The two crouch across from each other, then rise to their feet and circle each other again.
Sam’s vision is beginning to blur. She makes her way deeper into the shadows as Will turns his back to her, his focus on Ari. Ari’s arm is dripping with blood now, dotting the courtyard in a semicircle as he goes, the drops black in the night.
“You’re wasting your time,” Will calls to him. “Where do you think you’ll go, even if you escape?” He nods toward the dark shaft that Sam opened up.
Ari doesn’t answer him. He’s concentrating on Will’s steps.
Will laughs at his silence. “You don’t know,” he says. “You think you can just get out of here and find some new life. You think you’re not bound to this, like me.”
“You don’t have to be bound to this,” Ari says to him.
“I am who I am.”
And this time, Sam catches a hint of grief in his voice, that softness she once heard when they lay together in his bed.
Her gaze shifts to the ground right behind Will. There, she sees a familiar element, its tile glinting once in the moonlight.
Gold.
Ari’s finger tracing the circle on her hand, then the dot in the center.
She doesn’t have much strength—she can’t spend much energy on a long transmutation. But this, she can do.
It means perfection. It means, I like you the way you are, Sam.
She lunges for it right as Will turns to look at her over his shoulder. Her hand stretches out for the gold.
Will grabs her wrist before she can reach it. He trips her and flips her to the ground, then pins her throat under his knee. Sam’s eyes widen. Her body fights weakly to push him off.
Will turns his gaze down at her. In the night, his eyes are dark and glittering.
Ari darts forward. He touches a tile and a spear of silver appears in his hand. But he’s too far away.
The edges of Sam’s vision are turning black. Why isn’t Will killing her? He’s close enough. With the last of her strength, she flattens her palm against the ground. Feels cool metal against her fingertips. She calls on her soul, lets out a wrenching cry at the pain that rips through her at the transmutation, her body giving it all she has left.
Will suddenly stops moving. His eyes widen, his lips part.
He looks down to see a golden, needle-thin spike piercing straight through his chest from front to back, impaling him on the gleaming metal. Sam’s hand is in midair, trembling slightly, the gold tile beside her empty.
Will tries to grab her face with his hand, to transmute something, anything—but the wound makes him falter.
A second later, Ari is there, shoving Will off her and pinning him to the ground. Will tries to rise. His hands are wrapped around the spike, still trying to transmute it into something else, trying to pull it from his body. But he can barely grip it now, and Sam did what Sebastian once taught her—she fused his flesh right into the gold, so that it is part of his body, impossible to pull out.
Sam stares at him and feels a tide of something terrible in her chest.
There is an indescribable grief in his eyes. She sees a man who once showed her what was possible in this world, who once laughed with her in bed and gave her a glimpse of his heart, who had suffered his own darkness and betrayal. But it doesn’t matter, because the boy has drowned behind the man who killed her mother, who hurt her so badly, who left her to die on the street, invisible and unmourned.
No, not entirely unmourned. There had been sorrow in his eyes in thatmoment. And suddenly Sam realizes that Will hadn’t killed her just now because he was not the one who’d wanted her dead.
Know that I loved you.
Who alerted Demeter to her location, when she was dying on the street?
Will tries to say something to her, shudders, and blood drips from his mouth.
“Sam.” It’s Ari’s voice, clear and true. It cuts through the fog in her mind, and she looks up at him, struggling to focus. She feels so weak now.
“Sam, we have to go,” Ari says. He’s touching her arm, pulling her up to her feet and toward the yawning tunnel.
