herself in a readied stance, something in her eyes still gives me hope.
“I think hands is a liberal term,” I muse, feeling half out of my mind as the words tumble from my mouth, “as I gutted the Aeternalis with a hook.”
She watches me, stone-faced, as I continue, “I think it just has to be personal. Not by magic, but by something physical. Something…” I search for the right word. “…intimate.”
Willa’s eyes flare. “So, Wendy was right and my mother…she—she was like me.” Her mouth parts. “Is she still alive?”
I shake my head slowly. “She traced your mother’s whereabouts to London. That is where she…” I clear my throat. “…where she met her end.”
Horror etches itself into Willa’s face as another terrible thought takes hold. “My father?”
“We have no way of knowing.”
Willa’s expression tears my heart from my chest, and it takes everything in me to keep still.
“You’re right,” she says, raising her chin. “We only know that she allowed someone close enough to love her, and paid the price for it.”
Most would sink to their knees beneath the weight of their grief, but Willa has never been like most. She merely straightens her spine, and levels her blade at my heart.
I let my eyes fall shut for a brief second, for if it is to be my last moment, my last touch—I am grateful it is by her hand. And when I open them again, I am ready for whatever is next.
“Love is the most powerful of magics,” I tell her. “It is able to exist in worlds like the mainland where no others can survive. And you’ve learned well…power is neither good nor bad. It is just as likely to be a poison as it is a salve. Just as likely to ruin something as it is to save it.”
The sand digs into my knees and my bones ache fiercely, but I hardly feel any of it. I only feel Willa—her pain, her sorrow. Her love.
She traps her bottom lip with her teeth, halting its tremble. “And this magic between us, Niko?” she asks in a low voice. “Has it ruined us or saved us?”
“Both.”
