“Shaw Roser, delegate.”
His eyes lifted. Found hers. The warmest shade: the color of honey.
And Lux’s body betrayed her. Or maybe it wished to save her.
She turned her head and vomited gravel all over Godfrey’s boots.
Chapter thirty-one
Forthesecondtimethat night, Lux knew she was dying.
Her body had betrayed her, indeed. Blood pooled in her mouth—pouring down her throat and through her lips, both—and she couldn’t bear it. The taste. The warm wetness. The painful parts shredded. The rocks that had been forced down her had torn her throat wide. They’d not wanted to be expelled.
Everything was red.
To die this way is worse than all the rest.
Lux slumped onto the stairs. She thought there might have been voices shouting, but like before, her hearing had gone. Her vision darkened at the edges, tunneling then blurring. Her eyelids fluttered.
The pressure on her body seemed to come from far away: hands on her torso, on her legs. She tried to breathe, to help them help her, but when she dragged a breath, only blood ushered in.
After that, she could not breathe anymore.
This was not poetic. This was her most heinous nightmare coming to pass.
Her body was moving. Someone held her. Ran with her. The muffled shouts wouldn’t cease, and when she laid her head back, gasping for breaths that couldn’t come, only darkness beckoned.
Close your eyes,it said.It is peaceful here.
Maybe it would be. She’d gone down that road so many times in her revivals, but she’d never reached its end. A wall, a veil, had always blocked her path, and from there she could only call a soul forward. She could not go on.
She could go on now.
Her eyesight was gone. Perhaps she’d closed her lids after all. A different pressure bit into her arm then, and it likely would have hurt—if her nerves hadn’t been dulled to nothing. But she could feel the road beneath her feet. The veil at her fingertips. She could feel those two things plain.
Okay. I’ll go,she decided—and reached.
Bright light burst in her vision.
Lux turned her head at once to hide from its shine. The veil vanished. The road disappeared. Her brow furrowed and her teeth clenched. And then a pricking sensation swept through every limb until it centered in her chest.
“She’s not breathing.”
“She will.”
She did. A huge, gulping gasp and her lungs blessedly filled—with sweet air rather than blood.
From there, sensation returned. The hard surface beneath her horizontal body. The smell of iron and incense. She swallowed; her throat didn’t hurt at all.
“Lux. Lux, can you open your eyes?”
“Slow your breathing now.”
Shecouldopen her eyes. But she didn’t want to.
I’ve hallucinated him. Logic said she must have, and she wanted to sob. She didn’t truly hear his voice or feel the caress of his eyes. She didn’t see him standing on that threshold: tall and broad and determined. Shaw could not be here. He was in Ghadra, and she was far away. Now, she was even farther.This is madness, and he’s not real.
How quickly she’d spiraled into it.
