“Briony,” Beaufort says softly.
“No!” I yell.
I jump to my feet, nearly slipping on the blood-soaked cobbles.
“Fox!” I yell over the din, the noise and the chaos. “Fox!”
He’s by my side in a flash.
“You can save her,” I say, pointing toward Clare’s body, unable to look there myself. “You can turn her. Turn her into your kind. Give her immortality, Fox.”
He stares back at me, a blank expression on his face. He doesn’t move.
I take the lapels of his coat in both my fists and shake him, shake him hard.
“Fox,” I say. “Do it. Do it now!”
He doesn’t move. Instead, he wraps his arms around me, pulls me against his chest.
“I can’t, Briony. It’s too late. She’s already gone.”
“No,” I say. “No!”
I sob, my whole body shaking, shuddering, acid burning in my stomach and up my throat. My legs buckle. My head thuds.
I push him away.
“No!” I scream, snapping back my head, my arms outstretched around me?—
And then this light. This light from deep within me, soars up into the sky.
I thought my magic was gone. I thought I’d used every last drop of it. But this is something else. Something deep within me. Something so strong it’s blinding.
Beside me, Fox staggers away, lifting his arm to shield his face against the scorching heat and intensity of it.
It finds every last demon in this place – every demon hanging in the sky, feeding on the corpses, lurking in the shadows – and it obliterates every last one of them into ash.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Briony
My light slams back into my body and throws me off my feet. I land down hard on the cobblestones. I hope, when I open my eyes again, that all this will have been just a dream – a hideous, terrible nightmare. A fiction created by my own silly mind.
I’ll open my eyes and everything will be okay.
Fly will look down at me laughing, offer me his hand, pull me to my feet.
Clare will straighten her glasses, cock her head, and ask me what I’m doing lying there on the ground.
Everything will be okay. All the people I love in this world will be safe. Well. Alive.
I scrunch up my face. I pray to every star, every god, to the powers of fate, to fix everything, to make everything right. Because this is my fault. All my fault.
Clare should never have been here. There was no need for her to be here. She would have been better off never having known me, never crossing my path, never making my acquaintance.
I think back to that moment in the bathroom when we first met. That had been Odessa too. Her friend had slammed her fist into my nose, smashed it to pieces. And Clare, even then, had shown just how brave and just how kind she truly was, fixing me up despite what the consequences might be and the harm that might put her in.
I roll onto my side and curl up into a ball, hugging my knees tight to my chest. I can’t open my eyes. I don’t want to know the truth. I want to lie here and pretend none of this has happened.
