The keeper is a looming shadow at my side, breaking the motionlessness when his hand flies to his heart.
But for once, I’m not entirely sure if it’s due tomyemotions because… I feel nothing.
The initial shock has vanished and an emptiness fills me.
It’s like a cold breeze wafting through me, taking my fear and turmoil with it.
“That being lifted your body into the air, bleeding and broken, and dropped you from a great height. You were alive before you hit the ground. I’m certain of it because your mouth moved. You said something. I don’t know what. But it was the fall that killed you. After that, you lay still.” Lucian sways against Anarchy, his breathing labored now, a rapid deterioration.
He needs to stop and there’s a part of me that wants him to, but he persists. “You never spread your wings. If it had really been you, you would have spread your wings…” His voice is a bare whisper now, a forced and strangled sound. “You could have saved yourself. The version of you in the book didn’t have wings. The book is wrong… It wasn’t you… It won’t happen…”
He closes his eyes and leans into Anarchy.
“Stop now,” she whispers to him. “You don’t have to remember anymore.”
He nods against her as he drags air into his chest in the growing silence.
The emptiness within me becomes colder, expanding through my chest and spreading through my arms and legs until my whole body is numb.
“It changes nothing,” I whisper. Just as my father said.
Lucian’s eyes fly open. “But?—”
“I can’t fly.”
Lucian’s forehead creases. I keep my focus on him because I’m not ready to face the others.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
I guess he didn’t see me fall when Ryuji dropped me. After all, Lucian arrived at the rocky outcrop to see me with my wings spread and safely standing on solid ground. He probably thought I flew there.
“You saw my wings and assumed I could fly.” My voice is wooden. “You would be forgiven for believing that someone with wings would spread them to save themselves from a fall.”
“But…”
“My wings don’t work, Lucian.” A horrible, awful, terrible laugh pushes at my throat. “Which means everything in that book could be true.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“No!” Anarchy’s cry cuts through the tension. “That book is full of lies. Your life is your own, Darkness.”
Her voice continues to rise as she slips away from Lucian and closes in on me, her beautiful features marred with anger. “Your life and death will not be decided by a fucking book!”
The intensity of her anger breaks through the icy cocoon that was forming around me.
A sob rises to my throat as fear threatens to choke me. It’s a full rush of hot fear, like a wave crashing onto me.
Will I be the source of so much death?
Will I die, broken from a fall because of these stupid, fucking wings?
As Anarchy practically launches herself across the space toward me, the male panthers also crowd around me, bumping into me so forcefully that I fall forward over my knees before they round me, slip their heads under my chest, and lift me back up. Just in time for Anarchy’s arms to close around me.
Over her shoulder, I can see Lucian shuffling toward me in an uncoordinated manner, all feet and legs, clearly aconsequence of reliving the dark visions while being imbued with Anarchy’s venom.
He presses in beside Anarchy, his hand closing over my shoulder. His gaze is unsteady, but he holds my eyes.
“You can’t be the killer I saw,” he says with a conviction I wasn’t expecting. “You asked about the wings, so I told you about them. But that’s not the only reason I know it isn’t true: Your eyes aren’t dead like hers.” He arches an eyebrow at me. “Besides, you have an internal moral code all your own, remember?”
