Chapter Thirty-One
I screamed until my throat was raw.
“Fauna!”
I wailed. I clawed. I wept.
The sound bounced off the windows, echoing over the obsidian marble floor, filling every inch of my home with primal, animal torture.
I thrashed against any attempts to hold me, throwing hands and breaking anything in arm’s reach. I begged to go back. I pleaded with Caliban to take me to Álfheimr. I balled my hands into fists and beat his chest when he remained stoic. I tried to push him, to hurt him, to make him stand aside while I marched out the front door, but he was immovable, and I was powerless.
We were here on Earth. We were in my fucking apartment when I needed to be in Álfheimr. I needed to be there for her. I needed to help. I couldn’t let her die. Not because of me. I had to go get her. Caliban had to heal her. We had to help. We couldn’t just let her lie there. I had to do something.
I picked up a lamp and threw it across the room. I pounded my fists into the cement coffee table until Caliban caught my hands in his own and forced me to be still. I continued to flail within his arms, cursing him, trying to free myself, trying to hurt him as I pictured her trembling from exhaustion, body shaking, breath ragged as she gave every drop of her power to save me. Ten thousand swords every bit as sharp and deadly asEstrid’s cut through me, eating me up and shredding me until I was little more than pulp and gore as I pictured her blade finding purchase in Fauna’s neck.
Estrid had won the killing blow because Fauna had watched to see that I was safe.
She’d turned to ensure Caliban made it to me, and it had been her undoing.
I wasn’t sure exactly when my screams had turned to sobs. I didn’t know how long I’d had a throbbing migraine, or when I’d wounded myself. It was unseasonably cold in the apartment, sending goose bumps of adrenaline and chills up and down my arm as I looked at the crimson smears on them. I wasn’t entirely sure what blood was mine and what was Ella’s.
Caliban hadn’t tried to heal me, and I suspected I knew why.
Pain was what I wanted. I needed it. I clung to it like a lifeline in the void. Pain was true. It was love. It was something. And if he took it from me, I’d never forgive him.
I could barely see his ivory outline as the last lights faded.
I didn’t want a light, and he knew it.
Maybe he helped me fall asleep when night fell. Maybe I worked myself into an exhausted rage of my own accord. Maybe Fauna’s ghost put me into a coma to keep me from hurting myself so badly that I’d rendered her sacrifice useless.
When I dreamed, it was of the ocean.
Salt and pine and snow moved on the wind, rustling my hair as I stood along the beach. Cold waves licked around my ankles. There was something odd about the foam. The flotsam rolling against the waves and gathering at my feet was pink. I picked my foot up out of the sea, and bright, angry splashes of red dripped from my toes and into the water.
I turned to run for the shore, but it had disappeared.
The hard-packed beach disappeared beneath me as I was plunged beneath the ocean’s ruby waves, drowning in the very blood that was on my hands.
I sat up in bed coughing so hard that I thought I’d lose a lung.
Caliban touched my back as I cried, crumbling into him at long last as he held me. We sat awake through the night, but I was caught on sickening repeat, the same words stuck in my throat.
“Fauna can’t be dead,” I said over and over, as if repeating it would make it true. “She can’t be gone. She can’t.”
One day became two, bled into three.
If he had meetings, he didn’t say. If there were royal obligations pulling him away, he’d forsaken them to hold me.
On the fourth day of listless nothingness, in the repetition of Caliban fruitlessly trying to get me to drink water, falling in and out of sleep, refusing texts or calls or emails or television, and resuming my monastic silence, he spoke.
“Kirby is safe” was all he said.
I looked at him dully. I should have been glad they were safe, but it felt hollow. It was as if I knew their safety was temporary. Proximity to me would result in death. It was only a matter of time.
“Estrid?” I responded.
“Azrames did not spare her,” he said.
