Chapter 25

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

H e… didn't… kill her?

I'm certain I've misheard the echo, and for once, I actually wish it would repeat, but it doesn't.

My voice is a strangled whisper. "What did you say?"

"I killed her," Emil replies in a quiet declaration. "I ripped out her heart?—"

The echo cuts him off with a roar so loud that I jump.

" I didn't kill her! I took her darkness so she could be free. I ripped out the malice so she could be at peace. I died so she could live. She lived while I died. It should have been her. Not me. Not me. Not me ? — "

"Stop!" Emil shouts, his head snapping up, his green eyes wide, and his face deathly pale behind his silver hair. " Stop ."

" I cannot stop ," says the echo. " I am the truth ."

My chest is heaving, my exhalations overly loud in my own ears.

I stare from Emil to the room, wishing I could locate this bodiless voice whose truths I don't understand.

Emil, too, focuses on the room, following the words in the air with his eyes. "You lie."

" I am the truth ."

"No!" he roars at the room. "I killed her."

" I didn't kill her. She was already dying. I took her darkness. I took its burden so she could be free. I took the pain and the malice and the darkness so she could be at peace ? — "

" No! " Emil roars, bellowing out the denial so loudly that it's like a knife in my sensitive hearing.

Yet, a single word comes back at us.

" Yes."

"No," he whispers. "I am the darkness?—"

" I am the light. "

His eyes widen.

So do mine.

I don't understand anything right now, and my stomach is churning, turning into knots of fear and confusion.

He was right. So fucking right.

I shouldn't have asked for his truths.

He snarls like a predator, "I am the darkness."

The echo also speaks in a snarl, but this time, its words feel like an accusation. " I was born to the brightest light. My life was stolen. I paid the price for crimes that were not my own. What greater darkness could there be? "

For the life of me, it feels like the echo is demanding a response from me .

My voice has strangled in my throat. I have no answer to that question. I can't speak. All I can do is back away.

Emil slumps to the floor, rocking forward, nearly doubled over, his hands pressing to his temples. "I was the dark one. I was the dark one. I was the dark one…"

The echo repeats, over and over, " I was the light. I was stolen. I was the light. I was stolen… "

And then, out of the blue, the echo says, " Vengeance will be mine. "

Emil gives a muffled laugh from beneath his hair that sounds like a growl. "There is no vengeance for me. My fury has no resolution. All those responsible for my cage are already dead."

" But their magic lives on ," says the echo. " Their magic must be destroyed. "

Emil takes a sharp breath. Then, "I can't do it," he says. "I can't end what I've come to love."

There's a pause, a brief silence, and then, for the first time in long minutes, the echo repeats exactly what Emil said. " I can't end what I've come to love. "

I am stricken with confusion and fear and an overwhelming and unexplainable grief.

My eyes fill with tears and I don't understand why.

None of this makes sense to me, and I know I'm missing something absolutely critical.

I'm missing the right answer.

But I don't know the question that will elicit it.

I approach Emil carefully and quietly, watching for a reaction—any reaction—but he remains where he is. Doubled over. Slumped to the floor. Driven down…

I lower myself into a new kneeling position, so close to him now that my knees are only inches away from the top of his bowed head.

I try to breathe out my anxiety, try to bring moisture to my lips as I ask, "Who are you?"

His voice is bleak. "I am nobody."

" I am nobody ," says the echo. It speaks only once and then falls silent.

Softly, I persist, "What was your name?"

"It was taken from me."

" It was taken from me ," says the echo, again only once.

And then, there's silence. It's the same terrible silence that feels like it means something.

I'm suddenly reminded of a heated conversation between Emil and Anarchy. It was one morning back on the island outside the little hut where I slept.

I woke up to their voices.

Anarchy spoke about the other keepers. She had been a youngling when they'd been created. She said there were whispers about who they were and who they weren't. But as for the keeper of dark magic, there was only a terrible silence.

She asked Emil why there was such a hush around his name.

He didn't give her an answer.

Perhaps it was because he couldn't.

"Nobody named you," I whisper, although it's a guess this time.

" You did," he says, his voice still muffled. "Diavolo. Keeper. Enemy."

" I am your enemy ," says the echo.

I thought he was my enemy because he took my mother's heart, but now I'm not so sure.

"Why are you my enemy?" I ask.

"Because my entire purpose is to constrain your magic," he says. "From the moment of my transformation, this was my fate."

" Because I have no choice, " the echo says. " The magic in your mother's heart should have died with her. Instead, she passed it on to you. It is a magic so terrible that wars were fought to defeat it. Hundreds died. The soil was turned to ash and the sky to blood. It cannot happen again. "

"I accepted my cage," Emil says. "A cage of darkness and a black marble floor that once belonged in a throne room, and I accepted that I couldn't escape it, even as it stole my flesh and tore at my skin and left me with nothing but a crown for thousands of years. I accepted it because I knew that one day, I would finally seize the last of that cursed black metal and then…"

His heavy exhale sounds into the silence.

"Then it would be over. But it was not."

As he speaks, the echo whispers quietly, repeating every word he says, but now in a voice that's growing fainter.

And still, Emil speaks. "Because there you were. You and your shadow panthers, running through my cage. So free. As if that dark space was pure bliss to you."

He lifts his head, but only slightly. Only enough for me to see more clearly his clammy forehead and a streak of blood near his hairline.

As the echo repeats exactly what he said, I reach for him, intending to brush his hair away from his face so I can see him more clearly.

"You saw me," he says.

" You saw me ," says the echo.

My hand pauses, my fingertips so close to him.

"You gave me your heart's power and freed me," he says. "You filled my chest with air and gifted my mind with free will and you looked at the world with an awe and a thirst for knowledge that would surely swallow it all.

"I kept waiting for you to show your malice. I waited for you to harm without reason and to kill without thought. I maneuvered you into situations where you would face light magic creatures and old magic creatures and dark magic creatures—angels and vampires and wolves and dragons—and each time, you let them live. You made peace and walked away."

The echo is so quiet now that I can hardly hear it.

"I encouraged you to unleash your rage on the world, and I waited for you to do it because I needed a reason," Emil says. "A reason to cut the thread between us, end the magic you don't even know you control, and free myself once and for all."

Emil gives a harsh laugh. "I put you in front of The Book of Dark Magic and you tore it up. I gave you an orchard full of power and you drove your claws through it. You plucked its pieces from your body as if they offended you."

"Except one," I whisper.

"Yes." He's quiet for a moment. "But only because you couldn't reach it and you were unable to trust me?—"

He coughs suddenly, a dry cough that seems to catch in the air, echoing back at us.

"I broke your heart," he rasps. "And still, you chose hope."

I was already tense but now I am stricken and still. My fingertips hover near his face and yet I can't seem to close the gap between us.

I still have questions. So many unanswered questions, but there's one that might help me finally determine whether or not he truly is my enemy.

"What did my mother say to you before you took her heart?"

He coughs again, another dry sound, and this time, the air around me chills so sharply that it makes me shiver.

"She told me not to break."

The echo says, " She told me not to break. "

He finally looks up, raising his head and then his torso.

His pale green eyes are threaded with blood, his lip is split and bleeding, and a crimson gash rests across his forehead above his left eye. His chest is crisscrossed with lashes that have cut deep into his flesh, one so deep, I can see his rib bone.

My hand flies to my mouth. Oh!

So many wounds… And he isn't healing…

He coughs blood as he says, "But… my Veda… my Enemy… I'm breaking."