Finn’s mouth trembled as he looked down at his brother. He stared for a long moment at Darin, who was gasping and clenching his teeth, fighting back agonized cries, as if something were being torn out from inside of him.
As one, the Smiths bowed their heads.
Celia stared down at Darin, a pained, broken expression on her face. She wrapped her arms around her waist, and the puppy whimpered from under her shirt. Ragnor gripped her arm and slowly pulled her away. Celia took one last look at Darin, and then the Bards limped together from the street.
Finally, Darin stopped trembling. His agonized cries quieted. He lay still, his chest heaving, his cheek pressed against the concrete.
“It’s too much,” Darin whispered. “It’s too much to bear. I can’t . . . Finn. Take it away. It hurts?—”
Finn nodded. He bent down and gently pressed two fingers to Darin’s temple. When he did, Darin’s eyelids closed, his tension fled, and he fell asleep on the sidewalk.
“What did you take?” I asked.
Finn could draw out memories and make people lose their pasts.
His stoic expression broke, and his mouth trembled. “Everything,” he said brokenly. “I took everything.”
I nodded and folded myself against him.
Finn wrapped his arms around me, holding me as if I were the only thing keeping him standing. “I couldn’t kill him. I couldn’t kill my brother. I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I couldn’t?—”
“It’s okay.” I rubbed Finn’s back and held him in a tight hug. “It’s okay. It will be okay.”
Finn stared over my shoulder at Darin’s unconscious form. “When he wakes up, he won’t be able to conjure. He won’t know himself. He won’t know his past.”
I nodded. “What if someone tries to hurt him?”
He stiffened and whispered, “Then they’ll answer to me.”
We stood for a long moment, comforting each other. Slowly, the Smiths began to drift away. The sky was lightening from dawn-gray to a shattered gold.
I stared out over the horizon, watching the sunlight breach the city spires. In the distance, a siren sounded, like a bird signaling morning’s light. In response, a jackaltooth howled.
I’d told Finn it would be all right, but would it?
“Do you think it will be okay?” I whispered.
Finn nodded. “It will be okay.”
“Because where there’s despair, we’ll be hope?” I asked.
He smiled slowly and tipped my chin up, cupping my cheeks in his hands. His thumbs brushed away tears I hadn’t known were there.
“Yes,” he said, “because the truth is that it will be all right. Even if we aren’t here to see it. It will be all right. And until then, we’ll fight. We’ll keep fighting.”
We both knew this wasn’t the end. The horror was chained. Jagger was dead. But they weren’t the source of darkness—they were only its shadow.
Like Finn had always said, there’s a spiritual battle raging on the physical plane, and the front lines are drawn inside the confines of every human heart. Good. Evil. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lie.
Life, my dear friend, is a battle for your soul. Don’t let anyone tell you different. They’ll try to lure you with pleasure or pain. They’ll try to blind you with falsehoods or twisted truths. They’ll promise there isn’t a heaven and there isn’t a hell.
But I’m here to tell you, your heart is a battlefield.
When the bloody battle is done, where will you stand?
With me?
Or against me?
