“What?” I whispered.
The concierge blocked the door. In real life, Finn would be able to fight past him, but for some reason, here, I didn’t think he could.
“Do you really want to stay? To forget about everything else? To stay here, in the past?” His brows were pulled together, and he was really, really asking. He’d stay if I wanted to.
But if I stayed, what would happen to Luvic? Justice? What would the cruel Finn do to the world? Once, he’d told me every time we turned our backs on our responsibilities, we made ourselves a lesser person, and we made the world a darker place. I’d believed him.
“No. I don’t want to stay.”
His mouth curved into a soft smile. “Do you remember what you said had to happen for you to wake up?”
I frowned. The last two times, I hadn’t woken up until Finn had died. “Yes?”
“You have about fifteen seconds to make a decision.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
The concierge shouted as I shoved Finn as hard as I could.
He flew out the window and fell five stories.
He died, I know, because I woke up in the asylum.
Alone.
54
The wind swept through the canyons of the city, curving around limestone edifices and steel spires. It rode over the landslide mountain at the center of the city, sliding along the jagged-edged broken glass and whistling through the fallen steel beams.
The landslide shifted and brushed ash and dust over the wind. The acrid scent stung, so the wind blew it aside.
The boy had cushioned the building’s fall. The wind had promised no being was inside. But after the boy and the girl had flown away, the trickster had spasmed and shook, seizing violently. The wind hadn’t known what to do. The boy had said the trickster would be fine. But he wasn’t.
The wind had circled the trickster worriedly, rounding his spasming form as screaming humans sprinted past, ignoring the trickster—trampling him, even. Blood and froth had trickled from his mouth, and the wind had felt the trickster’s spirit struggling. But then the father had come, and after one look at his son, he’d twisted his hands and conjured a forest fire to ravage the plaza.
Then he’d lifted the trickster, pressed an illusion to his forehead to silence the seizures, looked east, and vanished. East—that was the Smiths. The wind had blown free before the solange-eyed one and his brother arrived.
But the trickster?
It was a strange thing, caring what happened to a being. Not the boy—the wind had accepted long ago that it cared for the boy. But other beings. Other living things.
It made the wind itch, like it had rubbed stinging nettles or brushed alongside a jellyfish. Its sides stung, and it was restless and uncomfortable. It wanted to scrape over rough bark or run over jagged gravel, or even to roll over the spines of a porcupine. Anything to soothe the itching discomfort that had invaded its being.
But the wind was practical, intelligent, logical. It knew what this was. Making itself just human enough for the boy meant it had made itself just human enough for others too.
The wind had a pulse of worry. Something similar had happened eons ago to one of its cousins. They’d made themselves human enough for a girl, and then they’d become human enough for others. But when the girl had died, the wind’s cousin died too. It wasn’t a death like a human’s, where their body decomposed but their spirit remained. No. It was a different death. The wind’s cousin had fallen still. Had become silent. Had . . . ceased to be.
In nature, nothing ever ceased to be. Water became vapor. Vapor became rain. Flesh became soil. Soil became flesh. Every molecule, when broken apart, became something new.
Except . . . the wind’s cousin. It was gone, as if it had never been.
The wind moaned. Would it cease to be if it became too humanlike?
If it cared too much?
It rubbed along the edge of the East River, scratching its underbelly on the concrete pylons.
What could it do?
