“You’re awake,” Ambrose breathes in a relieved sigh as he rushes out of his seat to wrap me in his arms.
“Hello to you, too.” I smile against his chest, inhaling his calming, familiar scent and returning his embrace.
He pulls back only slightly to look down at me, as if he’s searching for anything that might indicate I’m not alright. “How are you feeling? You’ve been asleep for almost a full day.”
“I feel good.Reallygood, weirdly enough.”
He and Elias exchange a loaded look.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
Ambrose’s lips lift in a small, knowing smile. “I think it’s best if you sit down. We have some things to discuss.”
I do as he says, partly wishing I could make some coffee first, but I take the spot directly beside him on the couch and lean into his side as he wraps his arm around my shoulders.
“Elias,” I say coldly in acknowledgment to the man sitting across from us.
“Hello, Brielle.” He’s clearly nervous, wringing his hands in his lap, already a man of few words but made more cautious by the situation—whatever the situation is. I realize I don’tactuallyknow what he’s doing here in the first place. A part of me had assumed he’d run and never look back.
Ambrose’s voice is gentle when he says, “Elias used his powers to heal you after the incident at the church.”
Oh. “Thank you,” I mutter.
“Realistically, you shouldn’t have survived Samuel’s attack,” Ambrose says. “It’s impossible to know for sure, but we believe your possession of my artifact allowed you to fight off the effects of his attack just long enough to… well, to do what you needed to do.”
Elias chimes in next. His voice is soft and soothing, and as much as I try to resist it, it does put me slightly at ease. “But, we think there may have been some… unintended consequences from Samuel’s death.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were holding Ambrose’s artifact first, which allowed you to stay alive from Samuel’s attack. However, you were holding Samuel’s artifact when you killed him. To my knowledge, a Liminal being has never been killed by a human in possession of their artifact.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Well… we believe that Samuel’s powers and lifespan may have transferred to you.”
It takes a moment for the words to register.His powers and his lifespan. Magic, and the potential of eternity.
Ambrose notices my slack-jawed, wide-eyed expression and squeezes my shoulder in reassurance. “It’s better that you find out sooner rather than later, but I know this is hard to process.”
My mouth is dry when I ask, “And my lifespan? What is it?”
“Only you can tap into that information through your artifact,” Elias says.My artifact. The pocket watch isminenow. “It won’t be an exact number, but it will give you an idea of the life you have yet to live.”
I nod, trying to process this information as best I can. I have supernatural abilities now. I am functionally immortal so long as I choose to be. Ambrose being this way was one thing—there was a level of separation that allowed me to disregard the implausibility of it all—but becoming the same as him forces me to come to terms with the understanding that this isreal, though a part of me is convinced I’m still asleep and dreaming.
“You don’t have to know if you don’t want to,” Ambrose assures me. “You can just pretend it doesn’t exist if that’s what you want to do.”
“But I still have all those years left to live now, right?”
He nods.
“Then I need to know. I won’t be able to stop wondering otherwise.”
Ambrose pulls the small, gold pocket watch from his pocket and hands it to me. I take it gingerly, as if it might explode as soon as I touch it, but a sense of rightness washes over me as soon as I cradle it in my hand.Yes, it seems to say,I belong to you now. I am a part of you.
I close my eyes as the metal warms in my hand, andthough I have no clue what I’m doing, I try to tap into the same feeling with it as I did with the necklace before. Silently, I will it to tell me how many years it holds—how many years I have to live.
Just as Elias had said, it doesn’t give me an exact number, but the vastness of the number is staggering. Centuries upon centuries.
